Karl Marx (1818-1883)

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:
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The date is December 13th, 1983. This is the second lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the 19th century, tonight's lecture is entitled marks who lived 18, 18 to 1883, the philosophy of material, man and economic history.
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This is one of the most difficult of all courses. And I think those that managed to make it here last week, Ken 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. And our time is compounded of the eternal problem of being sandwiched in between two orders of incomprehension, which require for us responsibilities and act 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 and supermarkets and shop for our food.
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None of us in a sustained way, go to the 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 a hundred, hundred years. So to ignore the 19th century is to commit ourselves, to sailing a vast ocean without a compass and without a plan. What problem is exacerbated?
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Okay.
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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 They 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
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Progressively as the 19th century undeveloped 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 way 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 progressive way the fatal triumphal lunges of great minds to gulp existence down and digest it in one fell swoop, produced successive phases of disenchanted.
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Okay.
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Which led to the 20th century being characterized as an absurd time, abstracted from all history.
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No, all human yeah.
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Understanding. So that 20th century man has been characterized most aptly as Postic Storic on man, But he exists in the conundrum that is no longer even recognizable as a problem that we live our lives, a nest, the ties
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By
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The glacial habits of past epochs. We seek to entertain ourselves by media, which draw ourselves away from the central attention. And if there any figure that stands poignantly for late 20th century, man, it's the typical sculptures y'all committee of a burnt-out stick finger
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Man
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Composed of just a, almost a lumped nuggets of circumstance we had last week, the beginnings
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Of capitalism we
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Have this week, the beginnings of communism.
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We also noted that the beginnings of capitalism, where 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.
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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 dissembled between the vibrations, not of a polarity, but if I buy furcation so close that it produces no synthesis and no real combat, but only the new way 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
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Or
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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 right as a classic book, but as largely read in excerpts by graduate students now, because the thought of Adam Smith is an interesting period,
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A a, B, C
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SI primmer 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. Benton 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. He has an enduring monument in our time. One of the great books of philosophy was written by two Bentham mites who in the 20th century sought to re-introduce the perceptions and the conceptions of Bentham. They were CK Ogden and IAA Richards. We wrote a book called the meaning of meaning, which is one of the, world's really a 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 marks will become a very strange phenomenon. Marx was born in 18, 18
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Trade-offs and pressure
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Grew up mainly in the Rhine land area. The large city in that area would be, um, uh, cologne. Those, uh, Reinish LANs that, uh, have produced many, uh, great artists. Mox Ernst comes from that area. Meister Eckhart marks was born into a fairly well-to-do family. His father in particularly was a intellectual Jewish, uh, merchant gentlemen, commercial in his outlook, wanting very much for his son to be trained in law and wishing that the young Karl Marx would become, uh, attuned to the legal profession.
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The
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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,
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He was able to write extraordinary letters to his father about the condition of his mind, about the fact that, uh, he seemed not able to, uh, focus upon law that instead he would like to go into philosophy. And in fact, uh, marks would stay in the area of philosophy and receive a PhD, which was quite unusual at that time. A master's was more likely the degree to receive. They very, very earliest writings that we have other than letters to his father are, um, 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, it reads dear father. There are moments in one's life that represent the limit of a period.
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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. I have thought in order to come to a realization of our actual position, yes, history itself, like this sort of stock taking and introspection, which often make it look as though we're 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 leap motifs have already arrived. History is a phenomenal, no condition. It's not a fictive imagining it is in fact, a palpable, like an ocean were unmanned swims. And has this being in this condition, mountain 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 mater 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 master and rudder of human
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Life in
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History as being controlled by an analytical assessment of those mental processes, which relate us individually to history.
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And Mark's will coin a word
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Emphasize its use that when that relationship is oblique or not existence, 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 Mark's in a very real sense is the first existentialist. He is in fact, more profoundly an existentialist. Then 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 the doctrinaire position received, uh, uh, by, uh, 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 is perhaps more apt to style him in terms of the live existential stark awakening factor.
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When Mark
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Was receiving his doctorate,
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His life began to take shape. He had been engaged from the age of 16 to a woman named Jenny, uh, West fallen. Her ancestors had been the Dukes of Argyle in England and Scotland, and they had been a very rebellious family. Jenny's father, uh, liked Carl 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 to St. Cmon, uh, from the, uh, uh, French revolution, uh, era. The rest of the family did not like the young man because he seemed, uh, too obsessed with, uh, inner purposes, too intense, uh, around aspects of himself that were, uh, antisocial or hidden. But Jenny finally married him in 1843 and they stayed together, uh, their entire life through thick and thin, and they got pretty sick as you'll see. So Carl Marks in terms of his relationship to women had, but one love and one lady from adolescents 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 news letter. The Renish Zeit tone Published, uh, just, uh, in the cologne area.
