| Profile | Major Works | Resources |
Karl Marx, 1818-1883.
German economist, philosopher and socialist revolutionary, founder of Marxian economics.
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the Rhineland city of Trier, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. Marx was of German Jewish descent. His grandfather Marx Levi, had been a prominent rabbi in Trier. Karl's father, Heinrich Marx, a lawyer, had formally converted to Lutheran Christianity in 1824 to advance his legal career. Karl was his second son, but after the first died, became the eldest of the surviving brood of seven children (Karl had a younger brother and five sisters).
Trier had been under French occupation during the revolutionary wars. Heinrich Marx was an ardent enthusiast of the French Enlightenment and great admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau, and gave young Karl a largely secular irreligious upbringing. The young Marx was also greatly influenced by the Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a prominent Prussian aristocrat and official in Trier, the father of one of his school-friends. Von Westphalen was also an Enlightenment liberal, and much taken by the bright young Karl, served as an early mentor, practically a second father.
Berlin
Karl Marx was educated in the schools of Trier, and enrolled at the
nearby
University of Bonn in 1835.
Marx's early passion for literature and philosophy was overruled by his father, who
insisted he study law. Bored by his studies at Bonn, Marx delved into
extracurricular activities - drinking, dueling, student politics and
getting in trouble with the police. In an effort to get his son to
buckle down, away from bad influences, Heinrich allowed young Karl to
transfer to the University of Berlin in 1836.
Karl Marx flourished in Berlin - not that he found law at the University of Berlin any more attractive than it had been at Bonn, but Berlin had more stimulating offerings in other departments. Marx was particularly taken by the philosophy lectures of the charismatic young Bruno Bauer, then the leading figure of the "Young Hegelians". The Young Hegelians were a group of followers of the late Berlin professor and philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel (Hegel had died only recently, in 1831). Hegel had articulated a complex philosophy around the concept of "alienation" - that is, the disconnect between the "subject" (roughly, man's consciousness) and "object" (the real world around him). Hegel had posited that man's understanding of reality is a matter of ideas, but that these ideas are constantly changing and being re-interpreted by a process he called "dialectic". The Young Hegelians, like Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, had adopted Hegel's methods, but were uncomfortable with Hegel's relentless idealism. Hegel had emphasized the primacy of human ideas in determining the shape of society and the course of history, but the Young Hegelians began to reverse that, and suggesting that it was social conditions that determined human ideas (what they called "naturalism").
Marx came into the Young Hegelian circle in 1837 and began to absorb all this heady stuff. After his father's death in 1838, Marx's means were straitened, but the parental constraints on his activities were also lifted. Marx assisted Bauer in editing a new edition of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (1840). Marx went on to write a doctoral thesis on the Greek atomist philosophers, elevating Epicurus over Democritus. Fearing his Berlin professors might object to its content, Marx instead submitted the thesis at the University of Jena (known to be more relaxed), which awarded him his Ph.D. in 1841. Marx soon began making plans to follow Bauer and take up a lectureship in Bonn.
By this time, the Young Hegelians were drifting into politics. Despite their turn towards naturalism, they still believed that change in society came through change in ideas. As a result, many Young Hegelians believed reform in conservative Prussia could be brought about by people like themselves challenging existing ideas about the social, religious and political order. The ascension of King Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in 1840 seemed to promise a new era of liberalism - or at least many young Germans hoped. But it turned out to be illusory, and censorship was actually ratcheted up. The Young Hegelians were suspected and targeted by the obnoxious Prussian authorities - their journals and newspapers were censored and academic and civil posts blocked. When Bauer's lectureship at Bonn was terminated, Marx realized his own chances there were nil..
Cologne
Giving up the idea of an academic career, Marx turned to journalism. He moved to Cologne and became chief editor of a new liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhine Gazette") in October, 1842. At this stage, Marx's convictions were largely as a classical liberal, and consonant with the commercial interests that funded the newspaper. Marx's editorials, principally in defense of freedom of the press and other civil liberties, were stridently critical of what he perceived to be a disappointingly conservative Prussian government. Marx's bold attacks prompted the Prussian authorities to dedicate a special censor in Cologne to observe the newspaper, and find a basis to shut it down. But Marx was quite careful in his wording, and managed to escape two legal suits. Finally, in early January 1843, the wearied government simply decreed that the Rheinishe Zeitung should shut down at the end of the quarter. Marx had resigned in advance in the hopes of saving it, but the RZ was wrapped up by March.
Two months later, Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. A childhood friend from Trier, Jenny was the daughter of his early mentor, the Baron von Westphalen. The match raised some eyebrows, given Jenny's aristocratic background and Marx's lower social status and ethnic roots. But her liberal-minded father blessed the match, and after a seven-year engagement (begun in 1836), Karl and Jenny were finally married in Kreuznach on June 19, 1843. Marx and his new bride moved to Paris in November 1843.
Paris
The sojourn in Paris was a momentous phase of Marx's life - even though it turned out be short, little more than a year. Over the summer of 1843, Marx had planned with the Young Hegelian publicist Arnold Ruge to launch the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a new German-language journal to be published abroad to escape Prussian censorship. Although Zurich had been Ruge's first choice, Marx insisted on Paris. Marx's growing interest in politics had made him aware he needed to get a better grasp of economics and there was probably no better place to study it than in Paris. Marx was also curious to explore the budding socialist movement in France (recently brought to widespread attention in Germany by Lorenz von Stein's 1842 work). The Marxes (and Ruge) took up residence at 38 Rue Vaneau (gmap) in Paris. Several other German expatriates also lived in the building and were frequent guests in Marx's apartment - notably, the poet Heinrich Heine and the radical activist German Mäurer, leader of the proto-communist League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten). Through them, Marx became personally acquainted with, and consorted with. a variety of radical writers and leaders of political movements, both German and French. Marx's lifelong conversion to socialism was effected here.
Due to disagreements between Ruge and Marx, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was dissolved after its first and only number (February 1844). But the issue contained two notable articles by Marx already pointing in his future direction. The first criticzed Bruno Bauer's thesis on Jewish emancipation,. Bauer had argued that anti-Semitism could be overcome by separating church and state. Marx replied the problem was not caused by the state, but rooted in civil society, and that only by first changing the underlying social conditions could emancipation be achieved. Marx's second DFJ article was an introduction to a projected larger work criticizing Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Hegel's political philosophy had posited that the State was a determinant of ideas in society, whereas Marx argued that it was society that created the State and infused it with their ideas. While Hegel saw the State civil service possessing a universal point of view, transcending the particularist conflicts of different social groups, Marx saw them as merely tools to protect the interests of the dominant classes. Marx concluded that political reform in Prussia was impossible, everyone was too closely invested in the current order, and that change could only come about by a revolution from below. It is here that Marx first identified the existence of a new social class that seemed to be emerging in the rising industrial centers in France - the urban working class, the "proletariat". As it was a novel class that had no obvious space in the old social order, Marx boldly identified the proletariat as the conduit for change. As its numbers increased and their consciousness of their social condition became sharper, Marx conjectured the proletariat would begin demanding change, not merely political reform, but a complete overthrowing of the existing order and social relations. He predicted the proletarian revolution would start in France, where industrial conditions were more advanced, and then spill over into Germany. "The day of German resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallican cock" (p.85).
