The Daily Worker Newspaper, October 23, 1926, Page 8

KARL Personal Recollections . By PAUL LAFARGUE, mW For years I accompanied him on his walks to Hampstead Heath. On these walks thru the meadows I received my economic education from him. Without himself noticing it, he grad- ually developed before me the con- tents of the whole first volume of “Capital” to the extent to which he was then writing it. After returning home I always wrote down what I had heard as well as I could. At first it was very hard for me to follow Marx’ profound and imvolved train of thought. Unfortunately, I lost these precious notes; after the Commune, the police plundered and savaged my papers in and Bordeaux. I re- gret especially the loss of the no I took on that evening when, with that fullness of proof and reflection which were only his, Marx had un- folded to me his ingenious theory of thé"development of human society. It was as if a veil were torn from be- fore my eyes; for the first time I clearly felt the logic of world history and could trace back to its material causes the development of society axl of ideas which, in appearance, were such contradictory phenomena., I ‘was as if dazzled by it, and for years this impression remained with me. It had the same effect upon the Madrid socialists when, with my slenter means, I developed this theory for them, the grandest of the Marxian theories and undoubtedly one of the grandest that the human niind has ever conceived. Marx’ brain was armed with an in- credible mass of historic and scien- tifie facts and philosophic theories, MARX bled a warship lying in the harbor under full steam; he was always ready to strike out in every direction of thought. Certainly “Capital” re- veals to us a spirit of astonishing force and immense knowledge; but for me, as for all who knew Marx closely, neither “Capital” nor any of tude of his genius and of his knowl- edge. He stood far above his works. I have worked with Marx; I was only the writer to whom he dictated; but then I had the opportunity to ob- serve his manner of thinking and writing. His work was alternately easy and hard for him; easy since the facts and reflections relating to. the occasional theme crowded in profu- sion before his mind’s eye at the first stroke; but his profusion made the complete presentation of his ideas dif- ficult and lengthy. Vico said, “the thing is only a body for god who knows everything; for man, who recognizes only externali- ties, it is merely a surface.” Marx grasped things after the manner of Vico’s god. He did not merely see the surface, he penetrated to the thing within, he investigated all ele- ments in their actions amd interac- tions; he isolated every one of these parts and traced the history of its development. Then he proceeded from the thing to its environment and observed the effect of the latter upon the former and vice versa; he went back to the origin of the object, to the transformations, evolutions, and evolutions which it had gone thru and finally worked his way thru to its remotest effects. He did not view a thing in itself, isolated from its environment, but a whole complicated A barricade fight in the Revolution of 1848, in Germany, and he was thoroly able to make use of all this knowledge and/all these observations which he had gained by long intellectual labor. One could ask him about any subject at any time and he woud receive the most extensive answers that Could be de- sired and it was always accompanied by philosophical reflections of gen- era) significance. His brain resem- world’ in the process of constant ;movement; and Marx wanted to ren- der this world back again in its so, manifold apd continually flyctuating actions and reactions, The writers of the school of Flaubert and Concourt complain of how difficult it is to ren- his writings show the whole magni- |. A DOZEN IN BRIEF, THE PASSAIC STRIKE— Act on the suggestion above. VARIETY—By all means see it. ACROSS THE PACIFIC—By all means avoid it! THE STRONG MAN—Good comedy by Harry Langdon (Senate.) MEN QF STEEL—Horseradish. THE OAD TO MANDALAY — More horseradish. nal Ne NOSTRUM:—War horserad- ALOMA OF THE eee SEAS— Gilda Gray gouias .| THE AMATUER GENTLEMAN - Not so bad. TIN GODS—Rene Adoree saves it. LA BOHEME—Worth-while. UP IN MABEL’S ROOM— Clever Marie Prevost. Note: Only Chicago theaters show- ing a program for one week are listed. Pictures of current week ¢ Monday. “THE PASSAIC STRIKE.” T last here’s a chance to see the “Passaic. Strike” , for ourselves> For all who have read of this great labor struggle here is a glorious op- portunity. The film will be shown at the Ashland Blvd. Auditorium on Fri- day evening, October 29 at two per- formances at 7 and 9 p. m, Here we can see 16,000 workers in a great strike. The mills, the par- ades, the fights, the police are all woven into a story to thrill every worker right down to his shoes, And here is the beauty of this film: work- ers act in it, they made it and now they themselves present it—to con- tinue the good fight! Turn out to one of the performances of this splendid treat if you have to g0 without supper for days. Once be- A PEEK EACH WEEK AT MOTION PICTURES Ricardo Cortez, in, the