In Paris, where he had very intimate intercourse with Heinrich Heine, who always speaks of him with the greatest respect, and some of whose poems were suggested by Marx, the latter contributed to a Radical magazine, the Vorwärts; but in consequence of a request by the Prussian government, nearly the whole staff of the magazine soon got orders to leave France. Marx now went to Brussels, where he shortly afterwards was joined by Engels. In Brussels he published his second great work, La Misère de la philosophie, a sharp rejoinder to the Philosophie de la misère ou contradictions économiques of J. P. Proudhon. In this he deals with Proudhon, whom in the former work he had defended against the Bauers, not less severely than with the latter. It is shown that in many points Proudhon is inferior to both the middle-class economists and the socialists, that his somewhat noisily proclaimed discoveries in regard to political economy were made long before by English socialists, and that his main remedies, the “constitution of the labour-value” and the establishment of exchange bazaars, were but a repetition of what English socialists had already worked out much more thoroughly and more consistently. Altogether the book shows remarkable knowledge of political economy. In justice to Proudhon, it must be added that it is more often his mode of speaking than the thought underlying the attacked sentences that is hit by Marx’s criticism. In Brussels Marx and Engels also wrote a number of essays, wherein they criticized the German literary representatives of that kind of socialism and philosophic radicalism which was mainly influenced by the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, and deduced its theorems or postulates from speculations on the “nature of man.” They mockingly nicknamed this kind of socialism “German or True Socialism,” and ridiculed the idea that by disregarding historical and class distinctions a conception of society and socialism superior to that of the English and French workers and theorists could be obtained. Some of these essays were published at the time, two or three, curiously enough, by one of the attacked writers in his own magazine; one, a criticism of Feuerbach himself, was in a modified form published by Engels in 1885, but others have remained in manuscript. They were at first intended for publication in two volumes as a criticism of post-Hegelian German philosophy, but the Revolution of 1848 postponed for a time all interest in theoretical discussions.
In Brussels Marx and Engels came into still closer contact with the socialist working-class movement. They founded a German workers’ society, acquired a local German weekly, the Brüsseller deutsche Zeitung, and finally joined a communistic society of German workers, the “League of the Just,” a secret society which had its main branches in London, Paris, Brussels and several Swiss towns. For this league, which till then had adhered to the rough-and-ready communism of the gifted German workman Wilhelm Weitling, but which now called itself “League of the Communists,” and gave up its leanings towards conspiracy and became an educational and propagandistic body, Marx and Engels at the end of 1847 wrote their famous pamphlet, Manifest der Kommunisten. It was a concise exposition of the history of the working-class movement in modern society according to their views, to which was added a critical survey of the existing socialist and communist literature, and an explanation of the attitude of the Communists towards the advanced opposition parties in the different countries. Scarcely was the manifesto printed when, in February 1848, the Revolution broke out in France, and “the crowing of the Gallican cock” gave the signal for an upheaval in Germany such as Marx had prophesied. After a short stay in France, Marx and Engels went to Cologne in May 1848, and there with some friends they founded the Neue rheinische Zeitung, with the sub-title “An Organ of Democracy,” a political daily paper on a large scale, of which Marx was the chief editor. They took a frankly revolutionary attitude, and directed their criticism to a great extent against the middle-class democratic parties, who, by evading all decisive issues, delayed the achievement of the upheaval. When in November 1848 the king of Prussia dissolved the National Assembly, Marx and his friends advocated the non-payment of taxes and the organization of armed resistance. Then the state of siege was declared in Cologne, the Neue rheinische Zeitung was suspended, and Marx was put on trial for high treason. He was unanimously acquitted by a middle-class jury, but in May 1849 he was expelled from Prussian territory. He went to Paris, but was soon given the option of either leaving France or settling at a small provincial place. He preferred the former, and went to England. He settled in London, and remained there for the rest of his life.