That same issue of the DFJ contained a couple of articles by another German expatriate, Friedrich Engels, at that time a manager in his father's textile factory in Manchester, England. Marx and Engels finally met in September 1844, when Engels came on a short visit to Paris. Although they had met once before (in the RZ offices in Cologne), it was this Paris visit that marked the beginning of their close friendship and lifelong collaboration. At the time, Engels was better versed in economics, and certainly had a deeper empirical knowledge of industrial capitalism and workers' movements (Engels's 1844 DFJ contributions were preludes to his famous 1845 study of the conditions of the English working class). But Marx was catching up. As part of his research on Hegel's theory of the State, Marx was undertaking a crash course in economics, reading Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, James Mill, as well as immersing himself in French socialist literature. Marx was particularly impressed by Smith's account of the division of labor, and was trying at the time to combine it with Hegelian theory. In his Paris manuscripts (which would be later be collected and published in 1932 as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), Marx decided to explain the Hegelian theory of alienation in terms of economic relationships. Marx argued that alienation was brought about not by inadequate consciousness (as Hegel had assumed), but by the material situation. Specifically, Marx posited that the emergence of private property and division of labor had brought about four dimensions of alienation - the estrangement of the laborer from his product, his estrangement from the production process, his estrangement from his own humanity and his estrangement from society. It is for this reason, Marx concluded, that the proletariat was the revolutionary class - not only did they have a compelling interest to overthrow the existing order, but by being completely alienated, they were the only ones with nothing to lose.
Shortly after meeting Engels, Marx abandoned the grand Hegel project and launched a new one with Engels focused on some recent writings of the Young Hegelians. The first collaborative work between Marx and Engels was the treatise on the Holy Family (1845), a critique of Ludwig Feuerbach's theory of religion. A Young Hegelian, Feuerbach had posited that religion was an obstacle to consciousness, and that once it was removed, human ideals would be realized on earth. But Marx and Engels argued that religion was no obstacle, that the real obstacle, the roots of alienation, lay in material economic conditions. Religious ideals merely echoed difficulties on earth, and emancipation from religion would achieve nothing by itself, without changes in the underlying economic circumstances. And once the material circumstances changed, then the need for religion would disappear naturally. This was the first cogent expression (in print) of Marx's materialism and the beginning of his break with the Young Hegelians.
Brussels
After the DFJ had gone defunct, Marx took to contributing and editing Vorwärts!, a German-language magazine that was launched in 1844 by Heine and other radical exiles in Paris. Its unbridled attacks on the Prussian government drew the attention of the authorities. In January 1845, after pressure by the Prussian embassy (reportedly delivered by the cultural attaché in Paris, Alexander von Humboldt), the French minister François Guizot suppressed the magazine and issued an order expelling Marx from France. Marx and his family moved to Brussels in February, 1845 where they would remain for the next three years.. Engels visited Brussels in April 1845, and would stay with the Marxes on and off until August 1846. It was here that Marx and Engels began their work as political activists, establishing the "Communist Corresponding Committee" in Brussels. Although principally oriented to the community of immigrant German artisans and workers in Belgium, the intention was to put the leaders of disparate working class movements in various European countries in contact with each other, as a prelude to the formation of a general political movement. During the summer of 1845, Marx and Engels traveled to England together, to meet German expatriate workers there, as well as make contact with English Chartist leaders. Marx's knowledge of the British economy and economic thinking was deepened during this sojourn (it was here that Marx came across the works of the English Ricardian Socialists)
During the Brussels period, Marx and Engels produced their second collaborative work, The German Ideology, often regarded as marking the transition of Marx from young philosopher to the mature social scientist. The definitive epistemological break with the Young Hegelians can be dated in April 1845, when Marx drafted his eleven "Theses on Feuerbach" (what would become the first chapter of the German Ideology). Although the rest of the manuscript was finished by the Spring of 1846, Marx and Engels were unable to find a publisher, and so set the manuscript aside in June 1846 (the German Ideology was first published in the 1930s).
In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels expounded more generally on their theory of historical materialism, and introduced many of the building bricks of future Marxian thought. Their first part emphasizes the superiority of Marx's materialism over the naturalism of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians. Feuerbach was right to reverse Hegel, but had not gone far enough. Feuerbach's historical man, who constructs ideas, although materialist in conception, is still too abstract, living in an abstract situation, almost some state of nature of the philosopher's imagination, and as a result, his ideas are also abstract, and really owe more to the philosopher's own sentimental humanist ideals. Moreover, naturalism is inherently static - it leaps from circumstances to ideas in one leap, and does not account for how changing circumstances can and have changed ideas over time. The understanding of historical man, Marx and Engels insisted, needs to be embedded in real history, the historical situation of his real circumstances, as they actually have been, and the changes they have undergone over time. This requires serious, deep research into the facts of economic history, not conjectural anthropology. But a correct interpretation is not enough. Marx and Engels derided the Young Hegelian confidence in ideas being sufficient to bring about reform. Positing new interpretations, demanding changes in people's consciousness, combating old ideas with new ideas, is merely fighting with shadows with shadows. It will have no effect if they do not also address the underlying economic situation and engage with those actually capable of bringing about change (like the proletarian movements).. As Marx famously notes, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
Marx and Engels' reserved the second part of the German Ideology to criticize contemporary strands of socialism. Although he has little affection for the "utopianism" of French socialist thinkers like Fourier and Cabet, and the more limited vision of Saint-Simon, Marx reserves his criticism primarily for German commentators on French socialism. He accuses them of failing to grasp the significance of working class movements, and treating socialist literature (immature as it may be) like just another intellectual exercise. (This is the only part of the German Ideology that made it into print).
A major reason behind writing of the German Ideology was not merely to criticize German philosophers, but also for Marx and Engels to advertise their new political project to them. The German Ideology was supposed to provide the "scientific" foundations of the Brussels Corresponding Committee. Marx and Engels dedicate a good portion of the text giving an outline of the historical development of feudalism and its transition to capitalism and spend a perhaps inordinate amount of time describing an upcoming "communist revolution". This is the first time both these ideas were set down, and they have a perceptible "first draft" feel - clogged, inchoate and rough. As Marx would later note, the book really served more as an exercise in "self-clarification" than communication (Zur Kritik, 1859: p.13-14). Nonetheless, the basic underlying ideas of Marxian thought are already here - in particular, the dialectic of historical materialism. It explains how productive forces determine social relations (called "forms of intercourse" here), how productive forces develop and eventually come into contradiction with the original social relations, and how these contradictions are eventually resolved by social revolutions. This resolution, of course, is not permanent - it merely sets up a new historical phase of development, which goes through the same pattern. In the German Ideology, the development of productive forces are measured in terms of division of labor, which have their social counterpart in historical forms of property relations (tribal, communal, feudal, bourgeois), from which derive social classes and "superstructure" elements like the State and ideology. They dote on the final phase of bourgeois capitalism, explaining its transition from guild structures to large-scale factory systems, and how it sets up the conditions for a proletarian revolution, which will culminate in "communism", the abolition of private property, and consequently an end to the division of labor, classes and the State. The finality of communism is premised on the observation that the proletariat created by bourgeois capitalism is the only class created in history without property to fall back upon, and consequently the "last class" in history.
