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In Marxist socio-political thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a socialist state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power. The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the 19th century. The use of the term "dictatorship" does not refer to the Classical Roman concept of the dictatura (the governance of a state by a small group with no democratic process), but instead to the Marxist concept of dictatorship (that an entire societal class holds political and economic control, within a democratic system).^[1]

Following on from the theories of Marx and Engels, Marxists believe that such a socialist state is an inevitable step in the evolution of human society. They argue that it is a transitional phase that emerges out of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", or capitalist society, in which the private ownership of industry and resources leads to a monopoly of economic power (albeit sometimes within a democratic parliament) by the capitalist class. With an economy under democratic control, Marxists expect political power to be held by the majority working class. Whether or not capitalists are disenfranchised would depend upon the particular circumstances of a nation. In a period immediately after the Russian Revolution, the mode in which democracy was organised (elections within workplace 'soviets') automatically disenfranchised capitalists (who weren't a part of the workforce); however, Marxists such as Lenin argued that other forms of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in more developed countries would include capitalists among the electorate. However, as large-scale capitalism is phased out, future generations would not become capitalist owners, and class divisions would no longer exist within the electorate. As a result, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would whither away, resulting in an entirely classless, stateless form of society known as pure communism.

Both Marx and Engels argued that the short-lived Paris Commune, which ran the French capital for three months before being repressed, was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the 20th century, a socialist revolution in Russia was followed by the victory of a Stalinist clique of rulers who monopolised political power.^[2] Other revolutions in China, Vietnam, Cuba^[3] and North Korea were subsequently shaped by the USSR's model of a bureaucratic dictatorship^[4], not by the democratic organization of the working class. As a result, the use of the word "dictatorship" to describe the power of an entire class sometimes became confused with its common usage to describe a single ruler.

Theoretical approaches[link]

Karl Marx[link]

The German political theorist and sociologist Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the primary founder of Marxism, although he himself wrote little about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with his published works instead largely focusing on analysing and criticising capitalist society.

On 1 January 1852, the communist journalist Joseph Weydemeyer published an article entitled "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" in the German language newspaper Turn-Zeitung in New York.^[5] In that year, Karl Marx wrote to him, saying:

Now, as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.^[6]

Marx expanded upon his ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat in his short 1875 work, Critique of the Gotha Program, a scathing criticism and attack on the principles laid out in the programme of the German Workers' Party (predecessor to the SPD), a socialist organisation whose policies he thought to be ineffectual. He stated that in a proletarian-run society, the state should control the "proceeds of labour" (i.e. all the food and products produced), and take from them that which was "an economic necessity", namely enough to replace "the means of production used up", an "additional portion for expansion of production" and "insurance funds" to be used in emergencies such as natural disasters. Furthermore, he believed that the state should then take enough to cover administrative costs, funds for the running of public services, and funds for those who were physically incapable of working. Once enough to cover all of these things had been taken out of the "proceeds of labour", Marx believed that what was left should then be shared out amongst the workers, with each individual getting goods to the equivalent value of how much labour they had invested.^[7] In this manner, those workers who put in more labour and worked harder would get more of the proceeds of the collective labour than someone who had not worked as hard.

In the Critique, he noted however that "defects are inevitable" and there would be many difficulties in initially running such a workers' state "as it emerges from capitalistic society" because it would be "economically, morally and intellectually... still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges", thereby still containing capitalist elements.^[7]

In other works, Marx stated that he considered the Paris Commune, a revolutionary socialist government that ran the city of Paris from March to May 1871, as an example of the proletarian dictatorship. Describing the short-lived regime, he remarked that:

The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible, and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally workers, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive, and legislative at the same time. This form of popular government, featuring revocable election of councilors and maximal public participation in governance, resembles contemporary direct democracy.^[8]

Friedrich Engels[link]

In the 1891 postscript to The Civil War in France (1872) pamphlet, Friedrich Engels said: "Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"; to avoid bourgeois political corruption:

the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts — administrative, judicial, and educational — by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates [and] to representative bodies, which were also added in profusion”; moreover noting that the State is “at best, an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the State on the scrap-heap”.^[9] Marx’s attention to the Paris Commune placed the commune in the centre of later Marxist forms.

Lenin[link]

In the 20th century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin developed Leninism — the adaptation of Marxism to the backward socio-economic and political conditions of Imperial Russia (1721–1917). This body of theory later became the official ideology of some Communist states - but in a distorted form, with many of Lenin's works censored by the ruling elite.

The State and Revolution (1917) explicitly discusses the meaning of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and proposes pragmatic means of effecting it.^[10] In Imperial Russia, the Paris Commune model form of government was realised in the soviets (councils of workers and soldiers) established in the Russian Revolution of 1905, whose revolutionary task was deposing the capitalist (monarchical) state to establish socialism — the dictatorship of the proletariat — the stage preceding communism.

In Russia the Bolshevik Party (described by Lenin as the “vanguard of the proletariat”) elevated the soviets to power in the October Revolution of 1917. Throughout 1917, Lenin argued that the Russian Provisional Government was unrepresentative of the proletariat’s interests because, in his estimation, they represented the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. He argued that because they continually put off democratic elections, they denied the prominence of the democratically constituted soviets, and all of the promises made by liberal-bourgois parties prior to the February revolution remained unfulfilled, the soviets would need to take power for themselves.

Proletarian Government[link]

Lenin argued that in an underdeveloped country such as Russia, the capitalist class would remain a threat even after a successful socialist revolution.^[11] As a result, he advocated the repression of those elements of the capitalist class that took up arms against the new soviet government, writing that as long as classes existed, a state would need to exist to exercise the democratic rule of one class (in his view, the working class) over the other (the capitalist class).^[11]

Lenin was accused of being undemocratic by theoretician Karl Kautsky and others, although he regarded both the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and the repression of capitalist forces as methods to prevent the rule of a minority over the rest of society.

