Karl Marx, a 19th century thinker

I’m interested in the history of the 19th century and its most important ideas. Karl Marx is obviously part of this history. But in order to understand Marx, one has to understand the difference between Marx and what was called Marxism, which was the dominant way in which Marx was thought about until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The Marx I’m interested in is the Marx who lived in the 19th century and wrote for other people in the 19th century.

Karl Marx birthplace in Trier, Germany. wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, in a town called Trier. His father was a lawyer, and his parents were converted Jews. The Prussians had originally emancipated the Jews but then took a lot of those rights back, so the family had to convert.

Marx grew up in Trier. He became a journalist after attending university in Berlin, and he came to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the prime critical journals of the Rhineland. This journal was banned by the Prussian authorities at the end of 1843, so in 1844 he went to Paris. There, he met up with various socialists; he became in favour of a revolution and called himself a communist. At that time, a communist was mainly associated with travelling artisans on the one side and radical intelligentsia on the other. These were the two groups for which he wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

A new combination of ideas

Marx combined two ideas which no one else during the period had put together. The first was the mounting concern, which had developed in the 1830s and 1840s, about what was called the social question. That was the condition of the proletariat, or the new working class, which had emerged with the development of factories and the transformation of textile production, iron and steel.

The second idea was one that Marx had taken from Hegel, in particular from The Phenomenology of Spirit: the self-making of man, and the transformation of man, through his labour. This idea implied that history was the humanisation of nature, and this went against the predominant socialist and radical view, which was materialist, meaning that man was determined by his environment. What Marx argued, on the other hand, was that man, through his activity, transforms the environment. That is the reason why there has been historical development of such a dynamic kind.

How man transforms himself

Later on, when Marx develops his communism, he associates that activity of man with what he calls the forces of production. Through the development of the forces of production, man also transforms himself and this is the way in which history is developed. More specifically, this is the way that capitalism has developed, because it invents new ways of doing things. And that, in turn, changes the relations between people, in other words what he calls the relations of production.

This process is a denial, however, of the original sociability of man. In Marx’s definition of man, he argued against conventional philosophy that one doesn’t start with “I”, the ego; one starts with “I and thou”, and therefore history had started with human community. But that had been transformed by private property. Private property had deformed that harmonious social relationship, and yet it had also produced developments of the kind of which capitalism was the example.

Chartist meeting on 10 April 1848 at Kennington Common. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Marx thought that, with the development of a working-class movement in the 1840s, there would eventually be a revolution which would restore the original sociability of man. What happened, of course, was that in 1848 there were revolutions, but this communist ideal didn’t have much to do with the actual course of the revolutions, which was very disenchanting. Marx was forced to think again.

Capitalism as an organism

Recovering from the failure of the revolution while in exile in London, looking at the British Museum, Marx begins to study political economy in a more serious way. He studied Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other political economists in order to understand how capitalism – or commercial societies, as it was mainly called – worked as a system. The theory he develops is one in which, following the intellectual revolution at the end of the 18th century, capitalism is thought of not as a set of mechanical interactions, but as an organism.

In other words, there’s a whole which is determining capitalism. It is also developing into a worldwide system. In the 1850s, Marx tries to develop his theory. Once again, he owes a lot to Hegel, in this case to the Hegelian idea that reality is somehow circular: what starts off in a very small way becomes larger and larger, making ever increasing circles. This is how commodity production develops in the economic world and eventually becomes world capitalism, determining economic relations in all particular countries. So this system will develop by incorporating more and more, transforming pre-capitalist relations into capitalist relations. And once it has reached its apogee, it will begin to collapse. Like any organism, it has a beginning, grows, develops and then has an ending.

Marx and Engels think that when the next big downturn comes in the development of capitalism, then you’ll have another episode of revolution and that will bring about the end of capitalism, as they’d hoped. However, in 1857-58, there is a world economic crisis, but with no political impact whatsoever. The countries carry on as before; they barely notice what has happened at the level of the economy, although those changes were quite substantial.

From disenchantment to hope

This was very demoralising for Marx. He had produced a skeleton for the whole of his theory of capitalism in a book called the Grundrisse, meaning sketch, but he never gets to the chapter about capital itself. This shows how disturbed he was at that moment, because he has a chapter on money, but he never gets through to writing what the book is really going to be about. So 1859-60 was a very low point in his life.

In the 1860s, there are a number of hopeful developments. The 1850s have been a period of inaction and repression. Nothing much is happening which is of any real help to the progressives at the time. But in the 1860s, new things start happening. There’s the Italian Risorgimento, there’s the American Civil War and there’s the development of the International Workingmen’s Association, which had originally been started in 1863. Marx joins that and becomes part of the committee. He gets very excited and involved in it.

Lord Derby, Tory Prime Minister, and Benjamin Disraeli, Chancellor of the Exchequer, "dish" their opponents by introducing more liberal reforms than the Whigs/Liberals had contemplated. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

That’s combined with various other hopeful domestic developments in Britain. First of all, cooperative production has developed in many places on a large scale. Trade unions have grown and developed. These are combined with the growth of the reform movement, which wants to expand the suffrage and ensure the representation of working men – not women – in parliament. That culminates in the Second Reform Act of 1867, which increases the franchise by a large amount.

A new period of Marx’s development

This is a period of great hope, not just in these political events but for Marx’s own development. In 1867, he finally produces his book on capital. It’s unfinished, but it is still a major achievement and expresses a lot of what he wants to say. The 1860s is the moment when Marx also gets over 1848 and begins to think about revolution in a different way. Revolution is not, he now thinks, an event, but rather a process.

When Marx writes Capital, he describes the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which took place over two centuries. For him, the development of socialism is also now more of a process than an event. He doesn’t think there’s going to be a big bang, which will be a revolution; rather, there are developments on many fronts which are gradually pushing capitalism towards a more social existence. One of his great achievements is to formulate the social democratic language of the transition from capitalism to socialism, as it comes to influence thinkers thereafter.

Discover more about

Marx in context

Stedman Jones, G. (2016). Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Harvard University Press.

Moggach, D., & Stedman Jones, G. (Eds.). (2018). The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought. Cambridge University Press.

Understanding Marx in context