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Marx, Karl


"Marx" redirects here. For other uses, see Marx (disambiguation).
Karl Heinrich Marx
Full name Karl Heinrich Marx
Born May 5, 1818
Trier, Kingdom of Prussia
Died March 14, 1883(1883-03-14) (aged 64)
London, United Kingdom
Era 19th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Hegelianism
Main interests Politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, history, class struggle
Notable ideas Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), surplus value, contributions to the Labour theory of value, alienation and exploitation of the worker, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, materialist conception of history
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Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a German[2] philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, and communist revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction.[3] Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".[4][5] 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.[6]

Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism. "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."[6]

On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized 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."[7]

While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.[8] In 1999, a BBC poll revealed that Marx had been voted the "thinker of the millennium" by people from around the world.[9]

Contents

Biography

Karl Marx as a teenager

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, Heinrich Marx, was born Jewish and converted to Lutheranism prior to Karl's birth, in part to advance his career as a lawyer; Karl's grandfather was the rabbi of Trier. A man of the Enlightenment, Heinrich was devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. Karl's mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from the Netherlands, and Jewish at the time of Karl's birth, although she converted upon the death of her parents. Karl was baptized when he was six years old.[10] Little is known about Marx's childhood.[11]

Marx in 1882

Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian baron, on June 19, 1843, in the Pauluskirche, at Bad Kreuznach. Marx and Jenny had seven children, but due to poverty, only three survived to adulthood.[12] Marx's major source of income was from the support of Friedrich Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from his family's business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.[13] Inheritances from one of Jenny's uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. In 1864, a further inheritance of money and a house from an old colleague, Wilhelm Wolff allowed the family to live more comfortably. Marx had, for much of his life until then, generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, while striving to support a middle-class lifestyle for his wife and children.

Marx had seven children by his wife: 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 out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth.[14]

Karl Marx's Tomb at 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 March 14, 1883. He died a stateless person;[15] family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery, London, on March 17, 1883. There were only eleven mourners at his funeral.[16]

Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels's speech included the words

“ 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.[17] ”

In addition to Engels and Liebknecht, Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, also attended his funeral. 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. Those attending the funeral included Friedrich Lessner, who had been sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was described by Engels as "an old member of the Communist League" and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels. Three others attended the funeral—Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church.

Marx's tombstone bears the carved messages: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE", the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels's version of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach:[18]

“ The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it[19] ”

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.[20] In 1970 there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument using a homemade bomb.[21][22]

Cultural historians may regard Karl Marx as the first major social theorist to form a series of concepts within the break between modern and premodern societies.[23]

Career

"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people."

— Karl Marx, in a letter to his father, 1835[24]

Education

Marx was privately educated until 1830, when he enrolled at Trier High School.[11] He enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen; he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study.[25] At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner) and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented University of Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history.[26]

During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.[26]

The younger Karl Marx

Marx was influenced in his formative school years by Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. They were among his favorite authors, representing even early on his characteristic blend of German profundity and French subversive wit.[25]

Marx and the Young Hegelians

The Left or Young Hegelians consisted of a group of radical thinkers[26] circling around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, and opposing their teacher Hegel. Despite their criticism of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel's dialectical method as a powerful weapon for the critique of established politics and religion. One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against both Feuerbach and Bauer in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum" (1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these atheists "pious people" for their reification of abstract concepts. Stirner's work made a deep impression on Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach: he abandoned Feuerbachian materialism and accomplished what recent authors have denoted as an "epistemological break." He developed the basic concept of historical materialism against Stirner in his book, "Die Deutsche Ideologie" (1846, The German Ideology), which he did not publish.[27] Another link to the Young Hegelians was Moses Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to whom he owed many of his insights into the relationship between state, society, and religion. During his years at college, the official lectures on Hegel left Marx feeling ill, "from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested."[25]

Marx in Paris and Brussels

Owing to the conditions of censorship in Prussia, Marx retired from the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung, and planned to publish, with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,[28] (the German-French Annals) based in Paris, and arrived in late October 1843. Paris at this time served as the home and headquarters of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. In Paris, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he met Friedrich Engels, who would become his most important friend and life-long companion. Engels had met Marx only once before (and briefly) at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842;[29] he went to Paris to show Marx his recently published book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.[30] This book convinced Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.

After the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, living on the rue Vaneau, wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in Europe, Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just. When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read Proudhon.[31] He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he had never been acquainted with before: a large urban proletariat.

“ [Hitherto exposed mainly to university towns ...] Marx's sudden espousal of the proletarian cause can be directly attributed (as can that of other early German communists such as Weitling)[32] to his first hand contacts with socialist intellectuals [and books] in France.[33] ”

Marx re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to Bauer's atheism wrote On the Jewish Question. This essay consisted mostly of a critique of current notions of civil and human rights and political emancipation; it also included several critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from a standpoint of social emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 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 labour under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production.

In January 1845, after Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval of an assassination attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, the French authorities ordered Marx, among many others, to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels in Belgium.

Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history, and in collaboration with Engels elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), which stated as its basic thesis 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. This was the first major work of what scholars consider to be his later phase, abandoning the Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his earlier work.

Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come under the influence of Marx and Engels. Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals, the Revolutions of 1848. In February, Marx received a substantial inheritance from his father of 6000 francs. According to Belgian Ministry of Justice records Marx allegedly used a third of this money to arm revolution-minded Belgian workers[34], while other sources claim the figure was closer to 5000 francs[35][36]. The veracity of the allegations is however disputed.[37] Marx was subsequently deported from Belgium, though on what grounds is uncertain.

Meanwhile also in February 1848 a radical movement had seized power from King Louis-Philippe in France and had invited Marx to return to Paris. Arriving there he witnessed the revolutionary June Days Uprising at first hand. When this collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper"), which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father.[38] During its existence he went on trial twice, on February 7, 1849, because of a press misdemeanor, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion. Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to Paris, but was forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London.

London

The grave of Karl Marx in London

Marx moved to London in May 1849 and remained there for the rest of his life. For the first few years he and his family lived in extreme poverty. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851.[39] In London Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organizing, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism. Having read Engels' study of the working class, Marx turned away from philosophy and devoted himself 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 centered 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. On 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, wage labour, the state, 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 was published posthumously under the editorship of Karl Kautsky 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, well behind schedule, the first volume of Books By This Author


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