Revolutionary turmoil in Europe
In June 1843 Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of J.L. von Westphalen, got married. In October the young couple moved to Paris, then the centre of radical thinking and political activism in Europe, where Marx came in contact with men such as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Georg Herwegh (1817-1875), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), and Michail Bakunin (1814-1876), and where he planned to edit, together with Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), a literary-political magazine called the Deutsch- Franzosische Jahrbucher.
The first (and only) issue of these “yearbooks” was published in 1844. It contained inter alia Friedrich Engels’s contribution “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie” (“Outlines of a critique of political economy”) and two articles by Marx, “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish question”) and “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“A contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right”). Marx was very impressed by Engels’s contribution and the first meeting of the two men marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In Engels (1820-1895), the son of an industrialist from Barmen, Marx found a most congenial intellectual ally, who would subsequently stand by him in his scientific and political activities as a critical commentator, occasional co-author, generous financial helper, and editor of his unfinished works.Shortly after his meeting with Engels, in autumn 1844, Marx began to study seriously political economy. He filled several notebooks with excerpts and commentaries on the economic writings of Boisguilbert and the French physiocrats, and of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo (which he first read in French). He then used his “Paris notebooks” for drafting out a long text that he himself had not considered for publication, but which was published posthumously in 1932 as the so-called Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte von 1844 (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).
In these manuscripts Marx formulated a critique of Hegel’s philosophy and also discussed the specific forms that “alienation” assumes under capitalistic production relations. (On Marx’s early writings, see Colletti 1975.)In early 1845 Marx was expelled from France at the instigation of the Prussian embassy in Paris. With his wife and his newly born daughter “Jennychen” he flew to Brussels, where he continued to pursue his studies in political economy. In Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology), written jointly with Engels in 1845-46, he again discussed critically Hegel’s philosophy and developed the main ideas of what was to be called the materialist conception of history (on the so-called “dialectical materialism”, see Colletti 1969 [1973]), which he later summarized as follows in his celebrated “Introduction” to the critique of political economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.... In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.
The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production... but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. (Marx 1859 [1987]: 263-4)In 1846 Marx also published a scathing polemic against Proudhon, entitled Misere de la Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy) (1847) - thus ridiculing the title of Proudhon’s book Philosophie de la misere (Philosophy of Poverty) (1846). In this text as well as in a short tract on “Wage labour and capital”, which emanated from a set of lectures that he had delivered in 1847 at the German Workers’ Association in Brussels, Marx first set out his theory of value and surplus value. In Brussels, Marx and Engels also founded the “Communistisches Korrespondenz-Kommittee” (Communist Correspondence Committee) in early 1846, which aimed at the unification of the revolutionary German and international workers. They established an international Communist party by merging with Wilhelm Weitling’s “Bund der Gerechten” (League of the Just). At the first joint congress in London in November 1847 Marx and Engels succeeded in establishing the “Bund der Kommunisten” (the Communist League). From the mandate given to Marx and Engels at the second congress in 1848 to write a declaration of principle emanated the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party - which in fact was written by Marx alone after both had agreed that Engels’s preliminary drafts were unsuitable.
In spring 1848, when the revolutionary movements began to spread throughout Europe after the February revolution in Paris, Marx was briefly imprisoned and then expelled from Belgium. Upon an invitation from the newly installed French government he first returned to Paris, but after the March revolution in Germany he and Engels moved to Cologne in order to lead the revolutionary movement in the Rhine provinces and edit the re-established Neue Rheinische Zeitung. After the failure of the revolution, the popular daily paper was increasingly subjected to censorship and finally banned in May 1849. Marx was expelled from Prussia and deprived of his citizenship. After a brief interval in Paris he moved into exile with his family to England and settled down in London, where he was to stay until the end of his life.