Full text of "The three sources and three component parts of Marxism. Karl Marx. Frederick Engels"

See other formats

100

= CD

o=^

■i^O

C/)

2 =

— CD

1>~

\ mi

Lenin, Vladimir II' ich

Tl'ie three sources ana
three component parts of
Marxism

314

Li? 3

^,>

ill ill

liPiPl

Jlr

iiii

■■m

i m

V. I. LENIN

The
HREE SOURCES
AND THREE
COMPONENT

PARTS
OF MARXISM

VvJ'

I c.^1

7JJS-

Workers of All Countries, Unite!

V. I. LENIN

THE THREE SOURCES

AND THREE COMPONENT

PARTS OF MARXISM

KARL MARX

FREDERIOL ENGELS

FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE
MOSCOW

^bra:^>

DEC 20 1962

" '^UStTY OF -50^

~''^^>»'

4^^

The present issue 0/ Books for Socialism consists of three
works by V. I. Lenin — an appreciation of the great teaching of
Marx and Engels written at different times. They are: The Three
Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Karl Marx, and
Frederick Engels. They contain brief biographies of the founders
of scientific socialism and list their principal v^orfes. They also
contain a brief, yet profound, evaluation of the basic aspects of the
Marxist theory in all its three component parts, their essence and
revolutionary importance.

Along with questions of dialectical and historical materialism
and political economy Lenin sets forth the basic principles of
scientific socialism. Section III of The Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of Marxism is devoted to these principles. In it
Lenin renders honour to Marx for developing a truly scientific
theory of class struggle and pointing to the proletariat as the so-
cial force destined to sweep out the old, and install a new, society.

Lenin's Karl Marx gives an account of the basic problems of
the Marxist theory including the key problems of scientific social-
ism— the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat.

In setting out the essence of Marxism, Lenin voiced unshake-
able confidence in the ultimate triumph of socialism and the
powerful revolutionary potential of the proletariat. He wrote that
it was the proletariat which would be the "intellectual and driv-
ing force" in the transformation of the old society into a new
one. Under socialism there will be a new form of family, new
conditions in the status of women and in the upbringing of the
younger generation; the national question and the question of the
state will be approached in a new way. Lenin deals at length with
tactical matters pertinent to the class struggle of the proletariat.

In his Frederick Engels Lenin portrays that great fighter and
teacher of the proletariat. Engels collaborated with Marx in de-
veloping scientific socialism and proved that socialism is not a
vision of dreamers, but a natural and inevitable social phenom-
enon.

THE EDITORS

f.fl ElilK1»

CONTENTS

Page

THE THREE SOURCES AND THREE

COMPONENT PARTS OF MARXISM 7

I 8

II 10

III 12

KARL MARX (Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition

of Marxism) 14

Preface 14

The Marxian Doctrine 20

Philosophical Materialism 20

Dialectics 23

The Materialist Conception of History 26

The Class Struggle 29

Marx's Ecoroj-p'c Doctrine 31

Value 32

Surplus Value 34

Socialism ; .... 46

Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat 50

FREDERICK ENGELS 57

Notes 69

THE THREE SOURCES AND THREE
COMPONENT PARTS OF MARXISM^

Throughout the civihzed world the teachings of
Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bour-
geois science (both official and liberal) which regards
Marxism as a kind of "pernicious sect." And no other
attitude is to be expected, for there can be no "impar-
tial" social science in a society based on class strug-
gle. In one way or another, all official and liberal
science defends wage slavery, whereas Marxism has
declared relentless war on wage slavery. To expect
science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as
silly and naive as to expect impartiality from manufac-
turers on the question whether workers' wages should
be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the
history of social science show with perfect clarity that
there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marx-
ism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified
doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high
road of development of world civilization. On the con-
trary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact
that he furnished answers to questions the foremost^
minds of mankind had already raised. His teachings^
-arose- as the direct and immediate^ continuation of the
teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy,
political economy and socialism.

The Marxian doctrine is omnipotent because it is
true. It is complete and harmonious, and provides men
with an integral world conception which is irreconcil-
able with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence
of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor
to the best that was created by mankind in the nine-
teenth century in the shape of German philosophy,
English political economy and French socialism.

On these three sources of Marxism and on its three
component parts, we shall briefly dwell.

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Through-
out the modern history of Europe, and especially at the
end of the eighteenth century in France, which was the
scene of a decisive battle against every kind of medie-
val rubbish, against feudalism in institutions and
ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philoso-
phy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of na-
tural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so
forth. The enemies of democracy therefore exerted all
their efforts to "refute," undermine and defame mate-
rialism, and advocated various forms of philosophical
idealism, which always, in one way or another,
amounts to an advocacy or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical material-
ism in the most determined manner and repeatedly ex-
plained the profound erroneousness of every deviation
from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully
expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach
and Anti-DUhring, which, like the Communist Manifes-
to, are handbooks of every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eight-
eenth century: he advanced philosophy. He enriched it
with the acquisitions of German classical philosophy,

especially of the Hegelian system, which in its turn
led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these
acquisitions is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of develop-
ment in its fullest and deepest form, free of one-sided-
ness, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge,
which provides us with a reflection of eternally de-
veloping matter. The latest discoveries of natural sci-
ence— radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements
— have remarkably confirmed Marx's dialectical ma-
terialism, despite the teachings of the bourgeois philos-
ophers with their "new" reversions to old and rotten
idealism.

Deepening and developing philosophical material-
ism, Marx completed it, extended its knowledge of^a-
ture to the knowledge of human society. 'Marx's his-^
i^Jtorical materiah's^i was the greatest achievement of
scientific thought. The chaos and arbitrariness that had
previously reigned in the views on history and politics
gave way to a strikingly integral and harmonious
scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of
the growth of productive forces, out of one system of
social life another and higher system develops — ^how
capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism. •;

Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (i.e., de-
veloping matter) which exists independently of him, so
man's social knowledge (i.e., his various views and
doctrines — philosophical, religious, political and so
forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political
institutions are a superstructure on the economic foun-
dation. We see, for example, that the various political
forms of the modern European states serve to fortify
the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx's philosophy is finished philosophical material-
ism, which has provided mankind, and especially the
working class, with powerful instruments of knowl-
edge.

Having recognized that the economic system is the
foundation on which the political superstructure is
erected, Marx devoted most attention to the study of
this economic system. Marx's principal work, Capital,
is devoted to a study of the economic system of mod-
ern, i.e., capitalist, society.

"^ Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in
England, the most developed of the capitalist coun-
tries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their inves-
tigations of the economic system, laid the foundations
lijof the labour theory of value. Marx continued their
work. He rigidly proved and consistently developed
this theory. He showed that the value of every com-
modity is determined by the quantity of socially neces-
sary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation be-
tween things (the exchange of one commodity for an-
other) Marx revealed a relation between men. The ex-
change of commodities expresses the tie between indi-
vidual producers through the market. Money signifies
that this tie is becoming closer and closer, insepa-
rably binding the entire economic life of the individual
producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further
development of this tie: man's labour power becomes
a commodity. The wage worker sells his labour power
to the owner of the land, factories and instruments of
labour. The worker spends one part of the day cover-
ing the cost of maintaining himself and his family
(wages), while the other part of the day the worker
toils without remuneration, creating surplus value for
the capitalist, the source of profit, the source of the
wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus value is the corner-stone of
Marx's economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, presses
on the worker by ruining the small masters and creat-
ing an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory
of large-scale production is at once apparent, but
we observe the same phenomenon in agriculture as
well; the superiority of large-scale capitalist agricul-
ture increases, the employment of machinery grows,
peasant economy falls into the noose of money-capital,
it declines and sinks into ruin under the burden of its
backward technique. In agriculture, the decline of
small-scale production assumes different forms, but the
decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads
to an increase in productivity of labour and to the
creation of a monopoly position for the associations of
big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and
more social — hundreds of thousands and millions of
workers become bound together in a systematic eco-
nomic organism — but the product of the collective la-
bour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. The an-
archy of production grows, as do crises, the furious
chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of
the mass of the population.

While increasing the dependence of the workers on
capital, the capitalist system creates the great power
of combined labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from the
first germs of commodity economy, from simple ex-
change, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old
and new, is clearly demonstrating the truth of this
Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers
every year.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this
triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour
over capital.

Ill

When feudalism was overthrown, and "free" capital-
ist society appeared on God's earth, it at once became
apparent that this freedom meant a new system of op-
pression and exploitation of the toilers. Various social-
ist doctrines immediately began to arise as a reflection
of and protest against this oppression. But early so-
cialism was Utopian socialism. It criticized capitalist
society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its
destruction, it indulged in fancies of a better order and
endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of
exploitation.

But Utopian socialism could not point the real way
out. It could not explain the essence of wage slavery
under capitalism, nor discover the laws of the latter's
development, nor point to the social force which is ca-
pable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere
in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the
fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly
revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the
driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the
feudal class was won except against desperate resist-
ance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a
more or less free and democratic basis except by a life
and death struggle between the various classes of cap-
italist society.

The genius of Marx consists in the fact that he was
able before anybody else to draw from this and con-
sistently apply the deduction that world history teaches.
This deduction is the doctrine of the class strug-
gle.

People always were and always will be the stupid
victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they

learn to discover the interests of some class or other
behind all moral, religious, political and social
phrases, declarations and promises. The advocates of
reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the
defenders of the old order until they realize that every
old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may
appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some rul-
ing classes. And there is only one way of smashing
the resistance of these classes, and that is to find, in
the very society which surrounds us, and to enlighten
and organize for the struggle, the forces which can —
and, owing to their social position, must — constitute
the power capable of sweeping away the old and creat-
ing the new.

Marx's philosophical materialism alone has shown
the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in
which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished.
Marx's economic theory alone has explained the true
position of the proletariat in the general system of cap-
italism.

Independent organizations of the proletariat are
multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan
and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is
becoming enlightened and educated by waging its
class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of
bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more
closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its suc-
cesses; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresist-
ibly.

Prosveshcheniye, No. 3, Translated from V. I. Lenin's Works,

March 1913 4th Russ. ed., Vol. 19, pp. 3-8

Signed: V. I.

KARL MARX2

(Brief Biographical Sketch with
an Exposition of Marxism)

PREFACE

The article on Karl Marx now appearing in a sepa-
rate printing was written by me in 1913 (as far as I
can remember) for the Granat Encyclopedia. A rather
detailed bibliography of literature on Marx, mostly
foreign, was appended at the end of the article. This
has been omitted in the present edition. The editors of
the Encyclopedia, on their part, cut out, for censorship
reasons, the end of the article on Marx, namely, the
section in which his revolutionary tactics were ex-
plained. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to re-
produce that end here, because the rough draft remained
in my papers somewhere in Cracow or in Switzerland.
I only remember that in that concluding part of the ar-
ticle I quoted, among other things, the passage from
Marx's letter to Engels of the 16th of April, 1856,
where he wrote: "The whole thing in Germany will de-
pend on the possibility to back the proletarian revolu-
tion by some second edition of the Peasant War. Then
everything will be splendid." That is what our Menshe-
viks, who have now sunk to utter betrayal of socialism
and to desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie, failed
to understand in 1905 and after.

N. Lenin
Moscow, May 14, 1918

Published in 1918 in the pamphlet: Translated from V. I. Lenin's Works,
N. Lenin, Karl Marx, Priboi Pub- 4th Russ. ed., Vol. 21, p. 29
lishers, Moscow

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of
Trier (Rhenish Prussia), His father was a lawyer, a
Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. The family
was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary. After
graduating from the gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered
university, first at Bonn and later at Berlin, where
he studied jurisprudence, but chiefly history and philos-
ophy. He concluded his course in 1841, submitting his
doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Epicurus. In
his views Marx at that time was a Hegelian idealist.
In Berhn he belonged to the circle of "Left Hegelians"
(Bruno Bauer and others) who sought to draw atheis-
tic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philos-
ophy.

After graduating from the university, Marx moved to
Bonn, expecting to become a professor. But the reac-
tionary policy of the government — which in 1832 de-
prived Ludwig Feuerbach of his chair and in 1836 re-
fused to allow him to return to the uinversity, and in
1841 forbade the young professor Bruno Bauer to lec-
ture at Bonn — forced Marx to abandon the idea of pur-
suing an academic career. At that time the views of the
Left Hegelians were developing very rapidly in Ger-
many, Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly after 1836, be-
gan to criticize theology and to turn to materialism,
which in 1841 gained the upper hand in his philosophy
(The Essence of Christianity); in 1843 his Principles of
the Philosophy of the Future appeared. "One must

himself have experienced the liberating effect" of these
books, Engels subsequently wrote of these works of
Feuerbach. "We" (i.e., the Left Hegelians, includ-
ing Marx) "all became at once Feuerbachians." At
that time some Rhenish radical bourgeois who had
certain points in common with the Left Hegelians
founded an opposition paper in Cologne, the Rhei-
nische Zeitung (the first number appeared on Janu-
ary 1, 1842). Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited
to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx
became chief editor and removed from Bonn to Co-
logne. The revolutionary-democratic trend of the paper
became more and more pronounced under Marx's
editorship, and the government first subjected the pa-
per to double and triple censorship and then decided
to suppress it altogether on January 1, 1843. Marx had
to resign the editorship before that date, but his res-
ignation did not save the paper, which was closed
down in March 1843. Of the more important articles
contributed by Marx to the Rheinische Zeitung, Engels
notes, in addition to those indicated below (see Bibli-
ography^), an article on the condition of the peasant
wine-growers of the Moselle Valley. His journalistic
activities convinced Marx that he was not sufficiently
acquainted with political economy, and he zealously
set out to study it.

