Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaɐ̯l ˈmaɐ̯ks];
5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German
philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist,
political theorist, journalist and socialist
revolutionary.
Born in Trier, Germany, to a Jewish middle-class
family, Marx studied law and philosophy at
university. Due to his political publications,
Marx became stateless and lived in exile in
London for decades, where he continued to
develop his thought in collaboration with
German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish
his writings, researching in the reading room
of the British Museum. His best-known titles
are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto,
and the three-volume Das Kapital. His political
and philosophical thought had enormous influence
on subsequent intellectual, economic and political
history and his name has been used as an adjective,
a noun and a school of social theory.
Marx's theories about society, economics and
politics—collectively understood as Marxism—hold
that human societies develop through class
struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself
in the conflict between the ruling classes
(known as the bourgeoisie) that control the
means of production and the working classes
(known as the proletariat) that enable these
means by selling their labour power in return
for wages. Employing a critical approach known
as historical materialism, Marx predicted
that, like previous socio-economic systems,
capitalism produced internal tensions which
would lead to its self-destruction and replacement
by a new system: socialism. For Marx, class
antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part
to its instability and crisis-prone nature,
would eventuate the working class' development
of class consciousness, leading to their conquest
of political power and eventually the establishment
of a classless, communist society constituted
by a free association of producers. Marx actively
pressed for its implementation, arguing that
the working class should carry out organised
revolutionary action to topple capitalism
and bring about socio-economic emancipation.Marx
has been described as one of the most influential
figures in human history, and his work has
been both lauded and criticised. His work
in economics laid the basis for much of the
current understanding of labour and its relation
to capital, and subsequent economic thought.
Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists
and political parties worldwide have been
influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying
or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited
as one of the principal architects of modern
social science.
== Biography ==
=== Childhood and early education: 1818–1836
===
Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx
(1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863).
He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier,
a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's
Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ethnically
Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch
rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied
Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by
his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father,
as a child known as Herschel, was the first
in the line to receive a secular education
and he became a lawyer and lived a relatively
wealthy and middle-class existence, with his
family owning a number of Moselle vineyards.
Prior to his son's birth, and after the abrogation
of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland, Herschel
converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical
Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename
of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel. Marx
was a third cousin once removed of German
Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to
a German Jewish family in the Rhineland, with
whom he became a frequent correspondent in
later life.
Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man
of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas
of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire.
A classical liberal, he took part in agitation
for a constitution and reforms in Prussia,
then governed by an absolute monarchy. In
1815, Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney
and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room
property near the Porta Nigra. His wife, Henriette
Pressburg, was a Dutch Jewish woman from a
prosperous business family that later founded
the company Philips Electronics. Her sister
Sophie Pressburg (1797–1854) married Lion
Philips (1794–1866) and was the grandmother
of both Gerard and Anton Philips and great-grandmother
to Frits Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy
Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist,
upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later
often come to rely for loans while they were
exiled in London.Little is known of Marx's
childhood. The third of nine children, he
became the eldest son when his brother Moritz
died in 1819. Young Marx and his surviving
siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise,
Emilie and Caroline, were baptised into the
Lutheran Church in August 1824 and their mother
in November 1825. Young Marx was privately
educated by his father until 1830, when he
entered Trier High School, whose headmaster,
Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father.
By employing many liberal humanists as teachers,
Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local
conservative government. Subsequently, police
raided the school in 1832 and discovered that
literature espousing political liberalism
was being distributed among the students.
Considering the distribution of such material
a seditious act, the authorities instituted
reforms and replaced several staff during
Marx's attendance.In October 1835 at the age
of 17, Marx travelled to the University of
Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature,
but his father insisted on law as a more practical
field. Due to a condition referred to as a
"weak chest", Marx was excused from military
duty when he turned 18. While at the University
at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group
containing political radicals that were monitored
by the police. Marx also joined the Trier
Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft
der Treveraner), at one point serving as club
co-president. Additionally, Marx was involved
in certain disputes, some of which became
serious: in August 1836 he took part in a
duel with a member of the university's Borussian
Korps. Although his grades in the first term
were good, they soon deteriorated, leading
his father to force a transfer to the more
serious and academic University of Berlin.
=== Hegelianism and early journalism: 1836–1843
===
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier,
Marx became more serious about his studies
and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von
Westphalen, an educated baroness of the Prussian
ruling class who had known Marx since childhood.
As she had broken off her engagement with
a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their
relationship was socially controversial owing
to the differences between their religious
and class origins, but Marx befriended her
father Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat)
and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to
him. Seven years after their engagement, on
19 June 1843 they got married in a Protestant
church in Kreuznach.In October 1836, Marx
arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's
faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse.
During the first term, Marx attended lectures
of Eduard Gans who represented the progressive
Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational
development in history by emphasizing particularly
its libertarian aspects, and the importance
of social question, and lectures of Karl von
Savigny who represented the Historical School
of Law. Although studying law, he was fascinated
by philosophy and looked for a way to combine
the two, believing that "without philosophy
nothing could be accomplished". Marx became
interested in the recently deceased German
philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whose ideas were
then widely debated among European philosophical
circles. During a convalescence in Stralau,
he joined the Doctor's Club (Doktorklub),
a student group which discussed Hegelian ideas
and through them became involved with a group
of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians
in 1837. They gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach
and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly
close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like
Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of
Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but adopted
his dialectical method in order to criticise
established society, politics and religion
from a leftist perspective. Marx's father
died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished
income for the family. Marx had been emotionally
close to his father and treasured his memory
after his death.
By 1837, Marx was writing both fiction and
non-fiction, having completed a short novel,
Scorpion and Felix, a drama, Oulanem, as well
as a number of love poems dedicated to Jenny
von Westphalen, though none of this early
work was published during his lifetime. Marx
soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits,
including the study of both English and Italian,
art history and the translation of Latin classics.
He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on
editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion in
1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his
doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the
Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,
which he completed in 1841. It was described
as "a daring and original piece of work in
which Marx set out to show that theology must
yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy".
The essay was controversial, particularly
among the conservative professors at the University
of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit
his thesis to the more liberal University
of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD
in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both
atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for
a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic
Archives), but it never came to fruition.
In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn
from Berlin. There they scandalised their
class by getting drunk, laughing in church
and galloping through the streets on donkeys.Marx
was considering an academic career, but this
path was barred by the government's growing
opposition to classical liberalism and the
Young Hegelians. Marx moved to Cologne in
1842, where he became a journalist, writing
for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung
(Rhineland News), expressing his early views
on socialism and his developing interest in
economics. Marx criticised both right-wing
European governments as well as figures in
the liberal and socialist movements whom he
thought ineffective or counter-productive.
The newspaper attracted the attention of the
Prussian government censors, who checked every
issue for seditious material before printing,
as Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be
presented to the police to be sniffed at,
and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian
or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed
to appear". After the Rheinische Zeitung published
an article strongly criticising the Russian
monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be
banned and Prussia's government complied in
1843.
=== Paris: 1843–1845 ===
In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical
leftist Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then being
set up by the German socialist Arnold Ruge
to bring together German and French radicals
and thus Marx and his wife moved to Paris
in October 1843. Initially living with Ruge
and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau,
they found the living conditions difficult,
so moved out following the birth of their
daughter Jenny in 1844. Although intended
to attract writers from both France and the
German states, the Jahrbücher was dominated
by the latter and the only non-German writer
was the exiled Russian anarchist collectivist
Mikhail Bakunin. Marx contributed two essays
to the paper, "Introduction to a Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"
and "On the Jewish Question", the latter introducing
his belief that the proletariat were a revolutionary
force and marking his embrace of communism.
