Karl Marx was one the most fascinating men you could meet in the 19th Century. Born in 1818 to an affluent family, he was the grandson and great-grandson of German rabbis, and an atheist who despised the Jews.
He was an angry adversary and scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, but he lived the life of a model bourgeois: he married a German baroness and - according to Karl Marx, his biography by Jonathan Sperber - "was patriarchal, prudish, industrious, independent (or trying to be), cultured, (and) respectable."
Marx pretended to be a dignified, devoted husband and father to seven children, but secretly had a son with the family's housekeeper. To keep up appearances while being perpetually in debt, he pleaded for loans from affluent relatives and friends with such persistence that he antagonized not only Friedrich Engels, his financial supporter and close collaborator, but even his own mother, who eventually refused to give her "Karell" a penny until she died.
Marx was combative and arrogant, and his letters were full of anti-Semitic slurs, nasty remarks about fellow socialists and comments deprecating - as unintelligent and uncultured - the very factory workers whose political and economic demands he was advancing. But he had one quality that made all of his failings look petty:
He was a brilliant economist, philosopher and social scientist whose profound insights and prolific writings made him one of the most influential thinkers in human history.
A rebel at heart, Marx first won prominence among Young Hegelians, his leftist, freethinking, and atheistic fellow students at the University of Bonn, and their allies, the early trade unions of German industrial workers.
As a 24 year-old editor and writer of regional newspapers, he argued for the freedom of the press, fair treatment of labor, and against government oppression. Marx did it with such vehemence, sarcasm and persuasiveness that the German security police had him down as a "dangerous revolutionary" whose writing required special attention.
In 1847, Marx added to police suspicion by joining Engels, a German philosopher and journalist, in organizing his Hegelian supporters and factory workers into a group called the Communist League. It was the first Marxist political party, and Marx was elected its president.
The same year, Marx and Engels wrote (and delivered two weeks after the deadline, as was Marx' unbreakable habit) a 23-page pamphlet titled the Communist Manifesto that informed the world that "a specter is haunting Europe-the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter."
Later recognized as one of world's most influential political manuscripts, the Manifesto declared that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" in which the bourgeoisie - the entrepreneurs and an educated middle class - have emerged as the supreme class, primarily by exploiting the proletariat - the workers - and accumulating capital.
The Manifesto went on to predict that in doing so, the bourgeoisie "produces its own grave-diggers," because the proletariat inevitably will become conscious of their own potential. The workers then will rise to power through revolution, and overthrow the bourgeoisie.
The pamphlet, whose original German language version Sperber described as "compact, pithy, elegant, powerful and sarcastically amusing," denounced the "idiocy of rural life," expressed disdain for "lumpenproletariat" (the underclass of criminals and vagrants), and outlined a ten-point program for the future communist government.
Surprisingly - considering Marx's pugnacious attacks on the authorities - the Manifesto showed total faith in the competence and integrity of the proposed Communist regime, and made it practically all-powerful. It called for ten principal measures:
In retrospect, the Manifesto included two astonishing planks - the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels (two groups to which Marx belonged his entire adult life), and the downgrading of the abolition of child labor, a demand that has been at or near the top of the agenda of most (if not all) socialist parties.
A country whose citizens are told where they may live, are heavily taxed, and must obey numerous government restrictions and orders would not be a country where Marx, Engels and the Young Hegelians were likely to want to live.
But published as it was in 1848, when Europe's political atmosphere was overheated from attempted overthrows of Italian, French, German, and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, the Manifesto's daring, "scientifically proven" forecast of a proletarian triumph had the force of an explosion. It made the pamphlet a 19th Century best-seller.
The Manifesto first came out only in the German, Polish, and Danish languages, but within a few years it was translated into all European - and eventually, all major Asian - languages and was avidly read all over the world.
By the end of the 1800s, it had inspired in (mostly Eastern and Central) Europe the founding of nineteen socialist and labor parties and national labor federations that had millions of members and supporters. Following the Russian Revolution in October 1918, the Manifesto was printed in scores of languages and millions of copies, and became the guiding document of the Soviet Union's 15 "socialist" republics, Communist China, and - during the Cold War - it was a required reading for all Communist functionaries in Moscow's sphere of influence
He had three main goals, which he pursued for the rest of his life by penning innumerable newspaper articles and serious scientific studies: organizing European workers for "class struggle"; opposing the authoritarian regime of William II; and advocating Communist revolution in Russia.
The French and Belgian governments didn't agree with his agenda and expelled him from both countries before he found a permanent home for himself and his family in the more permissive and liberal England. Based in London, Marx got his first steady job when he was hired by the great American editor Charles Dana as the European correspondent of The New York Herald. The pay checks kept his large family from going hungry until the start of the American Civil War.
