Karl Marx, the son of Hirschel
and Henrietta Marx, was born in Trier, Germany, in
1818. Hirschel Marx was a lawyer and to escape anti-Semitism decided to
abandon his Jewish
faith when Karl was a child. Although the majority of people living in
Trier were Catholics, Marx decided to become a Protestant. He also
changed his name from Hirschel to Heinrich.
After schooling in
Trier (1830-35), Marx entered Bonn University to study law. At
university he spent much of his time socialising and running up large
debts. His father was horrified when he discovered that Karl had been
wounded in a duel. Heinrich Marx agreed to pay off his son's debts but
insisted that he moved to the more sedate Berlin University.
The
move to Berlin resulted in a change in Marx and for the next few years
he worked hard at his studies. Marx came under the influence of one of
his lecturers, Bruno Bauer, whose atheism and radical political opinions
got him into trouble with the authorities. Bauer introduced Marx to the
writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who had been the professor of philosophy at
Berlin until his death in 1831.
Marx was especially impressed by Hegel's theory that a
thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite. For example,
the slave could not exist without the master, and vice versa. Hegel
argued that unity would eventually be achieved by the equalising of all
opposites, by means of the dialectic (logical progression) of thesis,
antithesis and synthesis. This was Hegel's theory of the evolving
process of history.
Heinrich
Marx died in 1838. Marx now had to earn his own living and he
decided to become a university lecturer. After completing his doctoral
thesis at the University of Jena, Marx hoped that his mentor, Bruno
Bauer, would help find him a teaching post. However, in 1842 Bauer was
dismissed as a result of his outspoken atheism and was unable to help.
Marx now tried journalism but his radical political
views meant that most editors were unwilling to publish his articles. He
moved to Cologne where the city's liberal opposition movement was fairly
strong. Known as the Cologne Circle, this group had its own newspaper,
The Rhenish Gazette. The
newspaper published an article by Marx where he defended the freedom of
the press. The group was impressed by the article and in October, 1842,
Marx was appointed editor of the newspaper.
While in Cologne he
met Moses Hess, a radical who called himself a socialist.
Marx began attending socialist meetings organised by Hess. Members of
the group told Marx of the sufferings being endured by the German
working-class and explained how they believed that only socialism could
bring this
to an end. Based on what he heard at these meetings, Marx decided to
write an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine-farmers. The article
was also critical of the government and soon after it was published in
The Rhenish Gazette in January 1843, the
newspaper was banned by the Prussian authorities.
Warned that he might be arrested, Marx quickly married
his girlfriend, Jenny von Westphalen, and moved to France where
he was offered the post of editor of a new political journal,
Franco-German
Annals. Among the contributors to the journal was his old mentor, Bruno Bauer, the
Russian anarchist, Michael
Bakunin and the
radical son of a wealthy German industrialist, Friedrich
Engels.
In Paris he began mixing with members of the
working class for the first time. Marx was shocked by their poverty but
impressed by their sense of comradeship. In an article that he wrote for
the Franco-German Annals, Marx applied
Hegel's dialectic theory
to what he had observed
in Paris. Marx, who now described himself as a communist, argued that
the working class (the proletariat), would eventually be the
emancipators of society. When published in February 1844, the journal
was immediately banned in Germany.
Marx also upset the owner of the journal, Arnold
Ruge, who objected to his editor's attack on capitalism.
In 1844 Marx wrote Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts. In this work he developed his ideas
on the concept of alienation. Marx identified three kinds of alienation
in capitalist society. First, the worker is alienated from what he
produces. Second, the worker is alienated from himself; only when he is
not working does he feel truly himself. Finally, in capitalist society
people are alienated from each other; that is, in a competitive society
people are set against other people. Marx believed the solution to this
problem was communism as this would enable the fulfilment of "his
potentialities as a
human."
While in Paris he
become a close friend of Friedrich
Engels, who had just finished writing a book about the lives of the
industrial workers in England.
Engels shared Marx's views on capitalism and after their first meeting
Engels wrote that there was virtually "complete agreement in all
theoretical fields". Marx and Engels decided to work together. It was a
good partnership, whereas Marx was at his best when dealing with
difficult abstract concepts, Engels had the ability to write for a mass
audience.
