It reduced, at least in appearance, the importance of the class struggle by comparison with other interests and passions. The fact that the proletarian revolution broke out in France (and not in Britain) ran counter to the ‘logical’ schema of a crisis arising from capitalist accumulation itself. The crushing of the Commune revealed the disparity between bourgeoisie and proletariat in terms of forces and capacity for manoeuvre. Once again, there sounded the ‘solo … requiem’ of the workers of which The Eighteenth Brumaire had spoken.
Without doubt, Marx faced up to all this. He was able to read in the spirit of the defeated proletarians, short as their experiment had been, the invention of the first ‘working-class government’, which he regarded as having lacked only the force of organization. To the socialist parties that were then forming, he proposed a new doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the dismantling of the State apparatus in a ‘transitional phase’ in which the principle of communism would be ranged against the principle of bourgeois right. But he dissolved the International (which was riven by insurmountable contradictions). And he interrupted the writing of Capital, the draft manuscript remaining suspended in the middle of the chapter on ‘Classes’, to learn Russian and mathematics, and to embark, via an enormous amount of reading, on the rectification of his theory of social evolution. This task, interspersed with the settling of accounts with various individuals, was to occupy the last ten years of his life. It was to Engels, his constant partner in dialogue and, at times, his inspiration, that it would fall to systematize historical materialism, the dialectic and socialist strategy.
But let us not run ahead of ourselves. For the moment we are in 1845. Marx is twenty-seven. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena, is the former editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne and the Franco-German Yearbooks in Paris, and has been expelled from France, at the request of Prussia, as a political agitator. Though penniless, he has just married the young baroness von Westphalen and they have a little daughter. Like all those of his generation, the ‘class of forty-eight’, he saw himself as an up-and-coming young man.
Chronological table
| 1818 | Marx born at Trier (Rhineland Prussia). |
| 1820 | Birth of Engels. |
| 1831 | Death of Hegel. Pierre Leroux in France and Robert Owen in Britain invent the word ‘socialism’. Revolt of the Canuts in Lyon. |
| 1835 | Fourier, La Fausse Industrie morcelée. |
| 1838 | Feargus O’Connor draws up the People’s Charter (the manifesto of British Chartism). Blanqui advocates the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. |
| 1839 | Marx studies law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. |
| 1841 | Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Proudhon, What is Property?; Hess, Die europäische Triarchie; Marx’s doctoral thesis (‘On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’). |
| 1842 | Marx becomes editor of Rheinische Zeitung. Cabet, Voyage en Icarie. |
| 1843 | Carlyle, Past and Present; Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’. Marx in Paris: editor of Franco-German Yearbooks (containing ‘On the Jewish Question’ and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’). |
| 1844 | Comte, Discours sur l’esprit positif; Heine, Deutschland, ein Winter-märchen. Marx writes the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and, with Engels, publishes The Holy Family; Engels publishes The Condition of the English Working Class. |
| 1845 | Stirner, The Ego and its Own; Hess, ‘On the Essence of Money’. Marx expelled to Belgium; draws up the Theses on Feuerbach and, with Engels, writes The German Ideology. |
| 1846 | The Poverty of Philosophy (a response to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty). Marx joins the League of the Just, which becomes the Communist League, for which, with Engels, he writes the Communist Manifesto in 1847. |
| 1847 | Ten-hour bill in Britain (limiting working day). Michelet, Le Peuple. |
| 1848 | European revolutions (February). Back in Germany, Marx becomes editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a revolutionary, democratic journal. ‘June Days’ massacre of French workers. Californian gold rush. Renan, The Future of Science (published in 1890); John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy; Thiers, De la propriété; Leroux, De l’égalité. |
| 1849 | Failure of the Frankfurt National Assembly and reconquest of Germany by the royal armies. Marx emigrates to London. |
| 1850 | Marx, Class Struggles in France; Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music. |
| 1851 | Louis Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. |
| 1852 | Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Communist League dissolved. |
| 1853 | Hugo, Les Châtiments; Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races. |
| 1854–6 | Crimean War. |
| 1857 | Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art; Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal. |
| 1858 | Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église; Mill, On Liberty; Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos. |
| 1859 | Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Work begins on the Suez Canal. Darwin, The Origin of Species. Englishwoman’s Journal (the first feminist periodical) founded. |
| 1861 | American Civil War. Abolition of slavery in Russia. Lassalle, System der erworbenen Rechte. |
| 1863 | Polish insurrection. Hugo, Les Misérables; Renan, Life of Jesus; Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Injured. |
| 1864 | Recognition of the right to strike in France. International Working Men’s Association founded in London: Marx elected as the General Council’s corresponding secretary for Germany. |
| 1867 | Disraeli extends male suffrage in Britain; customs union in Germany. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. French conquest of Cochinchina. |
| 1868 | First Trades Union Congress in Britain. Haeckel, Natural History of Creation; William Morris, The Earthly Paradise. |
| 1869 | German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party founded (Bebel, Liebknecht). Suez canal opened. Mill, The Subjection of Women; Tolstoy, War and Peace; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. |
| 1870–1 | Franco-Prussian War. Proclamation of German Reich at Versailles. Siege of Paris and insurrection of Communards. Marx, The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council; Bakunin, God and the State. |
| 1872 | Hague Congress (break-up of the First International and transfer of the seat of the General Council to New York). Russian translation of the first volume of Capital. Darwin, The Descent of Man; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. |
| 1873 | Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy. |
| 1874 | Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, or The Theory of Social Wealth. |
| 1875 | Gotha Congress at which German socialist parties (Lassalleans and Marxists) are unified. French translation of Volume 1 of Capital. |
| 1876 | Victoria crowned empress of India. Spencer, Principles of Sociology. International officially dissolved. Dostoyevsky, The Possessed. Fest-spielhaus at Bayreuth inaugurated. |
| 1877 | Marx, Letter to Mikhailovsky; Morgan, Ancient Society. |
| 1878 | Anti-socialist (or ‘Exceptional’) Law in Germany. Engels, Anti-Dühring, with a chapter by Marx. |
| 1879 | French Workers Party founded by Guesde and Lafargue. Irish Land League founded. Henry George, Progress and Poverty. |
| 1880 | Communards amnestied. |
| 1881 | Free, compulsory, secular primary education in France. Alexander II assassinated by the ‘Society for the Liberation of the People’.
|
