July 27, 2025 • 16 mins
This captivating essay by Harold Laski, a renowned figure in the British socialist movement, offers an in-depth examination of Karl Marxs life and philosophy. Born in Manchester in 1893, Laski was an influential member of the Fabian Society and the Socialist League faction of the Labour Party. As a professor at the London School of Economics, he mentored numerous politicians, including leaders of post-war Asia and Africas independence movements, and Ralph Milliband, father of the current Labour Party leader, Ed Milliband. Laskis political views, which encompassed democratic socialism, revolutionary Marxism, and Zionism, were sophisticated and multifaceted. This compelling 1922 essay provides a critical and scholarly analysis of Marxs work and life. - Summary by Phil Benson (adapted from Wikipedia)
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Part four Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This libriyvox recording is in the public domain. Four. Marx's
London period is creatively the most important part of his career,
but it was a difficult and tragic struggle for existence,
and his work was accomplished only by heroic effort. For
(00:24):
the first ten years, the family was hardly over the
verge of starvation, and Marx had even to pawn his
clothes for necessary expenses. Nor was his intellectual environment easy.
The disappointed makers of a revolution are never comfortable neighbours,
and his pamphlet He Evoked eighteen sixty is a proof
(00:44):
that German communists did not differ from their fellows of
France or Russia. For ten years eighteen fifty one to sixty,
Marx acted as European correspondent of the New York Tribune,
a post which was the sole source of any continuous income,
however very poorly paid, and if the selection of his
articles therein published by Eleanor Marx after his death is
(01:06):
at all representative, it is clear that the taste of
the American reader has changed in remarkable fashion since the sixties.
For Marx does not abate one iota of his convictions
in his correspondence, and the manner of interpretation is that
of the philosopher rather than the journalist. The income apart,
Marx had no consistent means of livelihood during his first
(01:30):
ten years in London. Then came one or two family
legacies and a generous tribute from villelm Wulf. Later Engels
was able from his own means to allow Marks some
three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Yet with all
their penury, these were not unhappy years. His wife seems
to have had a real genius for deriving contentment from misfortune.
(01:52):
Judges like Heine and poor Lafargue paid her the tribute
of profound admiration. His children were growing up, and Marx
was passionately fond of his children. Their nurse, Helen des Mouth,
was a source of infinite help and comfort, and there
was always the sure knowledge of the inevitable triumph of
the revolutionary cause. For Marx did not share in the
(02:16):
sense of depression which fell upon the Liberals after the
failure of eighteen forty eight. He shut himself in the
British Museum and sometimes working sixteen hours a day set
himself to the composition of a socialist economics. One or
two minor pamphlets were written, as the unsparing Denunciation of
the Coudetat of eighteen fifty one, which he called the
(02:38):
eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, and the
Critique of Political Economy eighteen fifty nine, which is important
in part because it is the groundwork of the Capital itself,
and in part because of the valuable light it throws
upon his own conception of his method. But outside his
relations with the international, it was to the Capital that
(03:00):
these years were devoted, and they were years of unremitting
and devoted service. He was at the museum as it opened,
and never left until the attendants turned him out. A
chosen band of helpers, all fellow exiles, used to accompany
him and aid in the researches he conducted, though it
should perhaps be added that they were not admitted as
(03:21):
assistants until they had shown their agreement with Mars and
passed certain craniological tests. Phrenology was not typical merely of
the utopian period of socialism. Marx moreover, never considered the
exchange of conviction for comfort. Offers of position came to
him as when Buchar sounded him, possibly on Bismarck's behalf,
(03:43):
but he never dreamed of desertion. There is certainly no
more remarkable instance of great sacrifice for intellectual discovery than
that of which marks his life. Is a record. Darwin,
it is true, devoted twenty years to the testing of
his hypotheses, but he had ample means at his command.
