Volks-Kalender. Brunswick 1878

Friedrich Engels  
Karl Marx

Volks-Kalender.  
Brunswick 1878

Karl Marx.

The man who was the first to give a scientific foundation to socialism, and thereby to the whole labour movement of our day—Karl Marx—was born in Trier in 1818. He studied first law in Bonn and Berlin, but soon threw himself exclusively into the study of history and philosophy, and in 1842 was on the point of habilitating as a lecturer in philosophy when the political movement that had arisen since the death of Frederick William III diverted him into another career. With his collaboration, the leaders of the Rhenish liberal bourgeoisie, Camphausen, Hansemann and others, had founded the *Rheinische Zeitung* in Cologne; and Marx, whose criticism of the debates of the Rhenish Provincial Diet had created the greatest sensation, was called to the head of the paper in the autumn of 1842. The *Rheinische Zeitung* appeared, of course, under censorship, but the censorship could not cope with it.*) The *Rheinische Zeitung* almost always got the articles through that mattered; the censor was first thrown inferior fodder to delete, until he either gave way of his own accord or was compelled to give way by the threat that otherwise the paper would not appear next day. Ten newspapers that had the same courage as the *Rheinische* and whose publishers spent a few hundred thalers more on typesetting costs—and the censorship would have been made impossible in Germany as early as 1843. But the German newspaper proprietors were petty, timorous philistines, and the *Rheinische Zeitung* waged the struggle alone. It used up one censor after another; in the end it was subjected to double censorship, so that after the first censorship the district governor had to censor it again, definitively. That too was of no avail. At the beginning of 1843 the government declared that nothing could be done with this paper, and suppressed it without more ado.

Marx, who had in the meantime married the sister of von Westphalen, later minister of reaction, removed to Paris and there published, with A. Ruge, the *Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher*, in which he opened the series of his socialist writings with a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right. Further, with F. Engels: *The Holy Family. Against Bruno Bauer and Company*, a satirical critique of one of the last forms into which the German philosophical idealism of the time had strayed.

The study of political economy and of the history of the great French Revolution still left Marx time for occasional attacks on the Prussian government; the latter took its revenge by securing, in the spring of 1845, his expulsion from France through the Guizot ministry—Herr Alexander von Humboldt is said to have acted as intermediary. Marx transferred his domicile to Brussels and there published, in French, in 1846 a *Discours sur le libre-échange* (Discourse on Free Trade) and in 1847 *Misère de la Philosophie*, a critique of Proudhon’s *Philosophie de la Misère* (Philosophy of Poverty). At the same time he found the opportunity to found a German workers’ society in Brussels, and thereby entered into practical agitation. This became still more important for him after he and his political friends had, in 1847, joined the secret “League of Communists,” which had existed for many years. The whole structure was now transformed; the previously more or less conspiratorial association turned into a simple, only of necessity secret, organisation of communist propaganda—the first organisation of the German Social-Democratic party. The League existed wherever German workers’ societies existed; in almost all these societies in England, Belgium, France and Switzerland, and in very many societies in Germany, the leading members belonged to the League, and the League’s share in the emerging German labour movement was very considerable. Our League was, moreover, the first to emphasise the international character of the entire labour movement and also to give it practical effect: it had Englishmen, Belgians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. as members, and organised international workers’ meetings, notably in London.

The transformation of the League was accomplished at two congresses held in 1847, the second of which resolved on the drawing up and publication of the party principles in a manifesto to be edited by Marx and Engels. Thus arose the *Manifesto of the Communist Party*, which first appeared in 1848, shortly before the February Revolution, and has since been translated into almost all European languages.

The *Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung*, in which Marx participated and in which the blessings of the native police were pitilessly exposed, again prompted the Prussian government to work for Marx’s expulsion, but in vain. When, however, the February Revolution led to popular movements in Brussels and a turnaround in Belgium seemed imminent, the Belgian government arrested Marx without ceremony and expelled him. Meanwhile, the provisional government of France had, through Flocon, invited him to come back to Paris, and he followed this call.