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Yeah.
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And very quickly it was suppressed. This is 1843. The Prussian state government was very shaky. Like most of the shaky governments at the mid 19th century, they employed an enormous number of spies to read and sift, to listen, to talks and go to meetings. And that was drawn to someone's attention, very high up
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That there was a point
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And see a Leighton dynamite and the articles of the young marks. 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 still very much alive. When he went to Paris, he met Frederic angles and angles was to be his lifelong friend and angles who was two years younger than Mark's born in 1820 without outlive him by 12 years, angles would live until 1895. It is actually Frederick angles who will create after Marx's death. The phenomenon known as Marxism marks does not create Marxism angles creates Marxism. The best study in Marxism is by George lick dine, just simply entitled Marxism. That is to say, after Marx dies in 1883, until ankles dies in 1895. In those 12 years, angles edits marks his writing. He pulls together from his notes and completes the final two volumes of dusk capital. He begins with the funeral oration saying that above all things, Carl Marx was a revolutionary. So that marks the thinker, a marks. The man becomes marks 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
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Worked on an accepted Marxism rather than marks. 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 [inaudible], which was the basic manuscript out of which does capital was written. That's capital being the first of six parts. And the Gundry sea was the outline for the whole six parts. Dusk capital was only the beginning of an extended economic survey of the nature of history and the nature of man. It was inconvenient to review their goon dressy. It was inconvenient to review many of the early writings of marks 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 Marxism Leninism or one has marks presented by Leon Trotsky in 1940, just before his death. And, uh, He puts in here, the book compactly sets forth the fundamentals of Marx's economic teaching and marks his 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 marks? We have extracts from dusk capital, which is revised and put together by Frederick angles
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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 10 or 15 years, 20 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, uh, 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, this sweet little son Gado died. And Mark said that he was a casualty of the bourgeois, a 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,
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We have to set aside because we just don't have time to go into it. But there is a poignant house hold life of marks, which needs to be told what are the best individuals to address himself to the human Mark's was the great psychoanalyst Erik from and Eric from edited a book on Marx's view of man. And the very last chapter of prom's great book, the sane society is a re presentation of Karl Marx is 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, um, places to tab on other doctrines and so erased in a face, the man in a blur of triumphal expectation.
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[inaudible],
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Mark's also in 1843, went to Paris then and met Frederick King goals there, they put out a journal, it only ran one issue. It was a German, French, uh, review, and Mark's read, wrote some articles for it. Uh, angles wrote some articles for it. Uh, 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 angle's went to England and established a, uh, English, uh, connection, which he would use later on. In fact, uh, angles would associate himself with a textile manufacturing outfit in, uh, Manchester, England, and would, uh, stay there eventually on become a partner in the firm in 1864 and became economically, uh, uh, independent. He used his money to help support Carl Marx. And while he was just a clerk for the country accompany, he could only send so much and later on, uh, he was able to at least alleviate the, um, hunger, the starvation of the Mark's family.
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Angle's
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Great work is a description of the English working class in the factories circa 1840s, late 1840s. And someone wants to 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 turned the stomach just to read the descriptions, but the descriptions are in a tone. That's not hyperbole nor fiction is angles 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 a hold 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 insight. In fact, their assessment was that the jogger knot was just beginning to roll. And there was a frightful existential terror behind much of Karl Marx's writing, which later on manifested in himself. And for the last 10 years of his life, he suffered from severe mental depressions, nervous, uh, uh, disordering
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That
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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 Renish Zeit tone on, they revived it as the new Renish as item, and they began writing articles for it. And this publication, extraordinarily poignant, some of the early writings of marks 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 marks his writing it's called the Jewish on the Jewish question on the Jewish question.
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At this time, there was a radical thinker named Bruno Bauer, who was a member of a group called the freedom. And, uh, he had written a criticism about the Jews trying to expect, uh, improvement in their lot from a non-Jewish population saying that really, uh, the, the problem is not that there are Jews and non Jews, but that the whole humans, the whole political situation is a problem. And Marx and 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 Matt. So he begins, and this is, uh, uh, typical, uh, Marxian style of, uh, 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 ego-less. 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, uh, later on marks will right here. It is in brief, we have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.
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Matt 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?