Marx was surrounded by difficulties, of which not the least
(04:05):
was the knowledge that his self imposed task condemned his
wife and family to profound suffering. Neither he nor they
seem to have flinched from the consequences, and one may judge,
not unfairly that their pride in his work was for
Marx his happiest achievement. Of Marx's intellectual environment in London
(04:26):
we know all too little men like John Stuart Mill
he never met, though he was on friendly terms with
the leading trade unionists as Odger and Applegarth. With the latter, however,
he had no intimate political relations, and in the contemporary
history of English labour his name has no large place.
That perhaps was natural enough for English trade unionism was
(04:49):
then a system of compromises with which Marx's revolutionary dogmas
had little connection. For the most part, his affiliations were
with Engels and the German exiles in London. Only the
former seems to have enjoyed his full confidence. He had, moreover,
a close relationship with that mysterious figure, half fanatic and
(05:09):
half knight errant, David Urquhart, whose loathing of Russia Marx
seems fully to have shared. Both of them saw spies
at every street corner, and at one time or another,
in each case, without a shadow of justification, Marx was
able to convince himself that Hervey and Bakunin were government emissaries.
(05:29):
It is, of course sufficiently intelligible that an exile who
had himself been the object of police attentions should live
in an atmosphere of nervous suspicion. But it is a
regrettable corollary of Marx's accusations that both Hervey and Bakunin
belonged to different sections of the Socialist Party. Marx never
welcomed opposition or rivalry, and he was too prone to
(05:51):
assume that a doubt of his rightness was a doubt
also of his opponent's integrity. Yet it must be counted
to his great credit in these years that he is
in no small degree responsible for the sympathies shown to
the North by the working class. During the American Civil War.
It was Marx who advised the Union of the Labour Leaders,
with Cobden and Bright, to arouse the enthusiasm of the
(06:14):
trade unions, and it was Marx who proposed in the
General Council of the International that a vote of congratulation
be sent to Lincoln on his re election as President
of the United States. Marx played some part also in
arousing the trade unions to protest against the brutal suppression
by Russia of the Polish revolt of eighteen sixty three.
(06:37):
But apart from the preparation of capital, Marx's chief occupation
in London was with the early stages of the First International.
In eighteen sixty two, a group of Paris workmen paid
a visit to the London Exhibition of that year. A
trade union committee received them, and a joint international council
was founded. When the Polish Rebellion of eighteen sixty three broke,
(07:00):
it was this council which prepared the gigantic protest meetings
against Russian barbarity, which represented the first intervention failure, though
it was of British Labour in foreign politics. It was
in connection with this campaign that Odger, a member of
the junta, suggested that the needs of the working class
involved the holding of regular international meetings. The idea was
(07:24):
taken up with enthusiasm, and a great meeting was held
in London in September eighteen sixty four to organize the movement. Marx,
who had held rather aloof from the initial stages, was
present at the meeting and joined the founder's committee that
was created. He perceived at once the significance of the
new movement, and though he seems to have had little
(07:46):
but contempt for its leaders, he was appointed to draw
up the inaugural address. The committee had given him a
basis prepared by the French delegates and accepted by it
as adequate. Marx characteristically destroyed the basis and produced instead
an address of his own, detailing the progress of the
(08:06):
working class in England during the past thirty years, and
insisting that its meaning must be read in terms only
of his own theories. It is, in fact a new
edition of the Communist Manifesto with a revolutionary period of
trade unionism as the basis of its deductions instead of
universal history. The special interest of the address, however, lies
(08:27):
in Marx's use of the history of the Factory Acts
as a proof of the value of working class agitation.
