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Karl Marx,
revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist, was the author (with
Friedrich Engels) of Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the
most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement, as well as of
its most important book, Das Kapital. These writings and
others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known
as Marxism.
This article deals with Marx's life, his
thinking, his accomplishments, and the development of Marxist theory. See the
articles SOCIALISM and COMMUNISM
for full treatment of those ideologies.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5,
1818, in the city of Trier in the Rhine province of Prussia, now in Germany. He
was the oldest surviving boy of nine children. His father, Heinrich, a
successful lawyer, was a man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire,
who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born
Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were
descended from a long line of rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born,
his father--probably because his professional career required it--was baptized
in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl was baptized when he was six years
old. Although as a youth Karl was influenced less by religion than by the
critical, sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish
background exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him to
question the role of religion in society and contributed to his desire for
social change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at
the high school in Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils,
the school was under police surveillance. Marx's writings during this period
exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion and a longing for self-sacrifice on
behalf of humanity. In October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn.
The courses he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in such subjects as
Greek and Roman mythology and the history of art. He participated in customary
student activities, fought a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and
disorderly. He presided at the Tavern Club, which was at odds with the more
aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets' club that included some
political activists. A politically rebellious student culture was, indeed, part
of life at Bonn. Many students had been arrested; some were still being expelled
in Marx's time, particularly as a result of an effort by students to disrupt a
session of the Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a year
and in October 1836 enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and
philosophy.
Marx's crucial experience at Berlin was
his introduction to Hegel's philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young
Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel's doctrines; when
Marx fell sick it was partially, as he wrote his father, "from intense
vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested." The Hegelian
pressure in the revolutionary student culture was powerful, however, and Marx
joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose members were intensely involved
in the new literary and philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno
Bauer, a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the
Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human fantasies arising
from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx
enrolled in a course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah. Bauer
taught that a new social catastrophe "more tremendous" than that of
the advent of Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving
rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the
subversion latent in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the
universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839. Marx's "most
intimate friend" of this period, Adolph Rutenberg, an older journalist who
had served a prison sentence for his political radicalism, pressed for a deeper
social involvement. By 1841 the Young Hegelians had become left republicans.
Marx's studies, meanwhile, were lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a
doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to be lax in
its academic requirements, and received his degree in April 1841. His thesis
analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference between the natural philosophies
of Democritus and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of Promethean
defiance: (see also Index: Hegelianism)
Philosophy makes no secret of it.
Prometheus' admission: "In sooth all gods I hate," is its own
admission, its own motto against all gods, . . . Prometheus is the noblest saint
and martyr in the calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young
Hegelians, was much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig
Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx's mind, successfully criticized Hegel, an
idealist who believed that matter or existence was inferior to and dependent
upon mind or spirit, from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint, showing how
the "Absolute Spirit" was a projection of "the real man standing
on the foundation of nature." Henceforth Marx's philosophical efforts were
toward a combination of Hegel's dialectic--the idea that all things are in a
continual process of change resulting from the conflicts between their
contradictory aspects--with Feuerbach's materialism, which placed material
conditions above ideas. (see also Index:
dialectical materialism)
In January 1842 Marx began contributing
to a newspaper newly founded in Cologne, the Rheinische
Zeitung. It was the liberal democratic organ of a group of young
merchants, bankers, and industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the most
industrially advanced section of Prussia. To this stage of Marx's life belongs
an essay on the freedom of the press. Since he then took for granted the
existence of absolute moral standards and universal principles of ethics, he
condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying into people's minds
and hearts and assigned to weak and malevolent mortals powers that presupposed
an omniscient mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil
consequences.
On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of
the Rheinische Zeitung. As such, he
was obliged to write editorials on a variety of social and economic issues,
ranging from the housing of the Berlin poor and the theft by peasants of wood
from the forests to the new phenomenon of communism. He found Hegelian idealism
of little use in these matters. At the same time he was becoming estranged from
his Hegelian friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a sufficient mode of
social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the "liberal-minded
practical men" who were "struggling step-by-step for freedom within
constitutional limits," succeeded in trebling his newspaper's circulation
and making it a leading journal in Prussia. Nevertheless, Prussian authorities
suspended it for being too outspoken, and Marx agreed to coedit with the liberal
Hegelian Arnold Ruge a new review, the Deutsch-französische
Jahrbücher ("German-French Yearbooks"), which was to
be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after
an engagement of seven years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an
attractive, intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years older than Karl; she
came of a family of military and administrative distinction. Her half-brother
later became a highly reactionary Prussian minister of the interior. Her father,
a follower of the French socialist Saint-Simon, was fond of Karl, though others
in her family opposed the marriage. Marx's father also feared that Jenny was
destined to become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the
young couple moved to Paris, which was then the centre of socialist thought and
of the more extreme sects that went under the name of communism. There, Marx
first became a revolutionary and a communist and began to associate with
communist societies of French and German workingmen. Their ideas were, in his
view, "utterly crude and unintelligent," but their character moved
him: "The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of
life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened
bodies," he wrote in his so-called "Ökonomisch-philosophische
Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844" (written in 1844; Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were
not published for some 100 years, but they are influential because they show the
humanist background to Marx's later historical and economic theories.)
The "German-French Yearbooks"
proved short-lived, but through their publication Marx befriended Friedrich
Engels, a contributor who was to become his lifelong collaborator, and in
their pages appeared Marx's article "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie" ( "Toward the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy
of Right") with its oft-quoted assertion that religion is the "opium
of the people." It was there, too, that he first raised the call for an
"uprising of the proletariat" to realize the conceptions of
philosophy. Once more, however, the Prussian government intervened against Marx.
He was expelled from France and left for Brussels--followed by Engels--in
February 1845. That year in Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
The next two years in Brussels saw the
deepening of Marx's collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, Eng., where a branch factory of his father's textile firm was
located, all the depressing aspects of the Industrial Revolution. He had also
been a Young Hegelian and had been converted to communism by Moses Hess, who was
called the "communist rabbi." In England he associated with the
followers of Robert Owen. Now he and Marx, finding that they shared the same
views, combined their intellectual resources and published Die heilige Familie (1845; The
Holy Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism of the
theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die
deutsche Ideologie (written 1845-46, published 1932; The
German Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their important
materialistic conception of history, which set out to show how, historically,
societies had been structured to promote the interests of the economically
dominant class. But it found no publisher and remained unknown during its
authors' lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx
developed his views and, through confrontations with the chief leaders of the
working-class movement, established his intellectual standing. In 1846 he
publicly excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic
appeals. Marx insisted that the stage of bourgeois
society could not be skipped over; the proletariat could not just leap into
communism; the workers' movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic
phrases. He also polemicized against the French socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon in Misère de la philosophie (1847; The
Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on Proudhon's book subtitled
Philosophie de la misère (1846;
The Philosophy of Poverty). Proudhon
wanted to unite the best features of such contraries as competition and
monopoly; he hoped to save the good features in economic institutions while
eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no equilibrium was possible
between the antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were
transient historic forms determined by the productive forces: "The handmill
gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill, society with the
industrial capitalist." Proudhon's mode of reasoning, Marx wrote, was
typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the underlying laws of
history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx
and Engels to write their pamphlet The
Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a secret society, the League
of the Just, composed mainly of emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in
London and decided to formulate a political program. They sent a representative
to Marx to ask him to join the league; Marx overcame his doubts and, with
Engels, joined the organization, which thereupon changed its name to the Communist
League and enacted a democratic constitution. Entrusted with the task of
composing their program, Marx and Engels worked from the middle of December 1847
to the end of January 1848. The London Communists were already impatiently
threatening Marx with disciplinary action when he sent them the manuscript; they
promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It enunciated the proposition that all
history had hitherto been a history of class struggles, summarized in pithy form
the materialist conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and asserted that the forthcoming victory of
the proletariat would put an end to class society forever. It mercilessly
criticized all forms of socialism founded on philosophical "cobwebs"
such as "alienation." It rejected the avenue of "social
Utopias," small experiments in community, as deadening the class struggle
and therefore as being "reactionary sects." It set forth 10 immediate
measures as first steps toward communism, ranging from a progressive income tax
and the abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. It closed
with the words, "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in
the first months of 1848, in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been invited
to Paris by a member of the provisional government just in time to avoid
expulsion by the Belgian government. As the revolution gained in Austria and
Germany, Marx returned to the Rhineland. In Cologne he advocated a policy of
coalition between the working class and the democratic bourgeoisie, opposing for
this reason the nomination of independent workers' candidates for the Frankfurt
Assembly and arguing strenuously against the program for proletarian revolution
advocated by the leaders of the Workers' Union. He concurred in Engels' judgment
that The
Communist Manifesto should be shelved and the Communist League
disbanded. Marx pressed his policy through the pages of the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, newly founded in June 1849, urging a constitutional
democracy and war with Russia. When the more revolutionary leader of the
Workers' Union, Andreas Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him and
organized the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August 1848. When the king
of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in Berlin, Marx called for arms and
men to help the resistance. Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support from
Marx's newspaper, and he himself was indicted on several charges, including
advocacy of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial he defended himself with the
argument that the crown was engaged in making an unlawful counterrevolution. The
jury acquitted him unanimously and with thanks. Nevertheless, as the last
hopeless fighting flared in Dresden and Baden, Marx was ordered banished as an
alien on May 16, 1849. The final issue of his newspaper, printed in red, caused
a great sensation. (see also Index: "Neue
Rheinische Zeitung")
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went
to London in August 1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life.
Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of collaboration with the liberal
bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist League in London and for about a year
advocated a bolder revolutionary policy. An "Address of the Central
Committee to the Communist League," written with Engels in March 1850,
urged that in future revolutionary situations they struggle to make the
revolution "permanent" by avoiding subservience to the bourgeois party
and by setting up "their own revolutionary workers' governments"
alongside any new bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would
shortly lead to a revival of the revolutionary movement; when this hope faded,
he came into conflict once more with those whom he called "the alchemists
of the revolution," such as August von Willich, a communist who proposed to
hasten the advent of revolution by undertaking direct revolutionary ventures.
Such persons, Marx wrote in September 1850, substitute "idealism for
materialism" and regard
pure will as the motive power of
revolution instead of actual conditions. While we say to the workers: "You
have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national
wars not merely in order to change your conditions but in order to change
yourselves and become qualified for political power," you on the contrary
tell them, "We must achieve power immediately."
The militant faction in turn ridiculed
Marx for being a revolutionary who limited his activity to lectures on political
economy to the Communist Workers' Educational Union. The upshot was that Marx
gradually stopped attending meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he
devoted himself intensely to working for the defense of 11 communists arrested
and tried in Cologne on charges of revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet
on their behalf. The same year he also published, in a German-American
periodical, his essay "Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon" (The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the
formation of a bureaucratic absolutist state with the support of the peasant
class. In other respects the next 12 years were, in Marx's words, years of
"isolation" both for him and for Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material
misery and spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one occasion he
could not bring himself to seek paid employment. In March 1850 he and his wife
and four small children were evicted and their belongings seized. Several of his
children died--including a son Guido, "a sacrifice to bourgeois
misery," and a daughter Franziska, for whom his wife rushed about
frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For six years the family lived
in two small rooms in Soho, often subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children
learned to lie to the creditors: "Mr. Marx ain't upstairs." Once he
had to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally
contributed to Marx's financial support. The sums were not large at first, for
Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at Manchester. Later,
however, in 1864, when he became a partner, his subventions were generous. Marx
was proud of Engels' friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him. Bequests
from the relatives of Marx's wife and from Marx's friend Wilhelm Wolff also
helped to alleviate their economic distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of
earned income in the United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana,
managing editor of The New
York Tribune, he became in 1851 its European correspondent. The
newspaper, edited by Horace Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism,
a Utopian socialist system developed by the French theorist Charles Fourier.
From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close to 500 articles and editorials (Engels
providing about a fourth of them). He ranged over the whole political universe,
analyzing social movements and agitations from India and China to Britain and
Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on
economic theory, Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie (A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). In its preface he
again summarized his materialistic conception of history, his theory that the
course of history is dependent on economic developments. At this time, however,
Marx regarded his studies in economic and social history at the British Museum
as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his magnum opus, which was
to be published later as Das Kapital. Some of these drafts, including the Outlines
and the Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right and were
published after Marx's death.
Marx's political isolation ended in 1864
with the founding of the International Working Men's Association. Although he
was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its leading spirit. Its
first public meeting, called by English trade union leaders and French workers'
representatives, took place at St. Martin's Hall in London on Sept. 28, 1864.
Marx, who had been invited through a French intermediary to attend as a
representative of the German workers, sat silently on the platform. A committee
was set up to produce a program and a constitution for the new organization.
After various drafts had been submitted that were felt to be unsatisfactory,
Marx, serving on a subcommittee, drew upon his immense journalistic experience.
His "Address and the Provisional Rules of the International Working Men's
Association," unlike his other writings, stressed the positive achievements
of the cooperative movement and of parliamentary legislation; the gradual
conquest of political power would enable the British proletariat to extend these
achievements on a national scale.
As a member of the organization's
General Council, and corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were sometimes held several times
a week. For several years he showed a rare diplomatic tact in composing
differences among various parties, factions, and tendencies. The International
grew in prestige and membership, its numbers reaching perhaps 800,000 in 1869.
It was successful in several interventions on behalf of European trade unions
engaged in struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown
as a European political personality; it was the Paris
Commune that made him into an international figure, "the best
calumniated and most menaced man of London," as he wrote. When the Franco-German
War broke out in 1870, Marx and Engels disagreed with followers in
Germany who refused to vote in the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General
Council declared that "on the German side the war was a war of
defence." After the defeat of the French armies, however, they felt that
the German terms amounted to aggrandizement at the expense of the French people.
When an insurrection broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was proclaimed,
Marx gave it his unswerving support. On May 30, 1871, after the Commune had been
crushed, he hailed it in a famous address entitled Civil
War in France:
History has no comparable example of
such greatness. . . . Its martyrs are enshrined forever in the great heart of
the working class.
