 Well, you've had different sessions today on Marxism, on Marx. The question is, was Marx just a philosopher, or was he just an economist? The fact is he's neither one nor the other. He's a combination of the two. But was he just somebody who sat in a library reading books and writing books? Because that's one of the myths which are spread around by the bourgeois that more Marx did was right stuff. If you look at what he actually did, you realise this is a myth because he was a revolutionary and he was actively involved in revolutionary politics, not just in word, but indeed he intervened in the movement and he intervened in a revolution. Now the Germany that Marx was born into was not like Britain which had quite a highly developed industry, it was still a relatively backward country, fundamentally agricultural and peasant and feudalism still existed in many of the states that were to become Germany. So Britain and France had had their bourgeois revolutions. Germany had not had its bourgeois revolution when Marx was born and as he was growing up. In the 1830s you had the beginnings of a development of industry and within a few decades of course by the end of that century Germany appears as a major industrial power on the continent and of course then comes into contradiction with Britain. But very early on in 1842 when he was 24 years old he was editing the Reine Scheudzeitung in Cologne which was a radical journal that he produced and because of that he suffered expulsion, the paper was suppressed and he was forced to move to Paris. He was in the process of becoming a Marxist, Marx wasn't yet a Marxist at this stage, you could say he was always a Marxist in the sense that he supported the ideas of Karl Marx but those ideas changed and evolved on the basis of experience. He became a supporter of Feuerbach, his anti-religio stance towards Hegel, turning against the idealism of Hegel and turning in a materialist direction and through Feuerbach Marx was on a road towards becoming a communist. When he was in Paris after he had to leave Germany he had encounters with French socialists, discussions with class-conscious workers and he began to see society in class terms, he began to understand why those workers had those ideas. In that sense Marx didn't invent socialism, socialism is something that existed already as an idea. It wasn't a clearly worked out idea, there was a lot of utopianism in it, Marx obviously was to give it a scientific basis but he started to see society in class terms. He also began to read the English economists, you can see the different sources of Marx's ideas, the Hegelian philosophy which he stood on its head as he said or put it back on its feet, sorry. The English economists which were trying to understand how capitalism worked and of course the socialism which existed already in France as an idea. In 1844 he wrote the economic and philosophical manuscripts which are still within the limits of Feuerbach's ideas, it wasn't fully worked out scientific socialism. There's Engels who also comes from the same milieu, the young Hegelians, and he went to Manchester in 1842, saw the conditions of the work in class and wrote a book about it in which he also started drawing very similar conclusions to Karl Marx and published the book in 1844. And he drew the conclusion that the answer was the communist revolution. In September 1844 the two met in Paris, had weeks of discussions and came to the conclusions they had the same ideas and same understanding. In 1844 they wrote the Holy Family which is a critique of the ideas of the Hungry Gaelians but in 1845 they produced the German ideology which is a book which I would recommend you read if you haven't read it. Particularly the first part, it's a marvellous exposition of the basic ideas of Marxist understanding of history of society, etc. The funny thing is they wrote it, they never published it. It wasn't published until 1932. The reasons Marx actually says it at one point, the purpose of writing it was actually to clarify their own ideas which is what they did. They had their ideas clear and then they proceeded to intervene in the movement with those ideas to build an organisation to change society. That book is really the first clear exposition of historical materialism which you've discussed in other sessions. And in their critique of the idealism that existed at the time they refer to going from earth to heaven and not the other way round, i.e. basing yourself on concrete material world and not an abstract fantasy world in the minds of people. And they drew the conclusions that the way human beings, the way men produce their means of subsistence determines their ideas and their consciousness. This is a key idea of understanding how Marxists look at society. Why the development of the productive forces and how changes in the relations of property determines also how people think. And you see that how people's ideas change from feudalism to capitalism and it's based on the changing economic relations. He gives an outline of the development of society through the changes in the productive forces. He then breaks with Feuerbach as well because whereas Marxist thinking was clearly materialist it wasn't enough to be a materialist. He also took the dialectics of A Gaelian thought and brought them together and explained how actually the material world moves in a dialectical way. The laws of dialectics apply to the real material world. Hegel thought that they were the laws of thought whereas Marx explained thinking is a product of the material world and therefore the dialectical thinking is a result of the way the actual real world moves, how matter moves itself. They began to intervene in the movement. They turned to a German workers' organisation called the League of the Just which was an organisation of German workers which had a public front called the German Workers' Educational Association which was learning from the Chartist movement the experience of the English workers and how this could be used in Germany. But they worked to convince the League of the Just of the scientific communism that Marx and Engels had begun to develop as opposed to the utopianism which dominated that