Karl Marx
Karl Marx (Berlin German pronunciation: [kaːɐ̯l ˈhaɪnʀɪç ˈmaːɐ̯ks], 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a Prussian-German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the establishment of the social sciences and the development of the socialist movement. He is also considered one of the greatest economists of all time. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894). He worked closely with his friend and fellow revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
Born into a wealthy middle-class
family in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of
the Young Hegelians. In 1836 he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a
radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. After moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other
radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on
a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he
became a leading figure of the Communist League,
before moving back to Cologne and founding his own newspaper. In 1849 he was
exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In
London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and
formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it
could be improved. He also campaigned for socialism and became a significant
figure in the International
Workingmen's Association.
Marx's theories about society,
economics and politics—collectively known as Marxism—hold that
human societies progress through the dialectic
of class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls
production and a proletariat that provides the labour for production. He called
capitalism
the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie",
believing it to be run by the wealthy classes purely for their own benefit; and
he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism would
inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction
and replacement by a new system: socialism.
He argued that under socialism society would be governed by the working class
in what he called the "dictatorship
of the proletariat", the "workers'
state" or "workers' democracy".
He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless,
classless society called communism.
Along with believing in the inevitability of socialism and communism, Marx
actively fought for the former's implementation, arguing that social theorists
and underprivileged people alike should carry out organised revolutionary
action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change.
Revolutionary socialist governments
espousing Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th
century, leading to the formation of such socialist states as the Soviet Union
in 1922 and the People's
Republic of China in 1949. Many labour unions and
workers' parties worldwide were also influenced by Marxist ideas, while various
theoretical variants, such as Leninism, Stalinism,
Trotskyism,
and Maoism, were
developed from them. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim
and Max Weber,
as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human
history.
Early
life
Childhood
and early education: 1818–1835
Marx's birthplace in Trier. In 1928,
it was purchased by the Social
Democratic Party of Germany and now
houses a museum devoted to him.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May
1818 at 664 Brückergasse in Trier, a town in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province
of the Lower Rhine.
Ancestrally Ashkenazi Jewish, his maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since
1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.
Karl's father, Herschel Marx, was the first in the line to receive a secular education;
becoming relatively wealthy and middle-class, his family owned a number of Moselle
vineyards. To escape the constraints of anti-semitic
legislation, he converted from Judaism to the Protestant Christian
denomination of Lutheranism prior to his son's birth, taking on the German forename of
Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.
Largely non-religious, Herschel was
a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant
and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms
in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy.In 1815 Herschel began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a
ten-room property near the Porta Nigra.
His wife, Henrietta Pressburg, was a semi-literate Dutch Jew who claimed to
suffer from "excessive mother love", devoting much time to her family
and insisting on cleanliness within her home.
Retaining her Jewish faith, her beliefs would have some influence on her
children.
Little is known of Karl Marx's
childhood.
The third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz
died in 1819,
and was baptised into the
Lutheran Church along with his surviving siblings Sophie, Hermann, Henriette,
Louise, Emilie and Karoline in August 1824.He was privately educated until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose
headmaster Hugo Wyttenbach was a friend of his father. Wyttenbach had employed
many liberal humanists as teachers, angering the government. Police raided the
school in 1832, discovering that literature espousing political liberalism was
being distributed among the students; considering it seditious, the authorities
instituted reforms and replaced several staff.
Aged 17, in October 1835, Marx
traveled to the University of Bonn; although wishing to study philosophy and literature, his
father insisted on law as a more practical field.
Young Marx was deemed unavailable for military service when he turned eighteen
due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest,"
he joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals which was
monitored by the police.
Marx's student days also contained a fair share of frivolity. Marx joined the
Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner), and
at one point served as co-president of the Club.
Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes, some of which became
serious, as in August 1836, when he took part in a duel with a member of the
university's Borussian Korps.
Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated,
leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academically
oriented University
of Berlin.
Hegelianism
and early activism: 1836–1843
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in
Trier, Marx soon became more serious about his studies and his life. Over the
summer of 1836, Marx became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, a baroness of the Prussian ruling class who had known Marx
and had been close friends with Marx since childhood.
Jenny von Westphalen had brains and thanks to her father also had an education.
Thus, it is not surprising that Jenny broke off her engagement with a young
aristocrat to be with Marx. Their relationship was controversial due to the
differences between their ethnic and class origins, but Marx befriended her
father, the liberal aristocrat Ludwig von Westphalen, later dedicating his doctoral thesis to him.