Soviet democracy granted voting rights to the majority of the populace who elected the local soviets, who elected the regional soviets, and so on until electing the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Capitalists were disenfranchised in the Russian soviet model. However, according to Lenin, in a developed country it would be possible to dispense with the disenfranchisement of capitalists within the democratic proletarian dictatorship; as the proletariat would be guaranteed of an overwhelming majority [Notes on Plenkhanov's Second Draft Programme. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 6, p51].

The Bolsheviks in 1917-1924 did not claim to have achieved a communist society; in contrast the preamble to the 1977 Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the “Brezhnev Constitution”), stated that the 1917 Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat as “a society of true democracy”, and that “the supreme goal of the Soviet state is the building of a classless, communist society in which there will be public, communist self-government”. [1]

Banning of opposition parties and factions[link]

During the Russian Civil War (1918–22), all of the major opposition parties either took up arms against the new Soviet Government, took part in sabotage, collaboration with the deposed Tsarists, or made assassination attempts against Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. When opposition parties such as the Cadets and Mensheviks were democratically elected to the Soviets in some areas, they proceeded to use their mandate to welcome in Tsarist and foreign capitalist military forces. In one incident in Baku, the British military, once invited in, proceeded to execute members of the Bolshevik party (who had peacefully stood down from the Soviet when they failed to win the elections). As a result, the Bolsheviks banned each opposition party when it turned against the Soviet government. In some cases, bans were lifted. This banning of parties did not have the same repressive character as later bans under Stalin would.

Internally, Lenin’s critics argued that such political suppression always was his plan; supporters argued that the reactionary civil war of the foreign-sponsored White Movement required it — given Fanya Kaplan’s unsuccessful assassination of Lenin on 30 August 1918, and the successful assassination of Moisei Uritsky, the same day.

After 1919, the Soviets had ceased to function as organs of democratic rule, as the famine induced by civil war and international blockade led to the Soviets emptying out of ordinary people. Half the population of Moscow and a third of Petrograd had, by this stage, fled to the countryside to find food. Political life ground to a halt.

The Bolsheviks became concerned that under these conditions - the absence of mass participation in political life, and the banning of opposition parties - counter-revolutionary forces would express themselves within the Bolshevik party itself (some evidence existed for this in the mass of ex-opposition party members who signed up for Bolshevik membership immediately after the end of the Civil War). To highlight the dire situation, the Kronstadt Uprising in 1921 represented a minority rebellion partly sponsored by White forces. It highlighted the threat that continued to be posed despite the victory in the Civil War.

Despite the principle of democratic centralism in the Bolshevik Party, internal factions were banned. This was considered an extreme measure, and did not fall within Marxist doctrine. The ban remained until the USSR’s dissolution in 1991.^[12] In 1921, vigorous internal debate and freedom of opinion were still present within Russia; the beginnings of censorship and mass political repression had not yet emerged. For example, the Workers Opposition faction continued to operate despite being nominally dissolved. The debates of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union continued to be published until 1923.

Stalinism and 'dictatorship'[link]

Elements of the later censorship and attacks on political expression would appear during Lenins illness, and after his death, when members of the future Stalinist clique clamped down on party democracy among the Georgian Bolsheviks and began to censor material. Pravda ceased publishing the opinions of political oppositions after 1924, and at the same time, the ruling clique (Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin) admitted large numbers of new members into the party in order to shout down the voices of oppositionists at party meetings, severely curtailing internal debate. Their policies were partly directed by the interests of the new bureaucracy that had accumulated a great deal of social weight in the absence of an active participation in politics by the majority of people. By 1927 many supporters of the Left Opposition began to face political repression, and Leon Trotsky was exiled.

Critics of the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — Anti-Communists, Libertarian Marxists, Anarcho-Communists, and anti-Stalinist Communists and Socialists — argue that the Stalinist USSR and other Stalinist countries used the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to justify the monopolisation of political power by a new ruling layer of bureaucrats, derived partly from the old Tsarist bureaucracy and partly created by the impoverished condition of Russia.

However, the rising Stalinist clique rested on other grounds for political legitimacy, rather than a confusion between the modern and Marxist use of the term "dictatorship". Rather, they took the line that since they were the vanguard of the proletariat, their right to rule could not be legitimately questioned. Hence, opposition parties could not be permitted to exist. From 1936 onward, Communist-inspired state constitutions enshrined this concept by giving the Communist Party a "leading role" in society--a provision that was interpreted to either ban other parties altogether or force them to accept the Communists' guaranteed right to rule as a condition of being allowed to exist.

This justification was also adopted by subsequent 'communist' parties built upon the Stalinist model, such as the CCP in China, the CP in North Korea, Vietnam, and the CP (initially the 26th July Movement) in Cuba.

post-Stalin[link]

At the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Nikita Khrushchev declared an end to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and the establishment of the All People's Government,^[13] however, Khrushchev's regime (and those that followed) continued to represent a bureaucratic layer within the ruling apparatus.

This was exemplified in Hungary in 1956 when Russian tanks were used to put down a rebellion that had all the features of a classical Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat", with the setting up of new, democratic Soviets within Hungary and the beginnings of a new working class movement against the bureaucracy.