Only one issue was published, but it was relatively
successful, largely owing to the inclusion
of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King
Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states
to ban it and seize imported copies (Ruge
nevertheless refused to fund the publication
of further issues and his friendship with
Marx broke down). After the paper's collapse,
Marx began writing for the only uncensored
German-language radical newspaper left, Vorwärts!
(Forward!). Based in Paris, the paper was
connected to the League of the Just, a utopian
socialist secret society of workers and artisans.
Marx attended some of their meetings, but
did not join. In Vorwärts!, Marx refined
his views on socialism based upon Hegelian
and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism,
at the same time criticising liberals and
other socialists operating in Europe.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist
Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence,
beginning a lifelong friendship. Engels showed
Marx his recently published The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844, convincing
Marx that the working class would be the agent
and instrument of the final revolution in
history. Soon, Marx and Engels were collaborating
on a criticism of the philosophical ideas
of Marx's former friend, Bruno Bauer. This
work was published in 1845 as The Holy Family.
Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly
influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians
Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually
Marx and Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism
as well.During the time that he lived at 38
Rue Vanneau in Paris (from October 1843 until
January 1845), Marx engaged in an intensive
study of political economy (Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, James Mill, etc.), the French socialists
(especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles
Fourier) and the history of France. The study
of political economy is a study that Marx
would pursue for the rest of his life and
would result in his major economic work—the
three-volume series called Capital. Marxism
is based in large part on three influences:
Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism
and English economics. Together with his earlier
study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying
that Marx did during this time in Paris meant
that all major components of "Marxism" were
in place by the autumn of 1844. Marx was constantly
being pulled away from his study of political
economy—not only by the usual daily demands
of the time, but additionally by editing a
radical newspaper and later by organising
and directing the efforts of a political party
during years of potentially revolutionary
popular uprisings of the citizenry. Still
Marx was always drawn back to his economic
studies: he sought "to understand the inner
workings of capitalism".An outline of "Marxism"
had definitely formed in the mind of Karl
Marx by late 1844. Indeed, many features of
the Marxist view of the world's political
economy had been worked out in great detail,
but Marx needed to write down all of the details
of his economic world view to further clarify
the new economic theory in his own mind. Accordingly,
Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts. These manuscripts covered numerous
topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated
labour. However, by the spring of 1845 his
continued study of political economy, capital
and capitalism had led Marx to the belief
that the new political economic theory that
he was espousing—scientific socialism—needed
to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed
materialistic view of the world.The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 had
been written between April and August 1844,
but soon Marx recognised that the Manuscripts
had been influenced by some inconsistent ideas
of Ludwig Feuerbach. Accordingly, Marx recognised
the need to break with Feuerbach's philosophy
in favour of historical materialism, thus
a year later (in April 1845) after moving
from Paris to Brussels, Marx wrote his eleven
"Theses on Feuerbach". The "Theses on Feuerbach"
are best known for Thesis 11, which states
that "philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways, the point is to change
it". This work contains Marx's criticism of
materialism (for being contemplative), idealism
(for reducing practice to theory) overall,
criticising philosophy for putting abstract
reality above the physical world. It thus
introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical
materialism, an argument that the world is
changed not by ideas but by actual, physical,
material activity and practice. In 1845, after
receiving a request from the Prussian king,
the French government shut down Vorwärts!,
with the interior minister, François Guizot,
expelling Marx from France. At this point,
Marx moved from Paris to Brussels, where Marx
hoped to once again continue his study of
capitalism and political economy.
=== Brussels: 1845–1848 ===
Unable either to stay in France or to move
to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels
in Belgium in February 1845. However, to stay
in Belgium he had to pledge not to publish
anything on the subject of contemporary politics.
In Brussels, Marx associated with other exiled
socialists from across Europe, including Moses
Hess, Karl Heinzen and Joseph Weydemeyer.
In April 1845, Engels moved from Barmen in
Germany to Brussels to join Marx and the growing
cadre of members of the League of the Just
now seeking home in Brussels. Later, Mary
Burns, Engels' long-time companion, left Manchester,
England to join Engels in Brussels.In mid-July
1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England
to visit the leaders of the Chartists, a socialist
movement in Britain. This was Marx's first
trip to England and Engels was an ideal guide
for the trip. Engels had already spent two
years living in Manchester from November 1842
to August 1844. Not only did Engels already
know the English language, he had also developed
a close relationship with many Chartist leaders.
Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for
many Chartist and socialist English newspapers.
Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine
the economic resources available for study
in various libraries in London and Manchester.In
collaboration with Engels, Marx also set about
writing a book which is often seen as his
best treatment of the concept of historical
materialism, The German Ideology. In this
work, Marx broke with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno
Bauer, Max Stirner and the rest of the Young
Hegelians, while he also broke with Karl Grun
and other "true socialists" whose philosophies
were still based in part on "idealism". In
German Ideology, Marx and Engels finally completed
their philosophy, which was based solely on
materialism as the sole motor force in history.
German Ideology is written in a humorously
satirical form, but even this satirical form
did not save the work from censorship. Like
so many other early writings of his, German
Ideology would not be published in Marx's
lifetime and would be published only in 1932.After
completing German Ideology, Marx turned to
a work that was intended to clarify his own
position regarding "the theory and tactics"
of a truly "revolutionary proletarian movement"
operating from the standpoint of a truly "scientific
materialist" philosophy. This work was intended
to draw a distinction between the utopian
socialists and Marx's own scientific socialist
philosophy. Whereas the utopians believed
that people must be persuaded one person at
a time to join the socialist movement, the
way a person must be persuaded to adopt any
different belief, Marx knew that people would
tend on most occasions to act in accordance
with their own economic interests, thus appealing
to an entire class (the working class in this
case) with a broad appeal to the class's best
material interest would be the best way to
mobilise the broad mass of that class to make
a revolution and change society. This was
the intent of the new book that Marx was planning,
but to get the manuscript past the government
censors he called the book The Poverty of
Philosophy (1847) and offered it as a response
to the "petty bourgeois philosophy" of the
French anarchist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
as expressed in his book The Philosophy of
Poverty (1840).
These books laid the foundation for Marx and
Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet
that has since come to be commonly known as
The Communist Manifesto. While residing in
Brussels in 1846, Marx continued his association
with the secret radical organisation League
of the Just. As noted above, Marx thought
the League to be just the sort of radical
organisation that was needed to spur the working
class of Europe toward the mass movement that
would bring about a working class revolution.
However, to organise the working class into
a mass movement the League had to cease its
"secret" or "underground" orientation and
operate in the open as a political party.
Members of the League eventually became persuaded
in this regard. Accordingly, in June 1847
the League was reorganised by its membership
into a new open "above ground" political society
that appealed directly to the working classes.
This new open political society was called
the Communist League. Both Marx and Engels
participated in drawing up the programme and
organisational principles of the new Communist
League.In late 1847, Marx and Engels began
writing what was to become their most famous
work — a programme of action for the Communist
League. Written jointly by Marx and Engels
from December 1847 to January 1848, The Communist
Manifesto was first published on 21 February
1848. The Communist Manifesto laid out the
beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer
a secret society, the Communist League wanted
to make aims and intentions clear to the general
public rather than hiding its beliefs as the
League of the Just had been doing. The opening
lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal
basis of Marxism: "The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles".
It goes on to examine the antagonisms that
Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of
interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy
capitalist class) and the proletariat (the
industrial working class). Proceeding on from
this, the Manifesto presents the argument
for why the Communist League, as opposed to
other socialist and liberal political parties
and groups at the time, was truly acting in
the interests of the proletariat to overthrow
capitalist society and to replace it with
socialism.Later that year, Europe experienced
a series of protests, rebellions and often
violent upheavals that became known as the
Revolutions of 1848. In France, a revolution
led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the
establishment of the French Second Republic.