In October 1836 he arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty
of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse.
Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy, and looked for a way to
combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be
accomplished."
Marx became interested in the recently-deceased German philosopher G.W.F Hegel,
whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles.
During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the Doctor's Club (Doktorklub),
a student group who discussed Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved
with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians
in 1837; they gathered around Ludwig
Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer,
with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like
Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical
assumptions, but adopted his dialectical method in order to criticise established society, politics, and
religion from a leftist perspective.
Disapproving of his son's drunken behaviour, Marx's father died in May 1838,
resulting in a diminished income for the family.
A contemporary drawing of Karl Marx
as a young man.
Writing non-fiction and fiction, in
1837 Marx completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix, the drama Oulanem, and a number of love poems
dedicated to Jenny;
Abandoning fiction for other pursuits, including learning English and Italian,
studying art history and translating Latin classics,
he was engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean
Philosophy of Nature,
which he finished in 1841. Described as "a daring and original piece of
work in which he set out to show that theology must
yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy",
the essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at
the University of Berlin. Marx decided to submit it to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD based on it in April
1841.
He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy
of Religion in 1840, and in July 1841 the duo
scandalised their class on a visit to Bonn by getting drunk, laughing in church, and galloping through
the streets on donkeys.
Both militant atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Atheistic
Archives; it never came to fruition.
Considering an academic career, this
path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism
and the Young Hegelians.
Moving to Cologne in 1842,
he became a journalist, writing for radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhenish Newspaper") and in October
becoming editor-in-chief; expressing his increasingly socialist
views and interest in economics, he criticised both right-wing European
governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements whom he
thought ineffective or counter-productive.
The paper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors,
who checked every issue for potentially seditious material before printing;
Marx remarked that "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be
sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian,
the newspaper is not allowed to appear."
After the paper published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy,
Tsar Nicholas I requested that the Rheinische Zeitung be banned;
Prussia's government shut down the paper in 1843.
Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843 Marx married Jenny in a
Protestant church in Kreuznach.
Communist agitation
Paris: 1843–1845
Marx became co-editor of a new
radical leftist newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then
being set up by German socialist Arnold Ruge
to bring together German and French radicals.
Based in Paris, France, it was here that Marx and his wife moved in October
1843. Initially living with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau,
they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out following the birth of
their daughter Jenny in 1844.
Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states,
the Jahrbücher was dominated by the latter; the only non-German writer
was the exiled Russian anarcho-communist
Michael Bakunin.
Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "Introduction
to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"
and "On the Jewish Question,"[
the latter introducing his belief that the proletariat
were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism.
Only one issue was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing
to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported
copies; Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues,
and his friendship with Marx broke down.
After the paper's collapse, Marx began writing for the only uncensored
German-language radical newspaper left, Vorwärts!.
Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the utopian socialist
League of the Just; Marx attended some of their meetings, but did not join.
In Vorwärts!, Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian
and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising
liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met German
socialist Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence, beginning a lifelong friendship.
Engels showed Marx his recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
convincing Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the
final revolution in history.
Soon Marx and Engels were
collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx's former
friend, Bruno Bauer. This work was published in 1845 as The Holy
Family.
Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of
Young Hegelians Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach,
but eventually Marx and Engels became aware that also abandoned Feuerbachian
materialism as well.
During the time that he lived at 38
Rue Vanneau in Paris (from October, 1843 until January 1845),
Marx engaged in an intensive study of "political economy" (Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, James Mill etc.),
the French socialists (especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier
and the history of France."
The study of political economy is a study that Marx would pursue for the rest of
his life
and would result in his major economic work--the three volumes series called
"Capital."
Marxism is based in large part on three influences—Hegel's dialectics, French
utopian socialism and English economics. Together with his earlier study of
Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant
that all major components of "Marxism" (or political economy as Marx
called it) were in place by the autumn of 1844.
Although Marx was constantly being pulled away from his study of political
economy by the usual daily demands on his time that everyone faces, and the
additional special demands of editing a radical newspaper and later by the
demands of organizing and directing the efforts of a political party during
years in which popular uprisings of the citizenry might at any moment become a
revolution, Marx was always drawn back to his economic studies. Marx sought
"to understand the inner workings of capitalism."
An outline of "Marxism" had
definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late 1844. Indeed, many features
of the Marxist view of the world's political economy had been worked out in
great detail. However, Marx needed to write down all of the details of his
economic world view to further clarify the new economic theory in his own mind.
Accordingly, Marx wrote the The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.
