Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 2 of 13

Karl Marx (1818-1883)
The Philosophy of Material Man and Economic History
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 13, 1983

Transcript:

This is one of the most difficult of all courses and I think those that manage to make it here last week can review my comments in their minds and realize that the 19th century is a blind spot for us but that the blind spot is alive in two different orders of activity. One, it is alive in the social structures that surround us on the outside, and it is alive on the inner subconscious complexes which are alive inside of us. And thus, our problem in our lives in our time is compounded of the eternal problem of being sandwiched in between two orders of incomprehension, which require for us responsibilities and acts, decisions and judgments, which we in no way are capable of making with a reasonable– reasonable degree of certitude. And so, we either go along with inner hunches and follow their lead, or we go along with the habitual order of life already set up. All of us stand in lines in supermarkets and shop for our food. None of us, in a sustained way, go to a forest to gather berries. Thus, the social conditions externally create the actual environment in which we live.

But those social structures are not the product of our time. They are the product of the 19th century. And so we live in a house built in the 19th century. We also exhibit within ourselves psychological tendencies which largely have been inculcated, not ingrained, but inculcated in the last hundred, hundred fifty years. So to ignore the 19th century is to commit ourselves to sailing a vast ocean without a compass and without a plan. The problem is exacerbated. This quandary that I've outlined is true of any people at any given epoch, but it has become a real problem for 20th century human beings, especially by this late date – we’re now in the ninth decade of the 20th century.

The 19th century above all was a century of disenchantment. But the disenchantment came following progressive great lunges at triumph. That is to say, as the 19th century develops we find titanic minds and courageous individuals who assume that they are able to seize upon the right answer, the very map of existence, and seek to organize not only their lives and everyone else's lives, but all future history, and future lives, upon the maps, upon the plans, which they evolve. Progressively as the 19th century un-velopes for us, we find that the very figures who in their triumphal lunging thought they had the answer find that they have only shredded the problem into finer and finer details. That the emphasis – most of the individuals we will follow – placed upon life that being that if we could only understand the material world. If we could only come to grips with the social world. If we could only somehow order the phenomenal realm, we would have a secure base upon which to stand and at some future leisure mature ourselves from this stable base. The stable base never occurred and progressively the fatal, triumphal lunges of great minds to gulp existence down and digest it in one fell swoop produced successive phases of disenchantment which led to the 20th century being characterized as an absurd time abstracted from all history and all human understanding, so that 20th century man has been characterized most aptly as post-historical man. That he exists in a conundrum that is no longer even recognizable as a problem that we live our lives anesthetized by the glacial habits of past epochs. We seek to entertain ourselves by media which draw ourselves away from the central attention. And if there is any figure that stands poignantly for late 20th century man, it's the typical sculpture of Giacometti of a burnt out stick finger man composed of just almost lumped nuggets of circumstance.

We had last week the beginnings of capitalism. We have this week the beginnings of communism. We also noted that the beginnings of capitalism were the beginnings of liberality in terms of liberal politics. That is to say the world can be made better by our efforts. We may improve institutions; we may improve ourselves; that whatever problems we have are problems that will be progressively better as we go along. And so we need humane ideas to leaven the new structures that have arisen. So that liberality, the liberal mind, came in as a concomitant of the capitalist world order.

The communist world order is a twin sister to the capitalist world order. That is to say they come in together as twin sisters. And as twin sisters, the liberal mind of the capitalist world order has a twin in the socialist world order so that the liberal and the social, socialist and liberal outlooks, are actually not opposed to each other but are like twins. They have a common origin and capitalism and communism also have a common origin, so that we find ourselves today in a world which is largely disassembled between the vibrations not of a polarity, but of a bifurcation so close that it produces no synthesis and no real combat, but only the energy of a tuning fork out of harmony and out of tune. This has been observed many times in the past decades, that we in fact do not even have a world that has a problem. It is so confused that there is not even any problem, large, small, or indifferent.

So last week in talking about Bentham– and I chose Bentham rather than Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill, or David Ricardo, because in looking into the development of the thought, Bentham is the more profound of all those thinkers.

It is true that Wealth of Nations is read as a classic book but is largely read in excerpts by graduate students now, because the thought of Adam Smith is an interesting period piece. A ABC primer upon which other developments are based. But as you saw those of you who were here, or those who could buy the cassette and review it, Bentham is a profound thinker. Bentham produced an extraordinary critique of man's mind and Bentham's theory of fictions as a source and a critique upon which the very notions of language and logic are based is an enduring monument.

In our time, one of the great books of philosophy was written by two Benthamites who in the 20th century sought to reintroduce the perceptions and the conceptions of Bentham. They were C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, who wrote a book called The Meaning of Meaning, which is one of the world's really tremendous books on syntax and symbolism, The Meaning of Meaning. It's available in paperbacks.

So, today, with Karl Marx we have a sibling phenomenon. That is to say we have not a polarity to Bentham but something parallel. But where Bentham's critique ran finally to his theory of fictions, we will see that Marxist critique runs to the notion that it is not language that is the briar patch for human comprehension, but it is history. And history, for Marx, will become a very strange phenomenon.