Marx was supportive of such activity and having
recently received a substantial inheritance
from his father (withheld by his uncle Lionel
Philips since his father's death in 1838)
of either 6,000 or 5,000 francs he allegedly
used a third of it to arm Belgian workers
who were planning revolutionary action. Although
the veracity of these allegations is disputed,
the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused Marx
of it, subsequently arresting him and he was
forced to flee back to France, where with
a new republican government in power he believed
that he would be safe.
=== Cologne: 1848–1849 ===
Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred
the Communist League executive headquarters
to the city and also set up a German Workers'
Club with various German socialists living
there. Hoping to see the revolution spread
to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to Cologne
where he began issuing a handbill entitled
the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,
in which he argued for only four of the ten
points of the Communist Manifesto, believing
that in Germany at that time the bourgeoisie
must overthrow the feudal monarchy and aristocracy
before the proletariat could overthrow the
bourgeoisie. On 1 June, Marx started publication
of a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung, which he helped to finance through
his recent inheritance from his father. Designed
to put forward news from across Europe with
his own Marxist interpretation of events,
the newspaper featured Marx as a primary writer
and the dominant editorial influence. Despite
contributions by fellow members of the Communist
League, according to Friedrich Engels it remained
"a simple dictatorship by Marx".Whilst editor
of the paper, Marx and the other revolutionary
socialists were regularly harassed by the
police and Marx was brought to trial on several
occasions, facing various allegations including
insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, committing
a press misdemeanor and inciting armed rebellion
through tax boycotting, although each time
he was acquitted. Meanwhile, the democratic
parliament in Prussia collapsed and the king,
Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet
of his reactionary supporters, who implemented
counter-revolutionary measures to expunge
leftist and other revolutionary elements from
the country. Consequently, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung was soon suppressed and Marx was ordered
to leave the country on 16 May. Marx returned
to Paris, which was then under the grip of
both a reactionary counter-revolution and
a cholera epidemic and was soon expelled by
the city authorities, who considered him a
political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting
their fourth child and not able to move back
to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 he sought
refuge in London.
=== Move to London and further writing: 1850–1860
===
Marx moved to London in early June 1849 and
would remain based in the city for the rest
of his life. The headquarters of the Communist
League also moved to London. However, in the
winter of 1849–1850 a split within the ranks
of the Communist League occurred when a faction
within it led by August Willich and Karl Schapper
began agitating for an immediate uprising.
Willich and Schapper believed that once the
Communist League had initiated the uprising,
the entire working class from across Europe
would rise "spontaneously" to join it, thus
creating revolution across Europe. Marx and
Engels protested that such an unplanned uprising
on the part of the Communist League was "adventuristic"
and would be suicide for the Communist League.
Such an uprising as that recommended by the
Schapper/Willich group would easily be crushed
by the police and the armed forces of the
reactionary governments of Europe. Marx maintained
that this would spell doom for the Communist
League itself, arguing that changes in society
are not achieved overnight through the efforts
and will power of a handful of men. They are
instead brought about through a scientific
analysis of economic conditions of society
and by moving toward revolution through different
stages of social development. In the present
stage of development (circa 1850), following
the defeat of the uprisings across Europe
in 1848 he felt that the Communist League
should encourage the working class to unite
with progressive elements of the rising bourgeoisie
to defeat the feudal aristocracy on issues
involving demands for governmental reforms,
such as a constitutional republic with freely
elected assemblies and universal (male) suffrage.
In other words, the working class must join
with bourgeois and democratic forces to bring
about the successful conclusion of the bourgeois
revolution before stressing the working class
agenda and a working class revolution.
After a long struggle which threatened to
ruin the Communist League, Marx's opinion
prevailed and eventually the Willich/Schapper
group left the Communist League. Meanwhile,
Marx also became heavily involved with the
socialist German Workers' Educational Society.
The Society held their meetings in Great Windmill
Street, Soho, central London's entertainment
district. This organisation was also racked
by an internal struggle between its members,
some of whom followed Marx while others followed
the Schapper/Willich faction. The issues in
this internal split were the same issues raised
in the internal split within the Communist
League, but Marx lost the fight with the Schapper/Willich
faction within the German Workers' Educational
Society and on 17 September 1850 resigned
from the Society.
=== New-York Daily Tribune and journalism
===
In the early period in London, Marx committed
himself almost exclusively to revolutionary
activities, such that his family endured extreme
poverty. His main source of income was Engels,
whose own source was his wealthy industrialist
father. In Prussia as editor of his own newspaper,
and contributor to others ideologically aligned,
Marx could reach his audience, the working
classes. In London, without finances to run
a newspaper themselves, he and Engels turned
to international journalism. At one stage
they were being published by six newspapers
from England, the United States, Prussia,
Austria and South Africa. Marx's principal
earnings came from his work as European correspondent,
from 1852 to 1862, for the New-York Daily
Tribune, and from also producing articles
for more "bourgeois" newspapers. Marx had
his articles translated from German by Wilhelm
Pieper, until his proficiency in English had
become adequate.The New-York Daily Tribune
had been founded in April 1841 by Horace Greeley.
Its editorial board contained progressive
bourgeois journalists and publishers, among
them George Ripley and the journalist Charles
Dana, who was editor-in-chief. Dana, a fourierist
and an abolitionist, was Marx's contact.
The Tribune was a vehicle for Marx to reach
a transatlantic public to make a "hidden war"
to Henry Charles Carey. The journal had wide
working-class appeal from its foundation;
at two cents, it was inexpensive; and, with
about 50,000 copies per issue, its circulation
was the widest in the United States. Its editorial
ethos was progressive and its anti-slavery
stance reflected Greeley's. Marx's first article
for the paper, on the British parliamentary
elections, was published on 21 August 1852.On
21 March 1857 Dana informed Marx that, due
to the economic recession, only one article
a week would be paid for, published or not;
the others would be paid for only if published.
Marx had sent his articles on Tuesdays and
Fridays, but, that October, the Tribune discharged
all its correspondents in Europe except Marx
and B. Taylor, and reduced Marx to a weekly
article. Between September and November 1860,
only five were published. After a six-month
interval, Marx resumed contributions in September
1861 until March 1862, when Dana wrote to
inform him that there was no longer space
in the Tribune for reports from London, due
to American domestic affairs.
In 1868, Dana set up a rival newspaper, the
New York Sun, at which he was editor-in-chief.In
April 1857, Dana invited Marx to contribute
articles, mainly on military history, to the
New American Cyclopedia, an idea of George
Ripley, Dana's friend and literary editor
of the Tribune. In all, 67 Marx-Engels articles
were published, of which 51 written by Engels,
although Marx did some research for them in
the British Museum.By the late 1850s, American
popular interest in European affairs waned
and Marx's articles turned to topics such
as the "slavery crisis" and the outbreak of
the American Civil War in 1861, in the "War
Between the States".
Between December 1851 and March 1852, Marx
worked on his theoretical work about the French
Revolution of 1848, titled The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In this he explored
concepts in historical materialism, class
struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat,
and victory of the proletariat over the bourgeois
state.The 1850s and 1860s may be said to mark
a philosophical boundary distinguishing the
young Marx's Hegelian idealism and the more
mature Marx's scientific ideology associated
with structural Marxism; however, not all
scholars accept this distinction. For Marx
and Engels, their experience of the Revolutions
of 1848 to 1849 were formative in the development
of their theory of economics and historical
progression. After the "failures" of 1848,
the revolutionary impetus appeared spent and
not to be renewed without an economic recession.