These manuscripts, covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated labour.
However, by the spring of 1845, his continued study of political economy,
capital and capitalism had led Marx to the belief that the new political
economic theory that he was espousing--scientific socialism--needed to be built
on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world.
The Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 had been written between April and August of 1844 still
Marx recognized that the Manuscripts had been influenced by some
inconsistent ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Accordingly, Marx recognized the need
to break with Feuerbach philosophy in favor of historical materialism. Thus, a
year later, in April of 1845, after moving from Paris to Brussels, Marx
authored his eleven (11) Theses on Feuerbach,
The Theses on Feuerbach is best known for Theses 11, which states that
"philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point
is to change it".
This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism
(for being contemplative), idealism (for
reducing practice to theory) overall, criticising philosophy for putting
abstract reality above the physical world.
It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an argument that the world is changed not by ideas but by
actual, physical, material activity and practice.
In 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French
government shut down Vorwärts!, with the interior minister François Guizot
expelling Marx from France.
At this point, Marx moved from Paris, to Brussels where Marx hoped to, once
again, pick up his study of capitalism and political economy.
Brussels:
1845–1847
The first edition of The
Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in German in 1848
Unable either to stay in France or
to move to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium in February
of 1845. However, to stay in Belgium, Marx had to pledge not to publish
anything on the subject of contemporary politics in order to enter.
In Brussels, he associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe,
including Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, and Joseph Weydemeyer,
and soon, in April of 1845, Engels moved from Barmen in Germany to Brussels to
join Marx and the growing cadre of scientific socialists in Brussels.
In mid-July of 1845, Marx and Engels
left Brussels for England to visit the leaders of the Chartists,
a socialist movement in Britain. This was Marx's first trip to England and
Engels was an ideal guide for the trip. Not only, had Engels already spent two
years living in Manchester, England from November 1842
until August of 1844.
Not only did he already know the English language,
but Engels had developed a close relationship with many Chartist leaders.
Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist
English newspapers.
Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources
available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester.
In collaboration with Engels, Marx
also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the
concept of historical materialism, The German Ideology; the work, like many others, would not see publication in
Marx's lifetime, being published only in 1932.
He followed this with The
Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a
response to the French anarcho-socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The
Philosophy of Poverty and a
critique of French socialist thought in general.
These books laid the foundation for
Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to
be commonly known as The
Communist Manifesto. While
residing in Brussels 1846, Marx had joined a secret radical organisation called
the League of the Just.
The League of the Just had been active in radical
"underground" politics since the 1830s.
Members of the League of the Just were active in Germany, England, and
Switzerland as well as France.
In June 1847, the League of the Just was reorganized by its membership
into a new open "above ground" political society that appealed
directly to the working classes. This new open political society was called the
"Communist League." Both Marx and Engels participated in drawing the
program and organisational principles of the new Communist League.
Written jointly by Marx and Engels
for the Communist League from December 1847 through January 1848,
"The Communist Manifesto" was first published on 21 February 1848.
The "Communist Manifesto" laid out the beliefs of the new Communist
League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League, wanted to make
aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs
as the League of the Just had been doing.
The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism,
that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles." It goes on to look at the antagonisms that Marx claimed
were arising between the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie
(the wealthy middle class) and the proletariat
(the industrial working class). Proceeding on from this, the Manifesto
presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other
socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly
acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and
replace it with socialism.
Later that year, Europe experienced
a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals, the Revolutions of 1848.
In France, a
revolution led to the overthrow of the
monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic.
Marx was supportive of such activity, and having recently received a
substantial inheritance from his father of either 6000
or 5000 francs,
allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning
revolutionary action.
Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed,
the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused him of it, subsequently arresting him,
and he was forced to flee back to France, where, with a new republican
government in power, he believed that he would be safe.
Cologne:
1848–1849
Temporarily settling down in Paris,
Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and
also set up a German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there.
Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to
Cologne (Köln) where he began issuing a handbill entitled the Demands of the
Communist Party in Germany, in which he argued for only four of the ten
points of the Communist Manifesto, believing that in Germany at that
time, the bourgeoisie must overthrow the feudal monarchy
and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie.
On 1 June, Marx started publication of the daily Neue
Rheinische Zeitung
("New Rhenish Newspaper"), which he helped to finance through his
recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across
Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, Marx remained one of its
primary writers, accompanied by other fellow members of the Communist League
who wrote for the paper, although despite their input it remained, according to
Friedrich Engels, "a simple dictatorship by Marx", who dominated the
choice of content.
