#marx200

(Karl Marx and his wife Jenny had three children who lived to reach adulthood – daughters Jenny, Laura and Eleanor. Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), who came to London in 1865 after being banned from all French universities for student activism, married Laura Marx there in 1868 and, back in France after 1882, was one of the founders of French Socialism (which was much later to split into the Communist and Socialist parties). Lafargue served a term in the French Chamber of Deputies and a couple of brief terms in jail as a political prisoner. His writings include The Right To Be Lazy (La droit à la paresse, completed in prison in 1883), on the importance of reduced hours of work. The nineteenth century had a Romantic image of what a “genius” should be like, but probably Lafargue did not have to exaggerate very much to make his account of Marx fit. What we print here is excerpted from his longer essay on Marx, written in 1890, as republished in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, no date), pages 71-74.)

I met Karl Marx for the first time in February 1865. The First International had been founded on September 28, 1864 at a meeting in Saint Martin’s Hall, London, and I went to London from Paris to give Marx news of the development of the young organization there. M. Tolain, now a senator in the bourgeois republic, gave me a letter of introduction.

I was then 24 years old. As long as I live I shall remember the impression that first visit made on me. Marx was not well at the time. He was working on the first book of Capital, which was not published until two years later, in 1867. He feared he would not be able to finish his work and was therefore glad of visits from young people. “I must train men to continue communist propaganda after me,” he used to say.

Karl Marx was one of the rare men who could be leaders in science and public life at the same time: these two aspects were so closely united in him that one can understand him only by taking into account both the scholar and the socialist fighter.

Marx held the view that science must be pursued for itself, irrespective of the eventual results of research, but at the same time that a scientist could only debase himself by giving up active participation in public life or shutting himself up in his study or laboratory like a maggot in cheese and holding aloof from the life and political struggle of his contemporaries.

Paul Lafargue in 1871. [Public Domain]

“Science must not be a selfish pleasure,” he used to say. “Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity.” One of his favourite sayings was: “Work for humanity.”

Although Marx sympathized profoundly with the sufferings of the working classes, it was not sentimental considerations but the study of history and political economy that led him to communist views. He maintained that any unbiased man, free from the influence of private interests and not blinded by class prejudices, must necessarily come to the same conclusions.

Yet while studying the economic and political development of human society without any preconceived opinion, Marx wrote with no other intention than to propagate the results of his research and with a determined will to provide a scientific basis for the socialist movement, which had so far been lost in the clouds of utopianism. He gave publicity to his views only to promote the triumph of the working class, whose historic mission is to establish communism as soon as it has achieved political and economic leadership of society. [...]

Marx did not confine his activity to the country he was born in. “I am a citizen of the world,” he used to say; “I am active wherever I am.” And in fact, no matter what country events and political persecution drove him to – France, Belgium, England – he took a prominent part in the revolutionary movements which developed there.

However, it was not the untiring an incomparable socialist agitator but rather the scientist that I first saw in his study in Maitland Park Road. That study was the centre to which Party comrades came from all parts of the civilized world to find out the opinion of the master of socialist thought. One must know that historic room before one can penetrate into the intimacy of Marx’s spiritual life.

It was on the first floor, flooded by light from a broad window that looked out on to the park. Opposite the window and on either side of the fireplace the walls were lined with bookcases filled with books and stacked up to the ceiling with newspapers and manuscripts. Opposite the fireplace on one side of the window were two tables piled up with papers, books and newspapers; in the middle of the room, well in the light, stood a small, plain desk (three foot by two) and a wooden armchair; between the armchair and the bookcase, opposite the window, was a leather sofa on which Marx used to lie down for a rest from time to time. On the mantelpiece were more books, cigars, matches, tobacco boxes, paperweights and photographs of Marx’s daughters and wife, Wilhelm Wolff and Frederick Engels.

Marx was a heavy smoker. “Capital,” he said to me once, “will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.” But he was still heavier on matches. He so often forgot his pipe or cigar that he emptied an incredible number of boxes of matches in a short time to relight them.