But when Dana had let him go to save money for the war coverage, Marx and his household were utterly without income. At the age of 57, he depended on small handouts from Engels, who by them was a well-paid partner in a British textile manufacturing firm.
It was during the early 1860s that Marx, who by then suffered from painful and untreatable fist-size boils, spent weeks in the London public library engrossed in the colossal research for Capital, his major work in which he sought to provide the intellectual, historical and scientific foundation of Marxism.
His unpublished draft of the first of the eventual three volumes ran 800 hand-written pages; included the history of the world's economic thought; and developed Marx's central concept of political economy: the theory of "surplus value.
A shorthand for the excess of value produced by the labor of workers over the wages they are paid, the pioneering idea was interpreted and enlarged by Marx to make two key points: it was the basis for diagnosing as "inevitable" the collapse of capitalism, and for positing the establishment of a perfectly just society where everyone would be equal and work would cease to be a burden.
In Sperber's summing up of Marx's lengthy, arcane, and jargon-filled explanation of his economic prognosis, "[o]nly in this later phase of communism, when [according to Marx] 'labor is not just a means of life, but the first necessity of life,' … could 'society write in its flag: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!'"
Marx, needless to add, never got to see such a flag.
Thanks to his mother's substantial inheritance, which he made sure to receive (despite the third plank of The Communist Manifesto) after her death in 1863, he and his family moved into a posh residence in London. He lived for another 20 years trying to finish the last volume of his Capital but failed, and it was up to Engels to complete the trilogy from Marx's notes. The entire work was published in 1894.
Except for die-hard Communist ideologues, Marxism never won wide following among Western economists, and in the eyes of its detractors it had no credibility. One of Marx's critics was John Maynard Keynes, a foremost British economist, who in 1925 marveled "how a doctrine so illogical and dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history?"
Another was Austrian-born American Joseph Alois Schumpeter, one of the most influential economists of the last century, who pronounced Marxism as "essentially the product of the bourgeois mind," shrugged it off as "a religion," and warned that "He who places his trust in the Marxian synthesis… is apt to be woefully wrong."
Schumpeter's warning was confirmed by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and secretary general of the Communist Party.
In December 1988, he came to the United Nations to announce, in effect, that Marxism did not work, and he was launching "radical" reforms to bring the Soviet economic and political system in harmony with the rest of the world.
He was an angry adversary and scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, but he lived the life of a model bourgeois: he married a German baroness and - according to Karl Marx, his biography by Jonathan Sperber - "was patriarchal, prudish, industrious, independent (or trying to be), cultured, (and) respectable."
Marx pretended to be a dignified, devoted husband and father to seven children, but secretly had a son with the family's housekeeper. To keep up appearances while being perpetually in debt, he pleaded for loans from affluent relatives and friends with such persistence that he antagonized not only Friedrich Engels, his financial supporter and close collaborator, but even his own mother, who eventually refused to give her "Karell" a penny until she died.
Marx was combative and arrogant, and his letters were full of anti-Semitic slurs, nasty remarks about fellow socialists and comments deprecating - as unintelligent and uncultured - the very factory workers whose political and economic demands he was advancing. But he had one quality that made all of his failings look petty:
He was a brilliant economist, philosopher and social scientist whose profound insights and prolific writings made him one of the most influential thinkers in human history.
A rebel at heart, Marx first won prominence among Young Hegelians, his leftist, freethinking, and atheistic fellow students at the University of Bonn, and their allies, the early trade unions of German industrial workers.
As a 24 year-old editor and writer of regional newspapers, he argued for the freedom of the press, fair treatment of labor, and against government oppression. Marx did it with such vehemence, sarcasm and persuasiveness that the German security police had him down as a "dangerous revolutionary" whose writing required special attention.
In 1847, Marx added to police suspicion by joining Engels, a German philosopher and journalist, in organizing his Hegelian supporters and factory workers into a group called the Communist League. It was the first Marxist political party, and Marx was elected its president.
The same year, Marx and Engels wrote (and delivered two weeks after the deadline, as was Marx' unbreakable habit) a 23-page pamphlet titled the Communist Manifesto that informed the world that "a specter is haunting Europe-the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter."
Later recognized as one of world's most influential political manuscripts, the Manifesto declared that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" in which the bourgeoisie - the entrepreneurs and an educated middle class - have emerged as the supreme class, primarily by exploiting the proletariat - the workers - and accumulating capital.
The Manifesto went on to predict that in doing so, the bourgeoisie "produces its own grave-diggers," because the proletariat inevitably will become conscious of their own potential. The workers then will rise to power through revolution, and overthrow the bourgeoisie.
The pamphlet, whose original German language version Sperber described as "compact, pithy, elegant, powerful and sarcastically amusing," denounced the "idiocy of rural life," expressed disdain for "lumpenproletariat" (the underclass of criminals and vagrants), and outlined a ten-point program for the future communist government.