Marx was born in 1818, Treves, in Prussia, grew up mainly in the Rhineland area. The large city in that area would be Cologne – those Rheinische lands that have produced many great artists. Max Ernst comes from that area; Meister Eckhart. Marx was born into a fairly well-to-do family. His father in particularly was an intellectual Jewish merchant gentleman commercial in his outlook, wanting very much for his son to be trained in law, and wishing that the young Karl Marx would become attuned to the legal profession. The mother was not quite so influential as the father, but we note that young Karl Marx has an extraordinary capacity to develop himself. That is to say, by the time he was 19 years of age he was able to write extraordinary letters to his father about the condition of his mind, about the fact that he seemed not able to focus upon law, that instead he would like to go into philosophy. And in fact, Marx would stay in the area of philosophy and receive a Ph.D. which was quite unusual at that time – a Masters was more likely the degree to receive. The very very earliest writings that we have, other than letters to his father, are his doctoral thesis and some of the newspaper articles that he wrote at the time. But I'd like to give you an extract, about a paragraph, from a letter to his father written in 1837 – he's 19 years – old. This will give you the tone of Marx's mind as a teenager even. It reads,

“Dear Father:
There are moments in life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction. In such a period of transition we feel ourselves compelled to consider the past and present with the eagle eye of thought in order to come to a realization of our actual position. Yes, history itself likes this sort of stocktaking and introspection which often make it look as though it were going backwards or standing still whereas it is merely throwing itself into an armchair to understand itself and comprehend intellectually its own mental processes.”

So we have the beginnings of a theme here. We have the– as Wagner will say later on, when we get to the lecture on Wagner – the leitmotifs have already arrived. History is a phenomenal condition. It is not a fictive imagining. It is, in fact, palpable like an ocean wherein man swims and has his being. In this condition, man has a mind which is able analytically to consider not only the environment the historical context, and not only himself as a being, as a person, but the meta-relationship between the person and history, between the individual and history, and that this is our own mental processes. So that we have an indication, already at the age of 19, that he is going to look at the mast and rudder of human life in history as being controlled by an analytical assessment of those mental processes which relate us individually to history. And Marx will coin a word, and emphasize its use, that when that relationship is oblique or not existent we have an alienation of the individual, not just an alienation from other people, but an alienation from the very basic historical condition that would permit him to exist.

So Marx in a very real sense is the first existentialist. He is in fact more profoundly an existentialist than he is a communist. That is to say, his notions, as we will see, of communism are not based so much on an -ism, on a doctrinaire position received by maturated thought and then set into a doctrine as a human condition, which is constantly subject to evolution and involvement. And so, rather than the doctrinaire communism it is perhaps more apt to style him in terms of the live existential stark awakening fact.

When Marx was receiving his doctoring his life began to take shape – he had been engaged from the age of sixteen to a woman named Jenny Westfalen. Her ancestors had been the Dukes of Argyll in England in Scotland, and they had been a very rebellious family. Jenny's father liked Karl Marx very much. He– he liked the forthrightness of the young man. He liked his social views. Jenny's father had been a follower of the Duke de Saint-Simon, from the French Revolution era. The rest of the family did not like the young man because he seemed too obsessed with inner purposes, too intense around aspects of himself that were anti-social or hidden. But Jenny finally married him in 1843 and they stayed together their entire life through thick and thin. And it got pretty thick as you will see. So Karl Marx in terms of his relationship to women had but one love and one lady from adolescence through to the end of his life.

This was in 1843, in the spring and by the summer Marx was beginning to write articles for a newsletter – the Rheinische Zeitung. Published just in the Cologne area and very quickly it was suppressed. This is 1843. The Prussian state government was very shaky. Like most of the shaky governments of the mid-19th century. They employed an enormous number of spies to read and sift, to listen to talks, and go to meetings, and it was drawn to someone's attention very high up that there was a poignancy, a latent dynamite in the articles of the young Marx. So he left Prussia and went to Paris because Paris was the hotbed, the seedbed, of intellectual ideas, especially in the field of political and social revolution. The heritage of the French Revolution is still very much alive.

When he went to Paris he met Friedrich Engels and Engels was to be his lifelong friend. And Engels, who was two years younger than Marx – born in 1820 – would outlive him by 12 years. Engels would live until 1895. It is actually Friedrich Engels who will create, after Marx's death, the phenomenon known as Marxism. Marx does not create Marxism; Engels creates Marxism. The best study in Marxism is by George Lichtheim, just simply entitled Marxism. That is to say after Marx dies in 1883, until Engels dies in 1895, in those 12 years, Engels edits Marx's writing. He pulls together from his notes and completes the final two volumes of Das Kapital. He begins with the funeral oration saying that, above all things Karl Marx was a revolutionary. So that Marx the thinker Marx the man becomes Marx the revolutionary. So that Marxism as a– as a development after his death becomes a phenomenon in and of itself. So that 20th century thinkers worked on and accepted Marxism rather than Marx. Many of Marx's writings were not read, many of them that were read were not understood. And the most profound of all of his works was not publicly published until 1953 – the Grundrisse – which was the basic manuscript out of which Das Kapital was written.

