Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (Trier, May 5, 1818 - London, March 14, 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political scientist, journalist and politician.

Born into a relatively affluent middle-class family of Jewish origin, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the Humboldt University of Berlin, becoming interested in the philosophical views of young Hegelians. After his graduation he contributed to the Rhenish Gazette , a radical newspaper in Cologne. Moving to Paris in 1843, he continued to work for several radical newspapers and met important friends and supporters, including Friedrich Engels, with whom he published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. Exiled from France in 1849 due to his political views and for the his support for the riots of 1848, Marx moved with his wife Jenny von Westphalen and children first to Brussels and then to London. Here he continued to work as a reporter for the Anglo-American newspaperNew York Tribune and to deepen his studies on political economy, thus coming to elaborate his economic theory that should have been exposed in Il Capitale , of which Marx was able to publish only the first volume in 1867. The next two volumes would be published posthumously by Engels (1885 and 1894) and the complete version of the Theories of Surplus Value by Karl Kautsky (1905-1910).

In the 1940s the young Marx wrote the doctoral thesis The Difference Between Democritus' Philosophy of Nature and that of Epicurus (1841), The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842), For the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843), On the Jewish Question (1844), Notes on James Mill (1844), the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), The Holy Family (written together with Engels) (1845), the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) , German ideology (written together with Engels) (1846), Misery of philosophy (1847) eWage labor and capital (1848), in addition to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), a pamphlet written together with his partner Engels between 1847 and 1848 and commissioned by the Communist League, of which he was part, to express their political project. Of these works only a few were published in life. The 1950s saw the publication of The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850 (1850), The 18 Brumaire by Louis Bonaparte (1852), the Grundrisse (1857) and For the critique of political economy (1859). The 1960s saw the mature Marx engaged in writings on the American Civil War (1861-1865), on the three volumes of the Theories of surplus value (1862), on theSalary, price and profit (1865) and on the first volume of Il Capitale (1867). The last years of Marx's life saw the publication of The Civil War in France (1871), the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) and the Notes on Adolph Wagner (1883).

He also actively participated in the labor movement and soon became an important figure in the First International (1864-1876) until his death. His thought, centered on the materialist critique of the capitalist economy, society, politics and culture, exercised a decisive weight on the birth of socialist and communist ideologies, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, giving life to the socioeconomic current. politics of Marxism. Theorist of the materialistic conception of history and together with Engels of scientific socialism, Marx is considered one of the most influential thinkers on the political, philosophical and economic level of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as of the entire history of humanity.

Biography

Youth

«The appearance of this person has had an extraordinary effect on me, who also move in the same field of interests. Get used to the idea of ​​getting to know the best, perhaps the only philosopher in the true sense of the word alive today; soon - however he chooses to present himself to the public, with his writings or from the chair it does not matter - he will attract the eyes of all of Germany [...]. Doctor Marx [...] this is the name of my idol, he is still very young (he is about 24 years old). He will deliver the final blow to medieval religion and philosophy. He unites in himself the most biting spirit with the most profound philosophical seriousness: imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, d'Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel merged into a single person [...], here is Doctor Marx. "

( Moses Hess to Berthold Auerbach, 1841 )

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Brückengasse 664 in Trier, then a Prussian province of the Grand Duchy of the Lower Rhine and today part of Rhineland-Palatinate, to a wealthy family of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, the third son of nine children of the wealthy German lawyer Herschel Marx ( 1777-1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788-1863), born in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.His parents were married on November 22, 1814 at the synagogue in Nijmegen, receiving a dowry of 20,000 Dutch guilders. The father, son of the rabbi at the city synagogue Mordechai Halevi Marx (1743-1804) and the Polish-German Jewess Eva Lwow (1753-1823), was the first in his family to receive a secular education and to refuse line of rabbinic succession, which was left to his brother Samuel Marx (1775-1837). A follower of the Enlightenment, especially of Rousseau, Kant and Voltaire, as well as a convinced liberal, his father was often involved in the various reform campaigns of the absolutist Prussian state, which following the famous defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo had to the territories of the Lower Rhine (until then an integral part of theBefore becoming a lawyer, his father was secretary of the Jewish Consistory of Trier, and in 1808, following the Napoleonic laws, he had changed his surname (removing the Hebrew Halevi from Marx, which means belonging to the Israelite tribe of the Levites). Her mother Henriette was the daughter of Isaac Heymans Pressburg (1747-1832) and Nanette Salomons Cohen (1764-1833), both of whom belonged to families of wealthy Jewish merchants and rabbis at the synagogues of Wroclaw and Nijmegen.A sister of his, Sophie Pressburg (1797-1854), married Lion Philips (1794-1866), a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer, with whom he had the only child Frederick Philips (1830-1900), future co-founder of Philips. On his mother's side, Marx was a third cousin of Henrich Heine, whom he met during his stay in Paris in 1843.

The city of Trier, an important Rhenish cultural and economic center, had repeatedly been the subject of disputes by France from at least the period of the bloody Thirty Years War until its final occupation in 1794, as a result of which it developed a profitable network. of ties and commercial ties with the main French cities, as well as sharing with them the great social reforms that the results of the French Revolution had introduced at home, and then with the Prussian annexation of 1815 being progressively stripped of its body of constitutional rights and its strategic economic position. In fact, in 1817, a year before Marx's birth,so that in 1831 he joined the Justizrat , the supreme judicial council, which, although not procuring a particular academic title, was certainly a highly prestigious position. In addition to his income as a middle-class Jewish lawyer, his father owned several vineyards on the Moselle.

With his father, who exercised a considerable influence on the intellectual formation of the young Marx, he would always have been linked by a deep bond of affection and esteem. This was not the case with his mother, considered by some historians and biographers an intellectually arid woman or perhaps just a very simple person, who would always reproach him for not having made a position adequate to his social rank and his intellectual abilities, nor with the his brothers and sisters Sophie (1817-1883), Hermann (1819-1842), Henriette (1820-1856), Louise (1821-1893), Caroline (1824-1847) and Eduard (1834-1837).

In 1830 he enrolled at the high school in Trier, obtaining his license on August 17, 1835. We have received the subjects of Greek, Latin, mathematics, French, religion and German. In Latin he writes a dissertation on the principality of Augustus entitled An principatus Augusti merit inter felicitoores reipublicae Romanae aetates numeretur? (in Italian: Can the principality of Augustus rightly be counted among the happiest periods of the Roman republic?; in German: Consideration of a young man on the choice of his own future), where he writes among other things that «the guide that must help us in choosing a condition is the good of humanity, our own perfection. Do not object that the two interests could oppose each other [...]. [T] he nature of man is such that he can reach his individual perfection only by acting for the perfection and good of humanity ".

In 1835 on the advice of his father he enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bonn, but he placed philosophical and literary studies before law studies in the courses held by August Wilhelm Schlegel, brother of Frederich Schlegel and author of the famous Dramatic Literature Course ( 1809), considered the "Bible of romantic writers". He participates in the goliardic and bohemian life of the city with which forms of political opposition are also mixed and supports the ritual duel between university freshmen, even spending a day in prison for drunkenness and nocturnal noises. He joins a circle of poets and begins to feel the weight of police surveillance.

In the summer of 1836 he met in Trier and was secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen (1814-1881), daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, nicknamed "the princess of dreams". In the autumn, following the decision of the family, he continued his studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had taught until five years earlier, with the authoritative jurists Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Eduard Gans. The first, belonging to the old historical and conservative school, considered law a creation of the popular spirit ( Volksgeist); the second, Hegelian and liberal, conceived law as a product of the dialectical development of the idea and a scholar also of Henri de Saint-Simon was in favor of social reforms that would alleviate the conditions of the popular classes.

With a cultural background with an Enlightenment imprint, Marx begins to write a Philosophy of Law which, however, he interrupts after a hundred pages, convinced that "without a philosophical system nothing can be achieved". During the course of an illness he reads all of Hegel's works, receiving a strong impression.

Young Hegelian

At the end of that year Marx wrote and dedicated three notebooks of poems to his fiancée, the Buch der Lieder ( Book of Songs ) and two Bücher der Liebe ( Books of love ), which have not survived. Instead, we have a notebook of poems dedicated to his father on November 10, 1837 on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday, also including four epigrams on Hegel. In one of them it is written:

“Kant and Fichte wandered in the clouds up there looking for a distant country. I try to skilfully grasp only what I have found on the road. "

On that occasion he communicates to his father the decision to abandon his legal studies to devote himself to philosophical ones. Hegelism was the then dominant cultural and philosophical expression in Prussia, with supporters of absolute power giving it a conservative interpretation, and for this reason belonging to the so-called Hegelian right, while the proponents of a political and cultural renewal in a liberal and democratic sense were defined as the Hegelian left, or even young Hegelians, because of their average age. Instead, they exalted the progressive aspects of Hegelism: in particular of the dialectic, for which the whole reality, even social and political, is a continuous evolution.

Unable to attack monarchical absolutism, the criticism of the young Hegelians was directed against the official religion. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauß had in fact published a heterodox Life of Jesus interpreting the Gospels as a set of myths. Bruno Bauer, professor of theology, refutes his theses from the columns of the periodical of speculative theology in which the major exponents of the Hegelian right take part. Marx thus found himself frequenting the Doktorklub in the suburb of Stralau from 1837 , a Berlin club of young Hegelians who quickly passed from liberal monarchical positions to Jacobin positions, taking the name of Friends of the People.

In 1835 he published the essay Die Vereinigung der Gläubigen mit Christo (nach Johannes 15, 1-14) ( The union of believers with Christ (John 15: 1-14) . In 1839 he was still a student and published his first work entitled Szenen aus: Oulanem. Trauerspiel ( Scenes from: Oulanem. Tragedy ). Oulanem is the anagram of the Hebrew form of the name Emmanuel (biblical name of Jesus Christ, which means "God with us"). It is a poem-tragedy unfinished in four scenes and seven characters set in a mountain resort in Italy starring Tillo Oulamen, a nihilist philosopher.

In 1841 in the Berlin literary magazine Athenaeum he published Der Spielmann ( The Volinist ).

From the end of 1838 to 1840 he prepared a History of Epicurean, Stoic and Skeptical Philosophy as a thesis for his degree, but given the vastness of the commitment he interrupted it. He thus graduated in philosophy on April 15, 1841 at the University of Jena with a thesis entitled Difference between the philosophy of nature of Democritus and that of Epicurus . In this dissertation, after having analytically treated the thought of both, he strongly leans towards that of Epicurus, who by introducing the "clinamen" avoids absolute determinism, leaving room for human freedom on which an ethics that pursues happiness can be founded. It is worth quoting from it the final passages of the preface:

«Philosophy [...] will always cry out to its adversaries with Epicurus: wicked is not he who denies the gods of the common people, but he who attributes the sentiments of the common people to the gods . Philosophy makes no secret of this. Prometheus's confession: frankly, I hate all gods is his own confession of him, his own sentence against all celestial and terrestrial deities who do not recognize human self-consciousness as the supreme divinity. Nobody can stand by her side. To the sad March hares, who rejoice in the apparently worsened civil condition of philosophy, she replies what Prometheus replies to the servant of the gods Hermes:I, I assure you, would not change my miserable fate with your servants. I esteem it much better to be loyal to this cliff than a faithful messenger to be from Jupiter . Prometheus is the greatest saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar. "

Political commitment

The conclusion of his university studies coincides with the worsening of the government repression on political and cultural life. Among others, his friend Bruno Bauer, who is barred from academic activity at the University of Jena, pays the price. Marx himself, who was thinking of a university career, feels the urgency of a direct political commitment. He begins with the Observations on the recent instructions for censorship in Prussia , an article written between January and February 10, 1842 for Arnold Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher ( German Annals ), which however prudently does not publish it and was published only on the 13th. February 1843 in the Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik (Anecdotes for recent German philosophy and publications ).

