reply to post by batvette
Honk, honk! If anyone is interested I can post the remainder.
Karl Marx, 1818-1883
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. With 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 (1844)
The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the
19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the
socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist.
This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of
political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars
had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of
rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he
would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University
of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man
responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious
University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the
time.
Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a
radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the
Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal
newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper.
Marx then emigrated to France.
Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French
socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical
Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism,
influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist
society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong
partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where
Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated
what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of
which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history
of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.
At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J.
Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx
and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a
succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship since the
Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless
night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life.
Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two
lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was
soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in
order to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had
four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was trying a
steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the
New York Daily Tribune.
Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage
labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his
work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed the
capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and
exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III were finished during
the 1860s but Marx worked on the manuscripts for the rest of his life and they were published posthumously by Engels.
One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council
he was elected at its inception in 1864.