In Paris he opposed, above all, the swindle that had gained ground among the Germans there, who wanted to form the German workers in France into armed legions so as to carry the revolution and republic into Germany. On the one hand, Germany had to make her revolution herself, and on the other hand, every foreign revolutionary legion formed in France was betrayed from the outset to the government that was to be overthrown by the Lamartines of the provisional government, as happened in Belgium and Baden.

After the March Revolution, Marx went to Cologne and founded there the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*, which lasted from 1 June 1848 to 19 May 1849—the only paper that, within the democratic movement of the time, represented the standpoint of the proletariat, and this already by its unreserved partisanship for the Paris June insurgents of 1848, which cost the paper almost all its shareholders. In vain did the *Kreuzzeitung* point to the “Chimborasso impudence” with which the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* attacked everything sacred, from the king and the imperial regent down to the gendarme, and that in a Prussian fortress with a garrison of 8,000 men at the time; in vain did the liberal, suddenly become reactionary, Rhenish philistine element rage; in vain did the state of siege in Cologne suspend the paper for a lengthy period in the autumn of 1848; in vain did the Imperial Ministry of Justice in Frankfurt denounce to the Cologne public prosecutor article after article for judicial prosecution; the paper was quietly edited and printed under the eyes of the main guard, and its circulation and reputation grew with the vehemence of its attacks on the government and the bourgeoisie. When the Prussian coup d’état took place in November 1848, the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* called upon the people, at the head of every issue, to refuse to pay taxes and to meet force with force. Brought before the jury in the spring of 1849 on this account, and also on account of another article, it was acquitted on both occasions. Finally, when the May uprisings of 1849 in Dresden and the Rhine Province had been suppressed, and the Prussian campaign against the Baden-Palatinate insurrection was initiated through the concentration and mobilisation of considerable troops, the government believed itself strong enough to suppress the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* by force. The last number—printed in red—appeared on 19 May.

Marx went back to Paris, but only a few weeks after the demonstration of 13 June 1849, the French government confronted him with the choice of either removing his domicile to Brittany or leaving France. He chose the latter and removed to London, where he has resided uninterruptedly ever since.

An attempt to continue the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* in the form of a review (in Hamburg) (1850) had to be given up after some time in face of the ever more violently erupting reaction. Immediately after the coup d’état in France in December 1851, Marx published *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte* (Boston 1852, second edition Hamburg 1869, shortly before the war). In 1853 he wrote *Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne* (first printed in Boston, later in Basel, recently again in Leipzig).

After the conviction of the members of the Communist League in Cologne, Marx withdrew from political agitation and devoted himself for ten years, on the one hand, to investigating the rich treasures which the library of the British Museum offers in the field of political economy, and, on the other, to working as a contributor to the *New-York Tribune*, which until the outbreak of the American Civil War published not only the correspondence signed by him, but also numerous leading articles on European and Asian affairs from his pen. His attacks on Lord Palmerston, based on exhaustive studies of English official documents, were reprinted in London as pamphlets.

As the first fruit of his many years of economic studies there appeared in 1859 *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*, First Part (Berlin, Duncker). This work contains the first coherent exposition of Marx’s theory of value, including the doctrine of money. During the Italian war, Marx fought, in the German newspaper *Das Volk*, published in London, against Bonapartism, which at that time was giving itself a liberal colouring and playing the liberator of oppressed nationalities, and against the Prussian policy of the time, which sought to fish in troubled waters under the cloak of neutrality. On this occasion he was also obliged to attack Herr Karl Vogt, who was then agitating for the neutrality, indeed the sympathy, of Germany on behalf of Prince Napoleon (Plon-Plon) and in the pay of Louis Napoleon. Overwhelmed by Vogt with the most infamous, knowingly invented slanders, Marx replied with *Herr Vogt*, London 1860, in which Vogt and the other gentlemen of the imperialist sham-democratic gang were exposed, and Vogt was convicted, on external as well as internal grounds, of having been bribed by the Empire of the Second of December. Exactly ten years later the confirmation came: in the list of Bonapartist hirelings found in the Tuileries in 1870 and published by the September government, there appeared under the letter V: “Vogt—in August 1859 he was remitted ... Frs. 40,000.” —

At last, in 1867, there appeared in Hamburg *Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I*—the principal work of Marx, which sets forth the foundations of his economic-socialist views and the main features of his critique of existing society, of the capitalist mode of production and its consequences. The second edition of this epoch-making work appeared in 1872; the author is engaged in the elaboration of the second volume.