Contention arose between Marx and his fellow
communists, whom he denounced as "adventurists".
Marx deemed it fanciful to propose that "will
power" could be sufficient to create the revolutionary
conditions when in reality the economic component
was the necessary requisite.
Recession in the United States' economy in
1852 gave Marx and Engels grounds for optimism
for revolutionary activity. Yet, this economy
was seen as too immature for a capitalist
revolution. Open territories on America's
western frontier dissipated the forces of
social unrest. Moreover, any economic crisis
arising in the United States would not lead
to revolutionary contagion of the older economies
of individual European nations, which were
closed systems bounded by their national borders.
When the so-called "Panic of 1857" in the
United States spread globally, it broke all
economic theory models, and was the first
truly global economic crisis.
Financial necessity had forced Marx to abandon
economic studies in 1844 and give thirteen
years to working on other projects. He had
always sought to return to economics.
=== The First International and Capital ===
Marx continued to write articles for the New
York Daily Tribune as long as he was sure
that the Tribune's editorial policy was still
progressive. However, the departure of Charles
Dana from the paper in late 1861 and the resultant
change in the editorial board brought about
a new editorial policy. No longer was the
Tribune to be a strong abolitionist paper
dedicated to a complete Union victory. The
new editorial board supported an immediate
peace between the Union and the Confederacy
in the Civil War in the United States with
slavery left intact in the Confederacy. Marx
strongly disagreed with this new political
position and in 1863 was forced to withdraw
as a writer for the Tribune.In 1864, Marx
became involved in the International Workingmen's
Association (also known as the First International),
to whose General Council he was elected at
its inception in 1864. In that organisation,
Marx was involved in the struggle against
the anarchist wing centred on Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–1876). Although Marx won this contest,
the transfer of the seat of the General Council
from London to New York in 1872, which Marx
supported, led to the decline of the International.
The most important political event during
the existence of the International was the
Paris Commune of 1871, when the citizens of
Paris rebelled against their government and
held the city for two months. In response
to the bloody suppression of this rebellion,
Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets,
"The Civil War in France", a defence 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, Marx had accumulated
over 800 pages of notes and short essays on
capital, landed property, wage labour, the
state and foreign trade and the world market,
though this work did not appear in print until
1939 under the title Outlines of the Critique
of Political Economy.Finally in 1859, Marx
published A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, his first serious economic
work. This work was intended merely as a preview
of his three-volume Das Kapital (English title:
Capital: Critique of Political Economy), which
he intended to publish at a later date. In
A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Marx expands on the labour theory
of value advocated by David Ricardo. The work
was enthusiastically received, and the edition
sold out quickly.
The successful sales of A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy stimulated
Marx in the early 1860s to finish work on
the three large volumes that would compose
his major life's work—Das Kapital and the
Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed
the theoreticians of political economy, particularly
Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Theories of
Surplus Value is often referred to as the
fourth volume of Das Kapital and constitutes
one of the first comprehensive treatises on
the history of economic thought. In 1867,
the first volume of Das Kapital was published,
a work which analysed the capitalist process
of production. Here Marx elaborated his labour
theory of value, which had been influenced
by Thomas Hodgskin. Marx acknowledged Hodgskin's
"admirable work" Labour Defended against the
Claims of Capital at more than one point in
Capital. Indeed, Marx quoted Hodgskin as recognising
the alienation of labour that occurred under
modern capitalist production. No longer was
there any "natural reward of individual labour.
Each labourer produces only some part of a
whole, and each part having no value or utility
of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer
can seize, and say: 'This is my product, this
will I keep to myself'". In this first volume
of Capital, Marx outlined his conception of
surplus value and exploitation, which he argued
would ultimately lead to a falling rate of
profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.
Demand for a Russian language edition of Capital
soon led to the printing of 3,000 copies of
the book in the Russian language, which was
published on 27 March 1872. By the autumn
of 1871, the entire first edition of the German
language edition of Capital had been sold
out and a second edition was published.
Volumes II and III of Capital remained mere
manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work
for the rest of his life. Both volumes were
published by Engels after Marx's death. Volume
II of Capital was prepared and published by
Engels in July 1893 under the name Capital
II: The Process of Circulation of Capital.
Volume III of Capital was published a year
later in October 1894 under the name Capital
III: The Process of Capitalist Production
as a Whole. Theories of Surplus Value derived
from the sprawling Economic Manuscripts of
1861-1863, a second draft for Capital, the
latter spanning volumes 30-34 of the Collected
Works of Marx and Engels. Specifically, Theories
of Surplus Value runs from the latter part
of the Collected Works' thirtieth volume through
the end of their thirty-second volume; meanwhile,
the larger Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863
run from the start of the Collected Works'
thirtieth volume through the first half of
their thirty-fourth volume. The latter half
of the Collected Works' thirty-fourth volume
consists of the surviving fragments of the
Economic Manuscripts of 1863-1864, which represented
a third draft for Capital, and a large portion
of which is included as an appendix to the
Penguin edition of Capital, volume I. A German
language abridged edition of Theories of Surplus
Value was published in 1905 and in 1910. This
abridged edition was translated into English
and published in 1951 in London, but the complete
unabridged edition of Theories of Surplus
Value was published as the "fourth volume"
of Capital in 1963 and 1971 in Moscow.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's
health declined and he became incapable of
the sustained effort that had characterised
his previous work. He did manage to comment
substantially on contemporary politics, particularly
in Germany and Russia. His Critique of the
Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his
followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel
to compromise with the state socialism of
Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united
socialist party. This work is also notable
for another famous Marx quote: "From each
according to his ability, to each according
to his need".In a letter to Vera Zasulich
dated 8 March 1881, Marx contemplated the
possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist
stage of development and building communism
on the basis of the common ownership of land
characteristic of the village mir. While admitting
that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum
of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also
warned that in order for the mir to operate
as a means for moving straight to the socialist
stage without a preceding capitalist stage
it "would first be necessary to eliminate
the deleterious influences which are assailing
it (the rural commune) from all sides". Given
the elimination of these pernicious influences,
Marx allowed that "normal conditions of spontaneous
development" of the rural commune could exist.
However, in the same letter to Vera Zasulich
he points out that "at the core of the capitalist
system ... lies the complete separation of
the producer from the means of production".
In one of the drafts of this letter, Marx
reveals his growing passion for anthropology,
motivated by his belief that future communism
would be a return on a higher level to the
communism of our prehistoric past. He wrote
that "the historical trend of our age is the
fatal crisis which capitalist production has
undergone in the European and American countries
where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis
that will end in its destruction, in the return
of modern society to a higher form of the
most archaic type—collective production
and appropriation". He added that "the vitality
of primitive communities was incomparably
greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman,
etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern
capitalist societies". Before he died, Marx
asked Engels to write up these ideas, which
were published in 1884 under the title The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State.
== Personal life ==
=== Family ===
Marx and von Westphalen had seven children
together, but partly owing to the poor conditions
in which they lived whilst in London, only
three survived to adulthood. The children
were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883);
Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar
(1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido";
1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska";
1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898)
and one more who died before being named (July
1857). There are allegations that Marx also
fathered a son, Freddy, out of wedlock by
his housekeeper, Helene Demuth.Marx frequently
used pseudonyms, often when renting a house
or flat, apparently to make it harder for
the authorities to track him down. While in
Paris, he used that of "Monsieur Ramboz",
whilst in London he signed off his letters
as "A. Williams". His friends referred to
him as "Moor", owing to his dark complexion
and black curly hair, while he encouraged
his children to call him "Old Nick" and "Charley".