Das Kapital, being the first of six parts in the Grundrisse, was the outline for the whole six parts. Das Kapital was only the beginning of an extended economic survey of the nature of history and the nature of man. It was inconvenient to review the Grundrisse. It was inconvenient to review many of the early writings of Marx because it compounded the perceptions that were so beautifully codified in Marxism. So that Marxism became a doctrine rather than a philosophic existential methodology. It became a doctrine which then could be wedded with, and amalgamated with, other doctrines so that one had Marxist-Leninism, or one has Marx presented by Leon Trotsky in 1940, just before his death, and he puts in here, “The book compactly sets forth the fundamentals of Marx's economic teaching in Marx's own words. After all no one has yet been able to expound the labor theory of value better than Marx himself.”

But what do we have in here by Marx? We have extracts from Das Kapital which is revised and put together by Friedrich Engels. So that the problem has been compounded. So that the origins of a philosophy dominating half the world are obscured by circumstance. Thus in the last ten or fifteen years, twenty years, the awakening intelligence has been to go back and search out and publish the works of the man himself. Let's read what he wrote. Let's set aside all the developments. Let's set aside the doctrinaire assessment. Let's go to the man. And that's what we're doing tonight.

So in 1843 Marx wrote articles for a newspaper. It was the beginning of his whole career as a journalist as one would say. He got married. It was the beginning of his career as a human being, as a man. He eventually had four children. Two of them would die as youngsters when Marx was starving to death in London his sweet little son Guido died and Marx said that he was a casualty of the bourgeois nightmare, and when his little daughter died his wife ran frantically from house to house trying to beg enough money to bury the dead child.

All of this we have to set aside because we just don't have time to go into it, but there is a poignant household life of Marx which needs to be told. One of the best individuals to address himself to the human Marx was the great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. And Erich Fromm edited a book on Marx's view of man and the very last chapter of Fromm's great book, The Sane Society, is a representation of Karl Marx as a man, and the way in which the thought poignantly came out of the man, out of his life, and not out of committees after he died who munched him up and produced almost theological-like doctrinaire positions which had convenient places to tab on other doctrines and so erase and efface the man in a blur of triumphal expectation.

Marx also, in 1843, went to Paris then and met Frederick Engels. There they put out a journal. It only ran one issue. It was a German French revue. And Marx wrote some articles for it. Engels wrote some articles for it. Most of the poignant philosophic political radical minds of that age, and of that time, contributed to it. It caused a great consternation and they had to flee for themselves. Now Engels went to England and established a English connection which he would use later on. In fact, Engels would associate himself with a textile manufacturing outfit in Manchester, England and would stay there eventually and become a partner in the firm in 1864 and became economically independent. He used his money to help support Karl Marx. And while he was just a clerk for the country– a company he could only send so much and later on he was able to at least alleviate the hunger the starvation of the Marx family. Engels’s great work is a description of the English working class in the factories – circa 1840s, late 1840s – and someone once described it as the 19th century inferno because it is a view of human life that we could hardly believe ever existed. Children working 12 to 14 hours a day under unhealthful conditions that turn the stomach just to read the descriptions. But the descriptions are in a tone that's not hyperbole nor fiction as Engels describing exactly meticulously what was happening every day across the face of Europe, so as to say, if we speak so harshly when we get ahold of a podium it's because our hearts are filled with uncontrollable anguish over conditions which we see our fellow man having to suffer with no hope in sight.

In fact their assessment was that the juggernaut was just beginning to roll and there is a frightful existential terror behind much of Karl Marx's writing which later on manifested in himself and for the last ten years of his life he suffered from severe mental depressions, nervous disorderings, that incapacitated him to finish any further major works, or to do much more than read and write a few letters. That is to say, his productive period runs from about 1843 to about 1872 – just about 30 years.

Back from Paris they decided to revive the Rheinische Zeitung and they revived it as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and they began writing articles for it. And this publication, extraordinarily poignant. Some of the early writings of Marx appeared in this journal. One of the earliest writings, and I wish to allude to it because it gives you a beginning basis upon which to review Marx's writing. It's called The Jewish– On the Jewish Question – On the Jewish Question. At this time there was a radical thinker named Bruno Bauer who was a member of a group called De Freien and he had written a criticism about the Jews trying to expect improvement in their lot from the non-Jewish population, saying that really the problem is not that there are Jews and non-Jews, but that the whole human the whole political situation is a problem.

And Marx, in writing his critique and his review, in On the Jewish Question takes it even deeper. He says the trouble with Bauer and people like this is that they don't think this through clearly. Yes they have some good thoughts and they go just so far. But on reviewing the situation in great depth and with analytical certainty we arrive at a problematic area that has never before been investigated by man. So he begins– and this is a typical Marxian style of– of incisive writing:

“The German Jews seek emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they want? Civic, political emancipation. Bruno Bauer replies to them: In Germany no one is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How could we then liberate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand for yourselves as Jews, a special emancipation. You should work as Germans for the political emancipation of Germany, and as men, for the emancipation of mankind.” And then, later on, Marx will write: “Here it is in brief: We have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.”

