Editing Karl Marx (section)

==== Labour, class struggle and false consciousness ====
{{further|Alienation (Marxism)|Class struggle|Capitalist mode of production (Marxist theory)}}
{{blockquote|The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.|Karl Marx, ''[[The Communist Manifesto]]''<ref name="MarxEngels2009pp5">{{cite book|first1=Karl |last1=Marx |first2=Friedrich |last2=Engels |author-link2=Friedrich Engels |title=The Communist Manifesto |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pC1RMZh4iC0C&pg=PA5 |year=2009 |publisher=Echo Library |isbn=978-1-4068-5174-8 |page=5 |access-date=27 June 2015 |archive-date=12 September 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150912161744/https://books.google.com/books?id=pC1RMZh4iC0C&pg=PA5 |url-status=live |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref>}}
[[File:Marx et Engels à Shanghai.jpg|upright|thumb|A monument dedicated to Marx and Engels in [[Shanghai]], China]]

Marx had a special concern with how people relate to their own labour power.{{sfn|Calhoun|2002|p=22}} He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienation]].{{sfn|Mészáros|2006|p=96}} As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception.{{sfn|Calhoun|2002|p=22}} [[Capitalism]] mediates social relationships of production (such as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through commodities, including labour, that are bought and sold on the market.{{sfn|Calhoun|2002|p=22}} For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour&nbsp;– one's capacity to transform the world&nbsp;– is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss.{{sfn|Calhoun|2002|p=22}} Marx described this loss as [[commodity fetishism]], in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behaviour merely adapt.<ref name="Balibar1995"/>

[[Commodity fetishism]] provides an example of what Engels called "[[false consciousness]]",<ref name="KołakowskiFalla2005">{{cite book|first1=Leszek |last1=Kołakowski |author-link1=Leszek Kołakowski |first2=Paul Stephen |last2=Falla |title=Main currents of Marxism: the founders, the golden age, the breakdown|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA226 |access-date=8 March 2011 |year=2005 |publisher=[[W.W. Norton & Company]] |isbn=978-0-393-06054-6 |page=226 |archive-date=16 June 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130616233048/http://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA226 |url-status=live |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref> which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal.<ref name="Hernadi1989"/> Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths, as they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production include not only the production of food or manufactured goods but also the production of ideas (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).<ref name=sep/><ref name="Thompson1990"/>

Marx was an outspoken opponent of [[child labour]],<ref>In ''[[The Communist Manifesto]]'', Part II:Proletariats and Communist and ''[[Capital, Volume I]]'', Part III</ref> saying that British industries "could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood too", and that U.S. capital was financed by the "capitalized blood of children".<ref name="autogenerated2" /><ref>{{cite speech |author=Karl Marx |title=Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association |year=1864}}</ref>