Karl Marx
German
philosopher
Also
known as: Karl Heinrich Marx
Written
by:Lewis.S.Feurer,David.T Maclellan
The
editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Fact-checked
by
Last
Updated: Oct 25, 2024 • Article History
Last
Updated: Oct 25, 2024 • Article History
Quick Facts
In
full: Karl Heinrich Marx
Born:
May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]
Died:
March 14, 1883, London, England
Also
Known As: Karl Heinrich Marx
Top Questions
Who
was Karl Marx?
Karl
Marx was a German philosopher during the 19th century. He worked primarily in
the realm of political
philosophy and was a famous advocate for communism. He
cowrote The Communist Manifesto and
was the author of Das Kapital, which together formed the basis of Marxism.
How
did Karl Marx die?
Karl
Marx died on March 14, 1883, when he was 64, after succumbing to a bout of
bronchitis. Not owning any land when he died, he was buried in London’s
Highgate Cemetery. Originally, his headstone was nondescript, but in 1954 the
Communist Party of Great Britain etched the stone with “Workers of all lands
unite,” the last line of The Communist Manifesto,
along with a quote from Marx’s Theses
on Feuerbach (1845).
What
was Karl Marx’s family like?
Karl
Marx was one of nine children. When he got older, he married his childhood
sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. The two had seven children together, four of
whom died before reaching adolescence. Because of Marx’s anti-capital core
beliefs, his family was impoverished for much of their lives.
Karl Marx (born
May 5, 1818, Trier,
Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died March 14, 1883, London, England) was a revolutionary, sociologist,
historian, and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest
der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most
important book, Das Kapital.
These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of
thought and belief known as Marxism. (See
also socialism; communism.)
Early
years
Karl
Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children. His father,
Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire,
who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was
from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of
rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his father—probably because his
professional career required it—was baptized in the Evangelical Established
Church. Karl was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth Karl
was influenced less by religion than by the critical, sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish background
exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him to question the
role of religion in society and contributed to his desire for social change.
Marx
was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in
Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils, the school was
under police surveillance. Marx’s writings during this period exhibited a
spirit of Christian devotion and a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of
humanity. In October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. The
courses he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in such subjects as
Greek and Roman mythology and the history of art. He
participated in customary student activities, fought a duel, and spent a day in
jail for being drunk and disorderly. He presided at the Tavern Club, which was
at odds with the more aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets’
club that included some political activists. A politically rebellious
student culture was, indeed, part of life at Bonn. Many students had been arrested; some
were still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly as a result of an effort
by students to disrupt a session of the Federal Diet at
Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a year and in October 1836 enrolled
at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy.
Marx’s
crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel’s philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young Hegelians.
Hegel's houseFriedrich Hegel
At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel’s doctrines; when Marx fell sick it
was partially, as he wrote his father, “from intense vexation at having to make
an idol of a view I detested.” The Hegelian pressure in the revolutionary
student culture was powerful, however, and Marx joined a society called
the Doctor Club, whose members were intensely involved in the new literary
and philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer,
a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the Christian
Gospels were a record not of history but of human fantasies arising from
emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled
in a course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah.
Bauer taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous” than that of the
advent of Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving
rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government,
fearful of the subversion latent in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to
drive them from the universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839.
Marx’s “most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph
Rutenberg, an older journalist who had served a prison sentence for his
political radicalism, pressed for a deeper social involvement. By 1841 the
Young Hegelians had become left republicans. Marx’s studies, meanwhile, were
lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a doctoral dissertation to the
university at Jena, which was known to be lax in its academic requirements, and
received his degree in April 1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference between the natural philosophies
of Democritus and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of Promethean defiance:
Philosophy makes no secret of it.
Prometheus’ admission: “In sooth all gods I hate,” is its own admission, its
own motto against all gods,…Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the
calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with
other Young Hegelians, was much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx’s mind,
successfully criticized Hegel, an idealist who believed that matter or
existence was inferior to and dependent upon mind or spirit, from the opposite,
or materialist, standpoint, showing how the “Absolute Spirit” was a projection
of “the real man standing on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s dialectic—the idea that all things are in a continual
process of change resulting from the conflicts between their contradictory
aspects—with Feuerbach’s materialism, which placed material
conditions above ideas.