Although the German Ideology manuscript was unpublished, Marx made his public break with "sentimental socialists" in print. Its second part on 'true socialism' found its way into anonymous articles in the Die Westfälischer Dampfboot in 1846-47. But the first clear announcement of Marx's new ideas in print was in 1847, when Marx wrote his polemical Poverty of Philosophy (the only work Marx wrote in French). It was a critique of the recent book of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (called Philosophy of Poverty - a title Marx satirically inverted) Although Proudhon and Marx had been friendly in Paris, Marx's critique of Proudhon's book was scathing. Marx uses the review to outline of his own theory of historical materialism, and mercilessly mocks Proudhon's failure to grasp both economics and historical change. He accuses Proudhon for continuing to embrace natural "eternal laws" and failing to see that social life is grounded in economic life, and that notions such as property (Proudhon's touchstone) change with historical epoch. Marx dismisses Proudhon's entire work as naive, trivial and pretentious. Marx's diatribe was sensational, and helped popularize Marx's name well beyond German exile circles. Clearly, the review of Proudhon was being used as a platform for Marx to state his own, growing views. Given that his prior manuscripts did not make it to print, Marx would later note that it was in the Misery of Philosophy that "the leading points of our theory were first presented scientifically, though in polemic form" (1859, p.14). But the scornful ferocity of the attack left a deep bitterness between the two men.
1848
In January 1847, Marx and Engels were invited by the League of the Just, a German working class organization formed back in 1836, to draw up a new program. Engels brought their program to League's congress in London in June, 1847, where it was adopted. The League of the Just and the Brussels Corresponding Committee were merged into a new organization, recast as the "Communist League" (Bund der Kommunisten), and adopted the now-famous motto "Working men of all countries, unite!". At the League's second London conference later that year (November, 1847), attended by both Marx and Engels, they were asked to transform the program into a manifesto. In the meantime, that same summer, Marx organized expatriate German workers in Brussels into the German Workers' Society (Deutschen Arbeiter Vereins, DAV), and took editorial control of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, effectively the paper of the new communist movement. That December, Marx delivered a set of lectures on economics before the DAV (what would be later printed in 1849 as Wage Labour and Capital, explaining the evolution of labor from slavery, to serfdom to wage labor).
The Communist Manifesto finally came out in late February 1848. It was a short, popular tract, written in German by Marx and Engels, intended to distinguish the Marxian socialism of the Communist League from other strands of socialism. This is perhaps the best-known and most accessible of their works. The Manifesto provides an outline of their theory, excising much of the heavy Hegelian baggage and placing a new emphasis on class conflict. They provide a thumbnail sketch of history as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed classes, and explain how socialism will emerge naturally from it. They outline the purpose of the League, and review, and criticize, other types of socialism. It ends with the famous and stirring threat: "Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win" (p.23)
The Manifesto came out at the height of the people's revolution in Paris, which had broken out on February 22-24, 1848. Although neither the Manifesto nor the Communist League had played a role in the Paris events, Marx was quick to congratulate the new revolutionaries. Provisional government minister Ferdinand Flocon (editor of La Reforme, and Marx's friend from the Paris days) promptly revoked the old expulsion order and invited Marx to return to Paris. Simultaneously, the Belgian government gave Marx twenty-four hours to leave, arrested him and marched him to the border. But Marx hardly needed encouragement, as he had no intention of missing out on being at the epicenter of revolutionary events. Marx arrived in Paris on March 5, Engels arrived a couple of weeks later, and the Brussels central committee of the Communist League relocated their headquarters to Paris. But they would not stay for long. The revolutionary upheavals had spread east -- to Vienna, Budapest and Berlin by mid-March. Marx and Engels scrambled to issue a manifesto calling for the establishment of a communist party inside Germany, and rushed east. Marx and Engels arrived in Cologne in early April, 1848.
Marx would remain in Cologne for a year, and from there would witness the rise and fall of the springtime of the peoples. Shortly after arriving in Cologne, Marx and Engels set about launching a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinishe Zeitung (named after the one shut down in 1843), with Marx as editor-in-chief and Engels as assistant editor. The NRZ was not, properly speaking, a communist newspaper, but rather set up as an organ of the democratic party in Germany (in which both Marx and Engels were active, and through which they first met and befriended the young Ferdinand Lassalle). But when the first issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung came out, on June 1, 1848, its liberal bourgeois backers balked at its strident tone. Marx was supportive of the most radical democratic reforms of the German revolution, and the NRZ editorials reflected this. However, he was not the most extreme. The Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, an old friend from Paris, had also arrived in Germany at this time. Marx refused to support the wilder violent schemes favored by Bakunin - such as Herwegh's armed invasion of Baden or Bakunin's call for a Pan-Slavic uprising - and they had some acrimonious moments. Nonetheless, Marx was radical enough - the NRZ was the only German newspaper to unequivocally applaud the autonomous effort of the Parisian working classes to seize power during the June Days. Marx urged the organization of German workers and visited revolutionary Berlin and Vienna that summer, trying to shore up fledgling workers' movements in those cities. In September, 1848, parallel to the Frankfurt uprising, Marx, Engels and the NRZ tried to organize a communal revolution in Cologne in the heat of worker unrest, but the effort was defeated by late October. Marx lingered on in Germany, watching morosely as the counter-revolution set in and the peoples' revolutions were suppressed across Europe. By November, both Vienna and then Berlin were back under conservative control. The NRZ called for civil disobedience to protest the Berlin coup, calling for a general boycott on taxes and other methods of peaceful protest. Marx, along with other NRZ editors, were charged with libel, but acquitted at their trial in February. In May, 1849, the NRZ vocally supported the violent insurgencies that broke out in pockets of Germany (including a Bakunin-organized uprising in Dresden) in a last-gasp effort to preserve popular gains. But the revolution was clearly over. The Prussian authorities ordered Marx expelled from Prussia on May 16, 1849 (he had renounced his Prussian citizenship back in 1845, and so was considered a foreign alien) By contrast, legal proceedings were instituted against Engels, who had been actively involved in the May uprisings in the Rhineland (Engels made his way to revolutionary Baden, and eventually managed to slip over the border to Switzerland). The last issue of the NRZ, which came out on May 19, 1849, was printed in red ink.
London
Marx returned to Paris in late May, 1849, in time to witness the June rally of Ledru-Rollin and the French far-left in Paris, and the subsequent repressive crackdown on leftist organizations by the government of Louis Napoleon. On June 23, Marx was ordered to leave Paris within twenty-four hours. He was given the option of going to Vannes, in Brittany, but Karl Marx decided to make his way to London instead. He arrived in London in late June, and his family followed in July. Marx would live in London for the rest of his life.
At this stage, Marx still hoped the situation in Germany could be retrieved, and that his stay in London might not be permanent. The central committee of the Communist League had stayed behind in Cologne under the leadership of Friedrich Lessner (one of Marx's earliest disciples), and Marx imagined he might still be able run things from abroad. At his urging, Engels left Switzerland and arrived in London in November. They promptly set up the NRZ Politisch-ökonomische Revue in London, recycling the title of their old paper as an irregular review, which they hoped to have printed and distributed into Germany from Hamburg. But it would only run for a few issues in 1850 before hitting logistical difficulties. In its pages, Marx published his assessment of the lessons of the 1848 revolutions. He applied his own theory to these political events - explaining the 1848 revolutions at least partly as a result of the financial panic and economic crisis of 1847, and the counter-revolutionary reaction also in economic terms. Marx characterized the 1848 revolutions as a class conflict, rather than a political conflict, and its bloody denouement as evidence that modest democratic reforms were insufficient to address the plight of workers. But he went on to conclude that the conditions for a proletarian revolution were not yet ripe.
