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Karl Marx: Marx and Engels
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the founders of modern socialism and communism. Together they authored the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, and collaborated on Marx's famous work Das Kapital, in which he analyzed economic and social history. Marx and Engels' ideas came to be known as 'Marxism', which greatly influenced the development of socialist ideas.
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In 1845 Marx was ordered to leave Paris because of his revolutionary activities. He settled in Brussels and began organizing and directing a network of revolutionary groups, called Communist Correspondence Committees, in a number of European cities. In 1847 these committees were consolidated to form the Communist League, and Marx and Engels were commissioned to formulate a statement of principles. The program they submitted, known throughout the world as the Communist Manifesto, was the first systematic statement of modern socialist doctrine and was written by Marx, partly on the basis of a draft prepared by Engels. Marx contributed the central propositions of the Manifesto, which embody the materialist conception of history, or historical materialism. This theory was later explicitly formulated in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859).
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After leaving Paris, Marx traveled to Belgium where he became involved with a group of artisans calling themselves the Communist League. In 1847 the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to pen a statement of their beliefs and aims. This statement became the Communist Manifesto, which Marx zealously composed in anticipation the revolutions of 1848. When revolution did begin in Germany in 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to encourage its progress. When the revolution failed, Marx returned to Paris but soon left for London where he would remain for the rest of his life.
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Throughout the fifties, Marx and Engels watched expectantly for signs of the major economic crisis that would inaugurate a new period of revolutions. None came for many years. When a serious slump finally occurred in 1857, it had no revolutionary consequences. Marx then concentrated less on the expected economic breakdown and more on organizing the working class, but here too he was disappointed for a long time. To be sure, Ferdinand Lassalle, the romantic firebrand of German socialism, had created a German labor movement. But Marx disapproved of its political orientation even more than of Lassalle's histrionic manners.
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At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, considered by both governments a dangerous revolutionary. Marx then moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. Marx and Engels took a prominent part in the League’s Second Congress (London, November 1847), at whose request they drew up the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. This work outlines a new world-conception based on materialism. This document analyzes the realm of social life; the theory of the class struggle; the tasks of the Communists; and the revolutionary role of the proletariat — the creators of a new, communist society.
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In The German Ideology Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism which had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the ‘premises of the materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, ‘modes of co-operation’ or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.
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Marx and Engels