KARL MARX:
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
FIRST LECTURE
I.
Workingmen and Workingwomen:
THERE is probably no name in the labor movement today, yes and in the scientific world, which is more revered and idolized than that of the founder of scientific Socialism: Karl Marx. In the proletarian movement the name of Marx has become a synonym for scientific soundness and irrefutable accuracy on the one hand, and also a cloak with which to cover and label the most spurious intellectual wares on the other. In scientific circles practically the same conditions prevail, only with the gratifying exception that here the distorters and corrupters of Marx: the Mallocks, Boehm-Bawerks, Skeltons and Simkhovitches, quickly meet their Waterloo at the hands of a competent Marxian, and are thus prevented from accomplishing any further confusion and material harm. As implied above, in the labor movement or Socialist movement proper the task is not so simple, yes a great deal more difficult, and the reason for this peculiarity is to be found in the astonishing ignorance prevalent amongst so-called Marxian Socialists on matters Marxian; furthermore in the fact that the corrupter and distorter of Marx in this case generally carries on his work, knowingly or unknowingly matters little, in the name of Socialist propaganda or under the cover of Marxism.
With so many of his great predecessors, Karl Marx, in the course of years and through the highly scientific character of his works, has been gradually elevated to the position of an infallible demi-god by veritable legions of adherents. Thousands, yes hundreds of thousands of sincere and well meaning Socialists never tire of acclaiming their allegiance to the teachings of this great economist, but—and this is a most regrettable truth—very rarely will the inquisitive seeker find a disciple amongst these masses who has intelligently read or studied the works of his idol. Nothing is more repulsive and disgusting than just this unqualified Marx-deification: a deification which like all idolatry finds its source in the ignorance of the masses, and a deification which is everything but a tribute to Marx and his teachings. To combat just these godlike conceptions of Marx and to familiarize the workers with the social significance of this truly great individual, is one of the cardinal objects of these lectures.
I fully appreciate the largeness of this task, also the impossibility to present to you even a fair pen-picture of the man, or an adequate synopsis of his theoretical system in the limited time at my disposal. These lectures, therefore, do not lay claim to exhaustiveness, neither are they to be considered a condensed compendium or handbook of Marxism made easy. Socialist literature is already plentifully supplied with works of this kind, many of which are excellent, and still more that would have performed a great service to Socialist clarity had they remained unwritten.
My aim in presenting these lectures is to bring the man and social creature Marx nearer to you. I would like to interest many of my comrades and fellow men in the teachings of this master of Socialist letters. To do this successfully, that is correctly, we must examine the historic conditions and the more immediate social atmosphere out of or in which Marx came to be and developed. By becoming familiar with the life of Marx and the distinct material conditions of which this life was but a product, much of the sanctimonious hero-worship will sink into oblivion, and make room for an intelligent appreciation based upon a sound perception. If I succeed in arousing and stimulating the interest of my auditors to the extent that they will make an effort to study and familiarize themselves with the works of Marx, then I believe the purpose of these lectures has been accomplished.
With these few preliminary remarks as a compass before us, let us embark on our journey into the fields of Marx and Marxism.
It is now practically a half century ago that Marx presented the first volume of his immortal work "Capital" to the world: a work which for the first time, since the inception of the capitalist mode of production, laid bare the laws and forces governing this economic structure. Through the analysis of capitalist production, Marx exposed the source of all profits, and showed this to rest in the appropriation of surplus value from the workers. His theory of surplus value is a most valuable addition to classical political economy, and raises itself upon the theories of value evolved by Petty, Ricardo and Adam Smith, however, also supplemented and perfected by Marx. With the aid of this theory, Marx demonstrated that although the worker under the system of capitalist production receives in the last analysis the full value of his labor-power, he is nevertheless exploited, because he produces in excess of this value, and does not receive the full value of his product.
Going out from the theory of value as evolved by classical political economy of which Ricardo was the last representative, and which formulated that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor time consumed in its production, Marx started to analyze the only thing the worker has left to sell, namely his labor-power, and also stamped this a commodity. And in just this commodity-status of labor-power he conceived the source of all profit and the source of all accumulated wealth. Marx clearly pointed out that the value of the worker's labor-power is determined by the same law that controls the values of all other commodities, namely: that the value of a worker's labor-power is also fixed by the volume of socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodities necessary to maintain the life of a wage-slave, i.e., that the articles—food, clothes, shelter, etc.,—consumed by the worker in order to sustain life, a life that is again fixed by a certain historical and social standard, determine the size of his wage. Marx now shows that due to its physical peculiarities and the wonderful productivity of our age, labor-power is the only commodity which in the process of productive consumption yields far more than its value, i.e., far more than it needs to reproduce itself. He clearly underscored that where all other commodities when consumed yield but the value contained in them, labor-power yields far in excess of its value, because the worker is the only commodity which produces or yields far more than what is consumed in its production. And he concluded that all work performed by the worker in excess of the work necessary to keep him alive, or to produce the value of his wages, is surplus work, or surplus labor appropriated by the purchaser of the worker's labor-power, the capitalist.
