Marx, Karl

views updated

MARX, KARL

MARX, KARL (1818–1883), German social and economic theorist. Marx was born in Trier on May 5, 1818. Both his grandfather and his uncle had been rabbis in the city and so had several of his paternal grandmother's ancestors. His mother also descended from a long line of rabbis in Holland. His father, Heinrich, had in 1817 converted to Protestantism in order to retain his position as a lawyer at the High Court of Appeals in Trier when the Rhineland, formerly French, became, through annexation, subject to the discriminatory laws of Prussia. Marx was baptized in 1824. During his high school years he enjoyed the literary tutelage of his father's friend, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, whose daughter Jenny he would later marry.

In 1835 Marx registered in the faculty of law at the University of Bonn. A year later he transferred to the University of Berlin, but there he soon became ill through overwork. The following months of convalescence in the country completely changed his intellectual outlook. At first a romantic, vaguely religious idealist, he now converted to Hegel's philosophy. He joined a discussion group of "Young Hegelians," consisting of instructors and advanced students in a variety of disciplines, mostly of radical political and religious leanings. For them Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its conservative content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. The leading voices in the Doktorklub, as the group was called, were those of the theologians David Friedrich Strauss and Bruno Bauer. In his Life of Jesus Strauss had interpreted the gospel narratives as mythologizing the aspirations of the early Christian community. After some initial criticism, Bauer went even further: those narratives contained no truth at all, while the faith based on them had become the main obstacle on the road to political and cultural progress.

The young Marx extended these critical conclusions to all religion. His doctoral dissertation, On the Difference between the Philosophies of Nature in Democritus and Epicurus, which he submitted in 1841 to the Jena faculty of philosophy, was prefaced by a motto taken from Aeschylus's Prometheus: "In one word, I hate all the gods."

In 1843 Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. After his wedding and a prolonged vacation near Trier, he returned to Bonn, where he started writing for the radical Cologne paper Die Rheinische Zeitung. His first contribution consisted of a series of critical articles on the proceedings of the Rhineland parliament dealing with freedom of the press and the debates concerning the punishment of wood thefts. Other reports, on religious disputes, were censored and never appeared. In October 1842 Marx, having been appointed editor-in-chief, moved to Cologne. Six months later the paper folded under the pressure of Prussian censorship. In October 1843 Marx left the Rhineland for Paris, where he expected to find more freedom as well as make direct contact with French revolutionary workers' movements.

During his final year in Germany Marx's political position had developed from radically democratic to communist. At the same time he had increasingly come under the influence of that other critical interpreter of Hegel's philosophy, Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach had applied Hegel's concept of alienation to all divine reality: in religion man projects his own nature into a supernatural realm and thus "alienates" from himself what rightly belongs to him. Marx instantly embraced the theory of religion as alienation, but he found Feuerbach's interpretation of the origin of the religious attitude inadequate. Religion, Marx asserted, mythically justifies a fundamental social frustration. Far from constituting the essence of human alienation, the need for religion implies a tacit protest against the existing, dehumanizing conditions of society. In that sense Marx called it "the opium of the people" in his essay "Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1844), published in the Paris-based Deutsch-Franzözische Jahrbücher. "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men is a demand for real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about this condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions." Full emancipation demands that the social structures that create the need for religion be changed.

The secondary character of religious beliefs with respect to social-economic conditions appears in another essay Marx published in the same issue of the Jahrbücher, "On the Jewish Question." Bauer had proposed the thesis that the Jewish problem could be solved instantly if Jews would cease to claim religious privileges from the state. By so doing, they maintained the religious state and prevented their own as well as other people's emancipation. Bauer held that emancipation of man required a secular state that recognizes neither Christians nor Jews. Marx agreed that the existence of religion always indicates an incomplete emancipation, but he denied that religion is the cause of the problem or, for that matter, that political rights are the solution. Bauer had simply identified religion with alienation and political equality with emancipation. But political emancipation is by no means human emancipation. "To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation." Even if the state should suppress religion, its own existence would remain a profane expression of an alienation that in time would irresistibly produce its religious form. So instead of being a remedy for religious alienation, the secular state is the purest symptom of its presence. Even more than religion, the state keeps alive the inhuman conditions that separate the individual from his fellow human beings and thereby prevent humankind from realizing its full potential. If religion means deception, the state is more religious than the church.

Henceforth Marx devoted his critical efforts entirely to the critique of the state. But under the influence of an essay by Friedrich Engels on political economy, published in the same issue of the Jahrbücher that had featured Marx's own two essays, he saw that political attitudes are rooted in economic conditions. This "genial" insight inspired the so-called Economic Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which would remain unpublished until 1927. Here, for the first time, Marx aims his attacks exclusively at the capitalist economy itself, a system that alienates the worker from the very activity through which he should achieve his humanization as well as from the kind of social cooperation required by genuine humanization.

In 1845 the French government (under Prussian pressure) forbade Marx all political activity and threatened him with imprisonment. Once again Marx emigrated, this time to Brussels, where he would remain until March 1848. This second stage of his mature life was to be a very productive one, even though little of his literary activity ever reached print.

