But the founder of communism was from Germany..........Karl M.................what is the common element? Purity...................................socialism/communism...........is based a lot on ideals......................................a lot of the abstract artists.............art in general.........a sense of the pure..........making things perfect....................communism is based on ideals...............all should be cared for equally...........the Russian rev. was like the People's rev in China..........like the one in El Salvador.............like the one that almost happened here.............the rich took advantage of the poor...................deliberately under educating them............................
Karl Marx
| Karl Marx FRSA | |
|---|---|
Karl Marx in 1875
| |
| Born | 5 May 1818 Trier, Kingdom of Prussia |
| Died | 14 March 1883 (aged 64) London, England |
| Residence | Germany, France, Belgium, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | Stateless after 1845 |
| Alma mater | |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy Marxism |
Main interests
| Politics, economics, philosophy, history |
Notable ideas
| Surplus value, contributions to the labour theory of value, class struggle, alienation and exploitation of the worker, materialist conception of history |
| Signature | |
 | |
Born in Trier to a middle-class family, Marx later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy. As an adult, Marx became stateless and spent much of his life in London, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and published various works. His two most well-known are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic and political history.
Marx's theories about society, economics and politics—collectively understood as Marxism—hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages.[8] Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[9] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.[10]
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and his work has been both appreciated and criticised.[11] His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought.[12][13][14][15] Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.[16][17]
Contents
[hide]Life[edit]
Childhood and early education: 1818–1836[edit]
Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.[18] Marx was ancestrally Jewish as his maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[19] His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education and he became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and to escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, Herschel converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, the main Protestant denomination in Germany and Prussia at the time, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[20] Marx was a third cousin once removed of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland, with whom he became a frequent correspondent in later life.[21][page needed]
Marx's birthplace, now Bruckenstrasse 10, in Trier. The family occupied two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor.[22] Purchased by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, it now houses a museum devoted to him[23]
Little is known of Marx's childhood.[27] The third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819.[28] Young Marx and his surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Caroline, were baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 and their mother in November 1825.[29] Young Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father. By employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. Subsequently, police raided the school in 1832 and discovered that literature espousing political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Considering the distribution of such material a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx's attendance.[30]
In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field.[31] Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest",[32] Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police.[33] Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner), at one point serving as club co-president.[34] Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes, some of which became serious: in August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps.[35] Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic University of Berlin.[36]
Hegelianism and early journalism: 1836–1843[edit]
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated baroness of the Prussian ruling class who had known Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and class origins, but Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to him.[37] Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843 they got married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.[38]In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse.[39] Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished".[40] Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles.[41] During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the Doctor's Club (Doktorklub), a student group which discussed Hegelian ideas and through them became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians in 1837. They gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but adopted his dialectical method in order to criticise established society, politics and religion from a leftist perspective.[42] Marx's father died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for the family.[43] Marx had been emotionally close to his father and treasured his memory after his death.[44]
Jenny von Westphalen in the 1830s
Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians.[51] Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics. Marx criticised both right-wing European governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive.[52] The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material before printing, as Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear".[53] After the Rheinische Zeitung published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned and Prussia's government complied in 1843.[54]
Paris: 1843–1845[edit]
In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical leftist Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then being set up by the German socialist Arnold Ruge to bring together German and French radicals[55] and thus Marx and his wife moved to Paris in October 1843. Initially living with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau, they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out following the birth of their daughter Jenny in 1844.[56] Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the Jahrbücher was dominated by the latter and the only non-German writer was the exiled Russian anarchist collectivist Mikhail Bakunin.[57] Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"[58] and "On the Jewish Question",[59] the latter introducing his belief that the proletariat were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism.[60] Only one issue was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported copies (Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx broke down).[61] After the paper's collapse, Marx began writing for the only uncensored German-language radical newspaper left, Vorwärts! (Forward!). Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the League of the Just, a utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans. Marx attended some of their meetings, but did not join.[62] In Vorwärts!, Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.[63]
Friedrich Engels, whom Marx met in 1844, as they eventually became lifelong friends and collaborators
During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vanneau in Paris (from October 1843 until January 1845),[71] Marx engaged in an intensive study of "political economy" (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.),[72] the French socialists (especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier)[73] and the history of France.[74] The study of political economy is a study that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life[75] and would result in his major economic work—the three-volume series called Capital.[76] Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and English economics. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism" (or political economy as Marx called it) were in place by the autumn of 1844.[77] Marx was constantly being pulled away from his study of political economy. Not only by the usual daily demands of the time, but additionally editing a radical newspaper and later the organising and directing the efforts of a political party during years of potentially revolutionary popular uprisings of the citizenry. Still Marx was always drawn back to his economic studies. Marx sought "to understand the inner workings of capitalism".[78]
An outline of "Marxism" had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late 1844. Indeed, many features of the Marxist view of the world's political economy had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down all of the details of his economic world view to further clarify the new economic theory in his own mind.[79] Accordingly, Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.[80] These manuscripts covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated labour.[81] However, by the spring of 1845 his continued study of political economy, capital and capitalism had led Marx to the belief that the new political economic theory that he was espousing—scientific socialism—needed to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world.[82]
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 had been written between April and August 1844, but soon Marx recognised that the Manuscripts had been influenced by some inconsistent ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Accordingly, Marx recognised the need to break with Feuerbach's philosophy in favour of historical materialism, thus a year later (in April 1845) after moving from Paris to Brussels, Marx wrote his eleven "Theses on Feuerbach".[83] The "Theses on Feuerbach" are best known for Thesis 11, which states that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it".[81][84] This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism (for being contemplative), idealism (for reducing practice to theory) overall, criticising philosophy for putting abstract reality above the physical world.[81] It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an argument that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice.[81][85] In 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government shut down Vorwärts!, with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France.[86] At this point, Marx moved from Paris to Brussels, where Marx hoped to once again continue his study of capitalism and political economy.