With the aid of this theory of surplus value, he was able to explain the cause and nature of the periodical crisis or panic in capitalist society. He predicted that as capitalism developed, the markets in which to dispose of the surplus wares, or in which to realize the surplus value extracted from the workers at home were bound to become scarcer, and the industrial depressions more frequent. And in the contradiction between the ever increasing social aspects of production and the growing features of individual ownership; in the contradiction that increased productivity on the one hand spells increased laziness on the other; in the contradiction between over-production and underconsumption—a contradiction which so graphically illustrates the economic status of the surplus-value sponging idler and the exploited proletarian respectively; and finally in the contradiction between social creation and individual appropriation, a contradiction which is the dynamo of the class struggle, Marx saw the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system of production. By cementing his economic deductions with his philosophical system of historical development, known as the Materialist Conception of History, he was able to clearly outline and formulate the historical mission of the workers, a mission based upon hard economic conditions and clearly flowing from and truly in accord with the class interests of the proletariat. As stated before, these interests he found were but the logical product of the material conditions underlying capitalist production: conditions which were bound to make the workers conscious of their class interests, and develop to such a climax where the expropriation of the expropriators would become a dictate of historic evolution: where individual social property would give way to social individual property, as the next step in the dialectical process of social development.
Practically fifty years have elapsed since the publication of the first volume of "Capital," and the formulation of the theories just touched upon. And on March 14th of this year it will be thirty-four years since Karl Marx has passed from us. In these days of hurry and scurry, thirty-four years seem a veritable age. How many refutations, corrections, revisions, and annihilations of Marxism were we not compelled to witness in this short span of time? Let me again remind you of the Brentanos, Mallocks, Simkhovitches, Skeltons, Boehm-Bawerks, Bernsteins and consorts. Consider the bulky tomes, highly praised by capitalist journals and professorial fossils, they wrote in their valiant attempt to overthrow the theoretical system of Marx; consider how the combined schools of vulgar-economy have thundered for years against the theoretical premises of this proletarian economist; consider how these henchmen of capital, in the face of irrefutable facts and figures, in the face of undeniable conditions, have sought by intimidation and fraud to ignore, stifle and finally corrupt the economic and philosophical deductions of Marx; consider these events well, and then take an inventory of the results accomplished. You will find that the majority of the "learned" books written to refute Marxism have been relegated into oblivion, or, probably, act as dust absorbers on the shelves of various libraries. Of course, the Mallocks, Skeltons and Boehm-Bawerks are still with us and plying their trade vigorously as ever. Are their theoretical effusions, however, taken as serious as of yore? No, they have neutralized the effect of their theoretical vaporings with the poison of their past idiosyncracies, to use a mild term. Only one opponent named above has had the courage of convictions to admit his errors and that was the strongest opponent of Marxism in Europe, the father of Revisionism—Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein has openly admitted himself mistaken in his deductions on capitalist development; since the outbreak of the war he has repudiated Revisionism and Revisionists, and is today the chief collaborator of Karl Kautsky, the foremost exponent of Marxism in the world. At a whole the bourgeois economists, in their attempt to refute Marx's theory of value and surplus value and the logical deductions flowing therefrom, or in their futile efforts to disprove the Materialist Conception of History have failed, yes, miserably failed.
And how many experiments, "practical" experiments along the lines of sugar-coated reforms, social uplift work and philanthropic saps have not been launched, in order to exterminate by practical demonstration the class hatred (understand class-consciousness) inherent in the Marxian conception of society, and so grandly symbolized by the fighting proletariat conscious of its aim. Have these efforts accomplished their task?; have the class cleavages been bridged over, or the antagonism abolished?; is the identity between Capital and Labor today a reality?; and finally, has the class struggle, this diabolical invention of satan, been substituted by social harmony? Has the spectre of Communism ceased to haunt Europe since the issuing of the Communist Manifesto? When we look upon society today, and compare the gigantic accumulations of wealth in the hands of an ever decreasing number of capitalists on the one hand with the, relatively speaking, dependency and misery of an ever growing proletariat on the other; when we compare the colossal struggles between the robbers and the exploited of today with the comparatively pygmean struggles of the past; and when we compare the social relations between the feudal-capitalist and the enslaved worker of our present oligarchic-capitalism with the relations between capitalist and worker of even fifty years ago, then every unbiased student will admit that the class demarcations are sharper drawn, the interests of the conflicting classes more opposed, and the class-struggle raging with greater vigor today than ever before. And, true to the Marxian conception of capitalism, class-lines will continue to become more distinct and the class struggle correspondingly more intensive, the industrial depressions more frequent and the lot of the worker more unsettled, as the capitalist mode of production reaches ever higher forms in its development. To sum up: today, more lucidly than ever, the economic and philosophical deductions and principles of Marx stand verified and vindicated by the force of past experience and the facts of current events—an intellectual oasis in the desert of vulgar-economy.
And the teachings of the founder, of scientific Socialism have not only been verified by the undeniable facts of economic evolution, but also by a corresponding increasing class-consciousness accompanying this inexorable historic process. When Marx went to eternal rest in 1883, already more than the proverbial baker's dozen had declared their allegiance to Socialism: it was the period when hundreds and thousands followed the standard of working-class emancipation—the dawn of modern capitalism, and the embryonic stage in the development of the modern labor movement. Today millions of disinherited all over the globe gather around the banner dedicated to the proletariat by Marx: a banner truly expressive of the demands of economic and social necessity, and symbolizing the ideals and historic mission of the working-class—the destruction of the political class state and the inauguration of the Industrial Republic.