In Engels' judgment, the Paris Commune
was history's first example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Marx's name, as the leader of The First International and author of the
notorious Civil War, became synonymous
throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris Commune.
The advent of the Commune, however,
exacerbated the antagonisms within the International Working Men's Association
and thus brought about its downfall. English trade unionists such as George
Odger, former president of the General Council, opposed Marx's support of the
Paris Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867, which
had enfranchised the British working class, had opened vast opportunities for
political action by the trade unions. English labour leaders found they could
make many practical advances by cooperating with the Liberal Party and,
regarding Marx's rhetoric as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they had
"sold themselves" to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under
the leadership of the famed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin.
A veteran of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, Bakunin could move men by his
oratory, which one listener compared to "a raging storm with lightning,
flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions." Bakunin admired
Marx's intellect but could hardly forget that Marx had published a report in
1848 charging him with being a Russian agent. He felt that Marx was a German
authoritarian and an arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General Council
into a personal dictatorship over the workers. He strongly opposed several of
Marx's theories, especially Marx's support of the centralized structure of the
International, Marx's view that the proletariat class should act as a political
party against prevailing parties but within the existing parliamentary system,
and Marx's belief that the proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois
state, should establish its own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of the
revolutionary was destruction; he looked to the Russian peasantry, with its
propensities for violence and its uncurbed revolutionary instincts, rather than
to the effete, civilized workers of the industrial countries. The students, he
hoped, would be the officers of the revolution. He acquired followers, mostly
young men, in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and he organized a secret society,
the International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in 1869 challenged the
hegemony of the General Council at the congress in Basel, Switz. Marx, however,
had already succeeded in preventing its admission as an organized body into the
International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune
was a model of revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they
considered to be Marx's "authoritarian communism." Bakunin began
organizing sections of the International for an attack on the alleged
dictatorship of Marx and the General Council. Marx in reply publicized Bakunin's
embroilment with an unscrupulous Russian student leader, Sergey Gennadiyevich
Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with
the anarchist left against him, Marx feared losing control of the International
to Bakunin. He also wanted to return to his studies and to finish Das
Kapital. At the congress of the International at The Hague in 1872, the only
one he ever attended, Marx managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to the
consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the seat of the General
Council be transferred from London to New York City. The Bakuninists were
expelled, but the International languished and was finally disbanded in
Philadelphia in 1876.
During the next and last decade of his
life, Marx's creative energies declined. He was beset by what he called
"chronic mental depression," and his life turned inward toward his
family. He was unable to complete any substantial work, though he still read
widely and undertook to learn Russian. He became crotchety in his political
opinions. When his own followers and those of the German revolutionary Ferdinand
Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist goals should be achieved through
cooperation with the state, coalesced in 1875 to found the German
Social Democratic Party, Marx wrote a caustic criticism of their program
(the so-called Gotha Program), claiming that it made too many compromises with
the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside and tried to mollify
him personally. Increasingly, he looked to a European war for the overthrow of
Russian tsarism, the mainstay of reaction, hoping that this would revive the
political energies of the working classes. He was moved by what he considered to
be the selfless courage of the Russian terrorists who assassinated the tsar,
Alexander II, in 1881; he felt this to be "a historically inevitable means
of action."
Despite Marx's withdrawal from active
politics, he still retained what Engels called his "peculiar
influence" on the leaders of working-class and socialist movements. In
1879, when the French Socialist Workers' Federation was founded, its leader
Jules Guesde went to London to consult with Marx, who dictated the preamble of
its program and shaped much of its content. In 1881 Henry Mayers Hyndman in his England
for All drew heavily on his conversations with Marx but angered him by being
afraid to acknowledge him by name.
During his last years Marx spent much
time at health resorts and even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the death
of his wife on Dec. 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan.
11, 1883. He died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, on March 14, 1883.
At Marx's funeral in Highgate Cemetery,
Engels declared that Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development
of human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society. But "Marx was
before all else a revolutionist." He was "the best-hated and
most-calumniated man of his time," yet he also died "beloved, revered
and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers."
The contradictory emotions Marx
engendered are reflected in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character.
Marx was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous intellectual. He
gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer,
Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that "he spoke
only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction," and seemed to be
"the personification of a democratic dictator such as might appear before
one in moments of fantasy." But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass
audiences and avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at congresses.
He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and rarely spoke at public
meetings. He kept away from the congresses of the International where the rival
socialist groups debated important resolutions. He was a "small
groups" man, most at home in the atmosphere of the General Council or on
the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress itself forcefully on
a small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting distinguished
scholars with whom he might have discussed questions of economics and sociology
on a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he
was prey to obsessive ideas such as that the British foreign minister, Lord
Palmerston, was an agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to let
bourgeois society make "a money-making machine" out of him, yet he
submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests of relatives. He
remained the eternal student in his personal habits and way of life, even to the
point of joining two friends in a students' prank during which they
systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London street and then fled
from the police. He was a great reader of novels, especially those of Sir Walter
Scott and Balzac; and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an
affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his love of children, but
sacrificed the lives and health of his own. Of his seven children, three
daughters grew to maturity. His favourite daughter, Eleanor, worried him with
her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her desire to be an actress.
Another shadow was cast on Marx's domestic life by the birth to their loyal
servant, Helene Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was
dying disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above all, Marx was a
fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his conception of a
better society. He regarded struggle as the law of life and existence.
The influence of Marx's ideas has been
enormous. Marx's masterpiece, Das Kapital,
the "Bible of the working class," as it was officially described in a
resolution of the International Working Men's Association, was published in 1867
in Berlin and received a second edition in 1873. Only the first volume was
completed and published in Marx's lifetime. The second and third volumes,
unfinished by Marx, were edited by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The
economic categories he employed were those of the classical British economics of
David Ricardo; but Marx used them in accordance with his dialectical method to
argue that bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow its
inevitable path of development. Through the working of such immanent tendencies
as the declining rate of profit, capitalism would die and be replaced by
another, higher, society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary
Blue Books, on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed that this
misery would increase, while at the same time the monopoly of capital would
become a fetter upon production until finally "the knell of capitalist
private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."
Marx never claimed to have discovered
the existence of classes and class struggles in modern society.
"Bourgeois" historians, he acknowledged, had described them long
before he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that each phase in the
development of production was associated with a corresponding class structure
and that the struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society. Marx took up the
very different versions of socialism current in the early 19th century and
welded them together into a doctrine that continued to be the dominant version
of socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis on the influence
of economic structure on historical development has proved to be of lasting
significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues
in his writings, his major impact has been in the fields of sociology and
history. Marx's most important contribution to sociological theory was his
general mode of analysis, the "dialectical" model, which regards every
social system as having within it immanent forces that give rise to
"contradictions" (disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new
social system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in their approach to
capitalist society. In this sense, Marx's mode of analysis, like those of Thomas
Malthus, Herbert Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the theoretical
structures that are the heritage of the social scientist. (L.S.F./D.T.McL.)
The term Marxism is used in a number of
different ways. In its most essential meaning it refers to the thought of Karl
Marx but is usually extended to include that of his friend and collaborator
Friedrich Engels. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced
by the various socialist movements, particularly
before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Lenin and modified by
Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism became the doctrine of the
communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution. Offshoots of this include
Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao
Zedong's (Mao Tse-tung's) Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Third
World Marxisms. There are also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that
have modified Marx's thought with borrowings from modern philosophies,
principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from
Sigmund Freud and others.
The written work of Marx cannot be
reduced to a philosophy, much less to a philosophical system. The whole of his
work is a radical critique of philosophy, especially of Hegel's
idealist system and of the philosophies of the left and right post-Hegelians. It
is not, however, a mere denial of those philosophies. Marx declared that
philosophy must become reality. One could no longer be content with interpreting
the world; one must be concerned with transforming it, which meant transforming
both the world itself and men's consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a
critique of experience together with a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed
that all knowledge involved a critique of ideas. He was not an empiricist.
Rather, his work teems with concepts (appropriation, alienation, praxis,
creative labour, value, etc.) that he had inherited from earlier philosophers
and economists, including Hegel, Johann Fichte, Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo,
and John Stuart Mill. What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that,
instead of making abstract affirmations about a whole group of problems such as
man, knowledge, matter, and nature, he examines each problem in its dynamic
relation to the others and, above all, tries to relate them to historical,
social, political, and economic realities. (see also Index:
Hegelianism)
In 1859, in the preface to his Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote that the hypothesis
that had served him as the basis for his analysis of society could be briefly
formulated as follows:
In the social production that men carry
on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of
their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in
material life determines the general character of the social, political, and
intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which
determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which
determines their consciousness.
Raised to the level of historical law,
this hypothesis was subsequently called historical materialism. Marx applied it
to capitalist society, both in The Communist Manifesto and Das
Kapital and in other writings. Although Marx reflected upon his working
hypothesis for many years, he did not formulate it in a very exact manner:
different expressions served him for identical realities. If one takes the text
literally, social reality is structured in the following way:
1. Underlying everything as the real
basis of society is the economic structure (what in late 20th-century language
is sometimes called the infrastructure). This structure includes (a) the
"material forces of production," that is, the labour and means of
production, and (b) the overall "relations of production," or the
social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution.
Although Marx stated that there is a correspondence between the "material
forces" of production and the indispensable "relations" of
production, he never made himself clear on the nature of the correspondence, a
fact that was to be the source of differing interpretations among his later
followers.
2. Above the economic structure rises
the superstructure consisting of legal and political "forms of social
consciousness" that correspond to the economic structure. Marx says nothing
about the nature of this correspondence between ideological forms and economic
structure, except that through the ideological forms men become conscious of the
conflict within the economic structure between the material forces of production
and the existing relations of production expressed in the legal property
relations. In other words, "The sum total of the forces of production
accessible to men determines the condition of society" and is at the base
of society. "The social structure and the state issue continually from the
life processes of definite individuals . . . as they are in
reality, that is acting and materially producing." The political
relations that men establish among themselves are dependent on material
production, as are the legal relations. This foundation of the social on the
economic is not an incidental point: it colours Marx's whole analysis. It is
found in Das Kapital as well as in The
German Ideology and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
To go directly to the heart of the work
of Marx, one must focus on his concrete program for man. This is just as
important for an understanding of Marx as are The
Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Marx's
interpretation of man begins with human need. "Man," he wrote in the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
is first of all a natural being. As a natural being and a living natural being, he is
endowed on the one hand with natural
powers, vital powers . . . ; these powers exist in him as aptitudes,
instincts. On the other hand, as an objective, natural, physical, sensitive
being, he is a suffering, dependent
and limited being . . . , that is, the objects
of his instincts exist outside him, independent of him, but are the objects
of his need, indispensable and
essential for the realization and confirmation of his substantial powers.
The point of departure of human history
is therefore living man, who seeks to satisfy certain primary needs. "The
first historical fact is the production of the means to satisfy these
needs." This satisfaction, in turn, opens the way for new needs. Human
activity is thus essentially a struggle with nature that must furnish man with
the means of satisfying his needs: drink, food, clothing, the development of his
powers and then of his intellectual and artistic abilities. In this undertaking,
man discovers himself as a productive being who humanizes himself by his labour.
Furthermore, man humanizes nature while he naturalizes himself. By his creative
activity, by his labour, he realizes his identity with the nature that he
masters, while at the same time he achieves free consciousness. Born of nature
man becomes fully human by opposing it. Becoming aware in his struggle against
nature of what separates him from it, man finds the conditions of his
fulfillment, of the realization of his true stature. The dawning of
consciousness is inseparable from struggle. By appropriating all the creative
energies, he discovers that "all that is called history is nothing else
than the process of creating man through human labour, the becoming of nature
for man. Man has thus evident and irrefutable proof of his own creation by
himself." Understood in its universal dimension, human activity reveals
that "for man, man is the supreme being." It is thus vain to speak of
God, creation, and metaphysical problems. Fully naturalized, man is sufficient
unto himself: he has recaptured the fullness of man in his full liberty.
Living in a capitalist society, however,
man is not truly free. He is an alienated being; he is not at home in his world.
The idea of alienation, which Marx takes from
Hegel and Feuerbach, plays a fundamental role in
the whole of his written work, starting with the writings of his youth and
continuing through Das Kapital. In the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the
alienation of labour is seen to spring from the fact that the more the worker
produces the less he has to consume, and the more values he creates the more he
devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from him. The
life of the worker depends on things that he has created but that are not his,
so that, instead of finding his rightful existence through his labour, he loses
it in this world of things that are external to him: no work, no pay. Under
these conditions, labour denies the fullness of concrete man. "The generic
being (Gattungwesen) of man, nature as well as his intellectual faculties,
is transformed into a being which is alien to him, into a means of his individual existence." Nature, his body, his
spiritual essence become alien to him. "Man is made alien to man."
When carried to its highest stage of development, private property
becomes "the product of alienated labour . . . the means
by which labour alienates itself (and) the realization of this
alienation." It is also at the same time "the tangible material
expression of alienated human life."
(see also Index: production)
Although there is no evidence that Marx
ever disclaimed this anthropological analysis of alienated labour, starting with
The German Ideology, the historical,
social, and economic causes of the alienation of labour are given increasing
emphasis, especially in Das Kapital. Alienated
labour is seen as the consequence of market product, the division of labour, and
the division of society into antagonistic classes. As producers in society, men
create goods only by their labour. These goods are exchangeable. Their value
is the average amount of social labour spent to produce them. The alienation of
the worker takes on its full dimension in that system of market production in
which part of the value of the goods produced by the worker is taken away from
him and transformed into surplus value, which
the capitalist privately appropriates. Market production also intensifies the
alienation of labour by encouraging specialization, piecework, and the setting
up of large enterprises. Thus the labour power of the worker is used along with
that of others in a combination whose significance he is ignorant of, both
individually and socially. In thus losing their quality as human products, the
products of labour become fetishes, that is, alien and oppressive realities to
which both the man who possesses them privately and the man who is deprived of
them submit themselves. In the market economy, this submission to things is
obscured by the fact that the exchange of goods is expressed in money. (see also
Index: labour
theory of value)
This fundamental economic alienation is
accompanied by secondary political and ideological alienations, which offer a
distorted representation of and an illusory justification of a world in which
the relations of men with one another are also distorted. The ideas that men
form are closely bound up with their material activity and their material
relations: "The act of making representations, of thinking, the spiritual
intercourse of men, seem to be the direct emanation of their material
relations." This is true of all human activity: political, intellectual, or
spiritual. "Men produce their representations and their ideas, but it is as
living men, men acting as they are determined by a definite development of their
powers of production." Law, morality, metaphysics, and religion do not have
a history of their own. "Men developing their material production modify
together with their real existence their ways of thinking and the products of
their ways of thinking." In other words, "It is not consciousness
which determines existence, it is existence which determines
consciousness."
