Part 9

Although the Provisional Government of the newly-baked French Republic was in no wise made up of friends of the democracy, Marx and Engels expressed themselves against any revolutionary action by the Paris working class. In the second Address (or declaration) of the General Council of the International, written on September 9, and composed by Marx, the question is discussed as follows:

"Thus the French working class finds itself placed in extremely difficult circumstances. Any attempt to overthrow the new Government, when the enemy is already knocking at the gates of Paris, would be a hopeless piece of folly. The French workers must do their duty as citizens; but they must not let themselves be overcome by the national reminiscences of 1792.... They have not to repeat the past but to build the future. Let them quietly and with determination make the most of the republican freedom granted to them, in order to carry out thoroughly the organisation of their own class. That will give them new, Herculean strength for the rebirth of France and for our common task--the emancipation of the proletariat."--("Civil War in France," Second Address.)

Marx then urged the French workers not to do anything foolish, not to set up a revolutionary Commune of Paris, but to make use of their republican liberties to create proletarian organisations and to save and discipline their forces for future tasks. Circumstances, however, proved much stronger than any words of wisdom. Goaded by the anti-democratic moves of the Government supporters, deeply humiliated by the defeats of the French army, burning with patriotism and whipped up into fury against the "capitulards," the Paris working men cast Marx's words to the winds and rose in revolution on March 18, 1871, proclaiming the Paris Commune. Paris was to be the capital of a Socialist Republic. In seven weeks the Paris Revolution was overthrown--and "Vae victis!" (Woe to the vanquished!) Marx afterwards wrote the pamphlet on "The Civil War in France, 1871," which is one of the most mature of his writings. He did not cut himself entirely adrift from the revolutionaries--the Bolsheviks of that time--but defended them with unsurpassable energy. It is the swan song of Marx and of the first International.

VII. THE EVENING OF LIFE.

During the last twelve years of his life Marx had to fight almost uninterruptedly against various bodily ailments, all of which had their origin in his chronic liver complaint and over-exertion. His work, for which he had sacrificed, as he wrote to an American friend, "health, happiness and family," remained unfinished. He devoted his enforced leisure to making a study of American agriculture and of rural conditions in Russia, for which purpose he learnt Russian; he likewise occupied himself with studies of the Stock Exchange, banking, geology, physiology, and higher mathematics. In 1875 he wrote his "Criticism of the Gotha Program"--("Neue Zeit," 9th year, Vol. I., No. 18)--which contains some very important data as to Marx's attitude to the State, to the revolutionary period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism, and lastly to Socialist society itself.

He went to Karlsbad for the purpose of recovering his health. In 1877 and 1878 he was in some measure capable of carrying on his work, and set about arranging his manuscripts and getting the second volume of "Capital" ready for the press; it soon appeared, however, that his capacity for work had gone. The decline in body and mind could no longer be checked; even visits to French and Algerian watering-places proved ineffective. It was just at this time that Marx began to find recognition both in France and in England: Jules Guesde, Henry M. Hyndman, Belfort Bax set about spreading Marxian doctrines, and Marxian and anti-Marxian parties were formed. But the man to whom this recognition had come was already a ruin. Bronchial catarrh, inflammation of the lungs, spasmodic asthma, together with the loss of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter (Mme. Longuet) in January, 1883, gave the finishing stroke to his enfeebled body. On March 14, 1883, Marx breathed his last. Engels gives an account of the last moments in a letter to his American friend Sorge, dated March 15, 1883:

"Yesterday, at half-past two in the afternoon, the best time for visiting him, I went down to see him; everybody was in tears; it looked as if the end had come. I made inquiries, trying to get at the truth of the matter and to offer consolation. There had been a slight haemorrhage, but a sudden collapse had supervened. Our good old Lena, who had tended him better than any mother does her child, went up, came down. He was half asleep, she said; I could go up. As we went in, he lay there, sleeping, never to wake again. Pulse and breathing had ceased. In those two minutes he had gone painlessly and peacefully to sleep.... Mankind is less by a head, and indeed by the most important head it had to-day. The working-class movement will pursue its course, but its central point, to which French, Russians, Americans, and Germans turned of their own accord in decisive moments, always to receive that clear, unambiguous counsel which genius and perfect mastery alone can give--is gone."

On Saturday, March 17, he was buried in the Highgate Cemetery, London. Among those who spoke at the graveside were Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The former gave a brief account of his revolutionary struggles, in which he said:

"Just as Darwin discovered the law of the evolution of organic nature, so Marx discovered the evolutionary law of human history--the simple fact, hitherto hidden under ideological overgrowths, that above all things men must eat, drink, dress, and find shelter before they can give themselves to politics, science, art, religion, or anything else, and that therefore the production of the material necessaries of life and the corresponding stage of economic evolution of a people or a period provides the foundation upon which the national institutions, legal systems, art, and even religious ideas of the people in question have been built, and upon which, therefore, their explanation must be based, a procedure the reverse of that which has hitherto been adopted. Marx discovered also the special law of motion for the modern capitalist mode of production and for the middle-class society which it begets. With the discovery of surplus value light was at once thrown upon a subject, all the earlier investigations of which, whether by middle-class economists or by Socialist critics, had been gropings in the dark...."

After him spoke Liebknecht, who had hastened from Germany to pay a last tribute to his friend and master:

"The dead one, whose loss we mourn, was great in his love and in his hate. His hate sprang from his love. He had a great heart, as he had a great intellect. He has raised social democracy from a sect, from a school, to a party, which now already fights unconquered, and in the end will win the victory."

Engels, who outlived him by twelve years, edited the two last volumes of "Capital," while Karl Kautsky, the disciple and successor of Engels and the real disseminator of Marxian doctrines, edited the three volumes of Marx's historical studies on surplus value. The latter work is not far short of being a great history of political economy.

