At the same time, much can be recognized in his attitude towards those who think differently than he does in the movement he inspired. He could be ruthless in his polemics, driving out those who diverged from organizations where he had a decisive influence. He was certainly not always like that; he could also work for compromises. But dialogue was not his natural medium. He pushed his own positions with unfailing force and energy.
It is nevertheless precisely that force and energy that makes Marx one of the great living classics – a classic that must constantly be brought up to date, especially in an age marked by ruthless capitalism. He is the master of the incomplete work and the excerpt, and he is the perpetual model of the close involvement of journalism and the detachment of Capital. He himself should not be regarded uncritically. Both the outstanding and the less tenable – yes, even the purely objectionable – must be held out under the light. This can only happen with a thoroughgoing exposition of what he achieved. Story, account, and analysis must be welded together into a totality.
Nostalgia is not an emotion suitable to Marx studies. We need him for the present, and for the future.
2
The Time of Revolutions
The Industrial Revolution
In many respects, Karl Marx was a child of the French Revolution of 1789. But it was another revolution – slower but even more sweeping – that above all would mark his life and works: the Industrial Revolution.
The term industrial revolution was developed by socialist thinkers in the early 1800s. The French radical Louis Auguste Blanqui was, as far as we know, the first person to use it to designate an entire epoch, and Friedrich Engels took over the usage in his 1845 book on the situation of the working class in England. Today, the Industrial Revolution is in history books everywhere.
But simply calling it a revolution can make its precise meaning unclear. The images of political revolutions govern its interpretations; barricades and battle formations appear in the mind’s eye. But for the school of thought that Marx would come to leave his mark on, the process of industrialization was the most thoroughgoing – fundamental, in fact – revolution of another type.
Industrialization, unlike political revolutions, does not have a birth date. It is a process that is only possible to distinguish after it has achieved a certain scale. It had its beginnings in England, Scotland, and Wales during the second half of the eighteenth century and required a long series of prerequisites, such as the expansion of sheep-breeding and wool production and the overpopulation of the countryside, as well as a series of technological innovations – especially the continuing domestication of steam power.1 The necessary infrastructure was established: first canals, and then – a few decades into the nineteenth century – railroads that were built for transport of both cargo and people.2 The villages where this production was located began to grow rapidly and cities became increasingly bloated; factories were constructed wherever there was energy to run them, and coal dominated, quickly causing environmental destruction on a previously unseen scale. But the wheels clattered faster and faster and productivity increased, creating a new kind of more expansive but also riskier wealth than the great landed properties of the aristocracy or the plunder from colonialism. Periods of brilliant economic success were replaced by crises where stock lay unsold, and many of the recently wealthy became destitute. But those who made it through the wringer came out of the crisis strengthened, with enough resources to make use of constantly new technological aids; incessant societal reorganization helped fortunate owners enjoy the fruits of increasingly efficient production.
Cotton was the commodity that set industrialization going in Great Britain. Raw materials were brought from increasingly vast plantations in America, where people stolen from Africa worked under the inhumane conditions of slavery. The damp British climate turned out to be ideal for the cotton trade, and the machines required for processing were relatively cheap. The British, who had recently imported cotton fabrics from India, soon dominated the entire world market.
A few decades later, modern iron production began – heavier, more cost-intensive, but nevertheless brilliantly efficient in comparison with earlier techniques. Now Belgium and France – and soon enough, Germany and the United States – were in on the competition. In some places, industrialization became a state interest.
Iron was produced for consumption only as an exception: nails and kitchen utensils – but rarely iron girders – were bought for household needs. The iron industry provided capital goods. From start to finish, its expansion was associated with the railroads, which left their mark on the nineteenth century. People spoke of railroad mania; the pace of expansion was incredible. In 1830 there were only approximately thirty kilometres of railroad – primarily the Manchester–Liverpool line – and a decade later, 7,200 kilometres. In 1859 that distance had more than quintupled. And it continued until a large part of the world had been linked together in vast railroad networks.
But it was not only through the railroads that iron became important. The world revelled in enormous iron constructions like bridges, with the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair the genre’s crowning glory.
Steamers were another typical product of the Industrial Revolution that would fundamentally change the transport of commodities and people. The telegraph was yet another. With it, messages could be quickly sent from place to place and from country to country. Before then, trips on horseback had been the fastest transport for both people and messages. Now, horses had been left hopelessly behind.