In bourgeois, capitalist society man is
divided into political citizen and economic man. This duality represents man's
political alienation, which is further intensified by the functioning of the
bourgeois state. From this study of society at the beginning of the 19th
century, Marx came to see the state as the
instrument through which the propertied class dominated other classes.
Ideological alienation, for Marx, takes
different forms, appearing in economic, philosophical, and legal theories. Marx
undertook a lengthy critique of the first in Das Kapital and of the second in The German Ideology. But ideological alienation expresses itself
supremely in religion. Taking up the ideas about religion that were current in
left post-Hegelian circles, together with the thought of Feuerbach, Marx
considered religion to be a product of man's consciousness. It is a reflection
of the situation of a man who "either has not conquered himself or has
already lost himself again" (man in the world of private property). It is
"an opium for the people." Unlike Feuerbach, Marx believed that
religion would disappear only with changes in society.
Marx analyzed the market economy system
in Das Kapital. In this work he
borrows most of the categories of the classical English economists Smith and
Ricardo but adapts them and introduces new concepts such as that of surplus
value. One of the distinguishing marks of Das
Kapital is that in it Marx studies the economy as a whole and not in one or
another of its aspects. His analysis is based on the idea that man is a
productive being and that all economic value comes from human labour. The system
he analyzes is principally that of mid-19th-century England. It is a system of
private enterprise and competition that arose in the 16th century from the
development of sea routes, international trade, and colonialism. Its rise had
been facilitated by changes in the forces of production (the division of labour
and the concentration of workshops), the adoption of mechanization, and
technical progress. The wealth of the societies that brought this economy into
play had been acquired through an "enormous accumulation of commodities."
Marx therefore begins with the study of this accumulation, analyzing the unequal
exchanges that take place in the market. (see also Index:
wealth and income, distribution of)
According to Marx, if the capitalist
advances funds to buy cotton yarn with which to produce fabrics and sells the
product for a larger sum than he paid, he is able to invest the difference in
additional production. "Not only is the value advance kept in circulation,
but it changes in its magnitude, adds a plus to itself, makes itself worth more,
and it is this movement that transforms it into capital."
The transformation, to Marx, is possible only because the capitalist has
appropriated the means of production, including the labour power of the worker.
Now labour power produces more than it is worth. The value of labour power is
determined by the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction or, in other
words, by the amount needed for the worker to subsist and beget children. But in
the hands of the capitalist the labour power employed in the course of a day
produces more than the value of the sustenance required by the worker and his
family. The difference between the two values is appropriated by the capitalist,
and it corresponds exactly to the surplus value realized by capitalists in the
market. Marx is not concerned with whether in capitalist society there are
sources of surplus value other than the exploitation of human labour--a fact
pointed out by Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy). He remains content with
emphasizing this primary source:
Surplus value is produced by the
employment of labour power. Capital buys the labour power and pays the wages for
it. By means of his work the labourer creates new value which does not belong to
him, but to the capitalist. He must work a certain time merely in order to
reproduce the equivalent value of his wages. But when this equivalent value has
been returned, he does not cease work, but continues to do so for some further
hours. The new value which he produces during this extra time, and which exceeds
in consequence the amount of his wage, constitutes surplus value.
Throughout his analysis, Marx argues
that the development of capitalism is accompanied by increasing contradictions.
For example, the introduction of machinery is profitable to the individual
capitalist because it enables him to produce more goods at a lower cost, but new
techniques are soon taken up by his competitors. The outlay for machinery grows
faster than the outlay for wages. Since only labour can produce the surplus
value from which profit is derived, this means that the capitalist's rate of
profit on his total outlay tends to decline. Along with the declining rate of
profit goes an increase in unemployment. Thus, the equilibrium of the system is
precarious, subject as it is to the internal pressures resulting from its own
development. Crises shake it at regular intervals, preludes to the general
crisis that will sweep it away. This instability is increased by the formation
of a reserve army of workers, both factory workers and peasants, whose
pauperization keeps increasing. "Capitalist production develops the
technique and the combination of the process of social production only by
exhausting at the same time the two sources from which all wealth springs: the
earth and the worker." According to the Marxist dialectic, these
fundamental contradictions can only be resolved by a change from capitalism to a
new system.
Marx inherited the ideas of class and
class struggle from Utopian socialism and the theories of Saint-Simon. These had
been given substance by the writings of French historians such as Adolphe Thiers
and François Guizot on the French Revolution of 1789. But unlike the
French historians, Marx made class struggle the central fact of social
evolution. "The history of all hitherto existing human society is the
history of class struggles."
In Marx's view, the dialectical nature
of history is expressed in class struggle. With the development of capitalism,
the class struggle takes an acute form. Two basic classes, around which other
less important classes are grouped, oppose each other in the capitalist system:
the owners of the means of production, or bourgeoisie, and the workers, or proletariat.
"The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. The fall of the
bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (The
Communist Manifesto) because
the bourgeois relations of production
are the last contradictory form of the process of social production,
contradictory not in the sense of an individual contradiction, but of a
contradiction that is born of the conditions of social existence of individuals;
however, the forces of production which develop in the midst of bourgeois
society create at the same time the material conditions for resolving this
contradiction. With this social development the prehistory of human society
ends.
When man has become aware of his loss,
of his alienation, as a universal nonhuman situation, it will be possible for
him to proceed to a radical transformation of his situation by a revolution.
This revolution will be the prelude to the establishment of communism and the
reign of liberty reconquered. "In the place of the old bourgeois society
with its classes and its class antagonisms, there will be an association in
which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all."
But for Marx there are two views of
revolution. One is that of a final conflagration, "a violent suppression of the old conditions of production," which
occurs when the opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat has been carried
to its extreme point. This conception is set forth in a manner inspired by the
Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, in The Holy Family. The other
conception is that of a permanent revolution involving a provisional coalition
between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie rebelling against a capitalism
that is only superficially united. Once a majority has been won to the
coalition, an unofficial proletarian authority constitutes itself alongside the
revolutionary bourgeois authority. Its mission is the political and
revolutionary education of the proletariat, gradually assuring the transfer of
legal power from the revolutionary bourgeoisie to the revolutionary proletariat.
If one reads The Communist Manifesto carefully one discovers inconsistencies that
indicate that Marx had not reconciled the concepts of catastrophic and of
permanent revolution. Moreover, Marx never analyzed classes as specific groups
of men opposing other groups of men. Depending on the writings and the periods,
the number of classes varies; and unfortunately the pen fell from Marx's hand at
the moment when, in Das Kapital (vol.
3), he was about to take up the question. Reading Das Kapital, one is furthermore left with an ambiguous impression
with regard to the destruction of capitalism: will it be the result of the
"general crisis" that Marx expects, or of the action of the conscious
proletariat, or of both at once?
Engels
became a communist in 1842 and discovered the proletariat of England when he
took over the management of the Manchester factory belonging to his father's
cotton firm. In 1844, the year he began his close association and friendship
with Marx, Engels was finishing his "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie"
("Outline of a Critique of Political Economy")--a critique of Smith,
Ricardo, Mill, and J.B. Say. This remarkable study contained in seminal form the
critique that Marx was to make of bourgeois political economy in Das
Kapital. During the first years of his stay in Manchester, Engels observed
carefully the life of the workers of that great industrial centre and described
it in Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in
England (The
Condition of the Working Class in England), published in 1845 in
Leipzig. This work was an analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism and
its social consequences. He collaborated with Marx in the writing of The
Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The
Communist Manifesto. The correspondence between them is of fundamental
importance for the student of Das Kapital,
for it shows how Engels contributed by furnishing Marx with a great amount
of technical and economic data and by criticizing the successive drafts. This
collaboration lasted until Marx's death and was carried on posthumously with the
publication of the manuscripts left by Marx, which Engels edited, forming
volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital. He
also wrote various articles on Marx's work.
In response to criticism of Marx's ideas
by a socialist named Eugen Dühring, Engels
published several articles that were collected under the title Herr
Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, which appeared in 1878
(Herr Eugen Dühring's
Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring]),
and an unfinished work, Dialektik und
Natur (1927; Dialectics of Nature),
which he had begun around 1875-76. The importance of these writings to the
subsequent development of Marxism can be seen from Lenin's observation that
Engels "developed, in a clear and often polemical style, the most general
scientific questions and the different phenomena of the past and present
according to the materialist understanding of history and the economic theory of
Karl Marx." But Engels was driven to simplify problems with a view to being
pedagogical; he tended to schematize and systematize things as if the
fundamental questions were settled. The connections that he thus established
between some of Marx's governing ideas and some of the scientific ideas of his
age gave rise to the notion that there is a complete Marxist philosophy. The
idea was to play a significant role in the transition of Marxism from a
"critique of daily life" to an integrated doctrine in which
philosophy, history, and the sciences are fused.
Anti-Dühring
is of fundamental importance for it constitutes
the link between Marx and certain forms of modern Marxism. It contains three
parts: Philosophy, Political Economy, and Socialism. In the first, Engels
attempts to establish that the natural sciences and even mathematics are dialectical,
in the sense that observable reality is dialectical: the dialectical method of
analysis and thought is imposed on men by the material forces with which they
deal. It is thus rightly applied to the study of history and human society.
"Motion, in effect, is the mode of existence of matter," Engels
writes. In using materialistic dialectic to make
a critique of Dühring's thesis, according to which political forces prevail
over all the rest in the molding of history, Engels provides a good illustration
of the materialistic idea of history, which puts the stress on the prime role of
economic factors as driving forces in history. The other chapters of the section
Political Economy form a very readable introduction to the principal economic
ideas of Marx: value (simple and complex), labour, capital, and surplus value.
The section Socialism starts by formulating anew the critique of the capitalist
system as it was made in Das Kapital. At
the end of the chapters devoted to production, distribution, the state, the
family, and education, Engels outlines what the socialist society will be like,
a society in which the notion of value has no longer anything to do with the
distribution of the goods produced because all labour "becomes at once and
directly social labour," and the amount of social labour that every product
contains no longer needs to be ascertained by "a detour." A production
plan will coordinate the economy. The division of labour and the separation of
town and country will disappear with the "suppression of the capitalist
character of modern industry." Thanks to the plan, industry will be located
throughout the country in the collective interest, and thus the opposition
between town and country will disappear--to the profit of both industry and
agriculture. Finally, after the liberation of man from the condition of servitude
in which the capitalist mode of production holds him, the state will also be
abolished and religion will disappear by "natural death."
One of the most remarkable features of Anti-Dühring
is the insistence with which Engels refuses to base socialism on absolute
values. He admits only relative values, linked to historical, economic, and
social conditions. Socialism cannot possibly be based on ethical principles:
each epoch can only successfully carry out that of which it is capable. Marx had
written this in his preface of 1859.
Karl
Marx and Marxism
The theoretical leadership after Engels
was taken by Karl Kautsky, editor of the official organ of the German Social
Democratic Party, Die Neue
Zeit. He wrote Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (1887; The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx), in which the work of Marx is
presented as essentially an economic theory. Kautsky reduced the ideas of Marx
and Marxist historical dialectic to a kind of evolutionism.
He laid stress on the increasing pauperization of the working class and on the
increasing degree of capitalist concentration. While opposing all compromise
with the bourgeois state, he accepted the contention that the socialist movement
should support laws benefiting the workers provided that they did not reinforce
the power of the state. Rejecting the idea of an alliance between the working
class and the peasantry, he believed that the overthrow of the capitalist state
and the acquisition of political power by the working class could be realized in
a peaceful way, without upsetting the existing structures. As an
internationalist he supported peace, rejecting war and violence. For him, war
was a product of capitalism. Such were the main features of "orthodox"
German Marxism at the time when the "revisionist"
theories of Eduard Bernstein appeared.
Bernstein created a great controversy
with articles that he wrote in 1896 for Die
Neue Zeit, arguing that Marxism needed to be revised. His divergence widened
with the publication in 1899 of Die
Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie ( Evolutionary
Socialism), to which rejoinders were made by Kautsky in Bernstein
und das Sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik (1899; "Bernstein
and the Social Democratic Program") and the Polish-born Marxist Rosa
Luxemburg in Sozialreform oder
Revolution ( Reform
or Revolution), both in 1899. Bernstein focused first of all upon the
labour theory of value. Along with the
economists of his time he considered it outdated, both in the form expounded by
British classical economists and as set forth in Das Kapital. He argued, moreover, that class struggle was becoming
less rather than more intense, for concentration was not accelerating in
industry as Marx had forecast, and in agriculture it was not increasing at all.
Bernstein demonstrated this on the basis of German, Dutch, and English
statistical data. He also argued that cartels and business syndicates were
smoothing the evolution of capitalism, a fact that cast doubt on the validity of
Marx's theory of capitalistic crises. Arguing that quite a few of Marx's
theories were not scientifically based, Bernstein blamed the Hegelian and
Ricardian structure of Marx's work for his failure to take sufficient account of
observable reality. (see also Index: value)
To this, Kautsky replied that, with the
development of capitalism, agriculture was becoming a sector more and more
dependent on industry, and that in addition an industrialization of agriculture
was taking place. Luxemburg took the position that the contradictions of
capitalism did not cease to grow with the progress of finance capitalism and the
exploitation of the colonies, and that these contradictions were leading to a
war that would give the proletariat its opportunity to assume power by
revolutionary means.