In January 1842 Marx began
contributing to a newspaper newly founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was the
liberal democratic organ of a group of young merchants, bankers, and
industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the most industrially advanced
section of Prussia. To this stage of Marx’s life belongs an essay on the
freedom of the press. Since he then took for granted the existence of
absolute moral standards and universal principles
of ethics, he condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying into people’s minds
and hearts and assigned to weak and malevolent mortals powers that presupposed
an omniscient mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil consequences.
On October 15, 1842, Marx
became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a variety
of social and economic issues, ranging from the housing of the Berlin poor and
the theft by peasants of wood from the forests to the new phenomenon of
communism. He found Hegelian idealism of little use in these
matters. At the same time he was becoming estranged from his Hegelian friends
for whom shocking the bourgeois was a sufficient mode of social activity. Marx,
friendly at this time to the “liberal-minded practical men” who were
“struggling step-by-step for freedom within constitutional limits,” succeeded in
trebling his newspaper’s circulation and making it a leading journal in
Prussia. Nevertheless, Prussian authorities suspended it for being too
outspoken, and Marx agreed to coedit with the liberal Hegelian Arnold Ruge a new review, the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher (“German-French
Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843
Marx, after an engagement of seven years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny
was an attractive, intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years older than
Karl; she came of a family of military and administrative distinction. Her
half-brother later became a highly reactionary Prussian minister of
the interior. Her father, a follower of the French socialist Saint-Simon, was
fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed the marriage. Marx’s father
also feared that Jenny was destined to become a sacrifice to the demon that
possessed his son.
Four months after their
marriage, the young couple moved to Paris, which was then the centre of
socialist thought and of the more extreme sects that went under the name of
communism. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a communist and began
to associate with communist societies of French and German workingmen. Their
ideas were, in his view, “utterly crude and unintelligent,” but their character
moved him: “The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of
life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies,”
he wrote in his so-called “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre
1844” (written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 [1959]).
(These manuscripts were not published for some 100 years, but they are
influential because they show the humanist background to Marx’s later
historical and economic theories.)
The
“German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but through their publication
Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a contributor who was to
become his lifelong collaborator, and in their pages appeared Marx’s article
“Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“Toward the Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion that religion is
the “opium of the people.” It was there, too, that he first raised the call for
an “uprising of the proletariat” to realize the conceptions of philosophy. Once
more, however, the Prussian government intervened against Marx. He was expelled
from France and left for Brussels—followed by Engels—in February 1845. That
year in Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
Brussels period of Karl
Marx
The
next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s collaboration with
Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in Manchester, England, where a branch
factory of his father’s textile firm was located, all the depressing aspects of
the Industrial Revolution. He had also been a Young Hegelian and had been
converted to communism by Moses Hess, who was called the “communist rabbi.” In
England he associated with the followers of Robert Owen. Now he and Marx,
finding that they shared the same views, combined their intellectual resources
and published Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy Family), a prolix criticism
of the Hegelian idealism of the theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die
deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German Ideology),
contained the fullest exposition of their important materialistic conception of
history, which set out to show how, historically, societies had been structured
to promote the interests of the economically dominant class. But it found no
publisher and remained unknown during its authors’ lifetimes.
During
his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and, through confrontations with
the chief leaders of the working-class movement, established his intellectual
standing. In 1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for
his moralistic appeals. Marx insisted that the stage of bourgeois society could
not be skipped over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism; the
workers’ movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic phrases. He also
polemicized against the French socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in
Misère de la philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on
Proudhon’s book subtitled Philosophie de la misère (1846; The Philosophy of
Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such contraries as
competition and monopoly; he hoped to save the good features in economic
institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no
equilibrium was possible between the antagonisms in any given economic system.
Social structures were transient historic forms determined by the productive
forces: “The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill,
society with the industrial capitalist.” Proudhon’s mode of reasoning, Marx
wrote, was typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the underlying
laws of history.
