Things and actions are what they are,
And the result of them will be what they should be:
So why should we seek to be deceived?
—Bishop Butler
No thinker in the nineteenth century had such a direct, far-reaching and powerful influence on humanity as Karl Marx. Both during his lifetime and after his death, he was intellectually and morally superior to his followers, and in that golden age of democratic nationalism, in that era of heroes and martyrs who had nurtured much attention, romantic, almost legendary figures whose lives and writing dominated the imagination and created a new revolutionary tradition in Europe. But Marx could not have been called a popular figure in the general sense of the word in any epoch; of course, he was not a writer or orator in any sense. It was written extensively, but during his lifetime his works were not widely read; and by the late 1970s, when some of his works were finally available to the public, their desire to read was largely motivated not by recognition of their intrinsic qualities, but by the prestige or notoriety with which their authors had been identified and accumulated in the movement.
Marx lacked the qualities expected of a great public leader or demagogue, he was not a genius propagandist like the Russian democrat Herzen, he did not possess the flamboyant eloquence of Bakunin, and he spent most of his working life in relative obscurity in London, in front of his desk or in the reading room of the British Museum. He was hardly known to the masses, and at the end of his life, when he was recognized and respected as the leader of a powerful international movement, nothing in his life or personality could arouse the imagination or evoke loyalty across national borders, the kind of intense almost religious worship, as Corsut, Mazzini, and even Lassalle in his later years were worshipped by their followers.
His public appearances are not frequent or exceptionally successful. On the few occasions when he attended banquets or public meetings, his speech was fraught with problems, his rhetoric was monotonous and rude, and he demanded the respect of his audience rather than arousing their interest. He was a theoretician and intellectual by temperament, and instinctively avoided direct contact with the masses, although he devoted his life to their interests. In the minds of many of his followers, he played the role of a stubborn, didactic Germanic teacher, repeating his arguments over and over again more sharply until the essence of the arguments was indelibly rooted in the minds of his followers. Most of his economics was first expressed in lectures for workers, and his elaborations on these occasions were considered understandable and conscientious.
But his writing is slow and painful, as a keen and erudite thinker sometimes faces, he can barely keep up with the speed of his own thinking, anxious to presuppose all possible rebuttals in the time to express a new doctrine; published discourses are generally boring, clumsy, and obscure in detail, though their core tenets have never been seriously questioned. He was acutely aware of this, and had compared himself to the protagonist of Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, who tried to paint an illusion that had taken shape in his mind, and he kept painting modifications on the canvas over and over again, and finally when he felt as if he were expressing what he imagined, he piled up only a piece of unformed color.
He found himself in a time that fostered sharper, more radical thoughts than those of his predecessors, and people around him invariably believed that ideas were more real than facts, and that personal relationships were more important than external events. They use their rich and detailed personal experience to understand and interpret public life. Marx was not an introspective man by nature and was indifferent to the heart or soul of an individual or a nation. So many of his contemporaries, assessing the importance of revolutionary change in the societies of their time, attribute their failures to rapid advances in technology and soaring wealth, as well as the cultural dislocation and chaos of the simultaneous society, which merely provoked his anger and contempt.
He was endowed with a strong, active, ruthless mind, a keen sense of injustice, and a sensibility too few to be ignored. He rejected the hypocritical and emotional intellectuals and the stupid and complacent bourgeoisie. The former seemed to him to be aimless chatters, detached from reality and irritating, whether sincere or false, while the latter were hypocritical and self-deluded, indulging in the search for wealth and high positions, and turning a blind eye to the salient features of the times.
This feeling of living in a hostile vulgar world may be stronger because of a fact that he does not like: it is a Jew, which increases his innate toughness and aggressiveness, and makes him form a formidable image in the popular imagination. Those who adored him the most would find it difficult for him to maintain an image of an empathetic good temper, or to care in any way for those who came into contact with him; in his opinion, most of those who came into contact with him were either fools or, and he openly showed doubt and contempt for them.