In 1843, in Kreuznach, Marx married Jenny von
Westphalen, a childhood friend to whom he had been
engaged while still a student. His wife came from a
reactionary family of the Prussian nobility. Her elder
brother was Prussian Minister of the Interior at a
most reactionary period, 1850-58. In the autumn of 1843
Marx went to Paris in order, together with Arnold Ruge
(born 1802, died 1880; a Left Hegelian; in 1825-30, in
prison; after 1848, a political exile; after 1866-70, a
Bismarckian), to publish a radical magazine abroad.

Only one issue of this magazine, Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbiicher, appeared. It was discontinued owing to the
difficulty of secret distribution in Germany and to dis-
agreements with Ruge. In his articles in this magazine
Marx already appears as a revolutionary who advocates
the "merciless criticism of everything existing," and in
particular the "criticism of arms,"'^ and appeals to the
masses and to the proletariat.

In September 1844 Frederick Engels came to Paris
for a few days, and from that time forth became Marx's
closest friend. They both took a most active part in the
then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris
(of particular importance was Proudhon's doctrine,
which Marx thoroughly demolished in his Poverty of
Philosophy, 1847), and, vigorously combating the var-
ious doctrines of petty-bourgeois socialism, worked
out the theory and tactics of revolutionary proletarian
socialism, or communism (Marxism). See Marx's works
of this period, 1844-48, in the Bibliography. In 1845, on
the insistent demand of the Prussian government, Marx
was banished from Paris as a dangerous revolutionary.
He moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and
Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the
Communist League;^ they took a prominent part in the
Second Congress of the League (London, November
1847), and at its request drew up the famous Commu-
nist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. Witli
the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines
the new world conception, consistent materialism,
which also embraces the realm of social life, dialectics,
as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of
"development, the theory of the class struggle and of
the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat
. — the creator of the new, communist society.

When the Revolution of February 1848 broke out,
Marx was banished from Belgium. He returned to

2-13 17

Paris, whence, after the March Revolution, he went to
Germany, to Cologne. There the Neue Rheinische Zei-
tung^ appeared from June 1, 1848, to May 19, 1849;
Marx was the chief editor. The new theory was bril-
liantly corroborated by the course of the revolutionary
events of 1848-49, as it has been since corroborated by
all proletarian and democratic movements of all coun-
tries in the world. The victorious counter-revolution
first instigated court proceedings against Marx (he
was acquitted on February 9, 1849) and then banished
him from Germany (May 16, 1849). Marx first went to
Paris, was again banished after the demonstration of
June 13, 1849, and then went to London, where he lived
to the day of his death.

His life as a political exile was a very hard one, as
the correspondence between Marx and Engels (pub-
lished in 1913) clearly reveals. Marx and his family
suffered dire poverty. Were it not for Engels's constant
and self-sacrificing financial support, Marx would not
only have been unable to finish Capital but would have
inevitably perished from want. Moreover, the prevail-
ing doctrines and trends of petty-bourgeois socialism,
and of non-proletarian socialism in general, forced
Marx to carry on a continuous and merciless fight and
sometimes to repel the most savage and monstrous
personal attacks (Herr Vogt). Holding aloof from the
circles of political exiles, Marx developed his material-
ist theory in a number of historic works (see Biblio-
graphy), devoting his efforts chiefly to the study of po-
litical economy. Marx revolutionized this science (see
below, "The Marxian Doctrine") in his Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital
(Vol. I, 1867).

The period of revival of the democratic movements
at the end of the fifties and the sixties recalled Marx
to practical activity. In 1864 (September 28) the Inter-

national Workingmen's Association — the famous First
International — was founded in London. Marx was the
heart and soul of this organization; he was the author
of its first Address and a host of resolutions, declara-
tions and manifestoes. Uniting the labour movement of
various countries, striving to direct into the channel of
joint activity the various forms of non-proletarian, pre-
Marxian socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal
trade unionism in England, Lassallean vacillations to
the Right in Germany, etc.), and combating the theories
of all these sects and petty schools, Marx hammered
out a uniform tactics for the proletarian struggle of the
working class in the various countries. After the fall of
the Paris Commune (1871)— of which Marx gave such
a profound, clear-cut, brilliant and effective, revolution-
ary analysis (The Civil War in France, 1871) — and after
the International was split by the Bakuninists, the ex-
istence of that organization in Europe became impos-
sible. After the Hague Congress of the International
(1872) Marx had the General Council of the Interna-
tional transferred to New York. The First International
had accomplished its historical role, and it made way
for a period of immeasurably larger growth of the la-
bour movement in all the countries of the world, a
period, in fact, when the movement grew in breadth
and when mass socialist labour parties in individual na-
tional states were created.

His strenuous work in the International and his still
more strenuous theoretical occupations completely un-
dermined Marx's health. He continued his work on the
reshaping of political economy and the completion of
Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material
and studied a number of languages (Russian, for in-
stance); but ill-health prevented him from finishing
Capital.

2 19

On December 2, 1881, his wife died. On March 14,
1883, Marx peacefully passed away in his armchair.
He lies buried with his wife in the Highgate Cemetery,
London. Of Marx's children some died in childhood in
London when the family lived in deep poverty. Three
daughters married English and French Socialists :
Eleonora Aveling, Laura Lafargue and Jenny Longuet.
The latter's son is a member of the French Socialist
Party.

THE MARXIAN DOCTRINE

Marxism is the system of the views and teachings of
Marx. Marx was the genius who continued and com-
pleted the three main ideological currents of the nine-
teenth century, belonging to the three most advanced
countries of mankind: classical German philosophy,
classical English political economy, and French social-
ism together with French revolutionary doctrines in
general. The remarkable consistency and integrity of
Marx's views, acknowledged even by his opponents,
views which in their totality constitute modem mate-
rialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory
and programme of the labour movement in all the civil-
ized countries of the world, oblige us to present a brief
outline of his world conception in general before pro-
ceeding to the exposition of the principal content of
Marxism, namely, Marx's economic doctrine.

PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM

From 1844-45, when his views took shape, Marx was
a materialist, in particular a follower of L. Feuerbach,
whose weak sides he even later considered to consist
exclusively in the fact that his materialism was not
consistent and comprehensive enough. Marx regarded
the historic and "epoch-making" importance of Feuer-

bach to be that he had resolutely broken away from
Hegelian idealism and had proclaimed materialism,
which already "in the eighteenth century, especially in
France, had been a struggle not only against the exist-
ing political institutions and against . . . religion and
theology, but also . . . against all metaphysics" (in the
sense of "intoxicated speculation" as distinct from "so-
ber philosophy"). (The Holy Family, in the Literari-
scher Nachlass.) "To Hegel . . ." wrote Marx, "the proc-
ess of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea,'
he even transforms into an independent subject, is the
demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world. . . .
With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than
the material world reflected by the human mind, and
translated into forms of thought." (Capital, Vol. I, Af-
terword to the Second Edition.)^ In full conformity
with this materiahst philosophy of Marx's, and ex-
pounding it, Frederick Engels wrote in Anti-DUhring
(which Marx read in manuscript): "The unity of the
world does not consist in its being. . . . The real unity
of the world consists in its materiality, and this is
proved ... by a long and wearisome development of
philosophy and natural science. . . ." "Motion is the
mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there
been matter without motion, or motion without matter,
nor can there be. . . . But if the . . . question is raised
what thought and consciousness really are and where,
they come from, it becomes apparent that they are pro-
ducts of the human brain and that man himself is a
product of nature, which has developed in and along
with its environment; hence it is self-evident that the
products of the human brain, being in the last analysis
also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of
nature's interconnections but are in correspondence
with them." "Hegel was an idealist. To him the
thoughts within his brain were not the more or less

abstract pictures (Abbilder, reflections; Engels some-
times speaks of "imprints") of actual things and proc-
esses, but, conversely, things and their evolution were
only the realized pictures of the 'Idea,' existing some-
where from eternity before the world was."8 In his Lud-
wig Feuerhach — in which he expounds his and Marx's
views on Feuerbach's philosophy, and which he sent to
the press after re-reading an old manuscript written
by Marx and himself in 1844-45 on Hegel, Feuerbach
and the materialist conception of history — Frederick
Engels writes: "The great basic question of all philos-
ophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that
concerning the relation of thinking and being, the re-
lation of the spirit and nature . . . which is primary,
spirit or nature. . . . The answers which the philosoph-
ers gave to this question split them into two great
camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to na-
ture and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed
world creation in some form or other . . . comprised the
camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as
primary, belong to the various schools of materialism."
Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) ideal-
ism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx
decidedly rejected not only idealism, always connected
in one way or another with religion, but also the views,
especially widespread in our day, of Hume and Kant,
agnosticism, criticism, positivism in their various
forms, regarding such a philosophy as a "reactionary"
concession to idealism and at best a "shamefaced way
of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying
it before the world. "9 On this question, see, in addition
to the above-mentioned works of Engels and Marx, a
letter of Marx to Engels dated December 12, 1868, in
which Marx, referring to an utterance of the well-
known naturalist Thomas Huxley that was "more ma-
terialistic" than usual, and to his recognition that "as

long as we actually observe and think, we cannot pos-
sibly get away from materialism, "lo reproaches him
for leaving a "loop-hole" for agnosticism, Humism. It
is especially important to note Marx's view on the re-
/ation between freedom and necessity: "Freedom is
he appreciation of necessity. 'Necessity is blind only
in so far as it is not understood.' " (Engels, Anti-Diih-
ring.y^ This means the recognition of objective law in
nature and of the dialectical transformation of neces-
sity into freedom (in the same manner as the trans-
formation of the unknown, but knowable, "thing-in-it-
self" into the "thing-for-us," of the "essence of things"
into "phenomena"). Marx and Engels considered the
fundamental shortcoming of the "old" materialism, in-
cluding the materialism of Feuerbach (and still more
of the "vulgar" materialism of Biichner, Vogt and Mo-
leschott), to be: (1) that this materiahsm was "pre-
dominantly mechanical," failing to take account of the
latest developments of chemistry and biology (in our
day it would be necessary to add: and of the electrical
theory of matter); (2) that the old materialism was
non-historical, non-dialectical (metaphysical, in the
sense of anti-dialectical), and did not adhere consist-
ently and comprehensively to the standpoint of de-
velopment; (3) that it regarded the "human essence"
abstractly and not as the "ensemble" of all (concretely
defined historical) "social relations," and therefore
only "interpreted" the world, whereas the point is to
"change" it; that is to say, it did not understand the
importance of "revolutionary, practical 'activity."i2

DIALECTICS

Hegelian dialectics, as the most comprehensive, the
most rich in content, and the most profound doctrine
of development, was regarded by Marx and Engels as

the greatest achievement of classical German philos-
ophy. They considered every other formulation of the
principle of development, of evolution, one-sided and
poor in content, and distorting and mutilating the real
course of development (which often proceeds by leaps,
catastrophes and revolutions) in nature and in society.
"Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue
conscious dialectics" (from the destruction of ideal-
ism, including Hegelianism) "and apply it in the ma-
terialist conception of nature. . . . Nature is the proof
of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural
science that it has furnished this proof with very rich
materials" (this was written before the discovery of
radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!)
"increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last
resort, nature works dialectically and not metaphys-
ically."i3

"The great basic thought," Engels writes, "that the
world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-
made things, but as a complex of processes, in which
the things apparently stable no less than their mind
images in our heads, the concepts, go through an unin-
terrupted change of coming into being and passing
away . . . this great fundamental thought has, especially
since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated or-
dinary consciousness that in this generality it is now
scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this
fundamental thought in words and to apply it in real-
ity in detail to each domain of investigation are two
different things." "For dialectical philosophy nothing
is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory
character of everything and in everything; nothing
can endure before it except the uninterrupted process
of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascend-
ency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical phi-
losophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection

of this process in the thinking brain." Thus, according
to Marx, dialectics is "the science of the general laws
of motion, both of the external world and of human
thought."!^

This revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy was
adopted and developed by Marx. Dialectical material-
ism "no longer needs any philosophy standing above
the other sciences." Of former philosophy there re-
mains "the science of thought and its laws — formal log-
ic and dialectics. "15 And dialectics, as understood by
Marx, and in conformity with Hegel, includes What is
now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology,
which, too, must regard its subject matter historically,
studying and generalizing the origin and development
of knowledge, the transition from non-knowledge to
knowledge.

