The theory and practice of communism; Marx and Engels

Now for a man says Marx the root of things is man himself. So he called for a new order based on a proletarian revolution and the free classless society. It was in this period in September 1840 far that he came into contact with Friedrich Engels and so began one of the great common ventures and cooperations of all time. Collaboration angles was the decisive influence in Karl Marx's life. And many people have called him Karl Marx's alter ego. Friedrich Engels was born environment in 1820 his father was a very well-to-do manufacture and a partner in a great textile firm at Amman and angles in addition to plants in Germany. They had a very profitable cotton spinning enterprise in Manchester. The mother was a cultured woman the daughter of a principal of a high school in her and a descendant of the Scottish Duke of

Argyll. The family was Calvinist and very strictly pious and young Friedrich rebelled against this Calvinism. To him the release too came with little left regalia nism and Strauss's like of Jesus. Angles was one of the people who joined the doctor or club the doctor's club in Berlin that I mentioned. He had to join it under a pseudonym Dr. Oswald is what he called himself. He was serving in the pression army at the time it wouldn't have been nice for him to be a member of such a subversive organisation. He achieved a reputation even then for a philosophical and literary writing notably a polemic against the idealist shelling who had been especially call to Berlin to give three lectures as a reply to the young he gave me and the end of 1840 to Engels went to England and there he became acquainted personally with the leaders of British reformism. You knew Fergus O'Conor the great Chartist

leader. He knew Robert Owen. He attended on night meetings he wrote articles for Owen's newspaper the new moral world. 1943 he came into contact with the Communist Workers Educational Society founded in London in 1840 by three German refugees. Meanwhile he read Marx's articles in the German French annals published in Paris and was much impressed by what he read there. So in 1844 he went to visit Karl Marx in Paris and the two men had an intellectual love affair from the start. They realized that they had reached complete agreement on all important theoretical points. Engels wrote an outline for a critique of political economy for Marxist newspaper and Marx described it as a work of genius. Praise that he did not give often to others. Their first collaboration was a work to which the publisher gave the interesting name of the highly

gifted me the Holy Family. In 1844 it was a tract of over three hundred pages. They reasoned they wrote so many pages was that if it was a book it avoided a certain type of censorship that had been restricted only to newspaper articles so they made everything long to get over this law. It was a very long track against Bruno Bauer and his brother Edgar and against utopian socialism in general. Marx and Engels insisted that socialism must be the outcome of historical evolution brought about by self-conscious and independent movement of the working class. They did not like the sort of emotional wishy washiness of the utopian socialists and believe that socialism should be based on a far more scientific propositions. Thanks to pression secret agents in Paris and a protest by the Prussian

government in January 1840 five marks and half dozen other German revolutionaries were expelled from Paris. Marx needed money badly and Engels made the first in a life long series of contributions. Marx moved to Brussels and Engels joined him there for further collaboration. The first outcome of this was their theses on fire. Which is a critique of what was then and this still known by the technical expression of vulgar materialism. This phrase to distinguish it from dialectical materialism. Also the theses on Feuerbach were for revolutionary very revolutionary practical dynamic historical dialectical materialism and we shall have much more to say about that when we discuss the philosophy of Marxism. It was these theses on Feuerbach that contains the famous sentence under number 11 of the thesis number 11.

Philosophers have done nothing more than interpret the world in various ways. But our business is to change it. The second work that was the result of the common labors was a work called The Duchy deal of the German idiology a few extracts from it will tell you something of its tone. For example quoting in sharp contrast with German philosophy which came down from heaven to earth. He's talking about it again in this and here in ascent is made from earth to heaven. Or another we may distinguish human beings from animals by consciousness by religion by anything you please but they themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their own means of subsistence. A step which is necessitated by their bodily constitution in as much as human beings produce their own means of subsistence. They interact we produce their own material life. End

of quote. If you stop to think about it this is a very interesting approach to a definition of what makes humans humans rather than animals. I mention it also because one of the names of Marxian socialism is scientific socialism. Marx him self never called it after himself or to Marx his socialism was always called scientific socialism. And this is what I meant when I said we must remember that Marx is a child of the nineteenth century. And why I paid special attention to Darwinism. This became an overriding passion in the 19th century that science was the key to all of man's problems and this is why Karl Marx and all of the scientific socialists rely so heavily so so heavily on analogies with the physical and biological sciences. Let me make another quotation from the German idiology. The necessities of life they write are above all food drink shelter clothing and a few others. Hence the first historical

