Marx - The Key Ideas: Teach Yourself

Gill Hands

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444129571
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

[Teach Yourself] Marx - the Key Ideas will quickly familiarize you with the revolutionary thinking of this great man. It will take you through all the essential concepts - from class struggle to dialectical materialism. Expressing Marx's sometimes complex ideas in simple terms, and backed up with references to his own texts, this book gives you everything you need to know.NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.
AUTHOR INSIGHTSLots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.
TEST YOURSELFTests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.
EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGEExtra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of Marx.
FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBERQuick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.
TRY THISInnovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

1

Marx’s early life

In this chapter you will learn:

• about Marx’s personal life and character
• the background to the society in which he lived
• key facts about his early life and career
• about his work on The Communist Manifesto
• why he became an exile.

Europe at the time of Marx

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, during a time of rapid social change throughout Europe. There were two main forces for this change. The first was the Industrial Revolution that had started in Britain. This led to the growth of the factory system throughout Europe and to an increase in the size and number of cities. The invention of the steam engine and the spread of the factory system meant that people were beginning to live in a completely different way to their ancestors. In the past, people had lived and worked in closely knit communities and worked in traditional agriculture or as craftsmen. They now began flocking from rural areas into the huge new cities that were beginning to spring up all over Europe.

Agricultural reforms and machinery had increased the efficiency of farms and led to unemployment in rural areas. In addition, landowners took over common rights and grazing areas that had once belonged to everyone under the feudal system. This also increased rural poverty.

The new towns and cities were soon flooded with destitute farmers, craftsmen and their families who were desperate for work under any circumstance. They mainly worked long hours for subsistence wages in factories and mines that were completely unregulated. Even young children worked for hours with unguarded and dangerous machinery. These unfortunate people lived in appalling conditions: squashed into slum housing with inadequate sanitation, poor food and no clean drinking water. Disease was rife and mortality rates were high.

Secondly, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars (1799–1815) had led to the downfall of the monarchy and the abolition of feudalism throughout much of Europe. The feudal system was a society where the power of the ruling class, or aristocracy, rested on its control of farmable lands or fiefs. The way these societies worked varied from country to country, but in general the lands were divided out among vassals (free men), who managed them in return for military service on behalf of the aristocracy. The land was then farmed by serfs or peasants, who were not free. Marx believed that this led to a class society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farmed the lands. His views on this are discussed later in the book.

Marx’s birthplace, Trier in the Rhineland, was then part of Prussia, in central Europe. Prussia was a large semi-feudal empire that covered what is known today as Germany and parts of what are now Poland and Sweden. Prussia had been invaded on several occasions by the French and Trier had been part of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine. When Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled in 1815, Prussia returned to being a set of kingdoms and principalities ruled by hereditary monarchies. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, state boundaries were redefined and an agreement was drawn up between Prussia, Russia and Austria; this was known as the ‘Holy Alliance’. It was an attempt by the ruling classes to preserve the social order; the aristocracy and landowners were determined to hang on to power now they had regained it.

Prussia was really a very loose patchwork of scattered countries, so it had always had a large army to keep order and had a government-controlled economy. Revolutions were sweeping through most of Europe and fear of these changes led to the Prussian state becoming overly bureaucratic, backward-looking and resistant to trade and industry. The police were particularly powerful as landowners were fearful of the democratic ideals that had led to the French Revolution. There was a deep suspicion of any new ideas, especially those that were seen to be liberal. Many free thinkers, including artists, writers and poets, moved to Paris or Switzerland to escape from this oppressive regime. Most liberal thinkers in Prussia wanted to see a united German state with a democratic constitution. In contrast the conservatives of the time wanted to keep Germany as separate countries within the Prussian Empire.

Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer. He was Jewish and came from a family that had several rabbis in its history, but he had registered as a Protestant Christian when laws were passed preventing Jews from holding public positions. Marx’s mother, Henriette, was a Dutch Jew who also came from a family that included a long line of rabbis. Marx himself did not hold any strong religious beliefs and ended his life as an atheist, but the strong anti-Jewish feeling in the Rhineland during his youth must have had some influence on him.

Although Prussia was a mainly agricultural country, the area of the Rhineland where Marx grew up was its most industrialized region. Marx’s early life there meant that he observed rural life under threat, experienced repression of religious belief and understood the power of the State and private ownership, all at first hand. These formative experiences had a part in shaping his later philosophy.

The early life of Marx

Marx’s upbringing was a middle-class one. Little is known of his very early life as he became somewhat estranged from his family in his later life. He came from a fairly large family with both brothers and sisters, but he was the oldest son and his brothers both died young.

His father was said to be a serious, well-educated man but not particularly imaginative. He wanted his children to fit in with the society around them and he tried to encourage them to be good members of the State and church. He was a bit of a social climber and became a member of the Casino Club, where in 1816 he met Baron von Westphalen, a senior government officer from an aristocratic family. The two families soon became friendly; Marx’s older sister Sophie was a great friend of the Baron’s daughter Jenny, and Karl was at school with Edgar, one of the Baron’s sons.

Marx’s mother was not formally educated but this was fairly normal for women at the time. She put all her energies into bringing up her family and was forever anxious about them, even when they had grown up and left home.

Young Karl was soon seen to be possessed of a strong and creative intelligence. He was fiercely independent, domineering and argumentative from a young age. His sisters told his daughter Eleanor that he used to force them to eat mud pies but they put up with it because he would tell them imaginative stories that they loved to listen to.