In the bright sunlight of day, He said, the bourgeois
political economy was here vanquished for the first time by
the political economy of the working class. The Factory Acts
were indeed revolutionary in the sense that they were a
(08:47):
direct admission of the inadequacy of laissez faire, but their
passage was hardly due to the type of influence Marks
had in mind. At least in other moods he would
not have called Lord Shaftesbury a revolutionary communis. Marx, henceforward
devoted much energy to the International, and as he hurried
it forth from its cradle, so he may be said
(09:09):
to have hastened it towards the grave. Its origin began
in dissension, the struggle between the idealist nationalism of Matsini
and the revolutionary and class conscious aggressiveness of Marx. On
the latter's victory, Matzini withdrew, though with characteristic selflessness, he
advised his followers to continue their support. Marx henceforth dominated
(09:32):
the organization, though he waged a continuous warfare to maintain
his supremacy. To him, the movement was essentially an effort
to propagate the ideas of the Communist Manifesto and thus
to prepare the way for the revolution. But to the
English members, the International was essentially an organ for promoting
trade unionism. And when Oju perceived in the Commune of
(09:54):
eighteen seventy one and marks his defense of it, the
real drift of its purpose he res from the organization.
The English Section always remained aloof and the directorate for
it was that special brand of radicalism, of which William
Lovett was perhaps the finest representative, that they were really
concerned to foster. Nor was the English Section the only difficulty.
(10:17):
For the first two years. The followers of prudon were
notable rivals, and they had no sympathy with Marx's idea
of a direct and immediate political revolution. They were moreover
hostile to communism, and racial differences played their part. Even
when the Prudonians had been defeated, Bacunin and his followers remained.
(10:38):
They were anarchists, and bitterly opposed to the centralized dictatorship
of which Marx was the exponent, and there were grave
differences between them on the degree to which property was
to be confiscated. Bakunin, it must be admitted, was as
difficult as Marx himself. In colleagueship. He founded a rival
organization and did much intriguing against Mark when he was
(11:00):
readmitted on its abandonment. By eighteen seventy two, his influence
has so increased that a frontal attack upon him was impossible.
In the Hague Congress of that year, Marx therefore proposed
the removal of the headquarters to New York. The motion
was carried, but it was obviously impossible to direct European
(11:20):
socialism from a position three thousand miles away. By eighteen
seventy five, the International was extinct and hostile, as were
the attentions given to it by the governments of Europe.
It rather perished of internal dissension, the struggle between two
powerful and antithetic personalities, than from external attack. Not however,
(11:42):
before it had rendered one great service. The Second Empire
perished in the defeat of Sudan and the provisional government
created by Tierre was not merely hostile to a democratic reorganization,
but even looked forward to the building of a new monarchy.
The working men of Paris had no simpleth with these ideas,
and the commune was their answer to them. The effort
(12:04):
lasted only seven weeks when it was overthrown amid scenes
of unexampled butchery. Marx had been definitely hostile to its inception.
For him, the essential function of the workers was to
strengthen their own organizations and to prepare themselves thereby for
their coming freedom. But when the Communards perished in their
(12:25):
heroic folly and were pursued, as even more modern history
has pursued them, by a campaign of virulent and lying attack,
Marx came to their defense in what is the Communist
Manifesto Apart the most brilliant pamphlet he ever wrote. The
Civil War in France, published as an official statement of
the International, is of course a partial and incomplete view
(12:48):
of the complicated events it narrates, But nothing that has
been written since so admirably depicts the ideas and sentiments
by which the Communards were inspired, or more energetically displayed
the savage brutality with which they were treated. The defense
was the more generous when Marx's low opinion of the
French socialist movement is remembered, as also his conviction that
(13:10):
Sedan was the just price of buonapartists imperialism. Yet even
in the hour of a victory, he welcomed Mark's address
the German workers in a manifesto which demanded a fair
and honorable place for the vanquished. Meanwhile, the great labour
of his life had been partially completed by the publication
(13:31):
in eighteen sixty seven of the first volume of the Capital.
It cannot be said to have received the welcome it deserved. Written,
of course, as it was in a German particularly cumbrous
and involved in structure, it was necessarily caviat to the multitude.