Quotations[link]

Karl Marx

• Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing, but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. — Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)

Vladimir Lenin

• The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won, and maintained, by the use of violence, by the proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.^[14]
• A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from democracy.^[14]
• The proletariat cannot achieve victory without breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie, without forcibly suppressing its adversaries, and that, where there is forcible suppression, where there is no freedom, there is, of course, no democracy.^[14]
• And if you exploiters attempt to offer resistance to our proletarian revolution we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we shall deprive you of all rights; more than that, we shall not give you any bread, for in our proletarian republic the exploiters will have no rights, they will be deprived of fire and water, for we are socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann or Kautsky fashion.^[14]
• The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously, with an immense expansion of democracy, which, for the first time, becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence. — The State and Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg

• This dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. This dictatorship must be the work of the class, and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class — that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people. — The Russian Revolution

Karl Kautsky

• The term, “dictatorship of the proletariat”, hence, not the dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class, ipso facto precludes the possibility that Marx, in this connection, had in mind a dictatorship in the literal sense of the term. — Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Bertrand Russell

• Friends of Russia here think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly occupational, not geographical. They think that "proletariat" means "proletariat," but "dictatorship" does not quite mean "dictatorship." This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the "class-conscious" part of the proletariat, i.e., the Communist Party. — The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

See also[link]

• Commune (Socialism)
• Critique of the Gotha Program
• Democracy in Marxism
• Direct democracy
• Invisible dictatorship
• Leninism
• Marxism
• Mass killings under Communist regimes
• The Civil War in France
• Trotskyism
• Tyranny of the majority
• People's democratic dictatorship

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Critique of the Gotha Programme
• The Civil War in France
• Marxists.org glossary term
• "The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Marx and Engels" by Hal Draper

The Proletariat was a punk band from Fall River, Massachusetts. They were active during the 1980s in the Boston Hardcore scene, despite their recorded output having a decidedly non-hardcore sound; The Proletariat show more strongly the musical influences of bands such as Wire, and Gang of Four in their angular guitar sound^{[clarification needed]} and Marxist-themed lyrics.

History[link]

The Proletariat gained notice in the 80s hardcore scene with obscene Sex Pistols covers, eventually melding the styles of their heroes, the Pistols and Gang of Four. In 1981 they released a 7-song demo tape they called Distortion, which became popular with DJs and critics. Several songs from Distortion would end up on their first LP, and they gained wider exposure to the hardcore audience on the This is Boston, Not L.A. and Unsafe at Any Speed compilations that were put out by the Modern Method label.

	The Proletariat "Bread and Circus" (1983) noicon "Bread and Circus" excerpt, from Soma Holiday.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

The Proletariat played vicious Hardcore fused with a jagged Gang of Four/Killing Joke edge. Frontman Richard Brown wrote poetically oblique lyrics with a distinct Marxist bent - part Burroughs, part Mao. Soma Holiday, their '83 LP, was way ahead of its time

—Steven Blush, American Hardcore^[1]

The band was made up of the British-sounding American singer Richard Brown, bassist Peter Bevilacqua, drummer Tom McKnight, and guitarist Frank Michaels. Their sound was characterized by drums holding a militaristic steadiness while guitars alternated between jarring upstrokes and overdriven chords.

The Proletariat were a Hardcore band that had a backbeat you could dance to, the most slam-dancable—they had that serious marching beat down. They were given the hardcore tag because they wrote short songs and kinda fit in.

—SHRED^[1]

The 1983 release of their first LP Soma Holiday was hailed by Robert Christgau as "The hardcore debut of 1983" even as Christgau noted their sound was not hardcore per se.^[2] Named for the drug in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the album demonstrates the band's artpunk roots, with lyrics examining social issues from Brown's distant, Marxist perspective, critiquing capitalism without embracing determinist revolutionary dogma. The band itself were actually members of the working class, most of whom dropped out of college to drive trucks and work elsewhere.

	The Proletariat "An Uneasy Peace" (1986) noicon "An Uneasy Peace" excerpt, with Roger Miller on keyboards, from Indifference.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

In 1985, the band released a 7" and a second full length LP. Indifference, on Homestead Records, showed the band's softer side, including the layering of melodies onto the songs, with an appearance by Roger Miller of Mission of Burma playing piano on "An Uneasy Peace." They also brought in Laurel Bowman, whose soft-toned voice contrasted with Brown's (he would later find himself taking over vocals completely in a late, unrecorded incarnation of the band).

... the trio harmonics here are as wide at the butt as at the neck. 'N that's as OK as the occasionally whiny Angloist vocals (by a since departed windbag) are not.

—Byron Coley, Forced Exposure review of Indifference^[3]

After a hiatus, Richard, Peter, and Frank, with a new drummer, formed a new band called Churn, which disbanded in 1997. ^[4] All recorded Proletariat material has been compiled on a double CD collection on Taang! Records.^[5]

Discography[link]

LPs[link]

7" singles[link]

• "Marketplace"/"Death of a Hedon" (1985). Homestead Records

Compilation tracks[link]

• "Options","Religion Is the Opium of the Masses","Allegiance", on This Is Boston, Not L.A. (1982) Modern Method.
• "Voodoo Economics" on Unsafe at Any Speed (1982) Modern Method.
• "Uneasy Peace", on P.E.A.C.E Compilation (1985) R-Radical Records.

Compilations[link]

The 2CD compilation Voodoo Economics and Other American Tragedies (Taang!, 1997) contains all their recorded work, including the previously unreleased tracks "10 Years", "Abstain", "Choice" and "It's More Than Soil".

References[link]

External links[link]

Official sites

• Official website of The Proletariat and Churn
• MySpace page.