Nowadays, the idea of development, of evolution,
has penetrated the social consciousness almost in its
entirety, but by different ways, not by way of the He-
gelian philosophy. But as formulated by Marx and En-
gels on the basis of Hegel, this idea is far more com-
prehensive, far richer in content than the current idea
of evolution. A development that seemingly repeats
the stages already passed, but repeats them otherwise,
on a higher basis ("negation of negation"), a de-
velopment, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line;
— a development by leaps, catastrophes, revolutions;
— "breaks in continuity"; the transformation of quan-
tity into quality; — the inner impulses to development,
imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the vari-
ous forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or
within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; —
the interdependence and the closest, indissoluble con-
nexion of all sides of every phenomenon (while history
constantly discloses ever new sides), a connexion that
provides a uniform, law-governed, universal process of

motion — such are some of the features of dialectics as
a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of development.
(Cf. Marx's letter to Engels of January 8, 1868, in
which he ridicules Stein's "wooden trichotomies"
which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist
dialectics.)

THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

Having realized the inconsistency, incompleteness,
and one-sidedness of the old materialism, Marx be-
came convinced of the necessity of "bringing the science
of society . . . into harmony with the materiahst foun-
dation, and of reconstructing it thereupon." i6 Since
materiahsm in general explains consciousness as the
outcome of being, and not conversely, materialism as
applied to the social life of mankind has to explain so-
cial consciousness as the outcome of social being.
"Technology," writes Marx (Capital, Vol. I), "discloses
man's mode of dealing with nature, the process of
production by which he sustains his life, and thereby
also lays bare the mode of formation of his social rela-
tions, and of the mental conceptions that flow from
them."i7 In the preface to his Contribution to the Cri-
tique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral for-
mulation of the fundamental principles of materialism
as extended to human society and its history, in the
following words:

"In the social production of their lif.e, men enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independ-
ent of their will, relations of production which corre-
spond to a definite stage of development of their mate-
rial productive forces.

"The sum-total of these relations of production con-
stitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political super-

structure and to which correspond definite forms of so-
cial consciousness. The mode of production of material
life conditions the social, political and intellectual life
process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of their development, the material pro-
ductive forces of society come in conflict with the exist-
ing relations of production, or — what is but a legal ex-
pression for the same thing — ^with the property rela-
tions within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an
epoch of social revolution. With the change of the eco-
nomic foundation the entire immense superstructure is
more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such
transformations a distinction should always be made
between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with
the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, esthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological
forms in which men become conscious of this conflict
and fight it out.

"Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on
what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such
a period of transformation by its own consciousness;
on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained
rather from the contradictions of material life, from the
existing conflict between the social productive forces
and the relations of production. ... In broad outlines
Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes
of production can be designated as progressive epochs
in the economic formation of society."i8 (Cf. Marx's
brief formulation in a letter to Engels dated July 7,
1866: "Our theory that the organization of labour is de-
termined by the means of production. "^9)

The discovery of the materialist conception of his-
tory, or rather, the consistent continuation and exten-
sion of materialism into the domain of social phenom-
ena, removed two chief defects of earlier historical
theories. In the first place, they at best examined only
the ideological motives of the historical activity of
human beings, without investigating what produced
these motives, without grasping the objective laws
governing the development of the system of social rela-
tions, and without discerning the roots of these rela-
tions in the degree of development of material produc-
tion; in the second place, the earher theories did not
cover the activities of the masses of the population,
whereas historical materialism made it possible for the
first time to study with the accuracy of the natural
sciences the social conditions of the life of the masses
and the changes in these conditions. Pre-Marxian "so-
ciology" and historiography at best provided an accu-
mulation of raw facts, collected sporadically, and a de-
piction of certain sides of the historical process. By
examining the whole complex of opposing tendencies,
by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of
life and production of the various classes of society, by
discarding subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice
of various "leading" ideas or in their interpretation,
and by disclosing that all ideas and all the various tend-
encies, without exception, have their roots in the con-
dition of the material forces of production, / Marxism
pointed the way to an all-embracing and comprehen-
sive study of the process of rise, development, and de-
cline of social-economic formations. People make their
own history. But what determines the motives of peo-
ple, of the mass of people, that is; what gives rise to
the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings; what is the
sum-total of all these clashes of the whole mass of
human societies; what are the objective conditions of

production of material life that form the basis of all
historical activity of man; what is the law of develop-
ment of these conditions — to all this Marx drew atten-
tion and pointed out the way to a scientific study of
history as a uniform and law-governed process in all
its immense variety and contradictoriness.

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

That in any given society the strivings of some of its
members conflict with the strivings of others, that so-
cial hfe is full of contradictions, that history discloses
a struggle between nations and societies as well as
within nations and societies, and, in addition, an alter-
nation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and
war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline — are
facts that are generally known. Marxism provided the
clue which enables us to discover the laws governing
this seeming labyrinth and chaos, namely, the theory
of the class struggle. Only a study of the whole com-
plex of strivings of all the members of a given society
or group of societies can lead to a scientific definition
of the result of these strivings. And the source of the
conflicting strivings lies in the difference in the posi-
tion and mode of life of the classes into which each so-
ciety is divided. "The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles," wrote Marx in
the Communist Manifesto (except the history of the
primitive community — Engels added subsequently).
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and
serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppres-
sor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in
a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in
the common ruin of the contending classes. . . . The

modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the
ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in
place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bour-
geoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it
has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." Ever since
the Great French Revolution, European history has
very clearly revealed in a number of countries this real
undersurface of events, the struggle of classes. And
the Restoration period in France already produced a
number of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, Thiers)
who, generalizing from events, were forced to recog-
nize that the class struggle was the key to all French
history. And the modern era — the era of the complete
victory of the bourgeoisie, representative institutions,
wide (if not universal) suffrage, a cheap, popular daily
press, etc., the era of powerful and ever-expanding
unions of workers and unions of employers, etc., has
revealed even more manifestly (though sometimes in
a very one-sided, "peaceful," "constitutional" form)
that the class struggle is the mainspring of events. The
following passage from Marx's Communist Manifesto
will show us what Marx required of social science in
respect to an objective analysis of the position of each
class in modern society in connexion with an analysis
of the conditions of development of each class: "Of all
the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary
class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in
the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its spe-
cial and essential product. The lower middle class, the
small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the

peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save
from extinction their existence as fractions of the
middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they
try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they
are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their im- S-
pending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend [
not their present, but their future interests, they desert
their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the
proletariat. "20 In a number of historical works (see
Bibliography), Marx has given us brilliant and pro-
found examples of materialist historiography, of an
analysis of the position of each individual class, and
sometimes of various groups or strata within a class,
showing plainly why and how "every class struggle is a
political struggle."2i The above-quoted passage is an
illustration of what a complex network of social rela-
tions and transitional stages between one class and an-
other, from the past to the future, Marx analyzes in or-
der to determine the resultant of historical development.
The most profound, comprehensive and detailed con-
firmation and application of Marx's theory is his eco-
nomic doctrine.

MARX'S ECONOMIC DOCTRINE

"It is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the
economic law of motion of modern society" (that is to
say, capitalist, bourgeois society), says Marx in the
preface to Capital.'^^ The investigation of the relations
of production in a given, historically defined society, in
their genesis, development, and decline — such is the
content of Marx's economic doctrine. In capitalist so-
ciety it is the production of commodities that domi-
nates, and Marx's analysis therefore begins with an
analysis of the commodity.

VALUE

A commodity is, in the first place, a thing that satis-
fies a human want; in the second place, it is a thing
that can be exchanged for another thing. The utility of
a thing makes it a use-value. Exchange-value (or sim-
ply, value) presents itself first of all as the ratio, the
proportion in which a certain number of use-values of
one sort are exchanged for a certain number of use-
values of another sort. Daily experience shows us that
millions upon millions of such exchanges are constant-
ly equating one with another every kind of use-value,
even the most diverse and incomparable. Now, what
is there in common between these various things,
things constantly equated one with another in a defi-
nite system of social relations? What is common to
them is that they are products of labour. In exchang-
ing products people equate to one another the most
diverse kinds of labour. The production of commodities
is a system of social relations in which the individual
producers create diverse products (the social division
of labour), and in which all these products are equated
to one another in exchange. Consequently, what is com-
mon to all commodities is not the concrete labour of a
definite branch of production, not labour of one par-
ticular kind, but abstract human labour — human labour
in general. All the labour power of a given society, as
represented in the sum-total of values of all commodi-
ties, is one and the same human labour power: millions
and millions of acts of exchange prove this. And, con-
sequently, each particular commodity represents only
a certain share of the socially necessary labour time.
The magnitude of value is determined by the amount of
socially necessary labour, or by the labour time that is
socially necessary for the production of the given com-
modity, of the given use-value. "Whenever, by an ex-

change, we equate as values our different products, by
that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the
different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are
not aware of this, nevertheless we do it."23 As one of
the earlier economists said, value is a relation between
two persons; only he ought to have added: a relation
disguised as a relation between things. We can under-
stand what value is only when we consider it from the
standpoint of the system of social relations of produc-
tion of one particular historical formation of society,
relations, moreover, which manifest themselves in the
mass phenomenon of exchange, a phenomenon which
repeats itself millions upon millions of times. "As val-
ues, all commodities are only definite masses of con-
gealed labour time."2^ Having made a detailed analy-
sis of the twofold character of the labour incorporated
in commodities, Marx goes on to analyze the forms of
value and money. Marx's main task here is to study the
genesis of the money form of value, to study the histor-
ical process of development of exchange, from single
and casual acts of exchange ("elementary or accident-
al form of value," in which a given quantity of one
commodity is exchanged for a given quantity of an-
other) to the universal form of value, in which a num-
ber of different commodities are exchanged for one and
the same particular commodity, and to the money form
of value, when gold becomes this particular commod-
ity, the universal equivalent. Being the highest pro-
duct of the development of exchange and commodity
production, money masks and conceals the social char-
acter of all individual labour, the social tie between
the individual producers who are united by the market.
Marx analyzes in very great detail the various func-
tions of money; and it is essential to note here in partic-
ular (as generally in the opening chapters of Capital),
that the abstract and seemingly at times purely deduc-

3—13 33

tive mode of exposition in reality reproduces a gigan-
tic collection of factual material on the history of the
development of exchange and commodity production.
"If we consider money, its existence implies a definite
stage in the exchange of commodities. The particular
functions of money which it performs, either as the
mere equivalent of commodities, or as means of circula-
tion, or means of payment, as hoard or as universal
money, point, according to the extent and relative pre-
ponderance of the one function or the other, to very
different stages in the process of social production."
(Capital, Vol. L)^^

SURPLUS VALUE

At a certain stage in the development of commodity
production money becomes transformed into capital.
The formula of commodity circulation was C — M — C
(commodity — money — commodity), i.e., the sale of one
commodity for the purpose of buying another. The gen-
eral formula of capital, on the contrary, is M — C — M,
i.e., purchase for the purpose of selling (at a profit).
The increase over the original value of the money put
into circulation Marx calls surplus value. The fact of
this "growth" of money in capitalist circulation is well
known. It is this "growth" which transforms money
into capital, as a special, historically defined, social re-
lation of production. Surplus value cannot arise out of
commodity circulation, for the latter knows only the ex-
change of equivalents; it cannot arise out of an addi-
tion to price, for the mutual losses and gains of buyers
and sellers, would equalize one another, whereas what
we have here is not an individual phenomenon but a
mass, average, social phenomenon. In ordfer to derive
surplus value, the owner of money "must . . . find ... in
the market a commodity, whose use-value possesses the

peculiar property of being a source of value"2C — a com-
modity whose process of consumption is at the same
time a process of creation of value. And such a commod-
ity exists. It is human labour power. Its consump-
tion is labour, and labour creates value. The owner
of money buys labour power at its value, which, like the
value of every other commodity, is determined by the
socially necessary labour time requisite for its produc-
tion (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his
family). Having bought labour power, the owner of
money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for
the whole day — twelve hours, let us suppose. Yet, in
the course of six hours ("necessary" labour time) the
labourer creates product sufficient to cover the cost of
his own maintenance; and in the course of the next six
hours ("surplus" labour time), he creates "surplus"
product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does
not pay. In capital, therefore, from the standpoint of
the process of production, two parts must be distin-
guished: constant capital, expended on means of pro-
duction (machinery, tools, raw materials, etc.), the val-
ue of which, without any change, is transferred (all at
once or part by part) to the finished product; and var-
iable capital, expended on labour power. The value of
this latter capital is not invariable, but grows in the
labour process, creating surplus value. Therefore, to
express the degree of exploitation of labour power by
capital, surplus value must be compared not with the
whole capital but only with the variable capital. Thus
in the example given, the rate of surplus value, as Marx
calls this ratio, will be 6:6, i.e., 100 per cent.