He also bestowed nicknames and pseudonyms
on his friends and family as well, referring
to Friedrich Engels as "General", his housekeeper
Helene as "Lenchen" or "Nym", while one of
his daughters, Jennychen, was referred to
as "Qui Qui, Emperor of China" and another,
Laura, was known as "Kakadou" or "the Hottentot".
=== Health ===
Marx was afflicted by poor health (what he
himself described as "the wretchedness of
existence") and various authors have sought
to describe and explain it. His biographer
Werner Blumenberg attributed it to liver and
gall problems which Marx had in 1849 and from
which he was never afterwards free, exacerbated
by an unsuitable lifestyle. The attacks often
came with headaches, eye inflammation, neuralgia
in the head and rheumatic pains. A serious
nervous disorder appeared in 1877 and protracted
insomnia was a consequence, which Marx fought
with narcotics. The illness was aggravated
by excessive nocturnal work and faulty diet.
Marx was fond of highly seasoned dishes, smoked
fish, caviare, pickled cucumbers, "none of
which are good for liver patients", but he
also liked wine and liqueurs and smoked an
enormous amount "and since he had no money,
it was usually bad-quality cigars". From 1863,
Marx complained a lot about boils: "These
are very frequent with liver patients and
may be due to the same causes". The abscesses
were so bad that Marx could neither sit nor
work upright. According to Blumenberg, Marx's
irritability is often found in liver patients:
The illness emphasised certain traits in his
character. He argued cuttingly, his biting
satire did not shrink at insults, and his
expressions could be rude and cruel. Though
in general Marx had a blind faith in his closest
friends, nevertheless he himself complained
that he was sometimes too mistrustful and
unjust even to them. His verdicts, not only
about enemies but even about friends, were
sometimes so harsh that even less sensitive
people would take offence… There must have
been few whom he did not criticize like this…
not even Engels was an exception.
According to Princeton historian J.E. Seigel,
in his late teens Marx may have had pneumonia
or pleurisy, the effects of which led to his
being exempted from Prussian military service.
In later life whilst working on Capital (which
he never completed), Marx suffered from a
trio of afflictions. A liver ailment, probably
hereditary, was aggravated by overwork, bad
diet and lack of sleep. Inflammation of the
eyes was induced by too much work at night.
A third affliction, eruption of carbuncles
or boils, "was probably brought on by general
physical debility to which the various features
of Marx's style of life — alcohol, tobacco,
poor diet, and failure to sleep — all contributed.
Engels often exhorted Marx to alter this dangerous
regime". In Professor Siegel's thesis, what
lay behind this punishing sacrifice of his
health may have been guilt about self-involvement
and egoism, originally induced in Karl Marx
by his father.In 2007, a retrodiagnosis of
Marx's skin disease was made by dermatologist
Sam Shuster of Newcastle University and for
Shuster the most probable explanation was
that Marx suffered not from liver problems,
but from hidradenitis suppurativa, a recurring
infective condition arising from blockage
of apocrine ducts opening into hair follicles.
This condition, which was not described in
the English medical literature until 1933
(hence would not have been known to Marx's
physicians), can produce joint pain (which
could be misdiagnosed as rheumatic disorder)
and painful eye conditions. To arrive at his
retrodiagnosis, Shuster considered the primary
material: the Marx correspondence published
in the 50 volumes of the Marx/Engels Collected
Works. There, "although the skin lesions were
called 'furuncules', 'boils' and 'carbuncles'
by Marx, his wife and his physicians, they
were too persistent, recurrent, destructive
and site-specific for that diagnosis". The
sites of the persistent 'carbuncles' were
noted repeatedly in the armpits, groins, perianal,
genital (penis and scrotum) and suprapubic
regions and inner thighs, "favoured sites
of hidradenitis suppurativa". Professor Shuster
claimed the diagnosis "can now be made definitively".Shuster
went on to consider the potential psychosocial
effects of the disease, noting that the skin
is an organ of communication and that hidradenitis
suppurativa produces much psychological distress,
including loathing and disgust and depression
of self-image, mood and well-being, feelings
for which Shuster found "much evidence" in
the Marx correspondence. Professor Shuster
went on to ask himself whether the mental
effects of the disease affected Marx's work
and even helped him to develop his theory
of alienation.
=== Death ===
Following the death of his wife Jenny in December
1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him
in ill health for the last 15 months of his
life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis
and pleurisy that killed him in London on
14 March 1883 (age 64), dying a stateless
person. Family and friends in London buried
his body in Highgate Cemetery (East), London,
on 17 March 1883 in an area reserved for agnostics
and atheists (George Eliot's grave is nearby).
There were between nine and eleven mourners
at his funeral.
Several of his closest friends spoke at his
funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and
Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included
the passage: On the 14th of March, at a quarter
to three in the afternoon, the greatest living
thinker ceased to think. He had been left
alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we
came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully
gone to sleep—but forever.
Marx's surviving daughters Eleanor and Laura,
as well as Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue,
Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, were
also in attendance. He had been predeceased
by his wife and his eldest daughter, the latter
dying a few months earlier in January 1883.
Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German
Social Democratic Party, gave a speech in
German and Longuet, a prominent figure in
the French working-class movement, made a
short statement in French. Two telegrams from
workers' parties in France and Spain were
also read out. Together with Engels's speech,
this constituted the entire programme of the
funeral. Non-relatives attending the funeral
included three communist associates of Marx:
Friedrich Lessner, imprisoned for three years
after the Cologne communist trial of 1852;
G. Lochner, whom Engels described as "an old
member of the Communist League"; and Carl
Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester,
a member of the Royal Society and a communist
activist involved in the 1848 Baden revolution.
Another attendee of the funeral was Ray Lankester,
a British zoologist who would later become
a prominent academic.Upon his own death in
1895, Engels left Marx's two surviving daughters
a "significant portion" of his considerable
estate (valued in 2011 at US$4.8m).Marx and
his family were reburied on a new site nearby
in November 1954. The tomb at the new site,
unveiled on 14 March 1956, bears the carved
message: "Workers of All Lands Unite", the
final line of The Communist Manifesto; and,
from the 11th "Thesis on Feuerbach" (as edited
by Engels), "The philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways—the point however
is to change it". The Communist Party of Great
Britain had the monument with a portrait bust
by Laurence Bradshaw erected and Marx's original
tomb had only humble adornment. In 1970, there
was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the
monument using a homemade bomb.The Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked: "One cannot
say Marx died a failure" because although
he had not achieved a large following of disciples
in Britain, his writings had already begun
to make an impact on the leftist movements
in Germany and Russia. Within 25 years of
his death, the continental European socialist
parties that acknowledged Marx's influence
on their politics were each gaining between
15 and 47 per cent in those countries with
representative democratic elections.
== Thought ==
=== Influences ===
Marx's thought demonstrates influences from
many thinkers including, but not limited to:
Lycurgus' philosophy, including the forceful
and equal redistribution of resources (land)
and the equality of all citizens
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy
The classical political economy (economics)
of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as
Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi's critique
of laissez-faire economics and analysis of
the precarious state of the proletariat
French socialist thought, in particular the
thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de
Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles
Fourier
Earlier German philosophical materialism among
the Young Hegelians, particularly that of
Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, as well
as the French materialism of the late 18th
century, including Diderot, Claude Adrien
Helvétius and d'Holbach
The working class analysis by Friedrich Engels,
as well as the early descriptions of class
provided by French liberals and Saint-Simonians
such as François Guizot and Augustin Thierry
Marx's Judaic legacy has been identified as
formative to both his moral outlook and his
materialist philosophy.Marx's view of history,
which came to be called historical materialism
(controversially adapted as the philosophy
of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin),
certainly shows the influence of Hegel's claim
that one should view reality (and history)
dialectically. However, Hegel had thought
in idealist terms, putting ideas in the forefront,
whereas Marx sought to rewrite dialectics
in materialist terms, arguing for the primacy
of matter over idea. Where Hegel saw the "spirit"
as driving history, Marx saw this as an unnecessary
mystification, obscuring the reality of humanity
and its physical actions shaping the world.