Jenny Laura Marx. (n.d.) [Public Domain]

He never allowed anybody to put his books or papers in order – or rather in disorder. The disorder in which they lay was only apparent, everything was really in its intended place so that it was easy for him to lay his hand on the book or notebook he needed. Even during conversations he often paused to show in the book a quotation or figure he had just mentioned. He and his study were one: the books and papers in it were as much under his control as his own limbs.

Marx had no use for formal symmetry in the arrangement of his books: volumes of different sizes and pamphlets stood next to one another. He arranged them according to their contents, not their size. Books were tools for his mind, not articles of luxury. “They are my slaves and they must serve me as I will,” he used to say. He paid no heed to size or binding, quality of paper or type; he would turn down the corners of the pages, make pencil marks in the margin and underline whole lines. He never wrote on books, but sometimes he could not refrain from an exclamation or question mark when the author went too far. His system of underlining made it easy for him to find any passage he needed in any book. He had the habit of going through his notebooks and reading the passages underlined in the books after intervals of many years in order to keep them fresh in his memory. He had an extraordinarily reliable memory which he had cultivated from his youth according to Hegel’s advice by learning by heart verse in a foreign language he did not know.

He knew Heine and Goethe by heart and often quoted them in his conversations; he was an assiduous reader of poets in all European languages. Every year he read Aschylus in the Greek original. He considered him and Shakespeare as the greatest dramatic geniuses humanity ever gave birth to. His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters. His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist; his three daughters knew many of his works by heart. When after 1848 he wanted to perfect his knowledge of English, which he could already read, he sought out and classified all Shakespeare’s original expressions. He did the same with part of the polemical works of William Cobbett, of whom he had a high opinion. Dante and Robert Burns ranked among his favourite poets and he would listen with great pleasure to his daughters reciting or singing the Scottish poet’s satires or ballads.

Let us begin this evening, by raising our glasses to Karl Marx, who was born on May 5th, 1818 – 200 years ago today.    

As Frederick Engels said at his funeral, a short lifetime later:  “His name and his work will endure through the ages.” So it has, and so it will.

Karl Marx’s titanic stature in human history derives from his monumental contributions to science, and to scientific socialism, and the theory and organization of the revolutionary working class movement, the organization of the Communist League, and the International Working Men’s Association – political organizations of the working class that could lead this revolutionary and world-wide struggle for socialism and for communism.

As Engels said at Marx’s funeral,

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact [...] that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must there be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case."

"Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist method of production and the bourgeois society that this method of production has created”,

Engels continued.

“The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem [...] which all previous investigators, both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping (for) in the dark."*

“Two such discoveries would be enough for one life-time,” said Engels.

“Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated – and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially – in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.

This was the man of science. But this was not even half the man.  Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced a quite other kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry and in the general course of history. [...] For Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, of the conditions under which it could win its freedom.  Fighting was his element.  And he fought with a passion, a tenacity, and a success such as few could rival.”

Lithograph of Marx as a student in 1834. [Public Domain]

Marx started life as the son of German Jews, his father a lawyer and his mother of Dutch background. According to his daughter, Eleanor, his favourite authors were Racine and Voltaire, Shakespeare and Homer. He was born in the small German town of Trier and received his university education in Bonn and Berlin, moving from law to philosophy and receiving his PhD degree in 1841. Already critical-minded, he began to write for various liberal newspapers. At the age of 24 he was offered the editorship of one of these – the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. His incisive criticism of governmental reaction in its pages infuriated the official censors, until in 1843 the Rheinische Zeitung was closed down by the government.

Marx’s observation two years later, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it,” is universally recognized as a call to action – as a call to link revolutionary theory to revolutionary organization and action.

After a seven-year engagement, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843, and they moved to Paris, keeping just ahead of the forces of the law. They had several children, two of whom died at a young age, leaving three daughters. All of his daughters were named Jenny after their mother, and with the exception of the eldest daughter, who was known as Jenny, the other two daughters were known by their second names or the affectionate nicknames given to them in the family. Marx’s third daughter, Eleanor Marx was a Marxist writer and agitator in her own right.