Eagle of the Sea, now being shown at the Oriental. + a el fore we asked our movie readers to take every child of their own and their neighbors, Make them fighters of tomorrow by showing to them the great labor deeds of today. Go with the whole family. Help mother with the dishes so she can see it also. Remember the date and place: Fri- day, October 29, at the Ashland Blvd. Auditorium at 7 and 9 p. m. eset which Vico speaks, the impression which they receive; their literary bade s play compared to that of it required an extraordinary rset of thought to grasp reality and a no less unusual art to render back what he saw and claimed to have seen, He was never satisfied with his work, constantly changing it and always finding that the presentation remained behind the conception. A psychological study by Balzac, “The Hidden Masterpiece,” which Zola mis- erably plagiarized, made a deep im- pression upon him because it de- seribed, in part, emotions’ which he himself had felt:.a gifted painter is’ so tortured by the urge to render things exactly as they are reflected in his ‘brain that he constantly pol- ishes and retouches his pieture until finally he had created nothing but a formless mass of paint which, in his biased eyes, is, nevertheless, the most perfect — of reality, Marx un niited in himself the two char- acteristics of a gifted thinker.. He was incomparable in dissecting a sub- ject into its component parts and was a master in restoring the dis- rsected subject in all its details and diverse forms of development and in discovering théir inner relationships. His proof did not allow of absérac- tions, contrary to the charges of eco- nomists incapable of thinking; he did not apply the method of geometri- ing them, entirely disregard reality in drawing their conclusions. One does not find a single definition in “Capital,” not a single formula, but a series of analyses of the finest pre- cision, which reveal the most fleeting nuances and the most imperceptible degrees of difference. He begins with a statement of the obvious fact that the wealth of those societies in which .jtte ‘capitalist method of production predominates appears as a monstrous collection of commodities: the com- modity, something corierete, no math- ematical abstraction, is therefore the a the unit of capitalist wealth Marx’then holds fast to the commod. ity, turns and twists it in every direc- tion and inside out, enticing from it one secret after another of which the official economists had not even the least suspicion, but which are never- theless more numerous and more pro- der back exactly what one sees, and |found than the mysteries of the” cath- yet that which they want to renderjolic church. After he has investi: back again is only the surface of {gated the eommodity from every an- cians who, after having taken their i definitions from the world m oe gle, he examines it in relation to its own kind, in exchange; then he goes over to its production and to the ite torical prerequisites of its production, He examines the forms in which the commodity appears and. shows how it passes from one form to another, how | one necessarily gives rise to the other, The logical development of phenom ena is portrayed with such consum- mate art that one could believe Marx: had invented it, and yet it has its ort gin in reality and is a rendition of the actual dialectics of the commodity. Marx always worked with the ex- tremest conscientiotsness. He gave neither fact nor number which could not be supported by the best authori- ties. He was not satisfied with coni- municating second-hand material; he always went to the source itself, no matter how laborious) that might be; for the sake of a minor fact, he was capable of hurrying to the British Museum in order to assure himself from the books there, Nor were his crit‘cs ever in a position to catch him in any carelessness or to show him that he was supporting his proof by facts which could not bear a strong test. His habit of going to the sources had brought him to the point of reading the least known writers who were cited by him alone. “Cap- ital” contains such a mass of quota- tions from unknown writers that one might think it was done for the pur- pose of displaying his extensive read- Marx thought otherwise about » it: “I exercise historic justice; I give every one his due,” he said, He con- sidered it his duty to name the writer, no matter how insignificant and un- known the latter might be, who had first expressed an idea or by whom it had been given its most exact expres- sion, His literary conscience was equally as severe as his scientific one. He would never make use of a fact of which he was not quite certain; he never allowed himself to talk about a subject before he had thoroly studied it. He published nothing that he had not repeatedly reworked and for which he had not found a correspond- ing form, He could not bear the thought of appearing before the public with an incomplete work; it would havo beon torture for him to show hig manus¢ripts before he had put the last touch to’them. This focling was so strong in him that one day he told me he would rather burn his than leave them behind unfinished, ‘ o/