The period between 1849 and 1852 were probably the darkest and most difficult days in Marx's life, not only for the repression of the revolutions and persecution of his comrades, but also for the precarious predicaments of his personal life. Now thirty one years of age, Marx had arrived in London at the end of June 1849. In July, the Marx family - which now included three children (a fourth would be born shortly after their arrival) as well as Jenny's live-in companion Helene Demuth ("Lenchen") - were crowded into an apartment in the Chamberwell section of London. They were soon also hosting a rotating coterie of German refugees and exiles. Although Marx had always been poor, things were particularly straitened. Marx had sold his last remaining property in Trier and was unable to find employment in London. His contributions to the Chartist papers and lectures at the local German workers union were unpaid. By the Spring of 1850, the money had run out and the Marxes were evicted. In June 1850, the Marxes moved into a one-bedroom apartment on 28 Dean Street, in Soho (gmaps), the poorest part of the poorest neighborhood in London, which would be their home for the next few years. Engels was also unable to find paying work in London, and at length, in November 1850, Engels moved back to Manchester, accepting a position as a lowly clerk in his own father's company, and sent what little financial assistance he could to the Marxes. That same November, 1850, their fourth child, Heinrich, died. A fifth child, Franziska, was born in 1851, but died in the Spring of 1852. The Marxes' poverty reached such levels that the aristocratic Jenny had to beg a neighbor for £2 to buy a coffin for her dead child.
Some form of relief soon began to arrive. In August 1851, Karl Marx had contributed some articles on the German revolution to Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune. They proved a sensation, and the managing editor Charles A. Dana hired Marx by March 1852, to contribute a regular weekly column to the Tribune. The sum - $5 or £1 per week (about $100 today) - was modest, but enough to stave off starvation, and when supplemented by Engels's generous subsidies (£5 a month after 1851), liberated Marx from the most pressing daily needs. Marx would continue contributing to the Tribune for the next eight years, until 1862 (although it is suspected Engels did most of the actual writing of Marx's earliest Tribune articles, given Marx's poor handle on the English language.).
At the height of these travails, from about July 1850, Marx delved into serious study of political economy. Marx spent his days in the reading room at the British Museum, getting deep into economics and economic history, this time going beyond Smith and delving deeply into David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and other classical writers. By January 1851, he was writing to Engels his first critiques of Ricardian rent theory. In April, Marx estimated he would get done going through economics "in five weeks", by June that he was writing a work on economics that would take some "six to seven weeks". By November, Marx spoke of looking for a German publisher for his forthcoming "Economy" book. It was a bit optimistic. By mid-1852 this surge of energy had apparently worn itself out, and we hear little more about it.
Political events interrupted his research into economics. In 1852, Marx published his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, condemning the French president's machinations to abolish the constitutional republic and transform France into an empire, elevating himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Marx resignedly recognized that France still rested on the small farmer and peasant, and his inherent conservatism formed the backbone of support for Napoleon's coup and regime. (it is here where Marx wrote his famous observation: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living", p.9).
Marx also revised his ideas on the future direction of the Communist League and other worker organizations. The remaining central committee of the Communist League that had stayed back in Cologne were arrested by Prussian authorities and put on trial in October 1852. The Cologne communists were sentenced to various prison terms. From London, Marx published a scathing expose of the trial, but realized there was no point in continuing and the Communist League was dissolved in the aftermath. Nonetheless, Marx refused to support the more radical plans being peddled by other German revolutionaries. Marx mocked the quixotic efforts of German radicals who made the rounds in the exile community, trying to re-ignite the revolution from abroad. Marx had little patience for their underground societies and hot-headed adventurist schemes. For Marx, the workers' movement should be an open, mass movement, which requires patience and organization. He deplored the murky conspiracies and plots for "direct action". Marx and Engels' sarcastic Great Men in Exile (written 1852, but unpublished) was directed against them..
After 1852, Marx turned to focus more on his journalism for the Tribune. In the run-up to the Crimean War in 1853, Marx came into the orbit of the shadowy orientalist David Urquhart, who managed to infect Marx with a rabid distaste for Tsarist Russia (already the arch-reactionary feudal imperialist state in Marx's mind, it did not take much). Marx wrote several polemical articles for the Tribune denouncing Russian designs and almost accusing British minister Lord Palmerston of being a Russian stooge. .In 1854, there was the Spanish revolution which focused his attentions. He returned to economics briefly in early 1855, writing notes on money and commercial crises. But then there was the Opium War of 1856 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. With his journalism pressing for research in other directions, it seemed that Marx might never end up getting around to his economics again. Although there is no indication that he stopped his research into economics after 1852, there do not seem to be periods of sustained activity on it.
In the meantime, his personal circumstances had changed again. Marx's only son, the eight-year old Edgar died in 1856, leaving the surviving family with three daughters. But things finally turned the corner later in 1856, when Jenny Marx came upon an inheritance from her mother in Trier, enabling the Marxes to move out of their crowded Soho apartment in early 1857 and take up residence in a comfortable suburban townhouse in Camden (north London. at 9 Grafton Terrace (now 46; gmaps]).
Grundrisse
Perhaps the new material comforts and less crowded atmosphere was the critical factor allowing him to return to economics. By July 1857, Marx was revisiting the works of Bastiat and Carey.. But everything went into high gear in the late summer, when the Panic of 1857 and the accompanying worldwide economic slump hit the headlines. For the next six months or so, in a gigantic burst of energy, Marx wrote a set of economics notes, known to posterity as the Grundrisse (Outlines). In eight, densely-written notebooks, some 800 pages, Marx worked out the essentials of his new economic theory, containing the seeds of almost everything that would subsequently appear in the three volumes of Capital years later. But this was also only an 'exercise' in self-enlightenment, rather than for publication. In May 1858, Marx set the Grundrisse notebooks aside. In the summer of 1858, Marx focused on actually writing a publishable draft. He reworked his notes on money and capital in the form of an introduction to a forthcoming general work. The introduction would come out as its own small book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. After some delays, it was published in early 1859.
The Grundrisse itself would never see the light of day. Although some consider it a "first draft" of Capital, that is an overstatement as apparently no passages from the former were transferred to the latter. Rather, like some earlier abandoned works, the Grundrisse was an exercise in self-clarification, to organize his own ideas for himself, rather than a proper composition. Capital would be composed from scratch. The Grundrisse would only appear in the mid-20th C.
The Grundrisse marks an important transition in Marx's theory of history. He jettisons the centrality of Smithian division of labor, which had measured the progress of forces of production in his earlier theories of the1840s, and now identifies the development of private property as the critically progressing element. Previously, Marx had been stumped by the problem of explaining the apparently regressive transition from slave-based antiquity (high division of labor) to feudalism (with lower division of labor). Marx resolved this in the Grundrisse by noting that feudalism was a step towards increasing private ownership relative to antiquity. He also backs away from the Manifesto-style obsession with internal class conflict, recognizing the transitions and social revolutions can, and often are, brought about externally (e.g. Germanic conquest of the Roman empire). Finally, he also abandoned the uniform linear stages history of modes of production (tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist), recognizing he had generalized too quickly from the experience of the Mediterranean civilizations. He now identifies that other non-slave organizations of production (which he calls "Asiatic", "Germanic" and "Slavic" modes of production) could arise from the tribal phase, and insinuates that they need not continue necessarily into the feudal stage. In short, in the Grundrisse, history is a little more open and a little less deterministic than in his previous writings.