The historical prerequisites for the genesis of capital
were, firstly, the accumulation of a certain sum of
money in the hands of individuals and a relatively high
level of development of commodity production in gener-
al, and secondly, the existence of a labourer who is

3* 35

"free" in a double sense: free from all constraint or
restriction on the sale of his labour power, and free
from the land and all means of production in general,
a free and unattached labourer, a "proletarian," who
cannot subsist except by the sale of his labour power.

There are two principal methods by which surplus
value can be increased: by lengthening the working
day ("absolute surplus value"), and by shortening the
necessary working day ("relative surplus value").
Analyzing the first method, Marx gives a most impres-
sive picture of the struggle of the working class to
shorten the working day and of governmental interfer-
ence to lengthen the working day (from the four-
teenth century to the seventeenth century) and to short-
en the working day (factory legislation of the nine-
teenth century). Since the appearance of Capital, the
history of the working-class movement in all civilized
countries of the world has provided a wealth of new
facts amplifying this picture.

Analyzing the production of relative surplus value,
Marx investigates the three main historical stages by
which capitalism has increased the productivity of la-
bour: 1) simple co-operation; 2) division of labour and
manufacture; 3) machinery and large-scale industry.
How profoundly Marx has here revealed the basic and
typical features of capitalist development is inciden-
tally shown by the fact that investigations of what is
known as the "kustar" industry of Russia furnish
abundant material illustrating the first two of the
mentioned stages. And the revolutionizing effect of
large-scale machine industry, described by Marx in
1867, has been revealed in a number of "new" countries
(Russia, Japan, etc.) in the course of the half-century
that has since elapsed.

To continue. New and important in the highest de-
gree is Marx's analysis of the accumulation of capital,

i.e., the transformation of a part of surplus value into
capital, its use, not for satisfying the personal needs or
whims of the capitalist, but for new production. Marx
revealed the mistake of all the earlier classical politi-
cal economists (from Adam Smith on) who assumed
that the entire surplus value which is transformed into
capital goes to form variable capital. In actual fact, it
is divided into means of production and variable capi-
tal. Of tremendous importance to the process of devel-
opment of capitalism and its transformation into so-
cialism is the more rapid growth of the constant capital
share (of the total capital) as compared with the var-
iable capital share.

The accumulation of capital, by accelerating the
supplanting of workers by machinery and creating
wealth at one pole and poverty at the other, also gives
rise to what is called the "reserve army of labour," to
the "relative surplus" of workers, or "capitalist over-
population," which assumes the most diverse forms
and enables capital to expand production at an extreme-
ly fast rate. This, in conjunction with credit facilities
and the accumulation of capital in means of produc-
tion, incidentally furnishes the clue to the crises of
over-production that occurred periodically in capitalist
countries — at first at an average of every ten years, and
later 'at more lengthy and less definite intervals. From
the accumulation of capital under capitalism must be
distinguished what is known as primitive accumula-
tion: the forcible divorcement of the worker from the
means of production, the driving of the peasants from
the land, the stealing of the commons, the system of
colonies and national debts, protective tariffs, and the
like. "Primitive accumulation" creates the "free" pro-
letarian at one pole, and the owner of money, the capi-
talist, at the other.

The "historical tendency of capitalist accumula-
tion" is described by Marx in the following famous
words: "The expropriation of the immediate producers
is accomplished with merciless vandalism, and under
the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most
sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned
private property" (of the peasant and handicrafts-
man), "that is based, so to say, on the fusing together
of the isolated, independent labouring-individual with
the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist-
ic private property, which rests on exploitation of the
nominally free labour of others. . . . That which is now
to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working
for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labour-
ers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action
of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself,
by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always
kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or
this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop,
on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the
labour process, the conscious technical application of
science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labour into instru-
ments of labour only usable in common, the econo-
mizing of all means of production by their use as the
means of production of combined, socialized labour,
the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the
world market, and with this, the international char-
acter of the capitalistic regime. Along with the
constantly diminishing number of the magnates of
capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of
this process of transformation, grows the mass of mis-
ery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but
with this too grows the revolt of the working class,
a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined,
united, organized by the very mechanism of the process

of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital
becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which
has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
Centralization of the means of production and sociali-
zation of labour at last reach a point where they be-
come incompatible with their capitalist integument.
Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capital-
ist private property sounds. The expropriators are ex-
propriated." (Capital, Vol. I.)-'

New and important in the highest degree, further, is
the analysis Marx gives in the second volume of Cap-
ital of the reproduction of the aggregate social capi-
tal. Here, too, Marx deals not with an individual phe-
nomenon but with a mass phenomenon; not with a
fractional part of the economy of society but with this
economy as a whole. Correcting the mistake of the
classical economists mentioned above, Marx divides
the entire social production into two big sections:
I) production of means of production, and II) produc-
tion of articles of consumption, and examines in detail,
with arithmetical examples, the circulation of the ag-
gregate social capital — both in the case of reproduc-
tion in its former dimensions and in the case of ac-
cumulation. The third volume of Capital solves the
problem of the f orniation of the average rate of profit
on the basis of the law of value. The immense advance
in economic science made by Marx consists in the fact
that he conducts his analysis from the standpoint of
mass economic phenomena, of the social economy as
a whole, and not from the standpoint of individual
cases or of the external, superficial aspects of com-
petition, to which vulgar political economy and
the modern "theory of marginal utility" are frequently
limited. Marx first analyzes the origin of surplus value,
and then goes on to consider its division into profit,
interest, and ground rent. Profit is the ratio between

the surplus value and the total capital invested in an
undertaking. Capital with a "high organic composi-
tion" (i.e., with a preponderance of constant capital
over variable capital exceeding the social average)
yields a lower than average rate of profit; capital with
a "low organic composition" yields a higher than aver-
age rate of profit. The competition of capitals, and the
freedom with which they transfer from one branch to
another equate the rate of profit to the average in both
cases. The sum-total of the values of all the commodi-
ties of a given society coincides with the sum-total of
prices of the commodities; but, owing to competition,
in individual undertakings and branches of produc-
tion commodities are sold not at their values but at
the prices of production (or production prices), which
are equal to the expended capital plus the average
profit.

In this way the well-known and indisputable fact of
the divergence between prices and values and of the
equahzation of profits is fully explained by Marx on
the basis of the law of value; for the sum-total of val-
ues of all commodities coincides with the sum-total of
prices. However, the equation of (social) value to (in-
dividual) prices does not take place simply and direct-
ly, but in a very complex way. It is quite natural that
in a society of separate producers of commodities, who
are united only by the market, law can reveal itself
only as an average, social, mass law, when individual
deviations to one side or the other mutually compensate
one another.

An increase in the productivity of labour implies a
more rapid growth of constant capital as compared
with variable capital. And since surplus value is a
function of variable capital alone, it is obvious that the
rate of profit (the ratio of surplus value to the whole
capital, and not to its variable part alone) tends to fall.

■^0

Marx makes a detailed analysis of this tendency and
of a number of circumstances that conceal or counter-
act it. Without pausing to give an account of the ex-
tremely interesting sections of the third volume of Cap-
ital devoted to usurer's capital, commercial capital
and money capital, we pass to the most important sec-
tion, the theory of ground rent. Owing to the fact that
the land area is limited and, in capitalist countries, is
all occupied by individual private owners, the price of
production of agricultural products is determined by
the cost of production not on average soil, but on the
worst soil, not under average conditions, but under the
worst conditions of delivery of produce to the market.
The difference between this price and the price of pro-
duction on better soil (or under better conditions) con-
stitutes differential rent. Analyzing this in detail, and
showing how it arises out of the difference in fertility
of different plots of land and the difference in the
amount of capital invested in land, Marx fully exposed
(see also Theories of Surplus-Value, in which the criti-
cism of Rodbertus deserves particular attention) the er-
ror of Ricardo, who considered that differential rent is
derived only when there is a successive transition from
better land to worse. On the contrary, there may be in-
verse transitions, land may pass from one category into
others (owing to advances in agricultural technique,
the growth of towns, and so on), and the notorious
"law of diminishing returns" is a profound error which
charges nature with the defects, limitations and con-
tradictions of capitalism. Further, the equalization of
profit in all branches of industry and national econ-
omy in general presupposes complete freedom of com-
petition and the free flow of capital from one branch
to another. But the private ownership of land creates
monopoly, which hinders this free flow. Owing to this
monopoly, the products of agriculture, which is dis-

tinguished by a lower organic composition of capital,
and, consequently, by an individually higher rate of
profit, do not participate in the entirely free process of
equalization of the rate of profit; the landowner, being
a monopolist, can keep the price above the average,
and this monopoly price engenders absolute rent. Dif-
ferential rent cannot be done away with under capital-
ism, but absolute rent can — for instance, by the nation-
alization of the land, by making it the property of the
state. iMaking the land the property of the state would
undermine the monopoly of private landowners, and
would lead to a more systematic and complete applica-
I tion of freedom of competition in the domain of agri-
f culture. And, therefore, Marx points out, in the course
of history bourgeois radicals have again and again ad-
vanced this progressive bourgeois demand for the na-
tionalization of the land, which, however, frightens
away the majority of the bourgeoisie, because it too
closely "touches" another monopoly, which is partic-
ularly important and "sensitive" in our day — the mo-
nopoly of the means of production in general. (Marx
gives a remarkably popular, concise, and clear exposi-
tion of his theory of the average rate of profit on cap-
ital and of absolute ground rent in a letter to Engels
dated August 2, 1862. See Brief wechsel, Vol. Ill, pp.
77-81; also the letter of August 9, 1862, ibid.,
pp. 86-87.28) — por the history of ground rent it is also
important to note Marx's analysis showing how labour
rent (when the peasant creates surplus product by
labouring on the lord's land) is transformed into rent
in produce or in kind (when the peasant creates sur-
plus product on his own land and cedes it to the lord
due to "non-economic constraint"), then into money
rent (which is rent in kind transformed into money, the
"obrok" of the old Russia, due to the development of
commodity production), and finally into capitalist rent,

when the peasant is replaced by the agricultural entre-
preneur, who cultivates the soil with the help of wage
labour. In connexion with this analysis of the "genesis of
capitalist ground rent," note should be made of a number
of penetrating ideas (especially important for backward
countries like Russia) expressed by Marx on the
evolution of capitalism in agriculture. "The trans-
formation of rent in kind into money rent is not only
necessarily accompanied, but even anticipated by the
formation of a class of propertyless day labourers, who
hire themselves out for wages. During the period of
their rise, when this new class appears but sporadi-
cally, the custom necessarily develops among the better-
situated tributary farmers of exploiting agricultural
labourers for their own account, just as the wealthier
serfs in feudal times used to employ serfs for their own
benefit. In this way they gradually acquire the ability
to accumulate a certain amount of wealth and to trans-
form themselves even into future capitalists. The old
self-employing possessors of the land thus give rise
among themselves to a nursery for capitalist tenants,
whose development is conditioned upon the general de-
velopment of capitalist production outside of the rural
districts." {Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 332.)^'' "The expropria-
tion and eviction of a part of the agricultural popula-
tion not only set free for industrial capital the labour-
ers, their means of subsistence, and material for labour;
it also created the home market." (Capital, Vol. I,
p. 778.) The impoverishment and ruin of the agricul-
tural population lead, in their turn, to the formation of
a reserve army of labour for capital. In every capitalist
country "part of the agricultural population is therefore
constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or
manufacturing proletariat. . . . (Manufacture is used
here in the sense of all non-agricultural industries.)
This source of relative surplus population is thus con-

stantly flowing. . . . The agricultural labourer is there-
fore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always
stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauper-
ism." (Capital, Vol. I, p. 668.)30 The private ownership
of the peasant in the land he tills constitutes the basis
of small-scale production and the condition for its pros-
pering and attaining a classical form. But such small-
scale production is compatible only with a narrow and
primitive framework of production and society. Under
capitalism the "exploitation of the peasants differs only
in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletar-
iat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual
capitalists exploit the individual peasants through
mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the
peasant class through the state taxes." (The Class
Struggles in France.) "The small holding of the peas-
ant is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to
draw profits, interest and rent from the soil, while leav-
ing it to the tiller of the soil himself to see how he can
extract his wages." (The Eighteenth Brumaire.) As a
rule the peasant cedes to capitalist society, i.e., to the
capitalist class, even a part of the wages, sinking "to
the level of the Irish tenant farmer — ^all under the pre-
tence of being a private proprietor." (The Class Strug-
gles in France.) What is "one of the causes which keeps
the price of cereals lower in countries with a predomi-
nance of small farmers than in countries with a capi-
talist mode of production"? (Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 340.)
It is that the peasant cedes to society (i.e., to the cap-
italist class) part of his surplus product without an
equivalent. "This lower price (of cereals and other agri-
cultural produce) is also a result of the poverty of the
producers and by no means of the productivity of their
labour." (Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 340.) The small-holding
system, which is the normal form of small-scale pro-
duction, deteriorates, collapses, perishes under capital-

ism. "Small peasants' property excludes by its very
nature the development of the social powers of produc-
tion of labour, the social forms of labour, the social
concentration of capitals, cattle raising on a large scale,
and a progressive application of science. Usury and
a system of taxation must impoverish it everywhere.
The expenditure of capital in the price of the land with-
draws this capital from cultivation. An infinite dis-
sipation of means of production and an isolation of the
producers themselves go with it." (Co-operative so-
cieties, i.e., associations of small peasants, while play-
ing an extremely progressive bourgeois role, only
weaken this tendency without eliminating it; nor must
it be forgotten that these co-operative societies do
much for the well-to-do peasants, and very little, al-
most nothing, for the mass of poor peasants; and then
the associations themselves become exploiters of wage
labour.) "Also an enormous waste of human energy.
A progressive deterioration of the conditions of produc-
tion and a raising of the price of means of production is
a necessary law of small peasants' property."3i In agri-
culture, as in industry, capitalism transforms the proc-
ess of production only at the price of the "martyrdom
of the producer." "The dispersion of the rural labour-
ers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance
while concentration increases that of the town opera-
tives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries,
the increased productiveness and quantity of the la-
bour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying
waste and consuming by disease labour power itself.
Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture
is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
labourer, but of robbing the soil Capitalist produc-
tion, therefore, develops technology, and the com-
bijiing together of various processes into a social

whole, only by sapping the original sources of all
wealth — the soil and the labourer." (Capital, Vol. I,
end of Chap. 13.)32