So the man has to formulate a clear intellectual assessment based on the phenomenal world based on the material world based upon the actual historical conditions. And only when he has come to a maturation of his understanding will he be able to help any situation whatsoever. But he says, “We must ask what kind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential conditions of the emancipation which is demanded? The criticism of political emancipation itself was only the final criticism of the Jewish question, and its genuine resolution into the general question of the age.” Marx always writes in a phase-term process, method.

There is an issue. The issue is delineated in outline. The outline then is seen against a background. The background absorbs the outline and thus acquires a grain a texture so that the condition itself becomes impregnated with the abstracted form of understanding the material. So in this way, thought reflects, consciousness reflects, a process from the material realm to consciousness, rather than the other way around of something coming from within or above or in some other way up to consciousness and then out projecting, emending out to the material world. It's the other way around.

So then, what is important for Marx is to find a way to cut the perception of man, like a jeweler cuts a gem, with a methodology that can be reproduced again and again, with a methodology that is time-tested, with a methodology that is scientific – that we can experiment with it. Our laboratory is history. The social conditions which we have and we wish to see it in a specific methodological way. We wish to abstract forms of understanding out of the actual situation and absorb those forms into the grain of the very condition of consciousness which we have. And thus progressively he says, “Man matures his mind to the actual situation that obtains.” Thus there is a dialectic between the world and the man, his mind, and it is a material connection. Thus dialectical materialism has a philosophic methodology involved in it. Although Marx will later say we have to get rid of the idea of– of philosophy. That philosophy is a kind of a theological approach. And that in many ways he says that logic is the money of philosophy and we become addicted to a phony process in thinking.

So we have to emancipate ourselves not only from the conditions that would oppress us in the physical world, the material world, but we have to emancipate ourselves from the habits which we have ingrained in ourselves from having lived in this condition brought up in this condition. But we further have to emancipate ourselves from the faulty unscientific methodology of understanding, which he says is purposely mis-construed. We are trained to misconstrue it because the educational system is in the hands of those who would perpetuate the confusion. And thus, he says, we face an almost incredible array of opponents: ourselves, others, the economic conditions, the nature of the material world itself, the processes of– of the mind and thinking. All of this, he says, are like nets that would take us away from any kind of maturation. That the problem, to put it in very simple language is: it's very difficult for man to grow up and learn. The only way by which he can assure himself of a chance for this is to lean upon a scientific methodology of observation, proof, understanding.

So he says, “We have to examine the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation.” This is the– this is the key in here. He will– I have to skip over some of this that I'm– I'm going to run out of time at least. But here's another example from On the Jewish Question:

“The source of the defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself religion no longer appears as the basis but as the manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain the religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular constraints upon them. We do not claim that they must transcend their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular limitations. We claim that they will transcend their religious narrowness once they have overcome their secular limitations. We do not turn secular questions into theological questions. We turn theological questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been resolved into superstition but we now resolve superstition into history. The question of the relation between political emancipation and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation. Political emancipation is not the final form. It is human emancipation.”

Therefore when we are abstracting these shapes by scientific observation: theorizing, setting up a hypothesis, investigating, coming to conclusions, feeding that back in. When we are making these forms of understanding which are going to be absorbed into the human consciousness we have to keep in mind that we are not building a political consciousness. We are building eventually and ultimately a human consciousness so that the end product is not the state but man.

This was so important to Marx and so misunderstood in various ways that – I guess– if I can find it here – very late in his life, in terms of his writing capacity 1875 it's in the critique of the Gotha Program. There were German socialists in 1875 that set up this program called the Gotha Program. Marx disapproved of it. And in the criticism he wrote, “Free State. What is this? It is by no means the aim of the workers who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects to set the state free. In the German Empire the state is almost as free as in Russia.” – He didn't like the Russians at all. – “Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.”

The doctrinaire Marxists do not like to hear that. What does it say? Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society. You do this because the doctrine says you must do this. The state says you must do this. This is not from Marx. This is from some amalgam.

“The forms of the state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the freedom of the state.” That is to say he's talking ironically. He says the freedom of the state is the freedom to superimpose itself in its forms upon people. He says – and he's criticizing the Gotha Program because it doesn't understand this – “And what of the riotous misuse which the program makes of the world's present day state, present day society, and of the still more riotous misconception it creates in regard to the state to which it addresses its demands. Present day society is supposed to be capitalist society which exists in all civilized countries more or less free from medieval admixture more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country more or less developed. On the other hand, the present day state changes with the country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland and different in England from what it is in the United States. The present day state is therefore a fiction.”

So the emphasis in Marx is that the responsibility is to develop the freedom of man and that this freedom is very difficult to come by because of the intertwined, interlocking, oppositions which are arrayed against him. The initial perception of the almost impossibility of the task is a sense of alienation. One no longer is receiving sustenance from the umbilical of the situation. One is cast out, one is isolated. And we'll find this in Marx.