The Communist Manifesto
The
Communist ManifestoA copy of Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The
Communist Manifesto), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
An
unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to write their pamphlet The
Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a secret society, the League of the Just, composed
mainly of emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to
formulate a political program. They sent a representative to Marx to ask him to
join the league; Marx overcame his doubts and, with Engels, joined the
organization, which thereupon changed its name to the Communist League and
enacted a democratic constitution. Entrusted with the task of composing their
program, Marx and Engels worked from the middle of December 1847 to the end of
January 1848. The London Communists were already impatiently threatening Marx
with disciplinary action when he sent them the manuscript; they promptly
adopted it as their manifesto. It enunciated the proposition that all history
had hitherto been a history of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist
conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and asserted that the
forthcoming victory of the proletariat would put an end to class society
forever. It mercilessly criticized all forms of socialism founded on
philosophical “cobwebs” such as “alienation.” It rejected the avenue of “social
Utopias,” small experiments in community, as deadening the class struggle and
therefore as being “reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate measures as
first steps toward communism, ranging from a progressive income tax and the
abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. It closed with
the words, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Revolution
suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months of 1848, in France, Italy, and
Austria. Marx had been invited to Paris by a member of the provisional
government just in time to avoid expulsion by the Belgian government. As the
revolution gained in Austria and Germany, Marx returned to the Rhineland. In
Cologne he advocated a policy of coalition between the working class and the
democratic bourgeoisie, opposing for this reason the nomination of independent
workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly and arguing strenuously against
the program for proletarian revolution advocated by the leaders of the Workers’
Union. He concurred in Engels’s judgment that The Communist Manifesto should be
shelved and the Communist League disbanded. Marx pressed his policy through the
pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly founded in June 1849, urging a
constitutional democracy and war with Russia. When the more revolutionary
leader of the Workers’ Union, Andreas Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted
him and organized the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August 1848. When
the king of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in Berlin, Marx called for
arms and men to help the resistance. Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support
from Marx’s newspaper, and he himself was indicted on several charges,
including advocacy of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial he defended himself
with the argument that the crown was engaged in making an unlawful
counterrevolution. The jury acquitted him unanimously and with thanks.
Nevertheless, as the last hopeless fighting flared in Dresden and Baden, Marx
was ordered banished as an alien on May 16, 1849. The final issue of his
newspaper, printed in red, caused a great sensation.
Early years in London of
Karl Marx
Karl
Marx
Expelled
once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August 1849. It was to be his home
for the rest of his life. Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of
collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist League in
London and for about a year advocated a bolder revolutionary policy. An
“Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” written with Engels
in March 1850, urged that in future revolutionary situations they struggle to
make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding subservience to the bourgeois party
and by setting up “their own revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any
new bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would shortly lead to a
revival of the revolutionary movement; when this hope faded, he came into
conflict once more with those whom he called “the alchemists of the
revolution,” such as August von Willich, a communist who proposed to hasten the
advent of revolution by undertaking direct revolutionary ventures. Such
persons, Marx wrote in September 1850, substitute “idealism for materialism”
and regard
pure
will as the motive power of revolution instead of actual conditions. While we
say to the workers: “You have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of
civil wars and national wars not merely in order to change your conditions but
in order to change yourselves and become qualified for political power,” you on
the contrary tell them, “We must achieve power immediately.”
The
militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a revolutionary who limited
his activity to lectures on political economy to the Communist Workers’
Educational Union. The upshot was that Marx gradually stopped attending
meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he devoted himself intensely to
working for the defense of 11 communists arrested and tried in Cologne on
charges of revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their behalf. The
same year he also published, in a German-American periodical, his essay “Der
Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the formation of a bureaucratic
absolutist state with the support of the peasant class. In other respects the
next 12 years were, in Marx’s words, years of “isolation” both for him and for
Engels in his Manchester factory.
From
1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and spiritual pain. His funds were
gone, and except on one occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid
employment. In March 1850 he and his wife and four small children were evicted
and their belongings seized. Several of his children died—including a son
Guido, “a sacrifice to bourgeois misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom
his wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For six
years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often subsisting on bread
and potatoes. The children learned to lie to the creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t
upstairs.” Once he had to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife
suffered breakdowns.
During
all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx’s financial support. The
sums were not large at first, for Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen
and Engels at Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a partner,
his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of Engels’s friendship and would
tolerate no criticism of him. Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and
from Marx’s friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their economic
distress.
Marx
had one relatively steady source of earned income in the United States. On the
invitation of Charles A. Dana, managing editor of The New York Tribune, he
became in 1851 its European correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace
Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist system developed by
the French theorist Charles Fourier. From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close
to 500 articles and editorials (Engels providing about a fourth of them). He
ranged over the whole political universe, analyzing social movements and
agitations from India and China to Britain and Spain.
In
1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory, Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). In
its preface he again summarized his materialistic conception of history, his
theory that the course of history is dependent on economic developments. At
this time, however, Marx regarded his studies in economic and social history at
the British Museum as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his
magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das Kapital. Some of these
drafts, including the Outlines and the Theories of Surplus Value, are important
in their own right and were published after Marx’s death.
Role in the First
International of Karl Marx
Ended
in 1864 with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association.