Marx's public debut as a journalist therefore took place on May 5, 1842 with the article "Debates on freedom of the press and the publication of debates at the Diet" in the Rheinische Zeitung ( Rhenish Gazette ), a Cologne newspaper financed by the liberal Rhenish bourgeoisie in cautious opposition to the Prussian regime and managed by the radical circle headed by Moses Hess, nicknamed the "red rabbi" due to his Jewish origins and because he was a supporter of Jewish integration into the universalist socialist movement. Becoming a friend and collaborator of Marx and Friedrich Engels, he converted the latter to socialism: "The first freedom of the press", he writes, "consists in the fact that it is not a '

In September 1842 he moved from Bonn to Cologne to devote himself full time to the publishing business. In October he was editor-in-chief of the newspaper which established itself as the main opposition body and was accused of being a communist by the reactionary Augsburg General Gazette following articles by Hess extolling the theories of Charles Fourier. Marx replied on October 16 that «the Rheinische Zeitung , which cannot grant to communist ideas, in their present form, not even theoretical relevance and therefore even less desire or consider possible their practical realization, will submit these ideas to a thorough criticism. But if the Gazzetta d'Augustademanded more than brilliant phrases, he would understand that writings such as those of Leroux, Considerant and above all the penetrating work of Proudhon, cannot be criticized with impromptu superficial findings, but only after a long, assiduous and very thorough study ».

From the circumspect tone of the answer one can already sense a certain interest on the part of Marx in these ideas. Marx left the editorial office of the newspaper on 17 March 1843, which was suppressed by the government on the following 21 March "because of the situation in which censorship places the newspaper". He writes to Ruge: «I was tired of hypocrisy, of police brutality and also of our servility. The government made me my freedom. In Germany I can no longer undertake anything: I would end up corrupting myself ».

Parisian period

He married Jenny von Westphalen on 19 June 1843 in the St. Paul's Church in Bad Kreuznach. The two then leave together for Paris, where Marx publishes with Ruge the new magazine Deutsch-französische Jahrbüche ( Franco-German Annals ), written in collaboration with Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Georg Herwegh and Friedrich Engels, a wealthy German entrepreneur who becomes henceforth his lifelong friend and main financier, as well as the one who would later recognize Frederick Demuth (1851-1929), Marx's natural son with his governess Helene Demuth.However, according to Terrell Carver this fact, which has been circulating since 1962, "is not well founded on the documentary material available", adding that such rumors are not supported by "direct evidence that points unambiguously on this topic".

A letter sent to Ruge in September 1843 clarifies the sense of his partial distance from the intellectuals of the Hegelian left:

«As religion is the index of the theoretical battles of men, the political state is the index of their practical battles [...]. [I] The critic not only can, but must take an interest in political problems [and] our motto will be: reform of the conscience, not through dogmas, but through the analysis of the mystical conscience dark to itself, whether it presents itself in a way religious, and in a political way. It will then be seen how for some time the world has possessed the dream of a thing, of which it has only the consciousness to possess, in order to really possess it. "

However, only a double issue of the Annals comes out in February 1844. Marx publishes The Jewish Question and the introduction to his own Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of public law (published however only in 1927), in which he notes that Hegel does not subordinate reality to reality. idea, but on the contrary you preserve the present German reality, pretending to transcend it and sell the Prussian state as an idea of ​​the state. According to Marx, a true theory of society is therefore possible only by putting aside any idea of ​​society in general, by analyzing instead the materially determined society. The work represents his detachment from Hegelian thought, of which he is already beginning to identify the mystification of reality.

On the Jewish question

In the article appeared in the Franco-German Annals in 1844 entitled On the Jewish question, Marx responds to the theory of Bruno Bauer, who in The Jewish Question and in The Capacity of Jews and Christians Today to Obtain Freedom, analyzing the Prussian case, he faced the critique of religious conscience and political reformism by entering into open conflict with the Hegelian left, which opposed the political cornerstone of the state religion and called for the political emancipation of the Jews. While sharing the liberal criticism of the political use of religion by the state, Bauer understood political freedom as the renunciation of all particularism and therefore moved a criticism of the arguments of how many Jews and non-Jews supported the cause of emancipation on the basis of the recognition of a particular identity. Also Marx considered possible the emancipation of the Jews in Prussia, but only if they were emancipated from religion, which always generates within it conflicts and discrimination between the various confessions: «The most rigid form of the contrast between the Jew and the Christian is the religious contrast. How is a dispute resolved? Making it impossible. How to make religious conflict impossible? Eliminating religion. When a Jew and a Christian recognize that the reciprocal religions are nothing but different stages of development of the human spirit, they are nothing more than different snake skins laid down by history, and that man is the snake that had clothed himself with them, then not they will find themselves more in a religious relationship, but by now only in a critical, scientific, human relationship ".

Marx believes that Bauer's answer rests on a misunderstanding in that he thinks that human emancipation coincides with political emancipation, stating that "we note Bauer's error in the fact that he only criticizes the" Christian state " , not the "state in itself", which does not seek the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation, and therefore poses conditions that can only be explained by an acritical confusion between political emancipation and human emancipation in general ".Instead, for Marx there are three possible emancipations: religious, political and human. Bauer stopped at the first two forms while Marx considers it essential to arrive at the third. Political emancipation is not yet human and in support of this thesis it brings the example of the United States of America in which despite the existence of a secular state in real life there are colossal differences in behavior depending on whether they are aimed at a Protestant or an atheist. . Marx therefore believes that political emancipation does not concern the real or earthly man, but rather an abstract man with equal rights and dignity, concealing instead the enormous inequalities that really exist: "The limit of political emancipation immediately appears in the fact that the State can to free oneself from a limit without man being really free of it,privatim . [...] But the behavior of the state towards religion, and particularly of the free state, is none the less the behavior of the men who make up the state towards religion. It follows that man through the state, politically, frees himself from a limit, rising beyond that limit, in contrast with himself, in an abstract and limited way, in a partial way ".

The State with its laws concerning man (built over the particular elements in order to build a universality) splits the human being between the sky of laws, the political State and the earth, reality and civil society. Therefore, the life of man is divided between the citoyen , the citizen, political subject with rights and duties; and the bourgeois, the bourgeois member of civil society having his own private interests: "The conflict in which man finds himself as a follower of a particular religion, with himself as a citizen, with other men as members of the community, is reduced to worldly split between the political state and civil society. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the politician is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen , in which the member of civil society finds himself with his political disguise ».Marx's critique thus shifts to human rights, which are the historical product of the American and French revolutions and therefore a mystification is hidden in them. Man, the subject of these rights, is none other than the private individual of civil society and therefore characterized by particular interests hidden under a false universality: "None of the so-called rights of man therefore goes beyond the selfish man, man insofar as he is a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private will, and isolated from the community. Far from being man understood in them as a species, the very life of the species, society, appears rather as a frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence ».In bourgeois society, since this split between public and private exists, man is therefore only on paper and abstractly a member of the State since only in the legal and political sphere is every man equal to others, not in the real sphere of economic and social life in which all men are unequal. When the real man summarizes the abstract citoyen in himselfin his empirical life by becoming a member of the human species where all men as such are equal only then human emancipation is accomplished. Human society (not what it is, but what it should be) is therefore hypothesized by Marx as rational, unitary and free of conflicts, so much so that the existence of law and politics is not necessary in it as freedom is realized in it. in an organic unity of all individuals ("unity of society and individual"). Marx's egalitarianism and anti-liberalism start from the assumption of an "intransigent organicism, which leaves no room for autonomy to the individual". .

In the Vorwärts! ( Avanti! ), Newspaper of German emigrants in Paris, Arnold Ruge publishes The King of Prussia and Social Reform , referring to Frederick William IV of Prussia and judging negatively a riot of Silesian weavers in June 1844 because he considers it without concrete political prospects . Marx replies with the article Critical observations on the sidelines , considering the insurrection of the Silesian proletariat the sign that revolutionary conditions are maturing even in backward Germany and breaks with Ruge, whom he accuses of aestheticizing intellectualism and of being a revolutionary only in words.

Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of public law

In this work written in 1843 (published only in 1927), also known under the title For the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law , Marx confronts the Outlines of philosophy of law (1821) in which Hegel had taken into consideration according to his dialectical conception is law ( Recht ), understood as abstract law, as the first moment (in itself) of the objective spirit, which relates to the antithesis (per se) of morality ( Moralität ), that is, formal morality of the Kantian type .

This relationship that is configured as opposition is resolved with the synthesis (in and of itself), the conciliation represented by ethics ( Sittlichkeit ), living unity, i.e. overcoming and conservation ( Aufhebung) of the one-sidedness of law and morality. Therefore, ethics are dialectically realized in historical institutions such as the family, civil society and the state. The latter as an ethical substance subsumes the other moments as a synthesis and the individual has the task of recognizing himself completely in it since only in the ethical state does the individual acquire "reality, truth and objectivity". While appreciating the Hegelian distinction between civil society and the state, Marx criticizes the Hegelian state because it is not at all ethical as it is actually founded on the "religion of private property".Instead, Marx favors civil society, which even in Hegel already had an important role, as a moment of the antithesis and the negative (per se), making possible for the first time a scientific study of society itself, in which, according to Marx, they act the classes that originate from the division between landowners and non-owners are in conflict with each other.

Against the conservatism of Hegel, which justified the hereditary monarchy, the large landowners and the majority in Prussia, Marx, on the other hand, influenced by Rousseau's concept of general will, envisages an egalitarian democracy based on universal suffrage. Subsequently, with the discovery of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, Marx passes from this egalitarian democratic position, the ultimate aim of which was constituted by universal suffrage, to a revolutionary conception. With the proletariat becoming the dominant class there is the abolition of private property and the birth of a classless society, even reaching the overcoming of the state. The critique of Hegel's philosophy of law represents the moment in which the Marxian analysis matures in analysis of the historical-concrete movement in which the comparison between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity stands out. The criticism of the Hegelian state is the achievement of the new point of view from which the history and organization of civil society is observed.

Religion and Ludwig Feuerbach

Religion is the sobbing of an oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people. "

( Karl Marx, For the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law - Introduction )

The introduction to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Public Law was published in the Franco-German Annals during Marx's first stay in Paris in 1844. It should have preceded a work that Marx had composed in 1843, concerning precisely Hegel's philosophy of law, but that was not published. However, it was only found in 1927 by Soviet researchers in the form of an unfinished manuscript.