II.
Upon the death of Marx, Frederick Engels wrote amongst others to Wilhelm Liebknecht: "The greatest mind of the second half of our century has ceased to think." He ends his pathetic letter with the following glowing tribute: "Whatever we are, we are through him; and whatever the movement of today is, it is through his theoretical and practical work; without him, we would still be stuck in the mire of confusion."
These words may seem pretentious and illogical, especially when uttered by a Historical Materialist, but when we consider the scientific reputation of their author, they command attention and respect. They seem more so pretentious, when we consider that the nineteenth century was particularly representative of great men. Was this not also the century that produced a Darwin, a man who achieved the same results in the field of biology that immortalized Marx's name in the annals of the social sciences? Just as Marx investigated and laid bare the great motive forces and the social laws which actuate and propel the development of society from a lower to a higher stage, so Darwin uncovered and pointed out the dynamic powers and laws of nature which compel life in its simplest form to develop endless-chain-like into more complicated organisms. However, when critically comparing Marx with Darwin, it seems to me that Engels' praise is just. In my humble opinion, Marx was the stronger and more diversified personality. In Darwin we celebrate the scholar, who searched and accumulated knowledge for the purpose of knowing and presenting his findings. His field was far away from the social conflict, and his findings, comparatively speaking, did not affect the social destiny and the class interests of certain social layers so vitally, as did the application of the evolutionary principle by Marx to History and Political Economy. In Marx we notice a blending of the earnest and searching scientist, who yearns for clearness and truth, with the man of action and deeds—the revolutionist. Darwin confined himself to, or at least was forced to confine himself to the establishment of the laws actuating life, i.e., to that what was and is in nature. After Marx had discovered the iron laws governing social development, after he had laid down these laws in the textbook of the proletariat, "Capital," he then did not rest satisfied with his achievements. Marx studied in order to place his findings into the service of social development: in order to actively participate in the struggle for the Socialist Commonwealth. He desired to know, so he could act, and he wanted to be well equipped for the task meted out to him and his class-conscious comrades by the unrelenting course of historic events. To him philosophical clarity implied philosophical clarity to the workers; the same as we see all his activity radiating from a class-conscious premise and inaugurated solely for the purpose of abolishing class-rule. He well appreciated, with the aid of the Materialist Conception of History, the great role the proletariat had to play in the advancement of society to a higher stage in civilization; he knew that social evolution had formulated this position of the workers in the social struggle, but he also knew that the workers had first to become conscious of their historic mission in order to fulfill the same successfully—in order to desire to perform the same.
Writing on the relation of philosophy to working-class activity in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), he gives the following piece of advice to his erstwhile friends, the Young-Hegelians: "You can not realize a philosophy without abolishing it." However, he did not forget what he had learned from them, and addressing the bourgeoisie says: "You can not abolish a philosophy without realizing it. Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons. The head of emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. The philosophy can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of philosophy." If the readers will substitute Socialism for the word philosophy, then the last sentence will read: Socialism can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of Socialism.
Before entering upon an examination of the details in Marx's life, details which are as interesting as they are plentiful and which in their totality furnish the sum-total of this turbulent life, let us subject the immediate and also the larger social environment out of which and in which Marx grew and developed to a casual examination. I believe, it is quite essential to have at least a general knowledge of the social and historic background overshadowing and influencing every step in the life of this genius, before you will be able to comprehend and appreciate the detailed phases of his tumultuous career intelligently.
Considering Marx's parentage, Klara Zetkin, a profound Marxian scholar, remarks: "The customary theories fail us, when we propound the question how this great personality, this genial thinker, grew and came to be. The parents of Marx were good and intelligent folks, although in no sense intellectually superior to the average. Neither do the family annals of either mother or father point to any ancestor whose intellectual endowments and characteristics remind us of or are comparable to Marx's."
Wilhelm Liebknecht, who for years shared the hard days of exile with Marx in London, writing on this subject states: "On the 5th of May, 1818, at Treves—the oldest German town—among the monuments of Roman civilization and amid the recent traces of the French Revolution that had cleaned the Rhenish province of medieval rubbish, a son was born in a Jewish family: Karl Marx. Only four years had passed since the province of the Rhine had been occupied by Prussia, and the new masters hastened, in the service of the "Holy Alliance," to replace the Heathenish-French by a Christian-German spirit. The pagan Frenchmen had proclaimed the equal rights of all human beings in the German Rhineland, and had removed from the Jews the curse of a thousand years' persecution and oppression, had made citizens and human beings of them. The Christian-German spirit of the "Holy Alliance" condemned the Heathenish-French spirit of equalization and demanded renovation of the old curse.
"Shortly after the birth of the boy, an edict was issued leaving to all the Jews no other choice but to be baptized or to forego all official position and activity.
"The father of Marx, a prominent Jewish lawyer and notary at the county court, submitted to the unavoidable, and, with his family, adopted the Christian faith.