SOCIALISM

From the foregoing it is evident that Marx deduces
the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist so-
ciety into socialist society wholly and exclusively
from the economic law of motion of contemporary so-
ciety. The socialization of labour, which is advancing
ever more rapidly in thousands of forms, and which has
manifested itself very strikingly during the half-century
that has elapsed since the death of Marx in the growth
of large-scale production, capitalist cartels, syndicates
and trusts, as well as in the gigantic increase in the
dimensions and power of finance capital, forms the
chief material foundation for the inevitable coming of
socialism. The intellectual and moral driving force and
the physical executant of this transformation is the pro-
letariat, which is trained by capitalism itself. The
struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie,
which manifests itself in various and, as to its content,
increasingly multifarious forms, inevitably becomes a
political struggle aiming at the conquest of political
power by the proletariat ("the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat"). The socialization of production is bound to
lead to the conversion of the means of production into
the property of society, to the "expropriation of the ex-
propriators." This conversion will directly result in
an immense increase in productivity of labour, a re-
duction of working hours, and the replacement of the
remnants, the ruins of small-scale, primitive, disunit-
ed production by collective and improved labour. Cap-
italism finally snaps the bond between agriculture
and industry; but at the same time, in its highest de-

velopment it prepares new elements of this bond, of a
union between industry and agriculture based on the
conscious application of science and the combination
of collective labour, and on a redistribution of the hu-
man population (putting an end at one and the same
time to rural remoteness, isolation and barbarism, and
to the unnatural concentration of vast masses of peo-
ple in big cities). A new form of family, new condi-
tions in the status of women and in the upbringing of
the younger generation are being prepared by the high-
est forms of modern capitalism: female and child labour
and the break-up of the patriarchal family by capital-
ism inevitably assume the most terrible, disastrous,
and repulsive forms in modern society. Nevertheless
". . .modern industry, by assigning as it does an im-
portant part in the process of production, outside the
domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to
children of both sexes, creates a new economic founda-
tion for a higher form of the family and of the relations
between the sexes. It is, of course, just as absurd to
hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be
absolute and final as it would be to apply that char-
acter to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the
Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a
series in historic development. Moreover, it is obvious
.that the fact of the collective working group being
composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages,
must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a
source of humane development; although in its spon-
taneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where
the labourer exists for the process of production, and
not the process of production for the labourer, that
fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery."
{Capital, Vol. I, end of Chap. 13.) In the factory sys-
tem is to be found "the germ of the education of the
future, an education that will, in the case of every

child over a given age, combine productive labour with
instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the
methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but
as the only method of producing fully developed human
beings." (Ibid.y^ Marxian sociahsm puts the question
of nationality and of the state on the same historical
footing, not only in the sense of explaining the past
but also in the sense of a fearless forecast of the future
and of bold practical action for its achievement. Na-
tions are an inevitable product, an inevitable form in
the bourgeois epoch of social development. The work-
ing class could not grow strong, could not become
mature and formed without "constituting itself within
the nation," without being "national" ("though not in
the bourgeois sense of the word"). But the development
of capitalism more and more breaks down national bar-
riers, destroys national seclusion, substitutes class an-
tagonisms for national antagonisms. It is, therefore,
perfectly true that in the developed capitalist countries
"the workingmen have no country" and that "united
action" of the workers, of the civilized countries at
least, "is one of the first conditions for the emancipa-
tion of the proletariat." (Communist Manifesto.) The
state, which is organized violence, inevitably came
into being at a definite stage in the development of so-
ciety, when society had split into irreconcilable classes,
and when it could not exist without an "authority"
ostensibly standing above society and to a certain de-
gree separate from society. Arising out of class con-
tradictions, the state becomes ". . . the state of the most
powerful, economically dominant class, which, through
the medium of the state, becomes also the politically
dominant class, and thus acquires new means of hold-
ing down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the
state of antiquity was .above all the state of the slave
owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as

the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for hold-
ing down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the
modern representative state is an instrument of exploi-
tation of wage labour by capital." (Engels, The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, a work
in which the writer expounds his own and Marx's
views.) Even the freest and most progressive form of
the bourgeois state, the democratic republic, in no way
removes this fact, but merely changes its form (con-
nexion between the government and the stock ex-
change, corruption — direct and indirect — of the official-
dom and the press, etc.). Socialism, by leading to the
abolition of classes, will thereby lead to the abolition
of the state. "The first act," writes Engels in Anti-DUh-
ring, "by virtue of which the state really constitutes it-
self the representative of the whole of society — the tak-
ing possession of the means of production in the name
of society — this is, at the same time, its last independ-
ent act as a state. State interference in social relations
becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and
then dies out of itself; the government of persons is
replaced by the administration of things, and by the
conduct of processes of production. The state is not
'abolished.' It dies out."^'' "The society that will organ-
ize production on the basis of a free and equal associa-
tion of the producers will put the whole machinery of
state where it will then belong: into the museum of
antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the
bronze axe." (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Pri-
vate Property and the State.)

Finally, as regards the attitude of Marxian socialism
towards the small peasantry, which will continue to
exist in the period of the expropriation of the expro-
priators, we must refer to a declaration made by En-
gels which expresses Marx's views: ". . . when we are
in possession of state power we shall not even think

4—13 49

of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regard-
less of whether with or without compensation), as we
shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our
task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first
place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise
and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly
but by dint of example and the proffer of social assist-
ance for this purpose. And then of course we shall
have ample means of showing to the small peasant
prospective advantages that must be obvious to him
even today." (Engels, The Peasant Question in France
and Germany, p. 17, Alexeyeva ed.; there are mistakes
in the Russian translation. Original in the Neue Zeit.)'^'^

TACTICS

OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE

OF THE PROLETARIAT

Having as early as 1844-45 examined one of the
chief defects of the earlier materialism, namely, its
inability to understand the conditions or appreciate
the importance of practical revolutionary activity,
Marx, along with his theoretical work, all his life de-
voted unrelaxed attention to the tactical problems of
the class struggle of the proletariat. An immense
amount of material bearing on this is contained in all
the works of Marx and particularly in the four volumes
of his correspondence with Engels published in 1913.
This material is still far from having been assembled,
collected, studied and examined. We shall therefore
have to confine ourselves here to the most general and
briefest remarks, emphasizing that Marx justly con-
sidered that without this side to it materialism was
irresolute, one-sided, and lifeless. Marx defined the fun-
damental task of proletarian tactics in strict conform-
ity with all the postulates of his materialist-dialectical

conception. Only an objective consideration of the sum-
total of reciprocal relations of all the classes of a given
society without exception, and, consequently, a consid-
eration of the objective stage of development of that
society and of the reciprocal relations between it and
other societies, can serve as a basis for correct tactics
of the advanced class. At the same time, all classes and
all countries are regarded not statically, but dynami-
cally, i.e., not in a state of immobility, but in motion
(the laws of which are determined by the economic
conditions of existence of each class). Motion, in its
turn, is regarded not only from the standpoint of the
past, but also from the standpoint of the future, and,
at the same time, not in accordance with the vulgar
conception of the "evolutionists," who see only slow
changes, but dialectically: "in developments of such
magnitude twenty years are no more than a day," Marx
wrote to Engels, "though later on days may come again
in which twenty years are concentrated." (Brief wech-
sel, Vol. Ill, p. 127.)36 At each stage of development,
at each moment, proletarian tactics must take account
of this objectively inevitable dialectics of human his-
tory, on the one hand utilizing the periods of political
stagnation or of sluggish, so-called "peaceful" de-
velopment in order to develop the class consciousness,
strength and fighting capacity of the advanced class,
and, on the other hand, conducting all this work of
utilization towards the "final aim" of the movement
of this class and towards the creation in it of the fac-
ulty for practically performing great tasks in the
great days in which "twenty years are concentrated."
Two of Marx's arguments are of special importance in
this connexion: one of these is contained in The Pov-
erty of Philosophy and concerns the economic strug-
gle and economic organizations of the proletariat; the
other is contained in the Communist Manifesto and

4* 51

concerns the political tasks of the proletariat. The first
argument runs as follows: "Large-scale industry con-
centrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to
one another. Competition divides their interests. But
the maintenance of wages, this common interest which
they have against their boss, unites them in a common
thought of resistance — combination. . . . Combinations,
at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups . . .
and in face of always united capital, the maintenance
of the association becomes more necessary to them [i.e.,
the workers] than that of wages. ... In this struggle —
a veritable civil war — all the elements necessary for
a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached
this point, association takes on a political character."^^
Here we have the programme and tactics of the eco-
nomic struggle and of the trade-union movement for
several decades to come, for all the long period in
which the proletariat will muster its forces for the
"coming battle." Side by side with this must be placed
numerous references by Marx and Engels to the exam-
ple of the British labour movement; how industrial
"prosperity" leads to attempts "to buy the workers"
(Brief wechsel, Vol. I, p. 136),38 to divert them from the
struggle; how this prosperity generally "demoralizes
the workers" (Vol. II, p. 218); how the British proletariat
becomes "bourgeoisified" — "this most bourgeois of all
nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession
of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as
well as a bourgeoisie" (Vol. II, p. 290);39 how its "revolu-
tionary energy" oozes away (Vol. Ill, p. 124); how it will
be necessary to wait a more or less " long time before
"the English workers will free themselves from their ap-
parent bourgeois infection" (Vol. Ill, p. 127); how the
British labour movement "lacks the mettle of the Chart-
ists" (1866, Vol. Ill, p. 305);^^o how the British workers'

leaders are becoming a type midway between "a radi-
cal bourgeois and a worker" (in reference to Holyoak,
Vol, IV, p. 209); how, owing to British monopoly, and
as long as this monopoly lasts, "the British working-
man will not budge" (Vol. IV, p. 433)/'i The tactics of
the economic struggle, in connexion with the general
" course (and outcome) of the labour movement, are
here considered from a remarkably broad, comprehen-
sive, dialectical, and genuinely revolutionary stand-
point.