However, although he was aggressive and offensive in public, he felt completely safe in his small circle of family and friends, he was considerate and gentle; his married life was full and harmonious, he interacted gently with his children, and he treated his lifelong friend and collaborator, Engels, with consistent loyalty and dedication. He was an unattractive man, and his behavior was often rough, but even his enemies were fascinated by the strength and momentum in his personality, his blunt insights, and the breadth and depth of his analysis of the situation.
Among his contemporaries, he maintained a strange and isolated image throughout his life. To the other revolutionaries, he was hostile to their people, their methods and their aims. However, his isolation is not only due to temperament or due to differences in geography and time. Whatever differences european democrats may be in personality, goals, or historical circumstances, they can agree on a fundamental attribute that makes cooperation between them, at least in principle, possible.
In the end, whether they believe in violent revolution or not, the vast majority of them are liberals and call for it to be classified as the moral standard for all mankind. They criticize and condemn the preconceived fantasies and systems that exist in humanity, at least the vision they diligently seek does not need to be demonstrated, because it is self-evident to all those who possess normal moral concepts. Their differences lie in the likelihood that their plans will be realized in practice, and to what extent they are classified as utopian.
There is a broad consensus among all democratic factions on the ultimate pursuit, but there is a disagreement over the effectiveness of the proposed means, the feasibility of compromising with those in power in morality or practice, the role and value of specific social systems, and what policies should be adopted towards them. In a sense, but they are essentially reformers, they believe that nothing cannot be changed by the firm belief of doctrine, and they equally believe that strong spiritual goals are an inexhaustible motivator for action. They defend themselves with some universal values, rather than by appealing to facts. First, to determine what the ideal world in their minds is like; secondly, they must consider that on this basis the existing social structures should be largely preserved and much of them should be abandoned; and finally, they should seek the most effective means of accomplishing the necessary transformations.
The above views are universally accepted by all revolutionaries and reformers. Taking this as a starting point, out of complete sympathy, Marx appeared. He believed that human history was governed by laws—just as the laws of nature controlled nature—and could not be interfered with by individuals or manipulated by certain ideals. He believed that the inner experience that people used to justify their goals, whether individual or collective, was merely an instinctive dependence that gave rise to myths and hallucinations, and was far from being able to explain a particular moral or religious truth.
Bound by innate material conditions, people tend to believe in any myth under the cloak of objective truth, and their deceptive effects cause people to misinterpret the world in which they find themselves, to misunderstand their place in it, and thus to miscalculate their own balance of power with others and the outcome of their own struggle with the enemy. Contrary to the non-democratic theorists who dominated the mainstream at the time, Marx believed that value could not be contemplated without the fact, and that the evaluation of value must depend on the observation of the facts.
To gain a real insight into the laws of history into their nature, without resorting to isolated secular moral standards; for a rational man it is necessary to clarify what laws he should adapt, that is, to the order which is best suited to the stage of history to which he belongs. Thus, Marx did not impose new moral or social ideals on humanity; he did not seek a kind of heart-swapping surgery, which he argued was necessary, but it was only a substitute for a series of fantasies. At least in his personal opinion, unlike the great theoreticians of his contemporaries, he called for pure reason and practical intellect, denouncing the evil and blindness of knowledge.
He insisted that in order to break themselves out of the chaos, all men must understand the actual situation in which they found themselves; he believed that it was a rational pursuit to make a correct assessment of the precise checks and balances between the forces of society. Marx attacked the existing order with history, not with utopian ideas: Marx attacked it not because it was bad or unfortunate, or because it was due to the ugliness and stupidity of human nature, but because it was the law of social development, and at the corresponding stage of the history of social development one class would have nothing and be exploited by another. The threat to the exploiters comes not from the deliberate retribution of the oppressed, but from the inevitable course of history, which as a class is destined to disappear from the stage of history very quickly.
