Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  Marx, however, wrote a pamphlet, The Civil War in France, in which he applauded the measures the communards had taken and said they had not gone far enough. It brought notoriety to the members of the International and they were publicly identified with violence and outrageous behaviour. This was not in keeping with the beliefs expressed in their constitution and many members blamed Marx for bringing the group into disrepute. It led to factions being set up in the group and weakened its power.

  ‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.’

  Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 1871

  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/ civil-war-france/ch06.htm

  The International finally fizzled out in 1876 after the council was transferred to America at Marx’s request. He felt there was still a lot of bad feeling towards him since his writing on the Commune and this was a way of winding everything down without explicitly having to do so. He knew he could not keep control over its affairs and warring factions for ever and if he couldn’t be in control he didn’t want to be involved. He admitted privately to friends that he felt tired and it was all wearing him out. Although the members were shocked and stunned they voted to have the headquarters move to America by a small majority. The American socialist movement was remote from the Europeans and without their support it fell into disrepute. The International was reconvened later after Marx’s death but by then it was much more conciliatory in nature than it had been when Marx was alive.

  The later years

  Marx became much less of a public figure after the International was dissolved. He spent a lot of time writing and he saw Engels frequently after his move to London. They were now the world authorities on socialism. At the time Marx and Engels were writing the terms socialism and communism were almost interchangeable, meaning a society where there was collective ownership of goods and equality for all. For Marx socialism was the stage before true communism.

  As Marx grew older he lost some of his fiery temper and did not write the vitriolic attacks on his opponents that he had in the past. Visitors who came to see him were surprised that he seemed such a genial man, for his reputation had made him into a morose and irritable monster.

  Marx took great pleasure from his grandchildren and spent a lot of time with them. Jennychen had married Charles Longuet, a French socialist who lectured at London University, and they had five sons. Laura married another Frenchman, Paul Lafargue, also a socialist. They had three children who all died.

  Eleanor did not marry and stayed at home. She wanted to be an actress, which was not a very reputable profession in those days, and she scandalized people by smoking, something a respectable young woman did not do. She was the daughter who was most like Marx in temperament and looks, with very dark, piercing eyes. She also shared his nervous health problems and together they visited spas around Europe looking for a cure for their skin and lung problems. These were probably not helped by the fact that they both chain-smoked, even when taking treatments.

  Jenny Marx became seriously ill in 1880 and the family went to Ramsgate for a seaside rest cure, which was very popular at that time. Her health did not improve and she became terribly emaciated. It was found she had cancer and she lived with a great deal of pain until her death in December 1881. Marx could not even go to her funeral for he was terribly ill with bronchitis at the time.

  Engels said that Marx was now ‘effectively dead’. He did not have the strength to write much and relied on Eleanor as his companion but she was suffering from a kind of nervous exhaustion brought on by her thwarted ambition. She was desperate to go on stage but remained with her father. He had not approved of the man she wished to marry and she lived under a kind of mental pressure that drove her into times where she starved herself and lived off nothing but tea. Marx realized that he had to let her live her own life and after that he spent time visiting Europe and North Africa, trying to find a climate that would improve his health. His lungs were in a very poor state and he was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis.

  By 1883 he was very weak and tired and when his favourite daughter, Jennychen, died of bladder cancer he seemed to finally lose the will to live. He had not seen the revolutionary changes that he had hoped for and did not know that they would ever occur. He felt despair that most of his work had been for nothing. When Eleanor went to France to help with the Longuet children she said she believed her father had gone home to die. He had bronchitis and pleurisy with abscesses on his lungs and was too weak even to read. Engels was terribly worried about him and visited often.

  On 14 March 1883 Engels visited and was told by Lenchen that Marx was dozing by the bedroom fire in his favourite armchair. By the time Engels went upstairs Marx was dead.

  He was buried in Highgate cemetery. Only 11 mourners were at the grave. A short paragraph in The Times obituary column noted his passing. He was not well known or respected, except in socialist circles, and few people believed that anything he had said would have any effect on the world around them.

  Key ideas

  Chartist A follower of the working class Chartist movement that advocated workers’ rights.

  Communards Members and supporters of the 1871 Paris Commune

  Communist League A political party established in 1847, now recognized as the first Marxist political party.