Brussels: 1845–1848[edit]
The first edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in German in 1848
In mid-July 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England to visit the leaders of the Chartists, a socialist movement in Britain. This was Marx's first trip to England and Engels was an ideal guide for the trip. Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from November 1842[89] to August 1844.[90] Not only did Engels already know the English language,[91] he had also developed a close relationship with many Chartist leaders.[91] Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist English newspapers.[91] Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester.[92]
In collaboration with Engels, Marx also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the concept of historical materialism, The German Ideology.[93] In this work, Marx broke with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and the rest of the Young Hegelians, while he also broke with Karl Grun and other "true socialists" whose philosophies were still based in part on "idealism". In German Ideology, Marx and Engels finally completed their philosophy, which was based solely on materialism as the sole motor force in history.[94] German Ideology is written in a humorously satirical form, but even this satirical form did not save the work from censorship. Like so many other early writings of his, German Ideology would not be published in Marx's lifetime and would be published only in 1932.[81][95][96]
After completing German Ideology, Marx turned to a work that was intended to clarify his own position regarding "the theory and tactics" of a truly "revolutionary proletarian movement" operating from the standpoint of a truly "scientific materialist" philosophy.[97] This work was intended to draw a distinction between the utopian socialists and Marx's own scientific socialist philosophy. Whereas the utopians believed that people must be persuaded one person at a time to join the socialist movement, the way a person must be persuaded to adopt any different belief, Marx knew that people would tend on most occasions to act in accordance with their own economic interests, thus appealing to an entire class (the working class in this case) with a broad appeal to the class's best material interest would be the best way to mobilise the broad mass of that class to make a revolution and change society. This was the intent of the new book that Marx was planning, but to get the manuscript past the government censors he called the book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)[98] and offered it as a response to the "petty bourgeois philosophy" of the French anarchist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as expressed in his book The Philosophy of Poverty (1840).[99]
These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as The Communist Manifesto. While residing in Brussels in 1846, Marx continued his association with the secret radical organisation League of the Just.[100] As noted above, Marx thought the League to be just the sort of radical organisation that was needed to spur the working class of Europe toward the mass movement that would bring about a working class revolution.[101] However, to organise the working class into a mass movement the League had to cease its "secret" or "underground" orientation and operate in the open as a political party.[102] Members of the League eventually became persuaded in this regard. Accordingly, in June 1847 the League was reorganised by its membership into a new open "above ground" political society that appealed directly to the working classes.[103] This new open political society was called the Communist League.[104] Both Marx and Engels participated in drawing the programme and organisational principles of the new Communist League.[105]
In late 1847, Marx and Engels began writing what was to become their most famous work — a programme of action for the Communist League. Written jointly by Marx and Engels from December 1847 to January 1848, The Communist Manifesto was first published on 21 February 1848.[106] The Communist Manifesto laid out the beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing.[107] The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".[108] It goes on to examine the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalist class) and the proletariat (the industrial working class). Proceeding on from this, the Manifesto presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and to replace it with socialism.[109]
Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions and often violent upheavals that became known as the Revolutions of 1848.[110] In France, a revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic.[110] Marx was supportive of such activity and having recently received a substantial inheritance from his father (withheld by his uncle Lionel Philips since his father's death in 1838) of either 6,000[111] or 5,000 francs[112][113] he allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action.[113] Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed,[111][114] the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused Marx of it, subsequently arresting him and he was forced to flee back to France, where with a new republican government in power he believed that he would be safe.[113][115]
Cologne: 1848–1849[edit]
Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and also set up a German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there.[116] Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to Cologne where he began issuing a handbill entitled the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,[117] in which he argued for only four of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto, believing that in Germany at that time the bourgeoisie must overthrow the feudal monarchy and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie.[118] On 1 June, Marx started publication of a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, the newspaper featured Marx as a primary writer and the dominant editorial influence. Despite contributions by fellow members of the Communist League, according to Friedrich Engels it remained "a simple dictatorship by Marx".[119][120][121]Whilst editor of the paper, Marx and the other revolutionary socialists were regularly harassed by the police and Marx was brought to trial on several occasions, facing various allegations including insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, committing a press misdemeanor and inciting armed rebellion through tax boycotting,[122][123][124][125] although each time he was acquitted.[123][125][126] Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in Prussia collapsed and the king, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counter-revolutionary measures to expunge leftist and other revolutionary elements from the country.[122] Consequently, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was soon suppressed and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May.[121][127] Marx returned to Paris, which was then under the grip of both a reactionary counter-revolution and a cholera epidemic and was soon expelled by the city authorities, who considered him a political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth child and not able to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 he sought refuge in London.[128][129]
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