His intelligence soon caught the attention of their family friend Baron von Westphalen. The Baron was a very cultured and educated man, somewhat radical in his beliefs and fond of literature, including Shakespeare, who he liked to quote in the original English. The Baron became friendly with young Karl and encouraged him in his studies; they often took walks together and talked about Greek poetry. He lent many of his own books to the boy so that he could further his education and Marx dedicated his doctoral thesis to him in appreciation.

It is thought that Marx was privately educated until he joined the Trier High School in 1830 at the age of 13. His school records do not show flashes of any particular genius but he showed signs of independent thought and of not going along with the crowd in his refusal to talk to a new state-appointed headmaster who was given a position at the school.

The old headmaster was a man of fairly liberal ideas and this led to a police raid on the school in 1832: literature in support of free speech was found circulating there and one of the schoolboy ringleaders was expelled. The headmaster was put under surveillance and eventually the authorities employed a very conservative co-headmaster to keep an eye on things. Marx would not talk to this man at all, and was one of the few boys who did not visit him after he graduated from school, much to his father’s embarrassment.

Although intellectually powerful, Marx never had a particularly strong constitution and was dogged by ill health for most of his life. He had a weak chest, which eventually led to him being found unfit for military service in 1836. His parents constantly fretted about his health when he went off to university in Bonn at the age of 17. They bombarded him with letters advising him not to study more than his health could bear, not to smoke, stay up late, drink too much wine and to keep his rooms and himself clean and hygienic. He never took much notice of their advice and for most of his life he lived in a disordered way, smoked and drank far too much, and spent long hours studying and writing.

University life

Marx attended Bonn University in the autumn of 1835 with the intention of studying law. He soon found that it was not to his taste and spent most of his year there in time-honoured student traditions: running up debts and drinking. His father’s letters are full of complaint, accusing him of debauchery, lounging in a dressing gown with unkempt hair and of not taking his studies seriously enough. It is not surprising that he felt this way, for the student Marx was arrested and imprisoned overnight for drunken behaviour and rowdiness, was found with a pistol in his possession (strictly illegal, although he got off without charges when his father intervened), and was later wounded in a duel. The wound was above his left eye and left a lasting scar. As his opponent was a trained soldier he was lucky to get away so lightly.

Marx was a rather arresting figure with a shock of dark hair, piercing eyes and a rather large flourishing beard. His dark complexion led to the nickname of Moor, which he kept all through his life; it became a special family name for him that even his children used. Although his voice was not commanding (he had a slight lisp), his intellectual abilities and inventive way with words meant that he was often listened to and deferred to by older students. He found an outlet for his ideas in the Poetry Club, where political ideas as well as literature were discussed. This meant that he did not spend as much time on his studies as he should have and eventually his father insisted that he should stop his ‘wild rampaging’ and move to a place with a more rigorous academic atmosphere.

In the autumn of 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, again with the intention of studying law. Berlin was a much bigger place than Bonn and the university had the reputation of being seriously academic and a centre of radical thought in the form of the ‘Young Hegelians’. These were a group of academics, intellectuals and students who discussed and developed the ideas of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

Hegel had been the rector at the university and was almost an institution there. He was the nearest thing to an officially endorsed philosopher that existed, having been decorated by Fredrick William III for services to the Prussian Empire. Most of his followers received appointments or preferment in the universities, for even these were controlled by the State. Hegel’s philosophy is rather complex and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, but basically he believed that society progressed by intellectual development or ‘Reason’ and that Reason could be identified with a God-like figure he called the ‘Absolute’. Hegel asserted that the Absolute had developed throughout history, but it had come to consciousness of itself and culminated its development in the state of Prussia. There was no further progress for it to make as it had reached its ideal.

The Young Hegelians agreed to some extent that the State should be the embodiment of Reason but they interpreted the theories of Hegel in increasingly radical ways. They saw the Absolute not as a God-like figure but as humanity itself. For a reader in the twenty-first century this does not seem particularly shocking but at the time the Church was a very powerful force in society. To suggest that mankind might be at the centre of the universe and not some God or Absolute was very daring. It was much later, in November 1859, that Charles Darwin made his theory of evolution public in The Origin of Species, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw that scientific discoveries had led to Western society becoming more secular and thought this might lead to a nihilistic viewpoint of a world without meaning, didn’t proclaim ‘God is Dead’ until 1882.

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Insight

Charles Darwin’s suggestion that mankind had evolved from apes caused more public outcry in its day than any work by Marx and it is still a contentious issue for some people with deeply held religious beliefs.

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The Young Hegelians were a potentially powerful political force; many of them were atheists and liberals. They argued that the Prussian state was not the culmination of Reason and expression of the Absolute. They believed that things could be changed and Germany could become more democratic. This led to the authorities being increasingly worried about their activities and, as the Prussian state was well supplied with spies and informers, in addition to a large police force, they kept an eye on the activities of the Young Hegelians. Most of their activities were theoretical: they wrote about the problems, discussed them in bars and debated points of philosophy in great academic detail. They did not take action and this was one of the reasons that Marx finally lost patience with them. As he wrote later in his Thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.

When Marx first arrived at the university he did not think much of the philosophy of Hegel, in fact he disregarded it, for he was meant to be studying law (although he did not find his classes particularly interesting). He spent his first term writing rather a lot of romantic poetry to his childhood friend Jenny von Westphalen. She had grown into a beautiful, cultured and intelligent young woman and they had seen quite a lot of each other during the summer break and had become secretl...