Newspapers also underwent a great development with the new methods of communication. Using the new rotary press – in operation since 1846 – more and more could be printed in shorter periods of time. Thus, these technical innovations interacted with each other, reorganizing not only the physical world, but also people’s thoughts and feelings. Throughout the nineteenth century, the press gained unprecedented power over minds.
Everywhere industrialization advanced, it brought not only new machinery, new forms of communication, and new products. It also transformed societies; its most revolutionary consequence was the production of two new social classes: industrial capitalists and industrial workers.
Capitalism was not born with industry. Merchant capital had already previously developed and was partially bound up with Europeans’ combined voyages of discovery and expeditions of conquest. It became profitable to invest money in exports of domestic products and imports of much-coveted exotic goods; companies were formed, often under state management but with individual partners. Vast riches were thus amassed, which were invested in new projects in a widening spiral.
But merchant capital invested in commerce; the capitalists dabbled with trade. Industrial capital dealt, from start to finish, with production. It was a fairly motley crowd who embarked upon competition: from already prosperous bourgeois to mere adventurers. The operations were risky, and many would fold during the recurrent crises. But, gradually, a social class crystallized that despite internal competition was able to form a united front against other social classes. With distaste and fright, the old landowning aristocracy observed how these upstarts not only slapped together factories and flooded the market with new products, but also thereby usurped ever greater economic power. With that power came growing political influence and demands to be given a part of the landowners’ privileges.
The other social class the bourgeoisie had to offer resistance to was the industrial workers. Most industrial workers were former agricultural workers driven off the land, but there was also a growing share of craftsmen who had lost their livelihoods in the fight against cheap industrial products. Rapidly growing multitudes of women, men, and children were united in industry. Like their masters, they represented something new in history.
To ensure profits from production, the industrial capitalists had to minimize their workers’ wages. The ideal was that the workers would work as many hours as possible for compensation that was only just enough fo
r their own and their children’s survival. But with technological development, more could be produced in shorter periods. At first, many workers saw this development of machinery as a threat to their employment and attacked the machines with sledgehammers and other weapons. But this struggle was in vain, and they soon found a tactic that was much more effective. They joined together into what could be called the first unions (or, if you like, the embryo of the first workers’ party). These workers were called the Chartists, after the list of demands (or charter) they united around. Their success was limited, and their ambitions of creating a new society were dashed. But the model for solidarity lived on, and despite intense resistance from their opponents the workers now and then succeeded in winning certain minor successes.3
The terrible conditions that industrial workers lived and worked in also roused consternation among many observers. Manchester in particular – the centre of the cotton industry – was a place of pilgrimage for a stream of travellers who, with alarm and indignation, witnessed what they assumed would be the future for all of humanity as long as no radical countermeasures were applied. In 1845, Benjamin Disraeli, who would soon stand out as the leader of the conservative British Tory Party, wrote a novel inspired by his observations in Manchester called Sybil: Or the Two Nations. In it, he vividly described the glaring differences between the slums the workers lived in and the wealth among the propertied classes. His remedy was a society in which everyone was incorporated into an organic unity where hierarchies were natural but no one lived in want or provocative affluence.
Another critical traveller was Scottish author Thomas Carlyle, who blamed the misery of the city on the disintegration of all natural human relationships, which were replaced by a society united only by money – what he called the cash nexus. What should have been miraculous – people being served by machines – was instead producing filth and misery.4
Manchester’s residents wrote about it, too. James Philips Kay, a government doctor confronted with his city’s poverty on a daily basis, described in detail the work, the sanitary conditions, and health in the factory and slum quarters. Friedrich Engels followed in his footsteps – but more on his contributions to the issue later.5
The grave working conditions also drew the attention of the government authorities. The British Parliament pushed through legislation shortening the working day to ten hours. The industrial capitalists fought tooth and nail against the reform. But it was carried out, and did not result in the collapse of industries; instead, it became a spur to further accelerating technological development so that more could be produced in a shorter amount of time.
The nineteenth century in which Karl Marx lived was just as revolutionary and changed just as rapidly as the decades that closed the twentieth and opened the twenty-first. Then, as now, people found it difficult to manage getting used to everything new.
Reorganization of the Sciences …
The Latin verb revolvo, which forms the basis for our word ‘revolution’, actually means ‘to roll back’ – that is, retake an earlier position. As late as the Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word ‘revolution’ was used for the constantly repeated movements of the planets.
In the eighteenth century, a completely new meaning set in. Now, revolution meant a thorough change. It was in this sense that people began talking about a revolution in the sciences with figures like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, who replaced an earlier conception of the world with a new one. From the history of science, the new meaning of the word spread to politics.
