Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the 5th of May, 1818, in Trier, Prussia. He was the son of a successful Jewish lawyer who had converted to Lutheranism. Aged seventeen, he went to the University of Bonn to study philosophy and literature. While there, he was put in prison for drunkenness and fought a duel. Desperate, his father sent him to Berlin to study law. In the same year, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, a member of the Prussian ruling class. After university, he started working for radical newspapers, first in Cologne and then in Paris. He then married Jenny and later became a revolutionary communist. In Paris he met the German radical philosopher Friedrich Engels, who would become his best friend. The 1840s were a time of social and political unrest in Europe, and Marx had problems with conservative authorities, forcing him to move from country to country.
Communist Manifesto
In February 1848, Marx and Engels published what would become one of the most important political documents in modern history. The Manifesto of the Communist Party predicted that capitalism had internal tensions which would cause its self-destruction. A classless, communist society would replace capitalism when the working class took political power. Republican revolts against monarchies were now occurring all over Europe, and Marx took refuge from angry conservative authorities in London.
Terrible Poverty
Marx and his wife spent many years living in terrible poverty. Jenny often visited pawnbrokers, and Marx even borrowed money from his baker. Engels, who lived in Manchester where his father owned a prosperous textile factory, helped them with money. Marx and his wife would have seven children, but only three of them, Jenny, Laura and Eleanor, survived to adulthood. Marx used pseudonyms when renting houses or flats, to avoid problems with the authorities. He and Engels began writing economic articles for foreign newspapers. During these years, Marx continued his study of capitalism and political economics, using the famous reading room of the British Museum.
Das Kapital
In 1867, he published Das Kapital (Capital), his most detailed explanation of his economic theory. Capital, also known as the ‘Bible of the working class’, is now one of the most studied books in the world. For years, Marx combined journalism with research and political writing, but his health was always bad. He suffered from headaches, eye inflammations, neuralgia, rheumatic pains and boils. His habits did not help. He liked highly-seasoned food, wine, liqueurs and cigars. Jenny died in December 1881. Heartbroken, Marx developed catarrh and then bronchitis and pleurisy. He died on the 14th of March, 1883.
Marx’s Legacy
Karl Marx is one of the most influential figures in history. Capital changed the course of the modern world. For much of the 20th century, one third of the world’s population lived under communist regimes influenced by Marx’s thoughts. And now, two hundred years after his birth, he is attracting interest once again. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, years of austerity and low wages, and growing economic injustice – the world’s richest one per cent are now richer than the rest of the global population – mean that many people, especially young people, are turning to Marx once again.
DYNAMISM AND DESTRUCTION
Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor of the history of ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also a world authority on Karl Marx and his ideas. In a book presentation in London, Stedman Jones talked about his authoritative biography of the German economist and thinker, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. He began by saying that he wrote the book not simply to praise Marx but to put the man and his ideas into context.
Gareth Stedman Jones (English accent): I wanted to warn people that this wasn’t going to be yet another exercise in great man history or great man ideas. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to, as it were, do a hatchet job on Marx, either. So, what I wanted to do is to show that he did, indeed, produce some truly important ideas, ideas which we still use, not just Marxists, but anyone who wants to think about modern capitalism. And you can still find a form of thinking about it which captures it, really. I mean, its energy, its restlessness. I think he put it best, the sense of the dynamism, the end of this forward movement, the way in which it removes traditional hierarchies, undercuts old ideas. It’s a very destructive force. But it’s also – as Marx himself said in the Communist Manifesto – capitalism produced more in a hundred years than had been produced in the hundred thousand years before it. And, in this sense it has produced a new world. And that, I think, he said it more powerfully than anybody else.
A GODLESS RELIGION
One of Marx’s key concepts is what he called ‘the fetishism of commodities’. To explain this, Stedman Jones compares capitalism to religion:
Gareth Stedman Jones: What capitalism does is to – in a similar way to what religion does – it suggests to human beings that the agency is impersonal. That it’s not their doing, it’s something else that is dominating them. And so that’s what Marx later refers to as the ‘fetishism of commodities’. It’s the idea that it’s somehow forces from outside which are forcing people to do things. When in fact it’s they themselves which [who] have created those conditions rather than nature.
NOT A SCIENTIST
Yet despite the comparison made by his friend Friedrich wide of the mark Engels, Marx was no Charles Darwin, says Stedman Jones. Marx himself never claimed that capitalism contained ‘natural laws’ that ensured it would evolve in a certain way:
Gareth Stedman Jones: He’s not at all a good day-to-day observer of things, and his views about working-class movements, whether it’s Germany, France or Britain, on the whole are always . And in terms of his theory, what Engels tried to do was to say, ‘Well, Marx went together with Darwin, really’. He says that at Marx’s funeral. That Marx transformed the law of history just as Darwin transformed the laws of nature. All this is not true. What Marx belongs to is a previous generation, the Romanticism, in which, suddenly, as opposed to 18th century mechanical thought, you’ve got the idea of the organism. People get very excited around 1780-1830 about organic development. What is an organism? It means that it has a birth, a growing up, a coming to maturity, decline, death. And that’s in a way the initial model he has of what is going to happen to the capitalist mode of production. But as his work goes on, although he never admits anytime his life that he’s ever wrong about anything, but I think what he comes to see is that that’s not happening. That capitalism isn’t… whatever it is, it isn’t quite the organism that has been thought about.