Although he was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its leading
spirit. Its first public meeting, called by English trade union leaders and
French workers’ representatives, took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London on
September 28, 1864. Marx, who had been invited through a French intermediary to
attend as a representative of the German workers, sat silently on the platform.
A committee was set up to produce a program and a constitution for the new
organization. After various drafts had been submitted that were felt to be
unsatisfactory, Marx, serving on a subcommittee, drew upon his immense
journalistic experience. His “Address and the Provisional Rules of the International
Working Men’s Association,” unlike his other writings, stressed the positive
achievements of the cooperative movement and of parliamentary legislation; the
gradual conquest of political power would enable the British proletariat to
extend these achievements on a national scale.
As
a member of the organization’s General Council, and corresponding secretary for
Germany, Marx was henceforth assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which
were sometimes held several times a week. For several years he showed a rare
diplomatic tact in composing differences among various parties, factions, and
tendencies. The International grew in prestige and membership, its numbers
reaching perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was successful in several interventions on
behalf of European trade unions engaged in struggles with employers.
In
1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European political personality; it
was the Paris Commune that made him into an international figure, “the best
calumniated and most menaced man of London,” as he wrote. When the
Franco-German War broke out in 1870, Marx and Engels disagreed with followers
in Germany who refused to vote in the Reichstag in favour of the war. The
General Council declared that “on the German side the war was a war of defence.”
After the defeat of the French armies, however, they felt that the German terms
amounted to aggrandizement at the expense of the French people. When an
insurrection broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was proclaimed, Marx gave
it his unswerving support. On May 30, 1871, after the Commune had been crushed,
he hailed it in a famous address entitled Civil War in France:
History
has no comparable example of such greatness.…Its martyrs are enshrined forever
in the great heart of the working class.
In
Engels’s judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s first example of the
“dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s name, as the leader of The First
International and author of the notorious Civil War, became synonymous
throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris
Commune.
The
advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the antagonisms within the
International Working Men’s Association and thus brought about its downfall.
English trade unionists such as George Odger, former president of the General
Council, opposed Marx’s support of the Paris Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867,
which had enfranchised the British working class, had opened vast opportunities
for political action by the trade unions. English labour leaders found they could
make many practical advances by cooperating with the Liberal Party and,
regarding Marx’s rhetoric as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they had
“sold themselves” to the Liberals.
A
left opposition also developed under the leadership of the famed Russian
revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. A veteran of tsarist prisons and
Siberian exile, Bakunin could move men by his oratory, which one listener
compared to “a raging storm with lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a
roaring as of lions.” Bakunin admired Marx’s intellect but could hardly forget
that Marx had published a report in 1848 charging him with being a Russian
agent. He felt that Marx was a German authoritarian and an arrogant Jew who
wanted to transform the General Council into a personal dictatorship over the
workers. He strongly opposed several of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s
support of the centralized structure of the International, Marx’s view that the
proletariat class should act as a political party against prevailing parties
but within the existing parliamentary system, and Marx’s belief that the
proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois state, should establish its
own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of the revolutionary was destruction; he
looked to the Russian peasantry, with its propensities for violence and its
uncurbed revolutionary instincts, rather than to the effete, civilized workers
of the industrial countries. The students, he hoped, would be the officers of
the revolution. He acquired followers, mostly young men, in Italy, Switzerland,
and France, and he organized a secret society, the International Alliance of
Social Democracy, which in 1869 challenged the hegemony of the General Council
at the congress in Basel, Switzerland. Marx, however, had already succeeded in
preventing its admission as an organized body into the International.
To
the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of revolutionary direct action
and a refutation of what they considered to be Marx’s “authoritarian
communism.” Bakunin began organizing sections of the International for an
attack on the alleged dictatorship of Marx and the General Council. Marx in
reply publicized Bakunin’s embroilment with an unscrupulous Russian student
leader, Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and murder.
Without
a supporting right wing and with the anarchist left against him, Marx feared
losing control of the International to Bakunin. He also wanted to return to his
studies and to finish Das Kapital. At the congress of the International at The
Hague in 1872, the only one he ever attended, Marx managed to defeat the
Bakuninists. Then, to the consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the
seat of the General Council be transferred from London to New York City. The
Bakuninists were expelled, but the International languished and was finally
disbanded in Philadelphia in 1876.