The Saturday Review perceived the value of the material of
which it made use, though not even Professor Beasley's persuasiveness
(13:55):
could induce George Henry Lewis to insert a long notice
from Engels in the forte Knightly Russian and French translations
soon followed, and in Russia particularly the book soon made
its way to that position of commanding influence. It has
never lost Marx. It must be remembered, was already well
known in Russia. Belinski had already praised the Franco German
(14:18):
year books, and Enkof had published a long critique for
Marx on Pruden, and his relations with Herzen and Bakunin
had made him a notable figure among international socialists in Germany.
The book seems to have made its way but slowly,
and the second edition eighteen seventy three contains a long
protest by Marx against what he deemed an organized conspiracy
(14:40):
of silence. It had, of course, presently to undergo the
inevitable attack incidental to all learned German controversy, on the
ground that its doctrines had been anticipated, and Marx was
ludicrously assumed to have stolen his thunder from Rodbertus. But
within five years from its publication, the Capital had become
(15:01):
the pivotal part of German socialist literature, and his name
assumed the position from which all other socialisms might be surveyed.
Marks was, not, however, destined to complete it. The long
struggle against poverty had left its mark upon his frame,
and the last twelve years of his life were in
incessant fight against pain and disease asthma and inflammation of
(15:24):
the lungs left him little chance of continuous work, though
typically enough. He devoted his rest to the study of
the Russian language that he might speak the more authoritatively
upon its agriculture, and to such recreations as to physiology
and advanced mathematics. He wrote, too, in eighteen seventy five,
his criticism of the Gutter Program, which contains perhaps the
(15:47):
clearest statement of his attitude towards the transition to socialism.
He was able further in eighteen seventy seven to eighteen
eighty eight to do something towards preparing the second volume
of Capital for the press, but visits to Carlsbad and
Algiers did not improve his shattered health, and he did
not lift his head again after the death of his
wife on December second, eighteen eighty one. To her Marx
(16:12):
had intended, as Engels has told us, to dedicate the
completed structure of his work. He had no strength for
the effort. On March fourteenth, eighteen eighty three, he died
peacefully after a slight hemorrhage of the lungs. His old
nurse Helene and Engels were present as his death, and
(16:32):
three days later he was laid to rest in the
cemetery at Highgates, Engels and Wilhelm Leipnecht spoke at his graveside,
and the former devoted the remaining twelve years of his
life to completing the unfinished edifice of his master. Marx
would have wished no other wreath upon his tomb. End
(16:52):
of Part four.
Part four Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This libriyvox recording is in the public domain. Four. Marx's
London period is creatively the most important part of his career,
but it was a difficult and tragic struggle for existence,
and his work was accomplished only by heroic effort. For
(00:24):
the first ten years, the family was hardly over the
verge of starvation, and Marx had even to pawn his
clothes for necessary expenses. Nor was his intellectual environment easy.
The disappointed makers of a revolution are never comfortable neighbours,
and his pamphlet He Evoked eighteen sixty is a proof
(00:44):
that German communists did not differ from their fellows of
France or Russia. For ten years eighteen fifty one to sixty,
Marx acted as European correspondent of the New York Tribune,
a post which was the sole source of any continuous income,
however very poorly paid, and if the selection of his
articles therein published by Eleanor Marx after his death is
(01:06):
at all representative, it is clear that the taste of
the American reader has changed in remarkable fashion since the sixties.
For Marx does not abate one iota of his convictions
in his correspondence, and the manner of interpretation is that
of the philosopher rather than the journalist. The income apart,
Marx had no consistent means of livelihood during his first
(01:30):
ten years in London. Then came one or two family
legacies and a generous tribute from villelm Wulf. Later Engels
was able from his own means to allow Marks some
three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Yet with all
their penury, these were not unhappy years. His wife seems
to have had a real genius for deriving contentment from misfortune.