organisation and they successfully won over the League of the Just which changed its name to the Communist League at the Congress in 1847 and then the aims of that organisation became quote, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat and a society without classes and without private property. That remains our programme by the way. They established the programme then and has remained ever since. At the second Congress they had in that year in November, that's where the Communist League asked Marx and Engels to write the basic principles of the Communist League which was to become the Communist Manifesto which was produced by the end of January 1848 and was sent to be printed just before the outbreak of revolution across the whole of the European continent. There was a revolt in the outbreak of revolution in Paris in February 1848 to overthrow the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe but the movement in Paris sparked off a movement across a large part of Europe. In February you had the revolution in Paris. In March you had popular uprising in Vienna against the Habsburg monarchy and in the same month in Berlin you had the movement against the Prussian Frederick William IV who was forced under pressure of the mass movement to grant political freedoms. What did Marx do? Immediately moved to Paris where he had been expelled previously. He formed a new central committee under the authority of the Communist League given him that authority to do that and from Paris he started to send hundreds of Communist League members into Germany to intervene in the revolution initially clandestinely because of the conditions but once the revolution had broken out and political freedoms were established more and more openly and he drafted the demands of the Communist Party of Germany which I haven't got time to read here but it's a program that he developed to intervene in that revolution. Marx and Engels then themselves returned to Germany to Cologne. Here we see Marx the revolutionary militant not the guy in the library writing books but he publishes the Neu, Neu-e-Rheine-E-Shadzaitung calling for the unification of Germany and under the demands and supporting the most advanced wing of the revolution of 1848. What became clear in 1848 however for Marx was that in the process of the revolution unfolding the contradictions became apparent between the workers and the bourgeois. The classic position would have been well the bourgeois are the class which will lead the revolution of 1848 in carrying out the bourgeois revolution in Germany and establishing the basis for a modern development of Germany and the position that he had was that the Communist would support that as a movement forward in history in Germany but it became clear also in France it became clear there was a contradiction already between the working class and the bourgeoisie and this actually pushed the German bourgeois into a reactionary position instead of standing at the head of the revolution because they feared the consequences of the movement of the working class they retreated and compromised. From the pages of the Neu-e-Rheine-E-Shadzaitung Marx lambasted the German bourgeois and he supported the French insurgents. He was accused under press laws he was arguing for a revolutionary government through popular insurrection and he defended himself brilliantly in the trial. Again Marx was put on trial wasn't just sitting in a library writing a book. The jury declared them innocent of course because he brilliantly denounced the use of laws which had been surpassed by the revolution itself. That revolution of course failed to achieve its ends and later in the year you have martial law Marx's paper is banned Engels was participating in the committee of public safety actually took part in the fighting he was actively involved he was part of the Barden army took part in attacking Prussian troops but faced with the overwhelming strength of the state had to flee in this case across the black forest and off to Switzerland martial law was imposed in Berlin by the end of the year the German bourgeois was not prepared to lead the revolution and go all the way in overthrowing the feudal aristocracy only for offered passive resistance and Marx there he said we need a people's militia we need the workers to have control of the arms to avoid this betrayal by the bourgeois and you see how Marx also this old Marx was rigid Marx changed his position on the basis of events his analysis flowed from events if you read the communist manifesto he says at one point when he's referring to Germany him and Engels that in Germany the communists fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against the absolute monarchy the feudal squierarchy and the petty bourgeoisie that's when you support the bourgeois Engels in the principles of communism which he drafted as a preparatory text for the communist manifesto he says since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power it follows that it is in the interests of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order to sooner to be able to overthrow it i.e critical support this is what it means for the bourgeois in overthrowing feudalism and establishing the conditions of capitalist development within which the working class then begins the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie now 1848-49 was an international revolution you had movements in some countries in directions in others to one degree or another you had movements in Denmark, in Sicily, Sardinia Piedmont in France, in Prussia Saxony in Hungary and Austria there were also movements in Ukraine and Poland in Ireland even Sweden and Switzerland saw some conflicts but in reality they were an anticipation of future events later on you would have the big movement that led to the unification of Italy in 1860 with Garibaldi and his revolutionary approach let's say to the unification of Italy that's a separate subject and eventually of course it was to lead to the Paris commune in France now what happened in 1848 as I said impacted on Marx's view of the German bourgeoisie itself he changed it he changed his position in essence anticipating Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution because Trotsky again when they said he invented he didn't really invent from a new but he based himself on Marx i.e. there are situations where a national bourgeoisie has become reactionary even before capitalism has been established even before let's say its own revolution is being called by history and they refuse to carry it out and he wrote in 1848 he talks about the German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly timidly and slowly at that moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism it saw menacingly pitted against itself the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas are related to those of the proletariat I haven't got time to quote the whole thing it's called the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution published in the Neu Rheineische Zeitung December 1848 here Marx is drawing conclusions about the nature of the bourgeoisie from that concrete experience as of 1849 therefore Marx begins to distance himself from the bourgeois democrats and move towards the building of an independent workers organisation he emphasises that need back in London in exile after being expelled from France again where he had fled to from Germany and Engels arrived in London via Switzerland back to the semi-clandestine work of rebuilding the Communist League this was now a period of re-evaluation Marx and Engels were elected to the Central Committee of the Communist League in London and they wrote for instance in 1850 an address of the Central Committee to the Communist League and he analyses what happened in that revolution what he emphasises is that the communists of the Communist League when they went back to Germany because of the of the move around the Democratic Party of the bourgeoisie the communists tended to be absorbed into that and dissolved in effect themselves as a group and Marx stressed the need that we cannot, this situation cannot be allowed to continue the independence of the workers must be restored and that they actually sent to the Central Committee to try and re-establish the Communist League and again to say that these people were just bookworms one guy called Joseph Moll he went back he was involved in the fighting and he was killed in the fighting in the battle of the river Morg he stresses it's written by Marx and Engels the address of the Central Committee the treacherous role of the German liberal bourgeoisie and interestingly this is where in 1850 he said, I'll read the last paragraph of the conclusions of this although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realisation of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development this time they can at least be certain he's talking about perspectives that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated his perspective was in France where the bourgeoisie is in power and the working class is more advanced and more developed the workers can come to power then talking about the German workers but they themselves must contribute most to their final victory by informing themselves of their own class interests by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organised party of the proletariat this is in 1850 already in Germany their battle crime must be and this is for our Stalinist friends the permanent revolution Marx invented the term and then Trotsky took it up as a developed theory Marx and Engels had entered 1848 seeing it as the beginning of the end of bourgeois society they then had to draw conclusions about the experience they had been through Engels many years later said this about that period history has proved us and all who thought like us wrong there is a Marxist who can actually analyse his own past and actually admit they were wrong there are some people around who can never do that it has made it clear that the state of economic development on the continent at that time was not by a long way ripe for the removal of capitalist production it has proved this by the economic revolution which since 1848 has seized the whole of the continent i.e. instead of having imminent collapse of capitalism you had a renewed period of massive development of the productive forces and this comes back to the idea of Marx that no system can be removed so long as it is developing the productive forces and they drew conclusions on that and I have to skip but the 1850s was a period of isolation from Germany material poverty for Marx often having to go to the pawn shop to get money just to survive to feed the family Marx suffered liver disease he lost several children in that decade he was helped by Engels who was now in Manchester working in the family cotton business and they were in regular correspondence in this period but it was a period of general reaction combined with a rapid development of the economy with that came a strengthening of the working class of course the strengthening of the working class was to lead to a revival of the labour movement and the working class movement in the 1860s and 70s as I said you had the unification of Italy in 1860 you had the Polish insurrection of 1863 against Russian rule and it's in the context of this revived movement of the working class that you have the next big concrete work of Marx which is the working towards the foundation of an international organisation of the working class Marx understood you needed an independent workers organisation but you also needed an international workers organisation and they proceeded as I said to build the first international it was a period of different developments such as the economic boom also led to the development of reformist ideas of opportunist ideas a tendency of the British trade unions to see politics only in terms of the liberal party many British trade union leaders were gone to become labour MPs these were the conditions in which they were working but at the same time you had in Britain for instance the rise of the trades councils workers organisations at local level strikes were taking place and often the bosses in one country would bring in black legs from another country to replace the striking workers and one of the aspects of the first international was to organise to