"Twenty years later, when the boy had grown to be a man, he gave the first reply to this act of violence in his pamphlet on the Hebrew Question. And his whole life was a reply and was the revenge."
"Marx's father," writes Marx's daughter, "was a man of great talent, and thoroughly imbued with the French ideas of the eighteenth century concerning religion, science and art; his mother was descended from Hungarian Jews who had settled in Holland in the seventeenth century. Among his earliest friends and companions were Jenny—later his wife—and Edgar von Westfalen. It was their father—a half Scot—who inspired Marx with his first love for the romantic school; and while his father read Voltaire and Racine to him, Westfalen read Homer and Shakespeare to him. And these remained his favorite authors."
It seems to me that the most desirable potentialities of the Jewish race lived in Marx. We find in him the untiring seeker for truth; the seeker who climbed lonely mountain peaks and strove to wrest from the fiery bush that which humanity has sought and striven for since the daybreak of culture: the knowledge of life. Furthermore, we meet here also the tenacious clinging to convictions, and the joy of faith and devotion to a cause: traits which are all predominant in the Jewish race. Then we find in him the flaming rage against injustice and slavery, and that strong developed brotherly feeling, which, according to a biblical legend, prompted Moses to clench his fist to strike the Egyptian who was maltreating a brother of his race. Nevertheless, all these characteristics do not possess anything typically Jewish or racial, because their uniqueness was not developed in sectarian seclusion, and because they are blended or prompted by a cosmopolitanism utterly foreign to the orthodox sectarian: a cosmopolitanism that tears down the boundaries of creed, color or race, and that expresses itself through the brotherhood of man based on the foundation of economic equality. However, wherever Marx's natural endowments, traits which singularly fitted and are no doubt to a large degree the product of the requirements of the historic hour, may come from matters little, especially when we note that in their manifestations they were always placed into the service of disinterested progress in general and into the cause of that class, ordained to be the vanguard of all progress, in particular—the working-class.
We know that Marx's cradle stood in that part of Germany which had been swept over and thoroughly cleansed of medieval refuse by the liberating and invigorating winds of the French Revolution. And, if we take into consideration that the Rhineland borders closely upon that country, which at the beginning of the fifteenth century was the first to give expression to bourgeois sentiments and interests; a country in which capitalism, still shut up in its feudalic womb, ripened first; a country that in those days produced an Erasmus and a Spinoza—the Netherlands; then it will not surprise you, when I emphasize that the Rhenish Province is today and always has been the most classical seat of capitalism in Germany, ergo, also the most progressive province in Prussia or the German Empire. During Marx's boyhood days, the pulsating throbs of the great French uprising were still felt in the Rhineland, and were graphically visible in the bold stand taken by the bourgeoisie against the powers of reaction—a spirit that remained unbroken and rose to its most magnificent heights in the turbulent days of 1848.
And now we come to a time in which Marx developed and worked to advance his views and ideals: the period of his life, and the period of victorious, advancing capitalism. England had practically achieved the mastery over the markets of the world. France or at least French capitalism was organizing gigantic accumulations of wealth for exploitation. In the sixties, Marx sees how victorious capitalism invades Austria, Italy, yes even Bohemia. He also is compelled to witness the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II., and thus receives valid indications that capitalism has also commenced to revolutionize the empire of the "little father." He further observes how capitalist production spreads across the ocean, and how the new world also succumbs to the irresistible economic forces making for social progress. Everywhere he sees the advancing forces, the dynamic powers of capitalist production, undermining and destroying the old economic foundations, and setting in their place devices more competent to carry on the process of production. And to be sure, these economic revolutions were bound to be followed by corresponding political upheavals whose aim and object it was to adapt the political institutions to meet the requirements of the new and changed economic conditions. The new capitalist society in the making was no exception to the rule: the nineteenth century may be correctly called a century of political revolutions.
In this manner, historical development presented to or spread before the eyes of Marx incomparable economic and political material: data as important to the searching eye of a student as the compass is to the destination of a ship. This development was internationally so plainly conceivable as the growth of plants in a hot-house, and quite naturally attracted the attention and animated the deeper searching intellects of the world to explain the underlying forces of this gigantic process. However, that Marx was able to penetrate and master this large, manifold and chaotic mass of material, that he was able to crystallize the results of his investigation in a manner as clear as crystal, he owes to the German classical philosophy. This philosophy gave him the scientific equipment, the scientific training, without which his achievements would have been impossible.