The natural sciences have continued to be revolutionized again and again since then, but the designation ‘scientific revolution’ is still reserved for the changes in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and perhaps eighteenth centuries.6
On the threshold of the 1800s, the mechanics that Newton developed a century earlier were perfected. At around the same time, chemistry was given a completely new foundation by French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, who determined that oxygenation is crucial for the combustion process, both in organic substances and in living organisms. Quantitative determinations replaced the old, merely qualitative ones. Chemistry became one of the great conquering sciences of the nineteenth century. It transformed agriculture and became the basis for the dyeing industry and crucial for large parts of the development of medicine – pharmacology in particular. For many, it provided a new basis for a philosophy of life and conception of the world: was not everything – the activity of thinking included – ultimately a chemical process?
In physics, the energy principle – in the beginning called the law of constancy of force – would create a great stir in the middle of the century. Simply put, it meant that what were then seen as nature’s fundamental forces could pass into each other. Mechanical movement, electricity, chemical reactions, and heat were thus linked together in a system of equilibrium. German physicist Rudolf Clausius aroused even more wonder in 1850 when he showed that heat can never completely pass into movement. The notion of eternal circulation was thus overthrown. The universe is moving inexorably towards stasis, which means that all processes will ultimately cease. For those who saw development as an endless process of advance, this truth was hard to swallow. The sun will die out and all humanity’s achievements will come to naught. Pessimists, if anything, experienced a dull satisfaction.
Equally spectacular, but richer in practical consequences, was the rapid development of knowledge about electricity. As early as 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted had discovered that an electric current created a magnetic field, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of electromagnetism. English physicist Michael Faraday went further, laying out the principles for both the dynamo and the electric motor – or, in layman’s terms, how movement is converted to electricity, and electricity into movement. He also became the father of electrolysis by showing how chemical compounds – water, for example – could be broken down with the help of electricity.
These, and a series of other scientific breakthroughs, laid the foundation for what is usually called the second scientific revolution.7 It began at the end of Marx’s life – he himself was fascinated by what he saw of the applications for both electricity and the new chemistry – and culminated prior to the First World War. Electricity was its greatest triumph – everything from the transmission of power over great distances to light bulbs that illuminated cities, workplaces, and homes.
There is an interesting difference between the first and the second industrial revolutions. The first in no way added to the most advanced science of the age. The principle of steam power has been known since antiquity, and the technological innovations required for the cotton industry, the early iron industry, and the coal trade presumed no great scientific breakthroughs. In the second revolution, on the other hand, research and technology met; which is why it also been called the technological revolution.
Developments in biology and medicine played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century conception of the world. At the centre, of course, was Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, The Origin of Species. There were many theories before him – going back to antiquity, in fact – that argued that animals and plants had changed over time. The problem was how the change itself was to be explained. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people generally sought the model in the most perfected scientific theory of the time: mechanics. It could explain how nebulae became planetary systems through the force of attraction. But organisms were so much more complicated.
Darwin went another way entirely. He found the model for his explanation in the breeding of domestic animals. Through cultivating certain desired characteristics, people developed breeds that corresponded to their wishes. Darwin spoke of this as an artificial selection. But he also discerned a natural one. Individual organisms of the same species differed significantly from each other. Certain variations were better suited to the environment where they lived; others succumbed. Changes could occur over time this way
.
The Origin of Species created an enormous sensation. It collided with the creation story of the Bible. But it did not answer to the strict scientific requirement for conformity to laws; with Darwin, blind chance ruled.8
Those who let themselves be convinced often drew consequences for humanity and its world. Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who wanted to summarize all knowledge into a system, had supplied Darwin with the watchword ‘survival of the fittest’ and applied the same thesis to human society. But there, the thesis went from description to norm: the less suited should perish – in fact, it was a mercy for them to disappear. From Spencer’s ideas, a ‘social Darwinism’ developed in the United States that saw the ideal society as an arena for merciless competition where only the best survived.9
Against this interpretation of Darwinism, socialists and communists emphasized the role collaboration between individuals played in his theory. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin maintained that species development progressed through mutual aid.
Conservative thinkers who accepted Darwin’s thesis drew more pessimistic conclusions: humans were one animal among others, and that set limits for what type of society they could live in. Others used Darwin to support racist ideas. Darwin likened species development to a great tree. Could the human races then not be likened to small branches that naturally grew apart? Should they not be? Reasoning of this kind had disastrous consequences then, and still does today.
A World to Win Page 4