While working on their first article together,
The Holy Family, the Prussian
authorities put pressure on the French government to
expel Marx from the country. On 25th January 1845, Marx received an
order deporting him from France. Marx and Engels
decided to move to Belgium,
a country that permitted greater freedom of expression than any other
European state. Marx went to live in Brussels, where there was a sizable
community of political exiles, including the man who converted him to socialism,
Moses Hess.
Friedrich
Engels helped to financially support Marx and his family. Engels
gave Marx the royalties of his recently published book, Condition of the Working Class in England and arranged for other sympathizers to make
donations. This enabled Marx the time to study and develop his economic
and political theories. Marx spent his time trying to understand the
workings of capitalist society, the factors governing the process of
history and how the proletariat could help bring about a socialist
revolution. Unlike previous philosophers, Marx was not only interested
in discovering the truth. As he was to write later, in the past
"philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is, to change it".
In July 1845 Marx and Engels visited England.
They spent most of the time consulting books in Manchester
Library. Marx also visited London
where he met the Chartist
leader, George Julian
Harney and political exiles from Europe.
When Karl Marx returned to Brussels he concentrated on
finishing his book, The German
Ideology. In the book Marx developed his materialist
conception of history, a theory of history in which human activity,
rather than thought, plays the crucial role. Marx was unable to find a
publisher for the book, and like much of his work, was not published in
his lifetime.
In January 1846 Marx set up a
Communist Correspondence Committee. The plan was to try and link
together socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe.
Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in
London where they formed a new organisation called the Communist League.
Marx formed a branch in Brussels and in December 1847 attended a meeting
of the Communist League' Central Committee in London. At the meeting it was decided that the aims of the
organisation was "the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of
the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on
class antagonisms, and the establishment of a new society without
classes and without private property".
When Marx returned to
Brussels he concentrated on writing The Communist
Manifesto. Based on a first draft produced by Friedrich
Engels called the Principles of
Communism, Marx finished the 12,000 word pamphlet in six
weeks. Unlike most of Marx's work, it was an accessible account of
communist ideology. Written for a mass audience, The Communist Manifesto summarised the
forthcoming revolution and the nature of the communist society that
would be established by the proletariat.
The Communist Manifesto begins with the
assertion, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles." Marx argued that if you are to understand human
history you must not see it as the story of great individuals or the
conflict between states. Instead, you must see it as the story of social
classes and their struggles with each other. Marx explained that social
classes had changed over time but in the 19th century the most important
classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. By the term
bourgeoisie Marx meant the owners of the factories and the raw materials
which are processed in them. The proletariat, on the other hand, own
very little and are forced to sell their labour to the capitalists.
Marx believed that
these two classes are not merely different from each other, but also
have different interests. He went on to argue that the conflict between
these two classes would eventually lead to revolution and the triumph of
the proletariat. With the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as a class,
there would no longer be a class society. As Engels later wrote, "The
state is not abolished, it withers away."
The Communist Manifesto was published in February,
1848. The following month, the government expelled Marx from
Belgium. Marx and Engels visited Paris
before moving to Cologne where they founded a radical newspaper, the
New Rhenish Gazette. The men hoped to
use the newspaper to encourage the revolutionary atmosphere that they
had witnessed in Paris.
After examples of police brutality in
Cologne, Marx helped establish a Committee of Public
Safety to protect the people against the power of the
authorities. The New Rhenish Gazette
continued to publish reports of revolutionary activity all over Europe,
including the Democrats seizure of power in
Austria and the decision by the Emperor to flee the country.
Marx's
excitement about the possibility of world revolution began to subside in
1849. The army had managed to help the Emperor of Austria return to
power and attempts at uprisings in Dresden, Baden and the Rhur were
quickly put down. On 9th May, 1849, Marx received news he was to be
expelled from the country. The last edition of the New Rhenish Gazette appeared on 18th May and
was printed in red. Marx wrote that although he was being forced to
leave, his ideas would continue to be spread until the "emancipation of
the working class".
Marx now went to France where
he believed a socialist revolution was likely to take place at any time.