(01:52):
Judges like Heine and poor Lafargue paid her the tribute
of profound admiration. His children were growing up, and Marx
was passionately fond of his children. Their nurse, Helen des Mouth,
was a source of infinite help and comfort, and there
was always the sure knowledge of the inevitable triumph of
the revolutionary cause. For Marx did not share in the
(02:16):
sense of depression which fell upon the Liberals after the
failure of eighteen forty eight. He shut himself in the
British Museum and sometimes working sixteen hours a day set
himself to the composition of a socialist economics. One or
two minor pamphlets were written, as the unsparing Denunciation of
the Coudetat of eighteen fifty one, which he called the
(02:38):
eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, and the
Critique of Political Economy eighteen fifty nine, which is important
in part because it is the groundwork of the Capital itself,
and in part because of the valuable light it throws
upon his own conception of his method. But outside his
relations with the international, it was to the Capital that
(03:00):
these years were devoted, and they were years of unremitting
and devoted service. He was at the museum as it opened,
and never left until the attendants turned him out. A
chosen band of helpers, all fellow exiles, used to accompany
him and aid in the researches he conducted, though it
should perhaps be added that they were not admitted as
(03:21):
assistants until they had shown their agreement with Mars and
passed certain craniological tests. Phrenology was not typical merely of
the utopian period of socialism. Marx moreover, never considered the
exchange of conviction for comfort. Offers of position came to
him as when Buchar sounded him, possibly on Bismarck's behalf,
(03:43):
but he never dreamed of desertion. There is certainly no
more remarkable instance of great sacrifice for intellectual discovery than
that of which marks his life. Is a record. Darwin,
it is true, devoted twenty years to the testing of
his hypotheses, but he had ample means at his command.
Marx was surrounded by difficulties, of which not the least
(04:05):
was the knowledge that his self imposed task condemned his
wife and family to profound suffering. Neither he nor they
seem to have flinched from the consequences, and one may judge,
not unfairly that their pride in his work was for
Marx his happiest achievement. Of Marx's intellectual environment in London
(04:26):
we know all too little men like John Stuart Mill
he never met, though he was on friendly terms with
the leading trade unionists as Odger and Applegarth. With the latter, however,
he had no intimate political relations, and in the contemporary
history of English labour his name has no large place.
That perhaps was natural enough for English trade unionism was
(04:49):
then a system of compromises with which Marx's revolutionary dogmas
had little connection. For the most part, his affiliations were
with Engels and the German exiles in London. Only the
former seems to have enjoyed his full confidence. He had, moreover,
a close relationship with that mysterious figure, half fanatic and
(05:09):
half knight errant, David Urquhart, whose loathing of Russia Marx
seems fully to have shared. Both of them saw spies
at every street corner, and at one time or another,
in each case, without a shadow of justification, Marx was
able to convince himself that Hervey and Bakunin were government emissaries.
(05:29):
It is, of course sufficiently intelligible that an exile who
had himself been the object of police attentions should live
in an atmosphere of nervous suspicion. But it is a
regrettable corollary of Marx's accusations that both Hervey and Bakunin
belonged to different sections of the Socialist Party. Marx never
welcomed opposition or rivalry, and he was too prone to
(05:51):
assume that a doubt of his rightness was a doubt
also of his opponent's integrity. Yet it must be counted
to his great credit in these years that he is
in no small degree responsible for the sympathies shown to
the North by the working class. During the American Civil War.
It was Marx who advised the Union of the Labour Leaders,
with Cobden and Bright, to arouse the enthusiasm of the
(06:14):
trade unions, and it was Marx who proposed in the
General Council of the International that a vote of congratulation
be sent to Lincoln on his re election as President
of the United States. Marx played some part also in
arousing the trade unions to protest against the brutal suppression
by Russia of the Polish revolt of eighteen sixty three.
(06:37):
But apart from the preparation of capital, Marx's chief occupation
in London was with the early stages of the First International.
