Copyright 1996, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College
Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the Rhineland (Germany), in 1818. His parents, who were Jewish, had, like most German Jews, been
forced into a nominal Protestantism in order to survive. His father practiced law and they were comfortably well off. Marx's youth was
a very middle-class existence, including even a poetry-filled romance with Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a baron and city
counselor. At seventeen, 1835, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn to study law, but he soon lost his way in romantic and
irresponsible behavior. His parents sent him off to the University of Berlin, in 1836, where the tone of education was significantly
more subdued.
Marx arrived in Berlin in the years following Hegel's death, and Hegel's reputation was still very strong. Nevertheless, a group of philosophers, called the "Young Hegelians," had already emerged and had carried Hegel's form of critique away from religious issues and toward the analysis of political power. One of these, Bruno Bauer, became Marx's mentor, as Marx's interests began to move from law toward philosophy. Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Difference in the Atomic Theories of Democritus and Epicurus" and left the university in 1841. Nevertheless, Marx's aspirations toward an academic position were frustrated by Bauer's dismissal on the grounds of political radicalism, in 1842. Nor were Marx's views any less radical.
Marx returned to the Rhineland and took a position with the Rheinische Zeitung as a journalist; within the year, he became editor. The paper was an organ of "liberal opposition" and Marx wrote several important articles, including one dealing with the poverty of the Moselle winegrowers. The newspaper was suppressed in 1843. In passing, one should take note of the extreme authoritarian conservativism of the German states throughout this period.
Realizing the unlikelihood that he would ever be allowed a significant voice in Germany, Marx left Germany and remained in his self-imposed exile for the remainder of his life. The only exception was a very brief, abortive return during the Revolutions of 1849. In 1843, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, he moved to Paris and, under political pressure later, removed to Brussels. After the disappointments of 1849, he moved to London, England, where he spent the remainder of his life. Marx died in London in 1883. With the exception of occasional journalistic positions, including a regular assignment as London correspondent to the New York Daily News, Marx remained unemployed and without a regular income. He, Jenny, and their four children lived close to poverty for most of the London years.
In 1843, Paris was the European capitol of liberal intellectual activity. He continued in journalism, writing for Deutsch-Franzoesischer Jahrbuecher, articles including "On the Jewish Question" and the "Introduction" from his unpublished manuscript "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right." This is the era in which Proudon had written that "property is theft;" and Marx associated with Proudon as well as Heinrich Heine, Herwegh, and Bakunin. In response to his associations and readings, he wrote extensively in notebooks which eventually became known as his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.
In September 1844, Marx met Friedrich Engels and began an association that affected him for the rest of his life. Engels was two years younger than Marx, the son of a German capitalist who owned cotton mills in Manchester, England. Engels had been sent to Manchester by his father to learn and to look after the business there; but in the process, Engels had been radicalized by the social conditions that he witnessed. Marx had read an article by Engels and made contact with him when he visited Paris. At this time, Engels was working on his first major book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Marx was, by this time, completely disenchanted with Bruno Bauer and the other Young Hegelians who, in his mind, were simply not going far enough in their critique of Hegel. He and Engels decided to draft a pamphlet on the Young Hegelians; and Engels submitted his fifteen pages of material before leaving for Germany. When The Holy Family was published, in 1845, it was several hundred pages long --- no pamphlet --- and an accurate measure of what Marx would do for the rest of his life.
It was at this time that Marx's radicalism made it necessary to move along, this time to Brussels. Marx and Engel's remained in correspondence with each other, though letters and drafts always had to pass through friends since mail was censored regularly. It was at this time that they published The German Ideology in which they introduced the concept of a "materialist" (dialectical) theory of history. Political communism was born within the same timeframe as a collection of small "committees" that networked German, French, and English socialists, keeping each other informed and distributing essays. Thus, when the old socialist organization, The League of the Just, decided to reorganize as The Communist League, they asked Marx and Engels to draft a powerful document that would give foundation to their new directions. The Communist Manifesto was published in February 1848.
Later in 1848, the second French Revolution occured and it set off political revolutions throughout Europe. Marx returned to Paris and then moved to Cologne. He even began a new political organ, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. However, by 1849, the revolutions were dead, swept back by a powerful tide of authoritarian political power. It was at this time that Marx and his family moved to England.