*) The first censor of the *Rheinische Zeitung* was Polizeirath Dolleschall, the same man who once deleted from the *Kölnische Zeitung* the announcement of the translation of Dante’s *Divine Comedy* by Philalethes (the later King John of Saxony), with the remark: One should not make a comedy of divine things.

Meanwhile, in various countries of Europe the labour movement had regained sufficient strength for Marx to be able to contemplate carrying out a long-cherished wish: the founding of a workers’ association embracing the most advanced countries of Europe and America, which was to demonstrate the international character of the socialist movement so to speak corporally to the workers themselves, as well as to the bourgeoisie and the governments—to the encouragement and strengthening of the proletariat, to the terror of its enemies. A public meeting in favour of Poland, just then once more crushed by Russia, held on 28 September 1864 in St. Martin’s Hall in London, provided the occasion to put the matter forward; it was taken up with enthusiasm. The International Working Men’s Association was founded; a provisional General Council with its seat in London was elected at the meeting, and the soul of this, as of all subsequent General Councils up to the Hague Congress, was Marx. Almost all the documents issued by the General Council of the International were edited by him, from the Inaugural Address of 1864 to the Address on the Civil War in France of 1871. To describe Marx’s activity in the International would be to write the history of this association itself, which moreover still lives on in the memory of the European workers.

The fall of the Paris Commune placed the International in an impossible position. It was thrust into the foreground of European history at a moment when it was everywhere cut off from all possibility of successful practical action. The events that raised it to the position of the seventh great power simultaneously forbade it to mobilise and actively employ its forces, on pain of certain defeat and the setting back of the labour movement for decades. To make matters worse, elements from various sides pushed themselves forward, seeking to exploit the suddenly enhanced reputation of the association for purposes of personal vanity or personal ambition, without insight into the real situation of the International, or without regard for it. A heroic decision had to be taken, and it was once again Marx who took it and carried it through at the Hague Congress. The International, by a solemn resolution, disclaimed all responsibility for the doings of the Bakuninists, who formed the centre of those foolish and unsavoury elements; then, faced with the impossibility, in the face of the general reaction, of meeting the heightened demands placed upon it and of maintaining its full effectiveness otherwise than by a series of sacrifices that would have bled the labour movement white—faced with this situation, the International provisionally withdrew from the stage by transferring the General Council to America. Events have proved how correct this decision—often criticised then and since—was. On the one hand, it cut the ground from under all attempts to stage useless putsches in the name of the International, and on the other hand the continuing close intercourse between the socialist labour parties of the various countries demonstrated that the consciousness of the community of interests and of the solidarity of the proletariat of all countries, awakened by the International, is able to assert itself even without the bond of a formal international association, which for the moment had become a fetter.

After the Hague Congress Marx at last found peace and leisure again to take up his theoretical work, and it is to be hoped that he will be able to send the second volume of “Kapital” to the press before very long.

Of the many important discoveries with which Marx has inscribed his name in the history of science, we can here highlight only two.

The first is the revolution he brought about in the whole understanding of world history. The entire previous view of history was based on the notion that the ultimate causes of all historical changes are to be sought in the changing ideas of men, and that of all historical changes the political ones are again the most important, dominating the whole of history. But whence the ideas come to men, and what the driving causes of political changes are, was a question no one had asked. Only the newer school of French and partially also of English historians had had the conviction thrust upon them that, at least since the Middle Ages, the driving force in European history was the struggle of the developing bourgeoisie with the feudal nobility for social and political rule. Marx now demonstrated that the whole of previous history is a history of class struggles, that in all the manifold and complicated political struggles the only question is the social and political rule of social classes, the maintenance of rule by older classes, the seizure of rule by newly emerging classes.