Other resources

• Hubbard, Chris (2004). "The Proletariat Page". Kill From The Heart. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/prole_main.html. Retrieved 2008-04-06.  – fan page with links to other articles and interviews

Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt speaking at the Seminário Internacional Mundo. 2008
Born	1960 Washington, D.C.
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, Autonomist thought, Queer theory
Main interests	Political philosophy, literature
Influenced by Antonio Negri

Michael Hardt at Subversive Film Festival

Michael Hardt (born 1960)^[1] is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000.^[2] It has been praised as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century."^[3]

Hardt and his co-author suggest that what they view as forces of contemporary class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services (or production of affects), have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, published in August 2004, details the notion, first propounded in Empire, of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.

The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth, appeared in the Fall of 2009.

Biography[link]

Born in Washington, D.C., Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources.^[1] Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."

After college, he worked for various solar energy companies.^[2] Hardt also worked with non-governmental organizations in Central America on tasks like bringing donated computers from the United States and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. Yet, he says that this political activity did more for him than it did for the Salvadorans.

In 1983, he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature at the University of Washington.^[1] While there, he received an M.A. in 1986 and his PhD in 1990.^[4] From there he went to Paris where he would meet Negri.

Hardt speaks fluent French, Spanish and Italian and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University and a Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.^[2]

Ideas[link]

Hardt is concerned with the joy of political life, and has stated, "One has to expand the concept of love beyond the limits of the couple."^[5] The politics of the multitude is not solely about controlling the means of productivity or liberating one's own subjectivity. These two are also linked to love and joy of political life and realizing political goals.

Hardt does not consider teaching a revolutionary occupation, nor does he think the college is a particularly political institution. "But thinking of politics now as a project of social transformation on a large scale, I'm not at all convinced that political activity can come from the university."^[6]

Hardt says visions of a public education and equal and open access to the university are gradually disappearing: the "war on terror" has promoted only limited military and technological knowledges, while the required skills of the biopolitical economy, "the creation of ideas, images, code, affects, and other immaterial goods" are not yet recognized as the primary key to economic innovation.^[7]

Duke Lacrosse Controversy[link]

During the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, he was one of the so-called Group of 88 professors who, shortly after members of the university's lacrosse team were accused of rape, signed a controversial letter attacking the players and thanking protesters for "making a collective noise" on "what happened to this young woman."^[8] After a year-long ordeal that is now widely viewed as one of the most conspicuous miscarriages of justices by a prosecutor in modern American history, the lacrosse players were found innocent of the rape charges. The "Group of 88" letter has since come to be regarded as a notorious example of unfair prejudgment.^[9]

Co-authorship with Antonio Negri[link]

Most of Hardt's works have been co-written with Antonio Negri, who was in prison for most of his career.

Occupation movements of 2011-2012[link]

In May 2012 Hardt and Negri self-published an electronic pamphlet on the occupation and encampment movements of 2011-2012 called Declaration that argues the movement explores new forms of democracy. The introduction was published at Jacobin under the title "Take Up the Baton."

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• Gilles Deleuze: an Apprenticeship in Philosophy, ISBN 0-8166-2161-6, 1993
• Labor of Dionysus: a Critique of the State-form, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-8166-2086-5, 1994
• Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-674-00671-2, 2000
• Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 1-59420-024-6, 2004
• Commonwealth, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-674-03511-9, 2009

Electronic Pamphlet / Kindle single[link]

• Declaration, with Antonio Negri, ASIN: B00816QAFY

Articles[link]

• "The Withering of Civil Society". Social Text (Duke University Press) (45): 27–44. 1995. 
• "Prison Time". Yale French Studies (Yale University Press) (91): 64–79. 1997. 
• "Affective Labor". boundary 2 (Duke University Press) 26 (2): 89–100. 1999. 
• Hardt, Michael; Antonio Negri (1999). "Value and Affect". boundary 2 (Duke University Press) 26 (2): 77–88. 
• Hardt, Michael; Antonio Negri (2003). "The Rod of the Forest Warden: A Response to Timothy Brennan". Critical Inquiry (The University of Chicago Press) 29 (2): 368–373. 
• "Take Up the Baton."

Film appearances[link]

• Marx Reloaded, Arte, April 2011.
• Examined Life, Sphinx Productions, 87 min., 2008.
• Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends, ZDF/Arte, 52 min., 2004.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

• Michael Hardt @ European Graduate School. Faculty Page with Biography, Bibliography and Video Lectures.
• Michael Hardt @ Duke University
• Full text of Empire [1]
• Slavoj Žižek. "Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?" European Graduate School. (2001)
• Michael Hardt. "Sovereignty" Theory & Event. Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001
• Michael Hardt. "The Withering of Civil Society" Social Text. No. 45 Winter, 1995. pp. 27–44
• Michael Hardt. "Porto Alegre – Today's Bandung?" New Left Review. No. 14, March–April 2002
• Ed Vulliamy. "Empire hits back" The Guardian. July 15, 2010. Profile of Hardt in the Guardian.

Interviews

• Real Democracy: An interview with Michael Hardt Michael Hardt talks to Shift Magazine about the global democracy movement.
• Astra Taylor's 2008 film Examined Life features Hardt rowing a boat in Central Park and ruminating on revolution.
• "For the Love of the Multitude" a conversation with Michael Hardt on The T-Machine
• "The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt" Hardt talks about Multitude, the sequel to Empire. (2004)
• "An Interview with Michael Hardt" (March 27–28, 2004) Hardt talks about the Free Trade Area of the Americas with dissidentvoice.org.
• "Conversation with Michael Hardt" Part of the 'Conversations with History' series organized by Harry Kreisler.
• Croatian Radio Interview
• "Power Within a Global Paradigm: Prof Michael Hardt Speaks in Olin"
• "Interview with Aut-Op-Sy" Interview conducted by the autonomist email list "Aut-Op-Sy".