He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement
of reality on its head, and that one needed
to set it upon its feet. Despite his dislike
of mystical terms, Marx used Gothic language
in several of his works: in The Communist
Manifesto he proclaims "A spectre is haunting
Europe—the spectre of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy
alliance to exorcise this spectre", and in
The Capital he refers to capital as "necromancy
that surrounds the products of labour".Though
inspired by French socialist and sociological
thought, Marx criticised utopian socialists,
arguing that their favoured small-scale socialistic
communities would be bound to marginalisation
and poverty and that only a large-scale change
in the economic system can bring about real
change.The other important contributions to
Marx's revision of Hegelianism came from Engels's
book, The Condition of the Working Class in
England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive
of the historical dialectic in terms of class
conflict and to see the modern working class
as the most progressive force for revolution,
as well as from the social democrat Friedrich
Wilhelm Schulz, who in Die Bewegung der Produktion
described the movement of society as "flowing
from the contradiction between the forces
of production and the mode of production."Marx
believed that he could study history and society
scientifically and discern tendencies of history
and the resulting outcome of social conflicts.
Some followers of Marx therefore concluded
that a communist revolution would inevitably
occur. However, Marx famously asserted in
the eleventh of his "Theses on Feuerbach"
that "philosophers have only interpreted the
world, in various ways; the point however
is to change it" and he clearly dedicated
himself to trying to alter the world.
=== Philosophy and social thought ===
Marx's polemic with other thinkers often occurred
through critique and thus he has been called
"the first great user of critical method in
social sciences". He criticised speculative
philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology.
By adopting this approach, Marx attempted
to separate key findings from ideological
biases. This set him apart from many contemporary
philosophers.
==== Human nature ====
Like Tocqueville, who described a faceless
and bureaucratic despotism with no identifiable
despot, Marx also broke with classical thinkers
who spoke of a single tyrant and with Montesquieu,
who discussed the nature of the single despot.
Instead, Marx set out to analyse "the despotism
of capital". Fundamentally, Marx assumed that
human history involves transforming human
nature, which encompasses both human beings
and material objects. Humans recognise that
they possess both actual and potential selves.
For both Marx and Hegel, self-development
begins with an experience of internal alienation
stemming from this recognition, followed by
a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective
agent, renders its potential counterpart an
object to be apprehended. Marx further argues
that by moulding nature in desired ways the
subject takes the object as its own and thus
permits the individual to be actualised as
fully human. For Marx, the human nature—Gattungswesen,
or species-being—exists as a function of
human labour. Fundamental to Marx's idea of
meaningful labour is the proposition that
in order for a subject to come to terms with
its alienated object it must first exert influence
upon literal, material objects in the subject's
world. Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps
the nature of work and comprehends objective
man, authentic because actual, as the result
of his own work", but characterises Hegelian
self-development as unduly "spiritual" and
abstract. Marx thus departs from Hegel by
insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal,
actual, sentient, objective being with natural
capacities means that he has actual, sensuous
objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression,
or that he can only express his life in actual
sensuous objects". Consequently, Marx revises
Hegelian "work" into material "labour" and
in the context of human capacity to transform
nature the term "labour power".
==== Labour, class struggle and false consciousness
====
The history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles.
Marx had a special concern with how people
relate to their own labour power. He wrote
extensively about this in terms of the problem
of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx
began with a Hegelian notion of alienation
but developed a more materialist conception.
Capitalism mediates social relationships of
production (such as among workers or between
workers and capitalists) through commodities,
including labour, that are bought and sold
on the market. For Marx, the possibility that
one may give up ownership of one's own labour—one's
capacity to transform the world—is tantamount
to being alienated from one's own nature and
it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this
loss as commodity fetishism, in which the
things that people produce, commodities, appear
to have a life and movement of their own to
which humans and their behaviour merely adapt.
Commodity fetishism provides an example of
what Engels called "false consciousness",
which relates closely to the understanding
of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels
meant ideas that reflect the interests of
a particular class at a particular time in
history, but which contemporaries see as universal
and eternal. Marx and Engels's point was not
only that such beliefs are at best half-truths,
as they serve an important political function.
Put another way, the control that one class
exercises over the means of production includes
not only the production of food or manufactured
goods, but also the production of ideas (this
provides one possible explanation for why
members of a subordinate class may hold ideas
contrary to their own interests). An example
of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding
of religion, summed up in a passage from the
preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the
expression of real suffering and a protest
against real suffering. Religion is the sigh
of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory
happiness of the people is the demand for
their real happiness. To call on them to give
up their illusions about their condition is
to call on them to give up a condition that
requires illusions.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis at the
Gymnasium zu Trier argued that religion had
as its primary social aim the promotion of
solidarity, here Marx sees the social function
of religion in terms of highlighting/preserving
political and economic status quo and inequality.Marx
was an outspoken opponent of child labour,
saying that British industries "could but
live by sucking blood, and children’s blood
too", and that U.S. capital was financed by
the "capitalized blood of children".
==== Economy, history and society ====
Marx's thoughts on labour were related to
the primacy he gave to the economic relation
in determining the society's past, present
and future (see also economic determinism).
Accumulation of capital shapes the social
system. For Marx, social change was about
conflict between opposing interests, driven
in the background by economic forces. This
became the inspiration for the body of works
known as the conflict theory. In his evolutionary
model of history, he argued that human history
began with free, productive and creative work
that was over time coerced and dehumanised,
a trend most apparent under capitalism. Marx
noted that this was not an intentional process,
rather no individual or even state can go
against the forces of economy.The organisation
of society depends on means of production.
The means of production are all things required
to produce material goods, such as land, natural
resources and technology but not human labor.
The relations of production are the social
relationships people enter into as they acquire
and use the means of production. Together,
these compose the mode of production and Marx
distinguished historical eras in terms of
modes of production. Marx differentiated between
base and superstructure, where the base (or
substructure) is the economic system and superstructure
is the cultural and political system. Marx
regarded this mismatch between economic base
and social superstructure as a major source
of social disruption and conflict.Despite
Marx's stress on critique of capitalism and
discussion of the new communist society that
should replace it, his explicit critique is
guarded, as he saw it as an improved society
compared to the past ones (slavery and feudalism).
Marx never clearly discusses issues of morality
and justice, but scholars agree that his work
contained implicit discussion of those concepts.
Marx's view of capitalism was two-sided. On
one hand, in the 19th century's deepest critique
of the dehumanising aspects of this system
he noted that defining features of capitalism
include alienation, exploitation and recurring,
cyclical depressions leading to mass unemployment.
On the other hand, he characterized capitalism
as "revolutionising, industrialising and universalising
qualities of development, growth and progressivity"
(by which Marx meant industrialisation, urbanisation,
technological progress, increased productivity
and growth, rationality and scientific revolution)
that are responsible for progress. Marx considered
the capitalist class to be one of the most
revolutionary in history because it constantly
improved the means of production, more so
than any other class in history and was responsible
for the overthrow of feudalism. Capitalism
can stimulate considerable growth because
the capitalist has an incentive to reinvest
profits in new technologies and capital equipment.According
to Marx, capitalists take advantage of the
difference between the labour market and the
market for whatever commodity the capitalist
can produce. Marx observed that in practically
every successful industry, input unit-costs
are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called
the difference "surplus value" and argued
that it was based on surplus labour, the difference
between what it costs to keep workers alive
and what they can produce. Although Marx describes
capitalists as vampires sucking worker's blood,
he notes that drawing profit is "by no means
an injustice" and that capitalists cannot
go against the system. The problem is the
"cancerous cell" of capital, understood not
as property or equipment, but the relations
between workers and owners—the economic
system in general.At the same time, Marx stressed
that capitalism was unstable and prone to
periodic crises. He suggested that over time
capitalists would invest more and more in
new technologies and less and less in labour.