Alienated from Europe and even disenchanted with The Communist League, Marx quit active politics and began the long hours of study and writing in the British Museum that ultimately made him famous. While Marx's studies were in economics and history, he was a romantic humanist at bottom. Even though his weekdays were spent glued to volumes in the Museum and his family suffered in cold and hunger, his Sundays were spent with his wife and children in Hampstead Heath, singing and reciting Shakespeare. Their survival depended quite literally on the charity of friends, Engels being highest among them. In many ways, Marx's work was a romance as well. Das Kapital was projected as his magnum opus, eight volumes in all. But only Volume One was published (1867) and only fragments of Volumes Two and Three were available for Engels to edit and publish later. By 1869, Engels created a permanent annuity for Marx and his family; and with a regular income, for the first time in his life, Marx became something of a Victorian gentleman, even investing in the stock market.
With the founding of The International Workingmen's Association (The First International), in 1864, Marx returned to active politics and was instrumental in its activities. The culmination of the period was production of three major essays on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the supression of the Paris Commune. By 1872, nevertheless, The First International had fallen apart through internal disagreements. Marx went into his second and final retirement from politics.
Marx died in London in 1883. He had published few coherent works but had left behind an enormous collection of drafts and notebooks. He was well known to the police authorities, whose job it was to suppress socialist radicals, but very little known to anyone else. His obituary in The London Times contained numerous errors. Ironically, his grave in London's High Gate Cemetery stands opposite the famous Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer --- perversely celebrating England's Marx and Spencer, the English equivalent of Penny's. Unfortunately, "Marxism" would make Marx famous and it would take the efforts of the Frankfurt School, in the next century, to discover the whole of Marx's thinking.
Sources:
Singer, Peter. Marx (Hill and Wang, 1980); McLellan, David. Karl Marx (Penguin Books, 1975); and McLellan, David. The Thought of Karl Marx: An
Introduction (Harper and Row, 1971).
The German Ideology
As a student at the University of Berlin, Marx had been well trained in the use of Hegel's dialectical logic. He continued to employ Hegel's logic throughout his works. Thus, for Marx, all observable change is dialectical, a process of thesis proceeding to antithesis and then to synthesis, never ending. The dynamic factor in this process, that is, the factor leading from one phase to the next, was alienation (Entfremdung), the process in which the negative reality of a situation realizes itself and motivates further change. Alienation meant that something, once posited, began to move out-of-itself, that is, became antithetical. For Hegel creation itself is a process of alienation, in fact, Idea moving out-of-itself into Nature and Nature moving away from pure externality to self-conscious Spirit.
Like Hegel before him, Marx was a serious student of history; indeed, the dynamic of dialectical logic is observed in history. The difference between Marx and Hegel lies in the fact that Hegel read history as a continuing expression of an Ideal process proceeding inevitably well beyond observation. Marx read history as an immediate empirical drama that could be observed within the material conditions of human beings, throughout the ages. Marx "turned Hegel upside down." Rather than Idea realizing itself through human history, we have humans realizing various social situations and ideologies as a result of various material conditions of life. Marx's so-called "dialectical materialism" was first developed in The German Ideology as an extensive critique of the Young Hegelians; but we need to keep in mind the fact that it is "materialist" only in that sense that it rests on the material (or phenomenal) conditions of life, as contrasted with the "idealist" conceptions of Hegel.
The German Ideology was written before Marx had undertaken his extensive studies of economic and political history in the British Museum. The depth and accuracy of his analyses are, in consequence, preliminary in this work. Nevertheless, Marx had already developed much of the conceptual system that would serve his historical studies; and he already had a vivid understanding of the way in which the Capitalist system was functioning in new industrial nations.