One of the most divisive questions was
that of war and peace. This was brought to the fore at the outbreak of World War
I, when Social Democratic deputies in the German Reichstag voted for the
financing of the war. Among German Marxists who opposed the war were Karl
Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Liebknecht was imprisoned in 1916 for agitating
against the war. On his release in 1918 he took the leadership of the Spartacist
movement, which was later to become the Communist Party of Germany. Luxemburg
had also been arrested for her antimilitary activities. In addition to her
articles, signed Junius, in which she debated with Lenin on the subject of World
War I and the attitude of the Marxists toward it (published in 1916 as Die
Krise der Sozialdemokratie [The Crisis
in the German Social-Democracy]), she is known for her book Die
Akkumulation des Kapitals (1913; The
Accumulation of Capital). In this work she returned to Marx's
economic analysis of capitalism, in particular the accumulation of capital as
expounded in volume 2 of Das Kapital. There
she found a contradiction that had until then been unnoticed: Marx's scheme
seems to imply that the development of capitalism can be indefinite, though
elsewhere he sees the contradictions of the system as bringing about
increasingly violent economic crises that will inevitably sweep capitalism away.
Luxemburg concluded that Marx's scheme is oversimplified and assumes a universe
made up entirely of capitalists and workers. If increases in productivity are
taken into account, she asserted, balance between the two sectors becomes
impossible; in order to keep expanding, capitalists must find new markets in
noncapitalist spheres, either among peasants and artisans or in colonies and
underdeveloped countries. Capitalism will collapse only when exploitation of the
world outside it (the peasantry, colonies, etc.) has reached a limit. This
conclusion has been the subject of passionate controversies. (see also Index: "Crisis in the German Social-
Democracy, The," )
The Austrian school came into being when
Austrian socialists started publishing their works independently of the Germans;
it can be dated from either 1904 (beginning of the Marx-Studien
collection) or 1907 (publication of the magazine Der
Kampf ). The most important members of the school were Max Adler, Karl
Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, Gustav Eckstein,
Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer. The most
eminent was Bauer, a brilliant theoretician whose Die
Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1906; "The
Nationalities Question and the Social Democracy") was critically reviewed
by Lenin. In this work he dealt with the problem of nationalities in the light
of the experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He favoured the
self-determination of peoples and emphasized the cultural elements in the
concept of nationhood. Hilferding was finance minister of the German Republic
after World War I in the Cabinets of the Social Democrats Gustav Stresemann
(1923) and Hermann Müller (1928). He is known especially for his work Das
Finanzkapital (1910), in which he maintained that capitalism had come
under the control of banks and industrial monopolies. The growth of national
competition and tariff barriers, he believed, had led to economic warfare
abroad. Hilferding's ideas strongly influenced Lenin, who analyzed them in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).
Das
Kapital was translated into Russian in 1872. Marx
kept up more or less steady relations with the Russian socialists and took an
interest in the economic and social conditions of the tsarist empire. The man
who originally introduced Marxism into Russia was Georgi Plekhanov, but the man
who adapted Marxism to Russian conditions was Lenin. (see also Index:
Leninism)
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, or Lenin, was
born in 1870 at Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). He entered the University of Kazan to
study law but was expelled the same year for participating in student agitation.
In 1893 he settled in St. Petersburg and became actively involved with the
revolutionary workers. With his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (1902), he
specified the theoretical principles and organization of a Marxist party as he
thought it should be constituted. He took part in the second Congress of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers' Party, which was held in Brussels and London
(1903), and induced the majority of the Congress members to adopt his views. Two
factions formed at the Congress: the Bolshevik
(from the Russian word for "larger")
with Lenin as the leader and the Menshevik (from
the Russian word for "smaller") with Julius
Martov at the head. The former wanted a restricted party of militants and
advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat. The latter wanted a wide-open
proletarian party, collaboration with the liberals, and a democratic
constitution for Russia. In his pamphlet One
Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin compared the organizational
principles of the Bolsheviks to those of the Mensheviks. After the failure of
the 1905 Russian revolution, he drew positive lessons for the future in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. He
fiercely attacked the influence of Kantian philosophy on German and Russian
Marxism in Materialism and
Empirio-criticism (1908). In 1912 at the Prague Conference the Bolsheviks
constituted themselves as an independent party. During World War I Lenin resided
in Switzerland, where he studied Hegel's Science of Logic and the development of capitalism and carried on
debates with Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg on the meaning of the war and the
right of nations to self-determination. In 1915 at Zimmerwald, and in 1916 at
Kiental, he organized two international socialist conferences to fight against
the war. Immediately after the February 1917 revolution he returned to Russia,
and in October the Bolshevik coup brought him to power.
The situation of Russia and the Russian
revolutionary movement at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th led Lenin to diverge, in the course of his development and his analyses,
from the positions both of "orthodox Marxism" and of
"revisionism." He rediscovered the original thought of Marx by a
careful study of his works, in particular Das
Kapital and The
Holy Family. He saw Marxism as a practical affair and tried to go
beyond the accepted formulas to plan political action that would come to grips
with the surrounding world.
As early as 1894, in his populist study The
Friends of the People, Lenin took up Marx's distinction between the
"material social relations" of men and their "ideological social
relations." In Lenin's eyes the importance of Das
Kapital was that "while explaining
the structure and the development of the social formation seen exclusively in terms of its relations of production, (Marx) has
nevertheless everywhere and always analyzed the superstructure which corresponds
to these relations of production." In The Development of Russian Capitalism (1897-99)
Lenin sought to apply Marx's analysis by showing the growing role of capital, in
particular commercial capital, in the exploitation of the workers in the
factories and the large-scale expropriation of the peasants.
It was thus possible to apply to Russia the models developed by Marx for western
Europe. At the same time Lenin did not lose sight of the importance of the
peasant in Russian society. Although a disciple of Marx, he did not believe that
he had only to repeat Marx's conclusions. He wrote:
We do not consider the theory of Marx
to be a complete, immutable whole. We think on the contrary that this theory has
only laid the cornerstone of the science, a science which socialists must
further develop in all directions if they do not want to let themselves be
overtaken by life. We think that, for the Russian socialists, an independent
elaboration of the theory is particularly necessary.
Lenin laid great stress upon the
dialectical method. In his early writings he defined the dialectic as
"nothing more nor less than the method of sociology, which sees society as
a living organism, in perpetual development (and not as something mechanically
assembled and thus allowing all sorts of arbitrary combinations of the various
social elements) . . . " (The Friends
of the People, 1894). After having studied Hegel toward the end of 1914, he
took a more activist view. Dialectic is not only evolution; it is praxis,
leading from activity to reflection and from reflection to action.
Lenin also put much emphasis on the
leading role of the party. As early as 1902 he was concerned with the need for a
cohesive party with a correct doctrine, adapted to the exigencies of the period,
which would be a motive force among the masses, helping to bring them to an
awareness of their real situation. In What
Is To Be Done? he called for a party of professional revolutionaries,
disciplined and directed, capable of defeating the police; its aim should be to
establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. In order to do this, he wrote in Two
Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, it was necessary
"to subject the insurrection of the proletarian and non-proletarian
masses to our influence, to our direction, to use it in our best
interests." But this was not possible without a doctrine: "Without
revolutionary theory, no revolutionary movement." On the eve of the
revolution of October 1917, in The
State and Revolution he set forth the conditions for the dictatorship
of the proletariat and the suppression of the capitalist state.
Lenin assigned major importance to the peasantry
in formulating his program. It would be a serious error, he held, for the
Russian revolutionary workers' movement to neglect the peasants. Even though it
was clear that the industrial proletariat constituted the vanguard of the
revolution, the discontent of the peasantry could be oriented in a direction
favourable to the revolution by placing among the goals of the party the seizure
of privately owned land. As early as 1903, at the third congress of the party,
he secured a resolution to this effect. Thereafter, the dictatorship of the
proletariat became the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. In
1917 he encouraged the peasants to seize land long before the approval of
agrarian reform by the Constituent Assembly.
Among Lenin's legacies to Soviet Marxism
was one that proved to be injurious to the party. This was the decision taken at
his behest by the 10th congress of the party in the spring of 1921, while the
sailors were rebelling at Kronstadt and the peasants were growing restless in
the countryside, to forbid all factions, all factional activity, and all
opposition political platforms within the party. This decision had grave
consequences in later years when Stalin used it against his opponents. (see also
Index: Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, )
It is Joseph
Stalin who codified the body of ideas that, under the name of
Marxism-Leninism, has constituted the official doctrine of the Soviet and
eastern European communist parties. Stalin was a man of action in a slightly
different sense than was Lenin. Gradually taking over power after Lenin's death
in 1924, he pursued the development of the Soviet Union with great vigour. By
practicing Marxism, he assimilated it, at the same time simplifying it. Stalin's
Marxism-Leninism rests on the dialectic of Hegel, as set forth in A
Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938), and on a
materialism that can be considered roughly identical to that of Feuerbach. His
work Problems of Leninism, which appeared
in 11 editions during his lifetime, sets forth an ideology of power and activism
that rides roughshod over the more nuanced approach of Lenin. (see also Index:
Stalinism)
Soviet dialectical
materialism can be reduced to four laws: (1) History is a dialectical
development. It proceeds by successive phases that supersede one another. These
phases are not separate, any more than birth, growth, and death are separate.
Though it is true that phase B necessarily negates phase A, it remains that
phase B was already contained in phase A and was initiated by it. The dialectic
does not regard nature as an accidental accumulation of objects, of isolated and
independent phenomena, but as a unified, coherent whole. Furthermore, nature is
perpetually in movement, in a state of unceasing renewal and development, in
which there is always something being born and developing and something
disintegrating and disappearing. (2) Evolution takes place in leaps, not
gradually. (3) Contradictions must be made manifest. All phenomena contain in
themselves contradictory elements. "Dialectic starts from the point of view
that objects and natural phenomena imply internal contradictions, because they
all have a positive and a negative side." These contradictory elements are
in perpetual struggle: it is this struggle that is the "internal content of
the process of development," according to Stalin. (4) The law of this
development is economic. All other contradictions are rooted in the basic
economic relationship. A given epoch is entirely determined by the relations of production
existing among men. They are social relations; relations of collaboration or
mutual aid, relations of domination or submission; and finally, transitory
relations that characterize a period of passage from one system to another.
"The history of the development of society is, above all, the history of
the development of production, the history of the modes of production which
succeed one another through the centuries." (see also Index: social evolution)
From these principles may be drawn the
following inferences, essential for penetrating the workings of Marxist-Leninist
thought and its application. No natural phenomenon, no historical or social
situation, no political fact, can be considered independently of the other facts
or phenomena that surround it; it is set within a whole. Since movement is the
essential fact, one must distinguish between what is beginning to decay and what
is being born and developing. Since the process of development takes place by
leaps, one passes suddenly from a succession of slow quantitative changes to a
radical qualitative change. In the social or political realm, these sudden
qualitative changes are revolutions, carried out by the oppressed classes. One
must follow a frankly proletarian-class policy that exposes the contradictions
of the capitalist system. A reformist policy makes no sense. Consequently (1)
nothing can be judged from the point of view of "eternal justice" or
any other preconceived notion and (2) no social system is immutable. To be
effective, one must not base one's action on social strata that are no longer
developing, even if they represent for the moment the dominant force, but on
those that are developing.
Stalin's materialist and historical
dialectic differs sharply from the perspective of Karl Marx. In The
Communist Manifesto Marx applied the materialist dialectic to the social and
political life of his time. In the chapter entitled "Bourgeois and
Proletarians," he studied the process of the growth of the revolutionary
bourgeoisie within feudal society, then the genesis and the growth of the
proletariat within capitalism, placing the emphasis on the struggle between
antagonistic classes. To be sure, he connected social evolution with the
development of the forces of production. What counted for him, however, was not
only the struggle but also the birth of consciousness among the proletariat.
"As to the final victory of the propositions put forth in the Manifesto,
Marx expected it to come primarily from the intellectual development of the
working class, necessarily the result of common action and discussion"
(Engels, preface to the republication of The
Communist Manifesto, May 1, 1890).
The result of Stalin's dialectic,
however, was what he called revolution from above, a dictatorial policy to
increase industrialization and collectivize agriculture based upon ruthless
repression and a strong centralization of power. For Stalin what counted was the
immediate goal, the practical result. The move was from a dialectic that
emphasized both the objective and the subjective to one purely objective, or
more exactly, objectivist. Human actions are to be judged not by taking account
of the intentions of the actor and their place in a given historical web but
only in terms of what they signify objectively at the end of the period
considered.
Alongside Marxism-Leninism as expounded
in the former Soviet Union, there arose another point of view expressed by
Stalin's opponent Leon Trotsky and his
followers. Trotsky played a leading role in both the Russian Revolution of 1905
and that of 1917. After Lenin's death he fell out with Stalin. Their conflict
turned largely upon questions of policy, both domestic and foreign. In the realm
of ideas, Trotsky held that a revolution in a backward, rural country could be
carried out only by the proletariat. Once in
power the proletariat must carry out agrarian reform and undertake the
accelerated development of the economy. The revolution must be a socialist one,
involving the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, or
else it will fail. But the revolution cannot be carried out in isolation, as
Stalin maintained it could. The capitalist countries will try to destroy it;
moreover, to succeed the revolution must be able to draw upon the industrial
techniques of the developed countries. For these reasons the revolution must be
worldwide and permanent, directed against the liberal and nationalist
bourgeoisie of all countries and using local victories to advance the
international struggle.
Tactically, Trotsky emphasized the
necessity of finding or creating a revolutionary situation, of educating the
working class in order to revolutionize it, of seeing that the party remained
open to the various revolutionary tendencies and avoided becoming
bureaucratized, and finally, when the time for insurrection comes, of organizing
it according to a detailed plan.
When the Chinese
Communists took power in 1948, they brought with them a new kind of Marxism that
came to be called Maoism after their leader Mao Zedong.
