Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals

Retrieving Marx for the Future

Robert X. Ware

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319977157
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319977164
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Highlights major differences and perspectives from major contemporary studies of Marx 

Centers around discussion of structures, organizations, and collectives in Marx's emphasis on emancipation and democracy

Especially focused on philosophical and theoretical issues but is widely accessible to readers in other disciplines

Part IGoals and Methodology

© The Author(s) 2019

Robert X. WareMarx on Emancipation and Socialist GoalsMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97716-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Emancipation and Retrievals

Robert X. Ware^{1, 2}

(1)

University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

(2)

Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Robert X. Ware

End Abstract

At the age of 17, Karl Marx set off from Trier, a small and ancient city in western Prussia (although recently a part of France), where he was born 5 May 1818. He left for university studies first in Bonn and soon afterwards in Berlin. He went to study law but “felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy” as he wrote to his father in 1837¹ (MECW 1, p. 11). He immersed himself in the work of Hegel , the great German philosopher who, at his death in 1831, had left an elaborate and complex system of ideas about concepts and change that dominated the philosophical and intellectual landscape of the time—and continues to be important in the history of philosophy . Marx was focused on these ideas and their development, but he also immersed himself in all aspects of university life.

His activities included writing lyrical poetry, all of which he sent to his beloved the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen , whom he had left behind in Trier. Jenny waited years for Karl’s return. Finally in 1843 they began their long but impoverished married life together, during which she dedicated herself to the goals she shared with Marx, committed to both his intellectual and his political life. In those early poems that he sent her, Marx reported to his father that the poems were “marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling … everything built out of … complete opposition between what is and what ought to be” (MECW 1, p. 11). This was a harbinger for both Marx and Jenny .² The point for both of them, from beginning to end, was to change the world,³ which they pursued with resoluteness and passion.

Throughout his life, Marx raged against the bourgeois capitalist corporate system, sometimes burying his head in books, research, and writing and sometimes virtually consuming himself in helping others, especially revolutionaries (including refugees from the Paris Commune in 1871), and playing a prominent role in associations, especially the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA , based in London from 1864 to 1872).⁴ He had a deep antipathy throughout his life towards those who had virtually complete political and economic power and a distrust of those who promoted fantasy and utopian solutions. From the beginning and throughout his life, Marx fought against injustices and inequality which he considered were inherent in state power and corporate control. Those had to be overcome, but he knew he had to understand the world with all its corruption and robbery of the alienated, but upright, workers who produced for society.

In Marx’s endeavour to understand the world—with the point of changing it—he was fortunate in associating with another person, Frederick Engels (1820–1895),⁵ who stood by him, supported him, and wrote and criticized with him, with intellectual vigour and literary adeptness. Even before Marx and Engels had met in Paris in 1844, Engels had moved to Manchester where he helped run the family business (based in Germany) and where he met his life partner Mary Burns, an Irish working-class radical who introduced him to the conditions of workers in England. Engels was an inquisitive observer of the times with a strong sympathy for the workers and a keen interest in understanding the system that oppressed them. The result was a stunning and influential work, The Condition of the Working-Class in England: From Personal Observations and Authentic Sources (MECW 4, pp. 297–596; 1845) which made a strong impression on Marx.

Engels’ work was perceptive and well written showing the stark conditions in Manchester, but most importantly it described the radical times and revolutionary culture and revealed Engels’ communist ideas, even at a young age. Engels was at the forefront (probably with some influence on Marx) in supporting workers’ unions and the growing movements of Chartism and socialism (MECW 4, pp. 501–529, in section “Labour Movements”). Marx and Engels were unique among socialists in their day in supporting trade unions. (See Draper 1978, pp. 81–146, for convincing evidence, and Chap. 6 for further discussion.) Engels also described the literary sophistication of the workers who read editions of authors that “the bourgeoisie owns only [in] castrated editions … cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today” (MECW 4, p. 528). Among the most noteworthy, according to Engels , was “Shelley , the genius, the prophet, Shelley” (MECW 4, p. 528)⁶ whose revolutionary credentials were also acknowledged by Marx. Marx’s daughter Eleanor reported that her father, “who understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists,” said that people “grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.”⁷

Some passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) that were well known by the workers (but not the landlords and bosses with their expurgated versions) give a sense of what Engels knew about the working-class culture and what Marx and his family discovered when they moved to London in 1849 for the rest of Marx’s and Jenny’s lives, first in Soho and then near Hampstead Heath. Shelley’s poem “To Liberty” begins:

O let not Liberty

Silently perish;

May the groan and the sigh

Yet the flame cherish

Till the voice to Nature’s bursting heart given,

Ascending loud and high,

A world’s indignant cry,

And startling on his throne

The tyrant grim and lone,

Shall beat the deaf vault of Heaven. (Shelley 2014, p. 15)

The workers also knew “The Mask of Anarchy” which ends:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few. (Shelley 2014, p. 368)

It was a working-class culture that Marx valued as a connoisseur of literature and whose goal was to change the world. He recognized Shelley as a revolutionary who wrote for the workers. But it was not just the culture that Engels introduced to Marx. Engels also knew the theoretical importance of the economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who needed to be understood and criticized. Engels had already written some of the preliminaries in his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” in 1843 (MECW 3, pp. 418–443). This set Marx, who was already concerned about the economy and its social effects, on his life-long project of understanding the structure and workings of what was coming to be known as capitalism. From 1845, Marx and Engels became close collaborators with Engels as a supporter, contributor, and eventually executor.

After Marx was expelled from France, he moved to Brussels with his family and was joined by Engels where they wrote some of the most influential joint writings in their career. The German Ideology (1846) was a massive work on German philosophy and the beginning of their ideas about the materialist conception of history. It was virtually unknown, but now widely read and quoted, after it finally saw the light of day in the first English version in 1964! They left the work incomplete and “abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice … since we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification” as Marx reported years later (MECW 29, p. 264).⁸

Soon afterwards, still in Brussels, they were drawn into their politically most influential work by accepting the decision of the Communist League that they write The Communist Manifesto . The final document, which had as a basis Engels’ Principles of Communism (1847), was completed by Marx, accepted by the League, and then published in 1848. Since then it has been translated and published throughout the world and is the focus of anyone who has wanted a primer to Marxism or who wants to reignite their passion for change.⁹ Writing the preface in 1888 for the English edition after Marx’s death, Engels said that he was “bound to state that the fundamental proposition [the] nucleus, belongs to Marx” (MECW 26, p. 517). That proposition Engels continued is:

that in every historical epoch , the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up [and explains that] the whole history of mankind … has been a history of class struggles.

[A] stage has been reached [in that history] where the exploited...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Goals and Methodology
• Part II. Social Relations and Organizations
• Part III. Nations, Morality, and Democracy
• Part IV. Reflecting on Transitions and Futures
• Back Matter