Whilst editor of the paper, Marx and
the other revolutionary socialists were regularly harassed by the police, and
Marx was brought to trial on several occasions, facing various allegations
including insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, committing a press
misdemeanor, and inciting armed rebellion through tax boycotting,
although each time he was acquitted.
Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in Prussia collapsed, and the king, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters,
who implemented counter-revolutionary measures to expunge leftist and other
revolutionary elements from the country.
Consequently, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was soon suppressed and Marx
was ordered to leave the country on 16 May.
Marx returned to Paris, which was then under the grip of both a reactionary
counter-revolution and a cholera epidemic, and was soon expelled by the city authorities who
considered him a political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth
child, and not able to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 he
sought refuge in London.
Life
in London
Marx moved to London in May 1849 and
would remain based in the city for the rest of his life. The headquarters of
the Communist League also moved to London. However, in the winter of
1849-1850, a split within the ranks of the Communist League
occurred when a faction within the Communist League led by August Willich
and Karl Schapper began agitating for an immediate uprising on the part of
the Communist League. Willich and Schapper believed that once the
Communist League had initiated the uprising, the entire working class from
across Europe would rise "spontaneously" to join the uprising, thus,
creating revolution across Europe. Marx and Frederick
Engels protested that such an unplanned uprising
on the part of the Communist League was "adventuristic" and would be
suicide for the Communist League.
Such an uprising, as that recommended by the Schapper/Willich group would
easily be crushed by the police and the armed forces of the reactionary
governments of Europe. This, Marx maintained, would spell doom for the Communist
League itself. Changes in society, Marx argued, are not achieved overnight
through the efforts and will power of "a handful of men."
Instead, changes in society are brought about through a scientific analysis of
economic conditions of society and by moving toward revolution through
different stages of social development. In the present stage of development
(circa 1850), following the defeat of the 1848 uprisings across Europe, Marx
felt that the Communist League should encourage the working class to
unite with progressive elements of the rising bourgeoisie in order to defeat
the feudal aristocracy on issues involving demands for governmental reforms, e.g.
a constitution republic with freely elected assemblies and universal (male) suffrage.
In other words, the working class must join with the bourgeois/democratic
forces to bring about the successful conclusion of the bourgeois revolution
before stressing the working class agenda and a working class revolution.
After a long struggle, which
threatened to ruin the Communist League, Marx's viewpoint prevailed and,
eventually, the Willich/Schapper group left the Communist League. London became
the new headquarters of the Communist League. Meanwhile, Marx also became
heavily involved with the socialist German Workers' Educational Society.
The German Workers' Educational Society held their meetings in Great Windmill Street, Soho, central London's entertainment district.
The German Workers' Educational Society also was racked with an internal
struggle between its members, part of which followed Marx and another part
which followed the Schapper/Willich faction. The issues in this internal split
were the same issues raised in the internal split within the Communist
League. Marx, however, lost the fight with the Schapper/Willich faction
within the German Workers' Educational Society and on September 17,
1850, resigned from the Society.
While in London, Marx devoted
himself to task revolutionary organizing of the working class. For the first
few years he and his family lived in extreme poverty.
His main source of income was his colleague, Engels, who derived much of his
income from his family's business.
Marx also worked as correspondent for the New York
Daily Tribune.
In earlier years, Marx had been able to communicate with the broad masses of
the working class by editing his own newspaper or editing a newspaper financed
by others sympathetic to his plilosophy. Now in London, Marx was unable to
finance his own newspaper and unable to put together finacing from others.
Thus, Marx sought to communicate with the public by writing articles for the New
York Tribune.
The New York Daily Tribune had been founded in New York City in the
United States of America by Horace Greeley in April 1841.
Marx's main contact on the "Tribune" was Charles Dana. Later in 1868, Charles Dana would leave the Tribune
to become the owner and editor in chief of the New York Sun a competing
newspaper in New York City.
However, at this time Charles Dana served on the editorial board of the Tribune.
Several things about the Tribune
made the newspaper an excellent vehicle for Marx to use in order to reach a
sympathetic public in across the Atlantic Ocean. First of all, since its
founding the Tribune was an inexpensive newspaper—two (2) cents per
copy.
Accordingly, the newspaper was popular with the broad masses of the common
working class of the United States. With a run of about 50,000 issues, the
Tribune was the most widely circulated journal in the United States.
Editorially, the Tribune reflected Greeley's own anti-slavery opinions.
