Marx Without Myth A CHRONOLOGICAL STUDY OF HIS LIFE ^ND WORK Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale BASIL BLACKWELL OXFORD1975 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner. ISBN o 631 15780 8 Set in Linotype Juliana (text) and Perpetua (display) Printed in Great Britain by Northumberland Press Ltd., Gateshead and bound by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd., Bungay Contents Introduction vii Authors’ Note xiii Part I 1818-1843 Chronological Summary 1 Central and Western Europe • Eastern Europe and the Middle East * The Far East • Scientific and Technological Progress * Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1818-1843 10 Part II 1844-1849 Chronological Summary 32 Europe • The Revolutions of 1848-1849 * The Americas The Far East * Scientific and Technological Progress Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1844-1849 38 Part III 1850-1856 Chronological Summary 88 Europe • The Crimean War • The Americas • The Far East • Scientific and Technological Progress Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1850-1856 93 PartIV 1857-1863 Chronological Summary 133 Europe * The Americas • The Far East • Scientific and Technological Progress • Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1857-1863 139 vi Contents Part V 1864-1872 Chronological Summary Europe • The Americas • Scientific and Technological Progress • Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1864-1872 195 Part VI 1873-1883 Chronological Summary 1 279 Europe • The Americas * Asia and Africa ! Scientific and Technological Progress • Important Works Published Karl Marx, 1873-1883 287 1 333 Selected Bibliography of Marx’s Writings I 1835-1843 I II. 1844-1849 in. 1850-1856 IV. 1857-1863 V. 1864-1872 VI. 1873-1883 Summary of Important Dates in the Composition of Capitol General Bibliography 341 345 Biographical Glossary 361 Index INTRODUCTION Destroyed by silence during his lifetime, Karl Marx has been posthumously victimised by an heroic myth which has harmed his work more than did the conspiracy of silence imposed by his contemporaries. The man who could have boasted of having dis- covered the law of ideological mystification himself became the target of new efforts at mystification by his own school. While his personality is caricatured in extremes—from lifeless travesty to the awesome image of an intellectual monster—his words are taken to be the sibylline proclamations of an omniscient oracle and used to mask the deeds and misdeeds of modern social leaders seeking to evade personal responsibility. The doctrines Marx intended as intellectual tools for the working class in its struggle for emancipation have been transformed into political ideology to justify material exploitation and moral slavery. His postulate of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in particular, conceived of as the democratic rule of the overwhelming majority in the interests of the overwhelming majority, has been distorted into ideological legitimation for the exploitation and oppression of one social group (or class) by another and invoked as justification for the abolition of basic human rights. Under the label of ‘Marxist socialism’ the inhuman social relations of feudal and pre- capitalist society have been legitimised for today’s world. To cap this process of mystifying Marx while stunting the mental and moral development of the masses he tried to reach with his works and his political activity, the supreme ethical principle of proletarian self- emancipation through class struggle has been resolved into the moral code of a new elite—‘Marxist’ politicians and ‘Marxist’ statesmen. With the most modern techniques of human self-destruction at its disposal, this new elite is both! partner and rival of the ruling elites in ‘imperialist countries!! their common goal the maintenance or extention of theirl supremacy. Modern history is no longer the history of class struggles, as was stated in The Communist Manifesto, but of global wars planned and executed in defence of what are proclaimed as ‘moral', ‘human' or ‘religious’ values. In the face of such distortion of his spiritual and theoretic® legacy, the present chronology has been conceived ?!to defend the non-legendary Marx. Its principal concern is to counter the- universal myth and misunderstandings with a portrait of the man, the revolutionary thinker, the militant. We have 'beep guided by the desire to highlight those steps and events In his career which most clearly bear witness to a life dedicated to one single goal—the emancipation of mankind through the conscious! activity of its poorest but, in mind and spirit, potentially richest members. To do justice to Marx’s central motivation'a certain selectiveness in the choice of material presented was, though®! appropriate and we were naturally compelled to neglect or condense radically many aspects which are not without significance in other contexts. Marx sacrificed not only personal success and wealth but also his health, family and friends to the self-appointed life-task of contributing