Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 3

But the partisans of critical communism differentiate themselves clearly on one point from all other forms or manners of communism, or of socialism, ancient, modern or contemporaneous, and this point is of capital importance.

They cannot admit that the ideologies of the past have remained without effect and that the past attempts of the proletariat have been always overcome by pure chance, by pure accident, by the effect of a caprice of circ.u.mstances. All these ideologies although they reflected in fact the sentiment directly due to social ant.i.theses, that is to say, the real cla.s.s struggles, with a lofty sense of justice and a profound devotion to an ideal, nevertheless all reveal ignorance of the true causes and of the effective nature of the ant.i.theses against which they hurled themselves by an act of revolt spontaneous and often heroic.

Thence their utopian character. We can moreover explain why the oppressive conditions of other epochs although they were more barbarous and cruel did not bring that acc.u.mulation of energy, that concentration of force, or that continuity of resistance which is seen to be realizing itself and developing in the proletariat of our time. It is the change of society in its economic structure; it is the formation of the proletariat in the bosom of the great industry and of the modern state.

It is the appearance of the proletariat upon the political scene,--it is the new things, in fine, which have engendered the need of new ideas.

Thus critical communism is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor herald, nor utopian--it already holds the thing itself in its hands and into the thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism.

This orientation which seems harsh to the sentimentalists because it is too true, too realistic and too real, permits us to retrace the history of the proletariat and of the other oppressed cla.s.ses which preceded it.

We see their different phases; we take account of the failures of Chartism, of the Conspiracy of Equals and we explore still further back to attempts at relief, to acts of resistance, and to wars,--to the famous peasants' war in Germany, to the Jacquerie and to Father Dolcino.

In all these facts and in all these events we discover forms and phenomena relating to the future of the bourgeoisie in proportion as it tears to pieces, overthrows, triumphs over and issues from the feudal system. We can do the same with the cla.s.s struggles of the ancient world but with less clearness. This history of the proletariat and of the other oppressed cla.s.ses, of the vicissitudes of their struggles and their revolts, is already a sufficient guide to a.s.sist us in understanding why the ideologies of the communism of other epochs were premature.

If the bourgeoisie has not yet arrived everywhere at the final stage of its evolution, it surely has arrived in certain countries at its accomplishment. In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting the various older forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to the action and to the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it tends to simplify, the different cla.s.s struggles of former times, which then obscured each other by their multiplicity, into this single struggle between capital which is converting into merchandise all the products of human labor indispensable to life and the ma.s.s of proletarians which sells its labor power,--now also become simple merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. It is all prosaic. And just as the present cla.s.s struggle is the simplification of all other, so likewise, the communism of the Manifesto simplifies into rigid and general theoretical formulas the ideologic, ethic, psychologic and pedagogic suggestion of the other forms of communism not by denying but by exalting them. All is prosaic and communism itself partakes of this character, it is now a science.

Thus there are in the Manifesto neither rhetoric nor protestations. It does not lament over pauperism to eliminate it. It sheds tears over nothing. The tears are transformed of themselves into a spontaneous revolutionary force. Ethics and idealism consist henceforth in this, to put the thought of science at the service of the proletariat. If this ethics does not appear moral enough for the sentimentalists, usually hysterical and silly, let them go and borrow altruism from its high priest Spencer who will give a vague and insipid definition of it, such as will satisfy them.

But, again, should the economic factor serve alone to explain the whole of history!

Historic factors! But that is an expression of empiricists or ideologists who repeat Herder. Society is a complex whole or an organism according to the expression of some who waste their time in discussions over the value and the a.n.a.logical use of this expression. This _complexus_ has formed itself and has changed several times. What is the explanation of this change?

Even long before Feuerbach gave a final blow to the theological explanation of history (man makes religion and not religion man) the old Balzac[21] had made a satire of it by making men the puppets of G.o.d.

And had not Vico already recognized that Providence does not act in history from without? And this same Vico, a century before Morgan, had he not reduced history to a process which man himself makes through successive experimentation consisting in the invention of language, religion, customs and laws? Had not Lessing affirmed that history is an education of the human race? Had not Rousseau seen that ideas are born from needs? Had not Saint Simon guessed when he did not lose himself in the distinction between organic and inorganic epochs the real genesis of the Third Estate, and did not his ideas translated into prose make of Augustin Thierry a reconstructor of historical research? In the first fifty years of this century and notably in the period from 1830 to 1850 the cla.s.s struggles which the ancient historians and those of Italy during the Renaissance had described so clearly, instructed by the experience of these struggles in the narrow domain of their own urban republic had grown and had reached on both sides of the Channel greater proportions and an evidence always more palpable. Born in the midst of the great industry, illuminated by the recollection and by the study of the French Revolution they have become intuitively instructive because they found with more or less clearness and consciousness their actual and suggested expression in the programmes of the political parties: free exchange or tariffs on grain in England, and so on. The conception of history changed to the observer in France, on the right wing as on the left wing of the literary parties, from Guizot to Louis Blanc and to the modest Cabet. Sociology was the need of the time and if it sought in vain its theoretic expression in Auguste Comte, a belated scholastic, it found its artist in Balzac who was the actual inventor of cla.s.s psychology. To put into the cla.s.ses and into their frictions the real subject of history and the movement of this in their movement,--this is what was then on the point of being studied and discovered, and it was necessary to fix a theory of this in precise terms.

Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical apt.i.tudes and by acc.u.mulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history and we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development? The very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has not yet reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its _processus_, and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process of birth before our eyes, as for example, in j.a.pan. In so far as it is society which transforms all the products of human labor into commodities by means of capital, society which a.s.sumes the proletariat or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old proprietors.h.i.+p, to speak the language of the jurists. In one country it elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of sociology.

As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the cla.s.s struggle were already implicitly contained in it.

This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of production had thrown light upon itself and its _processus_ in creating the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.

Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was a.s.sociated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to acc.u.mulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex sides of the problem of wealth; it developed in the pa.s.sage from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in the pa.s.sage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French Revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of "natural right" which developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the Const.i.tution of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the Physiocrats.

In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and a.n.a.lyzed the elements and the forms of the _processus_ of production, of circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, acc.u.mulating its a.n.a.lyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it ill.u.s.trated was the natural order, and that private property in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character of the forms which it studied. The ant.i.theses which it met on its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income from land rents.

The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the "natural order" is overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social ant.i.theses without diminis.h.i.+ng the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry. The ant.i.thesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This ant.i.thesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic constancy and unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical precision even into his thoughts of its details.

The ant.i.thesis between production and distribution once discovered, there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society by as many appropriate remedies.[22]

In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain? Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc.? These demands reduce the _things_, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasonings, and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and gearings.

The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of cla.s.sical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these relations arise in certain historic conditions but they const.i.tute a system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular one which returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish thing to a.s.sume that this system of facts which the ruling cla.s.s has established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this society that it shall change its law which const.i.tutes its defense is to demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who, reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed with a definition and a syllogism.

The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has the right to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it will be. But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of these consists in the fact that they grow and develop in certain determined conditions, but their relativity is not simply the opposite of necessity, a mere appearance, a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear and they will disappear by the very fact of the change of society, but they do not yield to the arbitrary suggestion which demands a change, proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism makes common cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social form and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more exact, the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new conditions are already born.

The theory of the cla.s.s struggle was found. It was seen to appear both in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic _processus_ was already ill.u.s.trated by the science of economics), and in this new appearance of the proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was discovered, but at the same time their relative necessity was understood. Herein lies the whole method and justification of the new materialistic conception of history. Those deceive themselves who, calling it the economic interpretation of history, think they understand it completely. That designation is better suited, and is only suited, to certain a.n.a.lytic attempts,[25] which, taking separately and in a distinct fas.h.i.+on on the one side the economic forms and categories, and on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs,--proceed to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life considered in an abstract fas.h.i.+on. Quite different is our position. Ours is the organic conception of history. The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fas.h.i.+on over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics and to explain the other changes by means of its changes. Therein lies our answer to all the criticisms which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are sentimental or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has done in his Capital, not the first book of critical communism, but the last great book of bourgeois economics.

At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did not go beyond the cla.s.sic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the prosaic conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now quite another thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to the ancient deposits of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the Semitic traditions. And it extends still further back into prehistory, that is to say, into, unwritten history. Morgan has given us a knowledge of ancient society, that is to say a pre-political society, and the key to understand how from it came all the later forms marked by monogamy, the development of the paternal family, the appearance of property, first of the _gens_, then of the family, lastly individual, and by the successive establishment of the alliances between _gentes_ which are the origin of the State. All this is ill.u.s.trated by the knowledge of the process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this process upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and making it traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be corrected at certain points, notably by the study of the different specific fas.h.i.+ons according to which in different parts of the world the pa.s.sage from barbarism to civilization has been effected. But, henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that we have before our eyes the general embryogenic record of human development from primitive communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome with their const.i.tutions of citizens arranged in cla.s.ses according to census which not long ago const.i.tuted the columns of Hercules for research into written tradition. The cla.s.ses which the Manifesto a.s.sumed have been later resolved into their process of formation and in this can already be recognized the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for the categories of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream of Fourier to find a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of a long and vast process has been realized. A scientific solution has been found for the problem of the origin of inequality among men which Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments of an original dialectic, relying however upon too few real data.

At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable.

One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of the society divided into cla.s.ses, which marks the pa.s.sage from higher barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with the new historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics relative to each epoch,[26] in order to explain specifically the cla.s.ses which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of origin is peculiar to Germany and to the other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect form in the Italian munic.i.p.alities forms the pre-historic background for that capitalist acc.u.mulation which Marx has explained with so many characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop there.

