Karl Dannenberg

“ Craving for knowledge and desirous of doing things, Marx, as a disciple of Hegel, delved through history, and particularly the history of his time, in search for the absolute idea: the idea that governs and propels everything in life. ”

“ Marx clearly pointed out that the value of the worker's labor-power is determined by the same law that controls the values of all other commodities, namely: that the value of a worker's labor-power is also fixed by the volume of socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodities necessary to maintain the life of a wage-slave, i.e., that the articles—food, clothes, shelter, etc.,—consumed by the worker in order to sustain life, a life that is again fixed by a certain historical and social standard, determine the size of his wage. ”

“ And, true to the Marxian conception of capitalism, class-lines will continue to become more distinct and the class struggle correspondingly more intensive, the industrial depressions more frequent and the lot of the worker more unsettled, as the capitalist mode of production reaches ever higher forms in its development. To sum up: today, more lucidly than ever, the economic and philosophical deductions and principles of Marx stand verified and vindicated by the force of past experience and the facts of current events—an intellectual oasis in the desert of vulgar-economy. ”

“ Marx now shows that due to its physical peculiarities and the wonderful productivity of our age, labor-power is the only commodity which in the process of productive consumption yields far more than its value, i.e., far more than it needs to reproduce itself. He clearly underscored that where all other commodities when consumed yield but the value contained in them, labor-power yields far in excess of its value, because the worker is the only commodity which produces or yields far more than what is consumed in its production. ”

“ It was up to Marx and Engels to clarify, amplify and develop these elementary truths, and this they have masterfully accomplished in the many years of joint efforts. Today the fruit of these efforts can be seen in the classical Socialist philosophy: a philosophy which has withstood the onslaughts of the master-minds of bourgeois intelligence; a philosophy, which furnishes scientific and incontrovertible knowledge appertaining to the cause, goal, driving forces and course of historic life; and a philosophy which is truly the beaconlight of the proletariat in its struggle for emancipation. ”

“ This philosophy conceived everything existing or in a state of creation, whether in nature or in society, as the outcome of a harmonious, well regulated process of evolution: an evolution which in its continuous flow destroys and creates, and whose final cause can be conceived in the self-assertion or movement of the absolute idea. According to this conception, evolution is stimulated or whipped on through the struggle of contradictions or antitheses: a struggle which usually or finally is bound to end with the coming together or amalgamation of the conflicting elements into a higher unit. ”

“ The Communist Manifesto, aside from its historic and political significance, will remain a conspicuous monument in the literature of the world; as long as thoughts possess a sense and words have a sound. ”

“ Bernstein has openly admitted himself mistaken in his deductions on capitalist development; since the outbreak of the war he has repudiated Revisionism and Revisionists, and is today the chief collaborator of Karl Kautsky, the foremost exponent of Marxism in the world. At a whole the bourgeois economists, in their attempt to refute Marx's theory of value and surplus value and the logical deductions flowing therefrom, or in their futile efforts to disprove the Materialist Conception of History have failed, yes, miserably failed. ”

“ France or at least French capitalism was organizing gigantic accumulations of wealth for exploitation. In the sixties, Marx sees how victorious capitalism invades Austria, Italy, yes even Bohemia. He also is compelled to witness the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II., and thus receives valid indications that capitalism has also commenced to revolutionize the empire of the "little father." He further observes how capitalist production spreads across the ocean, and how the new world also succumbs to the irresistible economic forces making for social progress. ”

“ The head of emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. The philosophy can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of philosophy." If the readers will substitute Socialism for the word philosophy, then the last sentence will read: Socialism can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of Socialism. ”

“ Actual business practice had given him a thorough insight into the structure and the various phases of capitalism, and upon this solid foundation he based his final conceptions of the role played by the conditions of production and exchange in historical evolution. In conjunction with these practical observations, the fearful effects of the capitalist system in England flashed the importance of private ownership under capitalist production upon his mind, and exposed to him the source of the innumerable contradictions so peculiar to capitalist society. ”

“ Engels, filled with libertarian aspirations and in his "Sturm und Drang" phase of life, had come to Paris in 1844. He became acquainted with Marx and quickly attached to him. This acquaintance was to result into a lifelong friendship: a friendship that was to be cemented by many years of literary collaboration and activity in the labor movement, and which furnishes silent testimony to the beautiful devotion with which these master-minds served the cause embodying their principles and ideals—the cause of the disinherited and exploited workers. ”

“ Thousands, yes hundreds of thousands of sincere and well meaning Socialists never tire of acclaiming their allegiance to the teachings of this great economist, but—and this is a most regrettable truth—very rarely will the inquisitive seeker find a disciple amongst these masses who has intelligently read or studied the works of his idol. Nothing is more repulsive and disgusting than just this unqualified Marx-deification: a deification which like all idolatry finds its source in the ignorance of the masses, and a deification which is everything but a tribute to Marx and his teachings. ”