It was after his marriage in 1843 that Marx began to write pro-communist theoretical works, the first of which was The Holy Family, which he wrote with Engels. This was a satirical critique of post-Hegelian idealism and his former mentor Bruno Bauer in particular. Shortly after, he moved (under duress) to Brussels, where in 1847 he wrote the lectures later published as Wage Labour and Capital and also The Poverty of Philosophy, in response to Pierre Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, and he joined a conspiratorial hole-in-the-wall organization which became the Communist League. He transformed this organization into a revolutionary vanguard in the short space of three years.

Marx paid the rent from writing articles for various progressive journals, which was generally insufficient, leaving the family in poverty throughout this period of their lives. Marx’s closest friend and collaborator Frederick Engels came to support the family financially, especially after his father’s death, when he was able to take his share out of the family textile business and retire from employment there. Engels also left generous bequests to Marx’s surviving children in his will.

In January 1848 Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, which was the theoretical and political program of the Communist League, just prior to the 1848-49 wave of revolutions across Europe. The Manifesto was written in German, but in the 170 years since then, it has been translated into just about every language in the world. The Manifesto famously declares, in clear and uncompromising words:

“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."

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite.”

Marx was just 30 years old when the Manifesto was written.

With Europe in flames, Marx then went back to Cologne and edited the New Rheinische Zeitung (Neue Rheinische Zeitung – subtitled Organ of the Democracy). This newspaper was a revolutionary-democratic opponent of the monarchical government but not a socialist or communist publication, though on the day it was shut down in 1849 its final issue was printed in red ink with an appeal to the workers of Cologne.  

As the liberal and democratic revolutions were defeated across Europe, Marx moved to London, where he lived in exile for the rest of his life, spending much of his time writing and communicating with the revolutionary working class movements across Europe and in the U.S.A.

The Communist League survived until 1852, when the Berlin government, now firmly back in power, hunted down its Central leadership, then located in Cologne, arresting and trying them in the Cologne Communist Trials. Seven of their leaders were imprisoned in a fortress with sentences of three and up to seven years. The League was then dissolved by its remaining members, terrorized by the police.

Marx’s theoretical and popular writings, pamphlets, meetings, and agitation in revolutionary circles in Cologne, Paris, Brussels and London did not sit well with the bourgeois governments and ruling classes of Europe that he regularly identified as the source of war, reaction, and social misery, and the main obstacle to social progress and working class advance. This was topped off, as far as Europe’s ruling class was concerned with the formation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, as a new wave of working class struggle began to unfold.

Members of the French section of the I.W.A. – the First International – were active in the Paris Commune rising of 1871. This was the first time in history that the working class held power anywhere – if only for a brief two months – before being destroyed and vilified by Europe’s ruling classes. The I.W.A.’s strong defence of the Commune – The Civil War in France, written by Marx – for the first time brought it and him to wide public attention. But the I.W.A. was reluctantly  wound up in 1873, as the class struggle waned once  more.

While studying at the British Museum, Marx wrote many leaflets and pamphlets attacking, for instance, Lord Palmerston’s government in the U.K. Palmerston  posed as a defender of the people internationally, but in fact consistently backed the interests of British capitalism.

It was in the British Museum library also that Marx developed his theory of surplus value first set out in his book, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. In 1867 Marx published Volume I of Capital (Das Kapital) in German in the city of Hamburg. The next two volumes were published after his death by his close friend Frederick Engels and have been translated into every major language around the world since.

The collected writings of Marx and Engels, comprising 50 volumes in English, were  published, starting in 1975, by a three-way collaboration, including International Publishers of New York.

The Rules of the International Working Men’s Association of 1864 set out the main tasks and objectives of today’s International Communist Movement,

“Considering:

> That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule;

> That the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopolizer of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all of its forms of social misery, mental degradation and political dependence;

> That all efforts aiming at that great end have hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries;

> That the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical of the most advanced countries;

> That the present revival of the working classes in the most industrious countries of Europe, while it raises a new hope, gives solemn warning against a relapse into the old errors, and calls for the immediate combination of the still disconnected movements;

“For these reasons the International Working Men’s Association has been founded.”

Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848. [E. Capiro | Public Domain]

Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, and one hundred and thirty-five years after his death, the international working class has passed through many trials, many struggles, the most significant of which was the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in November 1917 under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The Russian Revolution sent shock waves through the capitalist world, shaking the capitalist system to its core. To the international working class movement, the red revolution sparked a grassfire of hope, energy and solidarity, and led to the creation of revolutionary Communist Parties around the world.  Revolution was in the air, and had to be stamped out in Russia, according to Winston Churchill, who famously called for governments to “smash the Bolshevik eggs in the nest and not wait until Bolshevik chickens are hatched all over the world”. The Canadian government accused Lenin of being a German agent, while the Catholic Church pronounced him to be a devil.

Working people around the world rallied in “Hands Off Russia” campaigns that in many countries, including Canada, involved the trade unions and workers’ organizations of the time. In Alberta, this included the Alberta Federation of Labour which in February 1919 unanimously passed a resolution in support of the Russian Revolution, which read, in part:

“Resolved that that this convention of the Alberta Federation of Labour places itself on record as being in full accord and sympathy with the aims and purposes of the Russian and German socialist revolutions, and

"Be It Further Resolved that this convention gives the incoming executive officers full power to call a province-wide general strike should the allied powers persist in their attempt to overthrow the Soviet administration in Russia or Germany or in any country in which a Soviet form of government is or may be established.”

Heady stuff indeed! When Marx died in 1883 there had been another massive outpouring of grief and tributes from all over the world.  One of the biggest events was held in New York at the Cooper Union Meeting, where thousands were turned away because the hall couldn’t hold all those who came to offer their respects and hear the tributes.

Since the overthrow of socialism in the USSR and a large part of the socialist system of states, imperialism has crowed – once again – that socialism is dead, that Marxism is dead – that capitalism is eternal – that we have reached the end of history.

The people of Cuba would disagree – now in the 60th year of their socialist revolution – just 90 miles away from US imperialism – from the Empire.

The people of China would also disagree – now in the 70th year of their socialist revolution – with a quarter of the world’s population, a rapidly expanding economy, and holding more than $1.17 trillion of US government debt.

The people of Vietnam would disagree, 43 years after militarily defeating the U.S. – the most powerful imperialist country in the world.

The people of the DPRK of North Korea would also disagree, as they reject US imperialism’s threats to “totally destroy” the Korean Peninsula – threats made by Trump at the UN last winter as his campaign for “regime change” went full-tilt.

The people of Syria, Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Libya, Venezuela, Brazil, and many other countries seeking their own path of social and economic development, independence, and sovereignty, including some who choose the socialist path, would also not agree.  These countries and peoples too are threatened with regime change, or are already facing the US war machine and US aggression.

And what about Canada? Working people across Canada are also facing a foreign policy of active involvement in US / NATO and EU dirty wars.  We are being told that military spending will increase by 70% this decade, along with more financial commitments to NATO – imperialism’s global army.  Workers are facing real levels of unemployment that are startling, and real wages that have fallen or stagnated while prices and corporate profits have skyrocketed.  This is the reality in the advanced capitalist countries today. This is what is underneath workers’ growing anger with capitalist governments, corporations, and institutions. Their anger is well-founded, and has found outlets in the Occupy movement, in Idle No More, in the Women’s march, in the Quebec student strike, in the illegal US teachers’ strikes, and in the rising of the Indigenous peoples. It’s found a voice in widespread support for Bernie Sanders in the U.S., and for Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., people who call themselves socialists though they are not scientific socialists, they are not Marxists, and they do not call for overthrowing the capitalist state and instituting social ownership of the economy. Yet they reflect the growing interest in socialism around the globe, and the growing demand for fundamental social change.

In fact, Marx’s laws of capitalist development are being exposed in horrendous full colour and detail, as US imperialism dictates how the world’s peoples, nations and states will live or when and how they will die. The conditions of the working class, even in the most developed capitalist countries, have deteriorated to the point that force and war are increasingly the tools capitalist governments reach for to maintain the rule of capital in their countries.  In Europe, far-right and fascist parties are electing MPs and governments, while right-wing populism and reaction – linked to far-right and fascist forces – are gaining ground in Canada and the U.S.

For millions, including millions in the advanced capitalist countries, capitalism isn’t working. Working people are desperately searching for an alternative, expressed in the idea that “another world is possible”. We can add – “and urgent.”