At first he tried to reorganize the Communist League; but soon a conflict broke out in its ranks, and after some of its members had been tried in Germany and condemned for high treason, Marx, who had done everything to save the accused, dissolved the Communist League altogether. Nor was a literary enterprise, a review, also called the Neue rheinische Zeitung, more successful; only six numbers of it were issued. It contained, however, some very remarkable contributions; and a series of articles on the career of the French Revolution of 1848, which first appeared there, was in 1895 published by Engels in book form under the title of Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich von 1848” by Karl Marx.” Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets, published at that time, met with a very vehement criticism in the Neue rheinische Zeitung. The endeavours of Ernest Jones and others to revive the Chartist movement were heartily supported by Marx, who contributed to several of the Chartist journals of the period, mostly, if not wholly, without getting or asking payment. He lived at this time in great financial straits, occupied a few small rooms in Dean Street, Soho, and all his children then born died very young. At length he was invited to write letters for the New York Tribune, whose staff consisted of advanced democrats and socialists of the Fourierist school. For these letters he was paid at the rate of a guinea each. Part of them, dealing with the Eastern Question and the Crimean War, were republished in 1897 (London, Sonnenschein). Some were even at the time reprinted in pamphlet form. The co-operation of Marx, who was determinedly anti-Russian, since Russia was the leading reactionary power in Europe, was obtained by David Urquhart and his followers. A number of Marx’s articles were issued as pamphlets by the Urquhartite committees, and Marx wrote a series of articles on the diplomatic history of the 18th century for the Urquhartite Free Press (Sheffield and London, 1856-1857). When in 1859 the Franco-Austrian War about Italy broke out, Marx denounced it as a Franco-Russian intrigue, directed against Germany on the one hand and the revolutionary movement in France on the other. He opposed those democrats who supported a war which in their eyes aimed at the independence of the Italian nation and promised to weaken Austria, whose superiority in Germany was the hindrance to German unity. Violent derogatory remarks directed against him by the well-known naturalist Karl Vogt gave occasion to a not less violent rejoinder, Herr Vogt, a book full of interesting material for the student of modern history. Marx’s contention, that Vogt acted as an agent of the Bonapartist clique, seems to have been well founded, whilst it must be an open question how far Vogt acted from dishonourable motives. The discussions raised by the war also resulted in a great estrangement between Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle had taken a similar view of the war to that advocated by Vogt, and fought tooth and nail for it in letters to Marx. In the same year, 1859, Marx published as a first result of his renewed economic studies the book Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. It was the first part of a much larger work planned to cover the whole ground of political economy. But Marx found that the arrangement of his materials did not fully answer his purpose, and that many details had still to be worked out. He consequently altered the whole plan and sat down to rewrite the book, of which in 1867 he published the first volume under the title Das Kapital.
In the meantime, in 1864, the International Working Men’s Association was founded in London, and Marx became in fact though not in name, the head of its general council. All its addresses and proclamations were penned by him and explained in lectures to the members of the council. The first years of the International went smoothly enough. Marx was then at his best. He displayed in the International a political sagacity and toleration which compare most favourably with the spirit of some of the publications of the Communist League. He was more of its teacher than an agitator, and his expositions of such subjects as education, trade unions, the working day, and co-operation were highly instructive. He did not hurry on extreme resolutions, but put his proposals in such a form that they could be adopted by even the more backward sections, and yet contained no concessions to reactionary tendencies. But this condition of things was not permitted to go on. The anarchist agitation of Bakunin, the Franco-German War, and the Paris Commune created a state of things before which the International succumbed. Passions and prejudices ran so high that it proved impossible to maintain any sort of centralized federation. At the congress of the Hague, September 1872, the general council was removed from London to New York. But this was only a makeshift, and in July 1876 the rest of the old International was formally dissolved at a conference held in Philadelphia. That its spirit had not passed away was shown by subsequent international congresses, and by the growth and character of socialist labour parties in different countries. They have mostly founded their programmes on the basis of its principles, but are not always in their details quite in accordance with Marx’s views. Thus the programme which the German socialist party accepted at its congress in 1875 was very severely criticized by Marx. This criticism, reprinted in 1891 in the review Die neue Zeit, is of great importance for the analysis of Marx’s conception of socialism.
The dissolution of the International gave Marx an opportunity of returning to his scientific work. He did not, however, succeed in publishing further volumes of Das Kapital. In order to make it—and especially the part dealing with property in land—as complete as possible, he took up, as Engels tells us, a number of new studies, but repeated illness interrupted his researches, and on the 14th of March 1883 he passed quietly away.
From the manuscripts he left Engels compiled a second and a third volume of Das Kapital by judiciously and elaborately using complete and incomplete chapters, rough copies and excerpts, which Marx had at different times written down. Much of the copy used dates back to the ’sixties, i.e. represents the work as at first conceived by Marx, so that, e.g., the matter published as the third volume was in the main written much earlier than the matter which was used for compiling the second volume. The same applies to the fourth volume. Although the work thus comprises the four volumes promised in the preface to the book, it can only in a very restricted sense be regarded as complete. In substance and demonstration it must be regarded as a torso. And it is perhaps not quite accidental that it should be so. Marx, if he had lived longer and had enjoyed better health, would have given the world a much greater amount of scientific work of high value than is now the case. But it seems doubtful whether he would have brought Das Kapital, his main work, to a satisfactory conclusion.