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But he says,
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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 it's genuine resolution into the general question of the age marks always writes in a phase term process, a method, there is an issue. The issue is delineated. An outline. The outline then is seen against the background. The background absorbs the outline and thus acquires a grain, a texture so that the condition itself becomes with the abstracted form of understanding the material. So in this way, thought reflects consciousness reflects a process from the material round 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 EMA IE mending out to the material world. It's the other way around.
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So that what is important for a Marx is to find a way to cut the perception of man like a Juul or cuts of Jim with a methodology that can be re 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's a dialectic between the world
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And the man, his mind. Okay.
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And it has a material connection. Thus dialectical materialism has a philosophic methodology involved in it.
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Although marks well
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Later say we have to get rid of the idea of, of philosophy. That philosophy is as, uh, kind of, uh, uh, of theological approach. And, uh, uh, in many ways he says that, uh, uh, logic is the money of philosophy and we become addicted to a phony process in thinking. So we have to, uh, 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. What she says is purposely
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Miss
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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, um, nuts that would take us away from any kind of maturation. That's the problem to put it in simple language is it's very difficult for man to grow up and learn The only way by which he can assure himself a chance for this is to lean upon a scientific methodology of observation
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Proof understanding. So he says,
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We have to examine the relation between political maths of patient and human emancipation. This is the, this is the key in here.
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Well, I have to skip over some of this that, uh, I'm, I'm going to run out of time at least. But, um, here's another example from on the Jewish question, the source of the defect must be sought, 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 narrow ness. 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 emancipation political emancipation is not the final form.
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It is human emancipation. Therefore, when we are abstracting these shapes by scientific observation, they're arising setting up a hypothesis and investigating, uh, 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 Mark's and so misunderstood in, uh, various ways that, um, I guess, uh, if I can find it here very late in his life, in terms of his writing capacity, 1875, uh, it's in the, uh, uh, critique of the Gotha program. Uh, there were a German socialists in 1875 that, uh, set up this program called the Gotha program marks disapproved of it. And then 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 Oregon, super imposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.
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The doctrinaire Marxists do not like
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To hear that.
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What does it say? Freedom consistent converting the state from an Oregon, super imposed 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 freedom to superimpose itself and its forms upon people. He says, and he's criticizing the golf, the program because it doesn't understand this. And what of the riotous misuse, which the program makes it the words present day state, present day society, and of the still more riotous misconception that creates in regard to the state, to which it addresses its demands present day society 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 countries, frontier. It is different in the preshow 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 marks 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, inner locking oppositions, which are arrayed against him.
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The initial perception of the almost impossibility of the task is a sense of alienation.
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One no
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Longer is receiving sustenance from the umbilical of the situation. One is cast out. One is isolated, and we'll find this in marks for five years, marks and angles wrote articles attempted to form small groups. And then an 1848, an enormous event occurred
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1848 is known as the year of revolutions. And there were tremendous upheavals in many countries of Europe in the summer of 1848 marks and angles felt that the conditions had, uh, ripen to the extent, to where they were able to offer throughout his come to be known as the manifesto. Now, the communist manifesto appeared just at the time that the revolutions broke out in 18 eight, so that it seemed, but there was a connection between them actually, they had been working for five years, maturing their thought, cutting these forms, uh, 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.
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A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism, all the powers of old Uruk have entered into a Holy Alliance to exorcised. This specter Pope and Zar met her Nick and Quizzo French radicals in 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, one, communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power to it is high time that communist should open the, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter 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. No, where have we run across this
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Before this forum is this polemical form
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Occurs almost exactly in the same configurations And the great declarations at the beginning of the 17th century, by the Rosa crucial the pharma fraternity. [inaudible]
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The Rosa crucial ones. If you review his opening paragraphs, remarkably similar style, tone, and form of document, that is, it is say 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 Rosa Cruzans said this of the Pope and the antichrist and other figures of the early 17th century mentality, the communist manifesto saying it in 1848
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In terms,
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Then the amount of festival begins. And I just give you, um, 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 emergent. 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 in suing from that differentiation is a methodological analytical perspective that yields a new form of understanding history.
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In the earlier I'm extracting in the earlier at parks 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 men, apprentices serfs in almost all of these classes. Again, subordinate, graduations. So society was complex enormously. So the modern was wrong society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society and has not done away with class antagonisms. It has been established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones are Epic. The Epic 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.
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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 manifestor we have this, the difficulty was that the manifestor came out in the revolutionary turmoil of 1848. The revolutions were put down and ruthlessly and marks and angles 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 it was no longer going to be at home there. He tried to make his way and, uh, Brussels as he had done, uh, uh, for a year or so before unable to do that, where to go in the world, his friend angles was in England. So he went to England And spent the rest of his life in London.
