Introduction

Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818 and died as a political exile in London, 1883. When he had completed his studies at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and served his first political apprenticeship as an editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, 1842–3, he found himself cut off from almost every link with his native country. His father had died in 1838, he had ‘fallen out with his family’ since 1842, and all the plans for his future had collapsed under the blows of the Christian-Romantic reaction which set in with the accession of King Frederick William IV in 1840. ‘In Germany there is now nothing I can do’, Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in January 1843. ‘In Germany one can only be false to oneself’. Thus, in the Autumn of 1843, after marrying the woman he had wooed for seven years, he went to Paris and, when expelled from France in 1845, turned to Belgium, where he stayed until the revolution of 1848 made possible a short return to political activity in his own country, as an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848–9. After that, expelled from Germany, France and Belgium, he spent the remaining three decades of his life in the great refuge of revolutionary exiles from all European countries, which in those times was London. He tried in vain to earn a living for his growing family through jour- nalism and was saved from starvation only by the untiring services of his life- long friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who devoted the next 18 years of his life to the hateful drudgery of ‘doggish commerce’, mainly to help his friend to complete his great scientific work, Capital. When finally he was able to retire from business with enough money to secure freedom from financial worries both for himself and Marx, it was almost too late. Though the main results of Marx’s ever widening and deepening studies had taken final shape in Volume I, published in 1867, the remaining parts of Capital were never completed. The incessant struggles and miseries inseparable from the life of an inflexible political emigrant had by 1873 finally worn out even that tremendous mental productivity which had been embodied in Marx. However, he went on for a further decade to pile up excerpts and notes for the future completion of his work, and now and then displayed the full vigour of the old days in such fully matured pieces of workmanship as the ‘Marginal Notes to the Gotha programme of the German workers’ party’ in 1875 and the recently published ‘Critical notes on the economic work of Adolf Wagner’, dated 1881–2. Nor must we forget what Engels most aptly said at the funeral of his friend in 1883, that the man of science was ‘not even half the man’, but that this man Marx was ‘above all a revolutionary’. Of his two outstanding works, the

Communist Manifesto1 and Capital,2 the one was published on the eve of the revolution of 1848 as the working programme of the first international party of the militant vanguard of the proletariat. The other coincided with the begin- ning of the recovery of Western Europe from that protracted depression and stagnation of all progressive forces which had followed upon the bloody defeat of the insurrectionary workers of Paris in June 1848 and the ensuing failure of the European revolution of 1848–50 – a period most clearly characterised by the anti-democratic and anti-socialistic totalitarian régime of the third Napoleon in France between 1850 and 1870. Marx’s theoretical exposition of the bourgeois world in Capital coincided, moreover, with his actual participa- tion in the first open and comprehensive experiment in working-class unity, the International Working Men’s Association, which was founded in 1864. Thus Marx’s revolutionary theory and practice formed at all times an inseparable whole, and this whole is what lives on today. His real aim, even in this strictly theoretical work, was to co-operate in one way or another with the historical struggle of the modern proletariat, to whom he was the first to give a scientific knowledge of its class-position and its class-needs, a true and materialistic knowledge of the conditions necessary for its own emancipation and thus, at the same time, for the further development of the social life of mankind. It is the purpose of this book to restate the most important principles and contents of Marx’s social science in the light of recent historical events and of the new theoretical needs which have arisen under the impact of those events. In so doing we shall deal throughout with the original ideas of Marx himself rather than with their subsequent developments brought about by the various ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’, dogmatic and critical, radical and moderate schools of the Marxists on the one hand, and their more or less violent crit- ics and opponents on the other hand. There is today a struggle about Marx in practically every country of the civilised world – from Soviet Russia, where Marxism has become the official philosophy of the state, to the fascist and semi-fascist countries of central and southern Europe, South America, and East Asia, where Marxism is prosecuted and exterminated. Between those two extremes there lies the land of the as yet undecided battle between the so- called ‘Marxist’ and so-called ‘anti-Marxist’ ideas, and thus the only part of the world where it is still possible today to discuss with relative freedom the true significance of those genuine principles of Marx, which in the meantime have been adapted by friends and foes to an astonishing variety of political pur- poses which appear from the review of the various historical phases of Marxist

1 Marx and Engels 1931–2a. 2 Marx 1932.