Accordingly, not only did the Tribune have wide readership with the
United States and not only did that readership come from the working classes,
but the readers seemed to be from the progressive wing of the working class.
Marx's first article for the New York Tribune was on the British elections
to Parliament and was published in the August 21, 1852 issue of the Tribune.
Marx was just one of the reporters
in Europe that the New York Tribune employed. However, with the slavery
crisis coming to a head in the late 1850s and with the outbreak of the Civil
War in 1861, the American public's interest in European affairs declined.
Marx recognized this deterioration of interest in European subjects within
American readership and very early began to write on issues affecting the
United States—particularly the "slavery crisis" and the "War
Between the States."
Marx continued to write articles for
the New York Daily Tribune as long as Marx was sure that the Tribune'seditorial
policy was still a progressive policy. n until a change in the editorial board
at the Tribune brought about a new editorial policy at the Tribune. No
longer was the Tribune to be a strong abolitionist paper and a paper
dedicated to a complete union victory in the War Between the States. The new editorial board supported an immediate peace between
the union and the confederacy with slavery left intact in the confederacy.
Accordingly, in 1863, Marx was forced to withdraw as a writer for the Tribune.
From December 1851 to March 1852,
Marx wrote The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,
a work on the French
Revolution of 1848, in which he expanded upon his
concepts of historical materialism, class struggle
and the dictatorship
of the proletariat, advancing the argument that
victorious proletariat has to smash the bourgeois
state.
The 1850s and 1860s also mark the
line between what some scholars see as idealistic,
Hegelian young Marx from the more scientifically minded mature Marx
writings of the later period.This distinction is usually associated with the structural Marxism school,and not all scholars agree that it exists.
The years of revolution from 1848 through 1849 had been a grand experience for
both Marx and Engels. They both became sure that their economic view of the course
of history was the only valid way that historic events like the revolutionary
upsurge of 1848 could be adequately explained. For some time after 1848, Marx
and Engels wondered if the entire revolutionary upsurge had completely played
out. When time had passed, they began to think that a new revolutionary would
occur when there was another downturn in the national economy. The downturn in
the United States economy in 1852 set them to wonder if a revolutionary upsurge
would soon occur. The United States economy was too new to play host to a
classical revolution. Any economic crisis which began in the United States
would not lead to revolution unless one of the older economies of Europe
"caught the contagion" from the United States. In other words, economies
of the world were still seen as individual national systems which were
contiguous with the national borders of each country. The "Panic of
1857" broke the mold of all prior thinking on the world economy. The Panic
of 1857 was truly the first world-wide economic depression.
Marx longed to return to his
economic studies. He had left these studies in 1844 and had been preoccupied
with other projects over the last thirteen (13) years. By returning to his
study of economics, he felt he would be able to understand more thoroughly what
was occirring in the world.
In 1864, Marx became involved in the
International
Workingmen's Association (also
known as First International).,to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864.In that organisation, Marx was involved in the struggle against the anarchist
wing centred around Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–1876).
Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council
from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of
the International.
The most important political event during the existence of the International
was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the
citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two
months. In response to the bloody suppression of this rebellion Marx wrote one
of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil
War in France, a defense of the Commune.
Given the repeated failures and
frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to
understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of
the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists
and on economic data.By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital,
landed property, wage labour, the state, and foreign trade and the world
market; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse.
In 1859 Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In the early 1860s he
worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories
of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians
of political economy, particularly Adam Smith
and David Ricardo.
This work is often seen as the fourth book of Capital
and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of
economic thought.
In 1867 the first volume of Capital
was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production.
Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value (influenced by Thomas Hodgskin) and his conception of surplus value
and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of
profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.
Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to
work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.
Marx in 1882
During the last decade of his life,
Marx's health declined and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had
characterised his previous work.
He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly
in Germany and Russia. His Critique
of the Gotha Programme opposed
the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel
to compromise with the state socialism
of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party.
This work is also notable for another famous Marx's quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his
need."
In a letter to Vera Zasulich
dated 8 March 1881, Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the
capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the
common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.
While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social
regeneration in Russia", Marx also warned that, in order for the mir to
operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a
preceding capitalist stage, it "would first be necessary to eliminate the
deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all
sides."Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allowed that
"normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune
could exist.
However, in the same letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx points out that "at the
core of the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the
producer from the means of production."
In one of the drafts of this letter, Marx reveals his growing passion for
anthropology, motivated by his belief that future communism would be a return
on a higher level to the communism of our prehistoric past. He wrote that
"the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist
production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has
reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the
return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type — collective
production and appropriation". He added that "the vitality of
primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek,
Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist
societies".
