Defining the relation of capital to labor as immoral, unjust, and dysfunctional, thereby setting the stage for the communist revolutions of the twentieth century
Karl Marx
(1818–1883)
At the funeral of Karl Marx, who died on March 14, 1883, poor and mostly forgotten, his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), coauthor with Marx of The Communist Manifesto, delivered a eulogy. It is a fair statement of what would prove to be the magnitude of this economist-philosopher’s disruptive transformation of social thought. “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,” Engels told mourners, “so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
It is significant that Engels compared Marx to Charles Darwin, who explained biological evolution. Engels went even farther, effectively comparing Marx to Isaac Newton. Like Newton, Marx “discovered the special law of motion,” a law “governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.” Engels was specifically referring to the concept of “surplus value,” which Marx defined as the increase in the value of capital that results when workers add their labor to it. This “surplus value” is commonly called profit, and it is entirely appropriated by the capitalist when the products of labor are sold. In societies in which capitalists own the means of production, workers are exploited by being deprived of any share of the surplus value they create. Thus, the foundation of capitalist civilization is theft and therefore inherently corrupt.
Engels celebrated Marx as a scientist, but pointed out that “Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force” and “Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” While he took “great joy” in his scientific discoveries, his “real mission . . . was to contribute . . . to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.”
Marx founded the International Working Men’s Association and laid the ideological foundation of communism, which argued for an end to nations and nationalities and the beginning of a global union based on the common value of labor. For this, Engels told his fellow mourners, Marx “was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. . . . His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”
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Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, into the kind of family he would later deride as bourgeois (comfortably middle class), in the German town of Trier. Although both his mother and father were descended from rabbis, his father, Heinrich (born Herschel) allowed himself to be baptized a Lutheran to avoid losing his position as a prominent attorney. At seventeen, Marx began to follow in his father’s footsteps by enrolling in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. He also took a step toward a bourgeois life by becoming engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of Baron von Westphalen, who was highly placed in Trier society. Ironically, perhaps, it was the baron who directed young Marx to the works of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a political philosopher who foresaw a social evolution toward true equality based on a universal, international union of working people. With the support of his father, Marx left both the University of Bonn and the study of law for the more prestigious and academically oriented University of Berlin. Here, he became a disciple of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), especially his analytical method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and his concept of the master-slave dialectic. Marx joined the Young Hegelian movement, which articulated a radical criticism of Christianity and, by extension, opposition to the Prussian autocracy.
Marx’s identification with the Young Hegelians prevented his pursuing an academic career, since the Prussian government approved all university appointments, so Marx turned instead to journalism, becoming the editor, in October 1842, of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper based in Cologne. Refusing to compromise his views, he wrote articles that blatantly offended the Prussian government. Predictably, the government soon closed down the paper. This sent Marx in flight to Paris, where, shortly after his arrival at the end of 1843, he gravitated toward various organizations of expatriate German workers and French socialists. For a brief period, he edited the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which combined the interests of French socialists and radical German Hegelians. It was a rarefied group, which naturally limited the journal’s paid readership. The enterprise quickly folded.
In Paris, Marx became a communist and, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (unpublished until the 1930s), he hammered out a humanist version of communism that was based on contrasting the alienated nature of labor under capitalism with the engaged state of labor as it would be under communism. Marx argued that communism would leave people free to develop their nature in cooperative production. In Paris, he met Engels, with whom he would develop a lifelong friendship and intellectual collaboration.
By the end of 1844, Marx’s radicalism had become unpalatable even for Paris, and the French government expelled him. He moved, with Engels, to Brussels, which remained his home base for the next three years—though he frequently visited England with Engels, whose family owned cotton mills in Manchester. In Brussels, Marx also turned to the study of history in the light of economic theory and Hegelian philosophy. This led him to develop “materialism.” As explained in The German Ideology (which Marx composed at this time but that was published posthumously), materialism viewed history as being created by “the material conditions determining . . . production.” Marx focused on the history of various modes of production through the ages and thus predicted the inevitable collapse of the currently prevailing mode, industrial capitalism, which would be replaced by communism.
In Brussels, he also joined the Communist League, which consisted of German expatriate workers. The League was centered in London, and Marx and Engels quickly became the driving intellectuals of the organization. When members convened in London at the end of 1847, they commissioned Marx and Engels to write a declaration of their organization’s position. This was The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, the very year in which all Europe was swept by a tidal wave of revolution, in part driven by Marx’s journalism and intellectual presence.
