Continuing our series of articles on Marx, this contribution by Lal Khan, was first published in the Asian Marxist Review.
May 5th marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. This birthday is being celebrated at a time when his predictions and perspective are being borne out by the events erupting across the world. Its an historical paradox that what has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalist degeneration of the Chinese revolution and the fall of the Berlin wall in the sphere of global economics has served to underline Marx’s prescience; the veracity of his conviction that capitalism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction has been acknowledged even by some of those who are vexed with his ideas.
Capitalism’s relentless crisis has once again propelled the relevance of Marx’s ideas and his strategy of struggle for the emancipation of the humanity into the limelight of world politics. The number of articles being written, his works being republished and the discussions around his ideas amongst the intelligentsia and the media at the time of the second centenary of his birth are unprecedented in recent times. These are perhaps being more widely conversed than even during the existence of the so-called ‘socialist bloc’.
Marx, unlike most nineteenth-century critics of industrial capitalism, was a real revolutionary. His life and work were dedicated to the socialist revolution and the emancipation of humanity from the chains of capitalist drudgery and social coercion. Marx and Engels captured this beautifully in The Communist Manifesto. After his death, ‘communist’ revolutions that occurred, apart from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, were not in accordance with or in unison with Marx’s principles and methodology. Nevertheless, they were in his name. By the middle of the twentieth century, more than a third of the population of the world were living under regimes that called themselves Marxist, Socialist or Communist. Some of the activists and leaders in these revolutions, perhaps erroneously but earnestly, considered themselves as Marxists. It is cynical to blame Marx for the distorted way these revolutions took shape and for their outcomes, which were sometimes vicious totalitarian states.
Marx wrote in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Marx was not making philosophy irrelevant but explained that philosophical contradictions arise out of material living conditions. These could only be solved by radically altering those conditions. Marx’s ideas were and are being used today in striving to re-create the world and end the misery, destitution, devastation and tyranny being inflicted by obsolete and rotten capitalism.
On 14th March 1883, Marx died, aged sixty-four. He remained obscured from the wider world horizon during his lifetime. There were only eleven people present at his funeral. Apart from his loyal friend and lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels, few would have envisaged how influential he would become for the generations to come. At the funeral, Engels’ speech summed up Marx’s life and works with its impacts on the future of humanity’s struggle for liberation.
Fighting was his element
“Marx was before all else a revolutionist”, Engels solemnly said, “His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His writings… work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men’s Association – this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else. And, consequently, Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers … and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”
Twenty-eight years later, a Russian Marxist, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, one of the main speakers at another funeral, that of Marx’s daughter Laura and her husband Paul Lafarge in Paris in 1911, declared, that “the ideas of Laura’s father would be triumphantly realised sooner than anyone guessed”.
It is also an indubitable fact that without the victorious 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Marx probably would have remained in obscurity like many other nineteenth-century philosophers, sociologists, economists, and political theoreticians. The Russian Revolution was the greatest event of the twentieth century, shaking the planet to the core, propelling Marx and his ideas and his endeavours to organise the international proletariat onto the world stage and forcing the capitalist class to take his ideas seriously.
After 1917, communism was no longer a utopian fantasy. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent political setbacks amongst most class-conscious section of the working class have not swept Marxism aside. Ironically, in the recent period even capitalist economists, academics and theoreticians are now acknowledging the veracity of Marx’s ideas, particularly with regards to the decay and crisis of overcapacity, overproduction, the fall in the rate of profit and the general decay of capitalism. There is no doubt Marx’s influence is again on the rise with the impending crisis of world capitalism. In a survey conducted by the BBC at the turn of the twentieth century, Marx was voted as the most influential personality of the last millennium.
Merciless criticism of Young Hegelians
Marx was born in 1815 in the small German city of Trier. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but Marx went on to study philosophy. He studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, in Berlin, where Hegel had once been teaching. He joined a group of intellectuals known as the ‘Young Hegelians’ but soon developed differences with crucial aspects of Hegelian Philosophy. Marx and Engels wrote a polemic against the stagnant, sectarian politics of their former associates among the Young Hegelians titled, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. The irony in the title implies, a merciless criticism of those Young Hegelians who were trapped in the mire of scholastic ‘criticism’, divorced from the realities of life.
Marx was in love with and got engaged to Jenny von Westphalia, also from Trier. He was eighteen and she was twenty-two. This engagement lasted for seven years. Jenny was exceptionally beautiful and devoted to him. Marx wrote passionate love poetry for her. In his personal life, Marx was modest and gracious. He was playful, joyous and affectionate when not marred by illness. He often made up stories for his three daughters and enjoyed cheap cigars and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him. A Prussian government spy who visited Marx at his home in 1852 was surprised to find him “the gentlest and mildest of men.”
Marx was a passionate and a prolific writer. He wrote all night in clouds of tobacco smoke, books and papers piled around him. Marx and Engels wrote on so many issues and, in such detail, that their writings are collected into 54 large volumes. Some odd writings might still be missing from those collections.