act is the production of the means for the satisfaction of these needs. The production of material life itself and this one historical fact is a fundamental determinant of all history. End of quote. This is why they make the distinction I might add between natural history and human history human history is different from Natural History in that it does progress according to certain other laws dealing with man's consciousness sophistication and ability to provide for his own livelihood to produce. Another quotation as individuals express their lives so they are. Just what they are coincides with what they produce. And not only with what they produce but how they produce it. Consequently what individuals are depends upon the material conditions of production and of course. I don't want to go further into this at

this point but I hope you understand from this why for example the Fabian Socialists didn't take to Marxism they felt that it was too mechanical too biological and so illogical that it left too much out of the human personality. Now others have gone to the extreme of saying that Karl Marx was guilty. I have used the phrase before vulgar materialism. There is the famous German sentence man is us man this man is what he eats. This is the most vulgar expression of vulgar materialism that I know and a lot of detractors of Karl Marx accused him of this brand of vulgar materialism. This is a libel against Marx but on the other hand sentences such as this do give rise to serious doubts as to how human Marx thought humans were. If he saw if he was capable of saying that what an individual is depends upon the material conditions of production.

Another statement for us writes Marx communism is not a state of affairs which ought to be established. It is not an ideal towards which reality has to direct itself. When we speak of communism we mean the actual movement going on now. Which makes an end of the present state of affairs. This whole question of human nature and how Marx saw humans I should say that this is one of the great debates among Marxists themselves these days. Eric from a name known I hope to many of you has issued a book directed at the writings of the so called Young marks their younger Marks has become a kind of cult. Among communists in Eastern Europe today who are chafing against the. More inhuman or inhumane aspects of communism in the Soviet

Union and in their own countries and who are always eager to point out how very humanistic Marx was especially in his younger days. I'm happy to point out that not only has this cult of the young Marx been accepted in communist Eastern Europe but now the orthodox Marx ins are saying there never was much of a difference between the young Marx and the little Marx and the old Marx and this that Marx was always a humanist. Well I don't want to go into the rights and wrongs of that except to say that it makes me personally happy that so many Marxists are willing to agree on humanism as a basis for a cause for their actions. Marx accused Haykel of looking at humans as being simply puppets jerked on the stage of life by strings that he called ideas Feuerbach described humans as flesh and blood. But the people who didn't know how to go about their own business on the stage of life. But Marx It is said made out humans to

be independent actors performing their own drama with no prompter in the wings and no God up in the sky. And the play being a rational one. Progressing from act to act with the sense of conscious fulfillment. And yet all in accordance with the laws of good drama that is in accordance with the basic laws of universal development. This raises all kinds of problems which I hope we can bring up later. Let me mention only one more work of Marx's before the famous communist manifesto of 1848. And that is in 1847 his music and the life philosophy. The poverty of philosophy. This is a rather witty title to give because the book was meant to be a reply to prove Doan's book on the system of economic contradictions or the philosophy of poverty the importance of this work is not that it was not simply a literary massacre of an opposing point of view and socialism but in this work Marx for the first time gives a

concrete account of the materialist conception of history which one finds very soon after in the Communist Manifesto. In this work the basic theme was. That economic production and the social stratification which it produces differ from age to age in history and that these differences account for the differences in political and cultural the complection is of one epoch as opposed to another. As the means of production changed Karl Marx insisted so the rest changes and this is what makes one age in history so different from another. And throughout all of these changes is a struggle between the dominant class and the exploited class and this struggle will go on until the working class arises and the revolution will inaugurate a new classless society. And then the struggle will end real history will begin.

Now in many ways this reads like a rough draft of the Communist Manifesto. Now as to the manifesto itself this is the masterpiece. The SHArc pamphlet written in what I hope you'll find a vivid style. That marks was never to duplicate I'm sorry to say was that once a lesson in history it was a critical analysis of society and its economy. It's a program of action and it is a prophecy. How did it come to be written. First we've already mentioned a society of German refugees in London. There were such groups in France and in Belgium too. They were organized into something they called the League of the just. They wanted to unite and they held a Congress in London in the summer of 1847 and Engels attended. They held the second Congress that December also in London both angles and marks were there and were commissioned to draw up the basic principles of this new society. They returned

