Marx, Karl

views updated

MARX, KARL

marx, engels, and marxism
early years
politics and critique, 1845–1850
the international dimension, 1851–1883
last years and heritage
bibliography

MARX, KARL (1818–1883), German social and political theorist.

Karl Marx is recognized as one of the most influential social and political thinkers of all time and possibly the first thinker of nonreligious significance to become a truly global influence. He has been known since the late 1880s as the eponymous founder of Marxism, a doctrine of revolutionary communism. In one form or another, it has been supported by and has held sway over considerable portions of the world's population. Great political leaders such as Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), Joseph Stalin (1879), Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), and Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) have attributed their success to the inspiration they derived from his works and from those of his lifelong friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).

marx, engels, and marxism

Initially, Marx lived a life of considerable intellectual and personal obscurity. Both his fame and his notoriety were confined to narrow circles, even when he became known (briefly) in the early 1870s as the Red Terror Doctor. The books and pamphlets he published in his own lifetime divide roughly equally between political polemic against rival socialists (mostly long forgotten) and an astoundingly grandiose project: a savage critique of capitalist commodity production as a globalizing force, based on historical investigation and a unique philosophical insight. His overtly political activities were confined to editorial work on short-lived newspapers and international "correspondence committees," although during the revolutionary events of 1848 he addressed public meetings in Germany. For many years he also worked as an international journalist, commenting on political events and issues. Throughout his life, he promoted socialist political principles in contemporary politics, whether revolutionary or electoral, but he was never the leader of an organized movement or party as such, and indeed was said to have denied late in life that he had ever been a Marxist.

From late 1844 until his death, Marx was shadowed by Engels, who shared his socialist commitments and complemented his relentless analytical and satirical skills with an easier, synthesizing mode of writing and more accessible writing style. Engels was Marx's first biographer and bibliographer and his only significant collaborator, although they coauthored only three important works. The issue of authorship and interpretation has become more important in retrospect than it was in their lifetimes, when they had little visibility and were generally grateful for what attention they got.

Engels was also the biographer of their partnership, and from 1859 onward he framed his summary accounts of Marx's work, methods, and importance in this authoritative way. Moreover, after Marx's death, Engels's works, particularly those of the late 1870s through the mid-1890s, acquired far more fame and readership in socialist circles than those by Marx alone. However, after Engels's death, a certain skepticism concerning the relationship between Engels's popularizing works, which were avowedly based on Marx's ideas, and the original (and updated) import of Marx's published and unpublished writings began to emerge. This textual and scholarly work continues, and the projected complete works of the two will run to approximately 130 double volumes (printed text in the original languages with accompanying scholarly commentary) and is expected to be complete in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

In the decades between the death of Engels and World War I, Marxists became the most intellectually influential tendency within the broad socialist movement in continental Europe. This was largely based on the jointly written Communist Manifesto (1848), and on Engels's works, especially Anti-Dühring (1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which provided an apparently authoritative point of access to Marx's thought. Engels's works were generally perceived to be less challenging and more suited to political agitation than Marx's more elaborately historical and philosophically analytical works, such as A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital, volume 1 (1867), and even The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), a political broadside against a highly visible dictator.

Engels's German-language works went through numerous editions, reprintings, and translations and in general reached far more readers than Marx did in his individually authored works. Capital, volume 1, though, eventually acquired minor fame as a (generally unread) classic. Even Marx's English-language lectures, posthumously published as Value [or Wages], Price, and Profit (1898), never had the circulation, fame, and cachet of Engels's works, through which the concepts of a materialist interpretation of history, dialectics, and scientific socialism became a defining catechism of what it means to be Marxist.

Marx became something of a legend after his death, particularly in relation to the intellectual and political development of Marxism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is thus of profound importance in examining his actual life, works, and career that the legend should not be read back into any scholarly consideration of the books and manuscripts that have been preserved, unless a clear link between Marx's thought and events following his death can be established. It is possible, however, to undertake this historical task and thus renew Marx as an intellectual figure in social, political, economic, historical, and philosophical studies, particularly since far more of his work is available in reliable editions in the twenty-first century than was ever the case in the past.