“ Just as Marx investigated and laid bare the great motive forces and the social laws which actuate and propel the development of society from a lower to a higher stage, so Darwin uncovered and pointed out the dynamic powers and laws of nature which compel life in its simplest form to develop endless-chain-like into more complicated organisms. However, when critically comparing Marx with Darwin, it seems to me that Engels' praise is just. In my humble opinion, Marx was the stronger and more diversified personality. ”

“ Governed by the idea of evolution, Hegel's philosophy did not approach the objects of its investigation as completed and fixed creations, which are the same in life as in death, but in their rich diversity of growth and decline, i.e., in their various expressions or manifestations of life. This system of research was known as the dialectic method. Young Marx felt in Hegel a congenial intellect, whose teachings attracted him with an irresistible power. ”

“ Marx studied in order to place his findings into the service of social development: in order to actively participate in the struggle for the Socialist Commonwealth. He desired to know, so he could act, and he wanted to be well equipped for the task meted out to him and his class-conscious comrades by the unrelenting course of historic events. To him philosophical clarity implied philosophical clarity to the workers; the same as we see all his activity radiating from a class-conscious premise and inaugurated solely for the purpose of abolishing class-rule. ”

“ With the aid of this theory, Marx demonstrated that although the worker under the system of capitalist production receives in the last analysis the full value of his labor-power, he is nevertheless exploited, because he produces in excess of this value, and does not receive the full value of his product. ”

“ Writing on the relation of philosophy to working-class activity in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals) , he gives the following piece of advice to his erstwhile friends, the Young-Hegelians: "You can not realize a philosophy without abolishing it." However, he did not forget what he had learned from them, and addressing the bourgeoisie says: "You can not abolish a philosophy without realizing it. Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons. ”

“ And he concluded that all work performed by the worker in excess of the work necessary to keep him alive, or to produce the value of his wages, is surplus work, or surplus labor appropriated by the purchaser of the worker's labor-power, the capitalist. ”

“ In Darwin we celebrate the scholar, who searched and accumulated knowledge for the purpose of knowing and presenting his findings. His field was far away from the social conflict, and his findings, comparatively speaking, did not affect the social destiny and the class interests of certain social layers so vitally, as did the application of the evolutionary principle by Marx to History and Political Economy. ”

“ In Marx we notice a blending of the earnest and searching scientist, who yearns for clearness and truth, with the man of action and deeds—the revolutionist. Darwin confined himself to, or at least was forced to confine himself to the establishment of the laws actuating life, i.e., to that what was and is in nature. After Marx had discovered the iron laws governing social development, after he had laid down these laws in the textbook of the proletariat, "Capital," he then did not rest satisfied with his achievements. ”

“ However, wherever Marx's natural endowments, traits which singularly fitted and are no doubt to a large degree the product of the requirements of the historic hour, may come from matters little, especially when we note that in their manifestations they were always placed into the service of disinterested progress in general and into the cause of that class, ordained to be the vanguard of all progress, in particular—the working-class. ”

“ Before entering upon an examination of the details in Marx's life, details which are as interesting as they are plentiful and which in their totality furnish the sum-total of this turbulent life, let us subject the immediate and also the larger social environment out of which and in which Marx grew and developed to a casual examination. ”

“ Through the analysis of capitalist production, Marx exposed the source of all profits, and showed this to rest in the appropriation of surplus value from the workers. His theory of surplus value is a most valuable addition to classical political economy, and raises itself upon the theories of value evolved by Petty, Ricardo and Adam Smith, however, also supplemented and perfected by Marx. ”

“ As stated before, these interests he found were but the logical product of the material conditions underlying capitalist production: conditions which were bound to make the workers conscious of their class interests, and develop to such a climax where the expropriation of the expropriators would become a dictate of historic evolution: where individual social property would give way to social individual property, as the next step in the dialectical process of social development. ”

“ We know that Marx's cradle stood in that part of Germany which had been swept over and thoroughly cleansed of medieval refuse by the liberating and invigorating winds of the French Revolution. And, if we take into consideration that the Rhineland borders closely upon that country, which at the beginning of the fifteenth century was the first to give expression to bourgeois sentiments and interests; a country in which capitalism, still shut up in its feudalic womb, ripened first ”

“ Aside from the important fact, that this book completely shattered an obsession with which even up to this late day some Socialists and particularly Anarchists are still taken up, namely that abject poverty is the generator of and a prerequisite to revolutionary vitality, it also contained the first comprehensive exposition of Historical Materialism. Here in his quest for knowledge, Marx for the first time came in close contact with Socialist and revolutionary workingmen—an intercourse which was to be of far-reaching importance to his future work. ”

“ Nevertheless, all these characteristics do not possess anything typically Jewish or racial, because their uniqueness was not developed in sectarian seclusion, and because they are blended or prompted by a cosmopolitanism utterly foreign to the orthodox sectarian: a cosmopolitanism that tears down the boundaries of creed, color or race, and that expresses itself through the brotherhood of man based on the foundation of economic equality. ”

“ When we look upon society today, and compare the gigantic accumulations of wealth in the hands of an ever decreasing number of capitalists on the one hand with the, relatively speaking, dependency and misery of an ever growing proletariat on the other ”