intellectual support to the labouring dass for its long and arduous fight against enslaving capital. First and fore* most he wanted to partidpate in the struggle for emancipation, whose outcome would deride the fate of mankind, and did not consider himself called upon to create a new system of thought] or a universal social science. But not theory alone characterise! Marx's contribution to the working class movement} at every] promising occasion he actively associated with proletarians organisations: the international correspondence! committeesj (1846-47); the Communist League (1847-52), the workers! educational societies; and the International Working .Menjsj Association (1864-73) together with the Reform League. He did so because of a compelling belief that the truth of any theory! can be affirmed only in human practice, understood here not asj party politics but as the socio-political movement of the entire] working dass. The dialectic relationship: between scientific cognition and the practical fulfilment of the proletarian missio® did not in his opinion demand a special, highly centralised! workers''party but rather a well-developed capitalist system of economy with its ruling bourgeoisie and its antithesis, the disinherited, impoverished, but conscious working dass. He saw a correlation between the action of the latter and the inner decay of capitalism and therefore considered his role to be that of a sodal theorist adding srientific insights to the actual proletarian movement. Marx often spoke of his ‘bourgeois misery’ and he had every reason for doing so. His income as a writer was never suffident to support himself and his family adequately, hence they depended on the finandal generosity of his life-long friend Friedrich Engels. He spent most of his adult years in exile, a pariah from the age of 26, experiencing the tragedy of an outsider who threatens sodety’s tenuous equilibrium. Only a small part of his many writing projects were ever brought to fruition; penury, illness, family difficulties, journalistic hackwork made his life a long chain of disappointments and insoluble problems. Yet he turned a- deaf ear to generous offers tendered by government agents to collaborate on offirial publications which would have brought him to the attention of a much wider public and secured his reputation in the scholarly world. He felt nothing but disdain for the prejudices of ‘so- called public opinion’ and never cared for popularity. His attitude is typified by a quotation from Dante’s Divine Comedy which closes the Preface to Capital, Book I: ‘Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.’ Long before be had published even the first part of his ‘Economics’, many of his friends expected him soon to head a new school of thought. His charismatic personality and quick mind fasrinated and impressed them profoundly, although few of his contemporaries recognised his genius and obstinately supported him f in face of uninterested public opinion and the slanders or polemical attacks of men such as Karl Vogt and Brentano or of the Prussian state police. In a well-meaning effort to compensate for these slanders his loyal friend Engels tried to popularise Marx’s, writings by reinterpreting them, yet he succeeded only in initiating the transformation of Marx’s social theory into a proletarian Weltanschauung. Engels’s identification of Marx with ‘sdentific socialism’ in Anti-Diihring, his graveside eulogy of his friend as the source of proletarian consciousness were unfortunate statements that unwittingly fathered the self-contained ideological system of Marxism. He failed to respect the dialectic unity of revolutionary action by the conscious proletariat, the ethical imperative of Marxian thought, and scientific insight into the socio-economic mechanism of the historic process, replacing this subtle dualism with revolutionary phraseology. Every interpretation of Marx’s intellectual achievements which lays claim to the discovery of a new system of thought or philosophy necessarily amounts to a fundamental perversion of his actual intentions. An impartial examination of Marx’s political career shows, however, that he was not always able to reconcile his conduct with his theoretical views, thereby furnishing his political opponents with fuel for their polemical fire. He was accused of vanity, of desiring personal power and despotic control over the working class movement; and whereas it is certain that he did possess traits which sometimes exasperated his friends and made their relations problematic, to expect a ‘full-blooded’ man like Marx to be free of human weaknesses is unreasonable and dangerous. His favourite maxim, ‘Nihil humani a me alienum puto’, is conveniently overlooked by those who wish to make him a cult figure, while his detractors too, although assiduous in their criticism, have so radically distorted the dimensions of the man that he is no longer compatible with any reality, past or present. Marx’s own fate reflects in part the disheartening drama of the world’s deprived and injured working population.