Karl Marx Essay, Research Paper
Essay on Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children.
His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a man of the
Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in
agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born Henrietta
Pressburg, was from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were
descended from a long line of rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl
was born, his father–probably because his professional career
required it–was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church.
Karl was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth
Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical, sometimes
radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish background
exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him
to question the role of religion in society and contributed to his
desire for social change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in Trier.
Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils, the school was
under police surveillance. Marx’s writings during this period
exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion and a longing for self-sacrifice
on behalf of humanity. In October 1835 he matriculated at the
University of Bonn. The courses he attended were exclusively in the
humanities, in such subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the
history of art. He participated in customary student activities, fought
a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and disorderly. He
presided at the Tavern Club, which was at odds with the more
aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets’ club that
included some political activists. A politically rebellious student
culture was, indeed, part of life at Bonn. Many students had been
arrested; some were still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly
as a result of an effort by students to disrupt a session of the Federal
Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a year and in
October 1836 enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and
philosophy.
Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel’s
philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young
Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel’s doctrines;
when Marx fell sick it was partially, as he wrote his father, “from
intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested.” The
Hegelian pressure in the revolutionary student culture was powerful,
however, and Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose
members were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a
young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the
Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human
fantasies arising from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a
historical person. Marx enrolled in a course of lectures given by
Bauer on the prophet Isaiah. Bauer taught that a new social
catastrophe “more tremendous” than that of the advent of
Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving
rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in the
Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the
universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839. Marx’s
“most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph Rutenberg, an older
journalist who had served a prison sentence for his political
radicalism, pressed for a deeper social involvement. By 1841 the
Young Hegelians had become left republicans. Marx’s studies,
meanwhile, were lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a
doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to
be lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in April
1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference
between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. More
distinctively, it sounded a note of Promethean defiance:
Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’
admission: “In sooth all gods I hate,” is its own
admission, its own motto against all gods, . . .
Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the
calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was much
influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des Christentums
(1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach. Its
author, to Marx’s mind, successfully criticized Hegel, an idealist
who believed that matter or existence was inferior to and dependent
upon mind or spirit, from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint,
showing how the “Absolute Spirit” was a projection of “the real man
standing on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s
dialectic–the idea that all things are in a continual process of change
resulting from the conflicts between their contradictory
aspects–with Feuerbach’s materialism, which placed material
conditions above ideas. (See dialectical materialism.)
In January 1842 Marx began contributing to a newspaper newly
founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was the liberal
democratic organ of a group of young merchants, bankers, and
industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the most industrially
advanced section of Prussia. To this stage of Marx’s life belongs an
essay on the freedom of the press. Since he then took for granted
the existence of absolute moral standards and universal principles of
ethics, he condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying
into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and malevolent
mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient mind. He believed
that censorship could have only evil consequences.
On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a variety of
social and economic issues, ranging from the housing of the Berlin
poor and the theft by peasants of wood from the forests to the new
phenomenon of communism. He found Hegelian idealism of little use
in these matters. At the same time he was becoming estranged from
his Hegelian friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a
sufficient mode of social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the
“liberal-minded practical men” who were “struggling step-by-step
for freedom within constitutional limits,” succeeded in trebling his
newspaper’s circulation and making it a leading journal in Prussia.
Nevertheless, Prussian authorities suspended it for being too
outspoken, and Marx agreed to coedit with the liberal Hegelian
Arnold Ruge a new review, the Deutsch-franz sische Jahrb cher
(”German-French Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after an engagement of seven
years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an attractive,
intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years older than Karl;
she came of a family of military and administrative distinction. Her
half-brother later became a highly reactionary Prussian minister of
the interior. Her father, a follower of the French socialist
Saint-Simon, was fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed
the marriage. Marx’s father also feared that Jenny was destined to
become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the young couple moved to Paris,
which was then the centre of socialist thought and of the more
extreme sects that went under the name of communism. There,
Marx first became a revolutionary and a communist and began to
associate with communist societies of French and German
workingmen. Their ideas were, in his view, “utterly crude and
unintelligent,” but their character moved him: “The brotherhood of
man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility
of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies,” he wrote
in his so-called “+konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem
Jahre 1844″ (written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were not
published for some 100 years, but they are influential because they
show the humanist background to Marx’s later historical and
economic theories.)