According to Marx, when we try to understand a given period of historical change, we need to consider the material conditions of life that may have led to those changes. Consider, for instance, the American Revolution. The ideological explanation of the American Revolution is that documents such as the Declaration of Independence were borne out of the natural (Ideal) love of freedom of the people and that the movement of Ideas (freedom, representation, etc.) drew the colonials into greater and greater commitment to revolt against the English crown. Marx, however, would ask questions regarding the economic institutions of the north and the south in relation to the English regulations of manufacture and trade. Were not burgeoning industrial institutions of the northern colonies eager to function free of the restraints ordinarily placed on colonials? Wasn't there already class division in America? How were the classes able to come together into a coalition against the English? That is, what were their common unifying material interests? It should be no surprise that the Revolution came swiftly on the heals of issues such as taxation, trade restrictions, and lack of general protection along the frontier. History tends to be a reflection on the past that is guided by those (that class) who have exercised the greatest causal force in the past; thus, history is ideological, based on the ideas that these people hold over themselves as rationalization (justification) for their actions. Marx consistently asks us to get underneath and behind ideology so that we can explore the material forces and conditions that prompt people to act. Marxists would suggest that America had moved well beyond the material conditions that allowed a stable colonial patronage by the English crown.
Marx's historical analysis of the development of Capitalism demonstrates a progressive movement toward increasing alienation. That is, the stages through which productive forces are organized (and idealized) all carry the human participants further from their true nature as human beings. In the end, the full-blown system of Capitalism, all people have become de-humanized; it is no longer a world in which human beings have a home. Looking at this in detail, we can observe the difference between work and labor. It is natural for humans to work, that is, to produce the means of their survival by exerting themselves in the natural world. Humans self-identify with their work; in ideological terms, work is a spiritual activity. Labor, however, is a system of exerting oneself through diverse means-of-production that are owned by someone else in order to produce goods which also belong to someone else. The laborer receives a wage for her/his labor force, and the wage is determined by external forces largely irrelevant to what is produced or by whom. While the laborer may self-identify with the product produced, it is an alien thing, being owned by the Capitalist and being valued by the external market (the exchange value). Such a self-identification does not affirm a complete human being but, rather, an entity that is primarily under the control of external forces. Spiritual significance has been lost in labor.
For Marx, it is the process of de-humanization that is on-going in the revolutionary rise of Capitalism that guarantees the ultimate destruction of the Capitalist system. That is, the specter of humans participating in their own destruction cannot continue indefinitely; there must be a point at which the negative reality of complete de-humanization itself becomes instrumental in the organization of productive forces. Marx believed that the revolt of the Proletariat was historically inevitable. Ironically, the Capitalist system itself would achieve this end by bonding individuals-to-individuals in the community of shared oppression, poverty, and rage -- the Proletariat. This community itself would become the new classless society which would overthrow the ruling Bourgeois class and take over production through the existing, abandoned means of production.
One may ask, of course, why this revolt has not yet happened. In answering this question, if we can, Lenin's book, Imperialism, is an important contribution. Lenin argued that the big Capitalist industrial states of the 19th Century successfully avoided the revolt of the Proletariat class by embracing the system of Imperialism around the world. On this system, the proletariat class was effectively "exported" to what we have come to call the Third World and allowed, at their expense, the elevation of the laboring class at home to an affluent "middle class" which enjoyed the illusion of re-humanization through consumption of goods and services. (Note that the middle class does not re-possess the spiritual significance of work, in this scenario, but must be convinced that consumption itself has spiritual/human significance.) As Lenin noted, the system of Imperialism has the effect of exporting dissatisfaction so that conflict becomes international rather than potentially intra-national. The dialectic of international crises becomes inevitable as a new direction of human history --- well manifest in the 20th Century with two world wars and a variety of other imperialist conflicts. Meanwhile, it is fairly easy to argue that the Communist Revolution in Russia was ideological rather than dialectical, that is, not a genuine development out of the material conditions in Russia. On this weak basis, the struggle to become an international Communist movement was also thoroughly ideological and inauthentic. The Capitalist system has thus far never been challenged authentically in spite of America's eagerness to declare that they have "won" over Communism. Marx himself made it clear that the revolt of the Proletariat must be truly international and materially dialectical, that is, generated by the extremes of Capitalism itself. It is interesting to note today, however, that, with the demise of the Imperialist system and the premature Communist threat, Capitalists, seem to see total internationalization (globalization) of Capitalist enterprise as the wave of the future. If they succeed in creating a truly Capitalist global economy, of course, they will finally have established precisely the material conditions that Marx saw as the necessary stage from which Capitalism would finally become self-destructive.
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