This renewal is possible for political reasons. More than one hundred years have passed since the heyday of Marxism in Europe, and the particular kind of mass working-class politics associated with it is now attenuated. More importantly, enough time has passed since Soviet communism imploded that its claim of descent from Engels and Marx via Lenin and Stalin looks far less threatening and historically less plausible. Marxist and anti-Marxist political framing has dogged all assessments of Marx and has interfered with earlier scholarly presentation and assessment of his ideas. Moreover, the ways that his ideas influenced mass politics, particularly after his death, have been hagiographically recounted and politically demonized. The irony is that in his lifetime Marx courted controversy and sought mass adherence to his views (although not under his own direction), yet when these things arrived in his name, their relationship to his actual ideas and ambitions was highly questionable.

early years

Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family in Trier, in Rhenish Prussia. His father was a lawyer and converted Lutheran and his mother came from a rabbinical background, although Karl's upbringing was not unduly religious in any way and the family ambience is generally portrayed as one of Enlightenment liberalism. This outlook derives from moderates in the French Revolution, who favored individual rights, limited government, representative institutions, middle-class suffrage, free trade, and religious disestablishment. The Napoleonic regime introduced an element of this political ethos into the Rhineland, and the incorporation of the region into the much more authoritarian Kingdom of Prussia after 1815 was a blow to local liberals.

Marx had an unremarkable classical education and was sent to university, first to Bonn in 1835 and then Berlin in 1836 after some student scrapes. He was supposed to study law and follow a professional career but instead became interested in liberal, activist politics, albeit of a rather intellectual sort. During this period, he was deeply in love with Jenny von Westphalen (1814–1881), a childhood sweetheart from a family that was more aristocratic than the Marxes but still liberal and more intellectually adventurous.

Marx's initial political engagement was with the Young Hegelians, a movement based in liberal university faculties. Although it had an obvious intellectual appeal given his interests in history and philosophy (as he explains in his autobiographical sketch of 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), the political context for this movement—authoritarian, semifeudal, and highly militarized Prussia—may be less obvious to the modern observer. Prussia had no elected representative institutions; no constitutional guarantees of rights to free speech, expression, or assembly; and the regime employed an apparatus of police spies, detention, deportation, and harassment of anyone deemed a radical. In these circumstances, political activism—and even discussion of the commonplace elements of democracy or peaceful liberalizing change—were

dangerous enterprises, and the universities were always under surveillance. In the absence of any commitment to academic freedom, the royal government felt empowered to intervene in academic appointments, particularly those in philosophy and made it a duty for all to safeguard the supposed sureties of Christian belief from which the monarchy claimed a mandate to rule.

Crucially at issue in Prussia in the 1830s was the mammoth philosophical legacy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and its interpretation of Christian doctrine; this was a public political matter, since religion was not merely a private matter for individuals. Hegel (in his view and in the view of his disciples) had produced vast works of philosophical synthesis, reconciling history, religion, philosophy, science, logic, aesthetics, and politics with reason and the progressive development of human freedom. However, the relationship between his highly ambiguous writings on the one hand and contemporary politics and doctrinal Christianity on the other was difficult to discern, and two schools of interpretation developed: Old Hegelians, emphasizing the conservative side (i.e. alignment with the Prussian monarchy and its claimed relationship to the established churches), and Young Hegelians, emphasizing a further political development in history toward liberalism in politics, including skepticism about supernatural phenomena in general and Christianity in particular.

Characteristically, Marx took his Young Hegelian analysis into a recondite doctoral dissertation on the ancient Greek philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus (submitted by mail to the University of Jena in 1841), but his connections with radical professors cost him the chance of a university post. He obtained a job in journalism on a liberal Rhine-land paper in Cologne, and then unexpectedly became its editor in 1842. This coincided with a period of nervous and short-lived governmental liberalization, but the paper was suppressed in March 1843, after which Marx ended his long engagement and got married.