Since Marx believed that profit derived from
surplus value appropriated from labour, he
concluded that the rate of profit would fall
as the economy grows. Marx believed that increasingly
severe crises would punctuate this cycle of
growth and collapse. Moreover, he believed
that in the long-term, this process would
enrich and empower the capitalist class and
impoverish the proletariat. In section one
of The Communist Manifesto, Marx describes
feudalism, capitalism and the role internal
social contradictions play in the historical
process:
We see then: the means of production and of
exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie
built itself up, were generated in feudal
society. At a certain stage in the development
of these means of production and of exchange,
the conditions under which feudal society
produced and exchanged ... the feudal relations
of property became no longer compatible with
the already developed productive forces; they
became so many fetters. They had to be burst
asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their
place stepped free competition, accompanied
by a social and political constitution adapted
in it, and the economic and political sway
of the bourgeois class. A similar movement
is going on before our own eyes ... The productive
forces at the disposal of society no longer
tend to further the development of the conditions
of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they
have become too powerful for these conditions,
by which they are fettered, and so soon as
they overcome these fetters, they bring order
into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger
the existence of bourgeois property.
Marx believed that those structural contradictions
within capitalism necessitate its end, giving
way to socialism, or a post-capitalistic,
communist society:
The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation
on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore,
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.
Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.
Thanks to various processes overseen by capitalism,
such as urbanisation, the working class, the
proletariat, should grow in numbers and develop
class consciousness, in time realising that
they can and must change the system. Marx
believed that if the proletariat were to seize
the means of production, they would encourage
social relations that would benefit everyone
equally, abolishing exploiting class and introduce
a system of production less vulnerable to
cyclical crises. Marx argued in The German
Ideology that capitalism will end through
the organised actions of an international
working class: Communism is for us not a state
of affairs which is to be established, an
ideal to which reality will have to adjust
itself. We call communism the real movement
which abolishes the present state of things.
The conditions of this movement result from
the premises now in existence.
In this new society, the alienation would
end and humans would be free to act without
being bound by the labour market. It would
be a democratic society, enfranchising the
entire population. In such a utopian world,
there would also be little need for a state,
whose goal was previously to enforce the alienation.
Marx theorised that between capitalism and
the establishment of a socialist/communist
system, would exist a period of dictatorship
of the proletariat—where the working class
holds political power and forcibly socialises
the means of production. As he wrote in his
Critique of the Gotha Program, "between capitalist
and communist society there lies the period
of the revolutionary transformation of the
one into the other. Corresponding to this
is also a political transition period in which
the state can be nothing but the revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat". While he
allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition
in some countries with strong democratic institutional
structures (such as Britain, the United States
and the Netherlands), he suggested that in
other countries in which workers cannot "attain
their goal by peaceful means" the "lever of
our revolution must be force".
=== International relations ===
Marx viewed Russia as the main counter-revolutionary
threat to European revolutions. During the
Crimean War, Marx backed the Ottoman Empire
and its allies Britain and France against
Russia. He was absolutely opposed to Pan-Slavism,
viewing it as an instrument of Russian foreign
policy. Marx had considered the Slavic nations
except Poles as 'counter-revolutionary'. Marx
and Engels published in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung in February 1849:
To the sentimental phrases about brotherhood
which we are being offered here on behalf
of the most counter-revolutionary nations
of Europe, we reply that hatred of Russians
was and still is the primary revolutionary
passion among Germans; that since the revolution
[of 1848] hatred of Czechs and Croats has
been added, and that only by the most determined
use of terror against these Slav peoples can
we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard
the revolution. We know where the enemies
of the revolution are concentrated, viz. in
Russia and the Slav regions of Austria, and
no fine phrases, no allusions to an undefined
democratic future for these countries can
deter us from treating our enemies as enemies.
Then there will be a struggle, an “inexorable
life-and-death struggle”, against those
Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating
fight and ruthless terror — not in the interests
of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!"
Marx and Engels sympathised with the Narodnik
revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s. When
the Russian revolutionaries assassinated Tsar
Alexander II of Russia, Marx expressed the
hope that the assassination foreshadowed ‘the
formation of a Russian commune’. Marx supported
the Polish uprisings against tsarist Russia.
He said in a speech in London in 1867:
In the first place the policy of Russia is
changeless... Its methods, its tactics, its
manoeuvres may change, but the polar star
of its policy – world domination – is
a fixed star. In our times only a civilised
government ruling over barbarian masses can
hatch out such a plan and execute it. ... There
is but one alternative for Europe. Either
Asiatic barbarism, under Muscovite direction,
will burst around its head like an avalanche,
or else it must re-establish Poland, thus
putting twenty million heroes between itself
and Asia and gaining a breathing spell for
the accomplishment of its social regeneration.
Marx supported the cause of Irish independence.
In 1867, he wrote Engels: "I used to think
the separation of Ireland from England impossible.
I now think it inevitable. The English working
class will never accomplish anything until
it has got rid of Ireland. ... English reaction
in England had its roots ... in the subjugation
of Ireland."Marx spent some time in French
Algeria, which had been invaded and made a
French colony in 1830, and had opportunity
to observe life in colonial North Africa.
He wrote about the colonial justice system,
in which "a form of torture has been used
(and this happens ‘regularly’) to extract
confessions from the Arabs; naturally it is
done (like the English in India) by the ‘police’;
the judge is supposed to know nothing at all
about it." Marx was surprised by the arrogance
of many European settlers in Algiers and wrote
in a letter: "when a European colonist dwells
among the ‘lesser breeds,’ either as a
settler or even on business, he generally
regards himself as even more inviolable than
handsome William I [a Prussian king]. Still,
when it comes to bare-faced arrogance and
presumptuousness vis-à-vis the ‘lesser
breeds,’ the British and Dutch outdo the
French."According to the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy: "Marx’s analysis of colonialism
as a progressive force bringing modernization
to a backward feudal society sounds like a
transparent rationalization for foreign domination.
His account of British domination, however,
reflects the same ambivalence that he shows
towards capitalism in Europe. In both cases,
Marx recognizes the immense suffering brought
about during the transition from feudal to
bourgeois society while insisting that the
transition is both necessary and ultimately
progressive. He argues that the penetration
of foreign commerce will cause a social revolution
in India."Marx discussed British colonial
rule in India in the New York Herald Tribune
in June 1853:
There cannot remain any doubt but that the
misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan
[India] is of an essentially different and
infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan
had to suffer before. England has broken down
the entire framework of Indian society, without
any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing...
[however], we must not forget that these idyllic
village communities, inoffensive though they
may appear, had always been the solid foundation
of Oriental despotism, that they restrained
the human mind within the smallest possible
compass, making it the unresisting tool of
superstition.
== Legacy ==
Marx's ideas have had a profound impact on
world politics and intellectual thought. Followers
of Marx have often debated amongst themselves
over how to interpret Marx's writings and
apply his concepts to the modern world. The
legacy of Marx's thought has become contested
between numerous tendencies, each of which
sees itself as Marx's most accurate interpreter.
