Marx was a German social scientist and revolutionary, whose analysis of capitalist society laid the theoretical basis for the political movement bearing his name. Marx’s main contribution lies in his emphasis on the role of the economic factor the changing way in which people have reproduced their means of subsistence—in shaping the course of history. This perspective has had a considerable influence on the whole range of social sciences.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born in the town of Trier in the Moselle district of the Prussian Rhineland on 5 May 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both his father’s and his mother’s sides. His father, a respected lawyer in Trier, had accepted baptism as a Protestant in order to be able to pursue his career. The atmosphere of Marx’s home was permeated by the Enlightenment, and he assimilated a certain amount of romantic and early socialist ideas from Baron von Westphalen—to whose daughter, Jenny, he became engaged in 1835 and later married. In the same year he left the local gymnasium, or high school, and enrolled at the University of Bonn. He transferred the following year to the University of Berlin, where he soon embraced the dominant philosophy of Hegelianism. Intending to become a university teacher, Marx obtained his doctorate in 1841 with a thesis on post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy.
From 1837 Marx had been deeply involved in the Young Hegelian movement. This group espoused a radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, a liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed to him by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism. In October 1842 he became editor, in Gologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by Rhenish industrialists. Marx’s incisive articles, particularly on economic questions, induced the government to close the paper, and he decided to emigrate to France.
Paris was then the centre of socialist thought and on his arrival at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the shortlived Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, which was intended to form a bridge between nascent French socialism and the ideas of the German radical Hegelians. It was also in Paris that Marx first formed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels. During the first few months of his stay in Paris, Marx rapidly became a convinced communist and set down his views in a series of manuscripts known as the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). Here he outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labour under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in co-operative production. For the first time there appeared together, if not yet united, what Engels described as the three constituent elements in Marx’s thought—German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics. It is above all these Manuscripts which (in the west at least) reoriented many people’s interpretation of Marx—to the extent of their even being considered as his major work. They were not published until the early 1930s and did not attract public attention until after the Second World War; certain facets of the Manuscripts were soon assimilated to the existentialism and humanism then so much in vogue, and presented an altogether more attractive basis for non-Stalinist socialism than textbooks on dialectical materialism.
Seen in their proper perspective, these Manuscripts were in fact no more than a starting-point for Marx an initial, exuberant outpouring of ideas to be taken up and developed in subsequent economic writings, particularly in the Grundrisse (1857–8) and in Das Kapital (1867). In these later works the themes of the ‘1844 Manuscripts’ would certainly be pursued more systematically, in greater detail, and against a much more solid economic and historical background; but the central inspiration or vision was to remain unaltered: humankind’s alienation in capitalist society, and the possibility of emancipation—of people controlling their own destiny through communism.
Because of his political journalism, Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844. He moved (with Engels) to Brussels, where he stayed for the next three years. He visited England, then the most advanced industrial country in the world, where Engels’s family had cotton-spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels, Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history. This he set out in a manuscript known as The German Ideology (also published posthumously); its basic thesis was that ‘the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production’. Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one—capitalism and its replacement by communism.
At the same time that he was engaged in this theoretical work, Marx became involved in political activity and in writing polemics (as in Misère de la Philosophic (1847) (The Poverty of Philosophy) against what he considered to be the unduly idealistic socialism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon. He joined the Communist League, an organization of German émigré workers with its centre in London, for which he and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the league in London at the end of 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848) (Manifesto of the Communist Party), a declaration that was to become the most succinct expression of their views. Scarcely was the Manifesto published when the 1848 wave of revolutions broke in Europe.
Early in 1848, Marx moved back to Paris, where the revolution had first erupted. He then went on to Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. This widely influential newspaper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy. Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship, since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. With the ebbing of the revolutionary tide, however, Marx’s paper was suppressed. He sought refuge in London in May 1849, beginning the ‘long, sleepless night of exile’ that was to last for the rest of his life.
On settling in London, Marx grew optimistic about the imminence of a fresh revolutionary outbreak in Europe, and he rejoined the rejuvenated Communist League. He wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, entitled Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 (1850) (The Class Struggles in France) and Der achzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1852) (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). But he soon became convinced that ‘a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis’, and devoted himself to the study of political economy to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in three-room lodgings in the Soho district of London and experienced considerable poverty. The Marxes already had four children on their arrival in London, and two more were soon born. Of these, only three survived the Soho period. Marx’s major source of income at this time (and later) was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from his father’s cotton business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles he wrote as foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Legacies in the late 1850s and early 1860s eased Marx’s financial position somewhat, but it was not until 1869 that he had a sufficient and assured income settled on him by Engels.
Not surprisingly, Marx’s major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857–8 he had produced a mammoth 800-page manuscript—a rough draft of a work that he intended should deal with capital, landed property, wage-labour, the state, foreign trade, and the world market. This manuscript, known as Grundrisse (Outlines), was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, entitled Theorien über den Mehrwert (1861–3) (Theories of Surplus Value), that discussed his predecessors in political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in Volume 1 of Das Kapital, devoted to a study of the capitalist process of production. Here he elaborated his version of the labour theory of value, and his conception of surplus value and exploitation that would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of capitalism. Volumes 2 and 3 were largely finished in the 1860s, but Marx worked on the manuscripts for the rest of his life. They were published posthumously by Engels. In his major work, Marx’s declared aim was to analyse ‘the birth, life and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another, superior order’. In order to achieve this aim, Marx took over the concepts of the ‘classical’ economists that were still the generally accepted tool of economic analysis, and used them to draw very different conclusions. Ricardo had made a distinction between use-value and exchange-value. The exchange-value of an object was something separate from its price and consisted of the amount of labour embodied in the objects of production, though Ricardo thought that the price in fact tended to approximate to the exchange-value. Thus—in contradistinction to later analyses—the value of an object was determined by the circumstances of production rather than those of demand. Marx took over these concepts, but, in his attempt to show that capitalism was not static but an historically relative system of class exploitation, supplemented Ricardo’s views by introducing the idea of surplus-value. Surplus-value was defined as the difference between the value of the products of labour and the cost of producing that labour-power, that is, the labourer’s subsistence; for the exchange-value of labour-power was equal to the amount of labour necessary to reproduce that labour-power and this was normally much lower than the exchange-value of the products of that labour-power.