  Das Kapital Marx’s masterwork. A critical analysis of political economy.

  Means of production Raw materials, factories and land, which allow production to take place.

  Socialism In Marxist theory the stage between revolution and true communism.

  The International (also known as The International Workingmen’s Association and The First International) Formed in 1864. A society that aimed to unite numerous working men’s groups throughout the world.

  Things to remember

  • Marx moved to London after his exile in 1849, intending to stay for only a few months, but lived there until his death.

  • Marx and his family lived in poverty for a lot of that time and of his seven legitimate children only three survived into adulthood.

  • Marx relied greatly on the support of Engels both financially and with his writing.

  • Marx spent most of his days working on Das Kapital as well as working for the International.

  • Das Kapital was his attempt to make a scientific study of politics, economics and capitalism. It was not well received at the time.

  • He died in 1883 in some obscurity and only 11 mourners attended his funeral.

  Fact check

  1 When did Marx move to London?

  a 1849

  b 1894

  c 1834

  d 1843

  2 What was Chartism?

  a A society for honouring Magna Carta

  b One of the first working-class labour movements

  c A revolutionary anarchist society

  d A survey dedicated to charting social strata

  3 Who wrote a book denouncing Marx, leading Marx to write one about him in return?

  a Mikhail Bakunin

  b Karl Vogt

  c Friedrich Engels

  d Friedrich Nietzsche

  4 When was Das Kapital Volume 1 published?

  a 1902

  b 1876

  c 1890

  d 1867

  5 When was The International Workingmen’s Association founded?

  a 1864

  b 1846

  c 1891

  d 1901

  6 What was the title of the pamphlet that Marx wrote in support of the Paris Commune?

  a The Holy Family

  b The German Ideology

  c The Civil War In France

  d The Communards – A Defence

  7 Which of these writings is not an explanation of Marx’s economic theory?

  a Value, Price And Profit

  b Wage-Labour And Cap
ital

  c Das Kapital

  d The Holy Family

  8 What year did Marx die?

  a 1888

  b 1894

  c 1902

  d 1883

  Dig deeper

  Terrell Carver, Engels, A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), Oxford University Press 2003

  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford World's Classics) edited, with an introduction by David McLellan, Oxford University Press 2009

  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, full text https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx//works/1845/condition-working-class/

  Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury 2014

  Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, Allen Lane 2009

  Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography, Grove Atlantic 2007

  To dig deeper into all kinds of original documents from the Victorian Era visit http://www.victorianweb.org/

  3

  Marx and philosophy

  In this chapter you will learn:

  • about the philosophers who came before Marx

  • about political economists and Utopian Socialists

  • how they influenced his thinking

  • how he differed from them.

  Marx is seen by some as a great philosopher and by others as a great economist. He was in fact both of these things, although he claimed to have little time for most of the philosophers who went before him: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’, he wrote in a thesis on Feuerbach, the German philosopher. This is sometimes seen as a statement that he was totally against the study of philosophy and saw it as a waste of time. In fact, he believed that philosophy should be made clearer by scientific study and then used to bring about social change.

  His interest in the serious study of philosophy began while at the university in Berlin. His doctoral thesis was written on the contrasts between two ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus. Marx saw parallels between the thoughts of these ancient philosophers and the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel was an important figure in Germany at that time and his ideas were hotly debated by students, who have always enjoyed sitting around discussing what a terrible state the world is in and how they would like to change it. When Marx’s father accused him of ‘debauchery in a dressing gown’ he probably had no idea that his son would be one of the few students who would go on to change the world in a significant way.

  The main debate among the philosophers of the time centred on the differences between the views of idealist and materialist philosophers. To explain this very simply, idealist philosophers assume there is a divine force of some kind which is responsible for the development of ideas and beliefs among mankind; on the other hand, materialist philosophers believe that all ideas and beliefs come out of life and its conditions and not from any divine being or supernatural force.

  The debate between idealists and materialists had been recorded from the time of the ancient Greeks but it had been renewed by the popularity of Hegel in Germany at the time Marx was a student. It is easier to understand the importance of the debate, and of the development of Hegel’s philosophy by Marx, if we look at the development of Western philosophy up to the nineteenth century (the incorporation of Eastern philosophy into European thinking did not really begin until after the death of Marx, becoming popularized in the works of psychologist Carl Jung, 1875–1961, and Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900).