For five years Marx and Engels wrote articles, attempted to form small groups, and then in 1848 an enormous event occurred. 1848 is known as the Year of Revolutions and there were tremendous upheavals in many countries of Europe in the summer of 1848. Marx and Engels felt that the conditions had ripened to the extent to where they were able to offer, what has come to be known as, the manifesto. Now The Communist Manifesto appeared just at the time that the revolutions broke out in 1848, so that it seemed that there was a connection between them. Actually, they had been working for five years maturing their thought, cutting these forms, absorbing them into their consciousness, trying scientifically to build not just an awareness of the intricacies of the situation, but trying to develop in themselves the true grain of the understanding of the forms of actual material world and actual historical circumstance. So that The Communist Manifesto begins with an eerie prolegomena. This is how it runs.

“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been described as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact: (1.) Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a power. (2.) It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.”

Now where have we run across this before? This form? This polemical form occurs almost exactly in the same configurations in the Great Declarations at the beginning of the 17th century by the Rosicrucians. The Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucians, if you review its opening paragraphs, is a remarkably similar style, tone, and form of document. That is it is saying, we have labored under a curse and the curse is so omnipotent that we have thought that all solutions must be in terms of the curse and we have now cracked the shell of the world and have become born out of the conditions that we thought were omnipotent and universal. The Rosicrucians said this of the Pope and the Antichrist and other figures of the early 17th century mentality. The Communist Manifesto saying it in 1848 terms. Then the manifesto begins and I'll just give you a couple of extracts just to get the tone.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” So we have a structural view of history emerging. That is to say there is a scientific methodological angle, a thesis, at which the intellectual vision of man penetrates the actual situation and cuts it along a fracture line. And that fracture line is to say that class differentiations and the struggle ensuing from that differentiation is a methodological analytical perspective that yields a new form of understanding history.

In the early– I'm extracting – “In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.”

So society was complex, enormously so.

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.” Instead of the filigree, manifold nature of society, it's becoming monolithic and cracking down the center into a polarity. “Two great classes directly facing each other: the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat.”

So when he gets to Das Kapital he will say I am not offering an economic analysis per se but an analysis of capitalism as a particular kind of economic situation, because the situation is new. It's new to history; that there never was the congregation, the aggregation of power especially in the methods of production in the hands of so few, dominating the lives of so many with an increasing gulf and disparity. So already in the Manifesto we have this. The difficulty was that the Manifesto came out in the revolutionary turmoil of 1848.

The revolutions were put down ruthlessly and Marx and Engels were seized. Marx was put on trial for high treason and the jury unanimously acquitted him. However he was exiled from Prussia and sent back to Paris. When he went to Paris he realized that he was no longer going to be at home there. He tried to make his way in Brussels as he had done for a year or so before. Unable to do that. Where to go in the world? His friend Engels was in England so he went to England and spent the rest of his life in London. So at the age of 31, Marx went to live in England, took his wife, took his children. When he arrived there he attempted to organize a central council of the Communist League.

Now communists at this time does not mean doctrinaire communism, the monolithic system that we think of in the 20th century. It comes from the word commune. Commune. Group action. Group living. Because in the development of Marxist thought the liberation of any individual man is contingent upon also the liberation of other men. That he cannot in any realistic way mature by himself; he cannot liberate himself because he actually in fact exists only in relationship with others. Therefore, the liberation of any man requires the liberation of all men. Not as a political slogan that one would embroidery on a pennant and wave, but as a position reached by scientific analysis along the thesis of class struggles.

And I'm simplifying now because we don't have that much time. But the class struggles had filtered down into two great classes struggling against each other. Therefore there was an affinity between the majority of human beings who fall into the proletariat to achieve their liberation together, which meant that all of the avenues of development for the person had to be translated into development on a social scale, on a material scale, on a political scale. Not for social ends, not for material ends, so much, and not for the political ends, but to manifest a reasonable plateau of stability in history so that man would have reasonable environment within which to pursue his maturation. Very important distinction.

So in 1850 in London, Marx began writing – and this is a very little known – Address to the Central Council of the Communist League. And it reads in here – I guess I'll just give you a short excerpt.

“The democratic petty bourgeois is far from desiring to revolutionize all society. For the revolutionary proletarians strive for a change in social condition by means of which existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them. Hence they demand above all diminution of state expenditure by restricting the bureaucracy and shifting the chief taxes onto the big landowners and bourgeois– bourgeoisie. Further, they demand the abolition of the pressure of big capital on small.”

In other words, he's saying we have this liberal idea of making conditions better and we are thinking that by making conditions better that we are somehow getting closer to the solution but we are in fact just obscuring the real issue, which is not to make intolerable conditions palpable by sugarcoating them, but to recut the nature of man in a radically new way so that the conditions will never come up again. So that there will not be a need to apply adjustments, and Band-Aids, and makeshift do well which another generation will have to do all over again and children of that generation again. And perhaps we get to situations where it's almost impossible. So the issue is not to make things a little better but to face the problem, once and for all, squarely, and recut the nature of society completely.

This was not very well received. The Benthamite liberal mind in England was producing all kinds of philanthropic activities. There were grants to be had. There was help to be had. And so many of the English thinkers, individuals, shied away from Marx – a little bit too vociferous. And the way they shied away from him is the way that people always get around this sort of thing. They said, well Marx is just an intellectual. He just thinking. How come you're– how come you're not out on the picket lines with us and so forth? How come you're sitting there thinking all the time and writing all these things? You're an intellectual, meaning that you're not doing any real activity as if thinking was not real. As if thought had no power. As if the pen were not mightier than the sword. So Marx withdrew.