When the youthful Marx, imbued with an insatiable desire for truth, began to question the laws of social evolution, the sun of classical philosophy and art was already setting in Germany. Her splendour and warmth, however, still permeated the intellectual atmosphere of this period. The grand philosophy of Hegel particularly continued to affect, influence and live on in the progressive minds. This philosophy conceived everything existing or in a state of creation, whether in nature or in society, as the outcome of a harmonious, well regulated process of evolution: an evolution which in its continuous flow destroys and creates, and whose final cause can be conceived in the self-assertion or movement of the absolute idea. According to this conception, evolution is stimulated or whipped on through the struggle of contradictions or antitheses: a struggle which usually or finally is bound to end with the coming together or amalgamation of the conflicting elements into a higher unit. Governed by the idea of evolution, Hegel's philosophy did not approach the objects of its investigation as completed and fixed creations, which are the same in life as in death, but in their rich diversity of growth and decline, i.e., in their various expressions or manifestations of life. This system of research was known as the dialectic method. Young Marx felt in Hegel a congenial intellect, whose teachings attracted him with an irresistible power. These teachings have been a determining factor in his development and work. Marx, more so than any other man, accepted the legacy of Hegel: a legacy which he found in the concept of evolution. However, as Engels so pointedly remarks: he placed this conception, standing on its head, upon the feet. He sought for the driving forces of historic life not outside of nature or society, not in the mystical absolute idea of Hegel, but as far as history is concerned, in society itself: in the conditions of production and exchange. In what manner, however, and with the aid of what forces these conditions manifest themselves and compel recognition, i.e., by what forces economic and social development is impelled, also the laws underlying these movements, upon these questions Marx threw light with the aid of the dialectic mode of investigation: a method which he had accepted from Hegel and applied with a sovereign mastery.
III.
After young Marx had graduated with honors from the Trier Gymnasium, he matriculated at the University of Bonn. It was the fondest wish of his father, to see his son also a member of the legal profession—a wish, however, which was not to be realized. In Bonn he spent several terms without pursuing any definite studies, and in 1836 we find Marx at the University of Berlin. Here he was for the first time brought in contact with Hegel's philosophy and some prominent Young-Hegelians like Bruno Bauer, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, etc., who befriended him. As his interest in these problems and studies grew, his nominal studies or "Brotstudium," as the Germans call the grind for an income, were sadly neglected and removed ever farther from the centre of his work and future plans and aspirations. However, as a dutiful son, he continued these studies, but without any great enthusiasm or success, and for the sole reason of avoiding a conflict with his father and to create a source of income for the future. He was also a passionate lover and bethrothed to Jenny von Westfalen, his slightly senior playmate and the prettiest and most refined damsel in Trier. When we peruse some of the youthful poems of Marx, we can about realize the consuming love which he cherished for his beloved, and also how anxiously he looked forward to their wedding day, and how gladly he would have presented a safe and sunny future as a wedding gift to his Jenny.
However, stronger than every other desire there burned in Marx a yearning for knowledge—a desire to know. With an insatiable thirst he entered upon the study of the various sciences, however, specializing in philosophy and history. He consulted scholarly treatises, contemporary life and closely dissected and questioned scientific systems. Overstudy and also the gruelling inner conflict between the feverish wish for clarity and the inexorable duty endangered his health. The future was also beclouded by a threatening conflict with his father. An early death of Heinrich Marx, however, saved Marx from these ungratifying scenes. The youth remained steadfast in his determination. With tenacious perseverance, he devoted himself to his purposes and aims in life; he battled bravely with the sciences; toiled endlessly and unceasingly to achieve results; and he was rewarded for his untiring efforts, not over night mind you, but after many years of profound and conscientious research. Craving for knowledge and desirous of doing things, Marx, as a disciple of Hegel, delved through history, and particularly the history of his time, in search for the absolute idea: the idea that governs and propels everything in life. He desired to study the manifestations of this force in the intellectual progress of the people, in the form and institutions of social life; he desired to vision direction and aim of its effect clearly, in order to be able to serve evolution conscientiously. However, this process of self-enlightenment netted him at first, outside of a few fruitful doubts, only some starting points to his later conception of history. Only after years he found, instead of the absolute idea, the real driving power behind social development; he found the force that has shaped, determined and influenced ideas in history ever since the day society was organized upon private-property, namely: the class-struggles, which again are unchained and have their origin and aim in the conditions of production and exchange prevailing in a community at a certain historic period.