Last years of Karl Marx
During
the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative energies declined. He was
beset by what he called “chronic mental depression,” and his life turned inward
toward his family. He was unable to complete any substantial work, though he
still read widely and undertook to learn Russian. He became crotchety in his
political opinions. When his own followers and those of the German
revolutionary Ferdinand Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist goals
should be achieved through cooperation with the state, coalesced in 1875 to
found the German Social Democratic Party, Marx wrote a caustic criticism of
their program (the so-called Gotha Program), claiming that it made too many
compromises with the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside
and tried to mollify him personally. Increasingly, he looked to a European war
for the overthrow of Russian tsarism, the mainstay of reaction, hoping that
this would revive the political energies of the working classes. He was moved
by what he considered to be the selfless courage of the Russian terrorists who
assassinated the tsar, Alexander II, in 1881; he felt this to be “a
historically inevitable means of action.”
Despite
Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still retained what Engels called
his “peculiar influence” on the leaders of working-class and socialist
movements. In 1879, when the French Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded,
its leader Jules Guesde went to London to consult with Marx, who
dictated the preamble of its program and shaped much of its content. In 1881
Henry Mayers Hyndman in his England for All drew heavily on his conversations
with Marx but angered him by being afraid to acknowledge him by name.
During
his last years Marx spent much time at health resorts and even traveled to
Algiers. He was broken by the death of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his
eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on January 11, 1883. He died in London,
evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year
Character and significance
of Karl Marx
At
Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that Marx had made two
great discoveries, the law of development of human history and the law of
motion of bourgeois society. But “Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He
was “the best-hated and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he also died
“beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The
contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected in the sometimes
conflicting aspects of his character. Marx was a combination of the Promethean
rebel and the rigorous intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of
intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in
debate in 1846 recalled that “he spoke only in the imperative, brooking no
contradiction,” and seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator
such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.” But Marx obviously felt
uneasy before mass audiences and avoided the atmosphere of factional
controversies at congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked,
and rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses of the
International where the rival socialist groups debated important resolutions.
He was a “small groups” man, most at home in the atmosphere of the General
Council or on the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress
itself forcefully on a small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided
meeting distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed questions of
economics and sociology on a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his
broad intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas such as that the
British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an agent of the Russian
government. He was determined not to let bourgeois society make “a money-making
machine” out of him, yet he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and
the bequests of relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal
habits and way of life, even to the point of joining two friends in a students’
prank during which they systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London
street and then fled from the police. He was a great reader of novels,
especially those of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac; and the family made a cult of
Shakespeare. He was an affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for
his love of children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his own. Of his
seven children, three daughters grew to maturity. His favourite daughter,
Eleanor, worried him with her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her
desire to be an actress. Another shadow was cast on Marx’s domestic life by the
birth to their loyal servant, Helene Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick;
Engels as he was dying disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father.
Above all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for
his conception of a better society. He regarded struggle as the law of life and
existence.
The
influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s masterpiece, Das Kapital,
the “Bible of the working class,” as it was officially described in a
resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, was published in
1867 in Berlin and received a second edition in 1873. Only the first volume was
completed and published in Marx’s lifetime. The second and third volumes,
unfinished by Marx, were edited by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The
economic categories he employed were those of the classical British economics
of David Ricardo, but Marx used them in accordance with his dialectical method
to argue that bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow its
inevitable path of development. Through the working of such immanent tendencies
as the declining rate of profit, capitalism would die and be replaced by
another, higher, society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the
descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books, on the misery of
the English working class. Marx believed that this misery would increase, while
at the same time the monopoly of capital would become a fetter upon production
until finally “the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators are expropriated.”
Marx
never claimed to have discovered the existence of classes and class struggles
in modern society. “Bourgeois” historians, he acknowledged, had described them
long before he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that each phase in
the development of production was associated with a corresponding class
structure and that the struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship
of the proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society. Marx took up
the very different versions of socialism current in the early 19th century and
welded them together into a doctrine that continued to be the dominant version
of socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis on the influence
of economic structure on historical development has proved to be of lasting
significance.
Although
Marx stressed economic issues in his writings, his major impact has been in the
fields of sociology and history. Marx’s most important contribution to
sociological theory was his general mode of analysis, the “dialectical” model,
which regards every social system as having within it immanent forces that give
rise to “contradictions” (disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new
social system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic reasoning in Das
Kapital, are still guided by this model in their approach to capitalist
society. In this sense, Marx’s mode of analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus,
Herbert Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the theoretical
structures that are the heritage of the social scientist.
With
affection,
Ruben
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