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Karl Marx: Marx and Engels
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In addition to Engels and Liebknecht, Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law... attended his funeral. Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement, gave a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels' speech, this was the entire programme of the funeral. Also attending the funeral was Friedrich Lessner, who had been sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was described by Engels as "an old member of the Communist League" and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels. Three others attended the funeral — Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church — making eleven in all.
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Many proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, or that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the labour theory of value. In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical Communist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some Marxists argue that the former USSR was a variant of state capitalism whose collapse does not affect the veracity of Marxism.
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At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he ... wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
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Marx's theory of religion (Marx and Engels 1975:38 f) must be viewed as an aspect of his general theory of society. Like many others in his era, Marx too was critical of religion. Unlike them... Marx did not seek to criticize the logic of religion as a set of beliefs. Rather, he proposed that religion reflects society, therefore any criticism of religion must ipso facto be a criticism of society itself. "Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics ." Religion for Marx is a human product. "Man makes religion, religion doesn't make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again." In short, what Marx proposes is that religion does not reflect man's true consciousness.
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By the time Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, worker uprisings had broken out in Germany and several other European countries. Marx and Engels moved to Germany where they wrote articles, attacking the government. By 1849... the European governments had crushed all the revolts. Marx concluded that the revolts had been premature.
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Marx took a firm stand against the charge that his ideology represented an ‘abstract utopia’. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, Ernst Bloch reviewed it in terms of a ‘concrete utopia’. The chief advocate of Marxism in German literature in the first half of the 20th c. is Brecht and in literary criticism and aesthetics G. Lukács. Marx's own sustained interest in literature and aesthetics (re-examined by S. S. Prawer in Marx and World Literature, 1976) resulted in his appraisal of ‘realistic’ (as distinct from ‘naturalistic’) literary production, and in all manner of imaginative writing he insisted on the congruence of form and convincing substance. Werke, Schriften, Briefe (7 vols.) ed. H. J. Lieber, P. Furth, and B. Kautsky, appeared 1960-9. A complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels (some 100 vols.) began to appear under the auspices of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the German Democratic Republic in 1975.
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Marx and Engels