Before he was able to arrive at above conclusions, before he could formulate his findings into a clear and scientific theory, conditions compelled him to discontinue his studies, and with a dissertation on the "Philosophy of Epicure" he graduated, although not present, from the University of Jena in 1841, receiving the degree of doctor of philosophy. He had hoped and harbored the fond ambition to serve the cause of intellectual freedom, by becoming a lecturer at one of the German universities, but the dismissal of his friend Bruno Bauer in Bonn showed this anticipation to be a dream: a fata-morgana in a desert of bureaucratic intolerance. And when we today compare these events with conditions in our universities and other seats of learning, when we take the disciplining and the spectacular and unwarranted dismissal of Scott Nearing from the University of Pennsylvania as an analogy, we will be compelled to conclude that these institutions are as of yore dominated by class interests of the bourgeoisie and everything else but agencies of free thought and investigation. Academic liberty always was and is a fetish upon whose altar high-sounding phrases are sacrificed, but which like so many of our "inalienable rights" is in reality but one of the many conventional lies. In the face of these insurmountable obstacles, Marx decided to become a writer. In 1842, still residing in Bonn, he started to contribute to the "Rheinische Zeitung," published in Cologne, and whose editorship he shortly afterwards assumed. This paper was founded by a circle of class-conscious capitalists of the Rhineland; it was intended to be the official organ of the Rhenish bourgeoisie, and as such advocated in a moderate form such constitutional changes and liberties, as conceived by and were to the benefit of the capitalist class. It sulked against the so-called god-ordained powers of monarchy, aristocracy and bureaucracy; but as a whole the paper presented a somewhat lame opposition—but it was at least an opposition to the forces of reaction so dominant and provokingly brutal in Prussia before the memorable March days of 1848. Under the editorial guidance of Marx, this opposition gained in force and sharpness. He stormed against the censorship and advocated its abolition, voicing the demand for a free and unfettered press. As a political writer, he severely criticized the proceedings of the Rhenish Diet, and we also detect here the first manifestations of an awakening interest in Man: in economic conditions. He earnestly grapples with these problems to obtain a clear conception, but also feels here the insufficiency of Hegel's philosophy. The problem of the lumber thefts and the poverty amongst the wine-growers on the Mosel furnished Marx with actual material in this connection. These peasants had been alternately exploited and oppressed by the officials of the god-ordained government and unscrupulous usurers, and found in Marx a warm and fearless attorney. The struggle in behalf of these impoverished peasants was a thorn in the sides of the government, and only tended to swell the already lengthy list of treasonable offences and undesirable acts committed by this now formidable opponent. Shortly and upon explicit decree of Wilhelm IV. the suppression of the "Rheinische Zeitung" was ordered. Marx was practically now without any means of support and also, and that depressed him still more, without a field of public activity, and without the least possibility of creating such a field in Germany. In less than two years, it had forcefully dawned upon Marx that any work which aimed at the liberation of Germany from feudal domination was nigh impossible on German soil. He, consequently, decided to go to Paris—the center of political life and libertarian aspirations. Before his departure, he was wedded to Jenny von Westfalen after a courtship of seven years.
The material basis for the support of the family in Paris was to be created by the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher ("German-French Annals"), which Marx contemplated publishing in collaboration with Arnold Ruge. The "Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher" were to be a forum for the free expression and cultivation of radical thought; the periodical was to be a literary gauntlet thrown down to the conservative and sterile elements in Europe; and finally aimed to become a factor in the marshalling, organizing and intellectually clarifying the republican or democratic forces in Germany. As such, the annals were bound to become a medium for the continuation, development and perfection of Marx's search and studies of the driving forces and laws in social life. In this connection it may be of interest to cite the following lines of a letter which Ruge addressed to Feuerbach on this subject. Amongst others Ruge writes: "We intend to publish the "German-French Annals" in a foreign country, and desire to discard entirely the mediocre scholastic junk of the old almanachs with the end in view of uniting ourselves with prominent Frenchmen like Leroux, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, may be Lamartine—Lammendis and Cormenin are probably neither procurable or usable—to such an extent, as to have them directly contribute to the journal (French can be read by everybody) and also to function on the editorial board. The title and prospect we will then issue together, and thus suddenly set up the intellectual alliance of these two nations." The first and last copy of the "German French Annals" appeared in March, 1844, as a double number; it consisted of 236 pages, and contained contributions from Marx, Engels, Ruge, Heine, Bakunin, Herwegh, Feuerbach and several others. A series of causes is responsible for the early failure of this most creditable venture. First the financial resources of the undertaking were insufficient and practically consumed in the publication of the first issue. Secondly, the conditions in Germany were not conducive to the life and development of the periodical. In Germany its circulation was forbidden, and the smuggling of the books over the border was attended with heavy costs and ungratifying difficulties. Neither did the collaboration of the French writers, as anticipated and solicited, materialize. Finally the break and everlasting disagreement of Marx with Ruge was a tributary cause which aided in undermining the young life of the periodical. Marx, who through his historic philosophical conception was daily creating a wider gulf between himself and his associates, was unable to accept or subscribe to the views of Ruge on many important topics, until these differences culminated into an open quarrel that finally led to a severance of connections. These tempestuous days of strife and uncertainty reached their climax, when in 1845 Marx was expelled from Paris by the liberal government of that fossilized citizen-king, Louis Phillipe. Behind this act the untiring efforts of the Prussian government were plainly visible: a government which in this surreptitious manner sought to gratify its base lust for revenge on the hated and much feared revolutionist.
Poor in material possessions but rich in intellectual values, Marx and his young wife were compelled to leave Paris in search of a new exile. In Paris he definitely concluded his discourse with Hegelianism, i.e., with the Hegelian conception that proclaimed the absolute idea as the driving force in historic evolution. The great French Revolution served him as a mine of historic treasures from which he drew lesson after lesson of social significance. And the profound study of this gigantic epoch in the evolution of mankind, so ably laid down in "The Holy Family; or a Critical Critique against Bruno Bauer and his Followers," finally ripened his materialist conception of history. In the manifestations of this period of colossal upheavals, he found the real potential force that set the idea in motion, the force behind all ideological activity, and the force which was the generator of this as well as all previous historical dramas, namely: the struggle of classes. And the formulation of this conception also furnished him with an explanation of the passionate and turbulent life in Paris—a life which was but the forerunner of the February revolution. With the aid of the material gathered in Paris, he was able to estimate the value which the elements of production and exchange played in social evolution, and finally concluded that these were the ultimately determining forces, the so-called basic powers, in social development. In his book "The Holy Family," addressing his erstwhile Hegelian comrades on this subject, he scornfully hurls the following expressive questions at them: "Do these gentlemen think that they can understand the first word of history so long as they exclude the relations of man to nature, natural science and industry? Do they believe that they can actually comprehend any epoch without grasping the industry of the period, the immediate method of production in actual life?"
