Uphold Comrade Karl Marx!

On May 5th, 1818, the first classic of revolutionary communism, Karl Marx, was born. Marx made astounding contributions by practically founding the proletariat’s revolutionary science, which is scientific socialism. He did this by, first of all, applying a proper philosophical worldview to analyze material conditions; thus, he created dialectical materialism, which combines dialectics—”the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought”—with materialism—which says that, “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” [Source]. With that lens of dialectical materialism, Marx studied society, creating historical materialism; he discovered that class conflict is the driving force of history, prompting him to analyze the political economy of capitalism. His dialectical materialist philosophy and analysis of capitalism created the scientific background for his communist ideology.

We have used his theories in our own articles on how capitalism works and why capitalists’ myths about it are incorrect, but people must study his works to understand him in full detail. Likewise, we support his ideas of socialism and communism, but people need to study his words to get a good grasp on theory. We encourage Wage Labor and Capital; Value, Price, and Profit; Volumes One, Two, and Three of Capital, as well as his Theories of Surplus Value, which was meant to be his fourth volume; Critique of the Gotha Program; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; The German Ideology; The Civil War in France; and many more books and articles by Karl Marx and his friend, Friedrich Engels. For now, we will go into how Marx’s classical theories inspired praxis in his time and shortly after him.

Marx and Engels helped found the Communist League, the first international workers’ group; they wrote its manifesto, hence the Communist Manifesto. The League organized workers in any groups they could join, and it faced legal repression wherever it would operate. Engels covered this and more in “On the History of the Communist League”:

The League soon had several communities, or, as they were then still called, “lodges”, in London. The same obvious tactics were followed in Switzerland and elsewhere. Where workers’ associations could be founded, they were utilized in like manner. Where this was forbidden by law, one joined choral societies, athletic clubs, and the like. Connections were to a large extent maintained by members who were continually traveling back and forth; they also, when required, served as emissaries. In both respects the League obtained lively support through the wisdom of the governments which, by resorting to deportation, converted any objectionable worker—and in nine cases out of ten he was a member of the League—into an emissary. …

After the center of gravity had shifted from Paris to London, a new feature grew conspicuous: from being German, the League gradually became international. In the workers’ society there were to be found, besides German and Swiss, also members of all those nationalities for whom German served as the chief means of communication with foreigners, notably, therefore, Scandinavians, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Southern Slavs, and also Russians and Alsatians. …

All these circumstances contributed to the quiet revolution that was taking place in the League, and especially among the leaders in London. The inadequacy of the previous conception of Communism, both the simple French egalitarian Communism and that of Weitling, became more and more clear to them. … As against the untenability of the previous theoretical views, and as against the practical aberrations resulting therefrom, it was realized more and more in London that Marx and I were right in our new theory. This understanding was undoubtedly promoted by the fact that among the London leaders there were now two men who were considerably superior.

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The Communist League was dissolved in 1852 after many communists were arrested in Germany. The International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, was founded in 1864 after the immense amount of work that Marx, Engels, and other communists put in. The debate between Marxists and anarchists basically began in the International, which had an important anarchist faction led by Mikhail Bakunin. “Anarchy, then, is the great war horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of slogans” [Source].

Marxism and the First International partly inspired the Paris Commune, the attempt at proletarian dictatorship in France in 1871. More specifically, many communists at the time who were part of the Paris Commune supported Marx’s ideas. The experiment proved the importance of violence and force in revolution, the need to destroy the bourgeois state, and the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a proletarian revolution. In Chapter Five of The Civil War in France, Marx writes:

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class [bourgeois] society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. …

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. …

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.

[Source]

The Commune did sadly fail in two months, as we stated in the section on Marxist theories of the state. It did not use authority to the extent needed to defend itself from external threats, allowing the French bourgeois army to regroup itself and bombard the Commune, killing it. The errors mainly had to do with a lack of centralism, for the Communards failed to create a functioning state machine; they attempted to organize an election during their state of being at war, and this cost the time that could have been used to create an organized, disciplined armed body controlled by the proletariat. Marx and other contemporaries learned from this, and they drew what was good from it and criticized what went wrong.

After the Paris Commune revolution, no major attempts at proletarian seizure of power were made for a while. The Second International succeeded the first one in 1889 (after the first one was dissolved in 1876 following the anarchist-Marxist splits), but it had a lot of reformist “social-democrats” and anarchists (especially syndicalists). During World War One, many of the international’s members exposed their imperialist characters by supporting their own bourgeois governments, but Lenin’s RSDLP led the proletarian line within the group and maintained opposition to all capitalists in the war. The Second International itself failed, and the revolutionaries of it united in support of proletarian revolution, especially the October Revolution.

The October Revolution and other revolutions were possible because the working class’s vanguards had the ideology of Marxism, later Marxism-Leninism; with that proper theory, they could make proper movements that attacked their semi-feudal, semi-capitalist systems and the imperialists that dominated them. They clearly had to develop Marxism into Marxism-Leninism to fit their time period and material conditions, and their comrades in the future developed it further into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; still, they did what they did thanks to the foundational theories of Karl Marx!

Happy birthday, Karl Marx! We will study your works and apply them to our conditions!