In this important introduction and in contrast to Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that the epoch in which he lived marked the decline of religion, Marx specifies that the critique of religion is the premise of all other critiques and that in religion they cohabit a critical instance beyond than the illusory one. If for Feuerbach religion is the fruit of the inverted conscience of the world, for Marx this is due to the fact that society itself is an inverted world. Religion is an expression and criticism of the real misery in which man finds himself, with its very presence it denounces the intolerability of reality for man, but at the same time generates the illusion of achieving social justice in the afterlife.

Religion is "the groan of the oppressed creature, the soul of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a condition of life devoid of spirituality. It is the opium of the peoples ”, it dulls the senses in the relationship with reality, it is a deception that man perpetuates to himself. Unable to grasp the reasons for his condition, man considers it as a fact (cause of original sin), seeking consolation and justification in the religious heavens.

A concrete liberation from religion does not occur by eliminating religion itself, as stated by Bruno Bauer, but by changing the conditions and relationships in which man finds himself degraded and deprived of his own essence.

Proletariat

The political emancipation carried out by the liberal bourgeoisie must be followed by human emancipation. It can be reached through a universal class devoid of particular interests, which having suffered not a particular wrong, but total injustice, does not claim a single particular right, but can emancipate itself and the whole of society.

The subject of human emancipation is the proletariat, a class in which the essence of man has been completely lost and which can therefore re-appropriate it. The proletariat must be made aware that it has lost its essence and therefore its revolutionary aim. In this way philosophy and theory become practically achievable and the proletariat becomes "the true heir of classical German philosophy".

Economic-philosophical manuscripts of 1844

Stimulated by the reading of Friedrich Engels' Sketch of a Critique of Political Economy which shows how capitalist accumulation generates economic crises that exacerbate social conflicts, Marx undertakes in Paris the study of classical economists and their critics (Pierre- Joseph Proudhon and Simondo Sismondi). The result of this intense period of study are the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , published only in 1932.

In a suggestive analysis which, using the instrument of dialectics, combines the concreteness of economic investigation with the criticism of the falsification of the same dialectic in a spiritualist key made by Hegel and his followers, Marx gives the first theoretical definition of communism as "the true resolution of antagonism between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species ". Communist society is "the essential unity [...] of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the complete naturalism of man and the complete humanism of nature".

The Manuscripts consist of three parts based on the following themes:

• the critique of classical economics;
• the description of communism; And
• the critique of the Hegelian dialectic.

Critique of classical economics and alienation

In the treatment of the first theme he investigates the laws that regulate the market and industry and contrary to what Adam Smith said there was nothing harmonious and natural in economic relations, but rather the economy is a land of conflicts from which no it can abstract (as classical economists did by considering them accidental).

Marx criticizes the classical economists for having concealed and masked a certain mode of production, the capitalist one, with laws considered natural and immutable, considering the existence of private property to be a fact. To the question, as well as the title of the work, "What is private property?" Proudhon had replied "a theft."

For Marx, political economy had neglected the relationship between the worker, his work and production in order to conceal the alienation, characteristic of work in modern industrial society. Alienation, a term that Marx recovers from Hegel, is "becoming other", "giving up what is one's own to others". In capitalist production it can take on various aspects related to each other in which «the worker becomes poorer the greater the wealth he produces [...]. [The worker] becomes a commodity all the more vile the larger the quantity of commodity produced [and] comes to be found in relation to the object of his work as a foreign object [...]. [The] alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, something that exists outside, but that it exists outside of him, independent of him, alien to him, and becomes before him a power in its own right; it means that the life that he has given to the object is opposed to it hostile and extraneous ».

• Alienation concerns the worker and the product of his labor. This product of his labor does not belong to him but belongs to the capitalist, it is foreign to him.
• Productive activity is not the satisfaction of a need, but a means of satisfying needs unrelated to the work itself. In fact, the work does not belong to the worker, but belongs to another and therefore he, while working, does not belong to himself, but to another. The worker thus estranges himself from himself and does not consider work as part of his real life (which takes place outside the factory).
• The worker loses his generic essence, that is, what marks the essence of man. By man Marx means the being that is realized historically in the genre of which he belongs. Characteristic of the human race is work, which differentiates it from the animal and allows it to establish a relationship with nature through which it appropriates nature itself.
• Work in the factory is reduced to mere individual survival, therefore it is not a positive expression of human nature. The community dimension is lost in the factory. Thus we speak of the alienation of its social essence.

Thus the worker feels himself a man only in his animal functions (eating, drinking, procreating and so on) while he feels like an animal in his work, that is, in what should be a typically human activity. The organic unity of humanity, which is realized in activity and in social relations, is shattered by private property, which separates man from his activities and from their products.

Both Hegel and classical economists have seen work as a constitutive element of the human essence. The economists, however, saw only the positive side in the work, accepting it as something natural free from historical changes. Hegel had therefore grasped the historical character of work in that the spirit is self-production (through loss and re-appropriation) of itself just as man is the fruit of his own work. The only flaw was limiting this process to thinking to self-awareness. Alienation or objectification, even if recognized as the development of the subject, are reduced to a spiritual process in which the thought (the subject) in front of an object other than itself objectifies itself, that is, it gets lost in it,

Marx therefore recovers, according to the teaching of Ludwig Feuerbach, corporeality and sensitivity as an essential aspect, as the first ineliminable element of man. Man is a natural being and there is no negativity that must be overcome in his objectification in nature, but he is also a historical being as he is capable of removing alienation (objectification) by recovering his generic essence which is based on the relationship with objectivity, that is, the appropriation of nature in collaboration with other men.

Communism

If private property is therefore the expression of alienated human life, the suppression of it and of the social relations that generate and protect it is merely the suppression of any alienation. Communism is the elimination of alienation, therefore of private property, an operation which coincides with the recovery of all human faculties and the liberation of the human essence. Unlike the forms that Marx defines as crude or utopian communism, it is the outcome towards which historical development proceeds.

Money

In the manuscripts Marx also left an acute analysis of the subversive force of money. In fact, in the society that has private property as its basis "money is the alienated power of humanity. What I cannot as a man and therefore what my individual strengths cannot, I can through money. Therefore, money makes each of these essential forces something that it is not in itself, that is, it makes its opposite of them ".

Money satisfies desires and translates them into reality, realizes what is imagined, but on the contrary also transforms reality into representation: "If I have a vocation to study, but I have no money to make it happen [...] I have no effective vocation , no true vocation. On the contrary, if I really have no vocation, but have will and money, I have an effective vocation. [...] [T] he money is therefore the universal reversal of individualities that overturns into their opposite [,] changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice by virtue [and] is the universal confusion and inversion of all things ».

Money is embodied in its owner: «How great is the power of money, so great is my power. [...] What I am and can, is therefore not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful of women. And therefore I am not ugly, because the effect of ugliness, its repulsive force, is canceled out by money. I, considered as an individual, am crippled, but money gives me twenty-four legs; so I'm not crippled. [...] I am a wicked, dishonest, stupid man; but money is honored, and therefore also its owner. Money is the supreme good, and therefore its owner is good; money also takes away the pain of being dishonest; and therefore I am assumed to be honest. I am a fool, but money is the true intelligence of all things; so how could the owner be stupid? [...] [C] ostui [the stupid rich] will always be able to buy intelligent people, and whoever has power over intelligent people is not smarter than intelligent people? ».

Money transforms every human fallacy into its exact opposite. Money is therefore a "subversive power." [...] [C] onfuses and inverts everything, it is the universal confusion and inversion of all things, and therefore the world turned upside down, the confusion and inversion of all natural and human qualities. Money changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, stupidity into intelligence, intelligence into stupidity ".

Without the social necessity of money, that is, without private property, Marx writes:

«If you presuppose man as man and his relationship with the world as a human relationship, you will be able to exchange love only with love, trust only with trust. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically educated man; if you want to have any influence on other men, you must be a man who acts on other men by really stimulating and urging them. Each of your relations with man and nature must be a determined manifestation corresponding to the object of your will, of your individual life in its reality. If you love without arousing a loving correspondence, if your love as love does not produce a correspondence of love, if in your vital manifestation as a loving man you do not make yourself a beloved man, your love is powerless, it is a unhappiness. "

Finally, the Marxian analysis of money concludes with a wish that sounds emphatically almost like a mystical reminder if we do not consider that on this occasion Marx addresses the essence and universal definition of man, not his existing materiality: "The private property has made us dull and one-sided. [...] The human essence must be brought back to absolute poverty in order to understand and draw from itself its internal, intimate richness ".

Religious alienation

Marx also takes up Feuerbach's interpretation of religious alienation which he nevertheless extends to the economic sphere, identified as the foundation of all human alienations:

«Religious estrangement occurs only in the sphere of conscience, of human interiority; economic estrangement is on the other hand the estrangement of real life, whereby its suppression embraces both sides. "

Marx also seems to be close to detaching himself from Feuerbach and to the foundation of historical materialism when he writes that "religion, family, state, law, morality, art are but particular modes of production". Even the philosophy of praxis seems to be anticipated, when he asserts that "the solution of theoretical oppositions [is] possible only in a practical way [and] not [is] only a theoretical task, but a real task".

Thanks to the reports of the Prussian police we know how in the summer of 1844 he frequented the circles of Parisian workers and artisans and the socialists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc and the Russian anarchist Michail Bakunin. The Prussian government asked for his expulsion from France and Marx, with his wife and little daughter Jenny, settled in Brussels on 5 February 1845, where he was accepted on condition that he did not publish any political writings.

Nature

A conception of nature that goes beyond the philosophical panorama of the nineteenth century is the one that Marx expounds in The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 . Following this work, the theme of alienation is understood in a deeper and no longer simply political sense. Marx establishes a connection between what represents the essence of man, the activity in which man expresses all of himself (spirit and body): work, which beyond any separation between theory and practice is identified with the worked object, which in turn is nothing more than the natural object that man modifies. Nature itself is therefore the result of human activity.