Although little noticed at the time, Marx's early journalism contains the key to all his later work. On the one hand, he was a recognizable liberal in the French revolutionary tradition, writing to defend freedom of the press and religion within secular institutions (including civil marriage and divorce), all of which were dangerous, radical ideas in the Prussian context. On the other hand, he was highly radical compared with most liberals in that he highlighted economic issues in a class-structured way, suggesting that a reformed government should intervene and not leave poverty and working conditions simply to the market and individual enterprise or charity. This angle was identified as socialist or communist (terms that were largely interchangeable at the time) and was vilified as foreign (the ideas were generally of recent French currency) and incipiently revolutionary (middle-class liberals feared that the working classes were a threat to their property, investments, and livelihoods). Marx had absorbed some of this outlook from other associates on the Rheinische Zeitung, including Moses Hess (1812–1875), who praised him at the time as, "Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel fused into one person" (quoted in McLellan, p. 47).

As Marx writes in his autobiographical sketch, he suffered "the embarrassment of having to discuss so-called material interests," by which he meant matters of economic fact and theory (Later Political Writings, pp. 158–159). While in the Rhineland, he was concerned with the plight of vineyard workers when the markets failed and with peasants whose landlords were removing their traditional rights by legal means. But he was also aware of the increasing industrialization of other areas in Europe (notably France and Belgium), where concentrations of disadvantaged workers (in many instances German émigrés) had formed. Allying himself with other intellectuals of similar views, first in Paris and then in Brussels, he began to publish the first installments of what was for him an important political project: the critical destruction of Old Hegelian political conservatism and the Young Hegelian defense of historical change, albeit in a highly unusual way. Building on the historical critique of Christianity unwittingly accomplished by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) and the philosophical critique of religion accomplished by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), both of whom were driven from German intellectual life as a result, Marx embarked on a demystification of Hegel's philosophical system. The goal was to turn the (necessarily covert) world of Prussian politics around, away from conservative reaction and Christian orthodoxy, toward an enlightened world of liberal democracy and rationalistic atheism.

Although any number of Young Hegelians could have appreciated this project, it had two further dimensions that were Marx's own, or were at least not widely shared at that point: the first was a commitment to the class politics of socialism or communism, through which mankind was to be united in a non-exploitative society where production and consumption would be shared according to needs and abilities; the second was a commitment to working-class activism as a practical matter, promoting self-determination and suffrage for the vast unpropertied majority of men (political rights for women was a further radicalism not generally discussed in these circles). Both of these went well beyond the interests of contemporary middle-class liberals, and the commitment to hands-on activism among the working classes was alien to the intellectualized university politics of most Young Hegelians. Marx's work and activities at the time represented, in theory at least, an ambitious union of philosophy and politics together with a vision of the good society. This recouped the achievements of previous figures of the liberalizing Enlightenment, whether materialists and empiricists or idealists and rationalists, and promised to give it overwhelming political might. In his short work A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844) Marx (using the French socialist term proletariat, meaning "urban working class") announced that the philosophy of freedom and the emancipation of the proletariat must mutually merge.

politics and critique, 1845–1850

Having moved to the more liberal political climate of Brussels, Marx (in conjunction, from time to time, with Engels) worked with both the middle-class liberal Democratic Association and a communist group that was made up mostly of German émigrés, both of which were loosely allied to similar associations in France, England, and elsewhere. Marx published his short book The Poverty of Philosophy in French in 1847, attacking the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and broadening the scope of his critique of the forms of socialism that he considered economically naïve and out of touch with working-class political organizations. Throughout his life, these remained common points of self-created division between Marx and other socialists, and he had few stable political associates during his career other than Engels. However, during this period he and Engels were asked by the nascent Communist League to draft a defining document for international socialism, and the resulting pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, was accepted at a conference in London in late 1847.