In the political realm, these tendencies include
Leninism, Marxism–Leninism, Trotskyism,
Maoism, Luxemburgism and libertarian Marxism.
Various currents have also developed in academic
Marxism, often under influence of other views,
resulting in structuralist Marxism, historical
Marxism, phenomenological Marxism, analytical
Marxism and Hegelian Marxism.From an academic
perspective, Marx's work contributed to the
birth of modern sociology. He has been cited
as one of the 19th century's three masters
of the "school of suspicion" alongside Friedrich
Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud and as one of
the three principal architects of modern social
science along with Émile Durkheim and Max
Weber. In contrast to other philosophers,
Marx offered theories that could often be
tested with the scientific method. Both Marx
and Auguste Comte set out to develop scientifically
justified ideologies in the wake of European
secularisation and new developments in the
philosophies of history and science. Working
in the Hegelian tradition, Marx rejected Comtean
sociological positivism in attempt to develop
a science of society. Karl Löwith considered
Marx and Søren Kierkegaard to be the two
greatest Hegelian philosophical successors.
In modern sociological theory, Marxist sociology
is recognised as one of the main classical
perspectives. Isaiah Berlin considers Marx
the true founder of modern sociology "in so
far as anyone can claim the title". Beyond
social science, he has also had a lasting
legacy in philosophy, literature, the arts
and the humanities.
Social theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries
have pursued two main strategies in response
to Marx. One move has been to reduce it to
its analytical core, known as analytical Marxism.
Another, more common, move has been to dilute
the explanatory claims of Marx's social theory
and emphasise the "relative autonomy" of aspects
of social and economic life not directly related
to Marx's central narrative of interaction
between the development of the "forces of
production" and the succession of "modes of
production". Such has been for example the
neo-Marxist theorising adopted by historians
inspired by Marx's social theory, such as
E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. It has also
been a line of thinking pursued by thinkers
and activists like Antonio Gramsci who have
sought to understand the opportunities and
the difficulties of transformative political
practice, seen in the light of Marxist social
theory. Marx's ideas would also have a profound
influence on subsequent artists and art history,
with avant-garde movements across literature,
visual art, music, film and theater.Politically,
Marx's legacy is more complex. Throughout
the 20th century, revolutions in dozens of
countries labelled themselves "Marxist"—most
notably the Russian Revolution, which led
to the founding of the Soviet Union. Major
world leaders including Vladimir Lenin, Mao
Zedong, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Josip
Broz Tito, Kwame Nkrumah, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Nelson Mandela, Xi Jinping, Jean-Claude Juncker
and Thomas Sankara all cited Marx as an influence.
Beyond where Marxist revolutions took place,
Marx's ideas informed political parties worldwide.
In countries associated with some Marxist
claims have led political opponents to blame
Marx for millions of deaths, but the fidelity
of these varied revolutionaries, leaders and
parties to Marx's work is highly contested
and rejected by many Marxists. It is now common
to distinguish between the legacy and influence
of Marx specifically and the legacy and influence
of those who shaped his ideas for political
purposes.Two centuries after his birth Marx
remains both controversial and relevant, as
the unveiling of a 4.5m statue of him (given
by China, sculpted by Wu Weishan) in his birthplace
of Trier, Germany in 2018 demonstrates. In
2017 a feature film, The Young Karl Marx,
featuring Marx, his wife Jenny Marx, and his
collaborator Friedrich Engels, among other
revolutionaries and intellectuals prior to
the revolutions of 1848 received good reviews
both for its historical accuracy and its brio
in treating the intellectual life.
In May 2018, European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker attended the event in
Karl Marx's hometown of Trier, Germany, at
which a statue of Marx, donated by the Chinese
government, was unveiled. Juncker defended
Marx, saying that "Karl Marx was a philosopher,
who thought into the future, had creative
aspirations, and today he stands for things,
which is he not responsible for and which
he didn't cause, because many of the things
he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite."
== 
Honors ==
Hungary issued a postage stamp on 1 May 1953
on account of the 70th death anniversary of
Karl Marx.279
Hungary issued a commemorative postage stamp
on 6 November 1964 on the occasion of centenary
of 1st Socialist International.280
India issued a stamp on 5 May 1983.281
Russia issued two stamps on 5 April 2018.282
On 10 October 1983 Vietnam issued two stamps.283
In March 1933 Soviet Union issued three stamps.284There
are many other postage stamps; at least 22
countries issued postage stamps in his honor.
== Selected bibliography ==
The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical
School of Law, 1842
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843
"On the Jewish Question", 1843
"Notes on James Mill", 1844
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
1844
The Holy Family, 1845
"Theses on Feuerbach", 1845
The German Ideology, 1845
The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
"Wage Labour and Capital", 1847
Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
The Class Struggles in France, 1850
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,
1852
Grundrisse, 1857
A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, 1859
Writings on the U.S. Civil War, 1861
Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes, 1862
"Value, Price and Profit", 1865
Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867
"The Civil War in France", 1871
Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
"Notes on Adolph Wagner", 1883
Capital, Volume II (posthumously published
by Engels), 1885
Capital, Volume III (posthumously published
by Engels), 1894
== See also ==
== References ==
=== Bibliography ===
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Works by Karl Marx at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Karl Marx at Internet Archive
Works by Karl Marx at LibriVox (public domain
audiobooks)
Works by Karl Marx (in German) at Zeno.org
Karl Marx at Encyclopædia Britannica
Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Karl Marx". Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Marxists.org, homepage of the Marxists Internet
Archive
Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (1989). Karl Marx:
a Biography (4 ed.). Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Krader, Lawrence, ed. (1974). The Ethnological
Notebooks of Karl Marx (PDF) (2 ed.). Assen:
Van Gorcum.
Archive of Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels Papers
at the International Institute of Social History
The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, in
English translation and in 50 volumes, are
published in London by Lawrence & Wishart
and in New York by International Publishers.
(These volumes were at one time put online
by the Marxists Internet Archive, until the
original publishers objected on copyright
grounds: "Marx/Engels Collected Works". Marxists
Internet Archive. Retrieved 3 March 2018.)
They are available online and searchable,
for purchase or through subscribing libraries,
in the "Social Theory" collection published
by Alexander Street Press in collaboration
with the University of Chicago.
Marx, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Anthony
Grayling, Francis Wheen & Gareth Stedman Jones
(In Our Time, 14 July 2005)
Newspaper clippings about Karl Marx in the
20th Century Press Archives of the German
National Library of Economics (ZBW)
=== Articles and entries ===
Dead Labour: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered by
Paul Craig Roberts
Hegel, Marx, Engels, and the Origins of Marxism,
by David North
In Praise of Marx Terry Eagleton synopsising
his Why Marx was right chronicle.com 10 April
2011.
Karl Marx: An Overview of his Biographies,
by Angelo Segrillo
Karl Marx: Did he get it all Right? by Philip
Collins, The Times, 21 October 2008
Karl Marx, Ernest Mandel
Liberalism, Marxism and The State, by Ralph
Raico
Marx, Mao and mathematics: the politics of
infinitesimals, by Joseph Dauben
Marxism and Ethics from International Socialism
Paul Blackledge (2008)
Marxmyths.org Various essays on misinterpretations
of Marx
Portraits of Karl Marx (International Institute
of Social History)
Paul Dorn, The Paris Commune and Marx' Theory
of Revolution
Karl Marx (1818–1883). The Concise Encyclopedia
of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty
(2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2008.
Marx's Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping
the World. TIME, 25 March 2013.
Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl
Marx Predicted 2014. Rolling Stone, 30 January
2014.
Karl Marx Was Right. Chris Hedges for Truthdig,
31 May 2015.
Karl Marx, Against the State 1844-1891 (passages)