This connection between man-work-worked object-nature is blown up by the alienation that expropriates the worker not only of the product of labor, but also of the act of production. As an effect of alienated work, man restricts his humanity to the sphere of bestial needs, transforms himself into a commodity and suffers the consequences of the upheaval of the relationship between man and nature. Man is an entity that consciously places itself in a relationship of continuity with nature insofar as it lives from nature and in its productive activity nature manifests itself as the work of man. When the object of work is taken away from him by alienation, nature is also taken away from him. Nature, that is, from man's inorganic body,benign friend when it satisfied the social needs of man, it becomes a means of production subordinated to individual needs. Human life that was inserted into a friendly and not extraneous nature (life of the genus) when it becomes a means for the satisfaction of selfish individual needs turns into a foreign enemy force:

"[XXII] The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, something that exists on the outside, but that it exists outside of him, independent of him, alien to him, and becomes of before him a power in itself; it means that the life that he has given to the object is opposed to it hostile and extraneous.[XXIII] And now let us consider more closely the objectification, the production of the worker, and in it the estrangement, the loss of the object, of its product.The worker cannot produce anything without nature, without the sensible external world. This is the matter on which his work is carried out, on which his work acts, from which and through which it produces.But how nature provides work with the means of subsistence, in the sense that work cannot exist without objects to which it applies; thus, on the other hand, it also provides the means of subsistence in the strictest sense, that is, the means for the physical sustenance of the worker himself. Therefore the more the worker appropriates with his own work the external world, the sensitive nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of subsistence in the following double direction: first of all, due to the fact that the external world ceases more and more to be a object belonging to his work, a means of subsistence of his work, and then due to the fact that the external world itself ceases more and more to be a means of subsistence in the immediate sense, that is, a means for his physical sustenance. "

Brussels period

Reversal of Hegelian philosophy and historical materialism

The Brussels period is fruitful in theoretical studies. Already in September 1844 he had written together with Engels The Holy Family , published in 1845, a satire of those left Hegelians, such as Bruno Bauer and others, who were under the illusion of transforming society by limiting themselves to criticism. In this work Marx and Engels endorse Feuerbach's conception of real humanism, as Marx himself confirmed more than twenty years later, writing to Engels that the writing still seemed good to him, "although the cult of Feuerbach now makes a very humorous impression ".

It shows and ridicules the genesis of the abstraction of sensible reality, the mystification of reality produced by Hegelianism:

"If I form the general representation" fruit "from apples, pears, strawberries, almonds, real, if I go further and imagine that" the fruit ", my abstract representation, obtained from real fruit, is an existing essence outside of me, indeed the true essence of pear, apple, etc., I declare - with a speculative expression - that "the fruit" is "the substance" of pear, apple, almond, etc. So I say that for the pear it is not essential to be pear, that for the apple it is not essential to be apple. The essential in these things would not be their real existence, sensibly intuitable, but the essence that I abstracted from them and attributed to them, the essence of my representation "the fruit". I then declare that apple, pear, almond, etc. they are simple ways of existence, ways "of the fruit". My finite intellect, supported by the senses, certainly distinguishes an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares this sensitive difference inessential and indifferent. It sees in the apple the same thing as in the pear, and in the pear the same thing as in the almond, that is "the fruit". The particular real fruits are worth no more than as parventi fruit, the true essence of which is "the substance", "the fruit". [...] The minerologist whose science merely says that all minerals are indeed the mineral, would be a minerologist - in his imagination. and in the pear the same thing as in the almond, that is "the fruit". The particular real fruits are worth no more than as parventi fruit, the true essence of which is "the substance", "the fruit". [...] The minerologist whose science merely says that all minerals are indeed the mineral, would be a minerologist - in his imagination. and in the pear the same thing as in the almond, that is "the fruit". The particular real fruits are worth no more than as parventi fruit, the true essence of which is "the substance", "the fruit". [...] The minerologist whose science merely says that all minerals are indeed the mineral, would be a minerologist - in his imagination."

While the common man knows he is saying nothing extraordinary by saying that there are apples and pears, «the [Hegelian, speculative] philosopher, when he expresses these existences in a speculative way, has said something extraordinary. He has performed a miracle, he has produced, from the unreal intellectual being "the fruit", the real natural beings, the apple, the pear, etc .; that is, from his own abstract intellect, which he represents as an absolute subject existing outside himself, which he represents here as "the fruit", he has created these fruits, and in every existence he expresses, he performs a creative act [ e] declares his own activity, through which he passes from the apple representation to the pear representation, to be the self-activity of the absolute subject, "of the fruit". This operation is called,

In controversy with Bauer and his followers (who saw romanticism as the obligatory outcome of the Enlightenment), Marx reconstructs the genesis of modern philosophical materialism, recognizing it as the precursor of both modern natural science and socialism and communism.Towards the French Revolution, on the other hand, Marx manifests a rather critical attitude in this work. According to Marx, the French Jacobins unwittingly instituted a new type of slavery on the part of the bourgeoisie: "Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell because they exchanged the ancient, realistically democratic community, which rested on the foundation of royal slavery, with the modern representative state, spiritually democratic, based on emancipated slavery, on civil society. What a colossal illusion to be forced to recognize and sanction in human rights modern civil society, the society of industry, of general competition, of private interests freely pursuing their ends, of anarchy, of

Thesis on Feuerbach

If still in the economic-philosophical manuscripts of 1844 Feuerbach was "the only one who is in a serious and critical relationship with the Hegelian dialectic, who has made real discoveries in this field and who is the real winner of the old philosophy", already in the spring of 1845 Marx had written a few lines in a notebook found by Engels after his death and published in 1888 with the title of Thesis on Feuerbach .

In them Marx indicates that if Feuerbach had unmasked the upside-down world of religion by rediscovering the alienated essence of man, he had not grasped the historical character of man himself, nor that religion is the fruit of historical conditions that make it possible. Feuerbach conceives man as an entity endowed with sensitivity and corporeality, therefore marked by passivity and inserted in an already constituted world. Marx opposes praxis to passivity , that is, a transforming activity of nature, and the world becomes the product of human activity, as already mentioned in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 .

In the Theses he exposes the idea of ​​man as a practical entity, writing that «in praxis he must prove the truth, that is, reality and power, the immanent character of his thought. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thought - isolated from praxis - is a purely scholastic question ". This is the answer to Feuerbach's conception and of every vulgar materialism according to which external reality is always and only something that stands before man without taking into account that it is a product of human activity because praxis is essentially objective and turned outside.

Like all philosophers before him, Feurbach had posed the problem of the truth of thought, but thought cannot verify itself abstractly, it must be practical activity aimed at verifying the truth of ideas. This is the defect of the whole philosophy and not only of Feuerbach, namely that of having limited itself to trying to know reality, to interpret the world, "but it is a question of transforming it".

German ideology

Marx and Engels in German Ideology bring an attack on the German philosophy of the time represented by Ludwig Feuerbach, the most advanced exponent of the German philosophical panorama, by Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner.

Much of the book is devoted to the deliberately sarcastic and contemptuous criticism of Max Stirner's main work, The One and His Ownership , initially greeted with some favor by Engels, but identified as a danger by Marx. After all, Stirner, determined individualist and selfish, as well as a consequent atheist, had not spared criticism of that "society of the beggars" to which, according to him, the communist revolution would lead.

The work was published only in 1932 because after the impossibility of publication, the manuscript was abandoned "to the criticism of mice" by the two authors, who having clarified to themselves the theoretical foundations of the new materialism were determined to face the problems more urgent and politically more relevant than the critique of economics and direct engagement in political activity.

Historical materialism

The work contains the first organic formulation of the materialistic conception of history.

Marx and Engels express there the need for a knowledge that is immediately produced by concrete and positive, empirical and verifiable reality and that does not derive instead from a presupposed and idealistic "Absolute Spirit" which speculatively deduces the various aspects of reality according to an unproven and indemonstrable development of this same presumed Spirit.

Marx and Engels intend to start from «real presuppositions, from which one can abstract only in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their action and their material conditions of life, both those which they have found already exist, as well as those produced by their own action. These presuppositions are therefore ascertainable purely empirically ».

Relationships between men and with nature

Since human beings do not live isolated in overworlds, but in real communities and in immediate contact with nature, it is necessary to analyze both the relationships they establish among themselves, their social organization, and those established with nature, that is the way with which they appropriate nature and transform it.

With regard to the first point, it must be premised that the term community ( Gemeinwesen ) in Marx has a more pregnant meaning than that attributable to the capitalist bourgeois conception of the national and state community, society ( Gesellschaft ), that is, where the existence of the individual is strictly connected to that of all the others to the point that the life of the individual "even in its most individual manifestations has become the very existence of the community".

The true community is instead the one founded on the common human essence where man is free from bonds and limitations. Capitalist and statist society has instead caused the split between man and citizen:

"The completed political state is by its very essence the gendered life [ Gattungslaben ] of man, in opposition to his material life [...] Where the political state has reached its true development, man leads not only into thought and conscience, but in reality, in life, a double life, one heavenly and one earthly: life in the political community [ politischen Gemeinwesen ], in which it is considered as a collective [ Gemeinwesen ], and life in civil society, in as he acts as a private man, who considers other men as means, he degrades himself by means of and becomes a toy of extraneous forces. The political state relates to civil society in the spiritualistic way in which heaven relates to earth. "

The first signs of revolutions originate from the alienation of the individual from his human community:

«But don't all revolts break out, without exception, in the desperate isolation of man from the community [ Gemeinwesen ]? Doesn't every revolt necessarily presuppose this isolation? Would the revolution of 1789 have taken place without the desperate isolation of French citizens from the community? It was precisely intended to abolish this isolation. "

In the capitalist society that has privatized the world, the individual, reduced to a monad, must recover himself by opposing the community ( Gesellschaft ), founded on the principle of capital-market-money where selfishness and the struggle of competition predominate, to recover the sense of belonging to the human community ( Gemeinwesen ).

The relationships between men and those with nature cannot be severed. Since men are not even pure spirit, they must produce their own means of subsistence by which they "indirectly produce their own material life" and since the means of subsistence are always produced in some definite way, that way of producing is already «A determined way of expressing their life, a determined way of life [...]. As men externalize their life, so are they. What they are immediately coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with the way they produce. What individuals are therefore depends on the material conditions of their production ”.

Basic production of human history

The mode of production is historically determined by a particular development of the productive forces, it is the result of certain scientific knowledge and related technology, but it is also the product of relationships that have historically been established between the same men, it is the result of a particular social organization and together is an element that conditions the form and development of those social relations.

Production is the real basis of human history: «Up to now the whole conception of history has purely and simply ignored this real basis of history, or else it has considered it as a mere marginal fact, devoid of any connection with the historical course. For this reason we are always forced to write history according to a yardstick that is outside it; the real production of life appears as something prehistoric, while what is historical [...] appears as extra- and super-mundane. The relationship of man with nature is therefore excluded from history, and with this the antagonism between nature and history is created ".

Not even Ludwig Feuerbach's materialism is able to grasp the real relationships existing between men since he conceives man as a natural being, but he does not see that the relationship of man with nature is also a relationship of man with others men, it is a social relationship.

Forms of ownership in history

In The German Ideology a historiographical excursus is outlined which roughly gives an account of the development of the social forms that have occurred in the course of human history.

Population growth and the satisfaction of basic needs generate new needs which require a greater division of labor. The division of labor is a historical phenomenon, therefore dynamic, which has taken various forms including the division between cities (industry and commerce) and countryside (agriculture). With the change in the division of labor, the forms of ownership have also changed:

• tribal property, founded on the collection of the products of the earth, on hunting, fishing and later on pastoralism and again later on agriculture. The division of labor is underdeveloped and in the end slavery appears, produced by wars with other tribes;
• property of the ancient community in which the state has now formed and the differentiation of labor appears as an antagonism between city and countryside, with slaves providing the productive force used by their owners. Movable property, real estate and commerce are developed;
• feudal property in which agriculture dominates and society is hierarchically organized so that the first forms of capital begin to form; And
• ownership of the capitalist mode of production in which capital develops, wage labor, movable and real estate property, industry, commerce and finance. Nature thus acquires dynamism as it is inextricably linked with the processes of industry and human relationships. Human history is no longer the history of the general human essence, but the development of forms of production and social organization.