Equipped with this theoretical key, Marx was able to discern, dissect and explain the complicated and confused political atmosphere in France as well as in the other European countries. Everywhere the powerful rays shed by the searchlight of Historical Materialism penetrated the superficial but popular misconceptions of political issues; everywhere they laid open the deeper, underlying laws of social activity; and everywhere they traced the basic force, animating this activity and formulating these issues, to the material conditions in society. And when Marx ascertained the factors governing social activity and found them to rest in the prevailing system of production of a given historic period, then he had also found answer to the question of the ultimate outcome of the class war: an. answer that contained the goal and course for future working-class activity.
It is to Frederick Engels that Marx owes the fruitful suggestions which led to this epoch-making and revolutionary discovery. Engels, filled with libertarian aspirations and in his "Sturm und Drang" phase of life, had come to Paris in 1844. He became acquainted with Marx and quickly attached to him. This acquaintance was to result into a lifelong friendship: a friendship that was to be cemented by many years of literary collaboration and activity in the labor movement, and which furnishes silent testimony to the beautiful devotion with which these master-minds served the cause embodying their principles and ideals—the cause of the disinherited and exploited workers. Engels was also a graduate from the Hegelian school. It was, however, not History which had sharpened and trained his vision to perceive the laws of social development, but the industrial conditions of highly developed capitalist England. Engels was the son of a prominent manufacturer in Barmen, a highly developed industrial city in the Rhenish Province, who entertained quite some business relations with England and had a branch office of his undertaking in Manchester. Actual business practice had given him a thorough insight into the structure and the various phases of capitalism, and upon this solid foundation he based his final conceptions of the role played by the conditions of production and exchange in historical evolution. In conjunction with these practical observations, the fearful effects of the capitalist system in England flashed the importance of private ownership under capitalist production upon his mind, and exposed to him the source of the innumerable contradictions so peculiar to capitalist society. Following these thoughts to their logical conclusion, it was but natural, and also only the consequence of a firmly established historical conception, to conceive of the economic necessity of converting the private ownership in the means of production into communistic property. And in the above rough, imperfect and still vague conclusions and appreciations, we can see the raw material out of which the Materialist Conception of History was constructed, and which together with this theory furnished the basic elements necessary for the establishment of scientific Socialism. It was up to Marx and Engels to clarify, amplify and develop these elementary truths, and this they have masterfully accomplished in the many years of joint efforts. Today the fruit of these efforts can be seen in the classical Socialist philosophy: a philosophy which has withstood the onslaughts of the master-minds of bourgeois intelligence; a philosophy, which furnishes scientific and incontrovertible knowledge appertaining to the cause, goal, driving forces and course of historic life; and a philosophy which is truly the beaconlight of the proletariat in its struggle for emancipation.
The intellectual struggle of these two men for clarity, this slow process full of doubt, speculation and relentless self-criticism, has been productive of brilliant documents. In these days Marx wrote "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie" (a criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Law), "Zur Judenfrage" ("The Jewish Question"), being a reply to Bruno Bauer's metaphysical treatment of the subject as visioned by a historical materialist, and "Die Heilige Familie" ("The Holy Family") to which I have already referred in the preceding paragraph, and to which also Engels contributed. From Engels we find "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie" ("An Outline to a Critique of Political Economy"), "Die Lage Englands" ("England's Situation"), and later that masterly sociological study "Die Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse in England" ("The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844").
During his short stay in Paris, Marx also familiarized himself with the various systems and sects of the French Socialists. Particularly in these years of revolutionary unrest, their teachings enjoyed quite some popularity in Paris, especially amongst the workers and the small bourgeois. To Marx, as a student of all social manifestations, these Socialist tendencies were intensely interesting. He had received but meagre and incomplete news of these activities in Germany, and as a conscientious investigator and student, he was averse to forming an opinion or reaching a conclusion until the actual facts were at his disposal and had been examined. His stay in Paris enabled him to receive first hand information, and to study the theoretical and practical aspects of these movements at their original sources. The first product of this diligent work was his sharp criticism of Proudhon's book "La Philosophie de la Misere" ("The Philosophy of Poverty"), published in 1846. This critical work appeared in Brussels in 1847, under the significant title "La Misere de la Philosophie" ("The Poverty of Philosophy"). Aside from the important fact, that this book completely shattered an obsession with which even up to this late day some Socialists and particularly Anarchists are still taken up, namely that abject poverty is the generator of and a prerequisite to revolutionary vitality, it also contained the first comprehensive exposition of Historical Materialism. Here in his quest for knowledge, Marx for the first time came in close contact with Socialist and revolutionary workingmen—an intercourse which was to be of far-reaching importance to his future work.
