Soon after its publication, the February Revolution of 1848 broke out in France. Marx and Engels visited France while on their way to Cologne to help the revolution there. They then founded a newspaper and were able to support their campaign for revolution. The paper was then suppressed, and Marx was prosecuted for treason and expelled from Prussia. He then went to England.
Marx lived the last thirty-four years of his life in England. Living in Soho, he and his family lived off the money that Engels sent them. Most of his time was spent reading newspapers in the British museum or writing at home. Three of his six children died. In 1864 Marx again became active in politics. He organized the International Working Men’s Association and served as the head of the general council.
With and improvement in fortune in his last years, he looked for help with his declining health all around Europe and then returned to England no better off than he had been. Marx died on March 14, 1883, in London, and was buried at the Highgate Cemetery.
One of the first impacts of Marxism was felt in continental Europe. By the late 1800’s, through the influences of the Internationals, it had spread to the European trade union movement, and the major socialist parties were a part of it in theory if not in practice. A major division appeared, however, between the socialists who believed that violent revolution was inevitable and those who said that socialism would be achieved by evolution. The success of revolutionary socialists, also called Communists, in the Russian Revolution and the establishment of an authoritarian Communist state in Russia split the movement. By getting away from Russian Communists, many of the democratic socialist parties also moved slowly away from Marxist theory. Communists regarded Marxism as their strict doctrine. Because of this reason, Marxism has received a lot less popularity than it could have received.
The Soviet, Chinese, and other Communist states were at most only partly structured according to Marxism, and while such Communist leaders as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong claimed they used Marxism, all they really did was use a version of it to fit their own needs. In Africa, Marxism has had a notable impact in such nations as Ethiopia, Benin, Angola, Kenya, and Senegal. Its influence has significantly weakened, however, and seems likely to fade even more since the decline of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. The fall of Communism has led many to predict a similar fate for Marxism. Much of Marxism, because of its close association with Communism, has already been discredited.
Many people have objected to the way in which Communism and Marxism are used interchangeably. Some people have turned to Marx’s other writings and explored the present day value of such Marxists values as alienation. Marxism’s influence can be found in disciplines as diverse as economics, history, art, literary criticism, and sociology.
Many sociologists have different opinions about Marx and Marxism. Karl Mannheim said “Marx’s undertaking could reach its final goal only when the interest-bound nature of ideas, the dependence of thought on existence, was brought to light, not merely as regards certain selected ideas of the ruling class, but in such a way that the entire ideological superstructure appeared as dependent upon sociological reality. What was to be done was done to demonstrate the existentially determined nature of an entire system of Weltanschauung, rather than of his or that individual idea.
Max Weber lived from 1864-1920. He was a German nationalist, or anti-Socialist. Intellectually he was opposed to Marxism, and it became common to contrast Weber and Marx. In Germany, the people who supported Marxism were called the Social Democratic Party. Weber’s reaction to Marxism of the Social Democratic Party was like Engel’s reaction to Marxism: that it is an oversimplification of history and our contemporary society to say that the lines of causation run in one direction only, from the academic structures to the other elements. Since the Socialist Democratic Party’s leader in Germany was an extreme Marxists, Weber got to dislike Marxism even though Weber got most of his ideas from Marx.
When Marx died, Engels said he was the greatest thinker to ever exist. He also said that just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history. Engels also said that for Marx, social science was a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. He said that before anything else, Marx was a revolutionist. He said that his real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Engels said that Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. He said that he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers, from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America, and he was to make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy. Engels last sentence in his speech at Marx’s funeral was that his name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
One thing Marx wanted to do was to explain why the workers of his day and age worked so long and hard for miserable wages under terrible conditions. Marx predicted that because the workers could not endure their misfortunes forever, they would inevitably wage a revolution to free themselves from oppression. In my opinion, this sounds like something very reasonable. People were working in bad environments for hardly anything. Nobody would want to do this and this is why he thought the lower class would start a revolution to change this.
Today, over a third of the population of the world considers itself to be Marxist. However Marxism has undergone many changes since Marx first wrote down his own ideas.
I think that Marx’s life has a very ironic twist to it. Marx, who devoted himself to help the working people in factories and other horrible conditions, never worked in a factory a day in his life. When he wrote the Communist Manifesto, he was barely able to live because he had no money. It is also ironic that during all the social and political upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe, Marx, chose to write rather than fight. It is strange in the face that Marx’s books and articles were deemed perhaps more dangerous than bullets or guns.
Even though Marx is looked on as the father of Communism, his ideas are very good. The fact of the matter is that they just will not work.