Structure and superstructure

If the modes of production do not encompass the whole of social life, they certainly determine its institutions and social and political relations. Consciousness no longer determines reality, but reality determines consciousness. Marx makes two distinctions:

• "Structure", modes of production, economic and social organization; And
• "Superstructure", the production of ideas and culture.

Therefore the structural reality inevitably conditions the superstructure (religion, philosophy, politics, law and so on). According to Marx, the division of labor between manual and intellectual labor undoubtedly contributed to developing a fictitious autonomy of the superstructure, that is, ideology.

Critique of ideology

Ideology no longer indicates, as for ideologues and enlighteners, the study of sensations and the origin of ideas. For Marx it indicates the function that religion, philosophy and cultural productions in general can have in justifying the existing situation: «The ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas in every age; that is, the class which is the dominant power of society is at the same time its dominant spiritual power [...]. The dominant ideas are nothing but the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, they are the dominant material relations taken as ideas ».To understand the historical process, rather than paying attention to ideas and culture, it is necessary to investigate the ways in which material life is produced. For Marx and Engels, the materialistic conception of history places socialism on a scientific basis since it analyzes the historical process and the real conditions that will open the way for it.

Foundation of the League of Communists and Manifesto of the Communist Party

In the summer of 1845 Marx and Engels entered into a relationship in London with the Association of German Workers, an English legal emanation of the clandestine League of the Righteous, an international company that gathered memberships above all among German political emigrants. The theorist of the League was then Wilhelm Weitling, a German tailor, author in 1842 of the Guarantees of harmony and freedom , known and appreciated by Marx, not for the theoretical content, a mixture of primitive communism and early Christian messianism, but for the manifested need for an organization and a consequent revolutionary action. For Weitling the people were already ready for a communist society, to create which the decisive action of a handful of revolutionaries was enough.

In the autumn of 1845, convinced of the need to overcome both utopian theories and adventurous motions, Marx proposed the establishment of correspondence committees that put the various international communist associations in contact, in particular between France, Germany and the United Kingdom, to define shared theories and common revolutionary actions.

On March 30, 1846, a meeting was held in Brussels which was attended by Marx, Engels, Weitling, the Belgian Philippe Gigot, the Germans Edgar von Westphalen, Marx's brother-in-law, Joseph Weydemeyer, Sebastian Seiler and the Russian Pavel Vasil'evič Annenkov who wrote a report of the session: 'Weitling spoke first, repeating all the clichés of liberal rhetoric and would doubtless have spoken longer had Marx not interrupted him, his brow furrowed. In the essential part of his sarcastic response, Marx declared that by uplifting the people without at the same time establishing their activity on solid foundations, he was being deceived. Raising fantastic hopes did not lead to salvation but rather to the loss of those who suffered; turn to the workers, and especially the German workers, without having strictly scientific ideas and a concrete doctrine, it meant transforming propaganda into a meaningless, worse, unscrupulous game. Weitling replied that nothing good could be achieved with abstract criticism and accused Marx of being nothing more than a bourgeois intellectual far from the miseries of the world. At these last words Marx, absolutely furious, punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' it meant turning propaganda into a meaningless, worse, unscrupulous game. Weitling replied that nothing good could be achieved with abstract criticism and accused Marx of being nothing more than a bourgeois intellectual far from the miseries of the world. At these last words Marx, absolutely furious, punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' it meant turning propaganda into a meaningless, worse, unscrupulous game. Weitling replied that nothing good could be achieved with abstract criticism and accused Marx of being nothing more than a bourgeois intellectual far from the miseries of the world. At these last words Marx, absolutely furious, punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' Weitling replied that nothing good could be achieved with abstract criticism and accused Marx of being nothing more than a bourgeois intellectual far from the miseries of the world. At these last words Marx, absolutely furious, punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' Weitling replied that nothing good could be achieved with abstract criticism and accused Marx of being nothing more than a bourgeois intellectual far from the miseries of the world. At these last words Marx, absolutely furious, punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' he punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, he shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. ' he punched the table so hard that the light shook, and, rising abruptly, he shouted: "Up until now ignorance has never served anyone!" Following his example, we too got up. The lecture was over, and while Marx, excited by an unusual anger, paced up and down the room, I took leave of him and the others and returned home, very amazed at what I had seen and heard. '

He joined the Democratic Association of Brussels, becoming its vice-president and together with Engels he founded a study circle of German workers in Brussels, holding conferences there, which were later collected in the work Wage labor and capital .

In November 1846 the steering committee asked Marx and Engels to join the League, which they officially joined in February 1847. On June 1, 1847, at the London congress, the League of the Righteous took the name of the League of Communists, changing the motto " All men are brothers "in that of" Proletarians of the whole world unite ", proposed by Marx and becoming the first modern workers' party, whose statute stated in the first article:

«The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the reign of the proletariat, the suppression of the old bourgeois society founded on class antagonisms and the establishment of a new society without classes and without private property. "

( Statute of the League of Communists , article 1 )

In the second congress of London in November 1847 it was decided to entrust Marx and Engels with the drafting of the party program, which with the title of Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in 1848, shortly before the Parisian revolution of 23 February 1848, and was subsequently translated into all European languages.

Misery of philosophy

In the meantime he had published in French in 1847 the Misery of Philosophy , a critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 's Philosophy of Misery ; and in 1848 the Discourse on Free Trade .

The Misery of philosophy is a refutation of the economic thought of Proudhon, "petty-bourgeois socialist and utopian, who was one of the founders of anarchism", as well as of the method he used in drafting that Philosophy of misery in which he had intended to envisage a society that surpassed the present capitalist society. Proudhon's method, Marx argues, is derived from Hegel's Philosophy of History and is therefore a "Hegelian antiquity, it is not profane history, the history of man, but sacred history, the history of ideas".

Proudhon does not understand the real society in which he lives and does not know the real movement of history because he has remained with an idealistic conception. He did not understand that "economic categories are only abstract expressions" of the real social relations existing among men, which change as the development of the productive forces changes. By making economic categories abstract and eternal, as is customary for bourgeois economists, Proudhon interprets the real relationships of men as a "materialization of this abstraction."

Communist Party Manifesto : Ideology as False Conscience and Dominant Ideas

In the Communist Party Manifesto , the bourgeois social form is analyzed as the product of a long historical process:

"The oppressed class under the dominion of the feudal lords, a set of armed and autonomous associations in the Municipality, sometimes in the form of an independent municipal republic, sometimes as a third tributary state of the monarchy, then at the time of manufacturing industry, in the monarchy controlled by the states as in the absolute one, a counterweight to the nobility, and the main foundation of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie, finally, after the creation of large industry and the world market, has conquered the exclusive political dominion of the modern representative state. Modern state power is but a committee which administers the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class. "

With the transformation of social relations and the development of the productive forces «even the ideas, opinions and concepts, in short, even the conscience of men, changes with the change of their living conditions, their social relations, their social existence. What else does the history of ideas show, if not that intellectual production is transformed along with material production? The dominant ideas of an era have always been only the ideas of the ruling class. There is talk of ideas that revolutionize an entire society; these words simply express the fact that the elements of a new one have been formed within the old society, and that the dissolution of the old ideas goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the old relations of existence ”.

It is the division of intellectual and manual labor that produces within the same bourgeoisie its ideologues, the intellectual apologists, in good or bad faith, of political, economic, religious, moral and legal values, elaborated in philosophical and sociological systems, reported and exalted in the interpretations of historical facts, separating these dominant ideas from the relations that characterize the mode of production of society, believing and propagating the false theory of the historical domination of ideas which would develop through their own internal and independent motion. Such ideologies, or false consciences, cannot transform the social and economic structure, as some ideologues, more or less naively, may believe, being themselves the product of material human relations which spiritually justify the existing relations of production and become an instrument for the preservation of class domination and political power. It is not criticism or thought that reflects on itself, but revolution is the driving force of history.

Revolutionary function of the bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie has in fact historically been a revolutionary force in its struggle against the feudal organization of society, in which it arose and developed: "[T] he bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the instruments of production, the relations of production , therefore, all social relations. The first condition of existence of all the previous industrial classes was instead the unchanged maintenance of the old production system. The continuous revolution of production, the uninterrupted shaking of all social situations, the eternal uncertainty and movement distinguish the epoch of the bourgeois among all previous epochs. "

The subversion of the relations of production and the development of the forces of production brought about by it entailed a radical change in the ideological superstructures that accompanied the feudal relations of production:

«He has ruthlessly torn apart all the multicolored feudal bonds that bound man to his natural superior, and has left no other bond between man and man than bare interest, cold payment in cash. He drowned in the icy water of selfish calculation the sacred thrills of pious exaltation, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine melancholy. It has dissolved personal dignity into exchange value and in place of the innumerable patented and honestly won freedoms, it has placed, unique, the unscrupulous freedom of trade [,] it has put open, shameless, direct and arid exploitation in the place of exploitation disguised in religious and political illusions [,] stripped of their halo all the activities that until then had been revered and considered with pious fear. He turned the doctor, the jurist,"

Its revolutionary character has allowed an acceleration of transformations such as had not been seen in thousands of years. It has developed science and technology as never before, it has subjected the countryside to the city, it has created metropolis, it has forced all nations to adopt the capitalist system of production, on pain of their ruin: "In a word: it creates a world in his own image and likeness ".

However, if the development of the productive forces becomes such that it is not adequate to the relations of production, this generates the crisis and an inevitable revolutionary transition in which the proletariat becomes the ruling class. Just as it was in France where the bourgeoisie was the engine of change in feudal society, so it should happen in the capitalist system produced by it. By intensifying production to the maximum to obtain maximum profit, a crisis of overproduction is favored, part of production and the productive forces must be destroyed in order for capital to perpetuate itself and wealth must be destroyed and misery to produce new wealth:

“The bourgeoisie has not only manufactured the weapons that will bring death to it, it has also generated the men who will wield those weapons: the modern workers, the proletarians. "

Marx and Engels affirm the continuity of class antagonisms in all historically determined societies so that the engine of history is class struggle, or class conflict:

«The history of every society that has existed up to this moment is a history of class struggles. Free and slaves, patricians and plebeians, barons and serfs, members of guilds and apprentices, in short, oppressors and oppressed, were continually in mutual contrast, and waged an uninterrupted struggle, now latent now open; a struggle that every time ended either with a revolutionary transformation of the whole society or with the common ruin of the classes in struggle. In the past epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complete articulation of society in different orders, a multiple graduation of social positions. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages feudal lords, vassals, members of guilds, apprentices, serfs, and, moreover, also particular graduations in almost each of these classes [...]. Modern civil society, which arose from the decline of feudal society, has not eliminated the antagonisms between the classes. It has only replaced the old, new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle."

