"κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί."
Thuc., i., 22.
Karl Marx was born in Treves in the year 1818, the son of a Jewish lawyer, who was later baptised into the Christian faith. Intelligence and general culture were at home in the house of his parents. The favourite authors of the family were Rousseau and Shakespeare, the latter of whom was the favourite poet of Karl Marx throughout life. An element of cosmopolitanism was conspicuous in the household life of the Marx family. Their closest intercourse was with the family von Westphalen, the parents of the later Prussian minister—the half-Scottish, highly cultured Baron Edgar. To this man the young Karl owed his first introduction to literature, and later to his wife Jenny.
Karl studied philosophy and history in Bonn, purposing to become a Prussian professor. By the year 1842 he came to the point of formal admission as lecturer. But difficulties soon presented themselves; the young Marx, then allied with Bruno Bauer, was carried away by the reactionary tendency which at that time swept again over the Prussian universities, especially over heretical Bonn. As customarily happens in such cases of aborted career, the young Marx became a journalist. Soon he emigrated, because in 1844 the Prussian police drove him out of the land; he fled to Paris, was thrown out again by Guizot on demand, we suppose, of Prussia; in 1845 he went to Brussels, returning to Germany during the year 1848; finally after the year 1849 he found rest in London from the pressure of the police. Here he lived until his death in the year 1883.
His personality, the characteristics of which were strikingly developed through the external circumstances of his life, was marked by extraordinary intellectual activity. He was a pitiless and positive critic in his very nature. He had an abnormally sharp vision for psychological and historical continuity, especially where these are based upon the less noble impulses of mankind. A word of Pierre Leroux's seems to me as if coined for Marx: "il etait ... fort pénétrant sur le mauvais côté de la nature humaine." So it was by nature easy for him to believe in Hegel's teaching that "evil" has accomplished all the development of mankind. His conception of the world is expressed in Wallenstein's magnificent words:
"To the bad spirit belongs the earth, not to the good; the good things that the gods send to us from above are to be held only in communal possession. Their light gives us joy, yet makes no man rich; in their kingdom there is no private possession."
What qualified Karl Marx to reach the first rank among the social philosophers of the nineteenth century, and to obtain next to Hegel and Darwin the greatest influence upon modern ideas, was the fact that he united a knowledge of the highest form of the historic philosophy of his time—Hegel—with a knowledge of the highest form of social life—that of Western Europe, of France, and especially of England. It was because he knew how to concentrate, as by a lens, all the rays of light which had been shed by other thinkers, and because he was able through his cosmopolitan experience to withdraw attention from the incidental features of national development, and to concentrate it upon what is typical in modern social life.
Marx, in common with his friend Friedrich Engels, in a large number of monographs, the best known of which is Capital, has laid the ground-lines of an amazing system of social philosophy; but this is not the place for a study of its particular features. What interests us much more at this time is the Marxian theory of social agitation, because this is especially what has enabled him to influence decisively the progress of social development. In no single book of his is this theory comprehensively presented. Yet we find all the essential elements of it in the celebrated "Communistic Manifesto" of Marx and Engels in the year 1847, which was presented as a programme to the "League of the Righteous" in Brussels; they accepted it and thus changed themselves into a "League of Communists." The "Communistic Manifesto" contained the principles of a philosophy of history, upon which the programme of a party is based. Its leading thoughts are these:
All history is the story of a struggle between classes; the history of the present is the story of the struggle between the middle class and the proletariat. The making of classes results from certain economic conditions of production and distribution, through which also social control is determined. "Immanent" forces (the expression does not occur in the "Communistic Manifesto," but becomes later a technical term) constantly revolutionise the conditions of production, and thus of all economic matters. In our time this organic change is accomplished with especial quickness, because the tremendous forces of production created by the middle class grow too fast. Thus on the one side the conditions of existence under the present capitalistic economy quickly deteriorate; upon the other side the conditions of existence tend to a social organisation without classes upon a basis of common production and communal ownership of the means of production (this formula, also, is not found in the "Communistic Manifesto," in which merely the abolition of private property is presented; but our phrase first occurs two years later, in the history of class struggle in France). This deterioration appears in the crises in which society feels itself "suddenly thrown back into a condition of momentary barbarism," and in the emergence of pauperism in which it plainly appears now
"that the middle class is unfit longer to remain the ruling class of society and to enforce the life condition of itself as the ruling law; it is unfit to rule because it is incapable of securing subsistence to its slave within the terms of his slavery, because it is compelled to let him sink into a position in which it must support him instead of being supported by him."
But the conditions of the new social order (this thought also is merely suggested in the "Communistic Manifesto" and only later, especially by Engels, is it developed) are created by an enormous increase of the forces of production and by the "communisation of the processes of production" which goes hand in hand with this increase—that is, the interweaving and combination of the individual acts of production, and transition to co-operative methods, etc.