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So at the age of 31 marks 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
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Not mean doctrinaire, communism, the monolithic, uh, 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 marks is 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 him self 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 in wave. But as a position reached by scientific analysis along the thesis of class struggles.
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And I'm simplifying now because we're, 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 a, 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 from 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 marks began writing. And this was 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.
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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 diminuation of state expenditure by restricting the bureaucracy and shifting the chief taxes under the big land donors in bourgeois. Uh, Bruce Razi 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 some how 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 re cut 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 in band-aids and makeshift do well, which another generation will have to do all over again and children of that generation again.
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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. They bent the might liberal mind and 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 Mark two of us Sephora's okay. And the way they shied away from him is the way that people always get around this sort of thing. They said, well, marks 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.
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You're an intellectual meaning that, uh, 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 Mark's withdrew. And from 1850 to 1864 for 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 Mark's children died, his wife, Jenny suffered many breakdowns in order to eke out a living Marx was helped by a few individuals. Richard Dana un-American contacted his editor, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and really sort of liked the tough tone of Marx's writings. So he had Dana higher marks as a European correspondent for the New York. Trevino marks eventually wrote about 500 articles for the New York Tribune covering all aspects of history from 1850 to 1864.
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He wrote about the 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 Frederick angles would send money from Manchester. And what did marks do? What, what does the man did he do? What was his daily life? What was 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 their marks read everything. His tremendous dynamic, powerful mind reviewing patiently year and year out for almost a decade, Kate and the half, the entire history of man, the entire nature. Now it had been a part of Marx's background when he was young.
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Remember he got a PhD in philosophy, not just a, master's not just a degree, but he got a PhD. One of the aspects of marks intelligence was, Hey, goals, philosophy, no, I haven't gotten to Hagle. I have to do Hagle in a special lecture, very complicated man, very complicated thought. And when we do, um, in, um, April, may and June at the philosophic research society, the course on the age of revolution, then we'll take up, uh, thinkers, uh, uh, Garrett, Shelley Beethoven, Hagle, um, the age of revolution, Hagle, especially influenced marks 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, um, so complicated in its, uh, 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.
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It produces a, uh, dialectic, which was not a part of the classical medieval Renaissance world. Hey, go begins a whole new trend in thought a whole new style of thinking. And the dialectical, uh, thought of Hagle became four marks a poignancy. Um, 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 marks 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, inducible and grounded upon itself is directly opposed to it. You can see it's impossible to follow without a context.
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And the context is impossible to follow without a further context so that it must be taken as a whole, so that there was 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 Mrs. Marks 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 Hagle 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, 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, nothing to logical thesis of observation and analysis and introspection.
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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 gives an index to the accuracy of the application of Marx's 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 was permitted to exist and the consciousness, which is able to foster a relation between the individual and the environment.
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So you can see this is all extraordinarily complex. Now I know that I'm running on two times, so I'll, I'll just continue. March in the 1850s wrote a number of documents. He was researching in the British museum. He was researching to try and write. He has great, uh, uh, uh, economy. He was going to write this enormous work, which later on dusk capital 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. 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 Stewart
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Male
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In the critique of political economy in 1859, Mark set up a tremendous realization for himself that the scope of his work was going to have to be almost, uh, um, um, Titanic in order to encompass accurately scientific way each stage each step of the process. That is to say that as Marx wrote books, they became bigger and bigger. The reason that became bigger and bigger w 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. Marks would say these are abstract scholars in their studies who have absolutely no contact with life, but don't Marxist thinker, or rather, I should say Carl Marks as a sinker was dealing with a scientific thesis oriented methodology to build up a perspective.
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They 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 at the very process that Marx was in evolved in, was taking notes and 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 gun dressy, G R U N D R I S S E. You've been dressing has an as 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 and thus the socially determined production of individuals naturally constitutes the starting point.
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Does the say the material world that we live in is not nature. It is manmade. 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 manmade 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 18th 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 that is Russo's contracts to see all which makes naturally independent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by contract.
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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 in the course of development since the 16th century and made gigantic strides towards maturity in the 18th century, in this society of free competition, the individual appears free from bonds of nature, et cetera, which informer epochs of history had made him part of a definite limited human conglomerate conglomeration to the profits of the 18th century on whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo are still standing. This 18th century, individual constituting the joint pro product of the dissolution of the feudal form of society and of the new forces of production, which had developed since the 16th 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.