However, within a month of arriving, the French police ordered him out
of the capital. Only one country remained who would take him, and on
15th September he sailed for England.
Soon after settling in London
Jenny Marx gave birth to her fourth child. The Prussian authorities
applied pressure on the British government to expel Marx but the Prime
Minister, John
Russell, held liberal views on freedom of expression and refused.
With only the money that
Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty. In March
1850 they were ejected from their two-roomed flat in Chelsea for failing
to pay the rent. They found cheaper accommodation at 28 Dean Street,
Soho, where they stayed for six years. Their fifth child, Franziska, was
born at their new flat but she only lived for a year. Eleanor
Marx was born in
1855 but later that year, Edgar became Jenny Marx's third child to die.
Marx spent most of the time in the Reading Room of the British
Museum, where he read the back numbers of The
Economist and other books and journals that would help him
analyze capitalist society. In order to help supply Marx with an income,
Friedrich
Engels returned to work for his father in
Germany.
The two kept in
constant contact and over the next twenty years they wrote to each other
on average once every two days.
Friedrich
Engels sent postal orders or £1 or £5 notes, cut in half and sent in
separate envelopes. In this way the Marx family was able to survive. The
poverty of the Marx's family was confirmed by a Prussian police agent
who visited the Dean Street flat in 1852. In his report he pointed out
that the family had sold most of their possessions and that they did not
own one "solid piece of furniture".
Jenny helped her husband
with his work and later wrote that "the memory of the days I spent in
his little study copying his scrawled articles is among the happiest of
my life." The only relief from the misery of poverty was on a Sunday
when they went for family picnics on Hampstead Heath.
In 1852, Charles
Dana, the socialist editor of the New York
Daily Tribune, offered Marx the
opportunity to write for his newspaper. Over the next ten years the
newspaper published 487 articles by Marx (125 of them had actually been
written by Engels). Another radical in the USA, George Ripley,
commissioned
Marx to write for the New American
Cyclopaedia. With the money from Marx's journalism and the
£120 inherited from Jenny's mother, the family were able to move to 9
Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town.
In 1856 Jenny
Marx, who was now aged 42, gave birth to a still-born child. Her health
took a further blow when she contacted smallpox. Although she survived
this serious illness, it left her deaf and badly scarred. Marx's health
was also bad and he wrote to Engels claiming that "such a lousy life is
not worth living". After a bad bout of boils in 1863, Marx told Engels
that the only consolation was that "it was a truly proletarian disease".
Marx published
A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy in 1859. I the book Marx argued that the
superstructure of law, politics, religion, art and philosophy was
determined by economic forces. "It is not", he wrote, "the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness." This is what Friedrich
Engels
later called "false
consciousness".
By the 1860s the work for the New York
Daily Tribune came to an end and Marx's money problems
returned. Engels sent him £5 a month but this failed to stop him getting
deeply into debt. Ferdinand
Lassalle, a wealthy socialist from Berlin also began
sending money to Marx and offered him work as an editor of a planned new
radical newspaper in Germany.
Marx, unwilling to return to his homeland and rejected the job. Lassalle
continued to send Marx money until he was killed in a duel on 28th
August 1864.
Despite all his problems Marx continued to work and
in 1867 the first volume of Das
Kapital was published. A detailed analysis
of capitalism, the book dealt with important concepts such as
surplus value (the notion that a worker receives only the
exchange-value, not the use-value, of his labour); division of labour
(where workers become a "mere appendage of the machine") and the
industrial reserve army (the theory that capitalism creates unemployment
as a means of keeping the workers in check).
In the final part of
DAs Kapital Marx deals with the issue
of revolution. Marx argued that the laws of capitalism will bring about
its destruction. Capitalist competition will lead to a diminishing
number of monopoly capitalists, while at the
same time, the misery and oppression of the proletariat would increase.
Marx claimed that as a class, the proletariat will gradually become
"disciplined, united and organised by the very mechanism of the process
of capitalist production" and eventually will overthrow the system that
is the cause of their suffering.
Marx now began work on the
second volume of DAs Kapital. By 1871
his sixteen year old daughter, Eleanor Marx,
was helping him with his work. Taught at home by her father, Eleanor
already had a detailed understanding of the capitalist system and was to
play an important role in the future of the British labour movement. On
one occasion Marx told his children that "Jenny (his eldest daughter) is
most like me, but Tussy (Eleanor) is me."
