Karl Marx
Frederick Engels
[1893]
What follows is a brief biographical sketch of Karl Marx based
on Engels' version written at the end of July 1868 for the
German literary newspaper Die Gartenlaube -- whose
editors then decided against using it.
Engels rewrote it around July 28, 1869, and it was published in
Die Zukunft, No. 185, August 11, 1869. Translated by
Joan and Trevor Walmsley
|
It has become the habit in Germany to regard Ferdinand Lassalle as
the founder of the German workers' movement. And yet nothing could
be less correct. If six or seven years ago in all the manufacturing
districts, in all the major towns, the centres of the working
population, the proletariat flooded to see him in vast numbers, and
his journeys were triumphal processions which the reigning princes
might have envied -- had the ground not been quietly fertilized
beforehand for it to bear fruit so rapidly? If the workers acclaimed
his teachings, was this because those teachings were new to them, or
because they had long been more or less familiar to the thinkers
amongst them?
Life moves quickly for today's generation and they are quick to
forget. The movement of the forties, which culminated in the
revolution of 1848 and ended with the reaction of 1849 to 1852, has
already been forgotten together with its political and socialist
literature. It is therefore necessary to recall that before and
during the revolution of 1848 there existed amongst the workers,
precisely in western Germany, a well-organised socialist party,
which broke up after the Cologne Communist trial it is true, but
whose individual members continued quietly to prepare the ground of
which Lassalle later took possession. One must further recall that
there existed a man who, as well as organising that party, had
devoted his life's work to the scientific study of what was called
the social question, i.e. the critique of political economy, and
even prior to 1860 had published some of the significant results of
his researches. [i.e., A Contribution to the Cntique of
Political Economy] Lassalle was a highly talented and
well-educated fellow, a man of great energy and almost boundless
versatility; he was clearly cut out to play a part in politics
whatever the circumstances. But he was neither the initial founder
of the German workers' movement, nor was he an original thinker.
Everything he wrote was derived from elsewhere, not without some
misunderstandings either; he had a forerunner and an intellectual
superior, whose existence he kept a secret, of course, whilst he
vulgarised his writings, and the name of that intellectual superior
is Karl Marx.
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier,where he
received a classical education. He studied jurisprudence at Bonn and
later in Berlin, where, however, his preoccupation with philosophy
soon turned him away from law. In 1841, after spending five years in
the "metropolis of intellectuals", he returned to Bonn
intending to habilitate. At that time the first "New Era"
was in vogue in Prussia. Frederick William IV had declared his love
of a loyal opposition, and attempts were being made in various
quarters to organise one. Thus the Rheinische Zeitung was
founded at Cologne, with unprecedented daring Marx used it to
criticise the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly, in
articles which attracted great attention. At the end of 1842 he took
over the editorship himself and was such a thorn in the side of the
censors that they did him the honour of sending a censor [Wilhelm
Saint-Paul] from Berlin especially to take care of the Rheinische
Zeitung. When this proved of no avail either the paper was made
to undergo dual censorship, since, in addition to the usual
procedure, every issue was subjected to a second stage of censorship
by the office of Cologne's Regierungspräsident [Karl Heinrich
von Gerlach]. But nor was this measure of any avail against the "obdurate
malevolence" of the Rheinische Zeitung, and at the
beginning of 1843 the ministry issued a decree declaring that the
Rheinische Zeitung must cease publication at the end of the
first quarter. Marx immediately resigned as the shareholders wanted
to attempt a settlement, but this also came to nothing and the
newspaper ceased publication.
His criticism of the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly
compelled Marx to study questions of material interest. In pursuing
that he found himself confronted with points of view which neither
jurisprudence nor philosophy had taken account of. Proceeding from
the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it
was not the state, which Hegel had described as the "top of the
edifice", but "civil society", which Hegel had
regarded with disdain, that was the sphere in which a key to the
understanding of the process of the historical development of
mankind should be looked for. However, the science of civil society
is political economy, and this science could not be studied
in Germany, it could only be studied thoroughly in England or
France.
Therefore, in the summer of 1843, after marrying the daughter of
Privy Councillor von Westphalen in Trier (sister of the von
Westphalen who later became Prussian Minister of the Interior) Marx
moved to Paris, where he devoted himself primarily to studying
political economy and the history of the great French Revolution. At
the same time he collaborated with Ruge in publishing the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, of which, however only one issue was to appear.
Expelled from France by Guizot in 1845, he went to Brussels and
stayed there, pursuing the same studies, until the outbreak of the
February revolution. Just how little he agreed with the commonly
accepted version of socialism there even in its most
erudite-sounding form, was shown in his critique of Proudhon's mayor
work Philosophie de la misère, which appeared in 1847
in Brussels and Paris under the title of The Poverty of
Philosophy. In that work can already be found many essential
points of the theory which he has now presented in full detail. The
Manifesto of the Communist Party, London, 1848, written before
the February revolution and adopted by a workers' congress in
London, is also substantially his work.