Marx interrupted his economics again and returned to European politics during the 1859 Franco-Sardinian war against Austria. Although the cause of Lombard freedom from Austria had merit, Marx's deeply-held mistrust of Napoleon III led him to denounce the whole affair in the newspapers. This brought Marx into conflict with other leftist radicals, notably Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Vogt, who supported the Italian cause and the war against Austrian imperialism. Marx's relations with Lassalle were strained, and Vogt wrote a pamphlet personally denouncing Marx. Marx replied to the attack in his 1860 Herr Vogt basically accusing Vogt of being a paid Bonapartist agent. Marx also sued the Berlin newspaper, National Zeitung, for libel, for reiterating some of Vogt's accusations. The lawsuit went nowhere, and landed the Marxes only deeper in debt. Compounding the trouble, Jenny fell ill with smallpox around the same time.
The death of the Prussian king Frederick William IV in January 1861 and the ascension of the new king Wilhelm I of Prussia was accompanied by a general amnesty for former revolutionaries. Marx toyed with the idea of returning to Germany, and joining Lassalle in launching a new newspaper in Berlin. Marx undertook a visit to the continent in early 1861, calling on an uncle in Holland (who helped arrange a loan to tie the Marxes over) and his old mother in Trier. But plans for a newspaper fell through - Marx and Lassalle failed to come to an agreement on sharing editorial responsibilities, but more importantly the amnesty did not restore Marx's lost Prussian citizenship and an application for re-naturalization submitted in late 1861 was rejected by the Prussian authorities. Marx returned to London. With the outbreak of the American Civil War late that year, the New York Tribune canceled Marx's regular column in 1862, placing Marx in a new financial predicament just as he was embarking on his grandest treatise yet.
Marx had originally projected his 1859 Critique to be the first volume of a more general work on economics, but found that its rather abstract style had put off readers, and began reorganizing his general plan, for what would become Das Kapital. The entire first volume was essentially finished by the end of 1862 (at least according to his letters to the publishers). But it would take another five years before it saw the light of day.
The International
In the meantime, Marx was busy. The Universal Exhibition in London in 1862 had brought in streams of French and German artisans to visit the exhibition, and contact was opened between British, French and German labor leaders. The American civil war had drawn Marx's attentions, and in late 1862 he got involved in persuading British labor organizations to mount demonstrations in support of Lincoln and the unionist cause and to protest apparent plans by the British Liberal government to recognize the Southern Confederacy. Marx subsequently fell ill through much of 1863, although by early 1864, his financial situation had much improved - he received a small inheritance from his mother (who had died in 1863) and Engels had ascended to partner in his father's Manchester factory, allowing him to expand Marx's allowance. It is around this time that the Marxes moved once again, to 1 Modena Villas on Haverstock Hill in Hempstead Heath (now 1 Maitland Park Road, the original building was torn down c.1900 and replaced by "the Grange" gmap). .
In 1863, Ferdinand Lassalle founded the first German labor party (ADAV), but it fell into internal dissension following Lassalle's premature death in a duel in early 1864. At the time, Marx's attentions were focused on the Polish insurrection of 1863. Following on the pattern of the Lincoln demonstrations, Marx urged the London Trades Council to organize a public protest in support of the Poles in April 1864. A delegation of French union leaders was present, and the English council decided to draft an appeal to French laborers inviting them to form a sort of Anglo-French labor alliance. The plan expanded over the summer, and invitations were sent out to representatives of other countries. This culminated into a famous meeting at St. James Hall, London, in November, 1864, where British and French labor leaders, as well as representatives from a myriad of movements from other European countries, founded the International Workingman's Association (IWA), also known as the "First International". The First International collected a whole array of socialist, communist, anarchist and trade union groups into the congress - English Chartists and Owenites, French followers of rivals Proudhon and Blanqui, German communists, wild anarchist followers of Bakunin, Italian followers of Mazzini, Irish and Polish nationalists, etc. The London delegates elected a provisional committee of twenty-one to organize the association. Responsibility for writing its constitution and program was assigned to a subcommittee, which in turn left it to the forty-six year old Karl Marx to individually draft the provisional statutes. A thirty-two person general council (which included more international figures) was elected on October 5 with directional and fund-raising responsibilities. The immediate objectives of the International were to provide practical assistance to workers engaged in strikes, demonstrations and other struggles across different industries and countries, and to prevent the drafting of labor across-countries to break strikes. Its long-term objectives are more open-ended, speaking vaguely of the "complete emancipation of the working class". Marx's address - essentially a reiteration of the 1848 Manifesto - and his provisional statutes were adopted by the general council and published at the end of 1864.
Through 1865, Marx's attentions were focused on the organizational meetings of the General Council of the IWA in London. Unsurprisingly, quarrels were quick to develop - most notably between radical socialists like Blanqui (who argued for confrontational strikes) and anarchists like Proudhon (who argued for economic separatism, such as the establishment of worker cooperatives, outside of the capitalist system). Marx engaged in much correspondence to keep things together. English delegate Weston read a paper before the General Council of the IWA in 1865, using the wages fund doctrine to condemn trade union strikes as futile. In reply, Marx hurriedly composed his own paper, Value, Prices and Profit, giving a synopsis of his own theory of wages and exploitation (intended to be put out as a IWA pamphlet, it was only published posthumously).
Throughout much of this time, Marx was bedridden for long periods with illness brought about by overwork. Curiously, Marx also received overtures from the Prussian minister-president Otto von Bismarck. The conservative minister-president had been quite personally fond of Ferdinand Lassalle and was sympathetic to his State socialism program. More shrewdly, Bismarck also hoped to use the working classes against his principal political opponents, the bourgeois liberals. Since Lassalle's death, the ADAV had drifted under poor, squabbling leaders, and Bismarck may have believed Marx could breathe some life back into the movement (others suggest more cynically that Bismarck may have simply been trying to bribe Marx away from the revolutionary types of the IWA and tame him into a State socialist). Whatever his motivations, aware of Marx's poverty, Bismarck tried to bring Marx to Berlin, offering him (through Lothar Bucher, in October 1865) a position as economic correspondent for the Staats Anzeiger, the Prussian government gazette. Bismarck assured him he would have full editorial freedom, no restrictions on his content. Although tempted, Marx turned the offer down.
Marx's statutes were only made permanent at the first annual congress of the IWA in Geneva in September 1866. Three competing draft programs - Marx's, Mazzini's and Bakunin's - were submitted, but Marx's were finally adopted. Marx did not attend the second annual meeting at Lausanne in 1867 - as he was then overseeing the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital. Marx had declared it finished back in 1862, but it finally saw the light of day only now. In March 1867, with his manuscript under his arm, Marx headed to Hamburg to deliver it in person to the publisher Otto Meissner, and was receiving proof sheets by June. The first copies of the printed volume reached London in September, 1867.
Capital
The first volume of Das Kapital (1867) was Karl Marx's magnum opus. It begins with a long, intricate and somewhat abstruse discussion of commodity production (Pt.1), which includes a discussion of money carried over from his 1859 Critique. Only thereafter does he finally proceed to the principal theoretical contribution in this treatise: the theory of surplus value and labor exploitation. Marx essentially defines capitalism as a system ("mode of production") designed for capital accumulation rather than consumption. In more primitive systems, farmers and artisans produced commodities with the object of exchanging them for money in order to buy other commodities that better fit their consumption needs (C-M-C). In capitalism, by contrast, production of commodities for exchange are merely an intermediary step in a process initiated by capitalists in order to make more money, what he calls the "circuit of capital" (M-C-M'), That is, capitalists use money (M) to buy labor power and raw materials, which are then transformed by production into commodities (C) which are then sold for a greater amount of money (M').