Surprisingly - considering Marx's pugnacious attacks on the authorities - the Manifesto showed total faith in the competence and integrity of the proposed Communist regime, and made it practically all-powerful. It called for ten principal measures:
- Abolition of privately owned land
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax
- Abolition of all rights of inheritance
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels
- Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank
- Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state
- Equal obligation of all to work
- Gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country
- Free education for all children in government schools and abolition of children's factory labor
In retrospect, the Manifesto included two astonishing planks - the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels (two groups to which Marx belonged his entire adult life), and the downgrading of the abolition of child labor, a demand that has been at or near the top of the agenda of most (if not all) socialist parties.
A country whose citizens are told where they may live, are heavily taxed, and must obey numerous government restrictions and orders would not be a country where Marx, Engels and the Young Hegelians were likely to want to live.
But published as it was in 1848, when Europe's political atmosphere was overheated from attempted overthrows of Italian, French, German, and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, the Manifesto's daring, "scientifically proven" forecast of a proletarian triumph had the force of an explosion. It made the pamphlet a 19th Century best-seller.
The Manifesto first came out only in the German, Polish, and Danish languages, but within a few years it was translated into all European - and eventually, all major Asian - languages and was avidly read all over the world.
By the end of the 1800s, it had inspired in (mostly Eastern and Central) Europe the founding of nineteen socialist and labor parties and national labor federations that had millions of members and supporters. Following the Russian Revolution in October 1918, the Manifesto was printed in scores of languages and millions of copies, and became the guiding document of the Soviet Union's 15 "socialist" republics, Communist China, and - during the Cold War - it was a required reading for all Communist functionaries in Moscow's sphere of influence
MARX AFTER THE MANIFESTO
Marx didn’t fare nearly as well. The first copy of the Manifesto was barely off the press when the secret police showed up in his home to inform him that he had lost his citizenship and was being expelled from Germany. At the age of 30, Marx became a homeless exile searching for a country that would tolerate his revolutionary views.He had three main goals, which he pursued for the rest of his life by penning innumerable newspaper articles and serious scientific studies: organizing European workers for "class struggle"; opposing the authoritarian regime of William II; and advocating Communist revolution in Russia.
The French and Belgian governments didn't agree with his agenda and expelled him from both countries before he found a permanent home for himself and his family in the more permissive and liberal England. Based in London, Marx got his first steady job when he was hired by the great American editor Charles Dana as the European correspondent of The New York Herald. The pay checks kept his large family from going hungry until the start of the American Civil War.
But when Dana had let him go to save money for the war coverage, Marx and his household were utterly without income. At the age of 57, he depended on small handouts from Engels, who by them was a well-paid partner in a British textile manufacturing firm.
It was during the early 1860s that Marx, who by then suffered from painful and untreatable fist-size boils, spent weeks in the London public library engrossed in the colossal research for Capital, his major work in which he sought to provide the intellectual, historical and scientific foundation of Marxism.
His unpublished draft of the first of the eventual three volumes ran 800 hand-written pages; included the history of the world's economic thought; and developed Marx's central concept of political economy: the theory of "surplus value.
A shorthand for the excess of value produced by the labor of workers over the wages they are paid, the pioneering idea was interpreted and enlarged by Marx to make two key points: it was the basis for diagnosing as "inevitable" the collapse of capitalism, and for positing the establishment of a perfectly just society where everyone would be equal and work would cease to be a burden.
In Sperber's summing up of Marx's lengthy, arcane, and jargon-filled explanation of his economic prognosis, "[o]nly in this later phase of communism, when [according to Marx] 'labor is not just a means of life, but the first necessity of life,' … could 'society write in its flag: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!'"
Marx, needless to add, never got to see such a flag.
Thanks to his mother's substantial inheritance, which he made sure to receive (despite the third plank of The Communist Manifesto) after her death in 1863, he and his family moved into a posh residence in London. He lived for another 20 years trying to finish the last volume of his Capital but failed, and it was up to Engels to complete the trilogy from Marx's notes. The entire work was published in 1894.
Except for die-hard Communist ideologues, Marxism never won wide following among Western economists, and in the eyes of its detractors it had no credibility. One of Marx's critics was John Maynard Keynes, a foremost British economist, who in 1925 marveled "how a doctrine so illogical and dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history?"
Another was Austrian-born American Joseph Alois Schumpeter, one of the most influential economists of the last century, who pronounced Marxism as "essentially the product of the bourgeois mind," shrugged it off as "a religion," and warned that "He who places his trust in the Marxian synthesis… is apt to be woefully wrong."
Schumpeter's warning was confirmed by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and secretary general of the Communist Party.
In December 1988, he came to the United Nations to announce, in effect, that Marxism did not work, and he was launching "radical" reforms to bring the Soviet economic and political system in harmony with the rest of the world.
