Source: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/marx/eng-1869.htm
KARL
MARX
by
Frederick Engels
This short
biography is based on Engels’ version written at the end of July 1868 for the
German literary newspaper Die Gartenlaube, whose editors decided against using
it.
Written:
Engels rewrote it around July 28, 1869;
First
Published: in Die Zukunft, No. 185, August 11, 1869;
Translated:
by Joan and Trevor Walmsley;
Transcribed:
for the Internet by Zodiac;
Html Markup:
by Brian Baggins.
[...]
Karl Marx was
born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, where he received a classical education. He
studied jurisprudence at Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his
preoccupation with philosophy soon turned him away from law. In 1841, after
spending five years in the “metropolis of intellectuals,” he returned to Bonn
intending to habilitate. At that time the first “New Era” was in vogue in
Prussia. Frederick William IV had declared his love of a loyal opposition, and
attempts were being made in various quarters to organise one. Thus the
Rheinische Zeitung was founded at Cologne; with unprecedented daring Marx used
it to criticise the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly, in articles
which attracted great attention. At the end of 1842 he took over the editorship
himself and was such a thorn in the side of the censors that they did him the
honour of sending a censor [Wilhelm Saint-Paul] from Berlin especially to take
care of the Rheinische Zeitung. When this proved of no avail either the paper
was made to undergo dual censorship, since, in addition to the usual procedure,
every issue was subjected to a second stage of censorship by the office of
Cologne’s Regierungspresident [Karl Heinrich von Gerlach]. But nor was this
measure of any avail against the “obdurate malevolence” of the Rheinische
Zeitung, and at the beginning of 1843 the ministry issued a decree declaring
that the Rheinische Zeitung must cease publication at the end of the first
quarter. Marx immediately resigned as the shareholders wanted to attempt a
settlement, but this also came to nothing and the newspaper ceased publication.
His criticism
of the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly compelled Marx to study
questions of material interest. In pursuing that he found himself confronted
with points of view which neither jurisprudence nor philosophy had taken
account of. Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the
conclusion that it was not the state, which Hegel had described as the “top of
the edifice,” but “civil society,” which Hegel had regarded with disdain, that
was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of the
historical development of mankind should be looked for. However, the science of
civil society is political economy, and this science could not be studied in
Germany, it could only be studied thoroughly in England or France.
Therefore, in
the summer of 1843, after marrying the daughter of Privy Councillor von
Westphalen in Trier (sister of the von Westphalen who later became Prussian
Minister of the Interior) Marx moved to Paris, where he devoted himself
primarily to studying political economy and the history of the great French
Revolution. At the same time he collaborated with Ruge in publishing the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, of which, however only one issue was to
appear.
Expelled from
France by Guizot in 1845, he went to Brussels and stayed there, pursuing the
same studies, until the outbreak of the February revolution. Just how little he
agreed with the commonly accepted version of socialism there even in its most
erudite-sounding form, was shown in his critique of Proudhon’s major work
Philosophie de la misère, which appeared in 1847 in Brussels and Paris under
the title of The Poverty of Philosophy. In that work can already be found many
essential points of the theory which he has now presented in full detail. The
Manifesto of the Communist Party, London, 1848, written before the February
revolution and adopted by a workers’ congress in London, is also substantially
his
work.
Expelled once
again, this time by the Belgian government under the influence of the panic
caused by the February revolution, Marx returned to Paris at the invitation of
the French provisional government. The tidal wave of the revolution pushed all
scientific pursuits into the background; what mattered now was to become
involved in the movement. After having worked during those first turbulent days
against the absurd notions of the agitators, who wanted to organise German
workers from France as volunteers to fight for a republic in Germany, Marx went
to Cologne with his friends and founded there the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
which appeared until June 1849 and which people on the Rhine still remember well
today. The freedom of the press of 1848 was probably nowhere so successfully
exploited as it was at that time, in the midst of a Prussian fortress, by that
newspaper. After the government had tried in vain to silence the newspaper by
persecuting it through the courts – Marx was twice brought before the assizes
for an offence against the press laws and for inciting people to refuse to pay
their taxes, and was acquitted on both occasions – it had to close at the time
of the May revolts of 1849 when Marx was expelled on the pretext that he was no
longer a Prussian subject, similar pretexts being used to expel the other
editors. Marx had therefore to return to Paris, from where he was once again
expelled and from where, in the summer of 1849, [about August 26 1849] he went
to his present domicile in London.