Foremost among his unpublished writings from this period is The German Ideology (1845–1846). In it Marx developed the crucial concept of ideology and, with it, the basic principles of a powerful theory of history. Not what human beings think or imagine, not conscious decisions or theoretical schemes, but social-economic relations are the primary determining factors of history. Ideas, shaped by language, emerge from social-economic structures. The division between mental and physical labor, severing thinking from its vital, social roots, has given birth to an independent realm of abstract speculation. In fact, the theories accepted in a particular society express the interests and aspirations of the ruling class. As soon as one class acquires control over the process of material production, it falls heir to the "means of mental production" and begins to impose such ideas as best serve its dominion. Detached from its social-economic basis, theory turns into ideology. The term ideology refers to any theory that ignores the social conditioning of ideas and presents itself with a semblance of intellectual autonomy.

Engels later qualified Marx's position by suggesting that conscious processes, developed through the impact of social relations, in turn influence these relations. Unfortunately, Marx's later metaphorical reformulation of the relation (in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy ) as one between base and superstructure confirmed the "derived" character of ideas rather than eliminating it. Clearly, religion considered as a "superstructure" can hardly do more than "reflect" its social origins.

In Brussels, Marx and Engels, who had met in Paris in 1844 and by now had become constant, though often distant, collaborators, intensified their revolutionary activity. For the newly founded Communist League they wrote their famous Manifesto (1848), an entirely new vision of history. Since his early Paris days, the social-economic category of class had, for Marx, come to dominate all others. In the Manifesto 's scenario, the class of the bourgeoisie, created by the capitalist system, would function as the revolutionary lever toward the communist society of the future. An unprecedented social and cultural mover in its own development, the bourgeoisie is now destined to terminate the class structure of society itself. It does so by creating an underclass, the proletariat, that will increase in numbers and in misery until its members, for the sake of sheer survival, will be forced to rise throughout the entire industrialized world. "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all else, is its own grave-diggers."

In the same year, 1848, revolutions started all over the European continent. But when the Belgian authorities learned of an imminent republican putsch, they expelled Marx from the country for illegal political agitation. The exile barely interrupted Marx's revolutionary activity. Returning to Paris on March 5 with the papers of the Communist League, which a few days earlier had had its headquarters transferred from London to Brussels, Marx was, on March 10, elected as its president. In his French headquarters his attention remained fixed on Germany, where he still expected a "total" revolution to take place. Through his speeches to the German Working Men's Club (based in Paris) and his articles in the new communist paper of Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx continuously bombarded the German community with his revolutionary messages.

The June revolution in Paris confirmed at least part of Marx's theories, for in it social issues clearly prevailed over political ones. Meanwhile, Marx again had moved to Cologne to direct the Neue Reinische, which, not surprisingly, was gradually censored into extinction. Its editor was expelled from Prussian territory for having instigated open rebellion. During that same summer of 1848 Marx definitively settled down in London.

Here, amidst extreme poverty, domestic tragedy (several of his children died, possibly due to their living conditions), occasional family turmoil (his young servant bore him a child), and constant polemics, Marx completed the third stage of his career. Apart from revolutionary activity (mainly through the reorganized Communist League), he devoted himself entirely to his lifetime theoretical project: a definitive social critique of the capitalist economy. Only two parts of his voluminous theoretical writing during this period reached completion before his death: the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and the first volume of what by then had already become a reduced project, Capital (1867).

In all his later writings Marx criticizes capitalist theories in categories often borrowed from the classical economists, especially Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Even his central concept of surplus value, the value generated by labor beyond the cost of wages and tools, appears in Ricardo. But the perspective differs substantially. For Marx shows how capitalist theory merely expresses the practice of a society at a particular historical stage of its development. Indeed, capitalism is now approaching the point where its internal "contradictions" (in fact, mostly social conflicts) must openly erupt and destroy the system itself. Throughout his development Marx never wavered in his confidence that bourgeois society would break down in a social revolution that would result in a socialist state and, in due time, generate a stateless communist society.

Yet during this same period Marx also produced an enormous output of noneconomic writings, most important among them, two historical studies on the French revolution of 1848 and the subsequent events leading to the Second Empire of Napoleon III: The Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). In addition, he wrote hundreds of newspaper articles for the New York Daily Tribune and for the Neue Oder-Zeitung, his main source of support (beside the gifts of the ever-generous Engels) during that period.

From 1870 on Marx's health steadily declined. He increasingly suffered from respiratory problems, which, after 1880, forced him for prolonged periods to seek refuge from the damp, polluted London air in Margate, the Isle of Wight, Karlsbad (where he took the baths), Nice, and even North Africa. Yet despite his poor health his literary activity continued unabatedly, and his travels provided him with opportunities for establishing new revolutionary contacts as far away as Algiers. Still, it became gradually obvious that he would never complete his lifework, and during his final years he felt increasingly reluctant even to attempt bringing some order to his papers. Thus when he died on March 14, 1883, he left an enormous estate of unpublished manuscripts. Out of the more than a thousand pages of notes Marx had accumulated for the sequel of Capital, Engels published Capital II (1885) and Capital III (1894). In addition, in 1927 Karl Kautsky published the historical notes, Theories of Surplus Value, under the title Capital IV. In 1953 Marx's earlier preparatory notes for Capital appeared under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (in English, simply Grundrisse ).