Marx was encouraged by
the formation of the Paris Commune in March 1871 and
the abdication of Louis Napoleon. Marx called it the "greatest
achievement" since the revolutions of 1848, but by May the revolt had
collapsed and about 30,000 Communards were slaughtered by government
troops.
This failure depressed Marx and after this date
his energy began to diminish. He continued to work on the second volume
of DAs Kapital but progress was slow,
especially after Eleanor Marx
left home to become a schoolteacher in Brighton.
Eleanor returned to the family home in 1881
to nurse her parents who were both very ill. Marx, who had a swollen
liver, survived, but Jenny Marx died on 2nd December, 1881. Karl Marx
was also devastated by the death of his eldest daughter in January 1883
from cancer of the bladder. Karl Marx died two months later on the 14th
March, 1883.
(1) Karl Marx, speech in London to
the Fraternal Democrats (29th November, 1847)
The unification and brotherhood of
nations is a phrase which is nowadays on the lips of all parties,
particularly of the bourgeois free traders. A kind of brotherhood does
indeed exist between the bourgeois classes of all nations. It is the
brotherhood of the oppressors against the oppressed, of the exploiters
against the exploited. Just as the bourgeois class of one country is
united in brotherhood against the proletarians of that country, despite
the competition and struggle of its members among themselves, so the
bourgeoisie of all countries is united in brotherhood against the
proletarians of all countries, despite their struggling and competing
with each other on the world market. In order for peoples to become
really united their interests must be common. For their interests to be
common the existing property relations must be abolished, since the
exploitation of one nation by another is caused by the existing property
relations.
And it is only in the interests of the working class to
abolish existing property relations; only they have the means to achieve it. The victory of the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie represents at the same time the victory
over national and industrial conflicts, which at present create
hostility between the different peoples. Therefore, the victory of the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie also signifies the emancipation of all
downtrodden nations.
The old Poland is certainly
lost, and we should be the last to wish for its restoration. But not
only is the old Poland lost. The old Germany, the old France, the old
England, the old social order in general is lost. The loss of the old
social order, however, is not a loss for those who have nothing to lose
in the old society, and at the same time this is the case for the large
majority of people in all countries. They have, in fact, everything to
gain from the destruction of the old society, for it is a precondition
for the formation of a new society no longer based on class
antagonisms.
Of all countries it is
England where the opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
is most highly developed. Thus the victory of the English proletariat
over the English bourgeoisie is of decisive importance for the victory
of all oppressed peoples over their oppressors. Poland, therefore, must
be freed, not in Poland, but in England. You Chartists should not
express pious wishes for the liberation of nations. Defeat your own
enemies at home and then you may be proudly conscious of having defeated
the old social order in its entirety.
(2) Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now
hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either
in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,
or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
The modern bourgeois
society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in
place of the old ones.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!
(3) Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
You are horrified at our intending to do
away with private property. But in your existing society, private
property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population;
its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending
to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition of whose
existence is the nonexistence of any property for the immense majority
of society.
In one word, you reproach
us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is
just what we intend.
From the moment when labour
can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social
power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when
individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality
vanishes.
You must, therefore,
confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the
bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must,
indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man
of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is
to deprive him of the power.
(4) Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
All objections urged against the
communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products
have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of
producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the
bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical
with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture whose loss he
laments is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a
machine.
But don't wrangle with us
so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property,
the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.
Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your
bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence
is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose
essential character and direction are determined by the economic
conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception
that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason
the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form
of property - historical relations that rise and disappear in the
progress of production - this misconception you share with every ruling
class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient
property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of
course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of
property.
Does it require deep
intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one
word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions
of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social
life?
What else does the history
of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character
in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of
each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
(5) Karl Marx, New Rhenish Gazette (January, 1849)
The liberation of Europe
is dependent on a successful uprising by the French working class. But
every French social upheaval necessarily founders on the English
bourgeoisie, on the industrial and commercial world-domination of Great
Britain.