But what brings these classes into being and keeps them in existence? The material, palpably sensuous conditions under which society at a given time produces and exchanges its means of subsistence. The feudal rule of the Middle Ages rested on the self-sufficient, almost non-exchanging economy of small peasant communities that produced almost all their own requirements themselves, to which the warlike nobility gave protection from without and a national or at least political coherence; when the towns arose and with them a separate handicraft industry and a commercial intercourse, initially inland, later international, the urban bourgeoisie developed and, in struggle with the nobility, secured for itself already in the Middle Ages its incorporation into the feudal order as an equally privileged estate. But with the discovery of the extra-European world from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this bourgeoisie acquired a far wider trading area and with it a new spur to its industry; handicraft was supplanted in its most important branches by manufacture, already carried on along factory lines, and this in turn was supplanted by large-scale industry, made possible by the inventions of the previous century, notably the steam engine, which in turn reacted upon trade by driving out the old manual labour in backward countries and, in the more developed ones, creating the present-day new means of communication—steam engines, railways, electric telegraphs. Thus the bourgeoisie gathered more and more the social wealth and social power into its hands, while for a long time it remained excluded from the political power that was in the hands of the nobility and of the monarchy supported by the nobility. But at a certain stage—in France since the Great Revolution—it also conquered this, and now became in its turn the ruling class vis-à-vis the proletariat and the small peasants. From this standpoint all historical phenomena—given sufficient knowledge of the economic situation of society at the time, which is, to be sure, totally lacking in our professional historians—can be explained in the simplest way, and just as simply the conceptions and ideas of each historical period can be explained from the economic conditions of life and from the social and political relations of that period, which are themselves conditioned by those economic conditions. History was for the first time placed on its real basis; the palpable but previously totally overlooked fact that men must first of all eat, drink, dwell and clothe themselves, hence must labour, before they can strive for rule, pursue politics, religion, philosophy, etc.—this palpable fact now at last came into its historical own.

For the socialist outlook, however, this new understanding of history was of the highest importance. It showed that all previous history has moved in class antagonisms and class struggles, that there have always been ruling and ruled, exploiting and exploited classes, and that the great majority of mankind has always been condemned to hard labour and little enjoyment. Why is this? Simply because at all earlier stages of development of humanity production was still so little developed that historical development could only proceed in this antagonistic form, that historical progress was on the whole and on a large scale assigned to the activity of a small, privileged minority, while the great mass remained condemned to producing for themselves their meagre means of subsistence and, on top of that, the increasingly abundant means of the privileged. But the same investigation of history, which in this way explains the class rule that previously could only be accounted for out of the wickedness of man as natural and rational, also leads to the insight that, as a consequence of the so colossally heightened productive forces of the present day, even the last pretext for a division of mankind into rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited, has vanished, at least in the most advanced countries; that the ruling big bourgeoisie has fulfilled its historical calling, that it is no longer equal to the management of society and has even become an obstacle to the development of production, as the trade crises and especially the last great crash and the depressed condition of industry in all countries prove; that the historical leadership has passed to the proletariat, a class which, by virtue of its whole social position, can only free itself by abolishing all class rule, all bondage and all exploitation as such; and that the social productive forces, which have outgrown the hands of the bourgeoisie, only await their seizure by the associated proletariat in order to bring about a state of affairs in which every member of society is enabled to participate not only in the production but also in the distribution and administration of the social wealth, and which, by the planned operation of the entire production, increases the social productive forces and their yield to such a degree that the satisfaction of all rational needs remains assured to everyone in an ever-growing measure.