The Communist Manifesto set forth the fundamental
Marxian principle on the tactics of the political strug-
gle: "The Communists fight for the attainment of the
immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary
interests of the working class; but in the movement of
the present, they also represent and take care of the
future of that movement." That was why in 1848 Marx
supported the party of the "agrarian revolution" in
Poland, "that party which fomented the insurrection
of Cracow in 1846."42 in Germany in 1848 and 1849
Marx supported the extreme revolutionary democracy,
and subsequently never retracted what he had then
said about tactics. He regarded the German bourgeoi-
sie as an element which was "inclined from the very
beginning to betray the people" (only an alliance with
the peasantry could have brought the bourgeoisie the
integral fulfilment of its tasks) "and compromise with
the crowned representatives of the old society."'*3 Here
is Marx's summary of the analysis of the class position
of the German bourgeoisie in the era of the bourgeois-
democratic revolution— an analysis which, inciden-
tally, is a sample of that materialism which examines
society in motion, and, moreover, not only from the
side of the motion which is directed backwards: "With-
out faith in itself, without faith in the people, grum-
bling at those above, trembling before those below . . .

intimidated by the world storm ... no energy in any
respect, plagiarism in every respect . . . without initia-
tive ... an execrable old man, who saw himself doomed
to guide and deflect the first youthful impulses of a ro-
bust people in his own senile interests. . . ." (Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, 1848; see Literarischer Nachlass,
Vol. Ill, p. 212.) About twenty years later, in a letter
to Engels (Briefwechsel, Vol. Ill, p. 224), Marx declared
that the cause of the failure of the Revolution of 1848
was that the bourgeoisie had preferred peace with
slavery to the mere prospect of a fight for freedom.
When the revolutionary era of 1848-49 ended, Marx
opposed every attempt to play at revolution (the fight
he put up against Schapper and Willich), and insisted
on ability to work in the new phase which in a seem-
ingly "peaceful" way was preparing for new revolu-
tions. The spirit in which Marx wanted the work to be
carried on is shown by his estimate of the situation
in Germany in 1856, the blackest period of reaction:
"The whole thing in Germany will depend on the pos-
sibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some
second edition of the Peasant War." (Briefwechsel,
Vol. II, p. 108.)"^"^ As long as the democratic (bour-
geois) revolution in Germany was not finished, Marx
wholly concentrated attention in the tactics of the so-
cialist proletariat on developing the democratic energy
of the peasantry. He held that Lassalle's attitude was
"objectively ... a betrayal of the whole workers' move-
ment to Prussia" (Vol. Ill, p. 210), incidentally be-
cause Lassalle connived at the actions of the Junkers
and Prussian nationalism. "In a predominantly agri-
cultural country," wrote Engels in 1865, exchanging
ideas with Marx on the subject of an intended joint
statement by them in the press, ". . . it is dastardly to
make an exclusive attack on the bourgeoisie in the
name of the industrial proletariat but never to devote

a word to the patriarchal exploitation of the rural pro-
letariat under the lash of the great feudal aristocracy."
(Vol. Ill, p. 217.y'5 From 1864 to 1870, when the era of
the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution
in Germany, the era of the efforts of the exploiting
classes of Prussia and Austria to complete this revolu-
tion in one way or another from above, was coming to
an end, Marx not only condemned Lassalle, who was
coquetting with Bismarck, but also corrected Lieb-
knecht, who had inclined towards "Austrophilism" and
the defence of particularism; Marx demanded revolu-
tionary tactics which would combat both Bismarck and
the Austrophiles with equal ruthlessness, tactics which
would not be adapted to the "victor," the Prussian Jun-
ker, but which would immediately renew the revolu-
tionary struggle against him also on the basis created
by the Prussian military victories. (Briefwechsel, Vol.
Ill, pp. 134, 136, 147, 179, 204, 210, 215, 418, 437, 440-
41.)^*6 In the famous Address of the International of
September 9, 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat
against an untimely uprising; but when the uprising
nevertheless took place (1871), Marx enthusiastically
hailed the revolutionary initiative of the masses, who
were "storming heaven" (letter of Marx to Kugel-
mann). The defeat of the revolutionary action in this
situation, as in many others, was, from the standpoint
of Marxian dialectical materialism, a lesser evil in the
general course and outcome of the proletarian struggle
than the abandonment of a position already occupied,
than a surrender without battle. Such a surrender
would have demoralized the proletariat and under-
mined its fighting capacity. Fully appreciating the use
of legal means of struggle during periods when political
stagnation prevails and bourgeois legahty dominates,
Marx, in 1877 and 1878, after the passage of the Anti-
Socialist Law,'^7 sharply condemned Most's "revolution-

ary phrases"; but he no less, if not more sharply, at-
tacked the opportunism that had temporarily gained
sway in the official Social-Democratic Party, which
did not at once display resoluteness, firmness, revolu-
tionary spirit and a readiness to resort to an illegal
struggle in response to the Anti-Socialist Law. (Brief-
wechsel, Vol. IV, pp. 397,. 404, 418, 422, 424,^8 cf. also
letters to Sorge.)

July-November, 1914 Translated from V. I. Lenin's Works,

First published in 1915 in the Granat 4th Russ. ed., Vol. 21, pp. 30-62
Encyclopedia, 7th edition, Vol. 28
Signed: V. Ilyin

FREDERICK ENGELS^^

Oh, what a lamp of reason ceased to burn,
Oh, what a heart then ceased to throb!^^

On August 5, 1895, Frederick Engels died in London.
After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels
was the most noteworthy scholar and teacher of the
modern proletariat in all the civilized world. From the
time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
together, the life work of each of the two friends be-
came the common cause of both. And so, to understand
what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one
must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx's
work and teaching for the development of the contem-
porarj/^ labour movement. Marx and Engels were the
first to show that the working class and the demands
of the working class are a necessary outcome of the
present economic system, which together with the
bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organizes the pro-
letariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning
efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class strug-
gle of the organized proletariat that will deliver
humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their
scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to ex-
plain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers,
but the final aim and inevitable result of the development
of the productive forces of modern society. All recorded

history hitherto has been a history of class struggle,
of the succession of the rule and victory of certain so-
cial classes over others. And this will continue until the
foundations of class struggle and of class rule — private
property and anarchic social production — disappear.
The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction
of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class
struggle of the organized workers must be directed
against them. And every class struggle is a political
struggle.

These views of Marx and Engels have now been
adopted by all proletarians who are fighting for their
emancipation. But when in the forties the two friends
took part in the socialist literature and social move-
ments of their time, such opinions were absolutely
novel. At that time there were many people, talented
and untalented, honest and dishonest, v/ho, while ab-
sorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in the
struggle against the despotism of monarchs, police
and priests, failed to observe the antagonism be-
tween the interests of the bourgeoisie and the interests
of the proletariat. These people would not even admit
the idea that the workers should act as an independent
social force. On the other hand, there were many
dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it
was only necessary to convince the rulers and the gov-
erning classes of the injustice of the contemporary so-
cial order, and it would then be easy to establish peace
and general well-being on earth. They dreamt of social-
ism without a struggle. Lastly, nearly all the Socialists
of that time and the friends of the working class gen-
erally regarded the proletariat only as an ulcer, and ob-
served with horror how this ulcer grew with the growth
of industry. They all, therefore, were intent on how to
stop the development of industry and of the proletariat,
how to stop the "wheel of history." Far from sharing

the general fear of the development of the proletariat,
Marx and Engels placed all their hopes on the contin-
ued growth of the proletariat. The greater the number
of proletarians, the greater would be their power as a
revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible
would socialism become. The services rendered by
Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed
in a few words thus: they taught the working class to
know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substi-
tuted science for dreams.

That is why the name and life of Engels should be
known to every worker. That is why in this collection
of articles,5i the aim of which, as of all our publica-
tions, is to awaken class consciousness in the Russian
workers, we must sketch the life and work of Frederick
Engels, one of the two great teachers of the modern
proletariat.

Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine
province of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a
manufacturer. In 1838, Engels, without having com-
pleted his studies at the gymnasium, was forced by
family circumstances to enter one of the commercial
houses of Bremen as a clerk. Commercial affairs did
not prevent Engels from pursuing his scientific and po-
litical education. He came to hate autocracy and the
tyranny of bureaucrats while still at the gymnasium.
The study of philosophy led him further. At that time
Hegel's teaching dominated German philosophy, and
Engels became his follower. Although Hegel himself
was an admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, in
whose service he stood as a professor in the University
of Berlin, Hegel's teaching was revolutionary. Hegel's
faith in human reason and its rights, and the funda-
mental thesis of the Hegelian philosophy, namely, that
the universe is subject to a constant process of change
and development, was leading those of the disciples of

the Berlin philosopher who refused to reconcile them-
selves to the existing state of affairs to the idea that
the struggle against this state of affairs, the struggle
against existing wrong and prevalent evil, is also
rooted in the universal law of eternal development.
If all things develop, if institutions keep giving place
to other institutions, why should the autocracy of the
Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, why should the
enrichment of an insignificant minority at the expense
of the vast majority, or the domination of the bourgeoisie
over the people, continue forever? Hegel's philosophy
spoke of the development of the mind and of ideas; it
was idealistic. From the development of the mind it
deduced the development of nature, of man, and of
human, social relations. Retaining Hegel's idea of the
eternal process of development,* Marx and Engels
rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to the
facts of life, they saw that it was not the development
of mind that explained the development of nature 'but
that, on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be
derived from nature, from matter. . . . Unlike Hegel and
the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were material-
ists. Regarding the world and humanity materialisti-
cally, they perceived that just as material causes lie at
the basis of all the phenomena of nature, so the jfievel-
opment of human society is conditioned by the devel-
opment of material, productive forces. On the develop-
ment of productive forces depend the relations which
men enter into one with another in the production of
the things required for the satisfaction of human needs.
And in these relations lies the explanation of all the

* Marx and Engels frequently pointed out that in their intellec-
tual development they were very much indebted to the great
German philosophers, particularly to Hegel. "Without German
philosophy," Engels says, "there would have been no scientific
socialism."^2

phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and
laws. The development of productive forces creates so-
cial relations based upon private property, but now we
see that this same development of the productive forces
deprives the majority of their property and concen-
trates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It
destroys property, the basis of the modern social order,
it itself strives towards the very aim which the Social-
ists have set themselves. All the Socialists have to do is
to realize which of the social forces, owing to its po-
sition in modern society, is interested in bringing about
socialism, and to impart to this force the consciousness
of its interests and of its historical mission. This force
is the proletariat. Engels got to know it in England, in
the centre of British industry, Manchester, where he
settled in 1842, entering the service of a commercial
house of which his father was a shareholder. Here En-
gels did not merely sit in the factory office but wandered
about the slums in which the workers were cooped up.
He saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes.
But he did not confine himself to personal observations.
He read all that had been revealed before him on the
condition of the British working class and carefully
studied all the official documents he could lay his
hands on. The fruit of these studies and observations
was the book which appeared in 1845: The Condition
of the Working Class in England. We have already
mentioned the chief service rendered by Engels as the
author of The Condition of the Working Class in Eng-
land. Many even before Engels had described the suf-
ferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the neces-
sity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that not
only was the proletariat a suffering class, but that, in
fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletar-
iat was driving it irresistibly forward and compelling
it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fight-

ing proletariat would help itself. The political move-
ment of the working class would inevitably lead the
workers to realize that their only salvation lay in so-
cialism. On the other hand, socialism would become a
force only v/hen it became the aim of the political
struggle of the working class. Such are the main ideas
of Engels's book on the condition of the working class
in England, ideas which have now been adopted by all
thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that
time were entirely new. These ideas were enunciated in
a book which is written in an absorbing style and which
is filled with most authentic and shocking pictures of
the misery of the English proletariat. This book was a
terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. It
created a very profound impression. Engels's book be-
gan to be quoted everywhere as presenting the best
picture of the condition of the modern proletariat. And,
in fact, neither before 1845 nor after has there appeared
so striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the
working class.

It was not until he came to England that Engels be-
came a Socialist. In Manchester he formed contacts
with people active in the British labour movement at
the time and began to write for English socialist pub-
lications. In 1844, while on his way back to Germany,
he became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom
he had already started a correspondence. In Paris,
under the influence of the French Socialists and French
life, Marx had also become a Socialist. Here the friends
jointly wrote a book entitled The Holy Family, or Cri-
tique of Critical Critique. This book, which appeared a
year before The Condition of the Working Class in
England, and the greater part of which was written by
Marx, contains the foundations of revolutionary mate-
rialist socialism, the main ideas of which we have ex-
pounded above. The Holy Family is a facetious nick-

name for the Bauer brothers, philosophers, and their fol-
lowers. These gentlemen preached a criticism which
stood above all reality, which stood above parties and
politics, which rejected all practical activity, and which
only "critically" contemplated the surrounding world
and the events going on within it. These gentlemen,
the Bauers, superciliously regarded the proletariat as
an uncritical mass. Marx and Engels vigorously op-
posed this absurd and harmful trend. On behalf of a
real human personality — the worker, trampled down
by the ruling classes and the state — they demanded,
not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of
society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the
power that was capable of waging this struggle and
that was interested in it. Even before the appearance of
The Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx's and
Ruge's Deutsch-Franzosische JahrbUcher^i the "Critical
Essays on Political Economy," in which he examined
the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic
order from a socialist standpoint and concluded that
they were necessary consequences of the rule of private
property. Intercourse with Engels was undoubtedly a
factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, a
science in which his works have produced a veritable
revolution.

From 1845 to 1847 Engels lived in Brussels and
Paris, combining scientific pursuits with practical activ-
ities among the German workers in Brussels and Paris.
Here Marx and Engels formed contact with the secret
German Communist League, which commissioned them
to expound the main principles of the socialism they
had worked out. Thus arose the famous Manifesto of
the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, published in
1848. This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this
day its spirit inspires and motivates the organized and
fighting proletariat of the entire civilized world.

The revolution of 1848, which broke out first in France
and then spread to other countries of Western Europe,
brought Marx and Engels back to their native country.
Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the dem-
ocratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung published in Cologne.
The two friends were the heart and soul of all revolu-
tionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They
defended the interests of the people and of freedom
against the reactionary forces to the last ditch. The
reactionary forces, as we know, gained the upper hand.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx,
who during his exile had lost his Prussian citizenship,
was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular
uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after
the defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to Lon-
don.