And from 1850 to 1864 for fourteen years Marx was almost a solitary, isolated. They were terrible years economically. He was on the verge of starving almost all the time. The misery was colossal. As I mentioned before two of the little Marx children died. His wife Jenny suffered many breakdowns. In order to eke out a living, Marx was helped by a few individuals. Richard Dana, an American, contacted his editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and Greeley sort of liked the tough tone of Marx's writings. So he had Dana hire Marx as a European correspondent for the New York Tribune. Marx eventually wrote about 500 articles for the New York Tribune covering all aspects of history from 1850 to 1864. He wrote about India, about the British Empire, about this, that, and the other – tremendous range – and he was paid about a guinea for each article. And then his friend Friedrich Engels would send money from Manchester.

Well what did Marx do? What– What as a man did he do? What was his daily life? Well his daily life, when he could get some food on the table for the children and make some provision for his wife and take care of himself a little bit, he would go every day that he could to the British Museum to read, because the British Museum is one of the world's great oases of intelligence. And there, Marx read everything. His tremendous, dynamic, powerful mind reviewing patiently, year in and year out, for almost a decade and a half, the entire history of man, the entire nature. Now it had been a part of Marx's background. When he was young, remember he got a Ph.D. in philosophy, not just a master's, not just a degree, but he got a Ph.D. One of the aspects of Marx's intelligence was Hegel's philosophy.

Now I haven't gotten to Hegel. I have to do Hegel In a special lecture. Very complicated man, very complicated thought. And when we do in April, May, and June, at the Philosophical Research Society, the course on the Age of Revolution then will take up thinkers like Goethe, and Shelley, Beethoven, Hegel – The Age of Revolution.

Hegel especially influenced Marx as a young man and for most of his life, in the phenomenology – it's actually called the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Very difficult book to read. Almost so complicated in its recursive innuendos that one constantly is losing track of where one is. Not because of being unclear, but because of being overly specific, because it's overly specific in that it cuts new structures of thought. It produces a dialectic which was not a part of the classical Medieval Renaissance world. Hegel begins a whole new trend in thought, a whole new style of thinking. And the dialectical thought of Hegel became, for Marx, a poignancy.

I have to skip over almost everything that I've outlined in here. You'll have to just take this out of context and fit it in.

In writing the Critique of Hegel's Dialectic, this is 1844, Marx notes, “[for] the positing or self-affirmation and self-confirmation [which is implied] in the negation of the negation is regarded as a positing which is still uncertain burdened with its contrary doubtful of itself and thus incomplete not demonstrated by its own existence and implicit. The positing which is perceptually indubitable and grounded upon itself is directly opposed to it.” You can see it's impossible to follow without a context, and the context is impossible to follow without a further context, so that it must be taken as a whole, so that there is such a thing as a fabric of thought. Now a couple of sentences that suddenly leap out from the fabric of thought and become almost capable of being quoted.

This is Marx, 1844, “in conceiving the negation of the negation” – the negation of the negation – “from the aspect of the positive relation inherent in it as the only true positive and from the aspect of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and the self-confirming act of all being. Hegel has merely discovered an abstract, logical, and speculative expression of the historical process which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the history of the act of creation of the genesis of man.”

I deliver this to you just to remind you of some of the profundity in Marx's thinking. That the profundity is the way in which the forms of conception are crafted scientifically out of a methodological thesis of observation, analysis, and introspection, and then those abstracted forms are absorbed into the consciousness of the individual. And he thereby transforms himself from a naive puppet of circumstances, over which he has no understanding and no control, to a progressively freed individual who understands progressively and increasingly how to further his investigation, how to further his liberation. And that the prime quality of furthering it is to include more and more other people. So that the spread of the human relativity is an index to the accuracy of the application of Marxist thought. Thus we have the phrase, that comes down to us in our own time, solidarity. It's not just a phrase, it's a well thought out evolved manifestation of everyone understanding together unanimously that we all sink or swim together, or not at all. That is solidarity. It is a reasoned out harmony between all of us in unanimity of the exact and scientific requirements needed for our individuality to exist, and for the conditions to manifest which would permit it to exist, and the consciousness which is able to foster a relation between the individual and that environment. So you can see this is all extraordinarily complex.

Now I know that I'm running on to time so I'll– I'll just continue.

Marx in the 1850s wrote a number of documents. He was researching in the British Museum. He was researching to try and write his great economy. He was going to write this enormous work of which later on Das Kapital was the first of six large parts. In order to formulate for himself where he had gotten to, at what stage was his thinking, he wrote a book which was a critique of political economy. Now political economy is a liberal term. Comes from Jeremy Bentham, but was made famous by one of Bentham's disciples James Mills, who was the father of John Stuart Mill's– Mill.