FOOTNOTES:

By democratic parties were then understood working-class political movements, such as Chartism, etc.

IV.

THE MARXIAN SYSTEM.

I. THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY.

As a guide to his studies from 1843-4 onwards, Marx used the conception of history, or method of investigation, which--in contradistinction to the idealist conception of history of Hegel--was named materialistic. As its nature is dialectic--as it seeks to conceive in thought the evolving antagonisms of the social process--it is, like Hegel's dialectic, a conception of history and a method of investigation at the same time. Nowhere did Marx work out his method of investigation in a special and comprehensive form; the elements of it are scattered throughout his writings, particularly in the Communist Manifesto and in the "Poverty of Philosophy," and serve the purpose of polemics or demonstration. Only in the preface to his book, "On the Critique of Political Economy" (1859) did he devote two pages to a sketch of his conception of history, but in phraseology which is not always clear, sequential, or free from objection. It was the intention of Marx to write a work on Logic, where he would certainly have formulated clearly his materialistic dialectic. As, however, his fundamental ideas on this subject are available, we are able to extract the essentials of his position.

A glance over human history suffices to teach us that from age to age man has held to be true or false various opinions on rights, customs, religion, the State, philosophy, land-holding, trade, industry, etc., that he has had various economic arrangements, and forms of the State and of society, and that he has gone through an endless series of struggles and wars and migrations. How has this complicated variety of human thought and action come about? Marx raises that question, which, so far as he is concerned, does not aim in the first place at the discovery of the origin of thought, of rights, of religion, of society, of trade, etc.; these he takes to be historically given. He is rather concerned to find out the causes, the impulses, or the springs which produce the changes and revolutions of the essentials and forms of the mental and social phenomena, or which create the tendencies thereto. In a sentence: What interested Marx here was not the origin, but the development and change of things--he is searching for the dynamic law of history.

Marx answered: The prime motive power of human society, which is responsible for the changes of human consciousness and thought, or which causes the various social institutions and conflicts to arise, does not originate, in the first place, from thought, from the Idea, from the world-reason or the world-spirit, but from the material conditions of life. The basis of human history is therefore material. The material conditions of life--that is, the manner in which men as social beings, with the aid of environing nature, and of their own in-dwelling physical and intellectual qualities, shape their material life, provide for their sustenance, and produce, distribute and exchange the necessary goods for the satisfaction of their needs.

Of all categories of material conditions of existence, the most important is production of the necessary means of life. And this is determined by the nature of the productive forces. These are of two kinds: inanimate and personal. The inanimate productive forces are: soil, water, climate, raw materials, tools and machines. The personal productive forces are: the labourers, the inventors, discoverers, engineers, and finally, the qualities of the race--the inherited capacities of specific groups of men, which facilitate work.

The foremost place among the productive forces belongs to the manual and mental labourers; they are the real creators of exchange-value in capitalist society. The next place of importance is taken by modern technology, which is an eminently revolutionising force in society.--("Capital" (German), Vol. I., Chapters 1, 12, 13 and 14, "Poverty of Philosophy" (German edition, 1885, pp. 100-101.))

So much for the conception "Productive Forces," which plays an important part with Marx. We come now to the other equally important notion, "Conditions of production." By this phrase Marx understands the legal and State forms, ordinances and laws, as well as the grouping of social classes and sections: thus, the social conditions which regulate property and determine the reciprocal human relations in which production is carried on. The conditions of production are the work of men in society. Just as men produce various material goods out of the materials and forces made available to them by Nature, so they create out of the reactions of the productive forces upon the mind definite social, political, and legal institutions, as well as systems of religion, morals, and philosophy.

"Men make their own history, but do not so spontaneously in conditions chosen by them, but on the contrary, in conditions which they have found ready to hand transmitted and given."--(Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire," I.)

That is to say, under the influence of productive work and its needs, men build their form of society, their State, their religion, their philosophy and science. The material production is the substructure or the groundwork, while the corresponding political, religious, and philosophical systems are the superstructure. And in such a manner that the superstructure corresponds to the foundation, lends it strength, and promotes its development.

The foundation is material, and the superstructure is the psychical reflex and effect.

In broad outlines this conception may be illustrated somewhat as follows:

Primitive human groups lived under Communism and were organised according to blood relationship. Their deities have the characteristics of their natural environment, and reflect the physical effects of this environment upon the primitive mental life of the "savage"; their religion, their morality, and their laws promote the communal life and the tribal discipline. Feudal society is based on the possession of land by the nobles and on the industrial labour of the corporations of the towns. The inherited religious ideas are soon transformed in accordance with the dominant interests of these historical periods (primitive Christianity became a State religion); all religious, ethical, and philosophical ideas antagonistic to these interests were fought and persecuted. The middle-class society, which is based on personal property, is endeavouring to sweep away all vestiges of communal and corporation rights, to set free the individual, to mobilise labour and property, to abolish Feudalism and the old Church and monasterial institutions, and to put in their place the individual relation between man and God, or the personal conscience (the Reformation), introducing individual rights as well; it struggles against the independent sovereignty of the feudal domains, and labours for a united national territory, which will afford greater scope to trade and commerce; it supports Absolutism, so long as the latter is in conflict with the feudal lords; and when, afterwards, Absolutism is a hindrance to the development of middle-class society, this also is fought and a constitutional monarchy or a republic demanded. And all this takes place not because certain human intelligences, by reason of more intense thought, or enlightenment, or the call of a supernatural power, are primarily at work, but as a consequence of the influence of the material basis, of the economic foundation of society, upon the mind, which translates and transforms these external realities into religious, juridical, and philosophic conceptions: