By the same author

TIIE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE 20TH CENTURY A FAITH TO LIVE BY

CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION TEXTBOOK OF MARXIST PIHLOSOPHY (ED.) DOUGLAS FALLACIES THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOVIET STATE THE CASE AGAINST PACIFISM MARXISM AND MODERN IDEALISM AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY MARXISM AND THE IRRATIONALISTS MARXISM AND THE OPEN MIND RELIGIONS OF THE WOULD SCIENCE, FAITH AND SCEPTICISM ANTHROPOLOGY

SOCIALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY MAN AND EVOLUTION

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

by

JOHN LEWIS

INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Copyright © John Lewis 1965 First U.S. Edition, International Publishers Co., Inc., 1963

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Pan I

1. The Marxian Era	9
2. The Formative Years	17
3. The Foundations of Marx’s Thought	31
4. Marx in Paris	42
5. The Paris Manuscripts	53
6. The Young Hegelians	64
7. The German Ideology	74
Part II
8. Marx in Brussels	85
9. The Communist Manifesto	99
10. The Year of Revolutions	hi
11. Exile in London	124
12. Marx as Historian	136
13. Marx in the Sixties	148
14. The International	157
Part III
15. Marx as Economist	175
16. Capital	186
17. The Nature of Capitalist Crisis	196
18. Marx and German Social Democracy	206
19. Marx and British Labour	221

6 THE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

20. Marx and America 235

21. Marx and Russia 248

22. Last Years 261

Chronology of Events in the Life of Karl Marx together with his Books, Articles and other Writings 275

Index 283

Note; References to Marx’s Capital are to the International Publishers edition of Volume 1, edited by Dona Torr (1947), and to the Kerr edition of Volumes II and III.

PART I

The doctrine that man is the highest being for man; i.e. the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, despised and rejected being.

Marx

After labour has become not merely a means to live but is in itself the first necessity of living, after the powers of production have also increased and all the springs of wealth arc gushing freely together with the all-round development of the individual, then and only then can society inscribe on its banners: “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.”

Marx

I call revolution the conversion of all hearts and the raising of all hands in behalf of the honour of the free man.

Marx

I

THE MARXIAN ERA

“If a name had to be found for the age in which we live, we might safely call it the Marxian era”, is the judgment of one of the most severe of present-day critics of Marxism.1 The day when Marxism could be treated as of little account is past— if only because, judged by the number of those who regard themselves as his followers and by their political power, Marx must be regarded as an influential figure in human history. And his influence continues, so that it becomes of increasing importance to understand the nature of his ideas and the manner in which they are interpreted.

It is one of the peculiar ironies of history, says Erich Fromm,2 that there are no limits to the misunderstanding and distortion of theories, even in an age when there is unlimited access to the sources; and there is no more drastic example of this phenomenon than what has hap¬ pened to the theories of Karl Marx. It is only when such misunder¬ standings have been removed that serious study of Marx and his thought can be begun. It was Hegel who said that any philosophy may be reduced to empty formalism if one confines oneself to the simple repetition of fundamental principles. It is clear that Marxism needs to be understood for what it is and not for what it has been represented to be if it is to be subjected to critical examination. Above all one must avoid the procedure too common in philosophical controversy: namely, representation of the position of an opponent in the terms it would have if the critic held it; that is, not in its own terms, but translated into the terms of another and opposed theory.

First and foremost, then, it must be understood that Marx himself (and this is equally true of his disciples) was never a speculative theorist interested in ideas for their own sake or a philosopher producing a theoretical system designed to explain the whole course of human history.

“Philosophers,” said Marx, “have only sought to interpret the world

1 Dr. Leopold Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian.

2 Erich Fromm, Marx's Conception of Man.

10

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

in various ways; the real point is to change it.” But how is such change to be effected? Not, of course, by the process of discovering the basic principles of a just society and endeavouring to impose them upon the world, but by discovering the laws of historic change by the means at the command of the empirical sciences.

^ Marx clearly distinguishes the really acting forces in society from the artificial if ingenious reflections of metaphysics. Rational through and through, his aim was not to discover truth by arguments drawn from pure reasoning but by the objective study of things. Scientific theories do not arise in the head but arise from historical and contem¬ poraneous fact, and they are brought to the test in a world of stubborn and irresistible reality which lies outside the thinking process and offers a constant discipline and obligation to the scientific investi gator .fit was as such an investigator that Marx saw the processes of historic change as arising from the antagonisms which society bears within itself. These antagonisms produce continuous instability, and give rise to social and political movements aimed at overcoming them by radical reorganisation!]

This dialectical process, however, by no means implies that the movement of history is independent of the understanding and will of man.

Marx rejected earlier materialism in so far as it regarded man as merely acted upon by external forces ; that notion showed no recogni¬ tion of the part played by men in reacting upon, altering and trans¬ forming their environment — and in the process remaking themselves.

The question in every period is not to set the ideal of socialism over against the reality of capitalism and seek by persuasion to win support for its realisation; the question is to recognise or not to recognise in the course of human events the necessity at any given moment for social reorganisation. Is or is not society organised in such a way that the frictions increasing within its economic structure will end by break¬ ing and dissolving it?

What effects social change is the reaction of human consciousness to ripening conditions — the understanding, the decision, and the result¬ ing action. ^The movement of history is not due to the creative activity of Absolute Mind, nor to the result of a dynamic urge within life and matter; neither is it imposed from without by the irresistible force of economic pressure. It develops out of the redirective activity of human beings, trying to meet their natural and social needs by such economic and social changes as arc found to be necessary. That necessity arises

THE MARXIAN ERA TT

from the conditions which develop in the structural pattern of a capita¬ list societyTrhis, Marx sought to show, is the constant and increasing rebellion of its productive forces against the conditions imposed by that structure, a process maintained and augmented by the laws of its own existence which create the intrinsic conditions of its inevitable death. Marx ~ff— 1 ™ F"Trint a-fl11~lirp society, _but indicated Lw QiiTpmsent society will dissolve by the progressive dynamics of its own forces.

It is now generally recognised that we have here a contribution that represents a truth about the workings of history, a better pattern than the generally accepted view, and one that offers a corrective of that older view which evaded fundamental problems by seeing history as a field for the activity of disembodied ideas that were treated as irreducible, that is to say, as being the starting-point rather than the consequence of change. Marxism, armed with this historical method, and basing its gospei on Marxist theory, contains a sufficient degree of truth to enable it to stand as a serious challenge to the orthodoxies of the world.”1

Marxism, however, does not make any attempt to answer the problems of historical enquiry in advance — what it does is to define the right approach to the unimaginably complicated collection of data. “All history”, says Engels, “must be studied afresh, the condition of existence of the different formations of society must be individually examined.”2 The Marxist philosophy of history must never become an excuse for not studying history.

Prhe necessary reconstruction of society, which Marx envisages, is not, however, the task of society as a whole] For Marx, social change is effected by the coming upon the stage of history of new social classes. Fnr MnrY social Structure is defined in terms of economic classes. He sees the end of tlie^capitalist system of production as tne dissolution of an industrial society constituted by the economic separation of an owning and a working class; a bold stroke ot analytic strategy links the fate of the class phenomena with the fate of capi¬ talism, so that socialism is seen to be the only form of classless society.

Class struggle is not created by propaganda. It is unavoidable where the interests of classes are antagonistic. It necessarily results from a struggle for survival and grows with the development of the contra¬ dictions within society. It is the symptom of a disease, of a demonic

1 Butterfield, Christianity and History.

2 Engels, Letter to Conrad Schmidt. August 5th, 1890.

12 THE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

possession, in the grip of which modern society lives. {The Marxist cannot but encourage the fight of the proletariat for its own existence; but his aim is to overcome the system which by its very structure produces and exacerbates class struggle. That there appears to be no way of overcoming it short of socialism is what gives the proletarian fight its universal aim and ethical significance??

For the reconstructive upheaval that alters the economic structure of society there must be not only the action of an organised class but also the ideas and ideals without which no such mass movement is possible— the ideas which arise out of and are relevant to the economic situation and the needs of the class concerned.

This has often been supposed to mean that ideas are secondary in the sense of being themselves ineffectual, merely the ideological reflex of what could happen without them; dismissing the work of the mind as mere superstructure and therefore unimportant. But the fact that ideas have in every case their genesis in the concrete situation and the actual relationships and modes of behaviour of people involved in such relationships, far from disqualifying them, tends rather to guarantee their validity, competence, fruitfulness, and relevance to that reality. So far from denying the power of ideas in life it reveals its origin. Ideas, to be effective and valid, must accurately estimate the objective facts— knowledge is determined by what is known and is not the apprehension of truths existing outside of men and operating as independent powers in history .[Ideas must be themselves the result of history before they can start being the cause of anything”!

So far from this dispensing with the notion of truth £y reducing all ideas to ideology, in the sense of a false consciousness, for Marx truth is the revolutionary thing. Not the abstract truth of metaphysical theory or ethical idealism, but concrete truth, willed, put into opera¬ tion, maintained and victorious through social struggle by men who work for the liberation of mankind.

{Communism, he sought to show, is not the natural and necessary state of human life in all times and in all places; one does not reach communism by fervently preaching it as the social ideajjThe chequered history of civilisation cannot be considered as a series of deviations and shortcomings.(Communism can be, still more it must and will be, the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist society — without which, however, it could never have been possible!

In these circumstances the attitude of the working class combines the certainty that the system is doomed and must be replaced by a

THE MARXIAN ERA 13

system of common ownership, with the feeling of responsibility for its coming. It stimulates the highest degree of activity. Far from giving the workers the right merely to watch the process, it rather makes the demand that the dialectical necessity be materialised by means of revolutionary effort^^he most important function of Marxism is to give to the masses, otherwise liable to apathy or despair, an under¬ standing that will awaken them to clear consciousness of their situa¬ tion, of their historic mission, and will lead them to create a class organisation which will lift the individual out of his solitude into a fighting community^

So far from the transition to socialism being automatic, Marx believed that the promulgation of his illuminating analysis would be instrumental in precipitating the transition, because it would activate the proletariat itself. Not until “the lightning of thought had thoroughly impregnated the yielding popular soil 1 would the propertyless masses be inspired to appropriate the means of production.

It has sometimes been, said that Marx accepted in its entirety the capitalist theory of the “economic man”, merely transferring to the worker the role of struggle for self-interest and the motive of individual profit; that Marxim is therefore no more than a working-class version of utilitarianism. How very far this is from Marx s conception both of man and of the economic motive becomes clear when one recalls that his awakening to socialism in 1843 was due not only to his early studies in French socialist theory but to the publication in the Deutsche- Franzosischen Jahrbiicher, which he edited in Paris, of Engels review of Carlyle’s Past and Present. Here Carlyle furiously attacked the whole capitalist system of economics. “Supply and demand is not the Law of Nature: Cash payment is not the sole nexus of man with man how far from it ! . . . From the pursuit of monetary aims man will utterly fail to achieve happiness.” How is this wretched state of affairs to be overcome? Bv organising work in a co-operative fashion to serve human ends, replied Marx in his first socialist writings.; The problem “is to organise the empirical world in such a maimer that man experiences in it the truly human. Only in such a community will man find in his relations with others the realisation of his man¬ hood. Society is the necessary framework through which freedom and individuality are made realities.”2

This clearly is the most complete negation of the concept of

1 Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ,

2 Marx, Paris Manuscripts.

14

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

economic man. Nor did Marx ever assert that the motive of individual gain should be the driving force of the working class. True, men necessarily strive for the satisfaction of their basic interests, and those will be the interests of the class to which they belong; but they will see these interests as those of the wider group, and of society as a whole.

For the worker is in the position of serving society as a whole in working for a classless society. What he seeks therefore is not his individual interests but that common good in which he hopes to share.

As to Marx’s social theory being a form of utilitarianism — the view that human motives are to be explained in terms of desire for pleasure and aversion from pain— Marx derived from his philosophical predecessors Kant and Hegel a scorn for hedonism and related philo¬ sophies that always remained with him. The utilitarian ethics of Ben- tham he regarded as “a flat and hypocritical doctrine”, and no more than a philosophical generalisation of the pecuniary relations prevailing in bourgeois society.

In Capital, he graciously introduces Jeremy Bentham to the reader as “the insipid, pedantic, leather-ton gued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century. At no time and in no country has the most trivial commonplace ever strutted about with such appalling self-satisfaction.” To know what is useful for man we must know what human nature is and this cannot be excogitated from the principle of utility”. If this is somewhat unfair to poor Bentham it at least absolves Marx from the charge of being a utilitarian who conceived men as driven by no other motives than individual self- interest.

Was Marx a materialist, then, either in the sense of attributing to man no other motive than the wish for ever-increasing material gain or comfort, or in the philosophical sense of reducing all mental and spiritual phenomena to matter in motion? In fact Marx strongly opposed the abstract materialism of natural science, that excludes history and its processes”. His view as to the nature of life and man we would characterise today as naturalism or humanism, regarding thought as being as real as sight, the one being a function of the eye, the other ot the brain. The “materialist method” which Marx speaks of, which distinguishes his view from that of Hegel, involves the study of the real economic and social life of man, and of the influence of man’s actual way oflife on his thinking and feeling. “In direct contrast to German philosophy,” Marx wrote, “which descends from heaven

THE MARXIAN ERA

15

to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis ot their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological

reflexes and echoes of this life-process.”1

ffrom this we conclude not that man’s main desires are materia. - istTc, but that the way a man produces and, in particular, the pattern of social life, the kind of social relations that obtain between man and man at any particular stage of social development, shape the thinking and desires, the ideals and beliefs, which are the guiding light and

driving force of his lifej . . —7

r*"*Thus the great difference between Marx and the caphalKf tjheorists I

nf his time was that lie does not consider capha|Um to be the QlltOJinc

— ,..l, ; ^-1-. nrv*rafo

,fC7^n nature, nor the economic motives which admittedly operate in capitalism to be universal in man. Indeed, Marx’s whole criticism of capitalism is that in making desire for money and material gam the driving force of economic life, capitalism (historically necessary and fruitful though it has been) has now produced a situation winch is harmful to human interests and is threatening us with disaster. This situation calls for a socialist society in which not pecuniary interest 1

Lis dominant but human needs, the interest of the community. —4 — The importance of Marxim lies beyond even its major task, the bringing of socialism into being; it comprises a complete world¬ view, a Weltanschauung in which all human thought and action are related to certain basic principles of interaction and development; for Marx was compelled by his search for a theory of history to enquire into the nature of reality and of man as part of reality, and so create a

philosophic basis for his theory of society.

Its existence as the creed of a considerable proportion of the wor ld is of significance in view of the widespread failure of nerve elsewhere and the virtual abdication of philosophy today as responsible for our understanding of man’s nature and destiny. As loynbee has right y said, “A society cannot maintain its social cohesion unless a decisive majority of its members hold in common a number of guiding ideas and ideals”.2

But at the moment when the intellectual temper of the West is profoundly sceptical, Marxism offers a map that seems at once to take

1 Marx and Engels. The German Ideology.

2 A. Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion.

i6

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

in the whole of historical reality, to reveal the workin g of the capitalist system and the laws of social change. It is a philosophy of history in so far as it is its purpose to account for the development of our civilisation and to offer some guidance as to what we may expect in the future and what is required of us in bringing it to pass. As such it has gained a wider acceptance than any rival explanation advanced in modern times. Engels indeed claimed that it has brought about a revolution in the social sciences comparable to that which Darwin effected in the natural sciences.

It would seem to merit the considered attention of the modern world.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

HOME AND SCHOOL

Karl EIeinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818, in Trier (Treves), an ancient city of Germany in the Prussian province of the Rhine. It is situated on the right bank of the Moselle and lies in a fertile valley shut in by vine-clad hills, the picturesque red sandstone buildings of the old town interspersed witli orchards and gardens.

His father was a successful Jewish lawyer who rose to be Justizrat and head of the Trier bar. In 1824 he had renounced Judaism even though there was a Rabbinic tradition in both his own family and that of his wife. He and his family were baptised into the Christian faith, thus securing what Heine called an entrance card into the community of European culture”. The young Marx derived no part of his mental heritage from the Jewish tradition, nor did he ever think of himself as a Jew. He was always a European and a German.

In the history of the German intelligentsia the Jews were playing a significant part! Moses Mendlessohn, the philosopher, had brought his people into contact with the German cultural world, and they were becoming of importance to the literature and thought of the day. Four Jews were of exceptional influence — Marx, Lassalle, Heine and Borne. Borne’s works are remarkable for brilliancy of style and for a thoroughly French vein of satire. He was- regarded as one of the leaders of the new literary party of “Young Germany . Heine too was of “Young Germany”, but he combined with his romanticism an intensely matter-of-fact, realistic outlook on life, a withering irony and self-criticism. Marx knew Heine and Goethe by heart and was constantly quoting them.

We have then to think of the Marx household as enlightened and rationalist in outlook, deliberately leaving the narrower Jewish tradition in order to participate fully in both the cultural and national spirit of the times. The elder Marx was indeed passionately Prussian and monarchist in his views and was to have frequent quarrels with

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

18

his much beloved son, whose university career caused him not a little concern.

The most powerful influence on the young Marx was their next- door neighbour, Baron von Westphalen, a man of the widest culture who knew seven languages, loved Shakespeare, and knew much of Homer by heart. His father, who was regarded as a remarkable figure in military history, had been Chief of Staff to the Duke of Brunswick in his campagin against Louis XV during the Seven Years’ War, and had married the daughter of a Scottish nobleman, the Duke of Argyll, who was visiting the General of the British troops participating in that campaign. His son Ludwig von Westphalen was a Privy Councillor, and a typical representative of that section of the German upper class whose representatives were to be found in the vanguard of every enlightened and progressive cause.

What was called in France the Enlightenment was known in Germany as the Aufklarung. Originating in Germany as the rational¬ ism of Leibniz as developed by Wolff and in Britain as the philosophy of John Locke, it culminated in Germany in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte, while the philosophy of Locke became the foundation of French enlightenment as represented by Hclvetius, Holbach, Diderot and Voltaire.

This powerful movement of rationalist thought was certainly the dominant influence in that circle of cultural and able Germans among which the young Marx passed his early years. It played a particularly important part in Germany because of Germany’s political and social backwardness and authoritarian forms of government. In face of this restricted social, political and industrial life, in which the only public forum was the theatre and the only medium of public discussion the lecture room of the philosopher, Germany experienced a period of intense creative literary and poetical activity, and of philosophical speculation which, though it reflected the weakness of the German middle-class movement, achieved much for the culture of modern Europe.

It was thus the philosophy of Kant and Fichte that first influenced the young Marx before he turned to Hegel. It had undermined faith in religious authority and theology, and tended to reject all those aspects of the social order which embodied a merely traditional feudalism. Further, as Marx said,1 it developed the active side of knowing, in opposition to what Engels called “the simple, metaphysical and

1 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

19

exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century though it did so “only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real sensuous activity as such”. Thus it made a vital contribution to the ideology of the German revolution of 1848, in which Marx and Engels played a considerable part.

Karl Marx obtained in the Westphalen home a stimulus not afforded elsewhere. His growing interest in Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and Greek tragedy was fostered by his older friend, who lent him books, quoted long passages, took him for walks up the Moselle valley and treated him as his own son. An even more important member of the household as far as the young Marx was concerned was the daughter, Jenny von Westphalen, and the two children grew up together. She was an intelligent and remarkably beautiful girl, and when Marx was but seventeen and she twenty-one they were betrothed. She became his devoted companion through all the long years of exile and poverty, though, as one of the favoured children of fortune, she was not always capable of dealing with the misfortunes of their difficult life as a woman of the people, more inured to hardship, might have done. She copied his manuscripts, and he frequently consulted her on matters of policy. When they lived in Paris, Heine, who was a frequent visitor, expressed his admiration for her penetrating and sensitive understanding of men and events.

UNIVERSITY LIFE

Karl Marx left his school, the Fricdrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium, in August 1835 and entered the University of Bonn where it was intended that he should study law. But his father realised that there was in him a demonic spirit, and something at the same time as hard as granite, which was entirely foreign to his own rather conventional ideas. He wrote letter after letter to his son, expressing alarm at his restless energy, begging him to show sobriety and not to be so extravagant. But Karl joined the poet’s club and wrote bad verse2, got into debt, and was the most convivial of students. There is a portrait of him at this time with his head held high under its great mop of black hair,

1 Engels, Anti-Diihring. . ,

a Marx’s own opinion on these poems was extremely cntical. Feeling stamped flat and formless; nothing natural about them; everything up in the air; utter contradiction between what is and what ought to be; rhetorical reflections instead of poetical ideas.” His biographer Franz Mehnng, who was himself a literary critic of some reputation, says: “In general these poems breathe a spirit of trivial romanticism, and very seldom docs any true note ring through. I he technique of the verse is clumsy and helpless.”

20

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

a look of brooding fierceness in his eyes. Well might his father see in lnm the Faustian spirit of endless, passionate search for knowledge, that Promethean defiance of all the gods that made him so different from his fellows, even from the ablest of them.