The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history. Soon this fas.h.i.+on of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus' egg. And perhaps before an army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be so in reality. _To understand is to leave behind_ (Hegel).

When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the circ.u.mference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual pa.s.sion.

The probable circ.u.mference in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circ.u.mference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach.

The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself.

All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or even prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the reign of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world for its theatre. To-day the world is invaded by civilization and everywhere is developing that society which lives upon cla.s.s antagonisms and cla.s.s domination, the form of bourgeois production. (j.a.pan may serve us for an example.) The coexistence of the two nations in one and the same state, which the divine Plato had already described, is perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism to-morrow. But as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous are those who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms of production,--and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and precision; especially because in the domain and struggle of compet.i.tion, the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminis.h.i.+ng. The proletarian International, while embryonic in the Communist League of fifty years ago, henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the first of every May that the proletarians of the whole world are really and actively united. The future grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and their descendants to many generations will ever remember the date of the Communist Manifesto.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically under the name of "German or 'True' Socialism." This paragraph, which is unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the German philosophy of that epoch, notably in certain of its tendencies marked by acute degeneracy, has, with good reason, been suppressed in the Spanish translation.

[2] It is better to use the expression "democratic socialization of the means of production" than that of "collective property" because the latter implies a certain theoretical error in that, to begin with, it subst.i.tutes for the real economic fact a juridical expression and moreover in the mind of more than one it is confused with the increase of monopolies, with the increasing _statization_ of public utilities and with all the other fantasmagoria of the ever recurring State socialism, the whole effect of which is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands of the oppressing cla.s.s.

[3] Twenty-five octavo pages in the original edition (London, February, 1848) for a copy of which I am indebted to the special kindness of Engels. I should say here in pa.s.sing that I have resisted the temptation to affix any bibliographical notes, references and citations, for I should then have been making a work of scholars.h.i.+p, or a book, rather than a simple essay. I hope the reader will take my word for it that there are in this essay no allusions, or statements of fact or opinion, which I could not substantiate with authorities.

[4] The "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-oekonomie" appeared in the German-French Year Book, Paris, 1844, pp. 85-114; and his book on "The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England" at Leipzig in 1845.

[5] In these last years many jurists have thought they found in the re-adjustment of the civil Code a practical means for ameliorating the condition of the proletariat. But why have they not asked the pope to become the head of the free thought league? The most delightful of these is that Italian author who occupying himself with the cla.s.s struggle asks that by the side of the code which establishes the rights of capital another be elaborated which should guarantee the rights of labor.

[6] This development has been given in Marx's Capital which can be considered as a philosophy of history.

[7] It was not until after the publication of the Italian edition of this essay that I had at my disposal for some months a complete collection of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for which I owe hearty thanks to the Partei-Archiv of Berlin. The impression derived from this reading surpa.s.ses expectation. It is desirable either that this journal which now has become very rare, be reprinted entire or that the most important articles and letters in it be reproduced.

[8] Misere de la Philosophie, by Karl Marx, Paris and Brussels, 1847; new edition, Paris, Giard and Briere, 1896.

[9] This is made up of articles which appeared in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and which reproduced the lectures given by Marx to the German Workingmen's Circle of Brussels in 1847. It has since been published as a propaganda leaflet.

[10] See Chapter II. of the Manifesto.

[11] Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, pp. IV.-VI. of the preface. (Instead of retranslating this extract from the French I have availed myself of the a.s.sistance of Comrade Hitch, who has translated direct from the German of Marx. C. H. K.)

[12] These articles which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Politischokonomische Review, Hamburg, 1850, have recently been brought together into a pamphlet by Engels (Berlin, 1895) under the t.i.tle of "Die Kla.s.senkampfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850." The little work has a preface by Engels.

[13] Appeared for the first time in New York in 1852 in a review.

Several editions have since been made in Germany. A French translation appeared in 1891 published by Delory, Lille.

[14] In the preface to the "Cla.s.s Struggle in France in 1848-50" and elsewhere Engels treated fundamentally the objective development of the new revolutionary tactic. (It is well to remember that the first Italian edition of this essay appeared June 18th, and the second, October 15, 1895.)

[15] In my opinion this is the case in France. The recent discussions of the agrarian programme submitted to the deliberations of the social democracy in Germany confirm the reasons which I have indicated.

[16] It was otherwise in Germany. After 1830 socialism was imported there and became a current literature; it underwent philosophical alterations of which Gruen was the typical representative. But already before the _new doctrine_ socialism had received a characteristic imprint which was proletarian, thanks to the propaganda and the writings of Weitling. As Marx said in 1844 in the Paris Vorwaerts, "it was the giant in the cradle."

[17] It is what many people call Marxism. Marxism is and remains a doctrine. Parties can draw neither their name nor their justification from a doctrine. "I am no Marxist" said--guess who? Marx himself.

[18] It is he who established the first relations between Marx and the League and who served as intermediary in the publication of the Manifesto. He fell in the insurrection of 1849 at Murg.