The theoretical part of Volume 1 divides very easily into three sections. The first section is a rewriting of the Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859) (Critique of Political Economy) and analyses commodities, in the sense of external objects that satisfy human needs, and their value. Marx established two sorts of value—usevalue, or the utility of something, and exchange-value, which was determined by the amount of labour incorporated in the object. Labour was also of a twofold nature according to whether it created use-values or exchange-values. Because ‘the exchange-values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all’, and the only thing they shared was labour, then labour must be the source of value. But since evidently some people worked faster or more skilfully than others, this labour must be a sort of average ‘socially necessary’ labour time. There followed a difficult section on the form of value, and the first chapter ended with an account of commodities as exchange values, which he described as the ‘fetishism of commodities’ in a passage that recalls the account of alienation in the Pariser Manuskripte (1844) (Paris Manuscripts) and (even more) the Note on James Mill. ‘In order’, said Marx here, ‘to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mistenveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.’ The section ended with a chapter on exchange and an account of money as the means for the circulation of commodities, the material expression for their values and the universal measure of value.
The second section was a small one on the transformation of money into capital. Before the capitalist era, people had sold commodities for money in order to buy more commodities. In the capitalist era, instead of selling to buy, people had bought to sell dearer: they had bought commodities with their money in order, by means of those commodities, to increase their money.
In the third section Marx introduced his key notion of surplus value, the idea that Engels characterized as Marx’s principal ‘discovery’ in economics. Marx made a distinction between constant capital which was ‘that part of capital which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and instruments of labour, and does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value’ and variable capital. Of this Marx said: ‘That part of capital, represented by labour power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to the circumstances.’ This variation was the rate of surplus value around which the struggle between workers and capitalists centred. The essential point was that the capitalist got the worker to work longer than was merely sufficient to embody in the product the value of the labour power: if the labour power of workers (roughly what it cost to keep them alive and fit) was £4 a day and workers could embody £4 of value in the product on which they were working in eight hours, then, if they worked ten hours, the last two hours would yield surplus value—in this case £1.
Thus surplus value could arise only from variable capital, not from constant capital, as labour alone created value. Put very simply, Marx’s reason for thinking that the rate of profit would decrease was that, with the introduction of machinery, labour time would become less and thus yield less surplus value. Of course, machinery would increase production and colonial markets would absorb some of the surplus, but these were only palliatives and an eventual crisis was inevitable. These first nine chapters were complemented by a masterly historical account of the genesis of capitalism which illustrates better than any other writing Marx’s approach and method. Marx particularly made pioneering use of official statistical information that came to be available from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.
Meanwhile, Marx devoted much time and energy to the First International—to whose General Council he was elected on its foundation in 1864. This was one of the reasons he was so delayed in his work on Das Kapital. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual congresses of the International and in leading the struggle against the anarchist wing of the International led by Mikhail Bakunin. Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872—a move that Marx supported—led to the swift decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871, when the citizens of Paris, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets—entitled Address on The Civil War in France (1871)—which was an enthusiastic defence of the activities and aims of the Commune.
During the last decade of his life Marx’s health declined considerably, and he was incapable of the sustained efforts of creative synthesis that had so obviously characterized his previous work. Nevertheless, he managed to comment substantially on contemporary politics in Germany and Russia. In Germany he opposed, in his Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei (1875) (Critique of the Gotha Programme), the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Leibknecht and August Bebel to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interest of a united socialist party. In Russia, in correspondence with Vera Sassoulitch, he contemplated the possibility of Russia’s bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village council or mir. Marx, however, was increasingly dogged by ill health, and he regularly travelled to European spas and even to Algeria in search of recuperation. The deaths of his eldest daughter and of his wife clouded the last years of his life, and he died in London on 13 March 1883.
The influence of Marx, so narrow during his lifetime, expanded enormously after his death. This influence was at first evident in the growth of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, but reached worldwide dimensions following the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Paradoxically, although the main thrust of Marx’s thought was to anticipate that a proletarian revolution would inaugurate the transition to socialism in advanced industrial countries, Marxism was most successful in developing in Third-World countries, such as Russia or China. Since the problems of these countries are primarily agrarian and the initial development of an industrial base, they are necessarily far removed from what were Marx’s immediate concerns: for him, the collapse of Soviet communism would have been a source neither of surprise nor of dismay. On a more general level, over the whole range of the social sciences, Marx’s materialist conception of history and his analysis of capitalist society have made him probably the most influential figure of the twentieth century.
David McLellan
University of Kent
Further reading
Avineri, S. (1968) The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, UK.
Cohen, G. (1978) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford.
McLellan, D. (1974) Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York.
Marx, K. (1977) Selected Writings, ed. D.McLellan, Oxford.
Oilman, B. (1971), Alienation, Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge, UK.
Peffer, R. (1990) Marxism, Morality and Social Justice, Princeton, NJ.
Plamenatz, J. (1975) Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, Oxford.
Suchting, W. (1983) Marx: An Introduction, Brighton.