The thought of Mao must always be seen against the changing revolutionary
reality of China from 1930 onward. His thought was complex, a Marxist type of
analysis combined with the permanent fundamentals of Chinese thought and
culture.
One of its central elements has to do
with the nature and role of contradictions in socialist society. For Mao, every
society, including socialist (communist) society, contained "two different
types of contradictions": (1) antagonistic contradictions--contradictions
between us (the people) and our enemies (the Chinese bourgeoisie faithful),
between the imperialist camp and the socialist camp, and so forth--which are
resolved by revolution, and (2) nonantagonistic contradictions--between the
government and the people under a socialist regime, between two groups within
the Communist Party, between one section of the people and another under a
communist regime, and so forth--which are resolved by vigorous fraternal
criticism and self-criticism.
The notion of contradiction is specific
to Mao's thought in that it differs from the conceptions of Marx or Lenin. For
Mao, in effect, contradictions were at the same time universal and particular.
In their universality, one must seek and discover what constitutes their
particularity: every contradiction displays a particular character, depending on
the nature of things and phenomena. Contradictions have alternating
aspects--sometimes strongly marked, sometimes blurred. Some of these aspects are
primary, others secondary. It is important to define them well, for if one fails
to do so, the analysis of the social reality and the actions that follow from it
will be mistaken. This is quite far from Stalinism and dogmatic
Marxism-Leninism.
Another essential element of Mao's
thought, which must be seen in the context of revolutionary China, is the notion
of permanent revolution. It is an old idea
advocated in different contexts by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky but lacking, in
Mao's formulation, the international dimension espoused by his predecessors. For
Mao it followed from his ideas about the struggle of man against nature (held
from 1938, at least); the campaigns for the rectification of thought (1942,
1951, 1952); and the necessity of struggling against bureaucracy, wastage, and
corruption in a country of 600,000,000 to 700,000,000 inhabitants, where very
old civilizations and cultures still permeated both the bourgeois classes and
the peasantry, where bureaucracy was thoroughly entrenched, and where the
previous society was extremely corrupt. It arose from Mao's conviction that the
rhythm of the revolution must be accelerated. This conviction appeared in 1957
in his speeches and became manifest in 1958 in the "Great
Leap Forward," followed in 1966 by the Cultural
Revolution.
Mao's concept of permanent revolution
rests upon the existence of nonantagonistic contradictions in the China of today
and of tomorrow. Men must be mobilized into a permanent movement in order to
carry forward the revolution and to prevent the ruling group from turning bourgeois
(as he perceived it had in the Soviet Union). It is necessary to shape among the
masses a new vision of the world by tearing them from their passivity and their
century-old habits. This is the background of the Cultural Revolution that began
in 1966, following previous campaigns but differing from them in its magnitude
and, it would seem, in the mobilization of youth against the cadres of the
party. In these campaigns Mao drew upon his past as a revolutionary Marxist
peasant leader, from his life in the red military and peasant bases and among
the Red Guards of Yen-an, seeking in his past experience ways to mobilize the
whole Chinese population against the dangers--internal and external--that
confronted it in the present.
The distinguishing characteristic of
Maoism is that it represents a peasant type of Marxism, with a principally rural
and military outlook. While basing himself on Marxism-Leninism, adapted to
Chinese requirements, Mao was rooted in the peasant life from which he himself
came, in the revolts against the warlords and the bureaucrats that have filled
the history of China. By integrating this experience into a universal vision of
history, Mao gave it a significance that flows beyond the provincial limits of
China.
In his effort to remain close to the
Chinese peasant masses, Mao drew upon an idea of nature and a symbolism found in
popular Chinese Taoism, though transformed by
his Marxism. It can be seen in his many poems, which were written in the
classical Chinese style. This idea of nature is accompanied in his written
political works by the Promethean idea of man struggling in a war against
nature, a conception in his thought that goes back at least to 1938 and became
more important after 1955 as the rhythm of the revolution accelerated.
The Marxism of Fidel
Castro expresses itself as a rejection of injustice in any
form--political, economic, or social. In this sense it is related to the liberal
democracy and Pan-Americanism of Simón Bolívar in Latin America
during the 19th century. In its liberalism, Castro's early socialism resembled
the various French socialisms of the first half of the 19th century. Only
gradually did Castroism come to identify itself with Marxism-Leninism, although
from the very beginning of the Cuban revolution Castro revealed his attachment
to certain of Marx's ideas. Castro's Marxism rejects some of the tenets and
practices of official Marxism-Leninism: it is outspoken against dogmatism,
bureaucracy, and sectarianism. In one sense, Castroism is a Marxist-Leninist
"heresy." It exalts the ethos of guerrilla revolution over party
politics. At the same time it aims to apply a purer Marxism to the conditions of
Cuba: alleged American imperialism, a single-crop economy, a low initial level
of political and economic development. One may call it an attempt to realize a
synthesis of Marxist ideas and the ideas of Bolívar.
In the ideological and political
conflicts that divide the communist world, Castroism takes a more or less
unengaged position. Castro is above all a nationalist and only after that a
Marxist.
The development of Marxist variants in
the Third World has been primarily influenced by the undeveloped industrial
state and the former colonial status of the nations in question. In the
traditional Marxist view the growth of capitalism is seen as a step necessary
for the breakup of precapitalist peasant society and for the rise of the
revolutionary proletariat class. Some theorists believe, however, that
capitalism introduced by imperialist rather than indigenous powers sustains
rather than destroys the feudal structure of peasant society and promotes
underdevelopment because resources and surplus are usurped by the colonial
powers. Furthermore, the revolutionary socialist movement becomes subordinate to
that of national liberation, which violates Marx's theory of class struggle by
uniting all indigenous classes in the common cause of anti-imperialism. For
these reasons, many Third World countries have chosen to follow the Maoist
model, with its emphasis on agrarian revolution against feudalism and
imperialism, rather than the old Soviet one. Another alternative, one specific
to the Third World, also exists. This policy bypasses capitalism and depends
upon the established strength of other communist countries for support against
imperialism.
There are two main forms of Marxism in
the West: that of the traditional communist parties and the more diffuse
"New Left" form, which has come to be known as "Western
Marxism." In general, the success of western European communist parties had
been hindered by their perceived allegiance to the old Soviet authority rather
than their own countries; the secretive, bureaucratic form of organization they
inherited from Lenin; the ease with which they became integrated into capitalist
society; and their consequent fear of compromising their principles by sharing
power with bourgeois parties. The Western parties basically adhered to the
policies of Soviet Marxism until the 1970s, when they began to advocate
Eurocommunism, a moderate version of communism that they felt would broaden
their base of appeal beyond the working class and thus improve their chances for
political success. As described by Enrico Berlinguer, Georges Marchais, and
Santiago Carrillo, the leaders of the Italian, French, and Spanish communist
parties, respectively, Eurocommunism favoured a peaceful, democratic approach to
achieving socialism, encouraged making alliances with other political parties,
guaranteed civil liberties, and renounced the central authority of the Soviet
party. By the 1980s Eurocommunism had largely been abandoned as unsuccessful,
and communist parties in advanced capitalist nations returned to orthodox
Marxism-Leninism despite the concomitant problems.
Western Marxism, however, can be seen as
a repudiation of Marxism-Leninism, although, when it was first formulated in the
1920s, its proponents believed they were loyal to the dominant Soviet Communist
Party. Prominent figures in the evolution of Western Marxism include the central
Europeans György Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Lucien Goldmann; Antonio
Gramsci of Italy; the German theorists who constituted the Frankfurt school,
especially Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen
Habermas; and Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty of
France.
Western Marxism has been shaped
primarily by the failure of the socialist revolution in the Western world.
Western Marxists were concerned less with the actual political or economic
practice of Marxism than with its philosophical interpretation, especially in
relation to cultural and historical studies. In order to explain the inarguable
success of capitalist society, they felt they needed to explore and understand
non-Marxist approaches and all aspects of bourgeois culture. Eventually, they
came to believe that traditional Marxism was not relevant to the reality of
modern Western society.
Marx had predicted that revolution would
succeed in Europe first, but, in fact, the Third World has proved more
responsive. Orthodox Marxism also championed the technological achievements
associated with capitalism, viewing them as
essential to the progress of socialism. Experience showed the Western Marxists,
however, that technology did not necessarily produce the crises Marx described
and did not lead inevitably to revolution. In particular they disagreed with the
idea, originally emphasized by Engels, that Marxism is an integrated, scientific
doctrine that can be applied universally to nature; they viewed it as a critique
of human life, not an objective, general science. Disillusioned by the terrorism
of the Stalin era and the bureaucracy of the Communist Party system, they
advocated the idea of government by workers' councils, which they believed would
eliminate professional politicians and would more truly represent the interests
of the working class. Later, when the working class appeared to them to be too
well integrated into the capitalist system, the Western Marxists supported more
anarchistic tactics. In general, their views are more in accord with those found
in Marx's early, humanist writings rather than with his later, dogmatic
interpretations.
Western Marxism has found support
primarily among intellectuals rather than the working class, and orthodox
Marxists have judged it impractical. Nevertheless, the Western Marxists'
emphasis on Marx's social theory and their critical assessment of Marxist
methodology and ideas have coloured the way even non-Marxists view the world.
(H.C./
D.T.McL./Ed.)
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마르크스 (Karl
(Heinrich) Marx). 1818.
5. 5 프로이센 라인 트리어~1883. 3. 14 런던. 독일의
사회학자·경제학자·정치이론가.
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|
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마르크스
|
'마르크스주의'(공산주의)의
창시자로서 프리드리히 엥겔스와
함께 〈공산당선언 Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei〉(1848)·〈자본론
Das Kapital〉(1867, 1885, 1894)을 집필했다.
초기생애
카를
하인리히 마르크스는 1818년 5월 5일
프로이센의 라인 주 트리어 시에서 7남매 중 첫째로
태어났다. 명망있는 변호사였던 아버지는 칸트와 볼테르의
계몽주의 사상에 심취해 있었고 아명이 헨리에타
프레스부르크였던 어머니는 네덜란드 출신이었다. 양친
모두 유대 혈통이었으나 아버지는 카를이 태어나기 1년 전쯤(아마도
현실적인 필요에서) 복음주의 국교회의 세례를 받았고, 카를
역시 6세가 되던 해에 세례를 받았다. 유대인이 감당해야
하는 사회적 편견과 차별은 어린 마르크스에게 종교의
역할에 대한 의구심과 사회개혁의 열망을 불러일으켰다.
1830년
카를 마르크스는 트리어 김나지움에 입학했다. 학교는
자유주의 교사와 학생들의 은신처가 되었고, 경찰의 감시가
끊이지 않았다. 청년 마르크스의 글 속에는 그리스도교적
봉사와 자기희생의 의지가 역력히 드러나 있었다. 1835년 10월
카를은 본대학교로부터 입학통지를 받았다. 그가 수강한
과목들은 그리스어와 로마 신화, 미술사와 같은 오로지
인문주의적인 것들이었다. 마르크스는 통상적인 학생활동에
참가했고 결투를 벌였으며 술에 취해 소란을 일으켜
감방에서 하루를 보낸 적도 있었다. 그의 생애를 통틀어 단
한번의 감금이었다. 마르크스는 술집모임을 주관했고
직접행동주의자들이 포함된 시인 클럽에 출입하기도 했다.
실로 반동적인 대학문화가 본 생활의 주류를 이루고 있었다.
국민의회(프랑크푸르트)를 거부했던 학생들이 검거되고 그
가운데 일부는 마르크스의 전생애 동안 추방당해 있었다. 1년
후 카를은 법률과 철학을 공부하기 위해 베를린으로 떠났다.
카를
마르크스가 베를린대학교를 휩쓸고 있던 헤겔철학과
만나 청년 헤겔 학파를 추종하게 된 사실은 매우 중대한
의미를 갖는다. 처음에 카를은 G.W. F. 헤겔에
대해 적대감을 느꼈으며, 그무렵 몸져 눕게 된 얼마간의
이유는 아버지에게 썼듯이 "혐오해온 견해를 숭배해야
하는 데서 오는 혼란스러움" 때문이었다. 그러나 베를린
혁명문화에서 헤겔이 차지하는 비중은 압도적인 것이었고
카를은 새로운 문예·철학 운동을 전개하고 있던 '박사 클럽'에
가입했다. 클럽의 중심인물은 젊은 신학강사 브루노
바우어였는데, 복음서는 실제역사의 기록이 아니라 감성적
필요에 기인하는 환상의 기록이며 예수 또한 역사상의
실존인물이 아니라는 획기적인 가설을 전개시키고 있었다.
카를 마르크스는 예언자 이사야에 대한 바우어의 강좌에
등록했다. 브루노 바우어는 새로운 사회적 파국, 즉 예수의
재림시에 닥칠 시련보다 더욱 무시무시한 파국이 다가오고
있다고 설파했다. 청년 헤겔 학파는 급속도로 무신론에
가까워지고 어렴풋이 정치적 행동들도 거론되기 시작했다.
청년
헤겔 학파에 잠재되어 있는 정부전복 분위기에 공포를 느낀
프로이센 정부는 이들에 대한 색출작업에 착수했고
1839년 브루노 바우어는 강사직을 박탈당했다. 이 시절 가장
절친한 친구로서 투옥생활을 하기도 했던 저널리스트
아돌프 루텐베르크는 마르크스에게 보다 능동적인
사회참여를 권유했다. 그 사이 그의 연구는 지체되고 있었고,
마르크스는 친구들의 재촉에 못이겨 예나대학교에
박사논문을 제출했다. 마르크스의 논문은 학문적인 면에서
별로 우수하지 않았던 것으로 알려졌으나 1841년 4월
박사학위를 취득하는 데 성공했다. 논문은 헤겔주의자의
관점에서 데모크리토스와
에피쿠로스자연철학의
차이점을 분석한 것이었지만, 분명한 것은
프로메테우스적인 도전의 소리를 내고 있었다는 점이다.