In eighteen sixty two, a group of Paris workmen paid
a visit to the London Exhibition of that year. A
trade union committee received them, and a joint international council
was founded. When the Polish Rebellion of eighteen sixty three broke,
(07:00):
it was this council which prepared the gigantic protest meetings
against Russian barbarity, which represented the first intervention failure, though
it was of British Labour in foreign politics. It was
in connection with this campaign that Odger, a member of
the junta, suggested that the needs of the working class
involved the holding of regular international meetings. The idea was
(07:24):
taken up with enthusiasm, and a great meeting was held
in London in September eighteen sixty four to organize the movement. Marx,
who had held rather aloof from the initial stages, was
present at the meeting and joined the founder's committee that
was created. He perceived at once the significance of the
new movement, and though he seems to have had little
(07:46):
but contempt for its leaders, he was appointed to draw
up the inaugural address. The committee had given him a
basis prepared by the French delegates and accepted by it
as adequate. Marx characteristically destroyed the basis and produced instead
an address of his own, detailing the progress of the
(08:06):
working class in England during the past thirty years, and
insisting that its meaning must be read in terms only
of his own theories. It is, in fact a new
edition of the Communist Manifesto with a revolutionary period of
trade unionism as the basis of its deductions instead of
universal history. The special interest of the address, however, lies
(08:27):
in Marx's use of the history of the Factory Acts
as a proof of the value of working class agitation.
In the bright sunlight of day, He said, the bourgeois
political economy was here vanquished for the first time by
the political economy of the working class. The Factory Acts
were indeed revolutionary in the sense that they were a
(08:47):
direct admission of the inadequacy of laissez faire, but their
passage was hardly due to the type of influence Marks
had in mind. At least in other moods he would
not have called Lord Shaftesbury a revolutionary communis. Marx, henceforward
devoted much energy to the International, and as he hurried
it forth from its cradle, so he may be said
(09:09):
to have hastened it towards the grave. Its origin began
in dissension, the struggle between the idealist nationalism of Matsini
and the revolutionary and class conscious aggressiveness of Marx. On
the latter's victory, Matzini withdrew, though with characteristic selflessness, he
advised his followers to continue their support. Marx henceforth dominated
(09:32):
the organization, though he waged a continuous warfare to maintain
his supremacy. To him, the movement was essentially an effort
to propagate the ideas of the Communist Manifesto and thus
to prepare the way for the revolution. But to the
English members, the International was essentially an organ for promoting
trade unionism. And when Oju perceived in the Commune of
(09:54):
eighteen seventy one and marks his defense of it, the
real drift of its purpose he res from the organization.
The English Section always remained aloof and the directorate for
it was that special brand of radicalism, of which William
Lovett was perhaps the finest representative, that they were really
concerned to foster. Nor was the English Section the only difficulty.
(10:17):
For the first two years. The followers of prudon were
notable rivals, and they had no sympathy with Marx's idea
of a direct and immediate political revolution. They were moreover
hostile to communism, and racial differences played their part. Even
when the Prudonians had been defeated, Bacunin and his followers remained.
(10:38):
They were anarchists, and bitterly opposed to the centralized dictatorship
of which Marx was the exponent, and there were grave
differences between them on the degree to which property was
to be confiscated. Bakunin, it must be admitted, was as
difficult as Marx himself. In colleagueship. He founded a rival
organization and did much intriguing against Mark when he was
(11:00):
readmitted on its abandonment. By eighteen seventy two, his influence
has so increased that a frontal attack upon him was impossible.
In the Hague Congress of that year, Marx therefore proposed
the removal of the headquarters to New York. The motion
was carried, but it was obviously impossible to direct European
(11:20):
socialism from a position three thousand miles away. By eighteen
seventy five, the International was extinct and hostile, as were
the attentions given to it by the governments of Europe.
It rather perished of internal dissension, the struggle between two
powerful and antithetic personalities, than from external attack. Not however,
(11:42):
before it had rendered one great service. The Second Empire
perished in the defeat of Sudan and the provisional government
created by Tierre was not merely hostile to a democratic reorganization,
but even looked forward to the building of a new monarchy.