Yet, though his theories were conceived intellectually, his language was more like that of a messenger or prophet who spoke in the name of the universal laws of the world—not in the name of mankind. He tried not to reveal the truth and refute errors above all things, not through salvation or improvement, but through warnings and condemnations. Destruam et & dificabo (I will destroy, I will build) – these are the words Proudhon wrote at the beginning of one of his books. It very accurately describes Marx's conception of the task he had assigned to himself.
In 1945 he completed the first phase of the plan and found himself and knew himself in the laws of natural, historical and social development. He argues that the history of the world is the history of the class struggle, and that although the manner will vary, one of them will inevitably triumph in the struggle: progress will be the gradual victory of the struggle of one class against another, and in the course of society a man who is in harmony with the progressive class is rational. Or he has thrown himself into it entirely, or history has placed him in it, and he thinks and acts under its guidance.
Thus, when Marx realized that in his time the proletariat would triumph in the class struggle, he devoted the rest of his life to planning and guiding them to victory. This victory will in any case take place in the course of history, but human courage, determination and ingenuity can accelerate its realization and reduce the pain of transformation, so that the process of transformation is accompanied by less friction and less waste of human wealth. Since then he has become a commander, actually engaged in a movement, so that he has never ceaselessly called on himself and others to justify a struggle, or to support one side and not to anything else: the state of the struggle and one's place in it is predestined; they are facts that need to be accepted and tested, not questioned; a soldier's only mission is to defeat the enemy; all other questions are academic questions based on unrealistic assumptions and are therefore off-topic.
Thus, in Marx's later writings, there is little discussion of the basic principles or a defense against the bourgeoisie. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy, what will happen if there is no enemy or if the struggle does not exist, these questions are meaningless in the course of the struggle. Introducing these irrelevant issues into real battles will only divert the attention of their supporters from the key issues they face, whether they are aware of them or not, and thus weaken their resistance.
In the actual struggle, the most important thing is to have an accurate understanding of the resource situation of one's own side and the enemy's own side, and it is equally indispensable to understand the history of earlier societies and the laws that determine the course of society. Capital provides an attempt at the above analysis. In this book, explicit moral arguments, conscientious or principled demands are almost absent, and it is equally striking that, after concentrating on action to solve practical problems, the book does not elaborate on what will happen after the victory of the struggle.
Whatever the individual's position in the class struggle, the idea of natural rights and conscience is rejected as an illusion of freedom: the socialist movement does not please man, it commands man. It does not speak according to the law, but according to the new form of life. Under the unstoppable imminent situation of this new situation, the old social structure has clearly begun to disintegrate. The change in moral, political, economic ideas and ideals is no less than the change in the social situation, which is the prelude to all change: to regard any of them as universal and eternal is to believe that their existing order, that is, the bourgeois order, is eternal.
This fallacy permeates the moral and psychological doctrines of ideal humanists since the 18th century. Thus Marx's disdain and disgust for the common assumptions of these liberals and utilitarians exploded. These people argue that since the interests of all are always the same in the end, the kindness and kindness that everyone possesses will make compromise and reconciliation in general possible. But if the struggle were real, these interests would be completely incompatible. The rejection of this fact may be due to stupidity and cynicism, ignorance of facts, and this particular evil— hypocrisy and self-deception— exposed again and again on the film of history.
This fundamental difference in views is not merely a difference in world outlook or a difference in disposition and talent, but a fundamental attribute of Marx's clear demarcation of the boundaries with bourgeois radicals and socialist utopias, and Marx fought against these angry and confused people, who brutally insulted and fought non-stop for more than forty years.
He hated romanticism, sentimentalism, and humanism in any form, and, in order to avoid any inflammatory effect on the idealistic mood of the audience, he systematically removed the old democratic vocabulary from his writings propagating social movements. At no time was he forced or offered to make concessions, and he did not enter into any dubious political alliances because he rejected all forms of compromise.
