Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  1871–83

  Marx became increasingly disillusioned by public life and became ill and depressed. He still continued to work on the next volumes of Das Kapital. His wife died in 1881 and his oldest daughter, Jenny, died in 1883.

  1884

  Marx died in 1884 of lung disease. He was buried at Highgate cemetery in London. Engels inherited his papers and carried on with his work.

  The writings of Karl Marx

  Marx wrote numerous articles, essays and books in his life. These are the major works that contain his most important thoughts. Although many are not an easy read for the beginner, and not all of them are available from ordinary bookshops, anyone who wants to study Marx in more depth should read as many of his original works as possible. Fortunately most of them are available from good libraries as Lawrence and Wishart began publishing the Collected Works of Marx and Engels in 1975, and there are many cheap editions of Marx’s most important works printed by other publishers. Many original works are also available to view online at www.marxists.org.

  • On the Jewish Question (1844). An essay that is rather anti-Semitic but it sheds some light on Marx’s view of the rights of man.

  • Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). This was intended to be a full critique on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right but the introduction was the only part to be completed. It is an important work because it is here that Marx first discusses the importance of the emancipation of the proletariat.

  • Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844). Also known as the Paris Manuscripts. These were not published until after Marx’s death. The main theme of the manuscripts is the alienation that people suffer in a capitalist society.

  • The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique (1844). This was written with Engels as a criticism of the ideas of the Young Hegelians. The title is a sarcastic reference to the Bauer family. It was first published in Germany and not translated into English until after the deaths of Marx and Engels.

  • Theses on Feuerbach (1845). These are short statements that Marx wrote to show how his materialist philosophy differed from that of Feuerbach. They were published by Engels in 1888. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is engraved on Marx’s gravestone.

  • The German Ideology (1845–46). This was not published until after his death and it was a collaboration with Engels. It is important because it states the theory of the materialist view of history and further discusses alienation in a capitalist world.

  • Communist Manifesto (1848). Written with Engels, for the Communist League, this is one of Marx’s more important and well-known works. The first English translation was made in 1850. It was written as a direct appeal to the workers and so has the feel of propaganda. It describes the capitalist system and the creation of the classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat. It examines the idea of class conflict and calls the workers to revolution. It also gives some idea of how communism could be put into practice.

  • Wage-Labour and Capital (1849). This was produced from lectures given by Marx at German working men’s clubs in Belgium in 1847. These were later published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung as a series that was never finished. Engels updated and revised the work before publishing his translation after Marx died. It explains Marx’s economic theories including the growth of capitalism, how wages and profits are determined, and how this affects the worker.

  • The Eighteenth Bruimare of Louis Bonaparte (1852). This was originally published in Die Revolution, a German language paper published in New York. The Eighteenth Bruimare refers to the date in the French revolutionary calendar on which Napoleon Bonaparte made himself dictator. In 1852 his nephew Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself as Emperor Napoleon the Third. In this article Marx discusses French politics and history from 1848 until 1851, the date of the coup that brought Louis into power. The article is important because it explains his theories of the capitalist state.

  • The Grundrisse (1857–58). These were notes made in preparation for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital, and were not intended for publication. They were first published in Moscow in 1931–41 and were made available in translation in 1953. They are interesting to study because they show how Marx developed his ideas on economic philosophy and history.

  • A Critique of Political Economy (1859). A short piece on economics that is important mainly for the preface, which summarizes the theory of historical materialism.

  • Theories of Surplus Value (1861–63). These were contained in notebooks, and were not published until 1906–08. They are mainly notes for Das Kapital, dealing with the historical perspective of economic theory.

  • Value, Price and Profit (1865). An address given to the First International Workingmen’s Association published after Marx’s death. It explains most of Marx’s economic theory in more simple terms than Das Kapital, including the theory of surplus value.

  • Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867). This is Marx’s most important work, a long and detailed study of economics and its relation to history and society. It also gives evidence of the ways in which capitalists exploit workers.

  • Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). This was a commentary made on the document that was written during the Gotha conference, when two German socialist parties became united. Marx felt that the Gotha programme did not adhere to the precepts of scientific socialism. He wrote the critique in reply, and circulated it among German socialist leaders, but it did not have much effect on the unification that took place. It was published after his death and is one of the few places where he discusses the ways in which a future communist society might be organized.

  • Das Kapital, Volume 2 (1885). This was published by Engels, and was based on notes that Marx left before he died. It gives more detail on economic theory but is rather dry. Unless you are an academic with a great interest in Marx’s economics, it is probably not worth reading.

  • Das Kapital, Volume 3 (1894). This is another work published by Engels from notes made by Marx. It is slightly more interesting than Volume 2, but again it is of more use to academic scholars of economic history than to the beginner.

  Marx on …

  Some extracts from the Communist Manifesto.

  Communism

  ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’

  ‘In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.’

  ‘Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.’

  ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

  Class

  ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’

  ‘Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’

  ‘The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.’

  ‘Society as a whole is splitting into two great camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.’

  ‘The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’

  Bourgeoisie

  ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relation. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to hi
s ‘natural superiors’, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.’

  ‘It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’

  ‘Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.’

  ‘It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

  According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness.’

  ‘The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeois without a proletariat.’

  ‘And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.

  Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.’

  Proletariat

  ‘The proletariat, the modern working class, developed a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce.’

  ‘The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.’

  ‘But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more.’

  ‘This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.’

  ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is the genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.’

  Utopian Socialists

  ‘They reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.

  Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very underdeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.’

  Industrialization

  ‘Steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY.’

  ‘Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.’

  ‘Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage to the machine.’

  Imperialism

  ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’

  ‘It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into its midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’

  Women

  ‘The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.’

  ‘The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally can come to no other conclusion than the lot of being common will likewise fall to the woman.

  He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.’

  ‘Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

  Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common …’

  Family

  ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.’

  ‘By the action of modern industry, all the family ties among the proletariat are torn asunder, and their children are turned into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.’

  Revolution

  ‘But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.’

  ‘The immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.’

  ‘The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’

  ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’

  Answers to fact checks

  Chapter 1

  1c, 2b, 3a, 4a, 5c, 6d, 7d, 8a, 9a, 10c

  Chapter 2

  1a, 2b, 3b, 4d, 5a, 6c, 7d, 8d

  Chapter 3

  1b, 2a, 3d, 4d, 5a, 6d, 7a, 8a, 9b, 10a

  Chapter 4

  1c, 2d, 3b, 4d, 5a, 6b, 7a, 8d, 9a, 10a, 11a

  Chapter 5

  1a, 2a, 3d, 4a, 5a, 6b, 7a, 8b

  Chapter 6

  1b, 2a, 3a, 4a, 5d, 6a, 7a, 8d

  Chapter 7

  1b, 2d, 3a, 4b, 5b, 6d, 7a, 8d, 9a

  Chapter 8

  1b, 2a, 3a, 4b, 5c, 6a, 7b, 8b, 9c, 10a

  Chapter 9

  1c, 2a, 3c, 4a, 5d, 6c, 7a, 8a, 9b

 

 

 
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