The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more
his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever
cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing
value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the
devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities;
it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the
proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
The
philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx,
is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in
the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his
own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid
acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until
quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under
regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant
that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his
meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In
addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his
writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the
opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.
Karl Heinrich
Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the
river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of
rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew
Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so
that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in
Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at
the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von
Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member
of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic
literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's
father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he
remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the
Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.
Marx became a
member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the
theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical
critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to
the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the
Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842,
became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a
liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles,
particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian
government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.
Arriving
in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized
groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French
socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German
radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a
communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained
unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a
humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of
Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature
of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings
freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in
Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich
Engels (1820-1895).
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844
and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three
years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning
interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an
intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the
materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript
(published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic
thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material
conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of
the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the
present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by
communism.
At the same time Marx was composing The German
Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against
the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined
the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers
with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major
theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of
1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration
of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than
the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848
Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto
Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the
Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship
since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper
was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the
"long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his
life.
Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the
imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the
Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution
in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was soon convinced that "a new
revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then
devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine
the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half
of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in
the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children
and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major
source of income at this time was Engels who was trying a steadily
increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was
supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for
the New York Daily Tribune.
Marx's major work on political
economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page
manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign
trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not
published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to
compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed
the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the
first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed
the capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his
version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value
and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of
profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III
were finished during the 1860s but Marx worked on the manuscripts for
the rest of his life and they were published posthumously by Engels.
One
reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting
his time and energy to the First International, to whose General
Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly
active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and
leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by 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. On the bloody suppression
of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The
Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During
the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was
incapable of sustained effort that had so characterized his previous
work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics,
particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, he opposed in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme, the tendency of his followers Karl
Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) to compromise with
state socialism of Lasalle in the interests of a united socialist
party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich 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.
Marx's health did not
improve. He traveled to European spas and even to Algeria in search of
recuperation. The deaths of his eldest daughter and his wife clouded
the last years of his life. Marx died March 14, 1883 and was buried at
Highgate Cemetery in North London. His collaborator and close friend
Friedrich Engels delivered the following eulogy three days later:
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 for ever.
An immeasurable loss has been
sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and
by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been
left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make
itself felt.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or
organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human
history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of
ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and
clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.;
that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and
consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given
people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the
state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on
religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light
of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as
had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also
discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day
capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode
of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly
threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous
investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had
been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough
for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one
such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated --
and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in
every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent
discoveries.
Such was the man of science. But this was not even
half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic,
revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new
discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application
perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced
quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate
revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in
general. For example, he followed closely the development of the
discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of
Marcel Deprez.
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His
real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the
overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it
had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern
proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own
position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its
emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a
tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first
Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche
Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the
New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of
militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and
London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great
International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an
achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he
had done nothing else.
And, consequently, Marx was the best
hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both
absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories.
Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one
another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as
though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme
necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by
millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia
to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to
say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one
personal enemy.
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
Marx's
contribution to our understanding of society has been enormous. His
thought is not the comprehensive system evolved by some of his
followers under the name of dialectical materialism. The very
dialectical nature of his approach meant that it was usually tentative
and open-ended. There was also the tension between Marx the political
activist and Marx the student of political economy. Many of his
expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement
have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the
economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in
class conflict have had an enormous influence on history, sociology,
and study of human culture.