More than any other document, The Communist Manifesto conveys the essence of Marx's outlook on history, politics, and society. Although Engels played a major role in drafting it, it makes no mention of the core concepts that he later used to define Marxism: dialectic, materialism, determinism, metaphysics, idealism, interaction, contradiction, and reflection, and although the work was written to satisfy an executive committee and may thus contain an element of compromise and pastiche, little of its content could count as radically inconsistent with Marx's more detailed and thorough later writings. The Communist Manifesto is divided into four sections. The first is a magnificently sweeping historical account of the development of industrial production and commercial relations by the European "bourgeoisie" (again a French term, meaning the manufacturing and trading classes). As this broad social movement progresses, it disposes of feudal relations and structures, forces the peasantry to seek work as wage laborers, and spreads beyond Europe, destroying older cultures and creating exploited colonies. Predicting ever-worsening economic crises of overproduction and ever-increasing exploitation and misery for the proletariat, The Communist Manifesto maintains that the social structure of industrial societies will simplify into two great opposing classes and that the proletariat will gain consciousness of itself politically as a vast majority. A more or less veiled civil war between these two classes will break out openly into revolutionary conflict and socialists will eventually establish a classless society that will transcend national borders.

The second section explains the relationship between proletarians and communists, stating that they have identical interests but that communists have a role in unmasking bourgeois hypocrisy. In that way, the document claims, communists are more theoretically advanced than most workers but have no sectarian, partisan principles other than those of the workers' movement itself. Proletarian revolution will win "victory for democracy" while also mandating "despotic incursions into the rights of private property," since that is where exploitation originates. The section closes with a ten-point checklist of typical communist demands (most of which were institutionalized in the twentieth century by social democratic regimes).

The third section is an analytical and critical review of other popular theories of socialism and communism of the time, establishing clear points of differentiation from the views and methods of the Communist League, and the fourth section is a more detailed (and obviously ephemeral) statement of contemporary tactics in various countries such as France, Switzerland, Poland, and Germany. The Communist Manifesto promises a society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" and closes with the clarion call, "Proletarians of all countries unite!" (Later Political Writings, pp. 19, 30; emphasis in original).

The Communist Manifesto was printed in London in early 1848 and distributed just as revolution broke out in Paris and then spread swiftly to other European capitals. Conservative monarchies and aristocratic establishments were routed and democratic assemblies inaugurated throughout the Continent. Marx was welcomed into France by liberal revolutionaries of his acquaintance, and he journeyed from there to Cologne when revolution spread to the Rhineland. With others, he started a new version of his former liberal newspaper, and for the duration of the revolution he urged the democratic process forward, particularly on economic issues and working-class political participation, even making some speeches. As the revolutionary democrats were rolled back by conservative forces, and reaction and repression became the order of the day, he fled with his family (he and his wife now had two daughters) to London, as did many other political refugees. Engels followed and set himself up in Manchester with a job at one of his father's factories. For the remainder of what became a lifetime exile for the two of them, Engels supported the Marx family (another daughter was born in London; three other children, a daughter and two sons, did not survive beyond infancy or childhood).

the international dimension, 1851–1883

Writing almost always in German for an audience back in Germany (when he could reach them through the censorship) and in exile all over Europe and in America, Marx's thought and politics were necessarily international but also focused primarily on a German target group except in rare cases when translations could be arranged. His pamphlets The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and The Cologne Communist Trial (1853) were typical of his interest in saving something of the spirit of 1848 while pouring scorn on the conservative and reactionary political forces aligned with the rich, powerful, and well armed. Notably, he dismissed his former communist political associates as "jackasses," swearing he would never involve himself in partisan struggle again.

With Engels's help, Marx had a stop-gap career as an English-language journalist for the New York Tribune and various encyclopedias, but this was never enough to pay the bills and he resented the time it took away from what he defined as his life-work and major contribution to the socialist struggle: a critique of the categories of political economy. This multi-volume project went through numerous changes of plan, but the main thrust remained clear. Marx aimed to rewrite the economics of his day, known as political economy, by producing a new account of the production, consumption, distribution, and exchange of goods and services in any commodified and industrialized society where the capitalist mode of production prevails. He published a short installment in 1859 (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) and the first volume (Capital) in 1867, leaving a vast mountain of notebooks, manuscript drafts and critical commentary behind at his death.