  A brief history of philosophy

  As philosophy tries to explain the truth behind life itself it must have been around for as long as mankind has existed. The earliest people had no means of recording what they believed so we can only surmise that they were superstitious and tried to explain natural phenomena as products of some divine force. Natural elements such as fire and water were worshipped as gods and from this organized religion developed.

  In the Western world, the first philosophers (as we understand the term today) were ancient Greeks who started by criticizing religious beliefs. They used the scientific knowledge that was available to them at the time to explain the world around them and this sometimes brought them into conflict with organized religion and led to persecution.

  The conflict between organized religion and free-thinkers went on for centuries. In Europe the dominance of the Christian Church did not encourage the development of philosophical thought. Anyone who did not agree with orthodox Christian doctrines was likely to be branded as a heretic and tortured to death.

  It was not until the fifteenth century that freer debate began, and it was not until the French and American Revolutions in the eighteenth century that the Church began to lose its dominance over the thoughts of the masses.

  The materialist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries debated the existence of God and whether this could be proved by scientific means. Scientific development at that time was in the fields of mathematics and mechanical laws, for example Newton’s Laws of Motion. This influenced the world view of the philosophers who saw society as fixed and unchanging, believing it followed immutable scientific rules. It meant that people believed they had a fixed place in society which could not be altered. It was not until Hegel developed the idea of the dialectic that people began to understand that nothing was constant and that they themselves had a part to play in influencing the course of history.

  Which philosophers influenced Marx?

  Marx did not arrive at his own philosophy without studying, and being influenced by, those who went before him.

  ‘… And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic economy of the classes.’

  Karl Marx, Abstract from Letter to J. Weydemeyer in New York, 1852 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm

  Philosophers in the distant past, such as Aristotle, had seen the influence of class. Marx analysed the ideas of these ancient philosophers and read voraciously on many subjects. He also met many of the idealists and revolutionaries in Europe who wanted to change society. As he read and digested what they had to say, certain groups of thinkers became more important to him and became part of his own political and economic philosophy. Among these groups there were individuals whose ideas can be seen to have definitely influenced the philosophy of Marx.

  Ancient Greek philosophers

  The study of ancient Greek philosophy was an important part of the education of young Europeans in Marx’s time. It became even more popular in Germany under the influence of Hegel. There were three main ancient Greek influences on Marx’s philosophy.

  Democritus (c.460–c.370 BC) was an ancient Greek materialist philosopher who believed that the world could be explained by scientific laws, although science at the time was not advanced enough for him to be able to prove his theory. He believed that matter was made up of atomic particles, despite there being no means of him proving this. This view of the world meant that he saw that everything was in motion and in a process of change. The majority of other philosophers had the view that matter was fixed and unchanging. This fixed view of the universe continued in mainstream philosophy up until the time of Hegel and influenced the way that people thought about the structure of the world, including institutions such as the Church and State.

  Epicurus (341–271 BC) was a Greek philosopher who believed that if the world operates on mechanical principles then death and the gods are not to be feared. He thought this freedom from fear would allow people to live in peaceful communes devoted to pleasure. His ideas influenced both Marx and Nietzsche.

  Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, scientist and teacher. He was very well read on many diverse subjects and wr
ote a huge number of philosophical works. He tried to integrate all knowledge into a unified philosophical system. It was not until Hegel wrote The Science of Logic in the nineteenth century that anyone else tried to encompass everything into a system of philosophy. Aristotle saw the universe as fixed and unchanging and it was his view that was taken up by the official Church and dominated Western philosophy until after the Middle Ages. He was one of the first people to write that conflict in society often comes from economic conditions and inequality in the structure of society; something that Marx was to develop later.

  European philosophy

  There are many philosophers in a great chain connected to each other through time, each building upon those who have gone before. The connections between the thoughts of philosophers and how they have all influenced each other would be a huge book, so I can only write about a few of the philosophers who appear to have directly influenced what Marx wrote and the way in which he wrote it.