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And here Marx is jumping in with his profundity and he is profound. He's saying this is true as a mode of review and fictive imagining I've ever had a pocket history that we've been trapped on this wheel, running Pell Mell, and when it's time to get off, because the conditions now have become intolerable to the good and dressy and the critique of political economy belonged to the end of the 1850s. And it began to draw attention to marks. He was offered several positions, he turned them down. And then in 1864, eight 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 working men's association met in London.
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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 Mark's 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. Two conditions were intolerable horrible for them. The factory conditions were unbelievable. No amount of liberal band-aiding could have a, the, the condition. So they met with this common desperation, this common alienation and this common purpose. No, it was decided that there should be a working committee to draw up a program for this large assembly of people. So that committee Matt and they realized that they were still too large. So they had a sub committee and Mark's happened to be on the committee and on the subcommittee.
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And he offered his two room flat and Soho. And the sub committee of the international working men's association met there. And even though Mark's 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 Mark's is first really well-known powerful writings outside of the communist manifesto, which had been an 1848, came in 1864 when he wrote his, uh, program for, um, the international working men's association. It's interesting that in this work we find the characteristic, uh, uh, fire and verb of Marx has tempered itself down is 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 15 years and five years before that 20 years to think this through.
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And so Mark's, the educator comes for us 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 miss do in concert with others. So Mark's emphasizes that at this stage, his whole emphasis is on the educated, gradual maturing of the individuals. Many of his writings at this time criticized those revolutionaries, who would think overnight, they're going to change conditions. And he says, we've been at this for 10 or 20 years. We know it might take 50 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 a man that the nature of band is so mysteriously, elusive, that it may take all this time.
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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 unnecessary cradle of sacrifice to give him a structure while he matures. And so Mark's becomes very humane, very insightful, tremendously insightful. There is still that 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 marks at this time are quite profound. And it's in this period that DAS Kapital is published. And what does capital 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 and wages that's important in 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.
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And upon his condition is 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's still would be historically possible to comprehend, except that from the secret crow's nest of surplus valued purposes, the Vishwa class distorts the whole situation more and more so that it cannot be seen in its clarity. And so that man is purposely led the stray purposely diluted by those who would know better and probably do know better, but wish no one else, you know, better.
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So this quality begins to come into March his life and, uh, published by the McGraw Hill library volume, three of the Karl Marx library. And it's on the first international. And this was all of Marx's great writings from 1864 to 1872. And most of the writings that are in here, um, letters, interviews, uh, letters to the press. Um, various other documents are all characteristic of the humane teacher marks 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, uh, served notice that they were not going to put up with the French foolishness. They were not going to be any more Napoleons and they left the French political situation was up for grabs. And in 1871, the workers took over the sea of Paris and set up a commune.
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And the commune of Paris of 1871 was seized and seen by this teasing ocean of radical socialist communist thinkers across Europe, as a beacon for the revolution to start, and it'd be gone marks and angles, characterized it as they most glorious events in human history is the first time that the workers had seized. The methods of production 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. You took away the possibility of this tyranny of the overlay.
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And this expectation of course, led to rising tempers. Everyone wanted to have their say everyone. I wanted to have their view. And the first international fell apart, the Paris commune fell apart and Europe returned very quickly, too tight lid on the situation. No one mentioned 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 95 theses had been tacked to the board. It was that the second 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 marks. And fortunately began to suffer physically and mentally the strain, the stress of 30 years of intense work just collapsed on him. They misery F his family, the incredible wrenching of his whole life finally settled in upon him.
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And we find Mark's writing towards the end of his life to a friend of his. And I want to read you excerpts from the cute last letters at the very end of Marx's life. This is a letter to a woman, Vera. It's a sewage in February of 1881, a Russian populous. She was, he writes, dear set us in this and nervous disease that I have been suffering from periodically for the last 10 years has prevented Bay from replying earlier to your letter of 16th of February, to my regret, I'm 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 St 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.
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So-called there is in analyzing the Genesis of capitalist production, I say, and then he quotes himself from dusk capital. The foundation of the capitalist system is there for 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 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 pointing question there for us, 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 Chrome marks to write an 1881.
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In retrospect, that's the analysis given in capital assigns, no reasons for, or against the vitality of the rural community, but the special research into the subject, which I conducted the materials for, which I obtained from original sources has convinced me that this community is the main spring of Russia's social regeneration. What is the main spring, 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, on 101 years ago. This was the last published, writing the process 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's still occupied at that time.
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It's 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 immigration, both countries provided Europe with raw materials, and we're at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products in 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 lended property, large and small. In addition that enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that my 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 re cutting of the shape of history. Well, there's more, we've got, I think 10 more individuals. The 19th century is really the place I hope to see it next week is tell him wasn't even born when I got it.

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