In many manuscripts of manifestos, alongside faithful convictions and plans of action, he attached his name, bearing the brunt of the bitter and extreme commentary in which he tried to avoid all the phrases of the democratic movement that involved that era: like eternal justice, equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, free conscience, the struggle for civilization, and other cheap words (though they once truly embodied the ideals of democracy); he regarded these as useless hypocritical words, They can only show the confusion of thought and the stretching of action.
This struggle must take place in all fields, and contemporary society is politically organized, which dooms the foundation of the establishment of a party to be subordinated to the laws of historical development and to emerge in order to become a ruling class. They must be constantly educated that the seemingly stable existing society is doomed to perish quickly. But this fact is incomprehensible, but the fact that the dying class has consciously or unconsciously created enormous moral, religious, political and economic conditions and beliefs to conceal this imminent fate.
To understand it, it is necessary to have the courage of reason, to penetrate this fog with sharp eyes, and to recognize the essence of the constituent events. The old society will perish in chaos and imminent crisis, and it will persuade every sober-minded, curious observer to act. Every human being– as long as it is not a dead or dying man – will not be an indifferent bystander to the fate of society, for their destiny is bound by it, and they must do something for their survival. According to Marx's theory, it is not the difference in the subjective values of each person caused by an internal vision, but the understanding of the facts themselves, which determines the rationality of an action.
A society that is considered progressive and worthy of support is one that has the ability to expand in its original direction without changing its entire foundation. And for a reactionary society, when it inevitably moves towards a dead end, despite its most desperate efforts to survive, it cannot avoid internal chaos and eventual collapse, and it bothers to create irrational beliefs for its ultimate stability, which are the painkillers used by all dying institutions to deceive themselves.
However, all that history, Marx's right-hand man, condemns will eventually be swept away by the torrent of history: those who think they should be saved are projects that deny the rationality of the universal universe. For Marx, the criticism of facts is itself a childish act of subjectivism, out of a pathological superficial outlook on life, out of an irrational preference for virtues or customs of one kind or another; this act shows dependence on the old world, a symptom of a standard of value that has yet to be completely emancipated.
In his view, under the cover of a feeling of sincere fraternity, imperceptible weakness and deception are quietly taking root, that is, the basic desire to compromise with the reactionaries, a secret fear of facts, of revolution under the light of the sun. What humanitarians have is weakness and concessions from Gu Quanzi because they seek to avoid the dangers of open struggle, and even the risks and responsibilities of winning victory.
However, truth does not allow for compromise, and nothing can provoke his outrage as intensely as cowardice and timidity: thus, his tone becomes violent and rude at the mention of cowardice, which forms his harsh "materialist" style, a style which feels completely alien to his writings on the socialist revolution. This "naked objectivity" took this form, especially among later generations of Russian writers: the search for the sharpest words, the most unpretentious forms, the most shocking statements, to embellish propositions that were sometimes not very striking.
According to himself, Marx's beginning of the establishment of his new system stemmed from an almost unexpected event, which took place in 1843: he was an editor of a radical newspaper, and in the course of a polemic with the government on regional economic questions, he gradually discovered his ignorance of the principles of historical and economic development. By 1848, his complete education in politics and economics had made him a thinker in the field. With rare in-depth insight, he built a complete theoretical system involving society and its evolutionary processes, which gave absolutely precise answers to all such questions, and ways to seek and find those answers. The originality of this system has often been questioned.
But it is true that it is original, of course, and originality here is not at the level of a work of art: the originality of a work of art when it is incorporated into some of the undisclosed personal experiences; but the originality mentioned as a scientific theory: the originality embodied when the author forms a new hypothesis by modifying and combining existing ideas, and finally proposing a new solution to the problem that has not yet been solved.
Marx never attempted to deny his borrowing of the achievements of other thinkers: he made a noble statement, "I am fulfilling the justices of history and will give everyone the compensation he deserves." But he did claim that he was the first to provide a complete and adequate answer to questions that had been misunderstood or not given in sufficient clarity. Marx sought not nobility, but truth.