The working men of Paris had no simpleth with these ideas,
and the commune was their answer to them. The effort
(12:04):
lasted only seven weeks when it was overthrown amid scenes
of unexampled butchery. Marx had been definitely hostile to its inception.
For him, the essential function of the workers was to
strengthen their own organizations and to prepare themselves thereby for
their coming freedom. But when the Communards perished in their
(12:25):
heroic folly and were pursued, as even more modern history
has pursued them, by a campaign of virulent and lying attack,
Marx came to their defense in what is the Communist
Manifesto Apart the most brilliant pamphlet he ever wrote. The
Civil War in France, published as an official statement of
the International, is of course a partial and incomplete view
(12:48):
of the complicated events it narrates, But nothing that has
been written since so admirably depicts the ideas and sentiments
by which the Communards were inspired, or more energetically displayed
the savage brutality with which they were treated. The defense
was the more generous when Marx's low opinion of the
French socialist movement is remembered, as also his conviction that
(13:10):
Sedan was the just price of buonapartists imperialism. Yet even
in the hour of a victory, he welcomed Mark's address
the German workers in a manifesto which demanded a fair
and honorable place for the vanquished. Meanwhile, the great labour
of his life had been partially completed by the publication
(13:31):
in eighteen sixty seven of the first volume of the Capital.
It cannot be said to have received the welcome it deserved. Written,
of course, as it was in a German particularly cumbrous
and involved in structure, it was necessarily caviat to the multitude.
The Saturday Review perceived the value of the material of
which it made use, though not even Professor Beasley's persuasiveness
(13:55):
could induce George Henry Lewis to insert a long notice
from Engels in the forte Knightly Russian and French translations
soon followed, and in Russia particularly the book soon made
its way to that position of commanding influence. It has
never lost Marx. It must be remembered, was already well
known in Russia. Belinski had already praised the Franco German
(14:18):
year books, and Enkof had published a long critique for
Marx on Pruden, and his relations with Herzen and Bakunin
had made him a notable figure among international socialists in Germany.
The book seems to have made its way but slowly,
and the second edition eighteen seventy three contains a long
protest by Marx against what he deemed an organized conspiracy
(14:40):
of silence. It had, of course, presently to undergo the
inevitable attack incidental to all learned German controversy, on the
ground that its doctrines had been anticipated, and Marx was
ludicrously assumed to have stolen his thunder from Rodbertus. But
within five years from its publication, the Capital had become
(15:01):
the pivotal part of German socialist literature, and his name
assumed the position from which all other socialisms might be surveyed.
Marks was, not, however, destined to complete it. The long
struggle against poverty had left its mark upon his frame,
and the last twelve years of his life were in
incessant fight against pain and disease asthma and inflammation of
(15:24):
the lungs left him little chance of continuous work, though
typically enough. He devoted his rest to the study of
the Russian language that he might speak the more authoritatively
upon its agriculture, and to such recreations as to physiology
and advanced mathematics. He wrote, too, in eighteen seventy five,
his criticism of the Gutter Program, which contains perhaps the
(15:47):
clearest statement of his attitude towards the transition to socialism.
He was able further in eighteen seventy seven to eighteen
eighty eight to do something towards preparing the second volume
of Capital for the press, but visits to Carlsbad and
Algiers did not improve his shattered health, and he did
not lift his head again after the death of his
wife on December second, eighteen eighty one. To her Marx
(16:12):
had intended, as Engels has told us, to dedicate the
completed structure of his work. He had no strength for
the effort. On March fourteenth, eighteen eighty three, he died
peacefully after a slight hemorrhage of the lungs. His old
nurse Helene and Engels were present as his death, and
(16:32):
three days later he was laid to rest in the
cemetery at Highgates, Engels and Wilhelm Leipnecht spoke at his graveside,
and the former devoted the remaining twelve years of his
life to completing the unfinished edifice of his master. Marx
would have wished no other wreath upon his tomb. End
(16:52):
of Part four.
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