The second important discovery of Marx is the definitive elucidation of the relation of capital and labour, in other words the demonstration of how, within present-day society, under the existing capitalist mode of production, the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist takes place. Since political economy had put forward the proposition that labour is the source of all wealth and all value, the question had become unavoidable: how is it compatible with this that the wage-labourer does not receive the whole sum of value produced by his labour, but has to hand over a part of it to the capitalist? Both the bourgeois economists and the socialists racked their brains to give a scientifically tenable answer to this question, but in vain, until at last Marx came forward with the solution. This solution is as follows: The

The present-day capitalist mode of production presupposes the existence of two social classes; on the one hand, the capitalists, who are in possession of the means of production and of the means of subsistence, and, on the other hand, the proletarians, who, excluded from this possession, have only one single commodity to sell: their labour-power; and who therefore must sell this labour-power of theirs in order to obtain possession of the means of subsistence. The value of a commodity, however, is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in its production, and hence also in its reproduction; the value of the labour-power of an average human being during a day, a month, a year is therefore determined by the quantity of labour embodied in the quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of this labour-power during a day, a month, a year. Let us assume that the means of subsistence of the worker for a day require six hours of labour for their production, or, what is the same thing, that the labour contained in them represents a quantity of labour of six hours; then the value of labour-power for a day will be expressed in a sum of money that likewise embodies six hours of labour. Let us further assume that the capitalist who employs our worker pays him this sum, i.e. the full value of his labour-power. If the worker now works six hours of the day for the capitalist, he has completely replaced the latter's outlay—six hours of labour for six hours of labour. In that case, of course, nothing would remain for the capitalist, and for this reason he also looks at the matter quite differently: I have, he says, bought the labour-power of this worker not for six hours, but for a whole day, and accordingly he makes the worker work, according to circumstances, 8, 10, 12, 14 and more hours, so that the product of the seventh, eighth and following hours is a product of unpaid labour and initially finds its way into the pocket of the capitalist. Thus, in the service of the capitalist, the worker not only reproduces the value of his labour-power, which he is paid, but also produces beyond that a surplus-value, which, initially appropriated by the capitalist, is subsequently distributed, according to definite economic laws, among the entire capitalist class and forms the fund from which ground-rent, profit, accumulation of capital, in short, all the wealth consumed or accumulated by the non-working classes, springs. It was thereby demonstrated, however, that the acquisition of wealth by present-day capitalists consists just as much in the appropriation of the unpaid labour of others as does that of the slave-owner or of the feudal lord exploiting corvée-labour, and that all these forms of exploitation are distinguished only by the different manner in which the unpaid labour is appropriated. But with this the last footing was also cut from under all the hypocritical phrases of the possessing classes about right and justice, equality of rights and duties, and a general harmony of interests prevailing in the present social order, and present-day bourgeois society was revealed, no less than its predecessors, as a grandiose institution for the exploitation of the immense majority of the people by a small and ever-shrinking minority.

Modern, scientific socialism is based on these two important facts. In the second volume of Capital these and other scarcely less important scientific discoveries relating to the capitalist social system will be further developed, and thereby those aspects of political economy not yet touched upon in the first volume will also be subjected to a revolution. May Marx be permitted soon to deliver it to the press. |

Karl Marx: To the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski. Page 1.

Karl Marx
To the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski

Dear Editor,

The article “Karl Marx before the tribunal of Mr Zhukovsky”

The author of the article on Mr Zhukovsky is evidently a man of intelligence, and if he had found in my exposition of “primitive accumulation” a single passage in support of his conclusions he would have quoted it. In the absence of such a passage he is compelled to seize upon a digression, a polemical sally against a Russian “belletrist” printed in the appendix to the first German edition of Capital. What do I reproach that writer with there? That he discovered “Russian” communism not in Russia, but in the book of Haxthausen, a Prussian counsellor of government, and that in his hands the Russian commune serves only as an argument to prove that rotten old Europe must be regenerated by the victory of Pan-Slavism. My assessment of this writer may be correct, it may be false, but in no case can it furnish the key to my views on the efforts “русских людей найти для своего отечества путь развития, отличный от того, которым шла и идет Западная Европа etc.” In the postface to the second German edition of Capital—which the author of the article on Mr Zhukovsky knows because he quotes it—I speak of a “great Russian scholar and critic” with the high consideration he deserves. This scholar treated in remarkable articles the question whether Russia must begin by destroying, as her liberal economists would have it, the rural commune in order to progress to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she could, without experiencing the torture of this regime, appropriate all its fruits by developing her own historical prerequisites. He pronounces in favour of the latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason to infer from my consideration for this “great Russian scholar and critic” that I shared his views on this question, as to conclude from my polemic against the Russian “belletrist” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them. /