In his early years in Paris, where his system of thought eventually took shape, whenever he found the truth he sought in the works of others, he strove to merge his hypothesis with that discovery into a new theory. The originality of the result does not require the originality of any individual constituent links, but means that they are interconnected around the central thesis, so that the links follow and support each other under a system as a whole.
Tracing the origins of any of Marx's advanced ideas is therefore a relatively simple task, and this is exactly what many commentators are anxious to do. It is likely that, in all his opinions, it is impossible to find a single rudimentary form of opinion that does not come from earlier or contemporary writers.
In this way, it may be in some different form that the concept of public ownership, based on the abolition of private property, has had tens of thousands of adherents more than two thousand years ago. Thus, the often-debated question of whether Marx derived the concept of public ownership directly from the writings of Mabli or the French Communists was too academic to be of great significance. As for more specific ideas, such as historical materialism, which was fully developed a century ago in a paper by Holbach, and traced back to his discoveries, owes much to Spinoza; this concept was modified and restated by Feuerbach in Marx's time. The view that the history of all societies is the history of class struggle can be found in the writings of Saint-Simon, and Marx largely adopted the claims of contemporaries of the French liberal historians Thierry and Minnes, as well as the more conservative Guizot. The scientific theory of the "inevitability of periodic outbreaks of capitalist economic crises" was first articulated by Sismonti; the rise of the Fourth Estate was proposed by the early communists von Stein and Hess, and was popular in Germany in Marx's day; and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was outlined by Babeuf in the last decade of the 18th century and explained and developed in different angles by Wittling and Blanqui in the 19th century And the status and importance of the workers in the present and future industrial countries was fully calculated by Louis Blanco and the French National Socialists before Marx was ready to set foot. The labor theory of value has its roots in Locke, Adam Smith, and the early classical economists; the theory of exploitation and surplus value, and its remedy, state macro-control, can be found in the writings of Fourier and the American socialists Borret, Thomson, and Hodgkin. This list is easy to keep going.
The eighteenth century was particularly absent from such doctrines. Some of these doctrines die in the cradle, while others adapt to changes in the academic climate, modifying their claims and influencing practice. Marx sifted through these chaotic materials and distilled what he considered original, correct, and important; in this work of stripping marx created a new instrument of social analysis whose main value lay not in its beauty or consistency, nor in the perceptual or intellectual power emanating from its great speculative and imaginative utopian system, but in Marx's tolerance and reorganization of simple basic principles, reality, and details.
When he refers to the outside, he assumes that the direct experience of the individual in society is in fact the outside world itself; when he unfolds it in its simplest form, his analysis is so novel and acute, and his new hypothesis, which combines German idealism, French rationalism, and English political economy, so that they are relatively isolated and echoing each other, seems to really explain the great number of social phenomena that can be conceived so far. These analyses defined the specific meaning of the framework of the communist movement and produced popular slogans.
Above all, this enables it not only to stir up discontent and rebellion among them by reaching out to the masses — as in the case of the People's Charter Movement, merely a combination of a number of clear but loose political and economic ends — but it also directs them to concrete, direct and feasible goals that are intrinsically connected to the system, not as the ultimate goal applicable to all things, but as the phased goal of a revolutionary party suitable for a particular stage of development in a particular society.
He gives clear and consistent answers to these theoretical questions in a well-known practical way, and his exposition occupies the dimension of people's thinking. The most important contribution of Marx's theory is that when summarizing them and applying them in practice, the connection between the two does not appear rigid. Moreover, it has been given extraordinary vitality, allowing it to defeat and survive decades of arguments with its opponents.