There Marx also settled. Engels soon became a clerk
once more, and later a shareholder, in the Manchester
commercial house in which he had worked in the for-
ties. Until 1870 he lived in Manchester, while Marx
lived in London, which, however, did not prevent them
maintaining a most lively intellectual intercourse: they
corresponded almost daily. In this correspondence the
two friends exchanged views and knowledge and con-
tinued to collaborate in the working out of scientific so-
cialism. In 1870 Engels moved to London, and their
common intellectual life, full of strenuous labour, con-
tinued until 1883, when Marx died. Its fruit was, on
Marx's side, Capital, the greatest work on political
economy of our age, and on Engels's side — a number
of works, large and small. Marx worked on the analy-
sis of the complex phenomena of capitalist economy.
Engels, in simply written and frequently polemical
works, dealt with the more general scientific prob-
lems and with diverse phenomena of the past and pres-
ent in the spirit of the materialist conception of history

and Marx's economic theory. Of these works of Engels
we shall mention: the polemical work against DUhring
(in which are analyzed highly important problems in
the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social
sciences),* The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (translated into Russian, published
in St. Petersburg, 3rd ed., 1895). Ludwig Feuer-
hach (Russian translation with notes by G. Plekhanov,
Geneva, 1892), an article on the foreign policy of the
Russian government (translated into Russian in the
Geneva Sotsial-Demokrat, Nos. 1 and 2),55 remarkable
articles on the housing question,56 and finally, two small
but very valuable articles on the economic development
of Russia (Frederick Engels on Russia, translated into
Russian by Vera Zasulich, Geneva, 1894).57 Marx died
before he could complete his vast work on capital. In
the rough, however, it was already finished, and after
the death of his friend, Engels undertook the onerous
labour of preparing and publishing the second and
third volumes of Capital. He published Volume II in
1885 and Volume III in 1894 (his death prevented the
prepartion of Volume IV).58 These two volumes entailed
a vast amount of labour. Adler, the Austrian Social-
Democrat, has rightly remarked that by publishing Vol-
umes II and III of Capital Engels erected a majestic
monument to the genius who had been his friend, a mon-
ument on which, without intending it, he indelibly
carved his own name. And, indeed, these two volumes
of Capital are the work of two men: Marx and Engels.
Ancient stories contain many moving instances of friend-
ship. The European proletariat may say that its science

* This is a wonderfully rich and instructive book.^' Unfor-
tunately, only a small portion of it, containing a historical out-
line of the development of socialism, has been translated into
Russian. (The Development of Scientific Socialism, 2nd ed.,
Geneva, 1892.)

5—13 65

was created by two scholars and fighters, whose rela-
tions to each other surpassed the most moving stories of
human friendship among the ancients. Engels always —
and, on the whole, justly — placed himself after Marx.
"In Marx's lifetime," he wrote to an old friend, "I
played second fiddle. "^^ His love for the living Marx,
and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx
were limitless. In this stern fighter and strict thinker
beat a deeply loving heart.

After the movement of 1848-49, Marx and Engels
in exile did not occupy themselves with science alone.
In 1864 Marx founded the International Workingmen's
Association, and led this society for a whole decade.
Engels also took an active part in its affairs. The work
of the International Association, which, in accordance
with Marx's idea, united proletarians of all countries,
was of tremendous significance in the development of
the working-class movement. But even after the Inter-
national Association came to an end in the seventies
the unifying role of Marx and Engels did not cease. On
the contrary, it' may be said that their importance as
spiritual leaders of the labour movement steadily grew,
inasmuch as the movement itself grew uninterruptedly.
After the death of Marx, Engels continued alone to be
the counsellor and leader of the European Socialists.
His advice and directions were sought for equally by
the German Socialists, who, despite government per-
secution, grew rapidly and steadily in strength, and by
representatives of backward countries, such as Span-
iards, Rumanians and Russians, who were obliged to
ponder over and weigh their first steps. They all drew
on the rich store of knowledge and experience of old
Engels.

Marx and Engels, who both knew Russian and read
Russian books, took a lively interest in Russia, fol-
lowed the Russian revolutionary movement with sym-

pathy and maintained contact with Russian revolution-
aries. Tliey were both democrats before they became
Socialists, and the democratic feeling of hatred for po-
litical despotism was exceedingly strong in them. This
direct political feeling, combined with a profound theo-
retical understanding of the connexion between politi-
cal despotism and economic oppression, as well as
their rich experience of life, made Marx and Engels un-
commonly responsive precisely from the political
standpoint. That is why the heroic struggle of the
handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty
tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in
the hearts of these tried revolutionaries. On the other
hand, the tendency to turn away from the most imme-
diate and important task of the Russian Socialists,
namely, the conquest of political freedom, for the sake
of illusory economic advantages, naturally appeared
suspicious in their eyes and was even regarded by
them as a direct betrayal of the great cause of the so-
cial revolution. "The emancipation of the proletariat
must be the work of the proletariat itself" — Marx and
Engels constantly taught. But in order to fight for its
economic emancipation, the proletariat must win for
itself certain political rights. Moreover, Marx and
Engels clearly saw that a political revolution in Russia
would be of tremendous significance to the West-Euro-
pean labour movement as well. Autocratic Russia had
always been a bulwark of European reaction in gener-
al. The extraordinarily favourable international posi-
tion enjoyed by Russia as a result of the war of 1870,
which for a long time sowed discord between Germany
and France, of course only enhanced the importance of
autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. Only a free
Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the
Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians or any other small
nations, or constantly to incite France and Germany

S* 67

against each other, would enable modern Europe to free
itself from the burden of war, would weaken all the
reactionary elements in Europe and would increase the
power of the European working class. Engels therefore
ardently desired the establishment of political freedom
in Russia for the sake of the progress of the labour
movement in the West as well. In him the Russian rev-
olutionaries have lost their best friend.

May the memory of Frederick Engels, the great
champion and teacher of the proletariat, live for ever!

Autumn, 1895

First published in the symposium Translated from V. I. Lenin's Works,
Rabotnik, Nos. 1-2, 1896 4th Russ. ed.. Vol. 2, pp. 1-13

(^>-

NOTES

1 — Lenin's Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
were published in the journal Prosveshcheniye, No. 3, 1913, dedi-
cated to the 30th anniversary of Marx's death.

Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) — a Bolshevik socio-political
and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg from De-
cember 1911 to June 1914. It was put out on Lenin's instructions
in place of Mysl (Thought), a Bolshevik monthly published in
Moscow, which was banned by the tsarist authorities. Lenin
guided Prosveshcheniye from abroad, edited articles for it, and
corresponded regularly with the members of its editorial board.
The journal published the following works by Lenin: Fundamental
Issues of the Election Campaign, The Three Sources and Three
Componerd Parts of Marxism, Critical Remarks en the National
Question, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, and others.

The editorial board consisted of M. A. Savelyev, M. S. Olmin-
sky, A. I. Yelizarova, and others. The circulation of the journal
rose to 5,000 copies. On the eve of the First World War it was
banned by the authorities. Prosveshcheniye was resumed in the
autumn of 1917 but just one (double) issue of it appeared, con-
taining Lenin's works, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?
and About Revision of the Party Programme. p. 7

2 — ^V. L Lenin set out to write Karl Marx for the encyclopedic
dictionary of the Granat Brothers Society in spring 1914 in
Poronino, Galicia, and completed in November 1914 in Berne,
Sv/itzerland. In a preface written by Lenin when the article was
published as a separate pamphlet, he from memory cites the year
of writing as 1913.

The article appeared in the dictionary in 1915, signed by
V. Ilyin and supplemented with a Bibliography of Marxism. For
censorship reasons the editors deleted two chapters — Socialism

and Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat — and made
a few changes in the text.

In 1918 the Priboi Pubhshers put the work out in pamphlet
form with Lenin's preface, just as it appeared in the dictionary,
but omitting the Bibliography of Marxism.

The full text in accordance with the manuscript was first pub-
lished in 1925 in a collection titled Marx-Engels-Marxism, pre-
pared by the Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the
Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

The present edition is without the bibliography. p. 14

3 — ^The present article was followed by a review of Marxist litera-
ture and literature about Marxism omitted in this edition. p. 16

4 — Allusion is made to Marx's statement in The Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right. p. 17

5 — The Communist League — the first international communist or-
ganization of the proletariat. Its establishment was preceded by
considerable spadework by Marx and Engels in rallying Socialists
and foremost workers of various countries ideologically and or-
ganizationally. With this aim in view they organized the Com-
munist Correspondence Committee in Brussels early in 1846. Marx
and Engels defended the ideas of scientific communism in bitter
controversies with the vulgar equalitarian communism advocated
by Wilhelm Weitling, "true socialism" and the petty-bourgeois
Utopias of Proudhon, which had an influence, among other bodies,
on members of the League of the Just — a secret society of work-
ers and artisans which had lodges in Germany, France, Switzer-
land and Britain. The London leadership of the League of the
Just, convinced in the justice of Marx's and Engels's ideas, in-
vited them to join their organization late in January 1847 and
take part in re-organizing it, and also in drafting a programme of
the League based on principles which they set forth, Marx and
Engels accepted the invitation.

The congress of the League of the Just held in London early
in June 1847 has gone down in history as the first congress of
the Communist League. Engels and Wilhelm Wolff took part in
the congress. At the congress the League of the Just was re-
named the Communist League and the old obscure slogan, "All
Men Are Brothers," was replaced with the militant internationalist
slogan of the proletarian party — "Workingmen of All Countries,
Unite!" The congress also examined the "Rules of the Com-
munist League," which Engels actively helped to draw up. The

new rules clearly defined the final goals of the communist move-
ment and omitted clauses which lent the organization the
features of a secret society. The structure of the League was
based on democratic principles. Final approval of the rules came
at the second congress of the Communist League. Both Marx
and Engels took part in the second congress in London, November
29-December 8, 1847. In prolonged debates they upheld the prin-
ciples of scientific communism, which were finally adopted by
the congress unanimously. It was at the request of the congress
that Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist
Party — this programmatic document made public in February
1848.

When the revolution broke out in France the Central Com-
mittee of the League, with its seat in London, turned over the
leadership late in February 1848 to the Brussels District Com-
mittee headed by Marx. After the latter was deported from Brus-
sels and moved to Paris, the seat of the new Central Committee
was removed to the French capital early in March. Engels was
also elected to the Central Committee. In late March and early
April 1848 the Central Committee arranged for the repatriation
of a few hundred German workers, mostly members of the Com-
munist League, to take part in the German revolution, which had
then begun. The political platform of the Communist League in
this revolution was set forth in the Demands of the Communist
Party in Germany, formulated by Marx and Engels late in March.

On arriving in Germany early in April 1848 Marx, Engels and
their followers realized that in backward Germany, where the
workers were disunited and insufficiently conscious politically,
the two or three hundred members of the Communist League
scattered throughout the country were unable to influence the
broad masses to any appreciable extent. As a consequence, Marx
and Engels saw fit to join the extreme, in effect proletarian, left
wing of the democratic movement. They joined the Cologne Demo-
cratic Society and recommended their followers to join demo-
cratic groups in order to uphold in them the standpoint of the
revolutionary proletariat, to criticize the inconsistency and vacil-
lation of petty-bourgeois democrats, and spur them to resolute
action. At the same time, Marx and Engels urged them to or-
ganize workers' societies, to concentrate on the political educa-
tion of the proletariat, and to lay the foundations for a mass
proletarian party. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx
was the guiding centre for members of the Communist League.
Late in 1848 the League Central Committee in London tried to
restore contacts and sent Joseph Moll to Germany as an ernis-

sary with the purpose of re-organizing the League. The London
body had amended the 1847 rules, reducing their political impact.
It was no longer the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establish-
ment of proletarian rule and the. building of a classless com-
munist society that were defined in them as the chief aims
of the Communist League. Instead, they spoke of a social repub-
lic. Moll's mission in Germany in the winter of 1848-49 fell
through.

In April 1849 Marx, Engels and their followers quit the Demo-
cratic Society. Now that the working m.asses had gained political
experience and were bitterly disappointed in the petty-bourgeois
democrats it was time to think of establishing an independent
proletarian party. But Marx and Engels failed to carry out their
plan. An uprising broke out in South-Western Germany, and its
defeat put an end to the German revolution.

The course of the revolution revealed that the views of the
Communist League, as set forth in the Manifesto of the Com-
munist Party, were perfectly correct, and that the League was an
excellent school of revolutionary skill. Its members participated
with vigour in the movement, defending the standpoint of the
proletariat, that most revolutionary class, in the press, on the
barricades and in the battle-fields.

The defeat of the revolution was a painful blow to the Com-
munist League. Many of its members were imprisoned or had
emigrated. Addresses and contacts were lost. Local branches had
ceased to function. The League also suffered considerable losses
outside Germany.