In The Critique of Political Economy in 1859 Marx set up a tremendous realization for himself that the scope of his work was going to have to be almost titanic in order to encompass, accurately, scientifically, each stage, each step of the process. That is to say that as Marx wrote books they became bigger and bigger. The reason they became bigger and bigger was because he was following a methodology that he was having to follow by his own commitment to the method. And he did not know ahead of time just what all the ramifications might be, so someone had to sit and think it through. Thus, thought on this level, was different from simply someone reviewing his opinions, or other people's opinions. Marx would say these are abstract scholars in their studies who have absolutely no contact with life. But the Marxist thinker, or rather I should say Karl Marx as a thinker, was dealing with a scientific thesis-oriented methodology to build up a perspective, a conception, that as he built it up he would have to fill in the details to make it intelligible to himself. And in order to share this with others he would then have to write it all down. So that the very process that Marx was involved in was taking notes, writing out in large quantity, indications for himself where he should go here, what he should think about here, where this fit in. And so he collected an enormous body of notes. And in 1858, just before the Critique of Political Economy was published, he completed a manuscript called the Grundrisse – G-R-U-N-D-R-I-S-S-E. And Grundrisse has in its General Introduction– I'll just give you a few extracts here.

“The subject of our discussion is first of all material production. Individuals producing in society, thus the socially determined production of individuals, naturally constitutes the starting point.”

That is to say, the material world that we live in is not nature, it is man made, it has been produced. Therefore the production of this realm has to be reviewed not only the things that have been produced but the method, the way, by which they have been produced. That the things themselves are interesting but the method by which they were evolved and produced is more interesting. Therefore one is going to become involved with a scientific, philosophic assessment of the ways in which man-made worlds are produced.

“The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point [when] Adam Smith or Ricardo writes belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are [Robinson Crusoe] stories which do not by any means represent, as students of the history of civilization imagine, a reaction against over-refinement and a return to a misunderstood natural life. They are no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau's contrat social, which makes naturally independent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by contract. They are the fiction and only the aesthetic fiction of the small and great adventure stories. They are, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, which had been the course of development since the sixteenth century and made gigantic strides towards maturity in the eighteenth [century]. In this society of free competition the individual appears free from bonds of nature, etc., which in former epochs of history had made him part of a definite, limited human conglomeration. To the prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo are still standing, this eighteenth-century individual, constituting the joint product of the dissolution of the feudal form of society and of the new forces of production which had developed since the sixteenth century, appears as an ideal whose existence belongs to the past; not as a result of history, but as its starting point. …This illusion has been characteristic of every new epoch in the past.”

And here Marx is jumping in with his profundity – and he is profound. He is saying, this is true, as a mode of review and fictive imagining of every epoch of history. That we have been trapped on this wheel, running pell mell, and it's time to get off because the conditions now have become intolerable.

So the Grundrisse and the Critique of Political Economy belong to the end of the 1850s and it began to draw attention to Marx. He was offered several positions. He turned them down. And then in 1864 a position came up which enticed him. Less than a week before it happened he found out that there was going to be a meeting of workers, international workers, in London. And so he attended. And on September 28th of 1864, a monumental turning point in world history, the International Workingmen's Association met in London. Eventually this would grow to be about 800,000 workers. Most of them were from other countries – Ireland or Germany or France – but a good portion of them were from England. And Marx went there and he realized that here was a real vehicle, in terms of his assessment, a group of individuals who had actual contact with the world – they were working men. They had an actual need shared among them to– conditions were intolerable, horrible for them. The factory conditions were unbelievable. No amount of liberal Band-Aiding could have assuaged the– the condition. So they met with this common desperation, this common alienation, this common purpose. So it was decided that there should be a working committee to draw up a program for this large assembly of people. So that committee met and they realized that they were still too large. So they had a subcommittee. And Marx happened to be on the committee and on the subcommittee and he offered his two-room flat in Soho and the subcommittee of the International Workingmen's Association met there. And even though Marx was not the head of it, he was the dominating intellectual mind. And within a few days it was just apparent that he was the one who should write the program. And so Marx's first really well known powerful writings outside of the Communist Manifesto, which had been in 1848, came in 1864 when he wrote his program for the International Workingmen's Association.

It's interesting that in this work we find the characteristic fire and verve of Marx has tempered itself down, has toned itself down. That is to say he is taking very seriously the fact that he is going to have to educate a large number of individuals who have not had the benefit that he has had of having fifteen years, and five years before that – twenty years to think this through. And so Marx the educator comes forth, and we find in his writings at this time the painstaking care to educate the factory worker to understand stage by stage to mature him to the point to where he can understand that this is a process which he himself must do in concert with others.

So Marx emphasizes that at this stage his whole emphasis is on the educative, gradual maturing of the individual's. Many of his writings at this time criticize those revolutionaries who would think overnight they're going to change conditions. He says, we've been at this for ten or twenty years. We know it might take fifty or a hundred years just to mature a body of human beings to where they could conceive of what is happening and what is possible for man. That the nature of man is so mysteriously elusive that it may take all this time. And in fact he says, the very conditions that make it intolerable are actually the structures which hold man together in his suffering and his misery, like a necessary cradle of sacrifice to give him a structure while he matures. And so Marx becomes very humane, very insightful, tremendously insightful. There is still the tone that man must break his bad habits, not just think he's going to reform them, but break them. But there's also the tone that this has to be done over a concerted long stamina required period of time.

