In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value.
The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.
In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.
The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them.
In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.
The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.
In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.
Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.
Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.
After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848:
In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants.
Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris.
He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains,
[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party… the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence.
As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the U.S. Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.
Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.
The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.
The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.
Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out.
In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.
A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.
Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged,
[I]t is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland… to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867:
To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilized state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent.
Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.
In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.
The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.
Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote:
For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and… without any police of any kind.
In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.
Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.
The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.
Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.