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Karl Marx: Paris Manuscripts
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Marx's next work, The Civil War in France (1871), analysed the experience of the short-lived revolutionary government established in Paris during the Franco-German War, known as the Paris Commune. In this work Marx interpreted the formation and existence of the Commune as a historical confirmation of his theory of the necessity for workers to seize political power by armed insurrection and then to destroy the capitalist state; he hailed the Commune as “the finally discovered political form under which the economic emancipation of labour could take place”. This theory was explicitly projected in The Gotha Programme (1875; trans. 1922): “Between the capitalist and communist systems of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, whose state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. During his residence in England Marx ... contributed articles on contemporary political and social events to newspapers in Europe and the United States.
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In Paris Marx discovered a hothouse of innumerable socialist sects. A proposed journal collapsed, and he plunged into a program of exhasutive readfing in politics, history and economics. In 1844 Marx composed a series of treatises known as the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" or "Paris Manuscripts," in which he finally espoused "communism". He began a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels, whose father was a partner in a cotton firm in the English city of Manchester. Engels supplied Marx with a practical knowledge of the daily workings of capitalism, as well as generous cash subsidies and the one firm intellectual friendship that lasted until death.
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On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. In 1843, he moved to Paris, the centre of socialist thought. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a communist and began to associate with leftist societies of French and German workingmen. Under the pressure from the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from France and went to Brussels where he renounced his Prussian nationality. He later moved to London where he died in 1883. He is buried in London at Highgate cemetery.
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Marx wrote hundreds of articles, brochures, and reports but few books as such. He published only five books during his lifetime. Two of them were polemical, and three were political-economic. The first, The Holy Family (1845), written in collaboration with Engels, was a polemic against Marx's former teacher and Young Hegelian philosopher Bruno Bauer. The second was Misère de la philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy), written by Marx himself in French and published in Paris and Brussels in 1847. As its subtitle indicates, this polemical work was "An Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon."
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In the beginning of 1845 Marx was expelled from Paris by the Guizot government. Just as the Prussian government had once terminated Marx's editorial career as a result of protests from Russia, so the French government now acted to expel him upon representations of Prussia, which had been offended by the antiroyalist comments of the socialist paper Vorwaerts on which he collaborated. Marx moved to Brussels and established contacts with the German refugees who had taken shelter there. In particular, he sought out the remaining members of the dissolved League of the Just, an international revolutionary movement and eagerly cultivated relations not only with German but ... with Belgian and other socialist individuals and organizations. He had become a professional revolutionary, writing, lecturing, and conspiring in the service of a revolution which he, like his newly found comrades, believed imminent. From then on, as Isaiah Berlin has said, "His personal history which up to this point can be regarded as a series of episodes in the life of an individual [became] inseparable from the general history of socialism in Europe."
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Marx's hopes of teaching philosophy at Bonn University were frustrated by the reactionary policy of the Prussian government. He then turned to writing and journalism for his livelihood. In 1842 he became editor of the liberal Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, but it was suppressed by the Berlin government the following year. Marx then moved to Paris. There he first came in contact with the working class, gave up philosophy as a life goal, and undertook his serious study of economics.
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Paris Manuscripts