Karl Marx entry, Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics

28. Karl Marx Lucia Pradella Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, a city that had been under French administration from 1794 until 1814 and where the memory of the 1789 revolution remained strong. The years in which Marx lived were, for all of Europe, revolutionary: production was in a process of endless transformation, first in Britain and then on the continent; together with the scale of modern industry, the number and organization of workers continued to grow. In France, the bourgeois revolution, breaking the last remnants of feudalism, summoned the ‘fourth estate’ into the battlefield. And the latter, for its part, began to unite and become self-conscious, struggling to conduct the revolution to its radical end, beyond the formal rights of equality and liberty. These historical dynamics were reflected in Marx’s own experience and in his trajectory, from radical-democratic ideals to communism. He came from a moderately well-heeled family; his father, a Jewish lawyer, converted to Protestantism, was a cultivated man, educated to Enlightenment rationalism. After completing the ‘Gymnasium’, Marx first went to university in Bonn, where he dedicated himself to juridical studies. But in Berlin, the cultural centre of Germany, he studied philosophy and history, entering the circle of Young Hegelians. In 1842, in collaboration with Bruno Bauer, Marx founded, and subsequently directed, the Rheinische Zeitung, a democratic newspaper based in Cologne. His articles on the social conditions of the Mosel peasantry provoked government censorship, forcing Marx to leave the newspaper, itself suppressed in the following months. His activity as a journalist pushed Marx towards questioning the social conditions of the working class, forcing him to ‘to discuss what is known as material interests’ (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (CCPE), Preface) and to deepen his knowledge of political economy. This became his main occupation in Paris, ‘the capital of the new world’, where he was forced to move with his young bride, Jenny von Westphalen, in 1843, to continue the social and political propaganda that had become impossible in Germany. There he had the opportunity to establish a dialogue with various socialist and revolutionary organizations, while he engaged in studies of political economy, the French Revolution, the conditions of the working class, and socialist and communist thought. The intellectual impulse that moved Marx to study political economy was also due to his reading of the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy by Friedrich Engels, who was then working in Manchester, one of the main centres of the industrial revolution. Both England and France were privileged vantage points from which to observe modern bourgeois society, being much more advanced than Germany, where extreme political fragmentation was an obstacle to capitalist development. Engels’s Outlines was published in the only edited volume of the German-French Annals, alongside the introduction 174

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 174

19/12/2011 08:38

Karl Marx

175

to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law and an essay On The Jewish Question, both by Marx, who was the editor of the journal German–French Annals together with Arnold Ruge. In the Critique, Marx argued that Hegel’s attempt to overcome the separation between the state and civil society was both false and illusory; only the practical critique by the proletariat could abolish the social relations that underpinned that division. Subsequently, the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 represent Marx’s first systematic confrontation with classical political economy through use of philosophical categories developed from a critical reading of Hegel and Feuerbach. The alienation of labour, its reduction to the status of a commodity, is identified as the origin of the fundamental divisions in modern capitalist societies, that is, the estrangement of workers from the product of their labour and from their very activity, nature and other human beings. In the Manuscripts, Marx argues that the transformation of current social relations depends on the abolition of private property by the proletariat, the only force capable of creating a new social form, organized rationally according to the needs of the human species, and in which labour could become a source of individual realization as well as sociality. This totalizing and revolutionary character of the Marxian critique of capitalism continued to pervade all his writings, although they eventually broke free of their philosophical foundations and found a new point of departure in the immanent critique of political economy. In September 1844 Marx and Engels spent ten days together and, having ascertained their broad political and intellectual accord, began their lifelong collaboration. Their first work was The Holy Family, a polemic against Bruno Bauer and his separation of philosophical critique from political praxis. In 1845, following pressures from the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from Paris and moved to Brussels. There he was joined by Engels, who had earlier that year published the Condition of the Working Class in England, the result of extensive studies based on documents and direct observation of the living and working conditions of the workers. Aware of the importance of concrete experience of English reality, Marx journeyed to Manchester with his friend in the summer. There, they studied political economy and English socialism, and established contacts with leaders of the working-class movement. This was an important stage in the elaboration of a ‘new conception of history’ – according to which ‘[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ (CCPE, Preface) – and of the programme of revolutionary socialism. These were developed through critique of idealist doctrines and petty bourgeois and utopian positions, and these found expression first in the German Ideology (written in 1845 but unpublished until 1932) and then in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx’s 1847 polemical work against Proudhon. From his notebooks of the period it emerges that Marx studied economic history from a global perspective, the only approach compatible with the international character of capitalist production and trade. The unity between theory and praxis, argued for in the Theses on Feuerbach, did not remain on paper. In Brussels, Marx dedicated himself to organizational work, founding the Communist Correspondence Committee, establishing international connections and holding lectures on matters of interest to the working class, including those later published in Wage Labour and Capital and On Free Trade. In these pamphlets, criticizing the naturalistic representations of classical political economy, Marx argues that capital is a historically determined and transitory social relation of production founded on exploitation both within and between nations.

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 175

19/12/2011 08:38

176

The Elgar companion to Marxist economics

These efforts culminated in the foundation of the International Communist League, described by Engels as ‘the first international movement of the working class’, which united the members of the League of the Just, the Communist Correspondence Committee, English Chartists and German refugees dispersed across Europe. The First Congress, on 9 June 1847, was attended by Engels, who convinced the League to change its motto from the League of the Just’s – ‘All men are brothers’ – to ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ The Second Congress, held at the end of that year, gave Marx and Engels the task of writing the political and theoretical programme of the League, The Communist Manifesto. Although both capitalist production and the working-class movement were still limited, The Manifesto already provided a global account of the development of capitalism and expressed for the first time the worldview and the political aims of communists: the theory of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the proletariat, whose victorious revolution in Europe would lead to the end of all antagonisms between nations. Shortly after the publication of The Manifesto, the 1848 revolution spread throughout Europe, setting ablaze the political order established at the Congress of Vienna. Banished from Belgium, Marx (to whom the central committee of the League had attributed full powers) moved to Paris, and then to Cologne. There he founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – Organ der Demokratie, a newspaper supporting the unification of Germany and providing a focal point for the German workers’ societies in the unfolding revolutionary struggle. However, the repression in the wake of the June insurrection signalled the advance of the counter-revolutionary forces that rapidly extended their action, with the help of Czarist Russia, beyond Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, finally culminating in the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in France. The social revolution was halted, and the communist groups were systematically repressed. In Cologne, the 1852 trial against members of the central committee of the International Communist League led them to disband it. Marx and Engels ceased direct political involvement. They reconstructed the history of the failed revolution in The Class Struggle in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and articles in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany. Expelled from both Germany and France, Marx settled in London in the summer of 1849, where he remained for the rest of his life. As many other refugees, his family suffered extreme poverty in the first years of exile leading to the death of three of his children between 1850 and 1855: Edmund, Franziska and Edgar. Under pressure, Engels reluctantly decided to return to his ‘accursed commerce’. He started managing the English branch of his father’s firm and, as a result, he could support Marx financially. London, the metropolis of capitalism and the centre of an expanding empire, was ‘a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society’, where Marx decided ‘to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material’ available at the British Museum (CCPE, Preface). He wanted to understand how the crisis of 1848 had been overcome by a new cycle of prosperity, which seemed to postpone indefinitely the outbreak of European revolution. The ‘London Notebooks’ (1850–53) denote a period of intense study of theories of money, wage and rent, and scrupulous research on the Asiatic mode of production and the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Marx’s research was also influenced by his collaboration with the influential New York Daily Tribune. For over ten years, beginning in 1851, Marx wrote articles on current

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 176

19/12/2011 08:38

Karl Marx

177

events, including financial policy, economic crisis and colonialism in Asia (his authorship of the whole of this material was recognized only in the first half of the twentieth Century). He also followed the Crimean war, the Spanish revolution and the American civil war, without ceasing to publicize the living conditions and political struggles of the working class in several countries. Through these analyses, he gathered fundamental elements for the development of his critique of political economy. If the enormous expansion of commerce and of the empire had been among the major factors pulling Britain out of the crisis, it also amplified the scope and risk of new crises. Under the impulse of vast anti-colonial movements throughout Asia, Marx traced a relationship between anti-colonial struggles and the working-class movement in Europe, modifying substantially the conception of international revolution he had initially conceived in the Manifesto. His analysis was soon validated, if without the predicted revolutionary outcomes. The Indian uprising was one of the pivotal causes of the 1857 economic crisis that enveloped the world market. Marx was enthusiastic about the crisis, even though it did further destabilize his own financial circumstances, because of the reduction in his commissions from the New York Daily Tribune. Hoping for an imminent revolutionary outcome, Marx returned to his work on the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (‘Grundrisse’) (published in Moscow, in 1939). These manuscripts represent his first attempt to expose systematically the theory of capital on the basis of a plan modified in 1861–63 and again in 1863–65. In June 1859 Marx published only one part of his original project as A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There, he develops his analysis of the dual nature of labour embodied in the commodity, which he defines as ‘the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns’ (Capital I, ch. 1). In contrast, the classical political economists, although tracing value back to labour, could not distinguish clearly between abstract and concrete labour, naturalizing value-creating labour and eternalizing the system founded on wage labour. The 1857 crisis gave impulse to a number of social movements: in Russia for the suppression of servitude; in the United States for the abolition of slavery; and, in Europe the workers began to mobilize again at syndicalist and political levels. Communications began to be established between workers’ committees in different countries. In July 1864, an international meeting in solidarity with the Polish insurrection against Russian domination took place in London. English trade unionists and French workers agreed to found an association aimed at the coordination of the political activities of the working class in different countries. The International Workingmen’s Association was founded on 28 September. The meeting was also attended by Italian followers of Mazzini, French socialists and Blanquists, Polish revolutionaries and members of the former ‘Communist League’, including Marx. His activity in the Association was central, aimed at reinforcing international solidarity which, according to Marx’s Inaugural Address, was the condition for the conquest of political power and the emancipation of the proletariat. Unlike the Communist League, the First International was not a predominantly political and propagandistic organization; it was also syndicalist. The International grew vigorously in its first years of activity, partly as a consequence of the strike movements following the upswing of 1868. It gained new members and spread to new countries, including England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the United States, Denmark, Holland and Austria-Hungary. In the same period, the political standing of Marx and Engels increased sharply. They affirmed the necessity of political

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 177

19/12/2011 08:38

178

The Elgar companion to Marxist economics

struggle and to sustain the fight for the unification of the German and the Italian nations. The latter would lead to significant progress for the working-class movement in these two countries and, therefore, internationally. In turn, the intensification of the struggle for Irish independence in the late 1860s raised the colonial question. Marx and Engels affirmed the right of the Irish workers to have an independent organization within the International, and pushed the English workers to sustain the Irish struggle as a necessary condition for their own emancipation. In 1868 the International’s Brussels Congress passed a resolution recommending workers to read the first volume of Capital, published in 1867. There, Marx explained systematically the laws shaping the antagonisms of bourgeois society, and identified the kernel of these antagonisms in the conflict between wage labour and capital, whose origin is founded in the exploitation of labour. He demonstrates that capitalist accumulation extends and increases the exploitation of the workers on a global scale, although with important national differences: ‘in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse’ (Capital I, ch. 25). The impoverishment of the workers is, therefore, not limited to declining wages, but it affects all dimensions of their lives. Accumulation is founded on, and at the same time reinforces, the cooperation of labour, which is the objective condition for the conscious union of the workers. Capital intends to provide the theoretical underpinnings for this union, in order ‘to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ (The Civil War in France, The Paris Commune). Therefore, Capital offers not only a descriptive analysis of capitalism, but it also aims to contribute to the revolutionary overcoming of bourgeois society. The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated the capacity of the working class to organize itself and conquer political power. The armed workers held the French capital for two months, giving birth to ‘a government of the working class’ which, for Marx, was ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor’ (The Civil War in France, The Paris Commune). In The Civil War in France, Marx argues that the repression of the Commune was possible only because of the lack of international solidarity. The International was left fundamentally weakened in its aftermath, because it rapidly lost most of its forces membership not only in England – where the leaders of the trade unions, apprehensive of its communist tendencies, resigned – but also in the two pivotal countries of continental Europe, France and Germany, where the suppression of the Commune had disintegrating effects. At the Hague Congress in 1872, the anarchist faction, which was against direct participation in the political struggle, was expelled. Marx and Engels proposed to move the General Council to New York to ‘defend it from disaggregating elements’, and because the United States had become, through mass immigration, ‘the world of labour at its highest’, and the nation where the party could finally become truly international. Marx subsequently abandoned direct involvement in the Association but continued to follow its activity as well as the evolution of the working-class movements and the formation of mass political parties in Western Europe. In 1875 he intervened critically, although not publicly, against the programme of the Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands through his Critique of the Gotha Programme and, in 1880, he collaborated in the formulation of the programme of the Parti Ouvrier in France. He also followed the evolution of the Russian revolutionary movement, Russian being the first language into

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 178

19/12/2011 08:38

Karl Marx

179

which Capital was translated. Despite his deteriorating health, Marx was now able to devote time to the French translation of the first volume of Capital, which re-elaborated entire sections of the book, and he worked on the manuscripts of the second and third volumes of Capital (published for the first time in the MEGA II, Marx and Engels, 2003; Marx, 2008). Although Marx published only sporadically in the last years of his life, his notebooks show the extent to which he continued to research across all fields of knowledge, including mathematics and the natural sciences but, especially, those directly related to Capital. In the 1870s, his studies became more focused on global history: he deepened his research on pre-capitalist societies and colonialism; reflected on the historical developments of agricultural production, traced the evolution of different forms of communal landed property; and he expected to rewrite the section on ground-rent in the third volume of Capital, in which Russia would occupy a central role as a historical model. Marx also studied recent developments in archaeology, ethnology and anthropology, according great importance to these new disciplines and focusing in particular on evolutionist authors. Engels’s book The Origin of The Family, Private Property and the State was based on these notebooks. Marx wrote with Engels, in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto (1882), that, if a peasant revolution in Russia sparked the signal for proletarian revolution in Europe, and if both could complement one another, the rural commune could offer the basis for the transition to communism. He therefore denied any gradualist, positivist or deterministic vision of the revolutionary process, contrary to those who affirm that the universalization of the capitalist mode of production is both inevitable and a precondition that must be fatalistically imposed upon all peoples of the world prior to the realization of socialism. After Marx’s death, on 14 March 1883, Engels took upon himself the task of publishing the second and third volumes of Capital and following up the developments of the international movement of the working class.

M2834 – FINE TEXT.indd 179

19/12/2011 08:38