Karl Marx: Life and Revolutionary Thought
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, a city of Prussia’s Rhenish province. He came from a wealthy and educated, although not revolutionary, family. His father was a Jewish lawyer who converted to Protestantism in 1824. After studying at the baccalaureate in Trier, Marx entered the University, first in Bonn and then in Berlin, following a law career, but especially studying history and philosophy. He finished his university studies in 1841, submitting a thesis on The Differences Between the Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. His ideas were then still those of a Hegelian idealist. In Berlin, he approached the circle of “Left Hegelians” (Bruno Bauer, Strauss, Stirner, Feuerbach, and others), attempting to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy.
After attending college, Marx moved to Bonn, with the intention of becoming a teacher. But the reactionary policies of the government—which in 1832 had removed Ludwig Feuerbach from his chair, again denying him entry into the classroom in 1836, and in 1841 retired the young professor Bruno Bauer’s right to teach from a chair in Bonn—forced him to abandon his academic career. At this time, the ideas of the Left Hegelians in Germany made rapid progress.
It was Ludwig Feuerbach who, especially after 1836, surrendered to the criticism of theology, beginning to move towards materialism, which in 1841, with The Essence of Christianity, triumphed decisively in their doctrines. In 1836, his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future saw the light. “You have to have experienced the liberating effect” of these books, wrote Engels subsequently, referring to these works of Feuerbach. “We” (i.e., the Left Hegelians, including Marx) “became Feuerbachians at once.” By then, the radical bourgeois Rhineland, which had certain points of contact with the Left Hegelians, founded in Cologne an opposition newspaper, the Gazette of the Rhine (which began publication on January 1, 1842). Its main contributors were Marx and Bruno Bauer. In October 1842, Marx was appointed editor of the newspaper and moved from Bonn to Cologne. Under the leadership of Marx, the revolutionary-democratic trend of the newspaper was accentuated, and the government first subjected it to double and then triple filtering before ordering its complete removal from January 1, 1843. Marx was forced to give up the post of editor before that date, but the separation did not save the newspaper, which ceased publication in March 1843. Among the most important articles published by Marx in the Gazette of the Rhine, Engels notes, in addition to those cited below, one which refers to the situation of peasant winegrowers in the Moselle valley. As journalistic activities had shown that he lacked the necessary knowledge of economics, he applied himself to studying this science earnestly.
In the fall of 1843, Marx moved to Paris in order to edit there, from abroad, a radical-type magazine in collaboration with Arnold Ruge, called Franco-German Annals, but only the first notebook got to see the light. The publication was discontinued because of the difficulties encountered in its illegal diffusion in Germany and the differences of opinion that arose between Marx and Ruge. Marx’s articles in the Annals show the revolutionary that proclaims the “ruthless critique of everything that exists,” and in particular, criticism of weapons, appealing to the masses and the proletariat.
In September 1844, Federico Engels spent a few days in Paris, and from that moment on, he became Marx’s closest friend. They jointly took a very active part in the febrile life at that time of the revolutionary groups in Paris (particularly important was the doctrine of Proudhon, which Marx subjected to scathing criticism in his Poverty of Philosophy, published in 1847). In vigorous fight against various doctrines of petty and utopian socialism, they constructed the theory and tactics of proletarian revolutionary socialism, or communism. In 1845, at the request of the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from Paris as a dangerous revolutionary and fixed his residence in Brussels. In the spring of 1847, Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society, the “Communist League,” and took a prominent part in the Second Congress of this organization (held in London in November 1847), where they were entrusted with the drafting of the famous Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. This document sets out, with a clarity and brilliance of genius, the new worldview, materialism consistently applied also to the field of social life, dialectics as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, the theory of class struggle, and the historic revolutionary role of the world proletariat as the creator of a new society, a communist society.
At the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1848, Marx was expelled from Belgium. He returned to Paris, where, after the March Revolution, he came to Germany, settling in Cologne. From June 1, 1848, to May 19, 1849, the New Laws of the Rhine was published in this city, with Marx as its editor. The course of the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1849 came to confirm the new theory brilliantly, as they had to confirm it also now in all proletarian and democratic movements in every country in the world.
With the triumphant counterrevolution, Marx had to go to court and, although acquitted (on February 9, 1849), was subsequently expelled from Germany (May 16, 1848). He lived in Paris for a while but, expelled again from this capital after the demonstration of June 13, 1849, he settled in London, where he spent the rest of his life.
The living conditions of the émigrés were extremely arduous, as evidenced especially by the correspondence between Marx and Engels (published in 1913). Misery weighed in a truly stifling way on Marx and his family. But for the constant and altruistic financial assistance of Engels, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital but would have succumbed fatally under the weight of misery. Moreover, doctrines and trends of petty-bourgeois socialism and non-proletarian socialism generally prevailing at the time forced Marx to maintain an incessant and ruthless struggle, and sometimes to defend against personal attacks that were angrier and more absurd. Departing from émigré circles and concentrating his forces on the study of political economy, Marx developed his materialist theory in a series of historical works. His works Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (Vol. I, 1867) meant a revolution in economic science.