And so we find some of the writings of Marx at this time are quite profound. And it's in this period that Das Kapital is published. And what Das Kapital was was the attentiveness to the crux of production in the man-made historical realm. That Capital is not just the funds, the money, that is paid to the workers in wages – that's important and one has to look at this. But the fly in the ointment, the structural commodity that is needed to be analyzed scientifically and understood for its profound effect upon history and upon man's nature and upon his condition as a being, is surplus value, because surplus value is what comes out not of the worker providing his labor, selling his labor for wages to produce a product, but it's like the interest that accrues to those who have the methods and modes of production. And it's the interest upon interest. These are surplus values, and as the surplus values that tend to dominate finally and distort the actual process that could be comprehended, even though it is so complex it still would be historically possible to comprehend, except that from the secret crow's nest of surplus valued purposes the bourgeois class distorts the whole situation more and more so that it cannot be seen in its clarity. And so that man is purposely led astray, purposely deluded by those who would know better and probably do know better but wish no one else to know better.

So this quality begins to come into Marx's life and published by the McGraw Hill Library, volume three of the Karl Marx Library is On the First International. And this is all of Marx's great writings from 1864 to 1872. And most of the writings that are in here – letters, interviews, letters to the press, various other documents – are all characteristic of the humane teacher Marx coming through.

Then a great event happened. One of the most powerful events in the 19th century. Germany under Bismarck became fed up with the French. There was a war. The Germans marched into Paris and served notice that they were not going to put up with the French foolishness. There were not going to be any more Napoleon's. And they left. The French political situation was up for grabs. And in 1871 the workers took over the city of Paris and set up a commune. And the commune of Paris of 1871 was seized and seen by the seething ocean of radical socialist communist thinkers across Europe as a beacon for the revolution to start. It had begun. Marx and Engels characterized it as the most glorious event in human history. It was the first time that the workers had seized the methods of production. It was the first time that they had confronted, in a real material – as we would say today – out front way, the actual problem and took away the possibility of surplus value, took away the possibility of this tyranny of the overlay.

And this expectation of course led to rising tempers. Everyone wanted to have their say. Everyone wanted to have their view. And The First International fell apart, the Paris Commune fell apart, and Europe returned, very quickly, to tight-lid on the situation. No one mention this, no one talk about this. And the 1870s entered into the great Victorian dry spell. But some notice had been served. It wasn't so much that a series of ninety-five theses had been tacked to the board, it was that the sick and oppressed had had a glimpse of daylight and it wouldn't be long before the 20th century when just about anybody and everybody, anxious to throw anybody and everybody out.

Marx unfortunately began to suffer physically, mentally, the strain, the stress of thirty years of intense work, just collapsed on him. The misery of his family. The incredible wrenching of his whole life finally settled in upon him and we find Marx writing, towards the end of his life, to a friend of his. And I want to read you excerpts from two last letters at the very end of Marx's life. This is a letter to a woman Vera Zasulich in February of 1881, a Russian populist she was. He writes,

“Dear Citizeness:
A nervous disease that I have been suffering from periodically for the last ten years has prevented me from replying earlier to your letter of the 16th of February. To my regret I am unable to give you a succinct answer prepared for publication to the question which you have graciously submitted to me. Months have passed since I promised to write something on the same subject to the Saint Petersburg Committee. However, I hope a few lines will suffice to remove all doubt in your mind about the misunderstanding concerning my so-called theory.” So-called theory. “In analyzing the genesis of capitalist production I say,” – and then he quotes himself from Das Kapital – “the foundation of the capitalist system is therefore the utmost separation of the producer from the means of production. The basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producer. This has been accomplished in radical fashion only in England but all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.”

Do you notice how the quotation has this dynamic? And you notice how the letter has almost a gentleness to it. The difference.

He writes, “In this Western movement the point in question therefore is the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property. With the Russian peasants one would on the contrary have to transform their common property into private property.” A strange thing for Karl Marx to write in 1881, in retrospect. “Thus the analysis given in capital assigns no reasons for or against the vitality of the rural community. But the special research into this subject which I conducted, the materials for which I obtained from original sources, has convinced me that this community is the mainspring of Russia's social regeneration.”

What is the mainspring? Not a communist party but the rural people. Second letter and the last published document that Marx wrote was the Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. He wrote it just before he died. He died in March 14th, 1883. This was written at the end of 1882, about a hundred and one years ago. This was the last published writing, the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto.

“What a limited field the Proletarian movement still occupied at that time” – December 1847, just before he wrote the Communist Manifesto. “What a limited field the Proletarian movement still occupied at that time is most clearly shown by the last section of the Manifesto the portions of the communists in relation to the various opposition parties in the various countries precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction when the United States absorbed the surplus Proletarian forces of Europe through emigration both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. And both at that time were therefore in one way or another pillars of the existing European order. How very different things are today. Precisely, European immigration fitted North America for a gigantic agricultural production whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed property – large and small. In addition it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe for all time.”

Well what a different view when we go to the sources. What an extraordinary vision. What a recutting of the shape of history. Well there's more we've got, I think, ten more individuals. And the 19th century is really the place. I hope to see you next week.