Daniel Bensaïd

Bensaïd at a conference in Barcelona in April 2008
Born	(1946-03-25)March 25, 1946 Toulouse
Died	January 12, 2010(2010-01-12) (aged 63)
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Trotskyist

Daniel Bensaïd (25 March 1946 – 12 January 2010^[1]) was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre.

Life and career[link]

Bensaïd was born in Toulouse, to a father who was a Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and who had moved from Oran, where he met Bensaïd's mother, to Vichy Toulouse.^[2] In response to the 8 February 1962 Charonne massacre of Algerians in Paris, Bensaïd joined the Union of Communist Students. Irritated by the party orthodoxy he swiftly became part of a left opposition within the union, and was among the dissidents expelled from the party in 1966.^[2]

In 1966 Bensaïd began studying at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where he helped found the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, which became the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR).^[2] With Daniel Cohn-Bendit he helped to found the Mouvement du 22 Mars (Movement of 22 March) which was involved in the protests of May 1968 in France.^[2]

He became a leading theorist of the LCR and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. He was also a Fellow at the International Institute for Research and Education. Upon his death, Tariq Ali described him as "France's leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talkshows and writing essays and reviews in Le Monde and Libération."^[2] He was known for his studies of Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx, and a recent analysis of French postmodernism.

He died of cancer arising from the side effects of drugs used to treat AIDS, which he had had for the previous 16 years.^[2]

Criticism and debate[link]

Bensaïd and the Fourth International tradition have come under attack from sections of the far left for the strategy they have advanced in the social movements; in particular, for seeing reform and revolution as a false dichotomy, and proposing the formation of "broad parties". In one such critique, Luke Cooper criticised Bensaïd for arguing that—in certain, specific circumstances—it maybe permissible to enter a capitalist government, and seek to use the existing state as an instrument of revolutionary transformation.^[3] Bensaïd also debated revolutionary strategy with other Fourth International members, and the British Socialist Workers Party's Alex Callinicos.^[4]

Bibliography[link]

• with Henri Weber: Mai 1968: Une répétition générale (François Maspero, 1968)
• La revolution et le pouvoir (Penser, 1976)
• Walter Benjamin sentinelle messianique (Plon, 1990)
• La discordance des temps : essais sur les crises, les classes, l'histoire (Editions de la Passion 1995)
• Marx l'intempestif : Grandeurs et misres d'une aventure critique (Fayard 1996); English translation: Marx for Our Times (Verso 2002)
• Le pari melancolique (Fayard 1997)
• Le sourire du spectre (Michalon 2000)
• Qui est le juge? (Fayard 1999)
• Contes et le gendes de la guerre ethique (Textuel 1999)
• Eloge de la resistance e l'air du temps (Textuel 1999)
• Une lente impatience. Stock - Un ordre d'idées 2004. ISBN 2-234-05659-4
• Les irreductibles (Textuel 2001)
• Fragments Mécréants. Mythes Identitaires et République Imaginaire (2005)
• "In Memory of a Rebel." Telos 44, Summer 1980.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Daniel Bensaïd Archive at marxists.org
• All Daniel Bensaïd's articles (french language) on La Brèche Numérique
• Daniel Bensaïd's articles in International Viewpoint
• "Socialists from France speak out: Interviews with Daniel Bensaid and Alexandre Gaudillière". Socialist Worker. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=5743. Retrieved 2007-05-07. 
• "We Carry On Fighting. What Else is There to Do?": Remembering Daniel Bensaîd
• Obituary by Tariq Ali
• Obituary by Alex Callinicos

Karl Marx

Marx in 1875
Born	Karl Heinrich Marx 5 May 1818 Trier, Kingdom of Prussia
Died	14 March 1883(1883-03-14) (aged 64) London, United Kingdom
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy, German philosophy
School	Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Materialism
Main interests	Politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, labour, history, class struggle,
Notable ideas	Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), surplus value, contributions to the labor theory of value, alienation and exploitation of the worker, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, materialist conception of history
Influenced by Hegel, Feuerbach, Spinoza, Proudhon, Stirner, Smith, Voltaire, Ricardo, Vico, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Goethe, Helvetius, d'Holbach,[1] Liebig,[2] Darwin, Fourier, Robert Owen, Balcescu, Hess, Hupay, Guizot, Pecqueur,[3] Aristotle, Epicurus
Influenced Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Tito, Hoxha, Castro, Guevara, Ceaușescu, Ho, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Luxemburg, Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Chomsky, Bookchin, Arendt, Marcuse, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Debord, Situationist International, Frankfurt School, Negri, Taussig, Roy, Laclau, Bourdieu, Schumpeter, Aflaq and many others
Signature

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.^[4]

Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.

Marx's theories about society, economics and politics—collectively known as Marxism—hold that all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class which controls production and a lower class which produces the labour for such goods. Heavily critical of the current socio-economic form of society, capitalism, he called it the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", believing it to be run by the wealthy classes purely for their own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism.^[5] He argued that under socialism society would be governed by the working class in what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".^[6][7] He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless, classless society called communism. Along with believing in the inevitability of socialism and communism, Marx actively fought for the former's implementation, arguing that both social theorists and underprivileged people should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change.^[8][9]

Revolutionary socialist governments espousing Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of such socialist states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People's Republic of China in 1949. Many labor unions and worker's parties worldwide were also influenced by Marxist ideas. Various theoretical variants, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism, were developed. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.^[10] Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.^[11][12]

Biography[link]

Early life: 1818–1835[link]