"철학은
비밀을 지니지 않는다. 프로메테우스의
'진실로 나는 모든 신들을 싫어한다'는 고백은 바로 철학
자신의 고백이며 모든 신들에 대항하는 철학의 신조이다……
프로메테우스는 철학의 축일표에 있어서 가장 고귀한
성자이자 순교자이다."
1841년
출간된 루트비히 포이어바흐의
〈그리스도교의 본질 Das Wesen des Christentums〉은
마르크스와 청년 헤겔 학파에 커다란 영향을 미쳤다.
마르크스가 생각하기에 포이어바흐는, 자연에 발을 붙이고
사는 현실 인간으로부터 절대정신을 추출해낸 헤겔의
논리체계를 해부함으로써 그의 관념론적 이상주의를
효과적으로 비판할 수 있었다. 이후 마르크스의 철학적
노력은 모든 사물은 모순적인 국면의 충돌에 따라 지속적인
변화를 겪게 된다는 헤겔의 변증법과 물리적인 조건들을
관념의 상위에 두는 포이어바흐의 유물론을 결합시키는
방향으로 이루어지게 된다.
1842년
1월 마르크스는 쾰른에서 창간된 〈라인 신문 Rheinische Zeitung〉의
기고가가 되었다. 쾰른은 프로이센의 산업 중심지였고
신문사는 상인·은행가·산업가 들이 모여 만든 민주적이고
자유주의적인 기관이었다. 이즈음 언론의 자유에 관한
소논문 하나가 발표되는데, 그때까지만 해도 절대적인
도덕기준과 보편적인 윤리원칙을 당연한 것으로 받아들이고
있던 마르크스는 언론에 대한 당국의 검열을 민중을
염탐하고 비천하고 악의에 찬 속인들에게 신과 같은 권능을
부여하는 죄악으로 단정하고 있다. 1842년 10월 15일 카를
마르크스는 〈라인 신문〉의 주필이 되었고, 베를린 빈민의
주택문제로부터 농민들의 산림벌채와 새로운 공산주의
현상에 이르기까지 경제·사회 문제에 관한 수없이 많은
논설을 집필해야만 했다. 프리드리히 헤겔의 관념론은
이러한 현실과제의 해결에 별다른 도움이 되지 못했고,
카를은 부르주아 계급에 충격을 가하는 것만으로
사회활동이 충분히 이루어졌다고 믿는 헤겔파 동료들로부터
멀어지게 되었다.
법규범의
한계 내에서 점진적인 변혁을 추진하는 실천적
자유주의자들을 가까이했던 마르크스는 〈라인 신문〉의
발행부수를 3배로 늘리고 프로이센의
주요일간지로 부각시키는 데 성공했다. 그러나 솔직하고
자유분방한 논조를 문제삼은 정부당국은 신문을 정간시켰고,
마르크스는 〈독일-프랑스 연보 Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher〉를
발간하자는 자유 헤겔파 아르놀트 루게의 제의를 받아들인
뒤 파리로 향했다.
카를
마르크스는 약혼한 지 7년이 지난 1843년 6월 4세
연상인 예니 폰 베스트팔렌과 결혼했다. 지성과 매력을
겸비한 예니는 뛰어난 군인과 행정관들을 배출해낸
명문가의 딸로서 그녀의 이복형제는 훗날 프로이센의
내무장관에 오르게 된다. 생
시몽의
추종자였던 예니의 아버지는 카를을 좋아하여 가족들의
반대에도 불구하고 결혼을 성사시켰으나,
정작 카를의 아버지 하인리히는 그녀가 악령에 사로잡힌
아들의 제물이 되지나 않을까 걱정스러워했다.
마르크스가
파리로 이주한 것은 결혼 후 4년이 되던
해였다. 당시의 파리는 사회주의 세력과 보다 급진적인
공산주의 혁명운동이 꽃을 피우고 있었다. 혁명가가 된
마르크스는 프랑스·독일 노동자들의 공산주의 조직들과
실제적인 관련을 맺기 시작했다. 그들의 사상은 너무나도
조잡하고 무지한 것이었지만 그들의 인성은 그를
감동시키기에 충분했다. 〈 1844년의 경제학-철학 초고 Ökonomisch-philosophische
Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844〉에서 카를 마르크스는 "형제애는
그들에게 있어서 단순한 구호만이 아니고 삶의 진실이다.
노동으로 단련된 그들의 육체는 우리에게 인간의 고귀함을
일깨워준다"라고 쓰고 있다. 〈1844년의 경제학-철학
초고〉는 이후 100년 동안 빛을 발하지 못했지만 마르크스
역사·경제 이론의 바탕을 이루는 휴머니즘이 설명되고 있는
점에서 가치를 잃지 않고 있다.
단명으로
끝난 〈독일-프랑스 연보〉가 해마다 출판을
거듭하는 사이에 마르크스와 기고가였던 프리드리히 엥겔스와의
관계는 급속도로 발전되었다. 〈독일-프랑스연보〉에
실린 〈우익 헤겔파 철학 비판〉에는 "종교는 민중의
아편"이라는 유명한 문구와 함께 철학의 실현을 위한 '프롤레타리아
봉기'가 제창되고 있다. 프로이센 정부는 다시 한번 카를
마르크스의 제재에 나섰고 1845년 2월 카를은 파리를 떠나
브뤼셀로 향했다. 카를은 벨기에에서 엥겔스와 회동한 뒤
프로이센 국적을 포기했다.
브뤼셀
시대
브뤼셀에서의
다음 2년간은 마르크스와 엥겔스의
공동작업이 심화되던 시기였다. 엥겔스는 아버지의
직물공장이 위치해 있던 맨체스터에서 산업혁명의 암울한
현실들을 처음 접했다. 청년 헤겔 학파에 속했던 그는
공산주의 랍비라 불렸던 모제스 헤스의
영향을 받아 공산주의자가 되었으며 영국에서는 로버트 오언의
추종자들과 교류했다. 이제 그들 사이의
공통된 견해를 확인한 마르크스와 엥겔스는 두 사람의 지적
자원을 결합시켜 신학자 브루노 바우어의 헤겔주의적
관념론에 대한 장문의 비평 〈신성가족 Die heilige Familie〉(1845)을
펴냈다. 그들의 다음 저서 〈독일
이데올로기 Die deutsche Ideologie〉는 역사의 각 단계에서 지배계급이
자신의 경제적 이익을 도모하기 위해 사회공동체를
구조화한 방식들을 규명함으로써 역사적 유물론을 처음으로
완전하게 제시하고 있지만, 어떤 출판업자도
선뜻 나서지 않아 두 사람의 일생 내내 빛을 보지 못했다.
마르크스는 주요 노동운동지도자들과의 대결을 통해 자신의
공산주의 사상을 확립시켜나갔다. 1846년 그는 빌헬름
바이틀링의 도덕주의적 태도를 혹평하면서
프롤레타리아트는 부르주아 사회를 뛰어넘어 공산주의
단계로 곧장 비약할 수 없으며, 노동운동은 윤리적 구호가
아니라 과학적인 근거를 필요로 한다고 역설했다.
〈철학의
빈곤 Das Elend der Philosophie〉(1847)은 피에르
조제프 프루동의 〈빈곤의 철학
Philosophie de la misère〉(1846)을 논박한 것이었다. 프루동이
경제체제의 대립개념들로부터 단점을 지양하고 장점을
되살리려 노력했던 반면, 마르크스는 계급투쟁에 상호
충족적 타결점은 있을 수 없으며 사회공동체의 구조는
생산력과 생산관계에 의해 결정되는 역사의 일시적인
현상일 뿐이라고 반박했다. 맷돌은 봉건영주의 지배를,
증기기관은 산업자본가의 지배를 이끌어냈다는 설명이었다.
프루동의 추론양식은 역사의 기본법칙을 파악하는 데
실패한 소부르주아적 사회인식으로 여겨졌다.
사건들의
기이한 전후관계가 〈공산당선언〉을
탄생시켰다. 1847년 6월 독일계 이민
수공업자들로 구성된 '의인동맹'(義人同盟)이 런던에서
회합을 갖고 정치적 강령 채택을 결의했다. 카를 마르크스는
이들로부터 참여의 요청을 받았고 숙고 끝에 동료 엥겔스와
동맹에 가입했다. 의인동맹은 '공산주의자 동맹'으로 명칭을
변경한 뒤 민주적 헌장을 제정했다. 정강 작성을 위임받은
마르크스와 엥겔스는 1847년 12월 중순부터 1848년 1월까지
정강의 초안작업에 몰두했다. 〈공산당선언〉은 "지금까지의
모든 역사는 계급투쟁의 역사이다"라는 명제를 통해
〈독일 이데올로기〉에서 정립된 유물사관을 요약하고
계급사회는 프롤레타리아트의 승리에 따라 역사에서 자취를
감추게 될 것이라고 주장했다. 선언은 '소외'류의 박약한
추론에 근거한 모든 사회주의 형태를 비판하고 유토피아
사회를 지향한 공동체적 실험들을 계급투쟁을 무마시키는 '반동적
분파'로 간주해 단호히 거부했으며 누진과세, 상속의
폐지로부터 아동의 무상교육에 이르기까지 공산주의 사회로
나아가는 첫 단계로서 10개의 즉각적인 조치를 제시했다.
〈공산당선언〉은 "프롤레타리아가 잃을 것은 속박의
사슬밖에는 없다. 그들은 세계를 얻을 것이다. 만국의
노동자여 단결하라"는 말로 끝을 맺는다.
1848년초의
몇 개월 동안 프랑스·이탈리아·오스트리아에서 돌연히
혁명이 촉발되었다. 마르크스는 임시정부의 초청을 받아
파리로 떠났는데 벨기에 당국으로부터 추방령이 내려지기
전의 시기적절한 것이었다. 그러나 독일의 망명자들은
무력으로 조국을 해방시키자는 게오르크 헤르베크의 선동에
반대한 마르크스로부터 멀어져갔다. 오스트리아와 독일에서
혁명이 가열되고 있을 때 카를 마르크스는 라인란트로
되돌아왔다. 쾰른에서 그는 노동자계급이 민주적
부르주아지와 연합을 이루어야 한다고 주장했다. 그는
노동자동맹 지도자들의 프롤레타리아 혁명노선에 제동을
가하고 노동자계급은 프랑크푸르트 의회에 대표를 파견하지
말아야 할 것이라고 역설했다. 마르크스의 견해는
〈공산당선언〉이 유보되어야 하며 공산주의자 동맹은
해체되어야 한다는 프리드리히 엥겔스의 견해와 일치했다.
1849년 6월 카를 마르크스는 새로이 창간된 〈신(新)라인 신문
Neue Rheinische Zeitung〉을 통해 입헌적 민주주의와 러시아와의
개전을 촉구했다. 마르크스는 노동자동맹의 급진파 지도자
안드레아스 고트샬크가 체포되었을 때 그를 대신해
라인란트 민주의회를 창설했으며(1848. 8), 국왕이 베를린의
프로이센 의회를 해산시키자 지하저항운동을 돕기 위해
무기와 병력을 끌어모았다.
자유주의적
부르주아들은 〈신라인 신문〉에 대한 후원을 중단했고
카를 자신은 납세거부의 조장을 비롯한 여러 혐의를 받아
기소되었다. 법정에서 마르크스는 프로이센
왕이 불법적인 반혁명운동에 관여했다는 요지로 자신을
변호했으며 배심원단은 호의를 가지고 만장일치로 그를
방면시켰다. 그러나 최후의 희망 없는 싸움이 바덴과
드레스덴에서 타올랐고, 1849년 5월 16일 카를 마르크스에게
추방령이 내려졌다. 붉게 인쇄된 〈신라인 신문〉의
폐간호는 센세이션을 불러일으켰다.
초기
런던 시대
파리로부터
다시 한번 추방된 마르크스는 1847년 8월
런던으로 향했고 런던은 그의 마지막 정착지가 되었다.
마르크스는 자유주의적 부르주아와 제휴하려는 자신의
계획이 무위로 돌아간 것을 못내 아쉬워하면서 재차 런던의
공산주의자 동맹에 합류했고, 약 1년 동안 보다 대담한
혁명정책을 추진하게 된다. 그는 경제적인 위기가 곧
혁명운동을 소생시키리라고 기대했으나 이러한 기대가
시들어지자 스스로 '혁명의 연금술사'라고 불렀던 사람들,
즉 직접행동을 통해 혁명의 도래를 앞당길 것을 주장했던
아우구스트 폰 빌리히와 같은 공산주의자들과 다시 한번
대치하게 되었다. 마르크스는 1850년 9월 이들이 유물론을
이상주의로 대체했다고 비판하면서 다음과 같이 기술했다.
"그들은
실제적인 조건들을 도외시한 채 순수의지를 혁명의
원동력으로 간주한다. 우리가 노동자들에게 '여러분들은
단순히 여러분들의 여건을 개선시키기 위해서가 아니라
스스로를 변화시키고 정치적 권력을 분담하기 위해 수십 년
간의 내란과 국제전쟁을 겪어야 한다'고 말하는 반면 그들은
이와 대조적으로 '우리는 즉시 권력을 쟁취해야 한다'고
부추기고 있다."
급진주의자들은
마르크스가 노동자 교육동맹의 정치경제학 강사가 되기를
자처했다며 그를 비꼬았고, 마르크스의
공산주의자 모임 출석 횟수는 점차 줄어들었다. 1852년에
카를 마르크스는 쾰른에서 정부전복 혐의로 체포된 11명의
공산주의자들을 변호하는 데 혼신의 힘을 기울였으며 이를
위하여 팜플렛을 작성하 기도 했다. 〈루이 보나파르트의
브뤼메르 18일 Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte〉이 씌어진
것도 이무렵인데 여기서 그는 농민계급의 지지를 바탕으로
관료주의적 절대국가가 형성되는 과정을 날카롭게 분석하고
있다. 이후의 12년간은 마르크스의 표현에 따르자면 두
사람에게 '고립'의 시간이 되었다. 1850~64년 마르크스는
물질적인 궁핍과 정신적인 고통 속에서 살았다. 재원은
고갈되고 단 한번을 빼고는 수입이 있는 직업을 가지지
못했다. 1850년 3월 카를과 예니, 그리고 4명의 자녀들에게
강제퇴거명령이 내려졌고 자산은 압류되었다. 자녀들 중
몇몇은 죽었다. 그중에는 그가 '부르주아 사회의 희생자'라고
이야기한 아들 귀도와 딸 프란치스카가 포함되어 있었다.