to Brussels angles drew up a programme in the form of a catechism 25 questions and answers and it please neither Marx nor Engels and so Marx drew up a statement of his own which pleased angles very much. This was the famous communist manifesto. This document is a historical landmark in his work on Marx. Isaiah Berlin calls it very nearly a work of genius. No other modern political movement or cause can claim to have produced anything comparable to it in eloquence and power as an instrument of destructive propaganda it has no equal anywhere. Its effect upon succeeding generations is unparalleled. Outside religious history had its author written nothing else it would have ensured his lasting fame and quote. Let me read just the beginning of it it has a clarion call. Opening a specter is haunting Europe the specter of communism. All the

powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise the Specter pope and SAR Metternich and French radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power where the opposition that has not heard all the branding reproach of communism against the more advanced opposition parties as well as against its reactionary adversaries. Two things result from this fact. First communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power and to it is high time that communist should openly in the face of the whole world publish their views their aims their tendencies and meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with the manifesto of the party itself. To this and Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto to be published in English French German

Italian Flemish and Danish languages. The first sentence of part 1. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles and on it goes through. What is really a short number of pages considering everything that he has crammed into this Communist Manifesto. It ends in the same defiant way. It begins the communists deign to conceal their views and aims. They openly declared that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. What we have in the Communist Manifesto then is first the clarion call to action then an outline of history as seen by Marx described in

terms of the struggle between oppressor and the oppressed. Then a description of the bourgeoisie that is the oppressors of the capitalist epoch and the proletarians that is the oppressed working class. Then there is a section on the communists and their aims. Then a denunciation of other brands of socialism and finally the prophecy of revolution. The Communist Manifesto came in the same year as the revolutions of 1848 hit most of the countries of Europe. This is not the place to describe those revolutions. They interest us only because 1848 was the only time in Marx's life that he was involved in a revolution. He realized that 1848 was substantially a middle class affair against the feudal old regime and the basic strategy that he proposed was an alliance of workers with the middle class to fight against what he called the enemies of our enemies. The Revolution of 1848 took both

Marx and Engels by surprise in the soon as he could Marx went to Paris and from there to Germany where the revolution soon broke out. Marx Engels and others published the site in the new Rhenish newspaper in Cologne which waged war against all compromises. Soon Marx Engels and others were arrested and the case was brought to court February 8th 1849 marks made such a brilliant defense in the courtroom it was actually a lecture that the jury not only acquitted him but the foreman of the jury in the name of the jury thanked the accused for his interesting and instructive speech. The pression government would not let matters stand there and eventually ordered Marks out of the country. Twenty four hours from Marks quickly sold all the family belongings she could including the family silver and she marks and three little children went abroad to a life of poverty. They went from pillar to post and finally to

Paris where the police also ordered marks out in 24 hours. So they went to London where marks lived the rest of his life for 35 years. Karl Marx's life in England was a life of suffering. Jenny Mark says later today that Meyer. Is one of the most poignant and sad documents in all of history describing the death of the child and the living conditions. The son Edgar died in his father's arms at the age of nine. They lost their Prussian citizenship could never go home again. Angle's kept him going financially though Engels himself had little until he was able to inherit his father's fortune. In 1862 an international exhibition a kind of World's Fair was held in London and various worker societies took the opportunity to send delegates to London to found what became known as the international workingmen's

Association the first international marks generally held himself aloof from organisations that he himself did not organize but he consented to join this one. When German artisans in London asked him to represent them this first international founded in 1864. Ask Marx to draw up an inaugural address and Marx did in a little over a dozen pages. The aim of this remarkable document was to provide a mass movement with practical objectives and immediate tasks. As such this ranks only second only to the Communist Manifesto. Here are a few sentences from it. The emancipation that the emancipation of the working class must be won by the working class themselves. That the economics objection of the man of labor to the monopolize or of the means of labor lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms of social misery mental degradation and political dependence that the economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great and to which every

political movement ought to be subordinate as a means. This document ended with the same words as the Communist Manifesto. Workers of the world unite. The International quickly spread across Europe. Marx rarely attended its Congresses but did control many of its activities from London. Marx's great work was of course the three volume Das Capitale capital. The last two volumes were published in 1885 in 1890 for after his death Volume 1 appeared in 1867. It was indeed an epoch making book. You must not suppose that it was about communism as its title implies it was about capitalism. And this is why it is one searches in vain in Marx's greatest work to see what he really thought socialism ought to be. What he's really talking about there is what capitalism is and shouldn't be. This is a comprehensive