/ Finally, as I do not like “leaving something to be guessed”, I shall speak without circumlocution. In order to be able to judge in full knowledge of the economic development of contemporary Russia, I learned Russian and then, for many years, studied official publications and others relating to this subject. I arrived at this result: if Russia continues to march along the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance that history has ever offered to a people, to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.

I) The chapter on primitive accumulation claims only to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the entrails of the feudal economic order. It therefore follows the historical movement which divorces the producer from his means of production, transforming the former into a wage-labourer (proletarian in the modern sense of the word) and the latter into capital. In this history “every revolution that serves as a lever for the advance of the capitalist class in process of formation makes epoch... But the basis of the whole evolution is the expropriation of the cultivators.”

II) The chapter on primitive accumulation claims only to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the entrails of the feudal economic order. It therefore sets out the historical movement which, by divorcing the producers from their means of production, converts the former into wage-labourers (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) and the holders of the latter into capitalists. In this history “every revolution that serves as a lever for the advance of the capitalist class in process of formation makes epoch, above all those which, divesting great masses of their traditional means of production and subsistence, launch them all of a sudden on to the labour market. But the basis of this whole evolution is the expropriation of the cultivators. It has as yet been carried through in a radical manner only in England... But all the countries of Western Europe are travelling the same movement etc.” (French edition of Capital, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historical tendency of capitalist production is treated, and it is summed up thus: that it “engenders its own negation with the fatality that presides over the metamorphoses of nature”; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, giving at the same time the greatest impulse to the productive powers of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, which in fact already rests on a collective mode of production, cannot but transform itself into social property. At the end of the chapter the historical tendency of capitalist production is summed up thus: that it “engenders its own negation with the fatality that presides over the metamorphoses of nature”; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, giving at the same time the greatest impulse to the productive powers of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, which in fact already rests on a collective mode of production, cannot but change itself into social property. |

I provide no proof at this point, for the good reason that this assertion itself is only the condensed summary of lengthy developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production.

Now, what application could my critic make of this historical sketch to Russia? Only this one: If Russia tends to become a capitalist nation after the model of the nations of Western Europe—and in recent years she has taken a great deal of trouble in this direction—she will not succeed without first having transformed a good portion of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once brought into the lap of the capitalist regime, she will undergo its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all! But that is too little for my critic. He absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general path that each people is fated to take, whatever the historical circumstances in which it is placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which ensures, together with the greatest impulse of the productive powers of social labour, the most integral development of each individual producer. But I beg his pardon. (He is doing me at once too much honour and too much shame.) Let us take an example. In various places in Capital I have...

alludes to the fate that befell the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own parcels of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement that separated them from their means of production and subsistence involved not only the formation of large landed property, but also that of large money capitals. And so, one fine morning, there were on the one side free men stripped of everything save their labour-power, and on the other, to exploit this labour, the holders of all the acquired wealth. What happened? The Roman proletarians became not wage labourers, but an idle “mob”, more abject than the former poor whites of the southern States of the United States, and alongside them a mode of production unfolded that was not capitalist, but slave-based. Thus events strikingly analogous, but occurring in different historical milieux, brought about results that were altogether disparate. By studying each of these evolutions separately and then comparing them, one will easily find the key to this phenomenon; but one will never arrive at it by means of the master-key of some historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.