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Karl Marx: Works
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Ironically, the Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of the working class achieving power for itself and ... seemingly vindicating Marx's vision, also proved the undoing of the International. although the Paris Commune was dominated by Proudhonians and latter-day Jacobins rather than by Marxists, Marx had risen to its defense in an eloquent address published under the title, The Civil War in France. But soon after the Commune was drowned in blood, the latent dissensions in the ranks of the International came to a head. The English trade unionists grew frightened; they feared to be associated in the mind of peaceful British workers with the "red terrorists of Paris." The French movement was shattered, and its exiled leaders, as is the wont of emigre politicians, fell to quarreling among themselves. Followers of Bakunin now attempted to grasp the opportunity to wrest control from Marx. In order to insure his continued domination of the International, Marx managed to have its seat transferred to the United States where his followers were in full control.
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[W]hy is it that Marx felt that the existence of classes meant that the relationship between them was one of exploitation? In feudal societies, exploitation often took the form of the direct transfer of produce from the peasantry to the aristocracy. Serfs were compelled to give a certain proportion of their production to their aristocratic masters, or had to work for a number of days each month in the lord’s fields to produce crops consumed by the lord and his retinue. In capitalist societies, the source of exploitation is less obvious, and Marx devoted much attention to trying to clarify its nature. In the course of the working day, Marx reasoned, workers produce more than is actually needed by employers to repay the cost of hiring them. This surplus value, as he called it, is the source of profit, which capitalists were able to put to their own use.
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According to Marx, the value of a product is based on the labor used to manufacture it. Marx pointed out that workers' wages fell far short of the price of the products they made. This was because the capitalists made a profit on what they sold. Marx called the profit "surplus value" and thought that it exploited the workers. Marx said that capitalists had alienated the worker from the results of his labor, forcing him to become "enslaved by the machine." This exploitation, argued Marx, would soon bring about a new class struggle that would end with the "violent overthrow" of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.
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Marx spent most of his working time in the British Museum, doing research both for his newspaper articles and his books. He was a most conscientious scholar, never satisfied with secondhand information but tracing facts and figures to their original sources. In preparation for Das Kapital, he read virtually every available work in economic and financial theory and practice in the major languages of Europe.
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Marx wrote that the industrial capitalists and others using private property to make profits made up the oppressive class of his time. Marx called this class the bourgeoisie, which used its wealth and control over government to exploit the industrial working class. Marx named this class the proletariat.
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[C]onsequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.
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