Most of its theories took shape between 1843 and 1850, when he was spending a troubled time in Paris. At a time when a worldwide crisis hung over Europe, economic and political trends seemed to be unsettling under the surface of social life, but in both breadth and depth, they were subverting the conventional framework established by existing institutions. When it suddenly revealed its true identity in a illuminating brilliance, he pushed the collapse of the violent machine that tried to cover up all the problems. Marx benefited immensely from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make scientific observations in the field of social theory: indeed, to him the whole event seemed to fully affirm his hypothesis.
Marx's whole system eventually revealed its complex structure of relations and its strong defense against any strategic attack, which could not be knocked down by direct attack, and the sophisticated contingency mechanisms in its walls that could cope with all the contingencies of the controversy. His friends and enemies, especially sociologists, historians, and critics, were strongly influenced by his theories. His theories have changed the history of the human way of thinking, and in a sense since the advent of his theories, people's writings have become more rigorous and rigorous.
At least in the long run, none of the subjects of his theory were defeated in polemics. Among the many factors that determine human behavior, Marxists emphasize putting economic factors first, which directly leads to a boom in the study of economic history, although this research has not been completely ignored in the past, but it did not reach its current prominence until the rise of Marxism gave a strong impetus to the study of history in related fields, just as the powerful stimulus of Hegel's theory gave a huge impetus to the study of history of the previous generation.
As Discussed and conceived by Comte and later Spencer and Tanner, after the aggressive Marxists summed it up as an urgent question of imminent urgency, scholars became more enthusiastic about the search for evidence, more attentive to method, and the sociological treatment of historical problems became a precise and concrete study.
In 1849, Marx was forced to leave Paris to settle in England, and life in a foreign country had almost no effect on him. For him London meant nothing more than the British Museum — "the most powerful strategic resource for students in bourgeois society"—and unfortunately its owner, the bourgeoisie, did not realize the importance of the ammunition arsenal. Almost completely undisturbed by the affairs around him, he wrapped himself in a private space made up of a small group of close friends and political partners of his family. He also met some Britons, but he couldn't understand them and never cared about their way of life. He was a man who was almost unaffected by the outside world: he had almost no other medium to obtain information from the outside world except newspapers and books, and until his death, he did not understand the quality of life of the people around him, nor the social and natural environment of the time.
In terms of his intellect, he might as well have spent his years in exile on the island of Madagascar, provided him with books and periodicals on a regular basis: of course, if he had done so, it would have been almost impossible for the inhabitants of London to pay less attention to his existence—he was so unknown in London. Psychologically speaking, his most interesting formative period ended in 1849: he has hardly changed since then, emotionally and intellectually. While he was still in Paris, he conceived a whole set of justifications and explanations for the rise and inevitable demise of the capitalist system. He began his work in the spring of 1850, and his research was interrupted from time to time by the daily basic needs and the newspaper work on which he depended to support his family, and his work was intermittent until his death in 1883.
According to his new method of analysis, the pamphlets, articles, and letters he wrote over the next three decades constituted a coherent system of commentary on the political events of the time. In a colloquial and realistic, yet surprisingly sharp tone, he attacked the optimism that was all the rage of the era.
As a revolutionary, he opposed conspiracy tactics, which he considered obsolete and ineffective, that it could only provoke the wrath of public opinion and not shake the foundations of society. He was determined to create an open party armed with a new view of society. In his later years he devoted himself almost entirely to gathering evidence and disseminating his own doctrines for the truths he had discovered, until they occupied the horizon of the thoughts of all his followers, until they seeped into every texture of their thoughts and actions. For twenty-five years he had concentrated all his energies on achieving this goal, and at the end of his life, he had done so.
The 19th century had many outstanding social critics, perhaps Marx more original, more brutal, more dogmatic, but none of whom was as strict as Marx was, who was so forthright and single-minded as Marx, who single-mindedly pointed his every word and every action toward a single, direct, and practical goal, for whom nothing was more sacred than sacrifice. If in a sense he was ahead of his time, in an equally clear sense he embodied the oldest tradition in Europe.