Marx's birthplace in Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, which is now a museum devoted to him.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at 664 Brückergasse in Trier, a town located in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.^[13] His ancestry was Ashkenazi Jewish, with his paternal line having supplied the rabbis of Trier since 1723, a role that had been taken up by his own grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx; Meier's son and Karl's father would be the first in the line to receive a secular education.^[14] His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi.^[15] Karl's father, Herschel Marx, was middle-class and relatively wealthy: the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards; he converted from Judaism to the Protestant Christian denomination of Lutheranism prior to his son's birth, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over Herschel.^[4] In 1815, he began working as an attorney and in 1819 moved his family from a five-room rented apartment into a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra.^[16] A man of the Enlightenment, Heinrich Marx was interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, and took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, which was then governed by an absolute monarchy.^[17] Karl's mother, born Henrietta Pressburg (20 July 1788-30 November 1863), was a Dutch Jew who, unlike her husband, was only semi-literate. She claimed to suffer from "excessive mother love", devoting much time to her family, and insisting on cleanliness within her home.^[18] She was from a prosperous business family. Her family later founded the company Philips Electronics: she was great-aunt to Anton and Gerard Philips, and great-great-aunt to Frits Philips. Her brother, Marx's uncle Benjamin Philips (1830-1900), was a wealthy banker and industrialist, who Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come rely upon for loans, while they were exiled in London.^[19]

Heinrich Marx converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1816 or 1817 in order to continue practicing law after the Prussian edict denying Jews to the bar. Karl was born in 1818 and baptized in 1824, but his mother, Henriette, did not convert until 1825, when Karl was 7. There is no evidence that the Marx family actually embraced Lutheranism, although there is no evidence they were practicing Jews. Marx identified himself as an atheist.^[20][21][22]

Little is known about Karl Marx's childhood.^[23] He was privately educated until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster Hugo Wyttenbach was a friend of his father. Wyttenbach had employed many liberal humanists as teachers; this angered the government so that the police raided the school in 1832, discovering what they labelled seditious literature espousing political liberalism being distributed amongst the students.^[24] In 1835, Karl, then aged seventeen, began attending the University of Bonn, where he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study.^[25] He was able to avoid military service when he turned eighteen because he suffered from a weak chest.^[26] Being fond of alcoholic beverages, at Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner) and at one point served as its co-president.^[27] Marx was more interested in drinking and socialising than studying law, and because of his poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented University of Berlin,^[28] where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history.^[29]

Hegelianism and early activism: 1836–1843[link]

In 1836, Marx became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, a beautiful baroness of the Prussian ruling class—"the most desirable young woman in Trier" ^[30] —who broke off her engagement with a young aristocratic second lieutenant to be with him.^[31] Their eventual marriage was controversial for breaking two social taboos of the period: it was a marriage between a woman of a noble background and a man of Jewish origin, as well as being between a member of the upper class (aristocracy) and a member of the middle class, respectively. Such issues were lessened by Marx's friendship with Jenny's father, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a liberal thinking aristocrat. Marx dedicated his doctoral thesis to him.^[32] The couple married seven years later, on 19 June 1843, at the Pauluskirche in Bad Kreuznach.^[33]

Marx became interested in, but critical of, the work of the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel (1770–1831), whose ideas were widely debated amongst European philosophical circles at the time.^[34] Marx wrote about falling ill "from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested."^[35] He became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians, who gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer.^[29] Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but still adopted his dialectical method in order to criticise established society, politics and religion. Marx befriended Bauer, and in July 1841 the two scandalised their class in Bonn by getting drunk, laughing in church, and galloping through the streets on donkeys.^[36] During that period, Marx concentrated on his criticism of Hegel and certain other Young Hegelians.^[4]

A contemporary drawing of Karl Marx as a young man.

Marx also wrote for his own enjoyment, writing both non-fiction and fiction. In 1837, he completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix; a drama, Oulanem and some poems, none of which were published.^[37] In 1971, Marx's one act play Oulanem was made available in English by author Robert Payne. According to Payne, the title Oulanem is an anagram for "Manuelo" which is a variant of "Emmanuel" meaning "God is with us".^[38] He soon gave up writing fiction for other pursuits, including learning English and Italian.^[39]

He was deeply engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he finished in 1841. The essay has been described as "a daring and original piece of work in which he set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy",^[40] and as such was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided to submit it instead to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD based on it.^[29][41]

From considering an academic career, Marx turned to journalism.^[4][42] He moved to the city of Cologne in 1842, where he began writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, where he expressed his increasingly socialist views on politics.^[43] He criticised the governments of Europe and their policies, but also liberals and other members of the socialist movement whose ideas he thought were ineffective or outright anti-socialist.^[44] The paper eventually attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for potentially seditious material before it could be printed. Marx said, "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear."^[45] After the paper published an article strongly criticising the monarchy in Russia, the Russian Tsar Nicholas I, an ally of the Prussian monarchy, requested that the Rheinische Zeitung be banned. The Prussian government shut down the paper in 1843.^[46] Marx wrote for the Young Hegelian journal, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, in which he criticised the censorship instructions issued by Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. His article was censored and the newspaper closed down by the authorities shortly after.^[47]

In 1843, Marx published On the Jewish Question, in which he distinguished between political and human emancipation. He also examined the role of religious practice in society.^[4] That same year he published Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in which he dealt more substantively with religion, describing it as "the opiate of the people".^[4] He completed both works shortly before leaving Cologne.^[48]

Paris: 1843–1845[link]

Following the government-imposed shutdown of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx got involved with a new radical newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), which was then being set up by Arnold Ruge, another German socialist revolutionary.^[49] The paper was based not in Germany, but in the city of Paris in neighbouring France, and it was here that both Marx and his wife moved in October 1843. They initially lived with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau, but finding these living conditions difficult, the Marxes moved out following the birth of their daughter Jenny in 1844.^[50] Although it was intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was dominated by the latter, with the only non-German writer being the exiled Russian anarcho-communist Michael Bakunin.^[51] Only one issue was ever published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, which led to those copies sent to Germany being confiscated by the state's police force.^[52]