Driven out of Paris in 1845, Marx turns his steps towards Brussels. Completely disregarding his really precarious material conditions, and in the face of dire poverty, harassed by the police, Marx continues his activities as a serious student and indefatigable fighter. With an enthusiasm that recognized no bounds, he worked amongst the progressive elements in the labor movement of this city, and to the critical analysis of Proudhon's middle-class Utopianism, he adds a scathing refutation of the confused, hazy sentimental German Communism of the Weitling school. His lectures on "Wage-Labor and Capital," held before a Democratic Workingmen's Club, and the speech on "Free Trade"; also the treatise on "Free Trade or Protective Tariff," published in the "Deutschen Brüsseler Zeitung," show the marked and growing interest which Marx begins to manifest for economic problems. We note here the penetrating thoroughness with which he visualizes and dissects capitalist production, in order to intelligently appreciate its historic character, and in order to be able to define and deduce therefrom the position of the proletariat to the miscellaneous questions of the day. Through their untiring activity and distinguished faculties, Marx and Engels quickly became the centre of a brilliant circle of intellectuals in Brussels. This circle was made up of heterogeneous elements, including impatient Democrats and Socialists from the various parts of Germany, amongst them Wilhelm Wolf, to whom Marx later dedicated his masterpiece "Capital," Moses Hess, Robert Weitling, Ferdinand Freiligrath and others. And through his personal agitation and influence, even more so than through his contributions to the "Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung," Marx shaped and molded the intellectual development of these German, Russian and French exiles and revolutionists, and thus actually prepared and assisted in whipping on the evolution of things in these countries. In the Rhineland, Westphalia, Silesia and other parts of Germany his friends and disciples were openly or secretly carrying on the propaganda, always in the thickest of the fray, and thus their call and agitation very ominously announces the approach of the revolutionary year.
The first victory for Marxist principles—a victory of international magnitude—was scored, when Marx and Engels received an encouraging invitation from England. London had been for years the seat of a society calling itself the League of the Just. This organization was composed of revolutionary elements of various shades, and had been originally a conspiratory society devoted to the Young German idea, an offshoot of Mazzini's Young Europe agitation. In 1847, when Marx and Engels were invited to join the league, this organization represented the only internationally organized expression of the European proletariat. Its principles were a mixture of French-English Communism evolved and born with the aid of German philosophy: They were teachings as mysterious and hazy as the mystery with which their propagators surrounded themselves. After a thorough discussion with Joseph Moll, a representative of the League, Marx and Engels decided to join the organization, and reorganize the movement along lines fully in accord with their principles: the principles of scientific Socialism in the making. These principles of Marx in 1847, as today, strove and aimed primarily at the political unification of the laboring classes into a compact proletarian political party, pursuing a definite revolutionary aim, flowing from a clear and scientific conception of the workers' position in society. As we have seen, these principles were not the result of abstract Utopian speculations, evolved as a protest against the barbaric injustice and inhumanity of bourgeois society, and proclaiming to be the only true offspring of pure reason, divine justice and true humanity, but were rather the product of a thorough analysis of the capitalist mode of production: an analysis which exposed the origin of profit or surplus value, and thereby projected the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Of course, such principles based upon the bedrock of sound economics were bound to collide with the Utopianism on the one hand and the Nihilism on the other of the various intellectuals in the League of the Just. Marx anticipated this conflict, but was also convinced that the abstract speculative idiosyncracies of a Cabet or Weitling were no match for the coherent and irrefutable arguments and recommendations contained in the "Communist Manifesto." In November and December Marx and Engels attended a Congress of the League in London, and the message of Marx, which he recommended as the theoretical basis and working programme of the organization and which was practically a rough draft of the famous Manifesto, was received with great enthusiasm. The secret organization of the League of the Just was reorganized into a propaganda society calling itself the Communist League. Marx and Engels were authorized to draw up a document setting forth the fundamental principles of the League; and at the beginning of that stormy, revolutionary year of 1848 the most remarkable and epoch-making document in the annals of history appeared, a document in which the working-class for the first time since the inception of modern capitalism proclaimed itself the deadly enemy of bourgeois society: The Communist Manifesto.
In the "Communist Manifesto" we view the concerted efforts of Marx and Engels to present to the world a concise and scientific summary of their ideas. This document can without any undue exaggeration be called the birth certificate of scientific Socialism, and was destined to become the declaration of industrial emancipation for the world's workers. In the "Communist Manifesto" for the first time scientific Socialism speaks to the world, and proudly it proclaims its distinctive difference when compared with the childish antics of Utopian Socialism or Democratic Reformism. In a masterly manner and on a grand scale historical development is here analyzed, and the causes and forces actuating this process are exposed to the reader. This also leads to a dissection and scathing criticism of the capitalist order, winding up with the convincing demonstration that capitalist society bears within its womb the material germs of Communism; also that this society at the same time rears in the working-class the might necessary to execute the inexorable dictate of historical evolution. And in order to make the workers conscious of their historic mission, this masterpiece of keen scientific analysis, conciseness and literary beauty concludes with that world-renowned battle-cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
To quote the words of Klara Zetkin, a celebrated German Marxist: "The Communist Manifesto, aside from its historic and political significance, will remain a conspicuous monument in the literature of the world; as long as thoughts possess a sense and words have a sound."