In London at
that time was assembled the entire fine fleur [flower] of the refugees from all
the nations of the continent. Revolutionary committees of every kind were
formed, combinations, provisional governments in partibus infidelium,
[literally: in parts inhabited by infidels. The words are added to the title of
Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian
countries; here it means “in exile”] there were quarrels and wrangles of every
kind, and the gentlemen concerned no doubt now look back on that period as the
most unsuccessful of their lives. Marx remained aloof from all of those
intrigues. For a while he continued to produce his Neue Rheinische Zeitung in
the form of a monthly review (Hamburg, 1850), later he withdrew into the
British Museum and worked through the immense and as yet for the most part
unexamined library there for all that it contained on political economy. At the
same time he was a regular contributor to the New York Tribune, acting, until
the outbreak of the American Civil War, so to speak, as the editor for European
politics of this, the leading Anglo-American newspaper.
The coup
d’etat of December 2 induced him to write a pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, New York, 1852, which is just now being reprinted
(Meissner, Hamburg), and will make no small contribution to an understanding of
the untenable position into which that same Bonaparte has just got himself. The
hero of the coup d’état is presented here as he really is, stripped of the glory with which his momentary success
surrounded him. The philistine who considers his Napoleon III to be the
greatest man of the century and is unable now to exaplin to himself how this
miraculous genius suddenly comes to be making bloomer after bloomer and one
political error after the other – that same philistine can consult the
aforementioned work of Marx for his edification.
Although
during his whole stay in London Marx chose not to thrust himself to the fore,
he was forced by Karl Vogt, after the Italian campaign of 1859, to enter into a
polemic, which was brought to an end with Marx’s Herr Vogt (London, 1860). At
about the same time his study of political economy bore its first fruit: A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, Berlin, 1859. This
instalment contains only the theory of money presented from completely new
aspects. The continuation was some time in coming, since the author discovered
so much new material in the meantime that he considered it necessary to
undertake further studies.
At last, in
1867, there appeared in Hamburg: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy,
Volume I. This work contains the results of studies to which a whole life was
devoted. It is the political economy of the working class, reduced to its
scientific formulation. This work is concerned not with rabble-rousing
phrasemongering, but with strictly scientific deductions. Whatever one’s
attitude to socialism, one will at any rate have to acknowledge that in this
work it is presented for the first time in a scientific manner, and that it was
precisely Germany that accomplished this. Anyone still wishing to do battle
with socialism, will have to deal with Marx, and if he succeeds in that then he
really does not need to mention the dei minorum gentium.” [“Gods of a lesser
stock;” meaning, celebrities of lesser stature.
But there is
another point of view from which Marx’s book is of interest. It is the first
work in which the actual relations existing between capital and labour, in
their classical form such as they have reached in England, are described in
their entirety and in a clear and graphic fashion. The parliamentary inquiries
provided ample material for this, spanning a period of almost forty years and
practically unknown even in England, material dealing with the conditions of
the workers in almost every branch of industry, women’s and children’s work,
night work, etc.; all this is here made available for the first time. Then
there is the history of factory legislation in England which, from its modest
beginnings with the first acts of 1802, has now reached the point of limiting
working hours in nearly all manufacturing or cottage industries to 60 hours per
week for women and young people under the age of 18, and to 39 hours per week
for children under 13. From this point of view the book is of the greatest
interest for every industrialist.
For many
years Marx has been the “best-maligned” of the German writers, and no one will
deny that he was unflinching in his retaliation and that all the blows he aimed
struck home with a vengeance. But polemics, which he “dealt in” so much, was
basically only a means of self-defence for him. In the final analysis his real
interest lay with his science, which he has studied and reflected on for
twenty-five years with unrivalled conscientiousness, a conscientiousness which
has prevented him from presenting his findings to the public in a systematic
form until they satisfied him as to their form and content, until he was
convinced that he had left no book unread, no objection unconsidered, and that
he had examined every point from all its aspects. Original thinkers are very
rare in this age of epigones; if, however, a man is not only an original
thinker but also disposes over learning unequalled in his subject, then he
deserves to be doubly acknowledged.
As one would
expect, in addition to his studies Marx is busy with the workers’ movement; he
is one of the founders of the International Working Men’s Association, which
has been the centre of so much attention recently and has already shown in more
than one place in Europe that it is a force to be reckoned with. We believe
that we are not mistaken in saying that in this, at least as far as the
workers’ movement is concerned, epoch-making organisation the German element –
thanks precisely to Marx – holds the influential position which is its due.
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