예니는 아이들의 관을 살 돈을 마련하려고 거의 미친 듯이
뛰어다녔다. 6년을 대부분 빵과 감자로 연명하며 가족은
소호의 방 2칸에서 삶을 꾸려나갔고, 아이들은 몰려온
채권자들에게 "마르크스 선생님은 2층에 계시지 않아요"라는
거짓말을 해야만 했다. 빚쟁이들을 피해 카를은 맨체스터로
도망해야 했고 아내 예니는 신경쇠약에 시달렸다. 이러한
역경의 시간을 통해 엥겔스는 재정적인 후원을 아끼지
않았다. 처음에는 맨체스터 소재 어먼앤드엥겔스사(社)의
평사무원에 불과했으므로 돈의 액수가 많지 않았지만 1864년
그가 동업자가 되었을 때는 지원금의 규모도 커졌다.
마르크스는 엥겔스와의 우정을 자랑으로 여겼고 그에 대한
어떠한 비판도 용납하지 않았다. 아내의 친지들과 친구
빌헬름 볼프의 유산으로 마르크스의 경제적 고통은 크게
경감되었다.
마르크스는
미국에 비교적 지속적인 수입원을 가지고 있었는데,
푸리에주의에 공감하고 있던 〈뉴욕 트리뷴 The New York Tribune〉의
유럽 통신원이 된 것이었다. 1851~62년 카를은 500편에 가까운
기사와 논설들을 기고하면서(그중 1/4은 엥겔스 제공) 인도와
중국, 영국과 스페인의 사회운동과 소요들을 분석·검토했다.
1859년 마르크스는 경제이론에 관한 최초의 저술인 〈정치경제학 비판
Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie〉을 완성했다. 〈정치경제학
비판〉의 서문에는 유물사관에 도달하게 된 논리과정이
상세하게 설명되어 있다. "물질적인 생산양식은 삶의
사회적·정치적·정신적 차원들을 결정한다. 인간의 의식이
그들의 존재를 규정짓는 것이 아니라 반대로 그들의 사회적
생활이 의식을 좌우한다."
카를은
대영박물관에서 경제·사회사 연구에
몰두하는 것을 주요일과로 삼았으며 독일의 새로운
노동운동에 동참해달라는 페르디난트 라살의
권유를 거부했다. 라살은 혼자서 '전(全)독일
노동자동맹'의 결성에 착수했다.
제1인터내셔널
1864년
제1인터내셔널(국제노동자협회)의 창설과 더불어
마르크스의 정치적 고립도 끝이 났다. 그는 인터내셔널의
창설자도 회장도 아니었지만 곧 협회의 정신적인 지주가
되었다. 최초의 공식회의는 1864년 9월 28일 런던의 세인트
마틴 홀에서 영국 노동조합의 지도자들과 프랑스 노동자
대표들에 의해 소집되었다. 프랑스의 중개인을 통해 독일
대표 자격으로 초청되었던 마르크스는 침묵을 지키며
연단에 자리하고 있었다. 강령과 헌장을 채택하기 위한
위원회가 설치되고 만족스럽지 못한 많은 초안들이 제출된
후 분과위원회에 몸담고 있던 마르크스는 풍부한 언론계의
경험을 바탕으로 강령과 헌장을 기초했다.
국제노동자협회의 임시규칙은 그의 다른 저술들과는 달리
계급간의 제휴정책과 의회입법의 긍정적인 측면을 강조했다.
영국의 프롤레타리아트는 점진적인 노력을 통해 국가적
차원의 정치권력을 획득하게 될 것이라고 내다보았다.
협회의 활동은 1주일에도 몇 번씩 회합이 이루어지는 등
크게 활성화되었고, 마르크스는 총회의 회원이자 독일
지역의 통신간사로서 다양한 파벌과 경향들의 화합을
이루어내는 보기 드문 자질을 발휘했다. 날로 높아져가는
명성과 함께 1869년 제1인터내셔널의 규모는 약 80만 회원으로
확장되었고 각 지역 노동조합을 위한 분규조정에
관여함으로써 상당한 성공을 거두기도 했다.
파리
코뮌은
카를 마르크스를 국제적인 인물로 만든 사건이었다.
1870년 프랑스-프로이센 전쟁이 발발하자 독일 의회의
사회주의 세력은 전쟁공채안 투표를 거부했다. 처음에 제1인터내셔널
공동이사회는 프랑스-프로이센 전쟁을 독일의 방어전쟁으로
규정했으나 파리가 함락된 후 독일의 배상요구가 지나친
수준에 이르자 분위기는 반전되었다. 파리에서 폭동이
일어나고 코뮌이 선포되었을 때 전폭적인 지지를 표명했던
마르크스는 이듬해 5월 30일 코뮌이 분쇄되자 '프랑스 내전'이라는
제명으로 성명서를 발표한다.
"역사는
이토록 위대한 것에 필적할 만한 사례를 가지고 있지 않다……
파리 코뮌의 순교자들은 프롤레타리아의 가슴 속에 영원히
살아 있을 것이다."
엥겔스는
파리 코뮌을 인류 최초의 '프롤레타리아 독재'로
평가했으며 마르크스의 이름은 파리 코뮌의 혁명정신과
동의어가 되었다.
파리
코뮌은 국제노동자협회의 내부갈등을 증폭시켜 결국 붕괴를
초래하는 계기로 작용했다. 공동이사회
의장을 지냈던 노동조합주의자 조지 오저는 코뮌에 갈채를
보낸 마르크스의 처신을 불만스러워했고 1867년의 선거법
개정안으로 정치참여의 폭이 넓어진 영국의 노동조합들은
자유당과의 협력을 통해 실질적인 성과를 얻어내기를
희망했다. 노동조합 지도자들은 마르크스의 능변을
거추장스러운 걸림돌로 생각했고 자유주의자들에게
매수되었다는 그의 비난에 대해 분개했다.
제1인터내셔널
내 좌파의 도전은 러시아의 무정부주의자 미하일
알렉산드로비치 바쿠닌의 주도하에 이루어졌다 (→ 색인 : 바쿠닌).
시베리아 유형과 숱한 감옥생활을 경험한 혁명가로서 '노호하는
폭풍우와 사자의 포효'로 비유되는 웅변의 대가이기도 했던
바쿠닌은 뭇사람들을 사로잡을 만한 매력을 가진
인물이었다. 바쿠닌은 마르크스의 지성에 찬사를 보내기는
했으나 마르크스가 자신을 러시아 스파이로 매도했던
사실을 잊을 수는 없었다. 그가 보기에 카를 마르크스는
독일의 권위주의자이자 인터내셔널 총회를 노동자 지배를
위한 개인의 터전으로 탈바꿈시키려는 교만한 유대인이었다.
그는 인터내셔널의 중앙집권화를 비롯한 마르크스의 여러
이론에 반발했고 프롤레타리아트는 기존 의회제도 내에서
하나의 정당으로 기능해야 하며 일단 부르주아 국가가
전복된 다음에 프롤레타리아트 자신의 정권을 수립해야
한다는 신념에도 부정적이었다.
바쿠닌은
혁명가들의 임무는 '파괴'에 있다고 생각했다.
그는 선진산업국가의 나약한 노동자들보다 러시아 농민의
제어하기 힘든 혁명적 본능에 기대를 걸고 있었다. 학생들이
혁명의 중추세력이 되기를 희망했던 그는 이탈리아·스위스·프랑스에서
청년 지성인들의 많은 호응을 얻었고 비밀결사인 '국제사회민주주의동맹'을
조직했다. 사회민주주의동맹은 1869년 스위스 바젤에서 제1차
국제노동자협회가 개최되었을 때 공동이사회의 지배권에
도전장을 냈지만 이들의 가입을 사전 저지시키려는
마르크스의 손이 조금 더 빨랐다. 바쿠닌주의자들에게 파리
코뮌은 혁명적 직접행동의 본보기와 같았고 카를
마르크스의 권위주의적 공산주의를 반박할 수 있는 호기를
제공하기도 했다. 미하일 바쿠닌은 인터내셔널 내부에
자신의 조직을 구축해 마르크스와 공동이사회를 공격하기
시작했고 마르크스의 편에서는 바쿠닌이 협박과 살인을
일삼아온 러시아의 학생 혁명가 세르게이 네차예프와
연루되어 있다는 사실을 공표했다.
별다른
지지 기반도 없이 무정부주의 좌파에 대항해 선 마르크스는
바쿠닌에게 인터내셔널의 주도권을 빼앗기게 되지나 않을까
두려워했다. 한편으로는 자신의 연구로
되돌아가 〈자본론〉의 집필을 마무리하고 싶은 생각도
간절했다. 1872년 네덜란드 헤이그에서 최초로 인터내셔널
전체회의에 참석한 마르크스는 바쿠닌주의자들을
패배시키는 데 성공했으며 엥겔스는 이와 보조를 맞추어
공동이사회를 런던에서 뉴욕으로 이전시키자는 의견을
제시했다. 바쿠닌의 추종자들은 축출되었으나 제1인터내셔널의
영향력은 기울어갔고 1876년 필라델피아에서 마침내
해체되기에 이른다.
제1인터내셔널
이후의 마지막 10년 동안 마르크스의 창작능력은 급격히
감소되었다. 그는 스스로 고백했듯이 만성적인 정신의
침체에 사로잡혔고 내면화된 관심은 가족들에게 향했다.
여전히 독서량이 많았고 러시아어 학습에 착수하기도
했지만 실질적으로 어떠한 작업도 이루어내지 못했다.
마르크스의 정치적 견해는 그 변덕스러움으로 인해 종잡을
수가 없게 되었다. 심지어 그는 소년노동의 폐지를
반대하기까지 했다. 1875년 마르크스주의자들과 독일의
라살파가 독일 사회민주당을 창설하기 위해 고타에서
회동했다. 페르디난트 라살은 사회주의의 이상이
기존체제와의 협력 속에서 달성될 수 있다고 믿었던
인물이었다. 마르크스는 〈고타 강령 비판 Kritik des Gothaer
Programms〉을 통해 사회민주당 강령의 지나친 현실타협성을
논박했고 독일 지도자들은 그의 분노를 가라앉히기 위해
열과 성을 다했다.
점차로
마르크스는 유럽에서 전쟁이 일어나 보수 반동주의의
마지막 보루인 차르 체제를 타도하기를 바랐다.
이 전쟁으로 노동자 계급의 혁명적 에너지가 다시
소생될지도 모른다는 막연한 기대감에서였다. 1881년 차르
알렉산드르 2세가 암살되자 마르크스는 러시아 나로드니키의
사심없는 용기에 깊은 감명을 받았다. 테러는
마르크스에게 '상황적으로 불가피한 수단의 하나'로
여겨졌다. 비록 현실정치에서 한 걸음 물러선 것은
사실이었지만 마르크스는 엥겔스가 말했던 것처럼
사회주의적 노동운동에 대해 여전히 '독특한 영향력'을
행사하고 있었다. 1879년 쥘 게드가 프랑스 사회주의
노동자연맹의 창설에 즈음하여 런던을 방문,
마르크스로부터 강령의 전문과 내용에 관한 자문을
얻어갔다. 1881년에는 〈잉글랜드 포 올 England for All〉지(誌)의
헨리 메이어스 하인드먼이 마르크스와의 대담을 비중있게
다루었지만 그의 이름을 밝히기를 꺼려하여 노여움을 샀다.
말년의 마르크스는 대부분의 시간을 휴양지에서 보냈고
알제리까지 여행을 떠나기도 했다. 카를은 아내(1881.12.2)와
장녀 예니 롱구에트(1883.1.11)의 죽음으로 비탄에 젖어 살다가
1883년 3월 영국의 런던에서 폐종양으로 사망했다.
평가
하이게이트
프라이호프의 장례식에서 엥겔스는 마르크스가
'인류역사 발전의 법칙'과 '자본주의 사회운동의 법칙'을
발견해냈다고 선언했다. "무엇보다 카를 마르크스는
위대한 혁명가였다. 증오의 대상이 되어 극단적인 비방과
모략에 시달렸던 그는 이제 수백만 노동자들의 사랑과 존경,
애도 속에서 눈을 감는다."
마르크스에게는
프로메테우스적인 반항과 무력한 지성이 복합되어 있었다.
마르크스는 주위 사람들에게 지적 교만함의 인상을
전해주었다. 1846년 러시아의 작가 파벨 안넨코프는 토론에
참여한 마르크스를 관찰한 뒤 이렇게 회상했다. "그의
말투는 항상 명령조에 가까웠고 반론을 용인하는 법이
없었다. 그는 마치 환상 속에서나 나타날 수 있는 민주적
독재자와 같았다." 마르크스는 다수의 청중 앞에 나서는
것에 불편함을 느꼈고 파벌논쟁의 분위기를 좋아하지
않았다. 아내 예니 역시 그가 시위에 참여하지 않았으며
공공회의 석상에서 거의 이야기를 하지 않았다고 밝히고
있다. 그는 인터내셔널의 공동이사회나 신문사 간부모임과
같은 소규모 분위기를 가장 편안하게 느꼈다. 그의 성격은
소집단의 동료들에게 강력한 힘을 발휘할 수 있었다. 동시에
마르크스는 대등한 위치에서 경제학과 사회학의 여러
문제들을 논의할 수 있는 명망있는 학자들과의 회합을
기피했다. 자신의 넓은 식견에도 불구하고 마르크스는
영국의 외무장관 파머스턴 경이 러시아 정부의 첩자라는
식의 강박관념에 사로잡혀 있었다. 그는 부르주아 사회가
자신을 '돈 만드는 기계'로 전락시키지 못하게 하겠다고
결심하면서도 엥겔스의 증여와 친척들의 여러 유산에
생계를 의존했다.