treatise on the laws and structure of modern society in Marx's own words his aim was quote to discover the economic laws of motion in modern society. The work deals with the economic theory with history sociology and propaganda. And yet does not fit a single one of these descriptions. This is not the place to even attempt to summarize. To summarize its contents. As for an evaluation let me turn again to serve Isaiah Berlin. Quoting him the publication of dust Capi Tal had at least provided a definite intellectual foundation for international socialism in the place of a scattered mess. They defined and conflicting ideas. The interdependence of the historical economic and political theses preached by Marx and Engels was revealed in this monumental compilation. It became the central objective of attack and defense all subsequent forms of socialism hereafter

defined themselves in terms of their attitude towards a position taken in it and were understood and classified by their resemblance to it. After a brief period of obscurity its fame began to grow and reached an extraordinary height. It Choire the symbolic significance beyond anything written since the age of faith. It has been blindly worship and blindly hated by millions who have not read a line of it or who have read without understanding its obscure and torturous prose. End of quote. I find it significant that Karl Marx wanted to dedicate the book to Darwin. But Darwin politely refused the honor saying that he knew nothing about such matters. Marx's life after dusk is almost an anti-climax. There was a flurry of excitement in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War in the Paris Commune. Marx opposed the revolution on tactical grounds but supported it in his writings

after it took place for its propaganda value. Also there was the fight that I've mentioned before with but Kony and and the social revolutionaries are the anarchists. Whose International Alliance joined the Working Men's international nine hundred sixty eight and the fight between the two groups helped destroy both sides at a Congress at the Hague the International voted for its own dissolution and it died in Philadelphia in 1876. The difference between buck Union and Marx was well summarized I believe by Baconians himself. I quote but Marx is an authoritarian and centralizing communist. He wants what we want the complete triumph of economic and social equality. But he wants it in the state and through state power through the dictatorship of a very strong and so to say despotic provisional government that is by the negation of

liberty. His economic ideal is the state is the sole owner of the land and of all kinds of capital cultivating the land through well-paid agricultural associations under the management of state engineers and controlling all industrial and commercial associations with state capital. We want the same triumph of economic and social equality through the abolition of the state and of all that passes by the name of the law which in our view is the permanent negation of human rights. We want the reconstruction of society and the unification of mankind to be achieved not from above downwards by any sort of authority or by socialist officials and engineers and other accredited men of learning but from below upwards by the free Federation of all kinds of workers associations liberated from the yoke of the state and the world. I think you have your fairly good summary of how anarchist socialism differed from Marx

in socialism largely over the issue of the state and the state's despotic power. I might say that but Colin complained of another reason for the split between the new two of them but is Marxist jealousy vanity and ego ism. He's beginning to loathe everyone who will not bow the neck before him Baconian Wright's Marxist pamphlet against but Conan in 1873 shows the worst side of Marx. He lied he libeled the man. But Clinton was far from a sterling or admirable character. His friends leave us much evidence on this especially Hertz and but Marx violated all laws of decency and fairness in his treatment of Bakunin whereas Baconian frequently expressed respect for Mark's intellect and personal sacrifices. But 1878 Karl Marx was a physical wreck and he was unable to continue his work. The man suffered terribly from liver boils from bronchitis from

curacy and there is a kind of vulgar materialist interpretation of Marxism that says that we wouldn't had to have had Lenin or Stalin there whose job our bridge never crossed Seguin or North Vietnam or anything of the sort. If only Karl Marx didn't suffer from carbuncles I would say this was a simplification of history somewhat in the same line as Pascal's famous saying that if Cleopatra's nose had been a little longer all of history would have been different. Well. The truth is that for one reason or another Carl Barks was at odds with everyone including his own socialist son in law and many others. He was even incredibly rude to Engels who supported him and was this psychologically at least isolated. Jenny Marx whose wife died in December 1881 when Engels entered the house he said now the moor is dead too. Marx was definitely not the

same after his wife died he was doubly crippled. He went to Algiers for his health but the rain in the cold only made matters worse. And then in January 1883 his favored daughter also called Jenny died. And this was really the end of Karl Marx to who had long been prematurely old. Anyway he died on March 14th 1883. He had a very simple funeral attended by half a dozen friends. You have been listening to Professor Michael B Petrovich of the University of Wisconsin as he discussed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in another lecture drawn from the 1967 Wisconsin Alumni seminar on the theory and practice of communism. Next week I discussion of Marxism as a philosophy. These lectures are arranged for radio by W.H. a University of Wisconsin again almost speaking. This is the national educational radio network.