In Paris and Germany

On February 22, 1848, Paris rose up, in two days Louis Philippe of France was forced to flee to London and a republic was proclaimed. The revolution spread throughout Europe, canceling the political order created in 1814 by the Congress of Vienna. The publication of the German Gazette in Brussels , of which Marx is a collaborator, induces the Prussian government to request the expulsion of Marx and when popular uprisings also break out in Brussels, the Belgian government arrests Marx and expels him.

With the mandate of the League to set up a central committee of the party, he emigrated to Paris on 4 March where the provisional government greets him: "Tyranny has banished you, free France opens its doors to you and to all those who fight for the holy cause. of the fraternity of peoples ". In France, there had already been a split between liberal forces, which feared proletarian extremism; and the socialist ones, with the Blanquists who, referring to the French Revolution, called for a revolutionary war against absolute monarchies.

According to Marx, being the bourgeoisie incapable of leading the revolution even in the perspective of democratic conquests, the organized proletariat had to maintain its autonomy of action and prepare for the decisive confrontation for the social revolution. At the end of March the revolution spreads to Germany, where, however, compared to France, the revolutionary possibilities due to the absence of a numerous proletariat, organized and conquered by socialist ideas, had to be limited to requiring democratic reforms. In the meantime, for Marx it is necessary to foster the communion of intentions between the proletariat and democratic forces, hoping for a favorable evolution in France that will drive the German revolution.

In April 1848 together with his family and Engels he goes to Cologne, where on April 13 he is among the founders of the Democratic Association. He mortgages his father's inheritance to raise the money necessary to found the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ( New Rhine Gazette ) on 1 June 1848, with Marx as director and an editorial staff made up of members of the League. As director of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Marx sends a letter to the Florentine daily L'Alba proposing a collaboration: "This newspaper will follow, in our north, the same democratic principles that Alba represents in Italy". The letter was published on 29 June 1848 in the newspaper L'Albaand it is the first Italian writing of Marx and the one in which we see his position on the Italian popular movement at the beginning of the revolutions of 1848.

In the same month the French republic by means of the army commanded by General Cavaignac crushes the Parisian workers' movement. Marx writes that "the ephemeral triumph of brute force dispelled all the illusions of the February revolution, demonstrated the disintegration of the whole old republican party and the division of the French nation into two parts: that of the owners and that of the workers."

The defeat of the revolutionary movement has repercussions throughout Europe. Assuming that the Communist danger is far more serious for them, the liberals seek an agreement with semi-feudal absolutism. To the Prussian coup d'état of November 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung reacted by exhorting not to pay taxes and to respond with violence to violence. For this reason, in the spring of 1849 Marx was summoned twice in court, but he was acquitted. Abandoned by the weak democratic forces, the newspaper remains the only voice of opposition in Germany and in 1849 convenes a German workers' congress in Leipzig, but in May the Prussian army restores order.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed on May 19, 1849. He had had time to publish in installments from April 4, 1849 the wage and capital labor , introducing the notion of labor-power, distinct from that of labor and showing the origin of surplus value, as well as an analysis of the revolutionary moment in progress, then republished with additions by Engels in 1895 with the title The class struggles in France from 1848 to 1850 .

With the suppression of the daily Marx returns to Paris, but after the popular uprisings of 13 June 1849 the French government offers him the alternative of leaving the capital and moving to Vannes, in Morbihan, a marshy region, or to abandon France. He chooses to move to London, where he lives until his death.

Maturity

Study of political economy

In London he tries to reconstitute the ties between the adherents of the League dispersed after the defeats of the revolutions. In September 1849 the Central Committee of the League of Communists was reconstituted and in March 1850 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published monthly in Hamburg under the direction of Marx . In April, together with the Blanquists and Chartists, the Universal Association of Revolutionary Communists was formed for "the overthrow of the privileged classes and their submission to the dictatorship of the proletariat, maintaining the revolution permanently until the realization of communism, which must be the last form of organization of the human race ".

Analyzing the teachings of that period, Marx and Engels underline the need for organization and alliances both with democratic forces, without forgetting that they want to preserve the "capitalist mode of production", which must instead be demolished, both with the peasant masses. , to which it is necessary to envisage the advantages of the revolutionary confiscation of large estates to be transformed into state farms.

However, conflicts arise within the League and for Marx there are no immediate revolutionary prospects while a party led by August Willich and Karl Schapper proposes an immediate resumption of revolutionary activity, to which Marx writes:

“In the place of critical consideration, the minority puts a dogmatic one, instead of a materialistic one, it puts an idealistic one. For it, instead of actual conditions, the naked will becomes the driving wheel of the revolution. While we say to the workers: you have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and popular struggles not only to change the situation but also to change yourselves and to make yourself capable of political domination , you say instead: we must arrive immediately . in power, or we can go to sleep!While we call the German workers in particular to the fact that the German proletariat is not yet developed, you flatter the national sentiment and caste prejudices of the German craftsman in the most awkward way, which in any case gives it more popularity. "

On September 15, 1850, the split took place, with the adherents of the Marxist faction, moved to Cologne, tried by the Prussian judiciary and in November 1852 sentenced to a few years in prison. On November 17, 1852 at the proposal of Marx, the League of Communists is dissolved. Again in 1852 he wrote Il 18 brumaio by Luigi Bonaparte , a text in which he analyzed the Bonapartist coup d'état of 2 December 1851.

In London, Marx and his family live on meager income from his work as a publicist.

In 1853 a Prussian police informant reported the following to his superior:

“Marx lives in one of the worst neighborhoods in London, and therefore one of the cheapest. He occupies two rooms [a living room and a bedroom]. Not a single piece of furniture that is clean or in good condition is seen in the whole room. In the center of the living room there is a large antique-style table, covered with a tarpaulin, on which manuscripts, books and newspapers are scattered, along with the children's toys, wife's work items, nibbled teacups, spoons, forks and dirty knives, an inkwell, clay pipes [and] tobacco ash. There is a chair with only three legs, there is another which by chance is intact on which the children play to cook. This is kindly offered to the guest but the remains [of the game] of the children are not removed and you sit down at the risk of getting your pants dirty. But none of this causes Marx or his wife the slightest embarrassment. You are greeted in the most cordial way, you are kindly offered a pipe, tobacco and anything else available. In any case, the intelligent and pleasant conversation partially compensates for the shortcomings of the house and makes the discomfort bearable."

In this situation the wife who loves him deeply and believes in his ideas and in his socio-political project behaves heroically without ever reproaching him for anything and even supporting him. His sons Heinrich Guido (1849-1850) and Franziska (1851-1852) died in a short period of time from malnutrition and Edgar (1847-1855) from tuberculosis. On this occasion he wrote to Engels: «The house is completely desolate and empty after the death of the dear child who was its soul. It cannot be said how we miss the baby every moment [...]. I feel broken [...]. Among all the terrible pains that I have gone through in these days, the thought of you and your friendship, and the hope that we still have something intelligent to do with the world, have kept me up ».

After the failure of the revolutionary uprisings in Europe he believes that the land of the revolution could be England because it is industrially more developed. At that time the introduction of steam engines into production gave further impetus to the industry, earnings increased and the working hours of the workers improved slightly as did their wages. In this situation Marx resumes the study of political economy to define a correct method for the analysis of the economy. He visits the library of the British Museum almost daily, collecting a large amount of data.

For the critique of political economy

The results are notes gathered under the title Grundrisse and For the critique of political economy , the latter published in 1859, addressing the analysis of commodities and money in an introduction to the work itself theorizing the creation of exchange value of the commodity through the quantity of social labor put into it. The preface to this work is a compendium of historical materialism:

«In the social production of their existence, men enter into determined, necessary relations independent of their will, into relations of production which correspond to a determined degree of development of their material productive forces. The ensemble of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, that is, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure rises to which specific forms of social conscience correspond. The mode of production of material life conditions, in general, the social, political and spiritual process of life. It is not the conscience of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being determines their conscience [...].At a given point in their development, the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, that is, with the property relations (which is the legal equivalent of this expression) within which these forces hitherto they had moved. These relations, from forms of development of the productive forces, are converted into their chains. And then an era of social revolution takes over. With the change in the economic base, the entire gigantic superstructure is more or less rapidly upset. "

Marx recalls the need to distinguish between the upheaval of the economic conditions of production, which can be ascertained with the precision of the natural sciences: and the ideological forms (juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophical) through which men become aware and fight these conflicts: “Just as a man cannot be judged by the idea he has of himself, so one cannot judge such an epoch of upheaval by the consciousness he has of himself; instead it is necessary to explain this awareness with the contradictions of material life, with the existing conflict between the productive forces of society and the relations of production ”. He also adds:

«A social formation does not perish until all the productive forces that it can give course to have developed; the new superior relations of production never take over before the material conditions of their existence have matured within the old society. This is why humanity proposes itself only those problems that it can solve, because, if we consider things closely, we always find that the problem arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or at least are in the making [.. .].Broadly speaking, the Asian, ancient, feudal and bourgeois modes of production can be designated as epochs that mark the progress of the economic formation of society. Bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social production process; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism that arises from the social conditions of individuals. But the productive forces which develop in the bosom of bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society ends. "

Unlike classical economists, he believes that the object of political economy is not individuals who produce in isolation but in society. The investigation must therefore start from reality, from the concrete. However chaotic it is, it is the starting point for being able to make abstractions in order to create the categories of economic analysis (for example, abstract work, production tool, subject of work, and so on). These categories, that is abstract concepts, can give life to bonds that are simple general logical laws, but given the historical character they can hardly give life to natural laws that would require the absolutization and eternalization of certain relationships (in this specific case, bourgeois society).

Through this analysis Marx reminds us how even the abstract, like categories, has its roots in historical reality and with it changes as conditions change. The correct procedure in the analysis of political economy therefore involves replacing these abstract categories with historical data specific to each society. Marx does not stop at simple abstraction, like the classical economists, but brings the abstract back to the concrete by concluding the true dialectic: concrete (chaos), abstract (categories) and concrete (relations, order). The concrete reached is no longer chaotic like the initial one, but a totality of correctly identified relationships.

Marx once again brings the Hegelian dialectic to rest on the feet and not on the head: «my dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian one, but it is the opposite of it. For Hegel, the process of thought, which he transforms into an independent subject under the name of Idea, is the demiurge of reality, while reality is only its external phenomenon. Instead, for me the ideal factor is only the material factor transferred and translated in the minds of men [...] the mystification to which the dialectic in Hegel's hands is subject does not prevent him from being the first to have extensively and consciously exposed its general forms of movement. In him it is planted on the head. It is necessary to overturn it to find the rational core within the mystical covering ».

The dialectic, concretely conceived, representing the birth, development, decay and death of social organisms, "is a scandal and horror for the bourgeoisie and for its doctrinaire spokespersons, because in the positive component of the reality of things it includes at the same time also the understanding of its negation and its inexorable decline, because it considers every form it has become in the flow of the movement, therefore also from its transitory side, because it does not let itself be frightened by anything and is critical and revolutionary in its heart. What makes the practical bourgeois feel the contradictory movement of capitalist society most vividly are the uncertain events of the periodic cycle that modern industry has run through and their final term, the general crisis ».

