Marx, Karl (May 5, 1818-March 14, 1883), founder of scientific communism, theoretician and leader of the international proletariat and working people of the entire world. He was born in the city of Trier (Rhine Province of Prussia). His father was a lawyer. The ideas of the 18th-century French Enlighteners (Voltaire, Rousseau) and the great Utopian Socialists of the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries (Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier) greatly influenced the young Marx. Marx first studied at Bonn University (which he entered in October 1835), and then transferred to Berlin University where he took law. From this special branch of knowledge Marx soon switched to philosophy. From 1839 to March 1841 he worked on his doctorate thesis "Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature"—the philosophy of two ancient Greek materialist philosophers—and made in it a more serious step towards materialism as compared with Hegel. Work on the Rheinische Zeitung, founded by the bourgeoisie opposing Prussian absolutism (it appeared between January 1842 and March 1843) brought Marx into his first contact with social and economic problems. Little by little he realised that economic relations played the decisive role in the formation and development of society and the state. As he began acquainting himself with Utopian Socialism and communism ( Proudhon, Dezamy, Cabet and others), and criticising the Utopian form of their ideas, he arrived at the conclusion about the necessity of the theoretical substantiation of communism, and turning it from a Utopia into science. In 1843-46, after intensive philosophical, historical and economic studies aimed primarily at studying the real structure of society, Marx in collaboration with Engels established the fact that the economic system is the base with the political superstructure towering above it, that the interaction of the productive forces and production relations in the process of social production forms the concealed foundation of the historical development of any society, including bourgeois. This initiated the evolution of a dialectical and materialist conception of the historical process and, as a conclusion from this conception, the general propositions of the theory of scientific communism. At the same time the methodological foundation of Marxist political economy was given. From that moment, comprehensive research of the economic law of the development of the capitalist society became the main theme of Marx’s scientific work, and remained so throughout his life. The discovery of the determining role of material production in social development allowed Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to make important steps in studying the essence of wage labour and to provide the general features of the process of capitalist exploitation. In his economic works of 214 the second half of the 1840s—The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848, with Engels), Wage Labour and Capital (1849) —Marx approached the evolution of the theory of surplus value and the disclosure of the mechanism of capitalist exploitation. While criticising the anti-historic nature of bourgeois political economy, Marx at the same time emphasised that Ricardo’s theory of value (see Political Economy, Classical Bourgeois) provides a scientific interpretation of bourgeois economics. At the end of August 1849, after the defeat of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Europe, Marx was exiled from Paris for his revolutionary activity and moved to London where he lived the rest of his life. In July 1850 he began a thorough study of the capitalist economy and of the economic history of bourgeois society. Between 1850 and 1857, Marx made a grandiose historico-critical analysis of bourgeois political economy, filling notebooks with excerpts from the works of bourgeois economists, first of all, the classical political economists William Petty, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. His letters to Engels of January 7 and February 3, 1851 contained criticism of Ricardo’s theory of rent and currency theory. In his small manuscript Reflections (March 1851) he evolved in embryonic form some essential tenets of the Marxist theory of reproduction and economic crises. In April 1851 Marx compiled a detailed summary of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, to which he provided a critical commentary. In July 1857 in an outline about the vulgar economists Carey and Bastiat Marx presented the first clear definition of the framework of classical political economy from Boisguillebert to Sismondi. Finally, in the outline “ Introduction” to the future economic work (1857) Marx formulated the main propositions relative to the subject and method of political economy he was working on. The “Introduction” generalised Marx’s economic research of the 1850s, and at the same time concretised the dialectico- materialist method of political economy. His works of the 1850s, including the manuscript of 1857-58—Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, made a revolution in political economy. In this manuscript, the initial version of Capital, Marx first evolved his theory of value (its focal point is the theory of the dual nature of labour and its product in bourgeois society) and on this basis—the theory of surplus value, and made his first steps in the evolution of the theory of average profit and the price of production. This work shows, first of all, the process of research into the capitalist economy, whereas volumes I-III of Capital are, primarily, the scientific summary of the economic theory he had already evolved. The important feature of the theory of surplus value is the fact that Marx explained the mechanism of capitalist exploitation on the basis of the theory of value within the framework of equivalent exchange between the proletarian and capitalist. In other words, the capitalist class appropriates surplus value created by wage labourers in full accordance with inner laws of bourgeois society. From this followed an important conclusion: the working class could not free itself from capitalist exploitation through reformism within the framework of capitalism; to do so demanded a socialist revolution. In this way, the conclusion about the world-historic role of the