When it came to issues of ideological principles Marx was uncompromising. He was a persuasive speaker but had a lisp, hence his oration was not that fluent, and he rarely addressed crowds. Due to his commitment and persistence on ideological principles, Marx made many opponents of even his former friends and allies with his unforgiving and candid writing style. Still, he commanded respect. When Marx was just twenty-eight, a colleague described him as “a born leader of the people.” He was a meticulous editor and the leading figure in the International Workingmen’s Association, now known as the First International.
Apart from a few small book advances, journalism was Marx’s only source of earned income. Although most of his writings were on Europe, his articles on the Indian subcontinent are perhaps the best analyses of the events taking place in the South Asian subcontinent at the time. Marx edited and contributed to political newspapers in Europe and from 1852 to 1862 he was a columnist for the New York Daily Tribune, the largest circulation newspaper in the world at the time. It was during this period that Marx wrote some of the best writings on the British colonisation of India and the 1857 Great Revolt. Marx had a keen interest in developments taking place in India and China and wrote a number of articles on the ferment taking place in India, both during the 1857 Revolt and the period leading up to it. In these articles, Marx analysed the conquest and subjugation of India and outlined different forms and methods of British colonial rule and exploitation. According to Marx, the East India Company was a tool of Indian conquest and he stressed that the British seized Indian territories by taking advantage of the feudal strife between local princes and fanning racial, religious, tribal and caste antagonisms among the people.
British conquest of India
In an article written on 22nd July 1853 for the New York Daily Tribune Marx wrote “The paramount power of the Great Mogul was broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The Mahrattas broke the power of the Mughals. The Afghans broke the power of the Mahrattas, and while all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country not only divided between Mahommedan and Hindoo, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? If we knew nothing of the past history of Hindostan, would there not be the one great and incontestable fact, that even at this moment India is held in English thralldom by an Indian army maintained at the cost of India?”
In another article in the New York Daily Tribune Marx wrote, “Whatever the English bourgeoisie is forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people. The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Indians themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”
The Indians did fight back, starting with a revolt in the Indian army, and it very rapidly spread throughout the country. The British called it a ‘mutiny’ and an isolated uprising but Marx called this ‘nothing short of an insurrection’, and it was just part of a general anti-colonial liberation struggle of oppressed nations unfolding in the 1850s in nearly all of Asia. Marx was the first one to refute the lie that the Great Revolt of 1857 was a mere mutiny by soldiers and that there had been no involvement of broader sections of the society.
Marx went on to say that the uprising had brought together religions and communities. “Mussulmans and Hindus, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against their common masters; that disturbances beginning with the Hindus, have actually ended in placing on the throne of Delhi a Mohammedan emperor; that the mutiny has not been confined to a few localities.” One of Marx’s most celebrated sentences that summed up the perspectives of British colonialism was, “it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself”.
Marx’s journalistic work at the New York Daily Tribune provided him with some regular income but this dried up soon and he was broke. Engels supported him financially in the most difficult of times. Most of his life, Marx lived in deprivation and poverty. The author of Capital was financially always short of capital for his basic needs and for being able to continue to write. In spite of belonging to a well-off family, Marx accepted poverty as the price of his political ideology and struggle. He would gladly have lived in a slum himself, but he didn’t want his family to suffer. Three of their children died young and a fourth was stillborn due to poverty and substandard living conditions.
Communist Manifesto
Marx’s revolutionary ideas and struggle made him a serial exile. In 1843, he was kicked out of Cologne for his ‘subversive’ writings in a paper called Rheinische Zeitung. Marx escaped to Paris where his comradeship and personal friendship with Fredrick Engels blossomed. In 1845, Marx was expelled from France and had to move to Brussels.
In 1848, revolutions broke out across Europe. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, the iconic document that has transgressed epochs and generations and is still the most modern analysis of the system and society. In an introduction to its new edition republished on April 26 this year in London, Yanis Varoufakis, the former left-wing Greek finance minister, described this iconic document, “For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.”
In those stormy events of 1848, when the movement reached Brussels, Marx was accused of arming insurgents and he was evicted from Belgium. He returned to Paris. However, on the defeat of the1848 revolutions, Marx commented, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. The “tragedy” was the fate of the French Revolution under Napoleon and the “farce” was the ‘election’ of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1848, whom Marx considered as a mediocrity, to the Presidency of France.
In 1849 Marx was forced into exile once again. He fled with his family to London and lived there for the rest of his life. In the Reading Room of the British Museum, he did the research for Capital, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.
During Marx’s life, the Paris Commune of 1871 was the only time that a proletarian revolution put workers into power. It was the first workers’ state in human history. However, it was defeated and drenched in blood after just seventy days of working class rule. The elites of Germany and France, foes for millennia, suddenly dropped their ages of acrimonies and joined forces to crush the revolution.
This resulted in the ebbing and decline of the workers movement internationally. Marx was confronted with an arduous political and objective situation yet again. But his firm belief in the socialist future of mankind never mellowed or wavered. He remained committed and optimistic of the victory of revolutionary communism till his death in 1883. Shakespeare was one of Marx’s favourite poets. In his legendary play Hamlet, Shakespeare’s dialogue sums up Marx’s life and struggle in many respects: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?” Marx dared to fight against all odds and change the course of history. His ideas are still most relevant for the revolutionaries across the planet to accomplish this historic task of the emancipation of the human race.
May 9, 2018