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Revolution was the environment in which Marx thrived. He moved back to Paris and then returned to Germany, where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which took a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy. Predictably, the new paper was soon suppressed and, to escape arrest, Marx fled to London in May 1849. This was the commencement of what he deemed a lifetime of exile.
From London, Marx predicted that the recently suppressed fires of revolution would soon rekindle, and he wanted to play a leading part in the conflagration. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two long pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. All that was required to reignite wholesale revolution, he wrote, was some new crisis. While he waited for it, he and his family, which at the time included his wife, Jenny, and their four children, lived in poverty in London’s Soho. Engels was Marx’s chief source of income—which put both communists in an ideologically uncomfortable position. Engels worked ruthlessly to increase the revenue produced from the family business in Manchester. He was, in fact, a capitalist. Marx did manage to steadily supplement his income by writing weekly articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
In the meantime, he labored on a study of political economy, largely in an effort to articulate the nature of the coming crisis. The deeper he delved, the more voluminous the work became. In 1857, he halted, having produced a manuscript of 800 pages, which he called the Grundrisse (“Outlines”) of a projected study of the nature of capital, real property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade, and the world market. He laid the Grundrisse aside (it would not be published until 1941) and turned instead to writing Theories of Surplus Value, a three-volume tome reviewing the major authors of what was at the time called “political economy” and is today more simply called economics. The two most extensive analyses in this book were devoted to the Scottish apostle of capitalist economic theory, Adam Smith (1723–1790), and David Ricardo (1772–1823), one of the founders of classical economics.
At last, in 1867, Marx returned to the material in Grundrisse and wrote volume one of Das Kapital (Capital). This would prove to be his masterpiece, a comprehensive and upending analysis of the capitalist process of production. It was a work of materialist history. The next two volumes, which with the first comprised the complete book, were essentially finished during the 1860s, but Marx would not let them go. He tirelessly, obsessively made revisions. Left unpublished at his death, it was Engels who did the final editing and saw to their publication.
In Capital, Marx fully developed his analysis of the relationship of labor to capital and his theory of surplus value, which explained the historical oppression of the proletariat (working classes) by the bourgeoisie (capitalists). At the same time, however, Capital predicted the inevitability of the collapse of industrial capitalism due to the inescapable decline in the rate of profit built on surplus value. Capital was Marx’s exploration of social conflict as the playing-out on the world stage of Hegel’s process of thesis versus antithesis. What Marx saw as the crisis of this conflict, a crisis that history itself made inevitable, was the synthesis that would bring an end to industrial capitalism.
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Three things had slowed Marx in creating his Capital. The first was the sheer ambition of the project, which was nothing less than providing the historical explanation for the economic structure of a complex modern society. The second was his poverty, which forced him to take on many other writing projects to keep his family afloat. The third was that he was never content merely to study and write.
Marx devoted a large amount of time and effort to the First International Workingmen’s Association—or, more simply, the First International—to whose General Council he was elected when it was founded in 1864. This organization, he believed, gave the proletariat its best chance to reignite a successful revolution. But it was threatened from within by its own anarchist wing, led by the Russian founder of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Marx led the struggle against this wing and prevailed. In 1872, having ousted Bakunin, he went on to support moving the headquarters of the General Council from London to New York, believing that social and political change would come more readily in the New World than in the Old. Instead, the move precipitated the rapid decline of the International. Nevertheless, Marx was able to witness the Paris Commune of 1871, in which the citizens of Paris rose up against the government, which had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). The “communards” held the capital for two months before the Commune was crushed in bloody battle. Marx’s stirring pamphlet The Civil War in France briefly injected fresh life into the International, but the ray of hope proved fleeting.
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Marx was plagued by declining health from the 1870s on. Sustained composition became burdensome and then simply impossible. He lacked the strength to combat some of his major followers, who now opposed revolution and instead proposed compromise in the form of the mild socialism some liberal European states permitted and even favored. Marx did not fade into irrelevance, but he did diminish as a presence. Others picked up the revolutionary cause in his name; but, in attempting to create a comprehensive system of governing philosophy under the banner of dialectical materialism—by its nature a dynamic ideology rather than a settled governing philosophy—they damaged the theoretical foundation Marx had laid. (And, in fact, dialectical materialism isn’t Marx’s term at all, but was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen.)
Without question, Marx’s approach to history has been a powerful influence on how history is written, studied, and thought about to this day. Economic factors are now at the heart of modern academic history, political science, and sociology—thanks largely to Marx. But perhaps the most compelling gauge of the disruption created by this rebellious thinker’s work is the fact that, until as recently as the end of the twentieth century, half of the world lived under governments claiming to be “Marxist.”