proletariat as the grave-digger of capitalism and the creator of a new, communist society which Marx had formulated in the 1840s as a scientific hypothesis became a scientifically proved tenet. The dialectico- materialist understanding of history, formulated by Marx in detail in 1859 in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which contained a scientific summary of the theory of value and the theory of money, was economically substantiated. This book was the first issue of the economic work which was to be followed by subsequent issues. In August 1861 Marx began work on the second issue initiating the 1861-63 manuscript A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—the second rough version of Capital. The first five notebooks of the manuscript contained the material of the second issue, the work which Marx interrupted in March 215 1862 so that he could embark, beginning with the sixth notebook, on a detailed critical study of the history of bourgeois political economy. This central part of his manuscript is called The Theory of Surplus-Value and is in fact the sole outline of the fourth volume of Capital. In it, Marx worked out the theory of surplus value in the broadest sense of the word, passing from surplus value itself to its transformed forms: profit, average profit and ground rent, and evolving the theory of productive labour, reproduction and economic crises. At the end of 1862 Marx decided to publish his work under the title Capital, subtitled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In August 1863 Marx began writing a new manuscript (1863-65 manuscript, third rough version of Capital). Only Chapter VI has been preserved from this manuscript, which was intended for the first volume of Capital, as well as the initial version of the second volume and the only version of the third volume, based on which Engels prepared the third volume of Capital for print after Marx’s death. After completing his work on this manuscript in December 1865, Marx began preparing for print the first volume of Capital, which appeared in September 1867. In the 1870s Marx prepared and published the second German and French editions of the first volume of Capital and began preparing the third German edition. Apart from this, Marx wrote seven manuscripts containing material for the second volume (on the basis of these manuscripts Engels prepared the second volume of Capital for print after Marx’s death). While working on Capital, Marx evolved and perfected its structure. In 1857-59 he drew up a plan of work composed of six books: capital, land property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. In 1862-63 Marx worked out a plan of Capital in four volumes: the process of the formation of capital, the process of capital circulation, capital and profit, and the history of the theory. Thus, Capital is a detailed elaboration of the first of the six books which Marx initially planned to elaborate in accordance with the objective economic structure of bourgeois society. Marx was not only a man of genius and a scientist, but, above all. a proletarian revolutionary. As he elaborated his economic theory, he invariably tried to formulate the laws ensuing from it of the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class. In his works related to the period of the First International (1860-70s), and primarily in Wages, Price and Profit (1865), Marx concretised the basic theoretical foundations of his economic theory as applied to the fundamental questions of the working-class movement. This was of key importance for the spread of Marx’s theory in the international working-class movement, for evolving the strategy and tactics of the struggle of the working class, as well as for verifying the correctness of the theory itself and how it corresponded with reality. Marx in the last period of his life evolved political economy in a broader sense, working on the theory of precapitalist formations and the scientific forecasting of communist society. Marx worked on his economic theory in close cooperation with Engels (see Engels, Frederick), with whom Marx discussed questions figuring in Capital. In fact, Engels was the co-author of Volumes II and III of Capital and did much to popularise this great work and spread the ideas it represented in the working-class movement. Marxist theory invariably developed as an organic interaction of its components—philosophy, political economy and scientific communism and so can be said to be an integral theory. Having discovered the economic law of the motion of capitalist society and demonstrated the inevitability of the transition to communist society, and basing on the analysis of the material prerequisites of communism which ripen within capitalism, Marx formulated the key laws of the communist economy and communist organisation of labour: two phases of the development of communist society, of the communist mode of production; the law of time saving; the role of free time under communism; the all-round development of the individual as the objective of communist production; the scientifically substantiated character of the communist process of 216 reproduction, etc. Marx is credited not only with the creation but also with both generalising and adapting his economic theory so that it was relevant to questions of the development of other countries (Russia, the USA) where conditions were very different from those of the development of the classic British capitalism of Marx’s times. Marx took genuinely creative approach to theory, and in this he was fully succeeded by Lenin (see Lenin, Vladimir llyich), who comprehensively developed Marxism in new historical conditions and put it on to a higher level. Today Marxism-Leninism is not only a scientific theory, but also a great material force, embodied in the strength of the countries of the socialist community, in the revolutionary nature and organisation of world proletariat, and in the scope and depth of national liberation movement. The CPSU and other fraternal parties have been fighting against all kinds of attempts to distort and “improve” Marxism, for purity of Marxist-Leninist theory, creatively developing it with reference to a new historical situation. Such an approach is in keeping with the tradition and spirit of the Marxist theory and with the requirements of the communist movement.