마르크스는
예수가 어린이들을 사랑했기 때문에 예수를 찬양한다고
말할 정도로 애정이 넘치는 아버지였지만 자신의 생활이나
건강을 돌보지 않았다. 그는 '투쟁'을 삶과
존재의 법칙으로 간주했으며 언어의 습득조차도 삶의
투쟁에서 새로운 무기를 획득하는 일이라고 생각할
정도였다. 개인적인 습성이나 생활방식에 있어서
마르크스는 영원한 학생이었다. 마르크스는 두 친구와 함께
거리의 가로등을 깨부수고 경찰이 몰려오자 꽁무니를 빼는
어리광스러운 장난을 하기도 했다. 그는 대단한
소설광으로서 특히 월터 스콧 경과 발자크에 탐닉했고
가족은 모두 셰익스피어의 예찬론자들이었다. 마르크스와
예니 사이에는 7명의 자녀가 있었으나 세 딸만 남고
나머지는 유년기에 잃고 말았다. 가장 총애했던
엘레아노르는 신경질적이고 감성적인 성격을 지녔으며
여배우가 되려는 소망으로 인해 그를 근심하게 했다. 또다른
그림자가 마르크스의 가정생활을 어둡게 만들었는데 하녀
헬레네 데무트가 프리드리히라는 사생아를 출산했기
때문이었다. 엥겔스는 자신의 임종시에 마르크스가
프리드리히의 아버지임을 엘레아노르에게 일러주었다.
국제노동자협회의
결의서에 '노동계급의 성서'라고 공식 기술된
바 있는 〈자본론〉은 1867년
베를린에서 출판되었고 1873년 재판되었다. 오직 첫 권만이
생존시에 완성되었고 제2권과 제3권은 엥겔스의 편집에 의해
1885년과 1894년 출간되었으며, 처음 제4권으로 구상되었던
부분은 1905~10년 〈잉여가치학설사〉라는 독립된 형태로
카를 카우츠키에 의해 출간되었다.
카를 마르크스는 데이비드 리카도의
고전 경제학을 부르주아 사회는 모든 사회적 유기체와
마찬가지로 불가피한 발전의 경로를 거쳐야 한다는
유물변증법과 결합시켰다. 마르크스가
〈자본론〉을 준비하면서 수행했던 작업이 얼마나
광범위했는가를 알려면 먼저 많은 양의 유고(遺稿)와 수고(手稿),
방주(傍註), 서신교환 등을 조사해보아야 한다. 그의
분석대상은 자본주의 생산과정의 본질, 자본의 유통과정,
자본의 총과정, 인간과 자연의 물질대사, 이데올로기 비판,
인간상, 잉여가치론과 그 역사에까지 이르렀다. 뿐만 아니라
그는 사회학·기술·공학적 문제들을 연구했고 수학 및
자연과학을 연구했으며 역사적 과정과 농업경제를
분석했는가 하면, 헤겔의 〈논리학 Wissenschaft der Logik〉에
특별히 주목하기도 했다. 마르크스는 자본주의 사회의
법칙성에 관한 연구를 자연사적(自然史的) 과정이라는
성격을 갖는 사회구성체 발전이론으로 총괄했으며 경제적
토대, 이데올로기적 상부구조, 생산력, 생산관계 등
사회구성체의 생산관계를 밝히고 사회구성체의 여러 요소들
사이의 상호관계를 탐구했다.
〈자본론〉은
이윤의 감소율과 같은 자본주의의 내재적 모순들이
현저해짐에 따라 자본주의는 사라지고 더 나은 사회로의
이행이 이루어질 것이라고 예언한다. 기억할
만한 〈자본론〉의 내용 가운데 영국 의회의 청서(靑書)에서
발췌한 것으로 노동계급의 비참한 생활을 서술한
페이지들이 있다. 마르크스는 이 비참함이 증가되고 동시에
자본의 독점이 생산에 대하여 착취로 작용하는 가운데
마침내 부르주아 사유재산의 조종(弔鐘)이 울리게 되고
착취자가 피착취자로 전락하게 되리라고 믿었다. 그는
계급과 계급투쟁의 존재를 자신이 발견한 것이라고
주장하지는 않고 부르주아 역사가들이 자기보다 훨씬
이전에 이 문제들을 다루어왔음을 인정했다. 그러나 그는
생산발전의 각 단계는 이에 상응하는 계급구조와 연관이
있다는 것과 계급투쟁은 필연적으로 프롤레타리아트의
독재를 낳아 무계급 사회의 도래가 실현될 것임을 주장했다.
어떻게 그가 이러한 주제들에 관한 몇몇 단락들을 학문적
표준에 의해 이루어진 핵심적인 증거로 간주하게
되었는가를 이해하기란 쉽지 않은 일이다.
끊임없이
완성되어가는 혁명과정 속에서 마르크스와 엥겔스는
프롤레타리아트의 유능한 지도자와 이론가를 한 세대에
걸쳐 길러냈다. 베벨,
빌헬름 리프크네히트,
라 파르그, 메링,
카우츠키 등이 그러한 인물들이다. 마르크스는
프롤레타리아트에게 그들의 처지와 욕구를 과학적으로
인식할 수 있게 해주었다. 노동자 계급의 역사적 사명을
실현하는 데 협력하는 것, 이것이 그의 진정한 필생의
직무였다. 그의 철학은 결코 자기목적이 아니었고 항상
사회를 인식하고 변혁하는 무기였다. 그것은 경제생활과
정치적 계급투쟁, 과학과 기술의 혁명, 그리고 인민의
문화적·정치적 발전 등과의 결합에서 얻어진 것이었다.
마르크스의 철학은 거의 150년에 걸친 역사 속에서 생명력을
입증했으며 혁명적 노동운동과 실재하는 사회주의 속에서
실현되었다. 그것은 사회주의 사회의 이론적·실천적
문제해결과정 속에 지양되어 있다. 그것은 블라디미르
일리치 레닌에
의해 더욱 발전되었으며 공산당과 노동자당의 정치에
있어서 이론적 토대를 형성했다.
사회학
이론에 있어 마르크스의 가장 지대한 공헌은 그의 일반적
분석양식, 즉 '변증법적인' 양식에 있다. 이
양식은 모든 사회체계가 내재적 모순(불안정)을 발생시키며
이 모순은 새로운 사회의 등장에 의해서만 해결될 수 있다고
간주한다. 카를 마르크스의 분석양식은 토머스 맬서스,
허버트 스펜서,
빌프레도 파레토의
양식과 더불어 사회과학의 대표적인 이론구조의 하나로
정립되었고, 더이상 〈자본론〉의 경제학적
추론을 받아들이지 않는 신마르크스주의자들도 자본주의
사회체제의 분석에 있어서는 마르크스의 분석양식에
의존하고 있다. 그의 사고양식을 거부해온 학자들로는
경험주의 철학 계통의 버트런드 러셀,
존 듀이,
그리고 카를 포퍼가
있다.→ 공산주의
L.
S. Feuer 글
마르크스주의 (── 主義, Marxism)
19세기 중반 카를 마르크스와
프리드리히 엥겔스가
발전시킨 일단의 학설체계.
인간학, 역사철학, 정치·경제 이론의 3부분이 상호연관을
맺고 있다. 이들을 결합시켜 일관된 논리체계를 형성하려는
마르크스의 노력에도 불구하고 말년, 특히 사후에 내려진
다양한 해석과 소련의 공식 이데올로기로서 채택된(1917)
이후의 정치적 요청으로 말미암아 많은 타협과 절충이
이루어졌다. 오늘날 '마르크스주의'는 공산주의·사회주의
제정당의 이념과 마르크스의 영향을 받은 여러 사상가들의
정치·사회·경제 이론을 포괄하게 되었다.
마르크스주의는 인간의 창조력에서 인간만이 가지는
고유한 특성을 발견한다. 창조력이란 필요의 충족을 위해
자연이라는 대상에 쏟는 인간의 노력과 노동력이며, 여기서
노동은 개인적인 것이 아니라 인류라고 하는 하나의 종(種)을
위한 노력이다. 인간의 통제범위를 벗어나기도 하는
복잡다단한 역사적 사건들로 인해 이와 같은 이상은 아직
실현되지 못하고 있다. 예컨대 자본주의 체제에서는
창조적인 에너지 혹은 노동력을 투여하는 개인군(프롤레타리아트)과
임금을 주고 이 노동의 산물을 도용하는 계급(부르주아지)이
따로 존재하며, 이는 프롤레타리아트에 의해 창조된 세계가
실제로 노동에 참여하지 않은 자본가 계급에 의해 소유되고
있음을 의미한다. 카를 마르크스는 이러한 현실의 모순을 '
소외'라는 말로 표현했다.
노동자 계급이 노동의 결실을 회복하게 되는 그날이 도래할
때, 소외는 극복되고 모든 계급의 구분들은 사라지게 될
것이다.
계급투쟁과 계급 없는 사회의 이념은 마르크스 이전에
이미 제창되고 있었다. 공동체 내의 경제적 이해관계가
갈등을 유발한다는 착상은 멀리 투키디데스의 저작에까지
소급되며, 기존 경제체제의 비판 위에 계급없는 이상사회를
건설하려는 갖가지 사상들이 19세기의 첫 10년 동안 꽃을
피웠다. 카를 마르크스는 이 2가지 이념을 색다른 방식으로
결합시켰다. 공상적 사회주의자들의 과제는 자신이
생각하는 유토피아가 어떠한 것인가에 있는 것이 아니라
그것에 도달하는 방법을 제시하는 데 있었다. 마르크스는
계급투쟁을 역사의 추진력으로 간주한 뒤 인류의 역사는
계급 없는 사회의 출현으로 정점에 오를 것이라고
내다보았다. "지금까지의 역사는 계급투쟁의 역사이다"라고
시작되는 〈공산당선언
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei〉의 첫 구절은 마르크스
역사관의 가장 강력한 표현이었다. 마르크스와 엥겔스에게
모든 역사는 착취계급과 피착취계급 사이의 투쟁의
연속으로 비쳤다. 역사는 전쟁·발견·발명·조약·음모
등으로 전개된다는 것이 종전의 견해였다면 마르크스는
이들이 밖으로 드러나는 허상에 불과하다고 단언했다.
마르크스에게 역사의 동인은 인간의 의·식·주 문제를
해결하는 '생산수단'의 발전에 있었다.
인간이 생존하기 위해서는 물질에의 의존이 불가피하다는
것이 마르크스가 제창한 ' 역사적
유물론'의 핵심이었다. 물질적인 생활을 유지하기 위해
인간은 생산수단이라는 일단의 관계를 통해 자연과
교류해야만 한다. 인류는 역사의 매단계마다 독특한
생산수단을 발전시켜왔다. 14세기의 자본가 계급이란 상상할
수 없으며, 20세기의 봉건영주란 존재하지 않는다. 역사는
변증법의 원리에 따라 스스로 진화해간다. 매단계는
상반되는 단계에 의해 계승되며 이러한 2단계의 상호작용이
종합을 이루는 과정에서 새로운 역사단계가 대두한다. 어느
단계에서나 생산수단의 전제가 되는 것은 인간과 자연,
그리고 인간과 인간 사이의 관계인데 인간은 이러한 관계들
속에서 스스로의 인간성을 상실해간다.
자본주의
경제체제는 가장 최근의 역사단계이다. 자본주의의 번영은
생산력 규모의 세계적인 확대와 엄청난 양의 잉여가치
창출에 기초하고 있으며 잉여가치는 고스란히 자본가의
몫으로 된다. 내재적인 모순에 시달리고 있는 자본주의는
그러나 번영을 지속할 수는 없다. 가장 중요한 사실은
자본주의가 모든 인간들을 상품화함으로써 개성을
말살시킨다는 점이다. 이런 식으로 자본주의는 자멸을
초래한다. 자본주의로 말미암아 계급투쟁은 결정적인
국면을 맞이하며, 명백한 착취로 인해 완전히 인간성을
상실하게 된 프롤레타리아트는 마침내 공동목표를 향해
단합할 수 있게 된다. 그리하여 프롤레타리아트의 승리가
임박하고 계급 없는 이상사회가 실현되기에 이른다.
프롤레타리아트의 이익은 전체 인류의 이익이며,
프롤레타리아트의 승리는 노동의 분화가 이루어진 이후
끊임없이 공동체를 괴롭혀온 계급의 분화를 불식시킬
것이다.
1848년 혁명이 실패로 돌아가고 마르크스의 분석틀이
복잡성을 더해가는 사회구조의 해명에 한계를 드러내자,
특히 마르크스 사후에 이론에 대한 수정과 보완작업이
이루어졌다. 엥겔스와 카를 카우츠키등
정통 마르크스주의자들은 특정 상황을 겨냥한
혁명강령으로부터 역사의 진화에 따른 궁극적인 승리라고
하는 평화적인 기대 쪽으로 마르크스주의의 성격을
변화시켰다. 마르크스주의는 블라디미르 일리치 레닌에
의해 보다 심각한 변질을 겪게 되었다. 레닌은 노동자
계급의 자발적인 혁명수행능력을 부인하고 직업혁명가에
의한 체계적인 지도를 역설했으며, 마르크스의 역사이론을
새로이 해석해 전근대사회에서의 혁명 가능성을 받아들였다.
'마르크스-레닌주의'란 전통 마르크스주의와 효율적인
당조직의 결합을 의미하는 것이었다. 한편 오토 바우어가
주도하는 오스트리아 학파는 극단적인 계급투쟁을 고수하는
급진 혁명세력의 비윤리성에 반기를 들고 사회적 민주주의
본연의 인간주의적 토대로 되돌아갈 것을 주장했다. 세계
각국 공산주의의 실상은 정통 마르크스주의에서 벗어난
예가 많으며 지식인들은 현대의 기계문명을 비판하는
도구로서 마르크스주의적 시각들을 응용하고 있다.
실존주의 철학에 마르크스의 이론을 융합시킨 사르트르의
〈변증법 비판 Critique de la raison dialectique〉(1960)은 후자의
대표적인 예가 될 수 있다.
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