Before he died, Marx asked Engels to write up these ideas, which were published
in 1884 under the title The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Personal
life
Jenny Carolina and Jenny Laura Marx
(1869). All the Marx daughters were named in honour of their mother, Jenny von Westphalen
Marx and von Westphalen had seven
children together, but partly owing to the poor living conditions they were
forced to live in whilst in London, only three survived to adulthood.
The children were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–83); Jenny Laura
(m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy
("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska";
1851–52); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–98) and one more who died before being named (July
1857). There are allegations that Marx also fathered a son, Freddy,
out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth.
Marx frequently used pseudonyms,
often when renting a house or flat, apparently to make it harder for the
authorities to track him down. While in Paris, he used that of 'Monsieur
Ramboz', whilst in London he signed off his letters as 'A. Williams'. His
friends referred to him as 'Moor', owing to his dark complexion and black curly
hair, something which they believed made him resemble the historical Moors of North Africa, whilst he encouraged his children to call
him 'Old Nick' and 'Charley'.
He also bestowed nicknames and pseudonyms on his friends and family as well,
referring to Friedrich Engels as 'General', his housekeeper Helene as 'Lenchen'
or 'Nym', while one of his daughters, Jennychen, was referred to as 'Qui Qui,
Emperor of China' and another, Laura, was known as 'Kakadou' or 'the Hottentot'.
According to Sylvia Nasar,
Marx never properly learned English and never went to an English factory.
Death
The tomb of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery,
London
Following the death of his wife
Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept
him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It eventually brought on
the bronchitis
and pleurisy that
killed him in London on 14 March 1883. He died a stateless person;
family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery,
London, on 17 March 1883. There were between nine and eleven mourners at his
funeral.
Several of his closest friends spoke
at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels's speech included the passage:
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the
afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone
for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair,
peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.
Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet
and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, were also in
attendance.
Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a
speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class
movement, made a short statement in French.
Two telegrams
from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out.
Together with Engels's speech, this constituted the entire programme of the
funeral.
Non-relatives attending the funeral included three communist associates of
Marx: Friedrich Lessner, imprisoned for three years after the Cologne communist
trial of 1852; G. Lochner, whom Engels described as "an old member of the
Communist League"; and Carl Schorlemmer,
a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society,
and a communist activist involved in the 1848 Baden revolution.
Another attendee of the funeral was Ray Lankester,
a British zoologist who would later become a prominent academic.
Upon his own death, Engels left
Marx's two surviving daughters a "significant portion" of his $4.8
million estate.
Marx's tombstone
bears the carved message: "WORKERS OF
ALL LANDS UNITE", the final line of The
Communist Manifesto, and from the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (edited by Engels): "The philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it".
The Communist
Party of Great Britain had the
monumental tombstone built in 1954 with a portrait bust by Laurence
Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had had only
humble adornment.
In 1970 there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument using a
homemade bomb.
The later Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm
remarked that "One cannot say Marx died a failure" because, although
he had not achieved a large following of disciples in Britain, his writings had
already begun to make an impact on the leftist movements in Germany and Russia.
Within 25 years of his death, the continental European socialist parties that
acknowledged Marx's influence on their politics were each gaining between 15%
and 47% in those countries with representative
democratic elections.
Though inspired by French socialist
and sociological thought,
Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that their favoured small-scale socialistic
communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty, and that only a
large-scale change in the economic system
can bring about real change.
The other important contribution to
Marx's revision of Hegelianism came from Engels's book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in
terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive
force for revolution.
Marx believed that he could study
history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the
resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded,
therefore, that a communist revolution would inevitably occur. However, Marx
famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated
himself to trying to alter the world.
Philosophy
and social thought
Marx polemic with other thinkers
often occurred through critique, and thus he has been called "the first great user of critical method
in social sciences."
He criticised speculative philosophy,
equating metaphysics with ideology.
By adopting this approach, Marx attempted to separate key findings from
ideological biases.
This set him apart from many contemporary philosophers.
Human
nature
Marx's
theory of human nature
Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human history
involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both human beings and material objects.
Humans recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves.
For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal
alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation
that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended.
Marx further argues that, by molding nature
in desired ways,
the subject takes the object as its own, and thus permits the individual to be
actualised as fully human. For Marx, then, human
nature—Gattungswesen, or species-being—exists
as a function of human labour.
Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that, in
order for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object, it must first
exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world.
Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and
comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own
work",
but characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and
abstract.
Marx thus departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal,
actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he has actual,
sensuous objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that
he can only express his life in actual sensuous objects."
Consequently, Marx revises Hegelian "work" into material "labour", and in the context of human capacity to transform
nature the term "labour power".
— Karl Marx, The
Communist Manifesto
Marx had a special concern with how
people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power.
He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.
As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but
developed a more materialist conception.
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.
For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own
labour—one's capacity to transform the world—is tantamount to being alienated
from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss.
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
behavior merely adapt.
Commodity fetishism provides an
example of what Engels called "false consciousness",
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.
Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths;
they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that
one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the
production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas
as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a
subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).
An example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed
up in a passage from the preface
to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering
and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand
for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about
their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires
illusions.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that religion had as its primary
social aim the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of
highlighting/preserving political and economic status quo
and inequality.
Economy,
history and society
Further information: Marxian economics
Marx's thoughts on labour were
related to the primacy he gave to the economic relation in determining the
society's past, present and future (see also economic determinism).
Accumulation of capital shapes the social system.
Social change, for Marx, was about conflict between opposing interests,
driven, in the background, by economic forces.
This became the inspiration for the body of works known as the conflict theory.
In his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human history
began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and
dehumanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism.
Marx noted that this was not an intentional process; rather, no individual or
even state can go against the forces of economy.
The organisation of society depends
on means of production. Literally those things, like land, natural resources, and
technology, necessary for the production of material goods and the relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into
as they acquire and use the means of production.
Together these compose the mode of production, and Marx distinguished historical eras in terms of
distinct modes of production. Marx differentiated between base and superstructure, with the base (or substructure) referring to the economic
system, and superstructure, to the cultural and political system.
Marx regarded this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure as a major source of social disruption and conflict.
Despite Marx's stress on critique of
capitalism and discussion of the new communist society
that should replace it, his explicit critique of capitalism is guarded, as he
saw it as an improved society compared to the past ones (slavery and feudal).
Marx also never clearly discusses issues of morality and justice, although
scholars agree that his work contained implicit discussion of those concepts.
Memorial to Karl Marx in Moscow. The
inscription reads "Proletarians
of all countries, unite!"
Marx's view of capitalism was
two-sided.
On one hand, Marx, in the 19th century's deepest critique of the dehumanising
aspects of this system, noted that defining features of capitalism include
alienation, exploitation, and recurring, cyclical depressions leading to mass unemployment; on the other hand capitalism
is also characterised by "revolutionizing, industrializing and
universalizing qualities of development, growth and progressivity" (by
which Marx meant industrialisation, urbanisation, technological progress, increased productivity
and growth, rationality and scientific revolution), that are responsible for progress.
Marx considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history,
because it constantly improved the means of production, more so than any other
class in history, and was responsible for the overthrow of feudalism
and its transition to capitalism.
Capitalism can stimulate considerable growth because the capitalist can, and has
an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment.
According to Marx capitalists take
advantage of the difference between the labour market and the market for
whatever commodity the capitalist can produce. Marx observed that in
practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices.
Marx called the difference "surplus value"
and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour,
the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can
produce.
Marx's dual view of capitalism can be seen in his description of the capitalists:
he refers to them as to vampires sucking worker's blood, but at the same time,
he notes that drawing profit is "by no means an injustice"
and that capitalists simply cannot go against the system.
The true problem lies with the "cancerous cell" of capital, understood not as property or equipment, but the relations
between workers and owners – the economic system in general.
At the same time, Marx stressed that
capitalism was unstable, and prone to periodic crises.
He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new
technologies, and less and less in labour.
Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labour is the source
of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy
grew.
Marx believed that increasingly severe crises would punctuate this cycle of
growth, collapse, and more growth.
Moreover, he believed that in the long-term this process would necessarily
enrich and empower the capitalist class and impoverish the proletariat.
In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism,
capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical
process:
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on
whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a
certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange,
the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged ... the
feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already
developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst
asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition,
accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the
economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going
on before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of
bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these
fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property.
Marx believed that those structural
contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism,
or a post-capitalistic, communist society:
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from
under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all,
are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
equally inevitable."
Thanks to various processes overseen
by capitalism, such as urbanisation, the working class, the proletariat, should
grow in numbers and develop class consciousness, in time realising that they have to and can change the
system.
Marx believed that if the proletariat were to seize the means of production,
they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally,
abolishing exploiting class, and introduce a system of production less
vulnerable to cyclical crises.
