KARL MARX - A SHORT LIFE SKETCH

                                                             KARL MARX

The worker becomes all the poorer, the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity, the more commodities he creates. The increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.(Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)

The philosopher, social scientist, historian, and revolutionary, Karl Marx is without doubt the most influential socialist thinker of the nineteenth century. His social, economic, and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a middle class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany. At 17, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. The following year he went to the University of Berlin where he remained for 4 years. He abandoned the Romanticism acquired at Bonn for the Hegelianism which ruled Berlin at that time. Theologians like Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss who critiqued Christianity and liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. His university career closed, Marx moved onto journalism, became editor in Cologne of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. It was closed by the Prussian government and Marx went to France.

In France he made contact with organized groups of German workers and French socialists and edited a magazine which bridged French socialism and German Hegelianism. He became a communist and wrote Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). Influenced by Feuerbach, he outlined a humanist concept of communism. He also developed a partnership with Friedrich Engels. Marx was expelled from France and moved to Brussels for three years, visited England where Engel’s family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. In Brussels, he devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated the materialistic conception of history, written in a manuscript called The German Ideology, which believed that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production”. He predicted the collapse of the Industrial Capitalism, and its replacement by Communism. “Let the ruling classes tremble at the communist revolution; the workers all over the world will unite. They have nothing but to lose their chains”. He also wrote a polemic, “The Poverty of Philosophy”. He joined the Communist league of which Marx and Engels were the prominent theoreticians.  They wrote the Communist Manifesto, and wave of revolutions broke out in Europe. Marx moved back to Paris, and then to Germany where he founded the New Rheinische Zeitung. It was suppressed and he again took refuge in London. He was optimistic about a revolution in Europe. Marx rejoined the Communist League and then wrote The Class Struggles in France and The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and studied political economy. The articles published in The New York Daily Tribune was his source of income, and Engels also helped him financially. He wrote a 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, state, foreign trade and wage labour. He stopped working for some time to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Values, which discussed Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

In 1867 he published Volume 1 of Capital , a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production.  He explained his version of labour theory and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would lead to a falling rate of profit and the subsequent collapse of capitalism.  He was elected to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (also known as the First International) in 1864 at its first inception. The transfer of his seat from London to New York in 1872 led to its decline. The most important event was the Paris Commune, when the citizens of Paris held the city captive for two months. During this time he wrote The Civil War in France.

During the last ten years of his life he was not very well. But he still commented on contemporary politics in Germany and Russia.  Despite his ill health he wrote Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Liebnecht, and August Babel. He breathed his last on March 14, 1883, and was buried in England.

In his eulogy Engels said that:

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx developed the law of development of human history, that man must first eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before he can pursue politics, science, art, and religion. So the production of immediate material must be explained. “

 The specific law of motion governing present day capitalist mode was discovered by Marx . He made independent discoveries in every field he studied including Maths and Science. He was happy when he made a discovery and was overjoyed when the discovery made a revolutionary change.

His real mission was to overthrow capitalism. Fighting was his element , and he was the most calumniated man of his time. Conservatives and ultra democratic bourgeois heaped slanders on him, but he was oblivious to them. When he died, he was deeply mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers from the mined of Siberia to California. 

“The greatest living thinker had ceased to think”. (Engels)