Critical to this story is the role of machinery and technological change. .The transition from C-M-C to M-C-M' was brought about by the competitive nature of capitalism. The drive for profits emerged out of necessity - capitalists had an urgent need accumulate money in order to reinvest in the latest technology or risk being undercut and wiped out by other capitalists. It was cut-throat competition, not mere greed, that forced capitalists to strive towards profits, and turned production towards the generation of profit, rather than the satisfaction of needs. But of course, it was a short-term gain - for although a new piece of cost-reducing technology may yield extraordinary profits for a particular capitalist, it is only temporary, as other capitalists will adopt it too, and the profit rate will be driven back down.
While the dynamism of capitalism is the central story of Capital, it is all built on the exploitation of workers. And it is this part of the story that is most associated with Marx's thought. While M-C-M' may seem straightforward, Marx identifies a puzzle: how is this increase in value, from M to M', achieved? Having embraced Ricardo's labor theory of value most insistently - that is, that labor-embodied is the only source of value - then the exchange process cannot increase value. Instead, Marx turns to examining the production process, and identifies "labor power" (as distinct from labor) as the only input which has the capacity to create greater value than it costs the capitalist to hire. It is this difference that the creates surplus and thus profits.
The critical part of the labor exploitation story is that workers are paid full competitive wages, but that labor works more hours than what is needed to cover the wage bill. Using the example of a working day, suppose a laborer works ten hours, but that the daily wage can be covered by four hours of labor, then the remaining six hours are "surplus" labor time that accrues to the capitalist. Or to use Marx's term, the "rate of exploitation" = 6/4 = 1.5. Now the capitalist can increase the rate of exploitation by increasing either the absolute surplus value (Pt.3) or the relative surplus value (Pt.4). An example of the former is if the working day is increased from 10 to 11 hours, so the rate of exploitation increases accordingly to 7/4 = 1.75. But technological innovation, the introduction of machinery ("constant capital") can increase relative surplus value by reducing the the necessary labor time to produce daily wage. e.g. if the length of the working day is left unchanged at 10 hours, but technological improvements allows more to be done per hour, so that the wage bill is covered in 3 hours rather than 4, then the rate of exploitation increases to 7/3 = 2.33. That is, relative surplus value increases While increasing absolute surplus value was critical in the early stages of capitalism - with accompanying workplace struggles over the lengthening of the working day - it was relative surplus value that became the more important factor in the latter stages. His subtle discussion of the wage (Pt.6) goes well beyond the Malthusian/Ricardian iron law of wages to allow competitive wages and absolute standards of living to rise over time - so long as labor productivity is increasing faster than the wage, the rate of exploitation will be increasing. Although Marx's analysis taken together - technological innovation and rising wages - insinuates that workers may indeed be improving their living conditions as a result of capitalist exploitation, he believes workers find (or should find) rising relative surplus value and growing inequality to be a scandal.
A more subtle point is what happens to profit over time. This is elaborated more in volume II, with the scheme of expanded reproduction. While the Ricardian theory assume a diminishing rate of profit over time brought about by limitation of land, Marx rejects this limitation, believing capitalism can overcome such natural barriers. But Marx posits a diminishing rate of profit over time because of the increased investment into machinery and raw materials per worker. The rate of profit, by definition, is the surplus per capital invested. Even if the capitalist can extract a greater surplus value per worker, his overall profit rate might still decline because it requires ever-greater investment of capital. Marx believes that overall, as capitalist advances, this tends to be the case, forcing the capitalist to look for innovative ways to boost the profit rate without simply increasing capital per worker. This may have to be accomplished by mergers (thus leading to increased industrial concentration). An alternative is to lean on the labor force, forcing wages down. This is harder to accomplish in a competitive environment with tight labor markets, but Marx points out that there is a "reserve army of labor" that often softens labor markets. This includes not only the legions of urban unemployed displaced by mechanization, but more critically the rural poor, living on the margin between agrarian and industrial society, who can migrate into and out of employment on a dime.
Marx ends volume I of Capital rather anomalously with a discussion of "primitive accumulation" (Pt.7) This perhaps should have been included earlier (and is often read earlier). It discusses the critical role of private property in the transition to capitalism. Means of production existed in pre-capitalist times, but they were not necessarily transferable private property, that could be converted into capital. Marx identifies the critical historical role of political and military events in expanding the legal concept of private property, and the seizure of legal control and direction of productive activity by an emergent capitalist class.
After the publication of volume I, Marx promptly began working on the second volume, and did much work in the course of 1868-69, but effort thereafter was sporadic. Marx would not see the publication of the second and third volumes of Capital during his lifetime. Nonetheless, Marx oversaw revisions in the first volume for a second German edition in 1872. It was translated into Russian and French in 1872. Nonetheless, by and large, Capital volume I failed to make an impact. Few bothered to read the hefty tome. It passed largely unnoticed in the western press. Even in socialist circles it was largely overlooked, only in Russia did it seemed to draw serious attention.
Party politics
For the next few years, Marx's time was largely focused on political activities related to the International. With Marx absent, the IWA congress in Lausanne in September 1867 ended up being dominated by French followers of Proudhon, who passed a series of resolutions focusing on cooperatives and worker credit. Nonetheless, Marx was ably represented by Kugelman, Eccarius and Lessner, and resolutions were passed making the connection between workers' rights and political revolution. Many IWA delegates also ended up attending the neighboring Geneva Peace League organized by bourgeois liberals like J.S. Mill, and featured the presence of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi and Marx's old rival, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx denounced it as a sideshow and reiterated the importance of staying aloof from established political parties. At the next congress, in Brussels in1868, the IWA formally disassociated itself from the Geneva Peace League, although it did not forbid informal alliances with anti-militarist groups. But at the parallel conference of the Peace League at Bern in 1868, Bakunin and his followers resigned in a huff and formed their own organization (Alliance de la démocratie socialiste) based in Geneva, and applied to the IWA for affiliate status. At Marx's urging, the proposal was turned down by the IWA's general council in London, feeling that the ADS's program conflicted with that of the IWA, and the scope of an "organization within an organization" would merely cause trouble.
The Basel IWA Congress of 1869 seemed to cement the victory of Marx over Proudhon. The Marxians successfully persuaded the congress that Proudhonian approach reduced the worker's struggle to a mere matter of "wages and hours" rather than actual emancipation. But the Basel congress also happened to be attended by Mikhail Bakunin himself as a delegate. Marx suspected that Bakunin was calculating to take over the IWA organization for himself, and feared he might use to occasion to make wild demands and embarrass Marx and the GC leadership before the other delegates. Anticipating Bakunin, Marx submitted a proposal on the abolition of the law of inheritance, a pet cause of Bakunin, worded in a way that Bakunin would have no choice but to support it. Nonetheless, Bakunin still criticized Marx for exaggerating workers' revolutionary potential, criticized the Marxian political approach and instead urged the IWA to promote separation from the State, rather than taking it over.