Marx argued in The German Ideology that capitalism will end through the organised actions of
an international working class:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The
conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
In this new society the
self-alienation would end, and humans would be free to act without being bound
by the labour market.
It would be a democratic society, enfranchising the entire population.
In such a utopian world
there would also be little if any need for a state, which goal was to enforce
the alienation.
He theorised that between capitalism and the establishment of a
socialist/communist system, a dictatorship
of the proletariat—a period where the working class
holds political power and forcibly socialises the means of production—would
exist.
As he wrote in his "Critique
of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and
communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation
of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition
period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship
of the proletariat."
While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries
with strong democratic institutional structures (such as Britain, the US and the
Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries with strong centralised
state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the "lever of our
revolution must be force."
Legacy Influence
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
monument in Marx-Engels-Forum, Berlin-Mitte
Marx is widely considered one of the
most influential thinkers in history, who has had a significant influence on
both world politics and intellectual thought.
Robert C. Tucker credits Marx with profoundly affecting ideas about history,
society, economics, culture, politics, and the nature of social inquiry.
Marx's biographer Francis Wheen considered the "history of the twentieth century"
to be "Marx's legacy",
while philosopher Peter Singer believed Marx's impact to be comparable with that of Jesus Christ
and Muhammad.
Singer notes that "Marx's ideas brought about modern sociology,
transformed the study of history, and profoundly affected philosophy,
literature and the arts."
BBC polls
have consistently found Marx considered as the top "thinker of the
millennium."
Paul Ricœur calls Marx one of the masters of the "school of
suspicion", alongside Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
Karl Löwith considered Marx and Søren Kierkegaard to be the two greatest Hegelian philosophical successors.
Erich Fromm
identifies Marx, together with Freud and Albert Einstein,
as the "architects of the modern age", but rejects the idea that Marx
and Freud were equally significant, emphasizing that he sees Marx as both far
more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker.
Philip Stokes says that Marx's ideas led to him becoming "the darling of
both European and American intellectuals up until the 1960s".
Marx has influenced disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology,
media studies,
political science, theater, history, sociological theory, cultural studies,
education, economics, geography,
literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy.
Marx's widespread influence has been
understood to be a result of his work's "morally empowering language of
critique" against the dominant capitalist society. Later commentators
agree that no other body of work was so relevant to modern times and
simultaneously so outspoken about the need for change.
Marxism
In East Germany until the fall of
the Berlin Wall, Karl Marx portrait was on the banknotes of the highest value.
Followers of Marx have drawn on his work
to propose grand, cohesive theoretical outlooks dubbed "Marxism".
This body of works has had significant influence on both politics and science.
Nevertheless, Marxists have frequently debated amongst themselves over how to
interpret Marx's writings and apply his concepts to the modern world.
The legacy of Marx's thought has become contested between numerous tendencies,
each of which sees itself as Marx's most accurate interpreter. These tendencies
include Leninism, Stalinism,
Trotskyism,
Maoism, Luxemburgism,
and libertarian Marxism.
Various currents have also developed in academic Marxism,
often under influence of other views, resulting in structuralist Marxism, historical Marxism, phenomenological Marxism, Analytical Marxism and Hegelian Marxism.
The Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara
summed up his own appeal to Marxism by stating that Marx produced "a
qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history,
understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it,
he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted,
it must be transformed."
There is a distinction between
"Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly
before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde,
and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue,
accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of lack of
faith in the working class. After the French party split into a reformist and
revolutionary party, some accused Guesde (leader of the latter) of taking
orders from Marx; Marx remarked to Lafargue, "What is certain to me is
[that, if this is Marxism, then] I myself am not [a] Marxist" (in a letter
to Engels, Marx later accused Guesde of being a "Bakuninist").
Founder
of social science
Marx is typically cited, along with Émile Durkheim
and Max Weber,
as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.
In contrast to philosophers, Marx offered theories that could often be tested with the scientific method.
Both Marx and Auguste Comte set out to develop scientifically justified ideologies in
the wake of European secularization
and new developments in the philosophies of history and science. Whilst Marx, working in the Hegelian
tradition, rejected Comtean sociological positivism, in attempting to develop a science of society he
nevertheless came to be recognised as a founder of sociology
as the word gained wider meaning.
In modern sociological theory, Marxist sociology
is recognised as one of the main classical perspectives. Isaiah Berlin
considers Marx the true founder of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone
can claim the title."