The “German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but through
their publication Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a contributor
who was to become his lifelong collaborator, and in their pages
appeared Marx’s article “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie” (”Toward the Critique of the Hegelian
Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion that religion is the
“opium of the people.” It was there, too, that he first raised the call
for an “uprising of the proletariat” to realize the conceptions of
philosophy. Once more, however, the Prussian government
intervened against Marx. He was expelled from France and left for
Brussels–followed by Engels–in February 1845. That year in
Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
Marx, Karl
Brussels period
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s
collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, Eng., where a branch factory of his father’s textile firm
was located, all the depressing aspects of the Industrial Revolution.
He had also been a Young Hegelian and had been converted to
communism by Moses Hess, who was called the “communist rabbi.”
In England he associated with the followers of Robert Owen. Now
he and Marx, finding that they shared the same views, combined
their intellectual resources and published Die heilige Familie
(1845; The Holy Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism
of the theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die deutsche
Ideologie (written 1845-46, published 1932; The German
Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their important
materialistic conception of history, which set out to show how,
historically, societies had been structured to promote the interests of
the economically dominant class. But it found no publisher and
remained unknown during its authors’ lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and, through
confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class
movement, established his intellectual standing. In 1846 he publicly
excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic
appeals. Marx insisted that the stage of bourgeois society could not
be skipped over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism;
the workers’ movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic
phrases. He also polemicized against the French socialist thinker
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Mis re de la philosophie (1847; The
Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on Proudhon’s book
subtitled Philosophie de la mis re (1846; The Philosophy of
Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such
contraries as competition and monopoly; he hoped to save the good
features in economic institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx,
however, declared that no equilibrium was possible between the
antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were
transient historic forms determined by the productive forces: “The
handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill, society
with the industrial capitalist.” Proudhon’s mode of reasoning, Marx
wrote, was typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the
underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to write their
pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a secret
society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of emigrant
German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to formulate a
political program. They sent a representative to Marx to ask him to
join the league; Marx overcame his doubts and, with Engels, joined
the organization, which thereupon changed its name to the
Communist League and enacted a democratic constitution.
Entrusted with the task of composing their program, Marx and
Engels worked from the middle of December 1847 to the end of
January 1848. The London Communists were already impatiently
threatening Marx with disciplinary action when he sent them the
manuscript; they promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It
enunciated the proposition that all history had hitherto been a history
of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist
conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and
asserted that the forthcoming victory of the proletariat would put an
end to class society forever. It mercilessly criticized all forms of
socialism founded on philosophical “cobwebs” such as “alienation.”
It rejected the avenue of “social Utopias,” small experiments in
community, as deadening the class struggle and therefore as being
“reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate measures as first steps
toward communism, ranging from a progressive income tax and the
abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. It closed
with the words, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries,
unite!”
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months of 1848,
in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been invited to Paris by a
member of the provisional government just in time to avoid
expulsion by the Belgian government. As the revolution gained in
Austria and Germany, Marx returned to the Rhineland. In Cologne
he advocated a policy of coalition between the working class and
the democratic bourgeoisie, opposing for this reason the nomination
of independent workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly and
arguing strenuously against the program for proletarian revolution
advocated by the leaders of the Workers’ Union. He concurred in
Engels’ judgment that The Communist Manifesto should be
shelved and the Communist League disbanded. Marx pressed his
policy through the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly
founded in June 1849, urging a constitutional democracy and war
with Russia. When the more revolutionary leader of the Workers’
Union, Andreas Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him
and organized the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August
1848. When the king of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in
Berlin, Marx called for arms and men to help the resistance.
Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support from Marx’s newspaper,
and he himself was indicted on several charges, including advocacy
of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial he defended himself with the
argument that the crown was engaged in making an unlawful
counterrevolution. The jury acquitted him unanimously and with
thanks. Nevertheless, as the last hopeless fighting flared in Dresden
and Baden, Marx was ordered banished as an alien on May 16,
1849. The final issue of his newspaper, printed in red, caused a
great sensation.
Early years in London
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August
1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life. Chagrined by the
failure of his own tactics of collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie,
he rejoined the Communist League in London and for about a year
advocated a bolder revolutionary policy. An “Address of the
Central Committee to the Communist League,” written with Engels
in March 1850, urged that in future revolutionary situations they
struggle to make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding
subservience to the bourgeois party and by setting up “their own
revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any new bourgeois
one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would shortly lead to a
revival of the revolutionary movement; when this hope faded, he
came into conflict once more with those whom he called “the
alchemists of the revolution,” such as August von Willich, a
communist who proposed to hasten the advent of revolution by
undertaking direct revolutionary ventures. Such persons, Marx
wrote in September 1850, substitute “idealism for materialism” and
regard
pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of
actual conditions. While we say to the workers: “You