That very same year, the Marxists launched their political involvement inside Germany. In Marx's eyes, the Lassallian labor party (ADAV) had been too fractious and ineffective, with a bizarre and often hostile relationship to fledgling German trade unions, and the dissatisfaction with the party leadership was evident in the German delegates to the IWA. Under Marx's influence, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht launched their own separate labor party in Germany, the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Socialdmokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) on Marxian lines, and launched their party paper, Der Vokstaat. The Marxian SDAP and the Lassallian ADAV would compete with each other for the next few years.
There was no IWA congresses in either 1870 or 1871 - it was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. Marx - with his fervent detestation of Napoleon III, latent German patriotism and fear of offending workers on either side - did not outrightly condemn the war and the IWA's General Council issued only a tepid statement. The SDAP was spit over the issue - Bebel and Liebknicht condemned the war, but another group, the "Brunswick Committee", urged German workers to help the war effort so long as it was defensive (a position largely approved by Marx). But once the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was made an objective, Marx (and the GC) changed positions and condemned the war of conquest Marx and the IWA threw their support wholeheartedly behind the Paris Commune formed in the aftermath of the war on March 18, 1871. It was not a socialist creation - the Paris Commune was originally formed in alliance with bourgeois republicans and nationalists to resist what they perceived as attempts by a reactionary assembly at Versailles to reimpose a monarchy in France. But in the course of the siege of Paris, as the bourgeoisie faltered, the socialists grew in influence. The Paris Commune was crushed in May, in an orgy of bloodshed. The subsequent crackdown and mass executions were traumatic for the workers' movement. Perceived as the organizing force behind the commune, the IWA was blamed for revolutionary excesses and condemned by the press and politicians, and branches were suppressed in various European countries. The British trade unions had also withdrawn from the IWA around this time - realizing that any connection to the IWA or Marx worked against their efforts to get parliament to repeal the remaining restrictions of the Combination laws.
Besides these external events greatly weakening the International, the Bakuninite takeover bid remained a threat and new internal conflicts had also arisen. Engels had retired from Manchester and moved to London in 1870, and thereafter, Marx and Engels were inseparable. Other socialist leaders, even inside the GC, like Eccarius and Jung, grew embittered as they felt their counsel was being ignored by Marx, who seemed to now only consult Engels. Although he was still struggling with finishing volume II of Capital, the organizational matters of the International took much of his time and mind.
At the meeting of the general council in London in September 1871 (sometimes characterized as a congress), Marx introduced revisions to the IWA statutes, notably resolution No.9. which explicitly set up the goal of transforming the workers' movement into a political party. It was gauntlet thrown down against the anarchists. Marx's GC proposals were considered next year at the congress of the IWA in the Hague in September 1872 (which both Marx and Engels attended, and made sure as many of their followers were there as possible). Marx's proposals faced vociferous opposition from the anarchists (who dominated the Spanish, Italian and Swiss delegations). Marx emphasized the lesson of the Commune was the urgent need to seize political power. But anarchist leaders Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume say the real lesson was to reject politics and the state, to pursue separatism, and forge alliances between workers and peasants. They accused Marx of a penchant for authoritarian statism, and reminded the congress that Marx and Engels were not workers themselves, but "bourgeois intellectuals" out of touch with worker needs or desires. After five days of bitter fighting, the IWA's General Council voted to expel Bakunin and his followers.. Bakunin and the anarchist delegates decamped to form their own "Anti-Despotic" congress at St. Imier. The socialist-anarchist split was now permanent. Although the Marxists seemed to have "won" the Hague congress and prevented the Bakuninites from taking it over, it was a pyrrhic victory and the IWA was on the road to termination. At the Hague, the GC had voted to transfer the GC headquarters to New York, in the hands of trusted German socialists, effectively abandoning Europe. The Marxists realized that if it remained in Europe, the Bakuninite anarchists would continue to trying to to take it over and continue using its congresses to stage propaganda meetings against it . Several old branches (e.g. Belgian, Spanish) repudiated the Hague resolutions and transferred allegiance to the Bakunin's organization. The British federation also condemned the move to New York and English activist John Hales tried to raise a campaign to depose Marx from his leadership position (Marx and Engels replied with letters to the International Herald). Although an IWA congress was still held at Geneva in 1874, it was attended by only a paucity of Marxists. The last congress of the IWA was held at Philadelphia in 1876, where the First International was formally dissolved.
Through these stressful struggles, Marx's health declined precariously. With his finances more straitened and his daughters grown and married off, the Marxes moved one last final time in 1875 - this time to smaller, humbler place down the road at 41 Maitland Park in Hempstead (building destroyed in WWII, plaque at current Maitland flats gmap).
The dissolution of the IWA was a blow to Marx's original aspirations. But by now Marx realized that there was more to be gained by supporting the establishment and growth of separate workers' organizations and political parties at the national level, than insisting on unity in a precariously vulnerable international organization. Marx took some comfort in the rapid electoral gains the socialists seemed to continue to be making in Germany during - especially in the 1874 Reichstag elections. On a trip to Carlsbad for a medical cure in the summer of 1874, Karl Marx took a side-trip to Leipzig to consult with Liebknecht in person about negotiations for a merger of the two rival socialist parties - the Lassallian ADAV and the Marxian SDAP - at an upcoming joint congress in Gotha, Thuringia. However, in the prelude, the proposed united party program forwarded by Liebknecht to Marx took more elements from Lassalle's rather than the Marx's handbook. In advance of the congress, Marx wrote his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) as a missive to the SDAP leadership. Besides condemning the unity program, it is here that Marx first carefully outlined his ideas of revolutionary socialism, including the concept of a "dictatorship of the proletarian". He criticized the Lasallian formula of "To each according to his contribution" , which tied wages to productive contributions, as only the first stage of socialism, and promoted in its stead the old slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to what he needs" (originally forged by Louis Blanc) as the higher state of communism. Marx's critique was not published - Liebknecht realized it would imperil the merger, and respectfully advised Marx that his advice could not be followed in this instance. At the Gotha congress in May 1875, the socialist parties were merged to form a single united socialist party, the Social Democratic Party (initially called Sozialistiche Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD), and adopted the Lassallian-heavy program. Marx was infuriated.
The rapid rise of socialists in local elections had alarmed Bismarckian government. Or perhaps more precisely, it alarmed the German bourgeois liberal parties. Presenting himself as the savior of Germany from the "red menace", Bismarck exploited a couple of dubious failed assassination attempts on the Kaiser to ban the Social Democratic Party in 1878. But at the same time, Bismarck re-oriented German economic policy towards the more protectionist and State socialist direction he preferred himself with a series of reforms introducing the welfare state in Germany. .
With efforts in Germany stalled, Marx turned to France. Battered and driven underground in the aftermath of the commune, French workers' organizations only began to be rebuilt slowly. With the counter-reaction relaxing, various disconnected syndicates, cooperatives, student groups, were brought together by former communard Jules Guesde under the umbrella of the French Socialist Workers' Federation (Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France, FTSF) in 1878. Up until now, Marxism was still largely unknown in French socialist circles (Proudhon, Blanqui, etc. were bigger names and influences), but Guesde came into contact with Paul Lafargue (Marx's son-in-law), who introduced him to Marx. At a conference in Le Havre 1880, Jules Guesde founded the French Workers' Party (Parti Ouvrier, POF) as the political wing of the FTSF, the first French socialist party to compete independently in elections. The POF's party program was largely dictated by Marx himself. This was protested by the revolutionary syndicalist Blanquists, under Édouard Vaillant, who split to form their own organization, the Comité révolutionnaire central (CRC).