stop that intervening in solidarity with workers of other countries blocking the black legs from being sent etc in France there was a temporary weakening of the French working class after the defeat of the revolution in these conditions you had the idea that it wasn't socialism, it wasn't class struggle it wasn't the overthrow of capitalism but we could do have mutual aid cooperatives ie there was a move away from the idea of revolution and in these conditions you had the ideas of prudonism which are basically a form of reformism and you had all kinds of alien ideas within the movement which is a classic when there's a defeat of the working class a development of capitalism for a period there's a moving away in the consciousness from revolution to the idea of reformism until of course the system goes into crisis again as Rob explained in the talk on economics but in France although you had that political set up you had the development of the economy and a strengthening of the working class the same in Germany the German working class was beginning to develop and by 1853 you had the foundation of the general union of German workers under La Salle and also the league of German workers unions led by Babel and Lipnacht who were supporters of Marx these were later to go on to form the social democratic party which was the real first genuine mass independent working class organization in Germany similar developments we had in Belgium in Austria, in Italy, in Spain, in Switzerland there was an international revival of the working class that was the basis for the formation of this new international organization which became known as the first international in 1864 September there was a meeting in London Marx was present a resolution was voted by that conference to work towards the building of an international organization of the working class with its centre in London and with a committee of 21 members and the last one on the list is a certain Dr Marx who signed that resolution Marx convinced that gathering to adopt his rules for the organization but we have to understand not all those who were members of the first international were communists this was the early days there were even liberal bourgeois elements within the first international trying to use the organization to promote their agenda in some sections it was actually bourgeois elements in Switzerland there was a coolery he was the actual bourgeois who adhered British trade unionists didn't accept Marx's ideas they saw it more as promoting their own narrow trade union interests such as during strikes in France the Proudhonists led most of the sections of the first international but once the organization was formed it was gradually moving in the direction of communism on the basis of the experience and here something that the sects of today could learn something from Karl Marx he didn't set up the first international as a pure organization he was prepared to work with different tendencies within that organization and he worked it up gradually over a period of time to a communist understanding and if you look at the history of the development of the first international the first conference conference not congress was held in London in 1865 but apart from Britain the labour movement was still in its early stages embryonic stages that conference decided for a congress with delegates from organizations who could vote in the congress what was the base of this first international Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria to begin with there were the beginnings of initial groups in Italy, Spain and also in the United States in Chicago a congress of workers expressed interest in this new organization Marx used it as a forum to combat to educate and to combat alien ideologies within the labour movement it was made up of local sections it was an interesting organization it wasn't the French section or the Swiss section but it was the Paris branch, the Bordeaux branch the Sey branch, the London branch etc it was different branches all belonging to one international organization you had tendencies at the time such as Blanqui who believed in conspiratorial and insurrectionist methods not connected to the master of the working class or you had prudonism which were basically pacifist anarchists both trends opposed political struggle by the working class as an independent class in itself and it was an expression of certain layers of the working class upper layers who saw themselves as rising within society and also reflected the lack of industrial development in many of these countries in 1866 there was the congress in Geneva and some within that organization proposed that it become a cooperative movement rather than a political expression of the working class but Marx worked within it and if you look at each congress up until the end of the first international you will see the organization moving step by step in the direction of Marx's ideas and here we see something in terms of the method I'll have to skip because of time here the method of Marx was to build up the organization to use every experience of the class struggle to draw lessons and help the workers participating in that movement to move to a higher stage Engels refers to this many years later where he said you can't force down the throats of American workers ready made ideas you've got to build it up and you've got to basically travel with the working class and use the experience to take them one step further and that's what they did they eventually moved in the direction where the for instance in the congress the second congress of 1867 they a resolution for the collective ownership of the means of transport for instance was passed moving more and more in the direction of a socialist program the international was involved in solidarity activities when there was strikes of workers in one country the workers of another country would come out in solidarity we also see the method you see here he was not willing to impose on the mass of workers a system which was not an obvious deduction from their experience in the daily struggle in addition he wished to avoid forcing the pace of proletarian movement he understood the working class moves at its own pace and it draws lessons from its experience you can't artificially impose an acceleration on that which is what some sectarians think they think that their role is to go to the working class and raise their consciousness just by going and talking to them and telling them they need socialist revolution Marx understood the workers can reach that conclusion from their experience the role of the commons obviously is to actively participate and help in that process always being one step ahead of the class and helping it to move on and he understood that the natural extension of the economic and industrial struggle would lead to political conclusions and the struggle to achieve their ends within capitalism would lead the workers to understand that capitalism itself is the problem at a certain point the conclusions would be drawn that the system has to be overthrown and not just in one country but on an international scale now when they had the conference in Lausanne a resolution which was passed on the struggle for political freedoms actually led to the arrests of the members in France which led to the dissolution of the Paris section of the international and they were forced to go underground there's a list of other struggles they were involved in the third congress in 1868 they dealt with the question of war and that's where they discussed the question of how do we avoid a war between peoples i workers killing workers we have to transform it into a civil war into a class war and this is the basis of the thinking actually which later on would become the thinking of the second international when it developed what were the membership of this organisation well in Britain you had affiliated trade unions which had a lot of members obviously Belgium they calculated 64,000 members in Britain there were 230 branches with 95,000 members Austria 13,000 it's not easy to calculate in terms of active members because there were affiliated organisations which brought their membership obviously into it and you can see it had quite a wide influence within the international labour movement the congress of 1869 is what finally put an end to the influence of the bourgeois liberals within the international and established it as a communist organisation with clear principles but that's when of course you have the internal problems with the anarchists and Bakunin which I haven't got time to go into here because of the details there are plenty of articles on our website marxist.com we deal with this but again there was the Paris Commune which was the key moment in Marx's life because he analysed it the international intervened in the Paris Commune there were members of the first international on the committee that ran the Paris Commune but they were a minority and within those elements the Marxists let's say were a very small minority they were the other tendencies dominated but again Marx drew conclusions from the Paris Commune he didn't just keep repeating the same ideas he developed in 1845 for instance on the question of the state he very clearly comes out with the idea that the bourgeois state cannot simply be taken over by the working class it's an instrument of bourgeois rule and therefore it has to be smashed and replaced with something else i.e. a worker state that comes from the experience of the Paris Commune and you see that throughout his life he intervenes in the movement but also draws lessons out of that movement for the working class and brings the level of understanding to a higher stage but it's in the aftermath of the Paris Commune the defeat of the Paris Commune that you have the anarchist intrigues in the first international now anarchists today go around claiming that they are far more democratic because they don't believe in structures or organisations I'd invite comrades to read Bakunin's thinking of how to change society he thought that in a country like France it was enough to have 100 citizens 100 well-organised cadres 100 in Italy, 100 in Germany who responded to Citizen B you know who Citizen B was it was him now that's not exactly my view of a widely participated mass organisation with democracy and freedom of discussion it was a very tight organisation but the way they presented it was that they started attacking Marx saying that he was dictatorial or the rest of it in reality what it meant was Marx was acting on the decisions of the congresses of the international Bakunin was trying to split away a group of his own but the Paris Commune was the first attempt at a worker state in history but it was isolated there was no coordination there was no working class party leading it and Marx criticised them for a few fundamental mistakes they should have attacked Versailles directly and smashed the armed forces of the French state and there was no taking over of the national bank which they could have done there was a lot of extreme naivety within the Commune itself Marx, the preface to the Communist Manifesto of 1872 read it and you see the conclusions he draws from that terrible defeat the defeat of the Paris Commune again prepared new conditions for a further expansion of capitalism across Europe and with it came another period of class collaboration the British trade unions in particular but in Britain a side effect of the Paris Commune i.e. the British bourgeois fearing it passed the 1871 act which legalised the trade unions i.e. they understood that the working class now had become so strong that you couldn't simply crush it you had to allow it to organise itself and represent itself and then use those nice liberal trade union leaders to try and control the class and this also appeared therefore of opportunism of mediation of compromise and reformist ideas were strong within the movement and adaptation let's say of the working class leaders to bourgeois society anarchism not by chance Italy and Spain but that's the nature of that society I've got that in that period I've got to fast forward unfortunately Marx was faced with a situation now of ultra left anarchists on one side and reformist elements on the other and you see how history tends to repeat itself we have a similar situation today we have the reformists who dominate the labour movement and then you have the ultra left groups and none of them can actually reach a proper balanced scientific approach which is what Marxism is now in these conditions Marx developed what he says in a letter he writes to Engels just how do you deal with these liberals these trade unionists these reformists etc now we have groups who think and you see them today you'll find them on the fringes of the movement who think that to be a revolutionary Marxist you've got to go and insult Labour leaders you've got to go and insult trade unionists and denounce them for their reformism and declare revolution Marx has said his method was mild in manner, bold in content ie friendly approach but you don't give up on the fundamentals and on the content and it's a far more convincing method now it's a little detail in one of the letters that he writes but we stand on that method when you intervene in the labour movement this is the way Marxist should approach other tendencies in how we criticize reformists and other tendencies in the movement now what did they accuse Marx of the anarchists, authoritarianism as I said all he was doing was applying the resolutions of the congresses in 1872 the conflict climaxed the Hague Congress and there was the final split between the Marxists and the anarchists and then eventually because of the stifling atmosphere in Europe in London all the emigres from the defeated Paris commune there was a demoralised mood in that milieu Marx initially thought let's move the centre of the international away from this stifling environment and they shifted the centre to New York in the hope of connecting with the rising fresh American working class away from this stifling atmosphere but eventually in 1876 in Philadelphia the first international was disbanded now this was one of the major works of Marx from the early 1860s to the mid 1870s he dedicated a lot of attention to the building of the first international the dissolution came with a certain hindsight because he could see the way the organised movement was moving the danger of it falling actually into a sectarian stance I wish the leaders of the fourth international had the same hindsight instead of allowing the fourth international to become synonymous to absolute crazy sectarianism they had dissolved it and kept at least the clean banner that Trotsky had established for future generations the first international didn't suffer that because it was dissolved but the ideas and the methods continued to live and Marx continued to build on the ideas and to analyse the first international really was the struggle of Marx to spread the ideas of scientific socialism internationally and it laid the basis for what was to become the second international and it was born formally speaking at least on the basis of the ideas of Marxism whereas the first international had different tendencies and was eventually won to communism by Marx the second started off like that Marx's method was to work up the international towards scientific socialism step by step and eventually that's what he did now between 1872 and 1889 of course Marx died in 1883 but they maintained correspondence with socialists around Europe the fact that the organisation was formally dissolved didn't end the connections between Marx and socialist communists Marxists on the continent the main task of Marx in this period was to develop and clarify the ideas now somebody thinks that that is separate from his revolutionary activity that's wrong a capitalon took years to write but what Marx was doing was providing the worker activists with a scientific understanding of the society they were fighting it wasn't just enough to be instinctively against class exploitation class injustice etc it was necessary to understand the system that you are in and understand when that system and how that system goes into crisis and what that produces in terms of the movement of the working class and class consciousness Marx dedicated years the fact that he couldn't finish capital is because he was involved in so many different activities running the first international for example writing the resolutions or I've read a book which is based on all the eyewitnesses of Marx and Engels some of them very hostile some of them very friendly depends on who it was but you read scenarios like down the pub in east London somewhere or in central London where he lived meeting with Russians Germans, Italians for a drink and discussing the ideas and discussing the work in their country and I thought how many times have we done that down the pub same thing talking about building the organisation this was his regular activity Engels when he moved to London had a bit more money he had a house well stocked with good wine Sundays were dedicated was an open day you could turn up at Engels house if you were a comrade it was great I wish we had a comrade like that and he would get one of his excellent bottles of wine and he would spend the day talking with Bernstein or Kalski or whoever it was at the time and discussing what was happening in these countries and how to build the organisation this is what they were involved in this took up a lot of time so capital in fact was finished by Engels on the basis of taking the manuscripts that Marx had left but Marx did see the beginnings of a new international organisation for instance the founding of the German Socialist Workers Party of Germany in 1875 that's where he wrote that's where the critique of the Gotha programme comes because he was very critical of the way it was organised because of the compromise with the ideas of La Salle there was always a struggle for the ideas on the part of Marx when that party was founded Marx was fuming when he read the programme he said his comrades the Marxists had compromise with the La Salleans he was prepared at one point to come out openly against them and denounce them but then he drew the conclusion which is interesting if you think of our tendency in the way we approach organisations of the working class he felt although it was defective and had some wrong ideas the emergence of a mass Workers Party in Germany would be seen very positively by the working class and in spite of its shortcomings the Marxists could work within that milieu basing himself on his previous experience with the First International and working it up towards being a Marxist party and after move on Engels complains about the theoretical decline of the party because of that but that's why he wrote anti-doring for example to combat those alien ideas and also the dialectics of nature theory for Marx and Engels were not abstract concepts in and of themselves they were tools for strengthening the organisation of the working class and therefore those books like anti-doring like the dialectics of nature were to arm the cadres of the Marxist movement as they built up an organisation in France there was a movement towards an organisation first in 1879 a socialist workers congress was organised Engels actually adapted from anti-doring and wrote the shorter text of socialism utopian and scientific in 1880 to help Lafargue in France in building the new the new party so you see in 1880 Marx and Engels helped to draft the party programme in France in 1881 the parti ouvrier was formed the first real say Marxist workers organisation in France so you see Marx did see the beginnings of a new international organisation which he'd worked for in the first and we see the creation of sections of new organisations and I'll give the list in Denmark in 1878 in Belgium 1885 Marx was dead by then of course he went on to develop into what was to become the socialist international and Marx saw the beginnings of that in 1880 the German social democratic party supported the call of its Belgian comrades to call an international socialist congress in 1881 so you have the beginnings of that movement towards the second international which Marx was able to see before he died this is the work of Karl Marx theory and action he and Engels actively participated in the 1848 revolution Engels was involved in the fighting they were put on trial because of that they had to flee to exile they were expelled from one country after another eventually settling in Britain now there is a monument in London to Karl Marx I personally don't like it very much I prefer the original little tombstone that was there because that's how Marx was actually buried but it's not important, that's a question of taste some of you might like it the real monument to Karl Marx is not in Highgate Cemetery the real monument are his collected works, his theory his ideas and the people who today actively intervene and work to build the Marxist movement to complete the tasks that Marx gave himself right from the early days of the communist league which is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie bringing to power of the working class and an end to class society which remains our programme which many have broken with over the years of course the various reformist trends but you see Marx intervened he then drew lessons from the experience that he was involved in like in 1848 like the Paris Commune and so on he analysed the system as a whole he analysed events and he built an organisation to intervene he didn't limit himself just to writing books he built not just one organisation he built an international organisation across many countries because he understood that socialism is an international system but always with attention to theory he understood that an organisation without theory is nothing but at the same time theory without an organisation is nothing one goes with the other but I tell you of the two you don't have a clear theory you will not build an efficient organisation an effective organisation to intervene into the working class so 200 years later after his birth of course Marx stands as our model we defend his fundamental ideas we defend what aims he gave himself and the movement which is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a world socialist order that is the fundamental idea that he expressed and we defend it 200 years later in spite of all the attempts to claim that his ideas are not valid the number of times I'll end on this I've read in the Economist on this question Marx was right as if it was the only one except I've read it more than once and each time it was something different so the honesty would be that he must have been right at least two or three times and the general line is well he had an interesting analysis of capitalism but it was conclusions were wrong you see because he said it would lead inevitably to socialism which shows a complete lack of understanding of Marx's approach to this question Marx's ideas remain the best explanation of history the scientific explanation of history his method allows us to understand the world we live in today and how capitalism works nobody as far as I'm concerned or Marxists are concerned have come up with a better explanation of how this system works why it enters into crisis the bourgeois economists are always declaring the death of Marx or death of Marxism see I've known people that have died and they die once and I don't have to keep repeating that they're dead it's abundantly clear that they're dead my father died 40 years ago I don't have to say he's dead again he died once and that's it why do they keep declaring the death of Marxism well because it's alive and they would like to see it dead but it won't die and the reason it won't die is because it corresponds to the real events that are taking place today it corresponds to the way capitalism works today and that's what gives it life because it's the truth now somebody will say you're being very rigid, very dogmatic I invite anybody to explain a better way of understanding the society we live in I haven't found one yet because Marx explains the real processes and we have to base ourselves on that and build a tendency to change society Marx he said, philosophers so far have interpreted the world which is very nice I like history too I like all kinds of stuff cultural stuff but it's not enough just to like history or to study it or to read it for pleasure which is a nice thing to do I love it but as a Marxist it has the purpose i.e. you study it to apply it to change society and that's what Marx said the task is to change it and that's what we're here for