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Karl Marx: Paris Manuscripts
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Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier in western German, the son of a successful Jewish lawyer. Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, but was ... introduced to the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach. In 1841, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Jena. In 1843, after a short spell as editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, Marx and his wife Jenny moved to Paris, a hotbed of radical thought. There he became a revolutionary communist and befriended his life long collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Expelled from France, Marx spent two years in Brussels, where his partnership with Engels intensified.
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Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism.
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Marx, the radical liberal, completed his conversion to socialism in the heady atmosphere of Paris. It was here that, sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration with Engels, he wrote those early works that served to define his new philosophical and political position and helped to sever the ties that had bound him to his erstwhile Young Hegelian companions. Some of these writings appeared as articles in a short-lived review, Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher, which he edited with Arnold Ruge. Most... like the now famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology (which was completed in Brussels), were never published during his lifetime, having been written primarily as a means for intellectual self-clarification. The Holy Family, his final settling of accounts with the key figures of the Young Hegelian "family," appeared in Frankfort in 1845. It received little attention since it appeared to most readers, not without reason, as a tedious family quarrel within the ranks of the Hegelian Left.
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Marx moved to London in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in 1851.[12] In 1855, the Marx family suffered a blow with the death of their son, Edgar, from tuberculosis.[13] Meanwhile, Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. This work ... was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. This work, that was published posthumously under the editorship of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the Fourth book of Capital, and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.
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In Paris Marx not only had an opportunity to study novel doctrines, but he ... was able to meet a number of radicals in person. Among the emigres, he was especially attracted to the Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin, and among the Germans, he frequented the radical poets Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand Freiligrath, the revolutionary itinerant tailor Wilhelm Weitling, and the radical left-Hegelian writer Arnold Ruge. Among the Frenchmen Marx met in person, Proudhon may have made the strongest impression. Marx had already read his What Is Property? in Cologne and had praised it very highly. At first the two seemed to be made for each other, but after a fairly short period the friendship dissolved.
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At the same time as Engels, Marx took part in the political and philosophical struggle of his times, writing the Communist Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848, although the two events had nothing to do with each other. Marx had broken with his university environment, German Idealism and the Young Hegelians, and took part in the debates of the European workers' movement, in particular in relation with the First International founded in 1864. He published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, a few years before the 1871 Paris Commune. The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was given added impetus by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1917 October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular "Marxist" interpretations of it during this period is a point of controversy; he himself once said that "the only thing I know is that I'm not a Marxist" (in response to the views of a French Social-Democratic Party). While Marx's ideas have declined in popularity, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet regime, they are still very influential today, both in academic circles, some worker movements, and in political practice, and Marxism continues to be the official ideology of some Communist states and political movements.
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