The dismal showing of the POF in the 1881 French general elections brought further splits. At the FTSF Congress at Saint-Etienne, there was a floor revolt against the Guesde-Marx program, claiming it had cost workers electoral seats and postponed the badly-needed reforms they wanted. The Proudhonists, still nursing wounds from the First International, secured a resolution condemning the "Marxist dominance" of the party - prompting Guesde and Lafargue to decamp in a huff, splitting the Marxist POF off from the FTSF. The Proudhonist FTSF, under the leadership of Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon, would go on to become its own, gradualist, socialist party. The Proudhonists had exploited latent jacobin suspicions among French workers about the foreign program of the "Prussian Marx" (it didn't help that Lafargue was German-born). But in retrospect, Marx had overestimated the appeal of Marxism to French workers. The bulk of French industry was largely still organized around small-scale production with highly-skilled workers, with a preference for decentralized organizations. The centralized POF found some appeal in major industrial centers in the north, but not really beyond that.
Death
Although still acting as advisor to the various socialist parties, declining health and personal tragedies marked Marx's own last few years. His wife, Jenny Marx, fell grievously ill with cancer in the Summer of 1880, and after a long struggle, finally died in December 1881. During this period, as her condition worsened, Marx realized he would not long survive himself and with one last bout of effort in the summer of 1881, tried to finish the remaining volumes of Capital, but to no avail. Ill and overworked, Marx was broken by Jenny's death, and only at the urging of his doctor and friends consented to abandon the miserable home in London and go abroad. In early 1882, Marx visited his daughters in Paris and went on to try a cure in southern France and even Algiers, but it did little good. He returned to England, spending the remainder of 1882 on the Isle of Wight. In January, Marx returned to London. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883.
Posthumous publications
Marx's legacy at the time of his death was uncertain. Although he had achieved a degree of fame in his lifetime, he risked fading into the background after his death. As a revolutionary activist, Marx's aspirations had fallen short: the First International had been a fiasco and was buried, the German socialists had gone in a different direction (and were banned altogether away), while Marxists elsewhere were drummed out of the main workers' movements. His intellectual impact was no more certain. With the exception of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, most of Marx's published works had gone largely unread or were out of print and forgotten by 1883. It was left to Friedrich Engels to clear up the mess of manuscripts, popularize Marx's works and reignite the socialist movement.
Engels's saw Marx's Capital as his major work, and felt it needed more attention that it had hitherto received. Engels's primary task was to complete the remaining volumes of Capital which Marx had been working on sporadically in the last dozen years of his life. But even the first volume was having a hard time. It had been largely overlooked upon its first appearance in 1867. Most only became aware of its content via the synopsis of it given fourteen years later in Engels's popular Anti-Dühring (1878). An English translation would only appear in 1887, well after Marx's death. Engels put out a fourth (German) edition of volume I in 1890, in an effort to keep it print. But even so, few read it directly, most relying on popular synopses given elsewhere - besides Engels (1878), there was the notable French synopsis of Deville (1883), German of Kautsky (1887) and English of Aveling (1892).
Already in the immediate aftermath of Marx's death, Capital was threatened with usurpation. In early 1884, another book also called Das Kapital by the late German historicist Karl Rodbertus was published. It contained (in its introduction) the bald charge that Marx's theory of surplus value had been plundered wholesale from an 1842 treatise by Rodbertus. It was not the first time the charge had been raised, but it provoked Engels and Kautsky to reply in the pages of Die Neue Zeit. C.A. Schramm rose to the defense of Rodbertus, and the battle continued over the next year. Engels would spend a good part of his preface to a new 1884 edition of Poverty of Philosophy, as well as his preface to Vol. II of Capital, undermining Rodbertus's claim.
Under Engels's editorship, the second volume of Capital appeared in early 1885 (with the particular title "The Process of Circulation of Capital"). Less grand in its vision, volume II contains little history but a lot of economics. It contains Marx's intricate multi-sectoral scheme of simple reproduction and a (somewhat incomplete) scheme of expanded reproduction. It also delivers Marx's more detailed critique of Say's Law and a theory of crisis.
Curiously, one of the side-effects of the Rodbertus debate was the so-called "transformation problem.". This was essentially the same problem that bedeviled Ricardo and was noted by Marx in volume I - namely, that if competition equalizes wages and length of working day across sectors, so that surplus value is equalized. But if so, then industries with different degrees of capital intensity ("organic composition") will not have the same profit rate - contradicting the basic Smithian conception of competition in product markets. If equalization of profit is forced by assumption, then prices will diverge from embodied labor value, thus invalidating the labor theory of value. In the preface to volume II, Engels announced that Marx had already "resolved" the transformation problem in the notes to volume III, and challenged followers of Rodbertus (or anyone else who doubted Marx's ability) to posit their own solutions quickly before volume III came out. Among those who submitted attempted solutions to Engels were Wilhelm Lexis, Conrad Schmidt, Julius Wolf and Achille Loria.
As it turns out, Volume III was not "about to come out". Engels had put out volume II in one year. But the manuscripts of volume III were in a worse shape, and would take a decade to sort through. After hitting a wall in 1887, Engels set the manuscripts aside to focus on other projects. Besides his own works, Engels put out a new (fourth) edition of volume I in 1890 and reprinted some of Marx's lesser works. Volume III was finally published in 1894 (with particular title "the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole"). With attention pricked up by the transformation problem, it drew attention from economists to see Marx's own solution. The German historicist Werner Sombart reviewed it relatively generously, Wilhelm Lexis more critically, but the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk tore it to shreds. More useful were the Russian contributions, in particular the mathematical solutions offered by the unknown Vladimir Dmitriev (1898) followed up by the academic Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1907). Nonetheless, Marxian economics has remained divided on whether Marx actually solved the problem, or even in interpreting what Marx's solution was exactly.
Marx's other works only began to appear slowly. The ban on German socialists was lifted in 1890. In prelude to the new party congress, Wilhelm Liebknecht finally revealed and published Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. At the party congress in Erfurt in October 1891, the Lassallian Gotha program was ejected and a new program - the "Erfurt Program", on Marxian lines - was adopted by the renamed Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, SPD).
Among Marx's notes, Engels ignored the Grundrisse, the outlines Marx had written in the splurge of energy back in 1857-68. Engels had not used these notes in his own posthumous editing of the second and third volumes of Capital. Indeed, the existence of the Grundrisse was unknown for decades. The first indication was a 1902 article in Karl Kautsky's Die Neue Zeit, which extracted the introduction from its morass of notes, and assumed it was to have been intended as the introduction to his 1859 Zur Kritik work. The rest of the Grundrisse was only discovered in 1923 by David Ryazanov in Moscow, and began to published in parts in 1939. An excerpt on pre-capitalist formations was published as a separate tract in 1952. The full edition of the Grundrisse had to wait until 1953.
In a rare moment of collaboration, Engels handed a different set of Marx's notes on the history of economic thought, written around 1861-63, over to Karl Kautsky to edit and prepare for publication. But Kautsky was even slower than Engels, and the notes, which would bear the title the Theories of Surplus Value were only finally published in 1905-10.
For more post-Marx developments, see the Marxian school.
|
Major Works of Karl Marx
|
Top|
HET
|
|
Resources on Karl Marx Contemporary
Late 19th/early 20th C.
Modern
|
All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca