Category: Journal Articles

The Birth of Internationalism
On 28 September 1864, St. Martin’s Hall, in the heart of London, was packed to overflowing with some two thousand workers. They had come to attend a meeting called by English trade union leaders and a small group of companions from the Continent. This meeting gave birth to the prototype of all the main organizations of the workers’ movement: the International Working Men’s Association. Quickly, the International aroused passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of women and men to struggle for the most radical of goals: changing the world. Thanks to its activity, workers were able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of their own strength, and to develop new, more advanced forms of struggle for their rights.
When it was founded, the central driving force of the International was British trade unionism, the leaders of which were mainly interested in economic questions. They fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence, they conceived the International primarily as an instrument to prevent the import of manpower from abroad in the event of strikes. Then there were the mutualists, long dominant in France. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), they opposed any working-class involvement in politics, and the strike as a weapon of struggle. The third group in importance were the communists, opposing the existing system of production and espousing the necessity of political action to overthrow it. At its founding, the ranks of the International also included numbers of workers inspired by utopian theories, and exiles having vaguely democratic ideas and cross-class conception who considered the International as an instrument for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.
Securing the cohabitation of all these currents in the International, around a programme so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) great political accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable (Collins & Abramsky, 1965, p. 34). It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly working class-based, political programme that won it mass support beyond sectarianism. The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared almost all its congress reports.
Nevertheless, despite the impression created by the Soviet Union’s propaganda and by the majority of the ideologically driven scholars who wrote on the International, this organization was much more than a single individual, even one as brilliant as Marx. The International was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes; not, as it has often been written, the ‘creation of Marx’. It was made possible first of all by the labour movement’s struggles in the 1860s. One of its basic rules – and the fundamental distinction from previous labor organizations – was ‘that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’ (Engels & Marx, 2014, p. 265). The orthodox, dogmatic view of Marx’s role in the International, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory already forged in the confines of his study, is totally divorced from the historical reality. Marx was essential to the International, but also the International had a very positive impact on Marx (see Musto, 2018, pp. 171-239). Being directly involved in workers’ struggles, Marx was stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions.

The Organizational Structure of the International
During its lifetime and in subsequent decades, the International was depicted as a vast, financially powerful organization. The size of its membership was always overestimated, whether because of imperfect knowledge or because some of its leaders exaggerated the real situation or because opponents were looking for a pretext to justify a brutal crackdown.
In reality, the membership figures were much lower. It has always been difficult to arrive at even approximate estimates, and that was true for its own leaders and those who studied it most closely. But the present state of research allows the hypothesis that, at its peak in 1871–1872, the tally reached more than 150,000: 50,000 in Britain, more than 30,000 in both France and Belgium, 6,000 in Switzerland, about 30,000 in Spain, 25,000 in Italy, more than 10,000 in Germany (but mostly members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party), plus a few thousand each in a number of other European countries, 4,000 in the United States, and a few hundred in both Russia and Argentina.
In those times, when there was a dearth of effective working-class organizations apart from the English trade unions and the General Association of German Workers, such figures were certainly sizeable. It should also be borne in mind that, throughout its existence, the International was recognized as a legal organization only in Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, and the United States. In other countries where it had a solid presence (France, Spain, Italy), it was on the margins of legality for a number of years, and its members were subject to persecution. To join the International meant breaking the law in the 39 states of the German Confederation, and the few members in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were forced to operate in clandestine forms. On the other hand, the Association had a remarkable capacity to weld its components into a cohesive whole. Within a couple of years from its birth, it had succeeded in federating hundreds of workers’ societies. From the end of 1868, thanks to propaganda conducted by followers of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), other societies were added in Spain, and after the Paris Commune sections sprang up also in Italy, Holland, Denmark, and Portugal. The development of the International was doubtless uneven: while it was growing in some countries, it was elsewhere remaining level or falling back under the blows of repression. Yet a strong sense of belonging prevailed among those who joined the International for even a short time. When the cycle of struggles in which they had taken part came to an end, and adversity and personal hardship forced them to take a distance, they retained the bonds of class solidarity and responded as best they could to the call for a rally, the words of a poster or the unfurling of the red flag of struggle, in the name of an organization that had sustained them in their hour of need (see Braunthal, 1966, p. 116).
Members of the International, however, comprised only a small part of the total workforce. In Paris they never numbered more than 10,000, and in other capital cities such as Rome, Vienna, or Berlin they were rare birds indeed. Another aspect is the character of the workers who joined the International: it was supposed to be the organization of wage-labourers, but very few actually became members. The main influx came from construction workers in England, textile workers in Belgium, and various types of artisans in France and Switzerland.
In Britain, with the sole exception of steelworkers, the International always had a sparse presence among the industrial proletariat (see Collins & Abramsky, 1965, p. 70; D’Hondt, 1968, p. 475) and nowhere did the latter ever form a majority. The other great limitation was the failure to draw in unskilled labour (see Collins & Abramsky, 1965, p. 289). The great majority of members of the International came from tailoring, clothing, shoemaking and cabinet-making – that is, from sectors of the working class that were then the best organized and the most class-conscious. Moreover, the International remained an organization of employed workers; the jobless never became part of it.
From an organizational point of view, despite the considerable autonomy granted to federations and local sections, the International always retained a locus of political leadership. Its General Council was the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole. From October 1864 until August 1872, it met with great regularity, as many as 385 times. Its members debated a wide range of issues, such as: working conditions, the effects of new machinery, support for strikes, the role and importance of trade unions, the Irish question, various foreign policy matters, and, of course, how to build the society of the future. The General Council was also responsible for drafting the documents of the International: circulars, letters, and resolutions for current purposes; special manifestos, addresses, and appeals in particular circumstances (see Haupt, 1978, p. 78).

The Politics of the International
The lack of synchrony between the key organizational junctures and the main political events in the life of the International makes it difficult to reconstruct its history in chronological sequence. In terms of organization, the principal stages were: 1) the birth of the International (1864–1866), from its foundation to the First Congress; 2) the period of expansion (1866–1870); 3) the revolutionary surge and the repression following the Paris Commune (1871–1872); and 4) the split and crisis (1872–1877). In terms of its theoretical development, however, the principal stages were: 1) the initial debate among its various components and the laying of its own foundations (1864–1865); 2) the struggle for hegemony between collectivists and mutualists (1866–1869); and 3) the clash between centralists and autonomists (1870–1877).
In September 1866, the city of Geneva hosted the first congress of the International, with 60 delegates from Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. By then the Association could point to a very favourable balance-sheet of the two years since its foundation, having rallied to its banner more than one hundred trade unions and political organizations. Those taking part in the congress essentially divided into two blocs. The first, consisting of the British delegates, the few Germans and a majority of the Swiss, followed the directives of the General Council drawn up by Marx (who was not present in Geneva). The second, comprising the French delegates and some of the French-speaking Swiss, was made up of mutualists. At that time, in fact, moderate positions were prevalent in the International, and the mutualists, led by the Parisian Henri Tolain (1828–97), envisaged a society in which the worker would be at once producer, capitalist, and consumer. They regarded the granting of free credit as a decisive measure for the transformation of society; considered women’s labour to be objectionable from both an ethical and a social point of view; and opposed any interference by the state in work relations (including legislation to reduce the working day to eight hours) on the grounds that it would threaten the private relationship between workers and employers and strengthen the system currently in force. Basing themselves on resolutions prepared by Marx, the General Council leaders succeeded in marginalizing the numerically strong contingent of mutualists at the congress, and obtained votes in favour of state intervention.
From late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many countries and formed the core of a new and important wave of mobilizations. The first major struggle to be won with the International’s support was the Parisian bronze workers’ strike of the winter of 1867. Also successful in their outcome were the ironworkers’ strike of Marchienne, in Belgium, the long dispute in the Provençal mineral basin, and Geneva building workers’ strike. The scenario was the same in each of these events: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries; as a result, the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. These advances were greatly favoured by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathized with the ideas of the International, or were veritable organs of the General Council. They contributed to the development of class consciousness and the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International.
Thus, for all the difficulties bound up with the diversity of nationalities, languages and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the absolute need for class solidarity and international cooperation, moving decisively beyond the partial character of the initial objectives and strategies.
From 1867 on, strengthened by success in achieving these goals, by increased membership and by a more efficient organization, the International made advances all over Continental Europe. It was its breakthrough year in France in particular, where the bronze workers’ strike had the same knock-on effect that the London tailors’ strike had produced in England. But Britain was still the country where the International had its greatest presence. In the course of 1867, the affiliation of another dozen organizations took the membership to a good 50,000 – an impressive figure if we bear in mind that it was reached in just two years, and that the total unionized workforce was then roughly 800,000 (see Collins, 1968, p. 34).
This was the backdrop to the Lausanne congress of September 1867, where the International assembled with a new strength that had come from continuing broad-based expansion. There were 64 delegates from 6 countries (with one each from Belgium and Italy) attending this event and many of its most relevant debates were focused on Proudhonian themes (such as the cooperative movement and alternative uses of credit) dear to the strongly represented mutualists.
Right from the earliest days of the International, Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in France, French-speaking Switzerland, Wallonia, and the city of Brussels. His disciples, particularly Tolain and Ernest Édouard Fribourg *1834-1903), succeeded in making a mark with their positions on the founding meeting in 1864, the London Conference of 1865, and the Geneva and Lausanne Congresses. For four years the mutualists were the most moderate wing of the International. The British trade unions, which constituted the majority, did not share Marx’s anticapitalism, but nor did they have the same pull on the policies of the organization that the followers of Proudhon were able to exercise. Basing themselves on the theories of the French anarchist, the mutualists argued that the economic emancipation of the workers would be achieved through the founding of producer cooperatives and a central People’s Bank. Resolutely hostile to state intervention in any field, they opposed socialization of the land and the means of production as well as any use of the strike weapon. In 1868, for example, there were still many sections of the International that attached a negative, anti-economic value to this method of struggle. The Report of the Liège Section on Strikes was emblematic in this regard: ‘The strike is a struggle. It therefore increases the bubbling of hatred between the people and the bourgeoisie, separating ever further two classes that should merge and unite with each other’ (Maréchal, 1962, p. 268). The distance from the positions and theses of the General Council could scarcely have been greater.
The Brussels Congress, held in September 1868, with the participation of 99 delegates from France, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Spain (one delegate), and Belgium (55 in total) , finally clipped the wings of the mutualists. The highpoint came when the assembly approved César De Paepe’s (1841–1890) proposal on the socialization of the means of production – a decisive step forward in defining the economic basis of socialism, no longer simply in the writings of particular intellectuals but in the programme of a great transnational organization. As regards the mines and transport, the congress declared:

1. That the quarries, collieries, and other mines, as well as the railways, ought in a normal state of society to belong to the community represented by the state, a state itself subject to the laws of justice.
2. That the quarries, collieries, and other mines, and Railways, be let by the state, not to companies of capitalists as at present, but to companies of working men bound by contract to guarantee to society the rational and scientific working of the railways, etc., at a price as nearly as possible approximate to the working expense. The same contract ought to reserve to the state the right to verify the accounts of the companies, so as to present the possibility of any reconstitution of monopolies. A second contract ought to guarantee the mutual right of each member of the companies in respect to his fellow workmen.
As to landed property, it was agreed that:

the economical development of modern society will create the social necessity of converting arable land into the common property of society, and of letting the soil on behalf of the state to agricultural companies under conditions analogous to those stated in regard to mines and railways.

And similar considerations were applied to the canals, roads and telegraphs: ‘Considering that the roads and other means of communication require a common social direction, the Congress thinks they ought to remain the common property of society’. Finally, some interesting points were made about the environment:

Considering that the abandonment of forests to private individuals causes the destruction of woods necessary for the conservation of springs, and, as a matter of course, of the good qualities of the soil, as well as the health and lives of the population, the Congress thinks that the forests ought to remain the property of society (see Marx, 2014c, p. 92).

In Brussels, then, the International made its first clear pronouncement on the socialization of the means of production by state authorities. This marked an important victory for the General Council and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political programme of a major workers’ organization.
In addition, the congress again discussed the question of war. A motion presented by Becker, which Marx later summarized in the published resolutions of the congress, stated:

The workers alone have an evident logical interest in finally abolishing all war, both economic and political, individual and national, because in the end they always have to pay with their blood and their labour for the settling of accounts between the belligerents, regardless of whether they are on the winning or losing side (Burgelin, Langfeldt, & Molnár, 1962a, p. 403).

The workers were called upon to treat every war ‘as a civil war’ (Burgelin, Langfeldt, & Molnár, 1962a, p. 403). De Paepe also suggested the use of the general strike (see De Paepe, 2014, pp. 230–1) – a proposal that Marx dismissed as ‘nonsense’ (Marx, 1988b, p. 101), but which actually tended to develop a class consciousness capable of going beyond merely economic struggles.
If the collectivist turn of the International began at the Brussels Congress, it was the Basel Congress held the next year that consolidated it and eradicated Proudhonism even in its French homeland. This time there were 78 delegates at the congress, drawn not only from France, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Belgium, but also, a clear sign of expansion, from Spain, Italy, and Austria, plus a representative from the National Labor Union in the United States.
The resolutions of the Brussels Congress on landed property were reaffirmed, with 54 votes in favour, 4 against, and 13 abstentions. Eleven of the French delegates – including Eugène Varlin (1838–1871), later a prominent figure in the Paris Commune – even approved a new text which declared ‘that society has the right to abolish individual ownership of the land and to make it part of the community’ (Burgelin, Langfeldt, & Molnár, 1962b, p. 74); 10 abstained and 4 (including Tolain) voted against. After Basel, the International in France was no longer mutualist.
The Basel Congress was also of interest because Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) took part in the proceedings as a delegate. Having failed to win the leadership of the League for Peace and Freedom, he had founded the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy in September 1868 in Geneva, and in December this had applied to join the International. The General Council initially turned down the request, on the grounds that the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy continued to be affiliated to another, parallel transnational structure, and that one of its objectives – ‘the equalization of classes’ (Bakunin, 1973, p. 174) – was radically different from a central pillar of the International, the abolition of classes. Shortly afterwards, however, the Alliance modified its programme and agreed to wind up its network of sections, many of which existed only in Bakunin’s imagination anyway (see Carr, 1961, p. 392). On 28 July 1869, the 104-member Geneva section was accordingly admitted to the International. Marx knew Bakunin well enough, but he had underestimated the consequences of this step. For the influence of the famous Russian revolutionary rapidly increased in a number of Swiss, Spanish, and French sections (as it did in Italian ones after the Paris Commune), and at the Basel Congress, thanks to his charisma and forceful style of argument, he already managed to affect the outcome of its deliberations. The vote on the right of inheritance, for example, was the first occasion on which the delegates rejected a proposal of the General Council (Marx, 2014b, pp. 163–165). Having finally defeated the mutualists and laid the spectre of Proudhon to rest, Marx now had to confront a much tougher rival, who formed a new tendency – collectivist anarchism – and sought to win control of the organization.

The International and the Paris Commune
The period from late Sixties to early Seventies was rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation was spreading ever wider, and despite its limited resources the General Council never failed to respond with appeals for solidarity to its European sections and the organization of fund-raising.
Across Europe, the Association continued to increase the number of its members and to develop an efficient organizational structure. During this period, Bakunin’s ideas began to spread in a number of cities, especially in Southern Europe. More symbolically significant still, at least for the hopes it initially awakened, was its new mooring on the other side of the Atlantic, where immigrants who had arrived in recent years began to establish the first sections of the International in the United States. However, the organization suffered from two handicaps at birth that it would never overcome. Despite repeated exhortations from the General Council in London, it was unable either to cut across the nationalist character of its various affiliated groups or to draw in workers born in the ‘New World’. When the German, French, and Czech sections founded the Central Committee of the International for North America, in December 1870, it was unique in the history of the International in having only ‘foreign-born’ members. The most striking aspect of this anomaly was that the International in the United States never disposed of an English-language press organ. At the beginning of the 1870s, the International reached a total of 50 sections with a combined membership of 4,000, but this was still only a tiny proportion of the American industrial workforce of more than two million.
With this general background, the International made provisions for its fifth congress in September 1870. This was originally scheduled to be held in Paris, but repressive operations by the French government made the General Council opt instead for Mainz. Marx probably also thought that the greater number of German delegates close to his positions would help to stem the advance of the Bakuninists. But then the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, on 19 July 1870, left no choice but to call off the congress.
The conflict at the heart of Europe meant that the top priority now was to help the workers’ movement express an independent position, far from the nationalist rhetoric of the time. In his First Address on the Franco–Prussian War, Marx called upon the French workers to drive out Charles Louis Bonaparte (1808–1873) and to obliterate the empire he had established eighteen years earlier. The German workers, for their part, were supposed to prevent the defeat of Bonaparte from turning into an attack on the French people:

in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose international rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same – Labour! The pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association (Marx, 2014a, p. 239).

Although Bakunin had urged the workers to turn patriotic war into revolutionary war (see Lehning, 1977, p. xvi.), the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association in London initially opted for silence (see Musto, 2014, pp. 30–36). It charged Marx with the task of writing a text in the name of the International, but he delayed its publication for complicated, deeply held reasons. Well aware of the real relationship of forces on the ground as well as the weaknesses of the Paris Commune, born in March 1871, he knew that it was doomed to defeat. He had even tried to warn the French working class back in September 1870, in his Second Address on the Franco–Prussian War:

Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen […] must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national souvenirs of 1792 […]. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will gift them with fresh herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task – the emancipation of labour. Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the republic (Marx, 1986, p. 269).

A fervid declaration hailing the victory of the Paris Commune would have risked creating false expectations among workers throughout Europe, eventually becoming a source of demoralization and distrust. Marx therefore decided to postpone delivery and stayed away from meetings of the General Council for several weeks. His grim forebodings soon proved all too well founded, and on 28 May, little more than two months after its proclamation, the Paris Commune was drowned in blood. Two days later, he reappeared at the General Council with a manuscript entitled The Civil War in France. It was read and unanimously approved, then published over the names of all the Council members. The document had a huge impact over the next few weeks, greater than any other document of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century.
Despite Marx’s passionate defense, and despite the claims both of reactionary opponents and of dogmatic Marxists eager to glorify the International, it is out of the question that the General Council actually pushed for the Parisian insurrection.
After the defeat of the Paris Commune, the International was at the eye of the storm, held to blame for every act against the established order. ‘When the great conflagration took place at Chicago’, Marx mused with bitter irony, ‘the telegraph round the world announced it as the infernal deed of the International; and it is really wonderful that to its demoniacal agency has not been attributed the hurricane ravaging the West Indies’ (Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1967, p. 461). Governments all over Europe sharpened their instruments of repression, fearing that other uprisings might follow the one in Paris. Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) immediately outlawed the International and asked the British prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), to follow his example; it was the first diplomatic exchange relating to a workers’ organization. Pope Pius IX (1792–1878) exerted similar pressure on the Swiss government, arguing that it would a serious mistake to continue tolerating ‘that International sect which would like to treat the whole of Europe as it treated Paris. Those gentlemen […] are to be feared, because they work on behalf of the eternal enemies of God and mankind’ (Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1968, p. 460). Giuseppe Mazzini – who for a time had looked to the International with hope – had similar views and considered that principles of the International had become those of ‘denial of God, […] the fatherland, […] and all individual property’ (Mazzini, 1978, pp. 499–501).
Criticism of the Paris Commune even spread to sections of the workers’ movement. Following the publication of The Civil War in France, both the trade union leader George Odger (1813–1877) and the old Chartist Benjamin Lucraft (1809–1897) resigned from the International, bending under the pressure of the hostile press campaign. However, no trade union withdrew its support for the organization – which suggests once again that the failure of the International to grow in Britain was due mainly to political apathy in the working class (Collins & Abramsky, 1965, p. 222).
Despite the bloody denouement in Paris and the wave of calumny and government repression elsewhere in Europe, the International grew stronger and more widely known in the wake of the Commune. For capitalists and the middle classes it represented a great threat to the established order, whereas for workers it fuelled hopes for a world without injustice, exploitation and alienation. The labour movement had an enormous vitality and that was apparent everywhere. Newspapers linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales. The insurrection of Paris fortified the workers’ movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions and to intensify its militancy. Once again, France showed that revolution was possible, clarifying its goal to be building a society different from that of capitalism, but also that, to achieve this, the workers would have to create durable and well-organized forms of political association. The next step to take then, as stated by Marx, was understanding that ‘the economic movement [of the working class] and its political action are indissolubly united’ (Marx & Engels, 2014b, p. 285). That led the International to push (at the London Conference of 1871) for the foundation of a key instrument of the modern workers’ movement: the political party.
The most important decision taken at the conference, for which it would be remembered later, was the approval of Édouard Vaillant’s (1840–1915) Resolution IX. The leader of the Blanquists – whose residual forces had joined the International after the end of the Commune – proposed that the organization should be transformed into a centralized, disciplined party, under the leadership of the General Council. Despite some differences, particularly over the Blanquist position that a tightly organized nucleus of militants was sufficient for the revolution, Marx did not hesitate to form an alliance with Vaillant’s group: not only to strengthen the opposition to Bakuninite anarchism within the International, but above all to create a broader consensus for the changes deemed necessary in the new phase of the class struggle. The resolution passed in London therefore stated:

that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes; that this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes; and that the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economic struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.

Centralists vs. Autonomists: The Crisis of the International
Whereas the Geneva Congress of 1866 established the importance of trade unions, the London Conference of 1871 shifted the focus to the political party. For Marx, the self-emancipation of the working class required a long and arduous process – the polar opposite of the theories and practices in Sergei Nechaev’s (1847–1882) Catechism of a Revolutionary, whose advocacy of secret societies was condemned by the delegates in London (see Burgelin, Langfeldt, & Molnár, 1962b, p. 237; Marx, 1988a, p. 23) but enthusiastically supported by Bakunin.
Marx was probably surprised when signs of restlessness and even rebellion against the political line of the General Council began to appear in many countries. In a number of federations, the decisions taken in London were judged an unacceptable encroachment on local political autonomy. The opposition to the General Council was varied in character and sometimes had mainly personal motives; a strange alchemy held it together and made leadership of the International very difficult.
The final battle came at the Fifth Congress of the International that took place in The Hague, in September 1872, and that was attended by 65 delegates from a total of 14 countries. The most important decision taken at The Hague was to incorporate Resolution IX of the 1871 London Conference into the statutes of the Association, as a new article 7a. Whereas the Provisional Statutes of 1864 had stated that ‘the economic emancipation of the working class is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’ (Engels & Marx, 2014, p. 265), this insertion mirrored the new relationship of forces within the organization. Political struggle was now the necessary instrument for the transformation of society since: ‘the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies, and for the enslavement of labour. The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class’ (Engels & Marx, 2014, p. 268).
The International was now very different from how it had been at the time of its foundation: the radical-democratic components had walked out after being increasingly marginalized; the mutualists had been defeated and many converted; reformists no longer constituted the bulk of the organization (except in Britain); and anticapitalism had become the political line of the whole Association, as well as of recently formed tendencies such as the anarcho-collectivists. Moreover, although the years of the International had witnessed a degree of economic prosperity that in some cases made conditions less parlous, the workers understood that real change would come not through such palliatives but only through the end of human exploitation. They were also basing their struggles more and more on their own material needs, rather than the initiatives of particular groups to which they belonged.
The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal, and territorial identity; this placed a question mark over any supranational body that financed itself from membership dues in each individual country and required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all. It is true that, right from the beginning, the International had been an agglomeration of trade unions and political associations far from easy to reconcile with one another, and that these had represented sensibilities and political tendencies more than organizations properly so called. By 1872, however, the various components of the Association – and workers’ struggles, more generally – had become much more clearly defined and structured. The legalization of the British trade unions had officially made them part of national political life; the Belgian Federation of the International was a ramified organization, with a central leadership capable of making significant, and autonomous, contributions to theory; Germany had two workers’ parties, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers, each with representation in parliament; the French workers, from Lyons to Paris, had already tried ‘storming the heavens’; and the Spanish Federation had expanded to the point where it was on the verge of becoming a mass organization. Similar changes had occurred in other countries.
The initial configuration of the International had thus become outmoded, just as its original mission had come to an end. The task was no longer to prepare for and organize Europe-wide support for strikes, nor to call congresses on the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialize the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the collective heritage of the organization as a whole. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers’ movement was a revolutionary one: how to organize in such a way as to end the capitalist mode of production and to overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world. It was no longer a question of how to reform the existing society, but how to build a new one (see Jacques Freymond, 1962, p. x). For this new advance in the class struggle, Marx thought it indispensable to build working-class political parties in each country.
It was therefore decided that the General Council of the organization had to be transferred to New York and this resolution represented the end of the International.

Internationalism after the International
In later decades, the workers’ movement adopted a consistent socialist programme, expanded throughout Europe and then the rest of the world, and built new structures of supranational coordination. Apart from the continuity of names (the Second International from 1889–1916, the Third International from 1919–1943, or the Socialist International created in 1951), the various ‘Internationals’ of socialist politics have referred – although in very different ways – to the legacy of the so-called ‘First’ International. Thus, its revolutionary message proved extraordinarily fertile, producing results over time much greater than those achieved during its existence.
The International was the locus of some of the most famous debates of labour movement, such as that on Communism and Anarchy. The congresses of the International were also the place where, for the first time, a major transnational organization came to decisions about crucial issues, which had been discussed before its foundation, that subsequently became strategic points in the political program of socialist movements across the world. Among these are: the indispensable function of trade unions; the socialization of land and means of productions; the importance of participating in elections, and doing this through independent parties of the working class; and the conception of war as an inevitable product of the capitalist system.
An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the anti-systemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization.
The world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat, and the Left is still in the midst of deep crisis (see Musto, 2017). After decades of neoliberal policies, we have returned to an exploitative system, similar from many points of view to that of the nineteenth century. Labor market ‘reforms’ — a term now shed of its original progressive mean¬ing — have introduced more and more ‘flexibility’ with each passing year, creating deeper inequalities. Other major political and economic shifts have succeeded one another after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Among them, there have been the social changes generated by globalization, the ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, one of the biggest economic crises of capitalism (the one erupted in 2008) in history, the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a context such as this, class solidarity is all the more indispensable. It was Marx himself who emphasized that the confrontation between workers — including between local and migrant workers (who are moreover discriminated) — is an essential element of the domination of the ruling classes. New ways of organizing social conflict, political parties, and trade unions must certainly be invented, as we cannot reproduce schemes used 150 years ago. But the old lesson of the International that workers are defeated if they do not organize a common front of the exploited is still valid. Without that, our only horizon is a war between the poor and unbridled competition between individuals.
The barbarism of today’s world order imposes upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristics of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London in 1864 are today more timely than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade the twin requirements of pluralism and anticapitalism.

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I.  The Importance of the Development of Capitalism in Marx’s Early Political Works
The conviction that expansion of the capitalist mode of production was a basic prerequisite for the birth of communist society runs through the whole of Marx’s oeuvre. In one of his first public lectures, which he gave at the German Workers’ Association in Brussels and incorporated into a preparatory manuscript entitled “Wages,” Marx spoke of a “‘positive aspect of capital,’ of large-scale industry, of free competition, of the world market” (1976, 436). To the workers who had come to listen to him, he said:

I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production—the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society—would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken to the unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionizing the old society and itself. (Marx 1976, 436)

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, he argued with Engels that revolutionary attempts by the working class during the final crisis of feudal society had been doomed to failure, “owing to the then-undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the material conditions for its emancipation, conditions [. . .] that could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone” (Marx and Engels 1976, 514). Nevertheless, he recognized more than one merit in that period: not only had it “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” (486); “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [had] substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (487). Marx and Engels did not hesitate to declare that “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part” (486). By making use of geographical discoveries and the nascent world market, it had “given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (488). Moreover, in the course of barely a century, “the bourgeoisie [had] created more colossal and more massive productive forces than all preceding generations together” (489). This had been possible once it had “subjected the country to the rule of the towns” and rescued “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” so widespread in European feudal society (488).  More important still, the bourgeoisie had “forged the weapons that bring death to itself” and the human beings to use them: “the modern working class, the proletarians” (490); these were growing at the same pace at which the bourgeoisie was expanding. For Marx and Engels, “the advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association” (496).
Marx developed similar ideas in The Class Struggles in France, arguing that only the rule of the bourgeoisie “tears up the roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which a proletarian revolution is alone possible” (Marx 1978, 56). Also in the early 1850s, when commenting on the principal political events of the time, he further theorized the idea of capitalism as a necessary prerequisite for the birth of a new type of society.  In one of the reviews, he wrote hand in hand with Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he argued that in China “in eight years the calico bales of the English bourgeoisie [had] brought the oldest and least perturbable kingdom on earth to the eve of a social upheaval, which, in any event, is bound to have the most significant results for civilization” (Marx and Engels 1978, 267).
Three years later, in “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” he asserted: “England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia” (Marx 1979a, 217–218). He had no illusions about the basic features of capitalism, being well aware that the bourgeoisie had never “effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation” (221). But he was also convinced that world trade and the development of the productive forces of human beings, through the transformation of material production into “scientific domination of natural agencies,” were creating the basis for a different society: “bourgeois industry and commerce [would] create these material conditions of a new world” (222).
Marx’s views on the British presence in India were amended a few years later, in an article for the New York Tribune on the Sepoy rebellion, when he resolutely sided with those “attempting to expel the foreign conquerors” (Marx 1986, 341). His judgment on capitalism, on the other hand, was reaffirmed, with a more political edge, in the brilliant “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper.”. Here, in recalling that historically unprecedented industrial and scientific forces had come into being with capitalism, he told the militants present at the event that “steam, electricity and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even the citizens Barbès, Raspail and Blanqui” (Marx 1980, 655).

II. The Conception of Capitalism in Marx’s Economic Writings
In the Grundrisse, Marx repeated several times the idea that certain “civilizing tendencies” of society manifested themselves with capitalism (Marx 1973, 414). He mentioned the “civilizing tendency of external trade” (256), as well as the “propagandistic (civilizing) tendency” of the “production of capital,” an “exclusive” property that had never manifested itself in “earlier conditions of production” (542). He even went so far as to quote appreciatively the historian John Wade (1788–1875), who, in reflecting on the creation of free time generated by the division of labour, had suggested that “capital is only another name for civilization” (585).
At the same time, however, Marx attacked the capitalist as “usurper” of the “free time created by the workers for society” (Marx 1973, 634). In a passage very close to the positions expressed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party or, in 1853, in the columns of the New York Tribune, Marx wrote:

production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side [. . . and] on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility [. . .]. Thus, capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself. [. . .] In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. (Marx 1973, 409–10)

At the time of the Grundrisse, therefore, the ecological question was still in the background of Marx’s preoccupations, subordinate to the question of the potential development of individuals.
One of Marx’s most analytic accounts of the positive effects of capitalist production may be found in volume one of Capital.  Although much more conscious than in the past of the destructive character of capitalism, his magnum opus repeats the six conditions generated by capital—particularly its “centralization”—which are the fundamental prerequisites that lay the potential for the birth of communist society. These conditions are: 1) cooperative labour; 2) the application of science and technology to production; 3) the appropriation of the forces of nature by production; 4) the creation of large machinery that workers can only operate in common; 5) the economizing of the means of production; and 6) the tendency to create the world market. For Marx,

hand in hand with [. . .] this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. (Marx 1992a, 929)

Marx well knew that, with the concentration of production in the hands of fewer and fewer bosses, “the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation” (Marx 1992a, 929) was increasing for the working classes, but he was also aware that “the cooperation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them” (Marx 1992a, 453). He had come to the conclusion that the extraordinary growth of productive forces under capitalism—a phenomenon greater than in all previous modes of production—had created the conditions to overcome the social-economic relations it had itself generated, and hence to advance to a socialist society. As in his considerations on the economic profile of non-European societies, the central point of Marx’s thinking here was the progression of capitalism towards its own overthrow. In volume three of Capital, he wrote that “usury” had a “revolutionary effect” in so far as it contributed to the destruction and dissolution of “forms of ownership which provide[d] a firm basis for the articulation of [medieval] political life and whose constant reproduction [was] a necessity for that life.” The ruin of the feudal lords and petty production meant “centralizating the conditions of labour” (Marx 1993, 732).
In volume one of Capital, Marx wrote that “the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process” (Marx 1992a, 453). As he saw it, “the socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions” (Marx 1992a, 451). Marx maintained that the most favourable circumstances for communism could develop only with the expansion of capital:

He [the capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the free and full development of every individual form the ruling principle. (Marx 1992a, 739)

Subsequent reflections on the decisive role of the capitalist mode of production in making communism a real historical possibility appear all the way through Marx’s critique of political economy. To be sure, he had clearly understood—as he wrote in the Grundrisse—that, if one of the tendencies of capital is “to create disposable time,” it subsequently “converts it into surplus value” (Marx 1973, 708). Still, with this mode of production, labour is valorized to the maximum, while “the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is [. . .] reduced to a minimum.” For Marx this was a fundamental point. The change it involved would “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour” and was “the condition of its emancipation” (Marx 1973, 701). Capital was thus, “despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to replace labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development” (Marx 1973, 708).
Marx also noted that, to bring about a society in which the universal development of individuals was achievable, it was “necessary above all that the full development of the forces of production” should have become “the condition of production” (Marx 1973, 542). He therefore stated that the “great historical quality” of capital is:

to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. [. . .] This is why capital is productive; i.e., an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself. (Marx 1973, 325)

Marx reaffirmed these convictions in the text “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.”  Having recalled the structural limits of capitalism—above all, the fact that it is a mode of “production in contradiction, and indifference, to the producer”—he focuses on its “positive side” (Marx 1992b, 1037). In comparison with the past, capitalism presents itself as “a form of production not bound to a level of needs laid down in advance, and hence it does not predetermine the course of production itself” (1037). It is precisely the growth of “the social productive forces of labour” that explains “the historic significance of capitalist production in its specific form” (1024). Marx, then, in the social-economic conditions of his time, regarded as fundamental the process of the creation of “wealth as such, i.e., the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society” (990). What was “necessary” was to “abolish the contradictory form of capitalism” (1065).
The same theme recurs in volume three of Capital, when Marx underlines that the raising of “the conditions of production into general, communal, social conditions [. . .] is brought about by the development of the productive forces under capitalist production and by the manner and form in which this development is accomplished” (Marx 1993, 373).
While holding that capitalism was the best system yet to have existed, in terms of the capacity to expand the productive forces to the maximum, Marx also recognized that—despite the ruthless exploitation of human beings—it had a number of potentially progressive elements that allowed individual capacities to be fulfilled much more than in past societies.
Deeply averse to the productivist maxim of capitalism, to the primacy of exchange-value and the imperative of surplus-value production, Marx considered the question of increased productivity in relation to the growth of individual capacities. Thus, he pointed out in the Grundrisse:

Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g., the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field, etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. (Marx 1973, 494)

This greatly more intense and complex development of the productive forces generated “the richest development of the individuals” (541) and “the universality of relations” (542). For Marx,

Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. (325)

In short, for Marx capitalist production certainly produced “the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities” (162). Marx emphasized this point a number of times.
In the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, he noted that “a greater diversity of production [and] an extension of the sphere of social needs and the means for their satisfaction [. . .] also impels the development of human productive capacity and thereby the activation of human dispositions in fresh directions” (Marx 1988a, 199). In Theories of Surplus Value (1861–1863), he made it clear that the unprecedented growth of the productive forces generated by capitalism not only had economic effects but “revolutionises all political and social relationships” (Marx 1991, 344). And in volume one of Capital, he wrote that “the exchange of commodities breaks through all the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, [but] there also develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin [gesellschaftlicher Naturzusammenhänge], entirely beyond the control of the human agents” (Marx 1992a, 207). It is a question of production that takes place “in a form adequate to the full development of the human race” (Marx 1992a, 638).
Finally, Marx took a positive view of certain tendencies in capitalism regarding women’s emancipation and the modernization of relations within the domestic sphere. In the important political document “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions,” which he drafted for the first congress of the International Working Men’s Association in 1866, he wrote that “although under capital it was distorted into an abomination [. . .] to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production [is] a progressive, sound and legitimate tendency” (Marx 1985a, 188).
Similar judgments may be found in volume one of Capital, where he wrote:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. (Marx 1992a, 620–621)

Marx further noted that “the capitalist mode of production completes the disintegration of the primitive familial union which bound agriculture and manufacture together when they were both at an undeveloped and childlike stage.” One result of this was an “ever-growing preponderance [of] the urban population,” “the historical motive power of society” which “capitalist production collects together in great centres” (637). Using the dialectical method, to which he made frequent recourse in Capital and in its preparatory manuscripts, Marx argued that “the elements for forming a new society” were taking shape through the “maturing [of] material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” under capitalism (635). The material premises were thus being created for “a new and higher synthesis” (637). Although the revolution would never arise purely through economic dynamics but would always require the political factor as well, the advent of communism “requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product [naturwüchsige Produkt] of a long and tormented historical development” (173).

III. Capitalism in Marx’s Later Political Interventions
Similar theses are presented in a number of short but significant political texts, contemporaneous with or subsequent to the composition of Capital, which confirm the continuity of Marx’s thinking. In Value, Price and Profit, he urged workers to grasp that, “with all the miseries that [capitalism] imposes on them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society” (Marx 1985c, 149).
In the “Confidential Communication on Bakunin” (1985d) sent on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association to the Brunswick committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP), Marx maintained that “although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic revolution.”  He explained this as follows:

It is the only country where there are no more peasants and where landed property is concentrated in a few hands. It is the only country where the capitalist form—that is to say, combined labour on a large scale under capitalist masters—embraces virtually the whole of production. It is the only country where the great majority of the population consists of wage labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the working class by the trade unions have attained a certain degree of maturity and universality. It is the only country where, because of its domination on the world market, every revolution in economic matters must immediately affect the whole world. If landlordism and capitalism are classical features in England, on the other hand, the material conditions for their destruction are the most mature here. (Marx 1985d, 86)

In his “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” which contain important indications of his radical differences with the Russian revolutionary concerning the prerequisites for an alternative society to capitalism, Marx reaffirmed, also with respect to the social subject that would lead the struggle for socialism that “a social revolution is bound up with definite historical conditions of economic development; these are its premises. It is only possible, therefore, where alongside capitalist production the industrial proletariat accounts for at least a significant mass of the people” (Marx 1989e, 518).
In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1989f), in which he took issue with aspects of the platform for unification of the General Association of German Workers (ADAV) and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, Marx proposed: “In proportion as labour develops socially, and becomes therefore a source of wealth and culture, poverty and destitution develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the non-workers.” And he added: “What had to be done here [. . .] was to prove concretely how in present capitalist society the material, etc., conditions have at last been created which enable and compel the workers to lift this historical curse” (Marx 1989f, 82–83).
Finally, in the “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party” (1989g), a short text which he wrote three years before his death, Marx emphasized that an essential condition for the workers to be able to appropriate the means of production was “the collective form, whose material and intellectual elements are shaped by the very development of capitalist society” (Marx 1989g, 340).
Thus, with a continuity stretching from his early formulations of the materialist conception of history, in the 1840s, to his final political interventions of the 1880s, Marx highlighted the fundamental relationship between the productive growth generated by the capitalist mode of production and the preconditions for the communist society for which the workers’ movement must struggle. The research he conducted in the last years of his life, however, helped him to review this conviction and to avoid falling into the economism that marked the analyses of so many of his followers.

IV. A Not Always Necessary Transition 
Marx regarded capitalism as a “necessary point of transition” (Marx 1973, 515) for the conditions to unfold that would allow the proletariat to fight with some prospect of success to establish a socialist mode of production. In another passage in the Grundrisse, he repeated that capitalism was a “point of transition” (540) towards the further progress of society, which would permit “the highest development of the forces of production” and “the richest development of individuals” (541). Marx described “the contemporary conditions of production” as “suspending themselves and [. . .] positing the historic presuppositions for a new state of society” (461).
With an emphasis that sometimes heralds the idea of a capitalist predisposition to self-destruction,  Marx declared that “as the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate result” (Marx 1973, 712). He said he was convinced that “the last form of servitude” (with this “last” Marx was certainly going too far),

assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on one side, capital on the other, is thereby cast off like a skin, and this casting-off itself is the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital; the material and mental conditions of the negation of wage labour and of capital, themselves already the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production, are themselves results of its production process. The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production. (Marx 1973, 749–750)

Further confirmation that Marx considered capitalism a fundamental stage for the birth of a socialist economy may be found in Theories of Surplus Value. Here he expressed his agreement with the economist Richard Jones (1790–1855), for whom “capital and the capitalist mode of production” were to be “accepted” merely as “a transitional phase in the development of social production.” Through capitalism, Marx writes, “the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic formation of society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only a transition” (Marx 1991, 346).
Marx elaborated a similar idea in volume one of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts. In the famous unpublished “Appendix: Result of the Immediate Process of Production,” he wrote that capitalism came into being following a “complete economic revolution”:

On the one hand, it creates the real conditions for the domination of labour by capital, perfecting the process and providing it with the appropriate framework. On the other hand, by evolving conditions of production and communication and productive forces of labour antagonistic to the workers involved in them, this revolution creates the real premises of a new mode of production, one that abolishes the contradictory form of capitalism. It thereby creates the material basis of a newly shaped social process and hence of a new social formation. (Marx 1992b, 1065)

In one of the concluding chapters of Capital, volume one—“The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”—he stated:

The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reaches a point at which they become incompatible with the capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx 1992a, 929)

Although Marx held that capitalism was an essential transition, in which the historical conditions were created for the workers’ movement to struggle for a communist transformation of society, he did not think that this idea could be applied in a rigid, dogmatic manner. On the contrary, he denied more than once—in both published and unpublished texts—that he had developed a unidirectional interpretation of history, in which human beings were everywhere destined to follow the same path and pass through the same stages.

V. The Possible Path of Russia
In the final years of his life, Marx repudiated the thesis wrongly attributed to him that the bourgeois mode of production was historically inevitable. His distance from this position was expressed when he found himself drawn into the debate on the possible development of capitalism in Russia. In an article entitled “Marx before the Tribunal of Yu Zhukovsky,” the Russian writer and sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842–1904) accused him of considering capitalism as an unavoidable stage for the emancipation of Russia too (Mikhailovsky 1877, 321–356).  Marx replied, in a letter he drafted to the political-literary review Otechestvennye Zapiski (Fatherland Annals), that in volume one of Capital he had “claim[ed] no more than to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order” (Marx 1983, 135).  Marx referred to a passage in the French edition of volume one of Capital (1872–1875), which suggested that the basis of the separation of the rural masses from their means of production had been “the expropriation of the agricultural producers,” but that “only in England” had this process “so far been accomplished in a radical manner,” and that “all the countries of Western Europe [were] following the same course” (Marx 1983, 135).  Accordingly, the object of his examination was only “the old continent,” not the whole world.
Marx referred to a passage in the French edition of Capital (Le Capital, Paris 1872–1875), where he asserted that the basis for the separation of the producers from their means of production was the “expropriation of the agricultural producers,” adding that “only in England [had this been] accomplished in a radical manner,” but that “all the other countries of Western Europe [were] following the same course” (Marx 1989h, 634).
This is the spatial horizon within which we should understand the famous statement in the preface of Capital, volume one: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” Writing for a German readership, Marx observed that, “just like the rest of Continental Western Europe, we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development.” In his view, alongside “the modern evils,” the Germans were “oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations” (Marx 1992a, 91).  It was for the German who might “in optimistic fashion comfort himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad,” that Marx asserted “De te fabula narratur!” (90).
Marx also displayed a flexible approach to other European countries, since he did not think of Europe as a homogeneous whole. In a speech he gave in 1867 to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London, later published in Der Vorbote (The Harbinger) in Geneva, he argued that German proletarians could successfully carry out a revolution because, “unlike the workers in other countries, they need not go through the lengthy period of bourgeois development” (Marx 1985b, 415).
Marx expressed the same convictions in 1881, when the revolutionary Vera Zasulich (1849–1919) solicited his views on the future of the rural commune (obshchina). She wanted to know whether it might develop in a socialist form, or whether it was doomed to perish because capitalism would necessarily impose itself in Russia, too. In his reply, Marx stressed that in volume one of Capital he had “expressly restricted [. . .] the historical inevitability” of the development of capitalism—which had effected “a complete separation of the producer from the means of production”—to the countries of Western Europe” (Marx 1989c, 360).
In the preliminary drafts of the letter, Marx dwells on the peculiarities deriving from the coexistence of the rural commune with more advanced economic forms. Russia, he observed, is

contemporary with a higher culture, it is linked to a world market dominated by capitalist production. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it. (Marx 1989c, 362)

The peasantry could “thus incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks” (Marx 1989d, 368).
To those who argued that capitalism was an unavoidable stage for Russia too, on the grounds that it was impossible for history to advance in leaps, Marx asked ironically whether this meant that Russia, “like the West,” had had “to pass through a long incubation period in the engineering industry [. . .] in order to utilize machines, steam engines, railways, etc.” Similarly, had it not been possible “to introduce in the twinkling of an eye, the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise?” (Marx 1989d, 349). It was evident that the history of Russia, or of any other country, did not inevitably have to retrace all the stages that the history of England or other European nations had experienced. Hence, the socialist transformation of the obshchina might also take place without necessarily having to pass through capitalism.
In the same period, Marx’s theoretical research on precapitalist community relations, compiled in his Ethnographic Notebooks, were leading him in the same direction as the one evident in his reply to Zasulich. Spurred on by his reading of the work of the US anthropologist Lewis Morgan (1818–1881), he wrote in propagandistic tones that “Europe and America,” the nations where capitalism was most developed, could “aspire only to break [their] chains by replacing capitalist production with cooperative production, and capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, i.e., communist property” (Marx 1989c, 362).
Marx’s model was not at all a “primitive type of cooperative or collective production” resulting from “the isolated individual,” but one deriving from “socialization of the means of production” (Marx 1989b, 351). He had not changed his (thoroughly critical) view of the rural communes in Russia, and in his analysis the development of the individual and social production preserved intact their irreplaceable centrality.
In Marx’s reflections on Russia, then, there is no dramatic break with his previous ideas.  The new elements in comparison with the past involve a maturation of his theoretical-political position, which led him to consider other possible roads to communism that he had earlier considered unrealizable.

VI. Conclusions
The idea that the development of socialism might be plausible in Russia did not have as its sole foundation Marx’s study of the economic situation there. Contact with the Russian Populists, like his contact with the Paris Communards a decade earlier, helped to make him ever more open to the possibility that history would witness not only a succession of modes of production, but also the irruption of revolutionary events and of the subjectivities that produce them. He felt called upon to pay even more heed to historical specificities, and to the uneven development of political and economic conditions among different countries and social contexts.
Beyond his unwillingness to accept that a predefined historical development might appear in the same way in different economic and political contexts, Marx’s theoretical advances were due to the evolution of his thinking on the effects of capitalism in economically backward countries. He no longer maintained, as he had in 1853 in an article on India for the New-York Tribune, that “bourgeois industry and commerce create [the] conditions of a new world” (Marx 1979b, 222). Years of detailed study and close observation of changes in international politics had helped him to develop a vision of British colonialism quite unlike the one he had expressed as a journalist in his mid-thirties.  The effects of capitalism in colonial countries now looked very different to him. Referring to the “East Indies,” in one of the drafts of his letter to Zasulich, he wrote that “everyone [. . .] realizes that the suppression of communal ownership  there was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing  the native people backwards not forwards” (Marx 1989d, 365).  In his view, “all they [the British] managed to do was ruin native agriculture and double the number and severity of the famines” (Marx 1989d, 368).  Capitalism did not, as its apologists boasted, bring progress and emancipation, but the pillage of natural resources, environmental devastation and new forms of servitude and human dependence.
Marx returned in 1882 to the possibility of a concomitance between capitalism and forms of community from the past. In January, in the preface to the new Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which he co-authored with Engels, the fate of the Russian rural commune is linked to that of proletarian struggles in Western Europe:

In Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West? The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development. (Marx and Engels 1989a, 426)

In 1853, Marx had already analysed the effects produced by the economic presence of the English in China in the article “Revolution in China and in Europe” written for the New York Tribune. Marx thought it was possible that the revolution in this country could lead to “the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.”  He added that this would be a “curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western World while the Western powers, by English, French and American war-steamers, are conveying ‘order’ to Shanghai, Nanking and the mouths of the Great Canal” (Marx 1979b, 98).
Besides, Marx’s reflections on Russia were not the only reason for him to think that the destinies of different revolutionary movements, active in countries with dissimilar social-economic contexts, might become entwined with one another. Between 1869 and 1870, in various letters and a number of documents of the International Working Men’s Association—perhaps most clearly and concisely in a letter to his comrades Sigfrid Meyer (1840–1872) and August Vogt (1817–1895)—he associated the future of England (“the metropolis of capital”) with that of the more backward Ireland. The former was undoubtedly “the power that has hitherto ruled the world market,” and therefore “for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution”; it was, “in addition, the only country where the material conditions for the revolution have developed to a certain state of maturity” (Marx and Engels 1988, 474–475).
However, “after studying the Irish question for years,” Marx had become convinced that “the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England”—and, deluding himself, “decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world”—“cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.” The most important objective remained “to hasten the social revolution in England,” but the “sole means of doing this” was “to make Ireland independent” (Marx and Engels 1988, 473–476).  In any event, Marx considered industrial, capitalist England to be strategically central for the struggle of the workers’ movement; the revolution in Ireland, possible only if the “forced union between the two countries” was ended, would be a “social revolution”  that would manifest itself “in outmoded forms” (Marx 1985d, 86). The subversion of bourgeois power in nations where the modern forms of production were still only developing would not be sufficient to bring about the disappearance of capitalism.
The dialectical position that Marx arrived at in his final years allowed him to discard the idea that the socialist mode of production could be constructed only through certain fixed stages.  The materialist conception of history that he developed is far from the mechanical sequence to which his thought has been reduced several times. It cannot be assimilated with the idea that human history is a progressive succession of modes of production, mere preparatory phases before the inevitable conclusion: the birth of a communist society.
Moreover, he explicitly denied the historical necessity of capitalism in every part of the world. In the famous “Preface” to the Critique of Political Economy, he tentatively listed the progression of “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production,” as the end of the “prehistory of human society” (Marx 1987, 263–264) and similar phrases can be found in other writings. However, this idea represents only a small part of Marx’s larger oeuvre on the genesis and development of different forms of production. His method cannot be reduced to economic determinism.
Marx did not change his basic ideas about the profile of future communist society, as he sketched it from the Grundrisse on. Guided by hostility to the schematisms of the past, and to the new dogmatisms arising in his name, he thought it might be possible that the revolution would break out in forms and conditions that had never been considered before.

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I. The Marx Revival
For more than a decade now, prestigious newspapers and journals with a wide readership have been describing Karl Marx as a far-seeing theorist whose topicality receives constant confirmation. Many authors with progressive views maintain that his ideas continue to be indispensable for anyone who believes it is necessary to build an alternative to capitalism. Almost everywhere, he is now the theme of university courses and international conferences. His writings, reprinted or brought out in new editions, have reappeared on bookshop shelves, and the study of his work, after twenty years or more of neglect, has gathered increasing momentum. The years 2017 and 2018 have brought further intensity to this “Marx revival”, thanks to many initiatives around the world linked to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Capital and the bicentenary of Marx’s birth.

Marx’s ideas have changed the world. Yet despite the affirmation of Marx’s theories, turned into dominant ideologies and state doctrines for a considerable part of humankind in the twentieth century, there is still no full edition of all his works and manuscripts. The main reason for this lies in the incomplete character of Marx’s oeuvre; the works he published amount to considerably less than the total number of projects left unfinished, not to speak of the mountainous Nachlass of notes connected with his unending researches. Marx left many more manuscripts than those he sent to the printers. The sometimes-grinding poverty in which he lived, as well as his constant ill health, added to his daily worries; his rigorous method and merciless self-criticism increased the difficulties of many of his undertakings. Moreover, his passion for knowledge remained unaltered over time and always drove him on to fresh study. Nevertheless, his ceaseless labors would have the most extraordinary theoretical consequences for the future.

Of particular value for a reevaluation of Marx’s achievement was the resumed publication in 1998 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²), the historical-critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Friedrich Engels. Twenty-eight more volumes have already appeared (40 were published between 1975 and 1989), and others are in the course of preparation. The MEGA² is organized in four sections: (1) all the works, articles, and drafts written by Marx and Engels (with the exception of Capital); (2) Capital and all its preparatory materials; (3) the correspondence—consisting of 4,000 letters by Marx and Engels and 10,000 written to them by others, a large number published for the first time in the MEGA²; and (4) the excerpts, annotations, and marginal notes. This fourth section bears witness to Marx’s truly encyclopedic labors: ever since his time at university, it was his habit to compile extracts from the books he read, often interspersing them with reflections that they suggested to him. Marx’s literary bequest contains some two hundred notebooks. They are essential for an understanding of the genesis of his theory and of those elements he was unable to develop as he would have wished. The surviving excerpts, covering the long time-span from 1838 to 1882, are written in eight languages (German, ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian) and refer to the most varied disciplines. They were taken from works of philosophy, art history, religion, politics, law, literature, history, political economy, international relations, technology, mathematics, physiology, geology, mineralogy, agronomy, anthropology, chemistry, and physics—including not only books and newspaper and journal articles but also parliamentary minutes as well as government statistics and reports. This immense store of knowledge, much of it published in recent years or still waiting to be printed, was the construction site for Marx’s critical theory, and MEGA² has enabled access to it for the first time.

These priceless materials—many available only in German and therefore confined to small circles of researchers—show us an author very different from the one that numerous critics, or self-styled disciples, presented for such a long time. Indeed, the new textual acquisitions in MEGA² make it possible to say that, of the classics of political, economic, and philosophical thought, Marx is the author whose profile has changed the most in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. The new political setting, following the implosion of the Soviet Union, has also contributed to this fresh perception. For the end of Marxism-Leninism finally freed Marx’s work from the shackles of an ideology light years away from his conception of society.

Recent research has refuted the various approaches that reduce Marx’s conception of communist society to superior development of the productive forces. For example, it has shown the importance he attached to the ecological question: on repeated occasions, he denounced the fact that expansion of the capitalist mode of production increases not only the theft of workers’ labor but also the pillage of natural resources. Marx went deeply into many other issues that, though often underestimated, or even ignored, by scholars of his work, are acquiring crucial importance for the political agenda of our times. Among these are individual freedom in the economic and political sphere, gender emancipation, the critique of nationalism, the emancipatory potential of technology, and forms of collective ownership not controlled by the state. Thus, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become possible to read a Marx very unlike the dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric theorist who was paraded around for so long.

II. New Discoveries on the Genesis of the Materialist Conception of History
In February 1845, after 15 intensive months in Paris that were crucial for his political formation, Marx was forced to move to Brussels, where he was allowed residence on condition that he “did not publish anything on current politics” (Marx 1975b:677).  During the three years spent in the Belgian capital, he pressed on fruitfully with his studies of political economy and conceived the idea of writing, along with Engels, Joseph Weydemeyer, and Moses Hess, a “critique of modern German philosophy as expounded by its representatives Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, and of German socialism as expounded by its various prophets” (Marx 1976:72). The resulting text, posthumously published under the title The German Ideology, had a dual aim: to combat the latest forms of neo-Hegelianism in Germany, and then, as Marx wrote to the publisher Carl Wilhelm Julius Leske on August 1, 1846, “to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present” (Marx and Engels 1982:50; cf. Musto 2018:57). This manuscript, on which he worked right up to June 1846, was never completed, but it helped him to elaborate more clearly than before, though still not in a definitive form, what Engels defined for the wider public 40 years later as “the materialist conception of history” (Engels 1990a:519).

The first edition of The German Ideology, published in 1932, as well as all later versions, which only incorporated slight modifications, were sent to the printers with the semblance of a completed book. In particular, the editors of this actually unfinished manuscript created the false impression that The German Ideology included an essential opening chapter on Feuerbach in which Marx and Engels exhaustively set out the laws of “historical materialism” (a term never used by Marx). As stated by Althusser, this was the place where they conceptualized “an unequivocal epistemological break” with their previous writings (Althusser 1996:33). The German Ideology soon turned into one of the most important philosophical texts of the twentieth century. According to Henri Lefebvre (1968:71), it set out the “fundamental theses of historical materialism.” Maximilien Rubel (1980:13) held that this “manuscript contains the most elaborate statement of the critical and materialist concept of history.” David McLellan (1975:37) was equally forthright in maintaining that it “contained Marx’s most detailed account of his materialist conception of history.”

Thanks to Volume I/5 of MEGA², Deutsche Ideologie: Manuskripte und Drucke (1845–1847) (Marx and Engels 2017; 1893 pages), many such claims can now be downsized and The German Ideology restored to its original incompleteness. This edition—which comprises 17 manuscripts with a total of 700 pages plus a 1200-page critical apparatus providing variations and authorial corrections and indicating the paternity of each section—establishes once and for all the fragmentary character of the text. The twentieth-century fallacy of “scientific communism” and all the instrumentalizations of The German Ideology call to mind a phrase to be found in the text itself. For its cogent critique of German philosophy in Marx’s lifetime also sounds an acerbic warning against future exegetical trends: “Not only in its answers, even in its questions there was a mystification” (Marx and Engels 1976:28).

In the same period, the young Trier-born revolutionary extended the studies he had begun in Paris. In 1845, he spent July and August in Manchester delving into the vast English-language economic literature and compiling nine books of extracts (the so-called Manchester Notebooks), mostly from manuals of political economy and books on economic history. The MEGA² volume IV/4, Exzerpte und Notizen Juli bis August 1845 (Marx and Engels 1988), contains the first five of these notebooks, together with three books of Engels’s notes from the same time in Manchester. Volume IV/5, Exzerpte und Notizen Juli 1845 bis Dezember 1850 (Marx and Engels 2015; 650 pages), completes this series of texts and makes their previously unpublished parts available to researchers. It includes Notebooks 6, 7, 8, and 9, containing Marx’s excerpts from 16 works of political economy. The most sizeable of this group came from John Francis Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1839) and four texts by Robert Owen, in particular his Book of the New Moral World (1849), all of which evince Marx’s great interest at the time in English socialism and his deep respect for Owen, an author whom too many Marxists have over-hastily written off as “utopian.”  The volume ends with twenty or so pages that Marx wrote between 1846 and 1850, plus some of Engels’s study notes from the same period.

These studies of socialist theory and political economy were not a hindrance to Marx’s and Engels’s habitual political engagement. The 800 pages and more of the recently published Volume I/7, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, Februar bis Oktober 1848 (Marx and Engels 2016; 1294 pages), allows us to appreciate the scale of this in 1848, one of the most consuming years of political and journalistic activity in the lives of the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. After a revolutionary movement of unprecedented scope and intensity plunged the political and social order of continental Europe into crisis, governments in place took all possible countermeasures to put an end to the insurrections. Marx himself suffered the consequences and was expelled from Belgium in March. However, a republic had just been proclaimed in France, and Ferdinand Flocon, a minister in the Provisional Government, invited Marx to return to Paris: “Dear and valiant Marx . . . the tyranny banished you, but free France will reopen its doors to you.” Marx naturally set aside his studies of political economy and took up journalistic activity in support of the revolution, helping to chart a recommended political course. After a short period in Paris, in April he moved to the Rhineland and two months later began editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which had meanwhile been founded in Cologne. An intense campaign in its columns weighed in behind the cause of the insurgents and urged the proletariat to promote “the social and republican revolution” (Marx 1977:178).

Nearly all the articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were published anonymously. One of the merits of the MEGA2 volume I/7 is to have correctly attributed the authorship of 36 texts to either Marx or Engels, whereas previous collections had left us in doubt about who wrote which piece. Out of a total of 275, a full 125 are printed here for the first time in an edition of the works of Marx and Engels. An appendix also features 16 interesting documents containing accounts of some of their interventions at the meetings of the League of Communists, the aggregates of the Democratic Society of Cologne and the Vienna Union. Those interested in Marx’s political and journalistic activity during the “year of the revolution,” 1848, will find here much invaluable material to deepen their knowledge.

III. Capital: The Unfinished Critique
The revolutionary movement that rose up throughout Europe in 1848 was defeated within a short space of time, and in 1849, after two expulsion orders from Prussia and France, Marx had no other option than to make his way across the Channel. He would remain in England, an exile and stateless person, for the rest of his life, but European reaction could not have confined him in a better place to write his critique of political economy. At that time, London was the world’s leading economic and financial center, the “demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos” (Marx 1978:134), and therefore the most favorable location from which to observe the latest economic developments of capitalist society. He also became a correspondent for the New-York Tribune, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the United States of America.

For many years Marx awaited the outbreak of a new crisis, and when this materialized in 1857 he devoted much of his time to analyzing its key features. Volume I/16, Artikel Oktober 1857 bis Dezember 1858 (Marx and Engels 2018; 1181 pages), includes 84 articles that he published between autumn 1857 and the end of 1858 in the New-York Tribune, including those expressing his first reactions to the financial panic of 1857. The American daily often printed unsigned editorials, but research for this new volume of MEGA² has made it possible to attribute two more articles to Marx, as well as appending four that were substantially modified by the editors and a further three whose origin remains uncertain.

Driven by a desperate need to improve his economic circumstances, Marx also joined the editorial committee of The New American Cyclopædia and agreed to compose a number of entries for this project (MEGA2 volume I/16 contains 39 of these pieces). Although the payment of $2 per page was very low, it was still an addition to his disastrous finances. Moreover, he entrusted most of the work to Engels, so that he would be able to devote more time to his economic writings.

Marx’s work in this period was remarkable and wide-ranging. Alongside his journalistic commitments, from August 1857 to May 1858 he filled the eight notebooks famously known as the Grundrisse. But he also set himself the strenuous task of an analytic study of the first world economic crisis. Volume IV/14, Exzerpte, Zeitungsausschnitte und Notizen zur Weltwirtschaftskrise (Krisenhefte), November 1857 bis Februar 1858 (Marx 2017; 680 pages), decisively adds to our knowledge of one of the most fertile intervals of Marx’s theoretical production. In a letter to Engels of December 18, 1857, Marx described his feverish burst of activity:

I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o’clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines [Grundrisse] of political economy. (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter to the bottom, as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare.) 2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the [New-York] Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair as a reminder to the German public that we are still there as always, and always the same. (Marx and Engels 1983:224)

So Marx’s plan was to work at the same time on two projects: a theoretical work on the critique of the capitalist mode of production, and a more strictly topical book on the vicissitudes of the ongoing crisis. This is why in the so-called Notebooks on Crisis, unlike previous similar volumes, Marx did not compile extracts from the work of other economists but collected a large quantity of news reports on the major bank collapses, on variations in stock market prices, changes in trade patterns, unemployment rates, and industrial output. The particular attention he paid to the latter distinguished his analysis from that of so many others who attributed crises exclusively to the faulty granting of credit and an increase in speculative phenomena. Marx divided his notes among three separate notebooks. In the first and shortest one, entitled “1857 France,” he collected data on the state of French trade and the chief measures taken by the Bank of France. The second, the “Book on the Crisis of 1857,” was nearly twice as long and dealt mainly with Britain and the money market. Similar themes were treated in the slightly longer third notebook, “Book on the Commercial Crisis,” in which Marx annotated data and news items on industrial relations, the production of raw materials, and the labor market.

Marx’s work was as rigorous as ever: he copied from more than a dozen journals and newspapers, in chronological order, the most interesting parts of numerous articles and any other information he could use to summarize what was happening. His principal source was The Economist—a weekly from which he drew roughly half of his notes—although he also frequently consulted Morning Star, The Manchester Guardian, and The Times. All the extracts were compiled in the English language. In these notebooks, Marx did not confine himself to transcribing the main news reports concerning the United States of America and Britain. He also tracked the most significant events in other European countries—particularly France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain—and took a lively interest in other parts of the world, especially India and China, the Far East, Egypt, and even Brazil and Australia.

As the weeks passed, Marx gave up the idea of publishing a book on the crisis and concentrated all his energies on his theoretical work, the critique of political economy, which in his view could brook no further delay. Yet the Notebooks on Crisis remain particularly useful in refuting a false idea of Marx’s main interests during this period. In a letter of January 16, 1858, to Engels, he wrote that “as regards method” to use for his work “Hegel’s Logic had been of great use to him” and added that he wanted to highlight its “rational aspect” (Marx and Engels 1983:249). On this basis, some interpreters of Marx’s work have concluded that when writing the Grundrisse he spent considerable time studying Hegelian philosophy. But the publication of Volume IV/14 makes it quite clear that his main concern at the time was with the empirical analysis of events linked to the great economic crisis that he had been predicting for so long.

Marx’s indefatigable efforts to complete his “critique of political economy” are also the main theme of Volume III/12, Briefwechsel, Januar 1862 bis September 1864 (Marx and Engels 2013; 1529 pages), which contains his correspondence from the beginning of 1862 up to the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association. Of the 425 surviving letters, 112 are exchanges between Engels and Marx, while 35 were written to, and 278 received from, third persons (227 of this group being published here for the first time). The inclusion of the latter—the most significant difference from all previous editions—constitutes a veritable treasure trove for the interested reader, providing a wealth of new information about events and theories that Marx and Engels learned from women and men with whom they had a shared political commitment.

Like all the other MEGA² volumes of correspondence, this one also ends with a register of letters written by, or addressed to, Marx and Engels that have left no more than traces testifying to their existence. These come to a total of 125, nearly a quarter of the number that have survived, and include a full 57 written by Marx. In these cases, even the most rigorous researcher can do no more than speculate about various conjectural hypotheses.

Among the key points of discussion in Marx’s correspondence from the early 1860s were the American Civil War, the Polish revolt against Russian occupation, and the birth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany inspired by the principles of Ferdinand Lassalle.  However, a constantly recurring theme was his struggle to make progress in the writing of Capital.

During this period, Marx launched into a new area of research: “Theories of Surplus Value.” Over ten notebooks, he minutely dissected the approach of major economists before him, his basic idea being that “all economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent” (Marx 1988:348). Meanwhile, Marx’s economic circumstances continued to be desperate. On June 18, 1862, he wrote to Engels: “Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.” The situation was so extreme that Jenny made up her mind to sell some books from her husband’s personal library—although she could not find anyone who wanted to buy them. Nevertheless, Marx managed to “work hard” and expressed a note of satisfaction to Engels: “strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding poverty than it has done for years” (Marx and Engels 1985:380). On September 10 of the same year, Marx wrote to Engels that he might get a job “in a railroad office” in the new year (ibid.:417).  On December 28, he repeated to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann that things had become so desperate that he had “decided to become a ‘practical man’”; nothing came of the idea, however. Marx reported with his typical sarcasm: “Luckily—or perhaps I should say unluckily?—I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting” (ibid.:436).

Along with the financial stresses, Marx suffered a great deal from health problems. Nevertheless, from summer 1863 to December 1865 he embarked on further editing of the various parts into which he had decided to subdivide Capital. In the end, he managed to draw up the first draft of Volume One; the sole manuscript of Volume Three, in which he gave his only account of the complete process of capitalist production; and an initial version of Volume Two, containing the first general presentation of the circulation process of capital.

Volume II/11 of MEGA², Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des “Kapitals,” 1868 bis 1881 (Marx and Engels 2008; 1850 pages), contains all the final manuscripts pertaining to Volume Two of Capital that Marx drafted between 1868 and 1881.  Nine of these ten manuscripts had not been published previously. In October 1867, Marx returned to Capital, Volume Two, but various health issues forced another sudden interruption. A few months later, when he was able to resume work, nearly three years had passed since the last version he had written. Marx completed the first two chapters in the course of the spring of 1868, in addition to a group of preparatory manuscripts—on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the rate of profit, and the metamorphoses of capital—which occupied him until the end of the year. The new version of the third chapter was completed in the course of the next two years. Volume II/11 ends with a number of short texts that the aging Marx wrote between February 1877 and the spring of 1881.
The drafts of Capital, Volume Two, which were left in anything but a definitive state, present a number of theoretical problems. However, a final version of Volume Two was published by Engels in 1885, and it now appears in Volume II/13 of MEGA², entitled Karl Marx: Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Zweiter Band. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels, Hamburg 1885 (Marx 2008; 800 pages).

Finally, Volume II/4.3, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1868, Teil 3 (Marx 2012; 1065 pages), completes the second section of MEGA². This volume, which follows II/4.1 and II/4.2 in the previous series, contains 15 hitherto unpublished manuscripts from autumn 1867 to the end of 1868. Seven of these are draft fragments of Capital, Volume Three; they have a highly fragmentary character, and Marx never managed to update them in a way that reflected the progress of his research. Another three relate to Volume Two, while the remaining five tackle issues concerning the interdependence between Volumes Two and Three and include comments on excerpts from the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. The latter are particularly stimulating for economists interested in Marx’s theory of the rate of profit and his ideas on price theory. Philological studies linked to the preparation of this volume have also shown that the original manuscript of Capital, Volume One (of which “Chapter Six: Results of the Immediate Process of Production” used to be considered the only surviving part) actually dates back to the 1863–64 period, and that Marx cut and pasted it into the copy he prepared for publication.

With the publication of MEGA2 volume II/4.3, all the ancillary texts relating to Capital have been made available, from the famous “Introduction,” written in July 1857 during one of the greatest crashes in the history of capitalism, to the last fragments composed in the spring of 1881. We are talking of 15 volumes plus just as many bulky auxiliary tomes that constitute a formidable critical apparatus for the main text. They include all the manuscripts from the late 1850s and early 1860s, the first version of Capital published in 1867 (parts of which would be modified in subsequent editions), the French translation reviewed by Marx that appeared between 1872 and 1875, and all the changes that Engels made to the manuscripts of Volumes Two and Three. Alongside this, the classical box set of the three volumes of Capital appears positively minute. It is no exaggeration to say that only now can we fully understand the merits, limits, and incompleteness of Marx’s magnum opus.

The editorial work that Engels undertook after his friend’s death to prepare the unfinished parts of Capital for publication was extremely complex. The various manuscripts, drafts, and fragments of Volumes Two and Three, written between 1864 and 1881, correspond to approximately 2,350 pages of the MEGA2. Engels successfully published Volume Two in 1885 and Volume Three in 1894. However, it must be borne in mind that these two volumes emerged from the reconstruction of incomplete texts, often consisting of heterogeneous material. They were written in more than one period in time and thus include different, and sometimes contradictory, versions of Marx’s ideas.

IV. The International, Marx’s Researches Following Capital, and Engels’s Final Labors
Immediately after the publication of Capital, Marx resumed militant activity and made a constant commitment to the work of the International Working Men’s Association. This phase in his political biography is documented in Volume I/21, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe, September 1867 bis März 1871 (Marx and Engels 2009; 2,432 pages), which contains more than 150 texts and documents for the period from 1867 to 1871, as well as minutes of 169 meetings of the General Council in London (omitted from all previous editions of the works of Marx and Engels) in which Marx made an intervention. As such, it provides research material for crucial years in the life of the International.

Right from the earliest days, in 1864, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in France, French-speaking Switzerland, and Belgium, and the mutualists—the name by which his followers were known—were the most moderate wing of the International. Resolutely hostile to state intervention in any field, they opposed socialization of the land and the means of production as well as any use of strikes as a weapon. The texts published in this volume show how Marx played a key role in the long struggle to reduce Proudhon’s influence in the International. They include the documents related to the preparation of the congresses of Brussels (1868) and Basel (1869), where the International made its first clear pronouncement on the socialization of the means of production by state authorities and in favor of the right to abolish individual ownership of land. This marked an important victory for Marx and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political program of a major workers’ organization.

Beyond the International Working Men’s Association’s political program, the late 1860s and early 1870s were rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation was spreading ever wider, and to ask it to support their struggles. This period also saw the birth of some IWMA sections of Irish workers in England. Marx was worried about the division that violent nationalism had produced within the ranks of the proletariat, and, in a document that has come to be known as the  “Confidential Communication,”  he emphasized that “the English bourgeoisie ha[d] not only exploited the Irish misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen”; it had also proved able to divide the workers “into two hostile camps” (Marx 1985:120). In his view, “a nation that enslaves another forges its own chains” (ibid.), and the class struggle could not evade such a decisive issue. Another major theme in the volume, treated with particular attention in Engels’s writings for The Pall Mall Gazette, was opposition to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71.

Marx’s work in the International Working Men’s Association lasted from 1864 to 1872, and the brand-new Volume IV/18, Exzerpte und Notizen, Februar 1864 bis Oktober 1868, November 1869, März, April, Juni 1870, Dezember 1872 (Marx and Engels 2019; 1294 pages) provides the hitherto unknown part of the studies he made during those years. Marx’s research took place either close to the printing of Volume One of Capital or after 1867 when he was preparing Volumes Two and Three for publication. This MEGA² volume consists of five books of excerpts and four notebooks containing summaries of more than one hundred published works, reports of parliamentary debates, and journalistic articles. The most sizeable and theoretically important part of these materials involves Marx’s research on agriculture, his main interests here being ground rent, the natural sciences, agrarian conditions in various European countries and the United States, Russia, Japan, and India, and land tenure systems in precapitalist societies.

Marx read attentively Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1843), a work by the German scientist Justus von Liebig that he considered essential because it allowed him to modify his previous belief that the scientific discoveries of modern agriculture solved the problem of soil replenishment. From then on, he took an ever-keener interest in what we would today call “ecology,” particularly soil erosion and deforestation. Among the other books that greatly impressed Marx in this period, a special place should also be assigned to the Introduction to the Constitutive History of the German Mark, Farm, Village, Town and Public Authority (1854) by the political theorist and legal historian Georg Ludwig von Maurer. In a letter to Engels on March 25, 1868, he said that he had found Maurer’s books “extremely significant,” since they approached in an entirely different way “not only the primitive age but also the entire later development of the free imperial cities, of the estate owners possessing immunity, of public authority, and of the struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom” (Marx and Engels 1987:557). Marx further endorsed Maurer’s demonstration that private property in land belonged to a precise historical period and could not be regarded as a natural feature of human civilization.

Finally, Marx studied in depth three German works by Karl Fraas: Climate and the Vegetable World throughout the Ages, a History of Both (1847), A History of Agriculture (1852), and The Nature of Agriculture (1857). He found the first of these “very interesting,” especially appreciating the part in which Fraas demonstrated that “climate and flora change in historical times.” He described the author as “a Darwinist before Darwin,” who admitted that “even the species have been developing in historical times.” Marx was also struck by Fraas’s ecological considerations and his related concern that “cultivation—when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point)—leaves deserts behind it.” Marx could detect in all this “an unconscious socialist tendency” (Marx and Engels 1987:558–59).

Following the publication of the so-called Notebooks on Agriculture, it can be argued with more evidence than before that ecology might have played a much greater role in Marx’s thinking if he had had the energy to complete the last two volumes of Capital. Of course, Marx’s ecological critique was anticapitalist in its thrust and, beyond the hopes he placed in scientific progress, involved a questioning of the mode of production as a whole.

The scale of Marx’s studies in the natural sciences has become fully apparent since the publication of MEGA² volume IV/26, Exzerpte und Notizen zur Geologie, Mineralogie und Agrikulturchemie, März bis September 1878 (Marx 2011; 1104 pages). In the spring and summer of 1878, geology, mineralogy, and agrarian chemistry were more central to Marx’s studies than political economy. He compiled extracts from a number of books, including The Natural History of the Raw Materials of Commerce (1872) by John Yeats, The Book of Nature (1848) by the chemist Friedrich Schoedler, and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (1856), by the chemist and mineralogist James Johnston. Between June and early September, he was grappling with Joseph Jukes’s Student’s Manual of Geology (1857) (see Marx 2011:139–679), from which he copied down the largest number of extracts. The main focus of these is questions of scientific methodology, the stages of the development of geology as a discipline, and its usefulness for industrial and agricultural production.

Such insights awakened in Marx a need to develop his ideas regarding profit, with which he had last intensively occupied himself in the mid-1860s, when he wrote the draft of the part on “The Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground Rent” of Capital, Volume Three. Some of the summaries of natural-scientific texts had the aim of throwing greater light on the material he was studying. But other excerpts, more geared to theoretical aspects, were meant to be used in the completion of Volume Three. Engels later recalled that Marx “combed . . . prehistory, agronomy, Russian and American landownership, geology, etc., in particular to work out, to an extent . . . never previously attempted, the section on ground rent in Volume III of Capital” (Engels 1990b:341). These volumes of MEGA² are all the more important because they serve to discredit the myth, repeated in a number of biographies and studies on Marx, that after Capital he had satisfied his intellectual curiosity and completely given up new study and research.

Three books of MEGA² published in the last decade concern the late work by Engels. Volume I/30, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe Mai 1883 bis September 1886 (Engels 2011; 1154 pages) contains 43 texts that he wrote in the three years following Marx’s death. Of the 29 most important of these, 17 consist of journalistic pieces that appeared in some of the main papers of the European working-class press. For although in this period he was mainly absorbed in editing Marx’s incomplete manuscripts of Capital, Engels did not neglect to intervene on a series of burning political and theoretical issues. He also brought out a polemical work that took aim at the resurgence of idealism in German academic circles, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. A further 14 texts, published as an appendix in this MEGA² volume, are some of Engels’s own translations and a series of articles signed by other authors who benefited from his collaboration.

MEGA² has also published a new set of Engels’s correspondence. Volume III/30, Briefwechsel Oktober 1889 bis November 1890 (Engels 2013; 1512 pages), contains 406 surviving letters from the total of 500 or more that he wrote between October 1889 and November 1890. Moreover, the inclusion for the first time of letters from other correspondents makes it possible to appreciate more deeply the contribution that Engels made to the growth of workers’ parties in Germany, France, and Britain, on a range of theoretical and organizational issues. Some of the items in question concern the birth and many ongoing debates in the Second International, whose founding congress took place on 14 July 1889.

Finally, Volume I/32, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe März 1891 bis August 1895 (Engels 2010; 1590 pages), brings together the writings from the last four and a half years of Engels’s life. There are a number of journalistic pieces for the major socialist papers of the time, including Die Neue Zeit, Le Socialiste, and Critica Sociale, but also prefaces and afterwords to various reprintings of works by Marx and Engels, transcriptions of speeches, interviews and greetings to party congresses, accounts of conversations, documents that Engels drafted in collaboration with others, and a number of translations.

These three volumes will therefore prove highly useful for a deeper study of Engels’s late theoretical and political contributions. The numerous publications and international conferences scheduled for the bicentenary of his birth (1820–2020) will certainly not fail to probe these twelve years following Marx’s death, during which he devoted his energies to the diffusion of Marxism.

V. Another Marx?
What Marx emerges from the new historical-critical edition of his works? In certain respects, he differs from the thinker whom many followers and opponents presented over the years—not to speak of the stone statues to be found in public squares under the unfree regimes of Eastern Europe, which showed him pointing to the future with imperious certainty. On the other hand, it would be misleading to invoke—as do those who over-excitedly hail an “unknown Marx” after each new text appears for the first time—that recent research has turned upside down everything that was already known about him. What MEGA² provides, rather, is the textual basis for rethinking a different Marx: not different because the class struggle drops out of his thought (as some academics would wish, in a variation of the old refrain of “Marx the economist” against “Marx the politician” that vainly seeks to present him as a toothless classic); but radically different from the author who was dogmatically converted into the fons et origo of “actually existing socialism” supposedly fixated on class conflict alone.

The new advances achieved in Marxian studies suggest that the exegesis of Marx’s work is again, as at many other times in the past, likely to become more and more refined. For a long time, many Marxists foregrounded the writings of the young Marx—primarily the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology—while the Manifesto of the Communist Party remained his most widely read and quoted text. In those early writings, however, one finds many ideas that were superseded in his later work. For a long time, the difficulty of examining Marx’s research in the last two decades of his life hampered our knowledge of the important gains he achieved. But it is above all in Capital and its preliminary drafts, as well as in the researches of his final years, that we find the most precious reflections on the critique of bourgeois society. These represent the last, though not the definitive, conclusions at which Marx arrived. If examined critically in the light of changes in the world since his death, they may still prove useful for the task of theorizing, after the failures of the twentieth century, an alternative social-economic model to capitalism.

The MEGA² edition has given the lie to all the claims that Marx is a thinker about whom everything has already been written and said. There is still so much to learn from Marx. Today it is possible to do this by studying not only what he wrote in his published works but also the questions and doubts contained in his unfinished manuscripts.

References
1. Among the main recent works marking this resurgence of interest, see Musto 2020a.
2. Tomes II/4.1 and II/4.2 were published before the interruption of MEGA², while Tome II/4.3 came out in 2012. This three-part book brings to 67 the total number of MEGA² volumes published since 1975.  In the future, some of the further volumes will be published only in digital form.
3. Of particular relevance for the content of Marx’s library was the publication of MEGA² vol. IV/32, Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels (Marx and Engels 1999), which consists of an index of 1,450 books (in 2,100 total volumes)—two-thirds of those owned by Marx and Engels. This compilation indicates all the pages of each volume on which Marx and Engels left annotations and marginalia.
4. For a review of all 13 MEGA² volumes published from 1998—the year of the resumption of this edition—to 2007, see Musto 2007. In this review essay are discussed the 15 volumes—amounting to a total of 20,508 pages—published between 2008 and 2019.
5. In fact, Engels already used this expression in 1859, in his review of Marx’s book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but the article had no resonance and the term began to circulate only after the publication of his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.
6. A few years before the publication of the MEGA² vol. I/5, on the basis of the German edition of the Marx/Engels/Weydemeyer Die Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwürfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und Notizen zu I. Feuerbach und II Sankt Bruno, which appeared as a special issue (vol. 2003) of the Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, Terrell Carver and David Blank (2014) provided a new English-language edition of the so-called “Chapter on Feuerbach.” The two authors argued for maximum fidelity to the originals, furthermore criticizing the Marx-Engels Jahrbuch edition (now incorporated in MEGA² vol. I/5) on the grounds that, in line with earlier twenty-century editors, it arranged the discrete manuscripts as if they formed the draft of a a fully cohesive, if never completed, work.
7. A small part of this text has recently been translated into English as “Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1867–68 (Excerpt)” (Marx 2019).
8. Volume II/4.2 has recently been translated into English as Fred Moseley (ed.), Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (2015).
9. See Carl-Erich Vollgraf, “Einführung,” in MEGA² vol. II/4.3:421–74 (Marx 2012).
10. Some of them—like the addresses and resolutions presented to the congresses of the International—were instead included in the anthology Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Musto 2014), which appeared on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of this organization.
11. On these questions, see also the work by Kohei Saito (one of the editors of MEGA² vol. IV/18), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017).
12. Marx’s great interest in the natural sciences, for a long time almost completely unknown, is also evident in MEGA² vol. IV/31, Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte und Notizen, Mitte 1877 bis Anfang 1883 (Marx and Engels 1999), which presented the notes on organic and inorganic chemistry taken by Marx after 1877.
13. See Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2020b). An important milestone will be the publication of the volume edited by David Smith, Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts (forthcoming 2021).

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