Karl Marx
German philosopher
in full Karl Heinrich Marx
born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]
died March 14, 1883, London
Main
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 the articles socialism and Communism for full treatment of those
ideologies.
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. 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 Oct. 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
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s collaboration
with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in Manchester, Eng., 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.
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’ 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
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’ 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
Marx’s political isolation 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
Sept. 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’ 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, Switz. 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
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 Dec. 2,
1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan. 11, 1883. He
died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year.
Character and significance
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.
Lewis S. Feuer
David T. McLellan
Encyclopaedia Britannica