It was in Paris that, on 28 August 1844, Marx met German socialist Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence after becoming interested in the ideas that the latter had expressed in articles written for the Rheinische Zeitung and the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Although they had briefly met each other at the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, it was here in Paris that they began their friendship that would last for the rest of their lives.^[53] Engels showed Marx his recently published book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,^[54] which convinced Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.^[55] Engels and Marx soon set about writing a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx's former friend, the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, which would be published in 1845 as The Holy Family.^[56] Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of the other Young Hegelians Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually also abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as well.^[57]

In 1844 Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, a work which covered numerous topics, and went into detail to explain Marx's concept of alienated labour.^[4] A year later Marx would write Theses on Feuerbach, best known for the statement that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it".^[4] This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism (for being contemplative), idealism (for reducing practice to theory) and overall, criticising philosophy for putting abstract reality above the physical world.^[4] It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an argument that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice.^[4][58]

After the collapse of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, still living on the Rue Vaneau, began writing for what was then the only uncensored German-language radical newspaper in Europe, Vorwärts!.^[59] Based in Paris, the paper had been established and was run by many activists connected to the revolutionary socialist League of the Just, which would come to be better known as the Communist League within a few years.^[60][61] In Vorwärts!, Marx continued to refine his views on socialism based upon the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, whilst at the same time criticising various liberals and other socialists operating in Europe at the time.^[62] However in 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government agreed to shut down Vorwärts!, and furthermore, Marx himself was expelled from France by the interior minister François Guizot.^[62]

Brussels: 1845–1847[link]

The first edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in German in 1848

Unable either to stay in France or to move to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium, but had to pledge not to publish anything on the subject of contemporary politics in order to enter.^[62] In Brussels, he associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe, including Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen and Joseph Weydemeyer, and soon Engels moved to the city in order to join them.^[62] In 1845 Marx and Engels visited the leaders of the Chartists, a socialist movement in Britain, using the trip as an opportunity to study in various libraries in London and Manchester.^[63] In collaboration with Engels he also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the concept of historical materialism, The German Ideology; the work, like many others, would not see publication in Marx's lifetime, being published only in 1932.^[4][5][64] He followed this with The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to the French anarcho-socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought in general.^[65]

These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as The Communist Manifesto. First published on 21 February 1848, it laid out the beliefs of the Communist League, a group who had come increasingly under the influence of Marx and Engels, who argued that the League must make their aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding them as they had formerly been doing.^[66] The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism, that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."^[67] It goes on to look at the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising between the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy middle class) and the proletariat (the industrial working class). Proceeding on from this, the Manifesto presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and replace it with socialism.^[68]

Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals, the Revolutions of 1848.^[69] In France, a revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic.^[69] Marx was supportive of such activity, and having recently received a substantial inheritance from his father of either 6000^[70] or 5000 francs,^[71][72] allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action.^[73] Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed,^[70][74] the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused him of it, subsequently arresting him, and he was forced to flee back to France, where, with a new republican government in power, he believed that he would be safe.^[72][75]

Cologne: 1848–1849[link]

Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and also set up a German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there.^[76] Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to Cologne (Köln) where he began issuing a handbill entitled the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, in which he argued for only four of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto, believing that in Germany at that time, the bourgeoisie must overthrow the feudal monarchy and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie.^[77] On 1 June, Marx started publication of the daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper"), which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, Marx remained one of its primary writers, accompanied by other fellow members of the Communist League who wrote for the paper, although despite their input it remained, according to Friedrich Engels, "a simple dictatorship by Marx", who dominated the choice of content.^[78][79][80]

Whilst editor of the paper, Marx and the other revolutionary socialists were regularly harassed by the police, and Marx was brought to trial on several occasions, facing various allegations including insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, an alleged press misdemeanor and inciting armed rebellion through tax boycotting,^{[81][82][82][83][84]} although each time he was acquitted.^[82][84] Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in Prussia collapsed, and the king, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counter-revolutionary measures to expunge leftist and other revolutionary elements from the country.^[81] As a part of this, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was soon suppressed and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May.^[80][85] Marx returned to Paris, which was then under the grip of both a reactionary counter-revolution and a cholera epidemic, and was soon expelled by the city authorities who considered him a political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth child, and not able to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 he sought refuge in London.^[86][87]

London: 1849–1883[link]

Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny (before May 1864)

Marx moved to London in May 1849 and would remain in the city for the rest of his life. It was here that he founded the new headquarters of the Communist League, and got heavily involved with the socialist German Workers' Educational Society, who held their meetings in Great Windmill Street, Soho, central London's entertainment district.^[88][89] Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organising, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism. For the first few years he and his family lived in extreme poverty.^[90][91] His main source of income was his colleague, Engels, who derived much of his income from his family's business.^[91] Marx also briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851.^[92]

From December 1851 to March 1852 Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a work on the French Revolution of 1848, in which he expanded upon his concepts of historical materialism, class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat, advancing the argument that victorious proletariat has to smash the bourgeois state.^[93]

The 1850s and 1860s also mark the line between what some scholars see as idealistic, Hegelian young Marx from the more scientifically-minded mature Marx writings of the later period.^{[94][95][96][97]} This distinction is usually associated with the structural Marxism school;^[97] not all scholars agree that it indeed exists.^[96][98]

In 1864 Marx became involved in the International Workingmen's Association (also known as First International).^[82] He became a leader of its General Council, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864.^[99] In that organisation Marx was involved in the struggle against the anarchist wing centred around Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876).^[91] Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International.^[100] The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, a defense of the Commune.^[101]

Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data.^[102] By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse.^[91][103] In 1859, Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo.^[91] This work is often seen as the fourth book of Capital, and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.^[104] In 1867 the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production.^[105] Here, Marx elaborated his labour theory of value (influenced by Thomas Hodgskin^{[citation needed]}); and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.^[106] Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.^[91]

Marx in 1882

During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterised his previous work.^[91] He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. His Critique of the Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party.^[91] This work is also notable for another famous Marx's quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."^[107]

In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated 8 March 1881, Marx even contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.^[91][108] While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also warned that in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage, it "would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all sides."^[109] Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allowed, that "normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune could exist.^[109] However, in the same letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx points out that "at the core of the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production."^[109] In one of the drafts of this letter, Marx reveals his growing passion for anthropology, motivated by his belief that future communism would be a return on a higher level to the communism of our prehistoric past. He wrote that 'the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type — collective production and appropriation'. He added that 'the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies'.^[110] Before he died, Marx asked Engels to write up these ideas, which were published in 1884 under the title The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Death[link]

The tomb of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery, London

Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on 14 March 1883. He died a stateless person;^[111] family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. There were between nine and eleven mourners at his funeral.^[112][113]

Several of his closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels's speech included the passage:

Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, were also in attendance.^[113] Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement, made a short statement in French.^[113] Two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out.^[113] Together with Engels's speech, this constituted the entire programme of the funeral.^[113] Non-relatives attending the funeral included three communist associates of Marx: Friedrich Lessner, imprisoned for three years after the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, whom Engels described as "an old member of the Communist League" and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society, and a communist activist involved in the 1848 Baden revolution.^[113] Another attendee of the funeral was Ray Lankester, a British zoologist who would later become a prominent academic.^[113]

Upon his own death, Engels left Marx's two surviving daughters a "significant portion" of his $4.8 million estate.^[30]

Marx's tombstone bears the carved message: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE", the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and from the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (edited by Engels): "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it".^[9] The Communist Party of Great Britain had the monumental tombstone built in 1954 with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had had only humble adornment.^[9] In 1970 there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument using a homemade bomb.^[115]

The later Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked that "One cannot say Marx died a failure" because, although he had not achieved a large following of disciples in Britain, his writings had already begun to make an impact on the leftist movements in Germany and Russia. Within 25 years of his death, the continental European socialist parties that acknowledged Marx's influence on their politics were each gaining between 15 and 47% in those countries with representative democratic elections.^[116]

Marx's thought[link]

Inspirations[link]

The philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, whose ideas on dialectics heavily influenced Marx

Friedrich Engels

Marx's thought demonstrates influences from many thinkers, including but not limited to:

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy;^[117]
• The classical political economy (economics) of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;^[118]
• French socialist thought,^[118] in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier;^[119][120]
• Earlier German philosophical materialism, particularly that of Ludwig Feuerbach;^[57]
• The working class analysis by Friedrich Engels.^[55]

Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin) certainly shows the influence of Hegel's claim that one should view reality (and history) dialectically.^[117] However, Hegel had thought in idealist terms, putting ideas in the forefront, whereas Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms, arguing for the primacy of matter over idea.^[4][117] Where Hegel saw the "spirit" as driving history, Marx saw this as an unnecessary mystification, obscuring the reality of humanity and its physical actions shaping the world.^[117] He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that one needed to set it upon its feet.^[117]

Though inspired by French socialist and sociological thought,^[118] Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that their favoured small scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty, and that only a large scale change in the economic system can bring about real change.^[120]

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism came from Engels's book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.^[55]

Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution would inevitably occur. However, Marx famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world.^[8][9]

Philosophy and social thought[link]

Marx polemic with other thinkers often occurred through critique, and thus he has been called "the first great user of critical method in social sciences."^[117][118] He criticised speculative philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology.^[121] By adopting this approach, Marx attempted to separate key findings from ideological biases.^[118] This set him apart from many contemporary philosophers.^[8]

Human nature[link]

Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human history involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both human beings and material objects.^[122] Humans recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves.^[123][124] For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended.^[124] Marx further argues that, by molding nature^[125] in desired ways,^[126] the subject takes the object as its own, and thus permits the individual to be actualised as fully human. For Marx, then, human nature—Gattungswesen, or species-being—exists as a function of human labour.^{[123][124][126]} Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that, in order for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object, it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world.^[127] Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work",^[128] but characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and abstract.^[129] Marx thus departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he has actual, sensuous objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can only express his life in actual sensuous objects."^[127] Consequently, Marx revises Hegelian "work" into material "labour", and in the context of human capacity to transform nature the term "labour power".^[4]

Labour, class struggle, and false consciousness[link]

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto^[67])

Marx had a special concern with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power.^[130] He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.^[131] As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception.^[130] Capitalism mediates social relationships of production (such as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through commodities, including labour, that are bought and sold on the market.^[130] For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour—one's capacity to transform the world—is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss.^[130] Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt.^[132]

Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false consciousness",^[133] which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal.^[134] Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).^[4][135] An example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface^[136] to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

—Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right^[137]

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that religion had as its primary social aim the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of highlighting/preserving political and economic status quo and inequality.^[138]

Economy, history and society[link]

Marx's thoughts on labour were related to the primacy he gave to the economic relation in determining the society's past, present and future (see also economic determinism).^{[117][120][139]} Accumulation of capital shapes the social system.^[120] Social change, for Marx, was about conflict between opposing interests, driven, in the background, by economic forces.^[117] This became the inspiration for the body of works known as the conflict theory.^[139] In his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and dehumanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism.^[117] Marx noted that this was not an intentional process; rather, no individual or even no state can go against the forces of economy.^[120]