First International

The economic crisis that hit the whole world in 1857 marks a strong rise of the workers' movement which also made the need for international political unity felt. On July 22, 1864, a great demonstration in solidarity with Poland, which had risen against Russian domination, took place in London and the British and French workers leaders agreed to form an association. On September 28, 1864, the inaugural session of the founding congress of the International Workers' Association took place in London's St. Martin's Hall with the participation of British, French, Italian, Polish, Irish, Swiss and German representatives, including Marx. It is established that the congress annually elects the General Council, based in London,

Among the founders of the Association there was not a full agreement of theoretical and political positions as communists, socialists, utopian socialists, anarchists and republicans had converged. Marx succeeded in presenting on 1 November 1864 an inaugural address of the statute of the Association in order to gather the support of all the currents and the document was approved unanimously. Marx underlines the positive experience of the workers 'movement with the conquest of the 10-hour working day in England, the development of trade unionism and associations of workers' production, but also the need for the conquest of political power.

On June 26, 1865 he presented to the General Council the essay Salary, price and profit in which he demonstrated the falsity of the thesis of the relationship between wage increases and inflation.

Soon Marx, member of the Council and secretary for Germany, the Netherlands and later also for Russia, has to fight against the influence of the Mazzinians, the Owenians and above all the Proudhonists, who are in favor of cooperation but opposed to trade union and political struggles. . In the 1st Congress of the Association, held in Geneva on September 3, 1866, his instructions are approved, in which he argues that the cooperative workers' movement is unable to change the social situation of the proletariat and condemns the Proudhonian theses contrary to work and social life of women.

The controversy between the majority of the Association and the followers of Proudhon continued until the Congress of Brussels, held from 6 to 13 September 1868, at the end of which the right wing of the Proudhonists, headed by Henry Louis Tolain, preferred to leave the Association. while that on the left of Eugène Varlin approached the Marxist positions. At that congress it was also decided to advise all associates to read and disseminate Marx's Capital , whose first book had been published the previous year.

The capital

The need to analyze the capitalist mode of production on the basis of the categories identified by him will lead Marx to the drafting in 1867 of Il Capitale , published by the Hamburg publisher Meissner. He foresees a second book on the process of circulation of capital (published posthumously by Engels) in 1885; in 1895 a third book on the formation of the overall process and from 1905 to 1910 by Karl Kautsky, leader and principal theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany; and a fourth book on the history of economic theories, also titled Theories of Surplus Value .

The Russian economist Ilarion Kaufman in 1872 reviews the I volume of Il Capitale describing the method of analysis: "According to the external form of the exposition, Marx appears as the greatest idealist philosopher [,] but in fact he is infinitely more realistic than all his predecessors in the field of economic criticism [...]. [P] er Marx, only one thing is important: to find the law of phenomena that is aimed at investigating. And for him it is important not only the law that governs them [,] the law of their change, of their development from one form to another is important [and] as soon as he discovers this law, he investigates in detail the consequences with which the law it manifests itself in social life [...].

As a result of this, Marx strives for only one thing: to demonstrate [...] the need for certain social relations and to ascertain [...] the facts that he needs as starting points or points of support. For this purpose it is sufficient to prove both the necessity of the current order and the need for a different order in which the former must pass, being it indifferent whether men are aware of it or not. Marx considers the movement of society as a process of natural history governed by laws that do not depend only on the will, conscience and intention of men but, on the contrary, determine their will, their conscience and their intentions [.. .].

If the conscious element has such a subordinate place in the history of civilization, it is evident that the critique of civilization less than anything else will be able to take as its foundation any form or result of consciousness [...]. The critique will be restricted to comparing a fact not with an idea, but with another fact. It is important that both facts [...] truly represent different moments of development facing each other and above all that the series of legal systems, the succession and the link in which the degrees of development manifest themselves are investigated . It could be objected that the general laws of economics are unique and the same, whether they refer to the present or to the past. Marx denies this. For him these abstract laws do not exist [, ] each historical period has its own laws [and] as soon as economic life [...] has passed from one particular stage of development to another, it begins to be governed by different laws [...]. The relations and the laws which regulate the degrees of development change with the difference in development of the productive forces [...]. The scientific value of this investigation lies in the explanation of the specific laws that regulate the birth, existence, development, death of a social organism and its replacement with another, superior one ".

Value and surplus value

The commodity, elementary form of wealth in capitalist society, has first of all a use value, an intrinsic value which allows to satisfy a need and which is realized only in the consumption of it. Each commodity is also the custodian of another value that allows its exchange with certain quantities of other commodities, that is the exchange value. For example, one can exchange half a ton of iron for 13 kilos of wheat or in general X quantity of commodity A for Y quantity of commodity B and Z of commodity C and so on. Therefore a given commodity has both a use value in relation to its quality and an exchange value in relation to its quantity, with the first valued in relation to consumption and the second in relation to exchange.

For Marx the common factor is the quantity of labor employed to produce them, work understood independently of its specific quality (of tailoring, of mechanics, of building and so on), that is, work as a waste of energy, abstract labor.The exchange value of a commodity is then determined by the quantity of abstract labor contained in it and the quantity of labor is measurable by time duration, that is, the labor time required on average and socially necessary to produce a certain commodity. A good or commodity has this value because it is objectified by human labor. In the market, the exchanges of commodities refer to a commodity which acts as a general equivalent and this commodity is money, which can be equivalent to any other. Money makes it possible to establish the price of a good on the market through the law of supply and demand.

In a mercantile society, the money-commodity circulation is MDM in which there is the sale of the commodity from which money is obtained to reinvest for the purchase of other commodities. In capitalist society the conversion of commodities into money and of money into commodities is not aimed at the consumption of the commodity itself, but at the increase of money, that is, at profit or surplus value. In this way the exchange process DMD 'is carried out, in which D'> D. There is an increase in money d = D'-D. The commodity that allows to obtain a profit, that is to say the increase of money, is not to be found in the circulation circuit, but in that of production. In fact, no one would ever buy a commodity whose price is higher than its exchange value.

For Marx, the commodity endowed with productive capacity and from which profit can be extracted, that is, a gain compared to what is spent to purchase it, is labor power. Labor-power is sold for survival by individuals who own nothing but themselves on the free market and is bought by the capitalist, who owns the means of production as his property, paying a wage. To the question that asks how the capitalist makes a profit, Marx answers by explaining how these purchases not only raw materials, machinery, fuel and so on, money invested in the form of constant capital (C), but also labor-power as a commodity in the form salary. Labor power has an exchange value just like any other commodity, so it is worth the average labor time required to produce it.

Surplus labor can generate profit or surplus value if the capitalist pays a salary that is equivalent to only one part of the time spent by the worker in production, which therefore is not equivalent to his actual return. The capitalist corresponds to the worker only what is necessary for his survival (that is, for the reproduction of labor power). If the part of the work necessary for the worker for his own survival is six hours, the other hours of that day are not paid to him and therefore are (free) surplus labor that generates surplus value or profit which the capitalist legitimately appropriates as he has acquired the commodity labor-power under a regular contract for its exchange value. For example, the capitalist hires the worker for ten hours, but pays him only six,

The commodity produced by the worker contains the value of the raw material and the value corresponding to the wear and tear of the means of production C, the value of paid labor V and the surplus value corresponding to four unpaid hours PV. If in circulation the commodities produced on that day are exchanged for money, the capitalist has recovered the invested capital (C + V) and realized the surplus value PV.

Tendential fall in the rate of profit

The capitalist can consume the surplus value in income (simple reproduction) or reinvest it (enlarged reproduction), for example in the purchase of machines to increase productivity. Competition pushes the capitalist to invest in machines, constant capital; and to reduce wages, that is, the variable capital. The introduction of machines to replace the workers creates an increasing loss of employment among the workers and a high unemployment (which Marx defines as an industrial reserve army) and therefore an increase in the labor force on the market which further lowers wages. This for Marx is the tendential law of falling rate of profit leading to a crisis. Capitalist society generates its own negation.

It is possible to produce greater quantities of surplus value by increasing the working day and thus obtaining additional surplus labor when the hours worked are in excess. However, this increase has a limit in that if it is not possible to obtain more absolute surplus value, it is possible to obtain relative surplus value by paying the labor of the worker not for six hours, but for example for five, not only or not so much with a brutal cut in wages, rather by decreasing the exchange value of labor-power, that is, by decreasing the prices of the means of subsistence. The decrease in the price of commodities implies a decrease in the labor time necessary for the labor force to reproduce and the reduction of this necessary time entails a decrease in wages. Therefore the value of the hour of work no longer needed by the worker becomes a

You can decrease the price of goods by increasing productivity both with a greater division of labor that allows the workers to work simpler and therefore faster at the same time using more sophisticated and therefore more effective machinery that allows the worker to produce a greater quantity at the same time. of goods. In each single commodity, a smaller quantity of both constant (C) and variable (V) capital is thus confiscated and can go to the market at a lower price as the cost of living of the worker decreases and by decreasing the wages the surplus value increases. relative.

However, the technological revolution entails a loss for the capitalist who replaces the old machines without having fully utilized them and decreases the use of labor power, decreasing the rate of surplus value PV / V and changing the composition of the invested capital. With the increase of the constant capital and the decrease of the variable one, which produces surplus value (PV), the rate of profit P = PV / (C + V) decreases.

Problem of art

In 1857 Marx had prepared an introduction to For the critique of political economy (1859), which he suppressed (leaving only a preface) and which was only published in 1903. In it he marginally addresses, among other things, the problem of production artistic as a superstructure that remains in our consciousness even after radical transformations of the economic and social structure: "For art it is known that certain periods of its flowering are absolutely not related to the general development of society, nor therefore to the material basis, with the backbone, so to speak, of its organization [...].

Take, for example, the relationship of Greek and later Shakespeare art with the present age. It is known that Greek mythology was not only the arsenal but also the nourishing ground of Greek art. Is the conception of nature and social relations at the basis of Greek fantasy and art possible with automatic spinning machines, railways, locomotives and the telegraph? What about Vulcan in front of the Roberts and Co. Steelworks , of Jupiter in front of the lightning rod, of Ermes in front of the Crédit mobilier? Each mythology conquers, dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by means of the imagination but vanishes when effective domination over those forces is reached [...]. [The] Greek art presupposes the Greek mythology, that is the nature and the same social forces already elaborated by the popular imagination in an unconsciously artistic way [,] not any mythology [,] but a mythology [...].

But the difficulty does not lie in understanding that Greek art and epos are linked to certain forms of social development. The difficulty is represented by the fact that they continue to arouse in us an aesthetic enjoyment and constitute, under a certain aspect, an unattainable norm and model [...]. A man cannot become a child again or otherwise he becomes childish. But is he not pleased with the naivety of the child and must he not himself aspire to reproduce his truths on a higher level? In the infantile nature, does not the proper character of each epoch perhaps revive in its natural truth? And why should the historical childhood of humanity, in the most beautiful moment of its development, not exert an eternal fascination as a stage that never returns? There are rough children and children known as old men. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were ordinary children. The fascination that their art exerts on us is not in contradiction with the little or no evolved social stage in which it matured. Rather, it is the result, inseparably connected with the fact that the immature social conditions in which it arose and only could arise, will never be able to return. "

The acknowledged non-parallel development of structure and superstructure is proof that there is no iron and immediate deterministic relationship between them. Engels reiterated after Marx's death following numerous debates in the socialist movement that “the factor which is ultimately determining in history is the production and reproduction of real life. If now someone misrepresents things, stating that the economic factor is the only determining factor, he transforms that proposition into an empty, abstract, absurd phrase ».

