treason, Marx, who had done everything to save the accused,
dissolved the Communist League altogether. Nor was a literary
enterprise, a review, also called the Neue rheinische Zeitung,
more successful; only six numbers of it were issued. It contained,
however, some very remarkable contributions; and a series of
articles on the career of the French Revolution of 1848, which
first appeared there, was in 1895 published by Engels in book
form under the title of Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich von
1848 “by Karl Marx.” Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets, published
at that time, met with a very vehement criticism in the
Neue rheinische Zeitung. The endeavours of Ernest Jones and
others to revive the Chartist movement were heartily supported
by Marx, who contributed to several of the Chartist journals of
the period, mostly, if not wholly, without getting or asking payment.
He lived at this time in great financial straits, occupied
a few small rooms in Dean Street, Soho, and all his children
then born died very young. At length he was invited to
write letters for the New York Tribune, whose staff consisted
of advanced democrats and socialists of the Fourierist school.
For these letters he was paid at the rate of a guinea each.
Part of them, dealing with the Eastern Question and the
Crimean War, were republished in 1897 (London, Sonnenschein).
Some were even at the time reprinted in pamphlet form.
The co-operation of Marx, who was determinedly anti-Russian,
since Russia was the leading reactionary power in
Europe, was obtained by David Urquhart and his followers.
A number of Marx’s articles were issued as pamphlets by the
Urquhartite committees, and Marx wrote a series of articles
on the diplomatic history of the 18th century for the Urquhartite
Free Press (Sheffield and London, 1856–1857). When
in 1859 the Franco-Austrian War about Italy broke out, Marx
denounced it as a Franco-Russian intrigue, directed against
Germany on the one hand and the revolutionary movement in
France on the other. He opposed those democrats who supported
a war which in their eyes aimed at the independence of
the Italian nation and promised to weaken Austria, whose
superiority in Germany was the hindrance to German unity.
Violent derogatory remarks directed against him by the well-known
naturalist Karl Vogt gave occasion to a not less violent
rejoinder, Herr Vogt, a book full of interesting material for the
student of modern history. Marx’s contention, that Vogt acted
as an agent of the Bonapartist clique, seems to have been well
founded, whilst it must be an open question how far Vogt acted
from dishonourable motives. The discussions raised by the war
also resulted in a great estrangement between Marx and Ferdinand
Lassalle. Lassalle had taken a similar view of the war to
that advocated by Vogt, and fought tooth and nail for it in
letters to Marx. In the same year, 1859, Marx published as a
first result of his renewed economic studies the book Zur Kritik
der politischen Ökonomie. It was the first part of a much larger
work planned to cover the whole ground of political economy.
But Marx found that the arrangement of his materials did not
fully answer his purpose, and that many details had still to be
worked out. He consequently altered the whole plan and sat
down to rewrite the book, of which in 1867 he published the first
volume under the title Das Kapital.
In the meantime, in 1864, the International Working Men’s Association was founded in London, and Marx became in fact though not in name, the head of its general council. All its addresses and proclamations were penned by him and explained in lectures to the members of the council. The first years of the International went smoothly enough. Marx was then at his best. He displayed in the International a political sagacity and toleration which compare most favourably with the spirit of some of the publications of the Communist League. He was more of its teacher than an agitator, and his expositions of such subjects as education, trade unions, the working day, and co-operation were highly instructive. He did not hurry on extreme resolutions, but put his proposals in such a form that they could be adopted by even the more backward sections, and yet contained no concessions to reactionary tendencies. But this condition of things was not permitted to go on. The anarchist agitation of Bakunin, the Franco-German War, and the Paris Commune created a state of things before which the International succumbed. Passions and prejudices ran so high that it proved impossible to maintain any sort of centralized federation. At the congress of the Hague, September 1872, the general council was removed from London to New York. But this was only a makeshift, and in July 1876 the rest of the old International was formally dissolved at a conference held in Philadelphia. That its spirit had not passed away was shown by subsequent international congresses, and by the growth and character of socialist labour parties in different countries. They have mostly founded their programmes on the basis of its principles, but are not always in their details quite in accordance with Marx’s views. Thus the programme which the German socialist party accepted at its congress in 1875 was very severely criticized by Marx. This criticism, reprinted in 1891 in the review Die neue Zeit, is of great importance for the analysis of Marx’s conception of socialism.
The dissolution of the International gave Marx an opportunity of returning to his scientific work. He did not, however, succeed in publishing further volumes of Das Kapital. In order to make it—and especially the part dealing with property in land—as complete as possible, he took up, as Engels tells us, a number of new studies, but repeated illness interrupted his researches, and on the 14th of March 1883 he passed quietly away.
From the manuscripts he left Engels compiled a second and a third volume of Das Kapital by judiciously and elaborately using complete and incomplete chapters, rough copies and excerpts, which Marx had at different times written down. Much of the copy used dates back to the ’sixties, i.e. represents the work as at first conceived by Marx, so that, e.g., the matter published as the third volume was in the main written much earlier than the matter which was used for compiling the second volume. The same applies to the fourth volume. Although the work thus comprises the four volumes promised in the preface to the book, it can only in a very restricted sense be regarded as complete. In substance and demonstration it must be regarded as a torso. And it is perhaps not quite accidental that it should be so. Marx, if he had lived longer and had enjoyed better health, would have given the world a much greater amount of scientific work of high value than is now the case. But it seems doubtful whether he would have brought Das Kapital, his main work, to a satisfactory conclusion.
Das Kapital proposes to show up historically and critically the whole mechanism of capitalist economy. The first volume deals with the processes of producing capital, the second with the circulation of capital, the third with the movements of capital as a whole, whilst the fourth gives the history of the theories concerning capital. Capital is, according to Marx, the means of appropriating surplus-value as distinguished from ground rent (rent on every kind of terrestrial property, such as land, mines, rivers, &c., based upon the monopolist nature of such property). Surplus-value is created in the process of production only, it is this part of the value of the newly created product which is not given to the workman as a return—the wage—of the labour-force he expended in working. If at first taken by the employer, it is in the different phases of economic intercourse split up into the profit of industrial enterprise, commercial or merchants’ profit, interest and ground rent. The value of every commodity consists in the labour expended on it, and is measured according to the time occupied by the labour employed on its production. Labour in itself has no value, being only the measure of value, but the labour-force of the workman has a value, the value of the means required to maintain the worker in normal conditions of social existence. Thus, in distinction to other commodities, in the determination of the value of labour-force, besides the purely economical, a moral and historical element enter. If to-day the worker receives a wage which covers the bare necessaries of life, he is underpaid—he does not receive the real value of his labour-force. For the value of any commodity is determined by its socially necessary costs of production (or in this case, maintenance). “Socially necessary” means, further, that no more labour is embodied in a commodity than is required by applying labour-force, tools, &c., of average or normal efficiency, and that the commodity is produced in such quantity as is required to meet the effective demand for it. As this generally cannot be known in advance, the market value of a commodity only gravitates round its (abstract) value. But in the long run an equalization takes place, and for his further deductions Marx assumes that commodities exchange according to their value.
That part of an industrial capital which is employed for installations, machines, raw and auxiliary materials, is called by Marx constant capital, for the value of it or of its wear and tear reappears in equal proportions in the value of the new product. It is otherwise with labour. The new value of the product must by necessity