Marx's targets were the political economists Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823), together with their numerous precursors and followers. Their work differs somewhat from that of later marginalist economics of the 1870s onward, which defines value as market prices that result from calculations of utility "at the margin" of any individual's preferences to consume goods and services. The methods of the political economists were more philosophical than mathematical, and in particular they considered value itself (rather than merely numerical prices) to be the key to understanding and (minimally) directing the economies of their day. Value, they hypothesized, must rest in some way on labor, and Marx rightly argued that their ideas on this point were analytically inconsistent. Moreover he maintained that their work was politically biased toward the interests of the propertied classes and that their theory made the obvious exploitation of the working classes disappear as a (supposedly) fair exchange. Thus Marx accepted much of the project and methodology of the political economists while rejecting what he took to be their politics and certain details of their theories.

Marx's critique of political economy led rigorously to quite different political conclusions, namely that capitalism could not be a self-sustaining system but would instead be subject to crises of increasing severity; that it would proletarianize the middle classes rather than remedy the exploitation of the workers; and that it would thus represent an increasingly pale alternative to the obvious attractions that socialism would hold for the vast

majority. His solution to the question of value was to argue that human labor time was itself (in its abstract or generic form) the origin of value for mass-produced commodities and thus ultimately the regulator of their exchange ratios (as measured by their long-term price levels relative to each other). However, the system as a whole was not one of equal exchange between, for example, wages and labor time, because wages paid only for the labor time required to purchase subsistence goods and services to maintain the worker. He posited that human labor power has a unique property: it can produce more output in terms of labor time than is required for its own renewal and subsistence, thus allowing capitalists (who pay wages) to collect a surplus, from which their profits derive.

At a stroke, Marx had (apparently) solved a longstanding puzzle and generated a rigorous theory of exploitation that established it as a fact. Although his reasoning has since been faulted, his theory was bypassed rather than refuted. After the 1870s, economists reoriented their profession around an acceptance of monetary prices as the principal reality in their increasingly mathematical studies, rather than treating prices as something epiphenomenal to value. For Marxists, however, acceptance of the Marxist economics in Capital was doctrinal, although it was not of much political value other than as a (supposed) proof that capitalism was incontrovertibly exploitative and doomed to collapse.

Marx was instrumental in founding the International Working Men's Association in 1864 as a correspondence committee and an organ of socialist publicity; this organization was generally known as "The International" and later "The First International." Perhaps predictably, this kind of organization, which was by definition remote from national politics and prone to doctrinal factions, could never be rated a complete success, although it did give encouragement to many individuals and groups. Through it, socialists struggled together across national boundaries to get trade unions and working-class political parties properly represented and legally defended within the democratizing structures of industrial capitalist nations. Marx withdrew from the organization after bitter battles with anarchists and others whom he considered politically naïve and intellectually retarded. Perhaps his swan song was the (English-language) address to the International, published as The Civil War in France (1871), in which he defended and perhaps romanticized the struggles of ordinary Parisians against conservative forces. The French counter-revolution from the countryside was backed by the occupying Prussians, and neither group wanted any communal experiments in mass democracy and cooperative economic management. The communards were massacred in their thousands, and Marx's testimony still makes moving reading, although at the time he was vilified in the anglo-phone press for memorializing the communards.

last years and heritage

Marx's later years were spent largely in ill health and unhappiness, working on the later volumes of his unfinished masterpiece, Capital, itself a truncated version of his original scheme from the 1850s. The inspiration for Capital, however, dates all the way back to his earliest journalism in alliance with liberals, his relentless insistence on the importance of economic structures in constraining and empowering political change, and his conviction that collective, cooperative sharing of social resources through democratic means was compatible with the globalization of modern industry. Although a good deal of this vision remains in the posthumously established variations of Marxism that endure into the twenty-first century, they also contain, of necessity, many tenets and tactics that derive from other minds. Whether or not these adaptations of Marx's work are faithful is a matter for scholarly investigation and individual judgment.