Old age

At the beginning of the 1860s he earned two pounds per article by collaborating with the American newspaper New York Tribune , of which he soon became the only correspondent from Europe, also publishing articles on Italian political events and applying for a job on the railways of the United Kingdom which, however, is not accepted due to or as a pretext of its poorly legible handwriting. A small income left by his mother who died in 1863 comes to the family's rescue, but his mother's inheritance is not enough to live on, so his friend Engels, who was always financially generous towards him, sells his stake in a Manchester factory and an income is paid to him so that the family can live decently.

Paris City Council

In the summer of 1870 war broke out between Prussia and France. The General Council of the International publishes a manifesto written by Marx in which it is stated that Prussia is fighting a defensive war and the French workers are praised for declaring themselves against the war and against Napoleon III. After the lightning victory of the Prussian army and the proclamation of the French Republic on 9 September, the International publishes yet another manifesto written by Marx in which Otto von Bismarck's expansionist aims are denounced. Marx writes to the internationalist Friedrich Adolph Sorge:

“Those asses of the Prussians do not realize that the current war leads to a war between Germany and Russia [...]. Furthermore this war no. 2 will be the midwife of the inevitable social revolution in Russia. "

Marx then tries to discourage the Parisian workers from a premature revolutionary adventure:

“Any attempt to overthrow the new government, in the present crisis, while the enemy is beating almost on the doorstep of Paris, would be desperate folly. [...] They calmly and resolutely improve all the possibilities offered by republican freedom, to work on their class organization [because] the fate of the republic depends on their strength and wisdom. "

The Parisian proletariat, variously incited and directed by neo-Jacobin republicans, Blanquists and anarchists, rose up by proclaiming the revolutionary Commune on March 18, 1871. Marx is skeptical of his success, but takes sides with him. In May the French army, reorganized and armed by the Germans, suffocated the insurrection and forty thousand communards were massacred or shot.

In The Civil War in France Marx writes that the Commune "was a government of the working class, the result of the struggle of the producing classes against the possessing classes, the finally discovered political form with which it would have been possible to work for the economic emancipation of labor [ ...]. Working Paris, with its Commune, will be celebrated forever, as the glorious herald of a new society. Her martyrs have as their urn the great heart of the working class. History has already nailed its exterminators to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not be able to redeem them ».

Dissolution of the First International and Critique of the Gotha Program

On September 17, 1871, the Conference of the First International opens in London in which Marx presents a resolution in which he argues that the economic movement of the working class must be closely linked to political activity.

Opponent of political and trade union action, the anarchist Michail Bakunin instead relies on the spontaneous action of the urban underclass and poor peasants. He accuses the General Council of authoritarianism, of having attacked the general statutes of the Association and of making the International a hierarchical organization. Marx was always active and read the state and anarchy of his rival Bakunin, writing comments on it. Here is an excerpt:

• Bakunin: There are about 40 million Germans. Will they all be members of the government? '
  • Marx: "Of course, because everything begins with self-government for the common good."
• Bakunin: «Universal suffrage by which the whole people elects its representatives and the rulers of the state - this is the last word of the Marxists and of the democratic school. All these are lies that hide the despotism of a minority that holds the government, lies all the more dangerous as this minority presents itself as an expression of the so-called popular will ”.
  • Marx: "With the collectivization of property, the so-called popular will disappears to make room for the real will of the cooperative entity."
• Bakunin: «Result: the domination exercised over the great majority of the people by a minority of privileged people. But, the Marxists say, this minority will be made up of workers. Yes, of course, but as former workers who, once they become representatives or rulers of the people, cease to be workers ».
  • Marx: "No more than an industrialist today ceases to be a capitalist when he becomes a member of the city council."
• Bakunin: «And from the top of the state leaders they begin to look with contempt on the common world of workers. From that point on, they no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Anyone who questions this proves that they do not know human nature at all ”.
  • Marx: "If only Mr. Bakunin had the slightest familiarity with even the position of a manager of a workers' cooperative, he would throw away all his nightmares about authority."

In a new congress held on September 2, 1872 in The Hague, the resolution on political action approved by the London congress was reiterated by a majority and the expulsion of the anarchist faction was decided.

On July 15, 1876, the Philadelphia conference declared the dissolution of the First International.

In 1875 he wrote the Critique of the Gotha Program in which he amended many propositions of the program of the German Workers' Party (the future Social Democratic Party of Germany) written in the city of Gotha. There are some passages in it that point to a future communist society: «The various states of the various civilized countries, despite their variegated differences of form, all have in common the fact that they are on the ground of modern bourgeois society, which is only more or less less evolved from the capitalist point of view. They therefore also have some essential characteristics in common ".

He therefore asks "what transformation will the state undergo in a communist society?" In other words: what social functions will still persist there, which are analogous to today's functions of the state? This question can only be answered scientifically [...] [that] between capitalist society and communist society there is the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. It also corresponds to a transitory political period, the state of which cannot be other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat [...].

In a higher phase of communist society, after the servile subordination of individuals to the division of labor has disappeared, and therefore also the contrast between intellectual and manual labor; after work has become not only a means of life, but also the first need of life; after that with the general development of individuals the productive forces have also grown and all the sources of social wealth flow in all their fullness - only then can the narrow bourgeois juridical horizon be overcome, and society can write on its banners: Everyone according to his abilities; to each according to his needs! [...]

The capitalist mode of production rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are available to non-workers in the form of ownership of capital and ownership of the land, while the mass owns only the personal condition of production, of the labor-power. Since the elements of production are thus divided, the present-day distribution of the means of consumption derives from it. If the material means of production are the collective property of the workers, this also results in a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism has taken from the bourgeois economists (and in turn from him a part of democracy), the habit of considering and treating distribution as independent of the mode of production,

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Before the birth of communist society and the disappearance of private property and therefore of all classes in the new state which emerged from the proletarian revolution, the defeated bourgeois class remains. To avoid any attempt at a bourgeois counter-revolution, it is necessary to pass to an immediately post-revolutionary phase where the dictatorial power of the proletariat is established.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a theory which, although it had already been anticipated in the ten points of the Communist Manifesto, was actually conceived by Marx and Engels for the first time in 1852 in the letter to Joseph Weydemeyer and in 1875 in the Critique of the Gotha Program for refer to the social and political situation that would be established immediately after the proletarian revolution.

The single power of the proletariat therefore represents a transitional phase in which political power is held by the workers, who proceed to the definitive abolition of private property for the final construction of a communist society.

Death

On December 2, 1881 his wife Jenny died and this is how the German socialist Stephan Born remembers her in his memoirs: «Marx loved his wife, and she shared his love. I have rarely known such happy unions, in which joy, suffering (which was not spared them) and pain were shared with such certainty of mutual possession. And I have rarely met a woman who was more harmonious than Mrs. Marx both in physical and in the qualities of mind and heart, and who, from the first meeting, made such a favorable impression. She was blonde; her children, then still small, had black hair and eyes like her father. "

Marx never recovered from this serious loss and, in January, suffering from chronic bronchitis, he also lost his eldest daughter Jenny (1844-1883). He is survived by his daughters Laura (1845-1911), wife of the French socialist Paul Lafargue, and Eleanor (1855-1898), companion of the English socialist Edward Aveling. Laura and Eleanor both commit suicide. In addition to his already precarious health conditions, a lung ulcer was added and on 14 March 1883 he died. He is buried three days later in London's Highgate Cemetery next to his wife's remains. His friend Engels reads the funeral oration:

«On March 14, at two forty-five in the afternoon, the greatest mind of our time ceased to think. [...]Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx discovered the law of development of human history [...].But that is not all. Marx also discovered the peculiar law of the development of the modern capitalist mode of production and of the bourgeois society generated by it. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw a beam of light into the darkness in which both bourgeois economists and socialist critics groped before in all their research. [...]For him, science was a driving force of history, a revolutionary force. [...]Because Marx was above all a revolutionary. [...]Marx was therefore the most hated and maligned man of his time. Governments, absolute and republican, expelled him; the bourgeois, conservatives and radical democrats, covered him up with slander. He disdained all these miseries, paid no attention to them, and answered only in cases of extreme necessity. He died venerated, loved, mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers in Europe and America, from the Siberian mines to California. And I can add without fear: he could have many adversaries, but no personal enemies. His name will live on forever, and so will his work! "

Criticism of Marxism

Presenting itself as scientific socialism in the form of a science that has discovered the laws of historical becoming, but also as an ideology that promises such becoming oriented towards an end, Marxism has received criticism on this point from various scholars and philosophers, including Hans Kelsen, Max Weber and Karl Popper, who accused him of having mixed and contaminated science and ideology in this way without realizing it.

Unlike utopian socialism, which contrasts the ideal with reality, Marxism claims to be an objective and morally indifferent description of the way in which the development of history would proceed. At the same time, however, this historical development would be called upon to produce an end and realize a value, that is, the society of "free and equal". This is how Marxism claims to deduce from a scientific analysis based on a necessary evolution of things a final condition which it itself envisages as a leap from the realm of necessity into that of freedom.

According to Kelsen, history is traced back to a final value certainly not because science is actually able to give us ideals, but only because these have been subtly projected into reality, affirming that «Marx's scientific socialism is a social science, whose the aim is not only to conceive and describe social reality as it actually is, without evaluating it, but on the contrary to judge it according to a value that is presupposed by this science but deceptively projected into social reality, in order to conform it to the presupposed value ".The criticism is not dissimilar to that exercised by Max Weber and in turn reported by Karl Löwith, who observes that "in Marxism, as scientific socialism, Weber does not oppose the fact that it is generally based on scientifically indemonstrable ideals, but that gives the subjectivity of its fundamental presuppositions the appearance of an objective and universal validity, confusing one with the other and remaining, in its scientific intentions, biased by its own value judgments and prejudices ".

Criticisms of the alleged scientific nature of Marxism also came from Karl Popper, according to whom Marx and Engels, deceptively superimposing a finalistic course on the links of the causal course of events and thus posing as false prophets, ignored the distinction between facts and values, between causes and ethical purposes.Marxism would therefore be configured not as a science, but as a pseudoscience and an ideology. Apart from these considerations, it must be said that Marxism stimulates a reflection on scientific knowledge especially where it becomes a method of analysis of the historical-social reality, as was stated in the Marxian treatment of the process of investigation of the objective world, that is, in the examination that Marx makes of history, which is the only science possible and accepted from the analytic point of view.The validity of this consideration of history is found in the same criticism that Marx makes of classical political economy, that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, when he notes the academic character of the latter precisely in the face of the strength of a revolutionary discipline, that is in the face of historical materialism. It is precisely the latter and not bourgeois science that reveals the contradictions of the objective world and the true nature of capitalism.