His realism, his empiricism, his attack on abstract laws, and his demand that every solution must come from and be applicable to the realities, his contempt for the act of escaping fierce insurrection in a compromise or progressive way, his belief that the masses are the most vulnerable to deception and must be saved at all costs from the oppression of fools and scoundrels. All this made him a mentor to the more radical revolutionary practitioners of the next century, who believed almost harshly in the pursuit of the importance of a complete break with the past in order to find a new social system, that one man could save other individuals, and that if they were allowed to develop freely, they would be lost and destroyed on the way, which brought him among the great dictators, ruthless subversives and innovators who founded new faiths, who explained the world from a single, clear, passionate principle. Condemn and destroy everything that contradicts it. He was confident in the contours of his vision of a world that followed order and law, a world destined to emerge from the self-destruction of the present chaotic society, a pure world of vast skies that would dissolve all difficulties and solve all problems; which brought with it an idea of freedom, a similar idea that appeared in the religious beliefs of the 16th and 17th centuries, and later in the scientific truths and great revolutionary principles, in the theoretical system of the German metaphysicians.
If these early rationalists had a good reason to be called blind believers, then in this sense Marx was also a blind believer. But his belief in reason is not blind: in his pursuit of reason, he is equally seeking empirical evidence. It is true that the laws of history are eternal and unchanging, and the grasp of them requires metaphysical intuition, but it can only be established by the evidence of empirical facts. His body of knowledge is closed, and everything in it is designed to conform to a presuppositioned pattern, but this system is based on everyday observations and experiences. He was not bothered by any rigid ideas. He did not reveal the slightest notorious symptom of pathological fanaticism, switching between sudden extreme excitement and loneliness and annoyance, which is precisely the symptom that people who are far from reality often produce in the completely private world.
The thrust of his most important work matured as early as 1847. The initial sketch appeared in 1849, and ten years later another one was redrafted, but he could not write until he had mastered all the literature involved in his subject until he was satisfied with himself. This fact, coupled with the difficulty of finding publishers, supporting his family and living at home, as well as overwork and the consequent illness, has repeatedly delayed the release of his work.
After twenty years of conception, the first volume was finally released, the most glorious achievement of his life. It is an attempt to provide a comprehensive explanation of the processes and laws of social development, which includes a complete economic theory from a historical perspective and a less explicit determinism of economic factors. His writing is often interrupted by the analysis of the current situation of the proletariat and the historical silhouette, especially in the transition from handicrafts to large-scale industrial capitalism. He presents his general argument, which in fact shows a new revolutionary method of writing history: the most aggressive of all the components is his continuous and exhaustive indictment of the whole social order, his indictment of its rulers, its supporters, its theoreticians, its docile slaves, and his indictions of everything which is intimately connected with its survival. The bourgeois society he attacked was at the height of its material prosperity, and in the same year, in an atmosphere of exuberant optimism and ambition, Gladstone congratulated his fellow citizens in a budget speech on the intoxicating increase in wealth and power they had achieved in recent years.
In such a world, Marx exists as an isolated, fiercely hostile figure, like the early Christians or the French revolutionaries, who boldly rejected all that bourgeois society could offer; he called its ideals humble and its virtues evil; he denounced its institutions not because they were wrong, but because they were bourgeois, because they belonged to a degenerate and tyrannical society that must be completely destroyed and abolished forever. The epoch could easily defeat those who confronted it, for its opponents were dignified and slow, which forced Carlisle and Schopenhauer to seek escape from a remote civilization or an idealized past, which caused its powerful opponent Nietzsche to become hysterical and insane, and only Marx himself remained stable and powerful. Like the prophets of antiquity who carried out the tasks given by God, Marx possessed a piece of inner peace, he clearly adhered to the beliefs of the rational society of the future, and he observed and witnessed signs of decay and destruction in all aspects. As far as he was concerned, this decaying order of old age was crumbling before him; he had done more than anyone else to hasten its collapse and reduce its near-death pain.
This article was originally published in Karl Marx.