Expelled once again, this time by the Belgian government under
the influence of the panic caused by the February revolution Marx
returned to Paris at the invitation of the French provisional
government. The tidal wave of the revolution pushed all scientific
pursuits into the background; what mattered now was to become
involved in the movement. After having worked during those first
turbulent days against the absurd notions of the agitators, who
wanted to organise German workers from France as volunteers to fight
for a republic in Germany, Marx went to Cologne with his friends and
founded there the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which appeared
until June 1849 and which people on the Rhine still remember well
today. The freedom of the press of 1848 was probably nowhere so
successfully exploited as it was at that time, in the midst of a
Prussian fortress, by that newspaper. After the government had tried
in vain to silence the newspaper by persecuting it through the
courts -- Marx was twice brought before the assizes for an offence
against the press laws and for inciting people to refuse to pay
their taxes, and was acquitted on both occasions -- it had to close
at the time of the May revolts of 1849 when Marx was expelled on the
pretext that he was no longer a Prussian subject, similar pretexts
being used to expel the other editors. Marx had therefore to return
to Paris, from where he was once again expelled and from where, in
the summer of 1849, [about August 26 1849] he went to his present
domicile in London.
In London at that time was assembled the entire fine fleur
[flower] of the refugees from all the nations of the continent.
Revolutionary committees of every kind were formed, combinations,
provisional governments in partibus infidelium, [literally:
in parts inhabited by infidels. The words are added to the title of
Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in
non-Christian countries; here it means "in exile"] there
were quarrels and wrangles of every kind, and the gentlemen
concerned no doubt now look back on that period as the most
unsuccessful of their lives. Marx remained aloof from all of those
intrigues. For a while he continued to produce his Neue
Rheinische Zeitung in the form of a monthly review (Hamburg,
1850), later he withdrew into the British Museum and worked through
the immense and as yet for the most part unexamined library there
for all that it contained on political economy. At the same time he
was a regular. contributor to the New- York Tribune, acting,
until the outbreak of the American Civil War, so to speak, as the
editor for European politics of this, the leading Anglo-American
newspaper.
The coup d'état of December 2 induced him to write a
pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New
York, 1852, which is just now being reprinted (Meissner, Hamburg),
and will make no small contribution to an understanding of the
untenable position into which that same Bonaparte has just got
himself. The hero of the coup d'état is presented here as he
really is, stripped of the glory with which his momentary success
surrounded him. The philistine who considers his Napoleon III to be
the greatest man of the century and is unable himself how this
miraculous genius suddenly comes to be making bloomer after bloomer
and one political error after the other -- that same philistine can
consult the aforementioned work of Marx for his edification.
Although during his whole stay in London Marx chose not to thrust
himself to the fore, he was forced by Karl Vogt, after the Italian
campaign of 1859, to enter into a polemic, which was brought to an
end with Marx's Herr Vogt (London, 1860). At about the same
time his study of political economy bore its first fruit: A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One,
Berlin, 1859. This instalment contains only the theory of money
presented from completely new aspects. The continuation was some
time in coming, since the author discovered so much new material in
the meantime that he considered it necessary to undertake further
studies.
At last, in 1867, there appeared in Hamburg: Capital. A
Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. This work contains the
results of studies to which a whole life was devoted. It is the
political economy of the working class, reduced to its scientific
formulation. This work is concerned not with rabble-rousing
phrasemongering, but with strictly scientific deductions. Whatever
one's attitude to socialism, one will at any rate have to
acknowledge that in this work it is presented for the first time in
a scientific manner, and that it was precisely Germany that
accomplished this. Anyone still wishing to do battle with socialism,
will have to deal with Marx, and if he succeeds in that then he
really does not need to mention the dei minorum gentium."
["Gods of a lesser stock;" meaning, celebrities of lesser
stature.]
But there is another point of view from which Marx's book is of
interest. It is the first work in which the actual relations
existing between capital and labour, in their classical form such as
they have reached in England, are described in their entirety and in
a clear and graphic fashion. The parliamentary inquiries provided
ample material for this, spanning a period of almost forty years and
practically unknown even in England, material dealing with the
conditions of the workers in almost every branch of industry women's
anti children's work, night work, etc.; all this is here made
available for the first time. Then there is the history of factory
legislation in England which, from its modest beginnings with the
first acts of 1802, has now reached the point of limiting working
hours in nearly all manufacturing or cottage industries to 60 hours
per week for women and young people under the age of 18, and to 39
hours per week for children under 13. From this point of view the
book is of the greatest interest for every industrialist.
For many years Marx has been the "best-maligned" of the
German writers, and no one will deny that he was unflinching in his
retaliation and that all the blows he aimed struck home with a
vengeance. But polemics, which he "dealt in" so much, was
basically only a means of self-defence for him. In the final
analysis his real interest lay with his science, which he has
studied and reflected on for twenty-five years with unrivalled
conscientiousness, a conscientiousness which has prevented him from
presenting his findings to the public in a systematic form until
they satisfied him as to their form and content, until he was
convinced that he had left no book unread, no objection
unconsidered, and that he had examined every point from all its
aspects. Original thinkers are very rare in this age of epigones;
if, however, a man is not only an original thinker but also disposes
over learning unequalled in his subject, then he deserves to be
doubly acknowledged.
As one would expect, in addition to his studies Marx is busy with
the workers' movement; he is one of the founders of the
International Working Men's Association, which has been the centre
of so much attention recently and has already shown in more than one
place in Europe that it is a force to be reckoned with. We believe
that we are not mistaken in saying that in this, at least as far as
the workers' movement is concerned, epoch-making organisation the
German element -- thanks precisely to Marx -- holds the influential
position which is its due.