In autumn 1849 most of the leaders of the League assembled in
London. Thanks to the efforts of the new, re-organized Central
Committee headed by Marx and Engels the former organization
was restored and the activities of the League revived in spring
1850. The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist
League, written by Marx and Engels in March 1850, summed up
the results of the 1848-49 revolution and set the task of forming
a proletarian party independent of the petty bourgeoisie. The
Address was the first to define the idea of permanent revolution.
A new communist organ came off the press in March 1850. It was
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-okonomische Revue.

In the summer of 1850 a controversy arose in the Central
Committee of the Communist League over the question of tactics.
A majority headed by Marx and Engels firmly opposed the fac-
tion of August Willich and Karl Schapper, who proposed the
sectarian and reckless tactics of starting a revolution without
delay, in total disregard of objective developments and the reali-

ties of the political situation in Europe. In the meantime, Marx
and Engels laid prime emphasis on the propagation of scientific
communism and the training of proletarian revolutionaries for
forthcoming revolutionary clashes. This, they said, was the prin-
cipal task of the Communist League at a time when the reac-
tionaries had assumed the offensive. In mid-September 1850, the
schismatic activities of the Willich-Schapper faction brought about
a rupture. At a sitting on September 15 the powers of the Cen-
tral Committee were transferred at Marx's suggestion to the
Cologne District Committee. The Communist League branches in
Germany approved this decision of the London Central Com-
mittee. On instructions from Marx and Engels, the nev/ Central
Committee in Cologne drew up a new set of League rules in
December 1850. In May 1851, police persecution and arrests
brought the activities of the Communist League in Germany to a
virtual standstill. Soon after the Cologne Communist trial, Marx
urged the Com.munist League to announce its dissolution. It did
so on November 17, 1852.

The Communist League has done its historical share as a
school of proletarian revolutionaries, the nucleus of a proletarian
party, and the predecessor of the International Workingmen's
Association—the First International. p. 17

6 — Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Organ der Demokratie — a Cologne
daily edited by Karl Marx; published from June 1, 1848 to
May 19, 1849.

On returning to Germany after emigrating, Marx and Engels
set out at once to realize their plan for a revolutionary organ of
the press, which they regarded as a powerful means of influenc-
ing the masses. In view of the conditions obtaining in Germany
at the time, Marx, Engels and their followers assumed the poli-
tical standpoint of the Left, in effect proletarian, wing of the
democratic movement. This predetermined the tendency of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which appeared with Organ der Demo-
cratie written into its masthead.

A militant organ of the proletarian wing of the democratic
movement, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung served to educate the
masses and rallied them to fight the counter-revolution. In its
effort to keep its readers informed of all the important events
of the German and European revolution, the paper often put out
second editions. Whenever its four pages could not hold all the
news, it published supplements, and whenever new important
despatches came to hand it put out extra supplements and extra
editions, which were printed in leaflet form. Editorials stating

the attitude of the newspaper to the major issues of the revolu-
tion were, as a rule, written by Marx or Engels. These editorials
are marked *Kdln and **Kdln. Articles marked with a single
asterisk sometimes appeared in other sections of the paper
(among despatches from Italy, France, Britain, Hungary, and other
countries). Aside from handling the correspondence and helping
the editor-in-chief in technical matters, each of the editors dealt
with a limited, specific round of questions. Engels wrote critical
reviews of debates in the Berlin and Frankfort national assem-
blies and the second chamber of the Prussian Landtag, articles
about the revolutionary war in Hungary, the national-liberation
movement in Italy, the war in Schleswig-Holstein and, between
November 1848 and January 1849, a series of articles on Switz-
erland. Wilhelm Wolff wrote about the agrarian issue in the Ger-
man revolution, the situation of the peasantry and the peasant
movement, particularly in Silesia, and ran the section of cur-
rent news, "In the Country." Georg Weerth ran the section of
humour in rhyme and prose. Ernest Dronke was at one time the
paper's correspondent in Frankfort-on-Main, wrote some articles
about Poland, and in March-May 1849 reviews of reports from
Italy. Ferdinand Wolff was for a long time correspondent of the
paper in Paris. Heinrich Burger's association with the paper con-
fined itself, according to Marx and Engels, to a single article,
which was furthermore radically revised by Marx. Ferdinand
Freiligrath, who joined the editorial board in October 1848, con-
tributed revolutionary verses.

The paper's determined and irreconcilable stand, its militant
internationalism and the appearance in it of political exposes of
the Prussian government and the local Cologne authorities — all
this from the first caused it to be baited by the feudal-monarchist
and liberal-bourgeois press and persecuted by the government.
The authorities refused Marx the right to Prussian citizenship to
prejudice his stay in the Rhine Province, and initiated court
proceedings against the paper's editors, principally Marx and
Engels. After the Septem.ber events in Cologne the military
authorities proclaimed martial lav/ there on September 26, 1848,
and banned a number of democratic publications, the Neue Rhei-
nische Zeitung among them. Engels, Dronke and Ferdinand
Wolff were compelled to leave Cologne temporarily to avoid ar-
rest and Wilhelm Wolff had to go to the Pfalz for a few months,
and then to hide from the police in Cologne itself. Owing to
Engels's forced departure from Germany the brunt of the editorial
work, including the writing of editorials, fell to Marx's share un-
til January 1849.

In the teeth of persecutions and political obstructions the
t<!eue Rheinische Zeitung courageously defended the interests of
the revolutionary democrats and the proletariat. In May 1849, the
time of a general counter-revolutionary offensive, the Prussian gov-
-ernment took advantage of the fact that Marx was not granted
Prussian citizenship to order his deportation. Marx's departure
and repressions against the other editors of the paper caused it
to cease publication. The last, 301st, issue of the Neue Rheini-
sche Zeitung, printed in red, appeared on May 19, 1849. In a
parting statement to the Cologne workers the editors declared
that "their last word always and everywhere will be: liberation
of the working class!" p. 18

7 — See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 19. p. 21

«— See F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow 1954, pp. 65-66, 86, 55,
38-39. p. 22

9 — F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Ger-
man Philosophy. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works,
Vol. II, Moscow 1958, pp. 369, 370, 371. p. 22

10— Letter from K. Marx to F. Engels, December 12, 1866. p. 23

11 — See F. Engels, Anti-Diihring, Moscow 1954, p. 158. p. 23

12 — K. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. See K. Marx and F. Engels,
Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow 1958, pp. 403-05. p. 23

13 — See F. Engels, Anti-DUhring, Moscow 1954, pp. 17, 36. p. 24

14 — F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Ger-
man PhilosopJiy. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works,
Vol. 11, Moscow 1958, pp. 386-87, 363, 387. p. 25

15 — See F. Engels, Anti-DUhring, Moscow 1954, p. 40. p. 25

16 — F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Ger-
man Philosophy. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works,
Vol. II, Moscow 1958, p. 376. p. 26

17— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 372. p. 26

18 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow
1958, p. 363. p. 27

19 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Mos-
cow, p. 218. p. 27

20 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party, Moscow 1957, pp. 47-48, 66. p. 31

21 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party, Moscow 1957, p. 64. p. 31

22— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 10. p. 31

23— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 74. p. 33

24 — K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy, p. 33

25— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 170. p. 34-

26— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, p. 167. p. 35

27— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, pp. 762, 763.

p. 33"

28 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Mos-
cow, pp. 157-62, 164-65. p. 42

29— See K. Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. Ill, Berlin 1953, S. 850. p. 43

30— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, pp. 747, 642.

p. 44

31— See K. Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. Ill, Berlin 1953, SS. 858, 859.

p. 45

32— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, pp. 506-07. p. 46

33— See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1958, pp. 489-90, 484.

p. 48

34 — See F. Engels, Anti-DUhring, Moscow 1954, p. 389. p. 49

35 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow
1958, p. 433. p. 50

36 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Mos-
cow, p. 172. p. 51

37— See K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow,
pp. 194-95. P- 52

38 — Letter from F. Engels to K. Marx, February 5, 1854. p. 52

39— Letter from F. Engels to K. Marx, October 7, 1858. p. 52

40— Letter from F. Engels to K. Marx, April 8, 1863.

Letters from K. Marx to F. Engels, April 9, 1863 and April 2,

1866. p. 52

41 — Letters from F. Engels to K. Marx, November 19, 1869 and
August 11, 1881. p. 53

42— See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party, Moscow 1957, pp. 109, 110. p. 53

43 — See K. Marx, Bourgeoisie and Counter-revolution. p. 53

44 — See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Mos-
cow, p. 111. p. 54

45 — Letters from F. Engels to K. Marx, January 27, 1865 and
February 5, 1865. p. 55

46 — Letters from F. Engels to K. Marx, June 11, 1863; November
24, 1863; September 4, 1864; January 27, 1865; October 22, 1867;
December 6, 1867.

Letters from K. Marx to F. Engels, June 12, 1863; December 10,
1864; February 3, 1865; December 17, 1867. p. 55

47 — The Anti-Socialist Law was enacted in Germany on October
21, 1878. It banned all the organizations of the Social-Democratic
Party, mass organizations of workers, and the workers' press,
made socialist literature subject to confiscation and caused perse-
cutions of Social-Democrats. Under pressure of the mass work-
ers' movement it was repealed on October 1, 1880. p. 55

48 — Letters from K. Marx to F. Engels, July 23, 1877; August 1,
1877; September 10, 1879.

Letters from F. Engels to K. Marx, August 20, 1879 and Septem-
ber 9, 1879. p. 56

49 — V. I. Lenin wrote Frederick Engels in autumn 1895. It was
first published in March 1896 in the symposium Rabotnik, No. 1.

Rabotnik (The Worker) — a non-periodical symposium pub-
lished abroad through 1896-99 by the League of Russian Social-
Democrats. The initiator of the publication was Lenin. On
April 25 (May 7), 1895, Lenin went abroad to establish contacts
with the Emancipation of Labour group and to study the West-
European workers' movement. In Switzerland he reached an
agreement with G. V. Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod and other mem-
bers of the group about the issue and editing of the symposium.
On returning to Russia in September 1895 Lenin made every
effort to provide the symposium with articles and correspondence
from Russia and to organize financial support for it.

Aside from Frederick Engels, Lenin wrote several other items
for the first issue of the symposium.

All in all, there appeared six issues of Rabotnik in three vol-
umes, and ten issues of Listok Rabotnika (The Worfeers*^
Newssheet). p. 57

50 — ^The words of the epigraph to Frederick Engels were taken
by Lenin from a poem by N. A. Nekrasov, In Memory of Dobro-
lyubov. p. 57

51— See Note 49. p. 59

52— See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow
1958, p. 652. p. 60

53 — Lenin refers to Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, a journal
founded by Marx jointly with A. Ruge in Paris. Only one number
(double) of it appeared in 1844. (See p. 17 of this booklet.) p. 63

54 — Lenin refers to F. Engels's Anti-DUhring. Herr Eugen Diih-
ring's Revolution in Science. p. 65

55 — Sotsial-Demokrat — a literary and political review published
abroad in 1890-92 by the Emancipation of Labour group; just
four issues appeared. Lenin refers to Engels's article "Foreign Pol-
icy of Russian Tsarism."

56 — K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow 1958,
pp. 546-635. p. 65

57 — F. Engels, On Social Relations in Russia. See K. Marx and
F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow 1958, pp. 49-61. p. 65

58 — Fourth volume of Capital — this, in accordance with Engels's
own statement, is what Lenin calls Marx's Theories of Surplus-
Value, written in 1862-63. In the preface to Capital, Vol. II, En-
gels wrote: "After eliminating the numerous passages covered by
Books II and III, I intend to publish the critical part of this
manuscript (Theories of Surplus-Value. — Ed.) as Capital, Book
IV." But death prevented Engels from carrying out his plan. The
Theories of Surplus-Value were published in German as prepared
for print by K. Kautsky in 1905-10. This edition violated the basic
requirements of a scientific publication and contained a number
of distortions of Marxist principles.

The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee
of the C.P.S.U. is putting out a new edition of Theories of Sur-
plus-Value (Capital, Vol. IV) in three parts in accordance with
the manuscript of 1862-63 (K. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value
[Capital, Vol. IV], Part I, 1955; Part II, 1957). p. 65

59— Letter from Engels to J. Ph. Becker, October 15, 1884. p. 66

TO THE READER

The Foreign Languages Publishing House
would be glad to have your opinion of the
translation and the design of this book.

Please send all suggestions to 21, Zubov-
sky Boulevard, Moscow, U.S.S.R.

Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

B. H. JIEHHH

iji'i

TPH HCTOHHHKA
H TPM COCTABHblX HACTM MAPKCH3MA

pi i

■r

§1

II -I L--C» > "- '■

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

L373

Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich

The three sources and
three component parts of
■Warxlsm

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "The three sources and three component parts of Marxism. Karl Marx. Frederick Engels"

See other formats