Das Kapital proposes to show up historically and critically the whole mechanism of capitalist economy. The first volume deals with the processes of producing capital, the second with the circulation of capital, the third with the movements of capital as a whole, whilst the fourth gives the history of the theories concerning capital. Capital is, according to Marx, the means of appropriating surplus-value as distinguished from ground rent (rent on every kind of terrestrial property, such as land, mines, rivers, &c., based upon the monopolist nature of such property). Surplus-value is created in the process of production only, it is this part of the value of the newly created product which is not given to the workman as a return—the wage—of the labour-force he expended in working. If at first taken by the employer, it is in the different phases of economic intercourse split up into the profit of industrial enterprise, commercial or merchants’ profit, interest and ground rent. The value of every commodity consists in the labour expended on it, and is measured according to the time occupied by the labour employed on its production. Labour in itself has no value, being only the measure of value, but the labour-force of the workman has a value, the value of the means required to maintain the worker in normal conditions of social existence. Thus, in distinction to other commodities, in the determination of the value of labour-force, besides the purely economical, a moral and historical element enter. If to-day the worker receives a wage which covers the bare necessaries of life, he is underpaid—he does not receive the real value of his labour-force. For the value of any commodity is determined by its socially necessary costs of production (or in this case, maintenance). “Socially necessary” means, further, that no more labour is embodied in a commodity than is required by applying labour-force, tools, &c., of average or normal efficiency, and that the commodity is produced in such quantity as is required to meet the effective demand for it. As this generally cannot be known in advance, the market value of a commodity only gravitates round its (abstract) value. But in the long run an equalization takes place, and for his further deductions Marx assumes that commodities exchange according to their value.
That part of an industrial capital which is employed for installations, machines, raw and auxiliary materials, is called by Marx constant capital, for the value of it or of its wear and tear reappears in equal proportions in the value of the new product. It is otherwise with labour. The new value of the product must by necessity be always higher than the value of the employed labour-force. Hence the capital employed in buying labour-force, i.e. in wages, is called variable capital. It is the tendency of capitalist production to reduce the amount spent in wages and to increase the amount invested in machines, &c. For with natural and social, legal and other limitations of the working day, and the opposition to unlimited reduction of wages, it is not possible otherwise to cheapen production and beat competition. According to the proportion of constant to variable capital, Marx distinguishes capitals of lowest average and highest composition, the highest composition being that where proportionately the least amount of variable (wages) capital is employed.
The ratio of the wages which workmen receive to the surplus-value which they produce Marx calls the rate of surplus-value; that of the surplus-value produced to the whole capital employed is the rate of profit. It is evident, then, that at the same time the rate of surplus-value can increase and the rate of profit decrease, and this in fact is the case. There is a continuous tendency of the rates of profit to decrease, and only by some counteracting forces is their decrease temporarily interrupted, protracted, or even sometimes reversed. Besides, by competition and movement of capitals the rates of profit in the different branches of trade are pressed towards an equalization in the shape of an average rate of profits. This average rate of profits, added to the actual cost price of a given commodity, constitutes its price of production, and it is this price of production which appears to the empirical mind of the business man as the value of the commodity. The real law of value, on the contrary, disappears from the surface in a society where, as to-day, commodities are bought and sold against money and not exchanged against other commodities. Nevertheless, according to Marx, it is also to-day this law of value (“labour-value”) which in the last resort rules the prices and profits.
The tendency to cheapen production by increasing the relative proportion of constant capital—the fixed capital of the classical economist plus that portion of the circulating capital which consists of raw and auxiliary materials, &c.—leads to a continuous increase in the size of private enterprises, to their growing concentration. It is the larger enterprise that beats and swallows the smaller. The number of dependent workmen—“proletarians”—is thus continually growing, whilst employment only periodically keeps pace with their number. Capital alternately attracts and repels workmen, and creates a constant surplus-population of workmen—a reserve-army for its requirements—which helps to lower wages and to keep the whole class in economic dependency. A decreasing number of capitalists usurp and monopolize all the benefits of industrial progress, whilst the mass of misery, of oppression, of servitude, of depravation, and of exploitation increases. But at the same time the working class continuously grows in numbers, and is disciplined, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist mode of production. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of the mode of production reach a point where they will become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Then the knell of capitalist private property will have been rung. Those who used to expropriate will be expropriated. Individual property will again be established based upon co-operation and common ownership of the earth and the means of production produced by labour.