Nuclear war and irreversible climate change are new phenomena since Marx’s time, which have objectively speeded up the necessity of revolutionary transformation. What is missing is the mass influence of the revolutionary movement and the consciousness on the part of the working class of its historic mission to overthrow capitalism, and to establish working class power: socialism.

This revolutionary movement has not died out as a result of the great loss of the USSR and the other socialist states of the twentieth century, but it has been ferociously attacked, vilified, distorted and undermined by the actions of imperialism globally and in each country. The history of socialism has been distorted and perverted, the role of the world’s Communist and progressive movements has been distorted and perverted, as imperialism desperately seeks to extend its life, and continuously expand its rate of profit.

As Marx noted, there are waves in the class struggle which count as setbacks and advances for the working class and its allies through history. The current defensive position of the working class is historically temporary because capitalism cannot survive its built-in contradictions. It has produced its own grave-diggers: the working class; it has outlived its usefulness and is rotting. But it will not fall of its own accord. It requires the active conscious revolutionary action of the working class to finally topple it and to create a new society in which exploitation and oppression are assigned to the garbage bin of history.

The good news? Capitalism is already pregnant with socialism!  

Left panel of the "History of Mexico" mural by Diego Rivera on a stairway of the Palacio Nacional (National Palace) in México City. (2012) [Public Domain]

When Marx died, Engels said at his graveside, “Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time.”

The revolutionary Wilhelm Liebknecht responded:  

“True.  He was the most hated, but he was also the most loved.  Most hated by the oppressors and exploiters of the people; best loved by the oppressed and exploited, as far as they are conscious of their situation.”

Our job today is make the oppressed and exploited conscious of their situation, and armed with scientific socialism, to win socialism in Canada and around the globe.

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

We have a world to win!

* This is a reference to Marx’s scientific insight that rent, interest and profit can all be considered together as the proceeds of exploiting workers’ labour, though divided among different capitalists. In a letter to Engels written on August 24, 1867, after sending the corrected proofs of Capital to the publisher, Marx wrote,

“The best points in my book are: 1. the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value [...] 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. [...] The treatment of the particular forms in classical political economy, where they are for ever being jumbled up together with the general form, is an olla potrida [a hotchpotch].”

(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 42, page 407.)

Marx was born on May 5, 1818. This year his anniversary is being celebrated around the world, on account of what he gave us. It wasn’t his “far-sighted vision”, although he had that. He was far from the first to envisage a sharing society free from capitalist domination. And it was not his turn to the working class to achieve such an outcome. Numbers of communist workers had figured that out before Marx did. He was able to learn from them.

There was dialectical thought before Marx, and there was materialism before Marx. And others before him had identified class struggles in society, present and historical.

In a letter of March 5, 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx wrote,

“Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 39, pages 62-65)

Mass classes of the oppressed prior to the Industrial Revolution were scattered geographically and ignorant. By Marx’s day, however, the class of toilers was coming to be,

“disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”

(Capital I, chapter 32, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, page 750)

Workers’ daily experience on the job in modern industry prepares them with a collectivity and discipline so as to act together effectively upon coming to see the need. And modern capitalism is a teacher as well by unavoidably producing recurrent crises capable of shaking people out of their normal conservative caution. That’s what makes the workers’ eventual takeover inevitable.

As Marx’s brilliant co-worker Frederick Engels put it in 1880,

“Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. [...]

“This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of to-day. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation.”

(Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, III, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 24, page 310)

Of course, the crises capitalism produces vary widely in severity. They hit much harder in the Third World than in imperialist countries like Canada. And not all workers get the collectivity and discipline instilled in them on the job that industrial workers do. How much your job instills that in you is of course going to be a matter of degree. Miners’ capability for solidarity is famous, for example. Miners know they depend on each other every day for their lives. But different workers’ work can be less or be more collectivizing. All workers, though, have an interest in acting together to resist the boss class.

Recurrently and unevenly, capitalism smartens people up and forces them into action. Other class systems in history have had their day, and the eventual end of the capitalist system is certain also, although the historical path to that result in different countries will necessarily depend on many particular causes hard to foresee. But we can know that our efforts too are an indispensable part of this process.

Happy birthday, comrade Karl!

Danny Goldstick is the editor of The Spark!