Karl Marx
1818-1883 · Marxism · Household name
Marx was a German political economist who read history as a long fight between classes over who controls the means of making things. What a society believes, its laws, its religion, its morals, grows out of that economic ground. Under capitalism the worker produces more value than the wage returns, and that gap is where profit comes from. The method carries the name historical materialism.
Signature
The position Marx is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Society
- leans Collectivism
- Economy
- Stateless Communism
Positions on the 13 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Mechanistic (25 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- leans Brain Only (25 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- leans Realism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (0 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- leans Sublation (25 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Nature
- leans Mastery (25 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Polity
- leans Illiberalism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Conviction
- leans Certain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (75 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
7 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Marx refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Communal Order / Representative Democracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Freedom
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Dialectical / Genealogical
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pragmatic Test
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Non-Utilitarian Consequentialism
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Other
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Linear Progressive / Eschatological
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- Stateless Communism
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Authority
- Collective Will
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- False Consciousness
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Dialectical Sublation
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Revolutionary
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Class
What is your primary bond and loyalty?