England will only be overthrown by a world war, which
is the only thing that could provide the Chartists, the organised party
of the English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising
against their gigantic oppressors.
(6) In a letter written in March
1850, Jenny Marx described being evicted from their home in
London.
The landlady
demanded £5 that we still owed her. As we did not have the money at the
time two bailiffs came and sequestrated all my few possessions - linen,
beds, clothes - everything, even my poor child's cradle and the best
toys of my daughters, who stood there weeping bitterly.
(7) Karl Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Men make their own history, but they do not make it
just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and
transmitted from the past.
(8) Karl Marx, New York
Daily
Tribune
(4th September, 1852)
In order to comprehend the character of
bribery, corruption and intimidation, such as they have been practised
in the late election, it is necessary to call attention to a fact which
operated in a parallel direction.
If you refer to the general
elections since 1831, you will find that, in the same measure as the
pressure of the voteless majority of the country upon the privileged
body of electors was increasing; as the demand was heard louder from the
middle classes for an extension of the circle of constituencies; and
from the working class to extinguish every trace of a similar privileged
circle - that in the same measure the number of electors who actually
voted grew less and less, and the constituencies thus more and more
contracted themselves. Never was this fact more striking than in the
late election.
Let us take, for instance,
London. In the City the constituency numbers 26,728; only 10,000 voted.
The Tower Hamlets number 23,534 registered electors; only 12,000 voted.
In Finsbury, of 20,025, not one half voted. In Liverpool, the scene of
one of the most animated contests, of 17,433 registered electors, only
13,000 came to the polls.
These examples will
suffice. What do they prove? The apathy of the privileged
constituencies. And this apathy, what does it prove? That they have
outlived themselves - that they have lost every interest in their own
political existence. This is in no wise apathy against politics in
general, but against a species of politics, the result of which, for the
most part, can only consist in helping the Tories to oust the Whigs, or
the Whigs to conquer the Tories. The constituencies feel instinctively
that the decision lies no longer with Parliament, or with the making of
Parliament. Who repealed the Corn Laws? Assuredly not the voters who had
elected a Protectionist Parliament, still less the Protectionist
Parliament itself, but only and exclusively the pressure from without.
In this pressure from without, by other means of influencing Parliament
than by voting, a great portion even of electors now believe. They
consider the hitherto lawful mode of voting as an antiquated formality,
but from the moment Parliament should make front against the pressure
from without, and dictate laws to the nation in the sense of its narrow
constituencies, they would join the general assault against the whole
antiquated system of machinery.
The bribery and
intimidation practised by the Tories were, then, merely violent
experiments for bringing back to life dying electoral bodies which have
become incapable of production, and which can no longer create decisive
electoral results and really national Parliaments. And the result? The
old Parliament was dissolved, because at the end of its career it had
dissolved into sections which brought each other to a complete
standstill. The new Parliament begins where the old one ended; it is
paralytic from the hour of its birth.
(9) In January 1883, Eleanor Marx
had the task of informing her father that his eldest daughter had died
of cancer.
I have lived
many a sad hour, but none so bad as that. I felt that I was bringing my
father his death sentence. I racked my brain to find how I could break
the news to him. But I did not need to, my face gave me away. My father
said at once "our Jennychen is dead".
(10) Prussian police agent report
on Karl Marx in 1852.
In
the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture.
Everything is broken. There is a chair with only three legs. In private
life he is an extremely disorderly cynical human being, and a bad host.
He leads a real gypsy existence. Washing, grooming and changing his
linen are things he does rarely. He has no fixed times for going to
sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down
fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening.
(11) Frederick Lessner, first met
Karl Marx at a meeting of the Communist League in December
1847.
Marx
greatly impressed as all. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered,
powerful in build, and vigorous in his movements. His forehead was high
and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black, his gaze piercing.
Marx was a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing
and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every
sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the
chain of his argument.
(12)
Karl Marx, Das Capital (1867)
The monopoly of capital becomes a
fetter upon the
mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
Centralization of the means of production and
socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become
incompatible with their
capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of
capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated
(13)
Karl Marx, The Eastern Question (1885)
The
redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As
exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution,
so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived
their vitality.
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