In 1836 his father transferred him to the University of Berlin there to continue his legal studies. He cared little for the set lectures, but worked independently to the point of physical exhaustion— and continued to write bad poetry for Jenny. He read little law and much philosophy,^ especially the whole of Hegel. But we find him also read¬ ing Lessing’s Laocoon and Winckelmann’s History of Art, translating Tacitus and Ovid, and learning English and Italian. In 1838 his father died, and in the same year Marx established his friendship with that extraordinary group of philosophers who came to be known as the Young Hegelians.

HEGEL

Hegel s early philosophy was written largely as a response to the challenge of the French Revolution to reorganise state and society on a rational basis so that social and political institutions might accord with the freedom and interests of the individual. Fie related the concept of reason to the Revolution with the greatest of emphasis, seeing m it the assertion of reason’s ultimate power over realitv As he subsequently characterised this great event: “The idea of Right asserted itself, and the old fabric of injustice broke down. It was a g onous sunrise. All thmking beings celebrated that event. A noble emotion reigned in that epoch; the world was thrilled with spiritual enthusiasm as if the decree had now become a reality in the world ”l

But while the French Revolution had thus already begun to assert the reality of freedom, “German idealism was only occupying itself with the idea of it. The concrete historical efforts to establish a rational torm of society were here transposed to the philosophical plane and appeared in the effort to elaborate the notion of reason.”2

This was due to the economic and political backwardness of Ger- many The remains of feudal despotism still held sway. Serfdom was stiU prevalent. Princes hired out their subjects as mercenary soldiers to foreign countries. Strong censorship operated to repress the slightest traces of enlightenment; and there was no strong, con¬ scious, politically educated middle class to lead the struggle against a solutism. Hence the educated classes, isolated from practical affairs,

1 HCge1, The Philo«>PhY of History. 2 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

21

were impotent to apply their reason to the reshaping of society, and fulfilled themselves in the realm of science, art, philosophy and religion. Hegel’s system is the last and most complete expression of this cultural idealism; the last great attempt to render thought a refuge for reason and liberty.

Nevertheless, Hegel saw the possibility of the transformation of ideas into political action in Germany as well as in France. If, he says, the French nation, by the bath of its revolution, has been freed from many institutions which the spirit of man has left behind, and has cast off the fear of death and the life of custom, will not the Germans, once they have cast off their inertia, transcend their present cloudy and undeveloped spirit and “rouse themselves to action, preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of their inner life, and perchance surpass their teachers”?1

Hegel’s philosophy is developed through five very different stages, between 1790 and 1830. The earlier and more revolutionary thinking2 passes by degrees into the more static and systematic thought of his latter years in Berlin; but the whole course of his philosophical progress is accompanied by its political application to concrete historical situa¬ tions continuing right up to 1831, when he wrote his study of the English Reform Bill. This connection of Hegel’s philosophy with the historical development of the time made the political digressions an essential part of his systematic exposition. All his concepts arc given historical and political as well as philosophical explanation.

Although the realism of Hegel’s position always shows through the idealistic framework and terminology, there is a contrast between the dialectic, the great merit of which was that “the whole natural, historical and spiritual world was presented as a process, that is, as in constant motion, change, transformation and development”3 and the Hegelian system, as it came to be formulated, which Engels regarded as “a colossal miscarriage”, for which “things and their development were only the images of the idea existing somewhere or other already before the world existed, a system which laid claim to being the very sum total of precisely this absolute truth — a system of natural and historical knowledge which is all-embracing and final.”

1 Hegel, Letter to Zellman, XVII.628.

2 Hegel’s First System is contained in the three volumes of the Jetisener Real philosophic, which was not published in German until 1931 and has not been translated into English.

3 Engels, Anti-Diihring.

22 THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

This as Engels well says “is in contradiction to the fundamental basis of dialectical thinking”.1

As Hegel himself put it: “The consummation of the infinite end consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. The Good, the absolutely good, is eternally accom¬ plishing itself in the world ; and the result is that it need not wait upon us, but is already by implication, as well as in full actuality, accom¬ plished.”2

For Hegel, the Idea, which precedes everything, has limited itself in the material world (“Nature is the otherness of Mind”), and is gradually realising itself in the development of man’s self-consciousness in history. Here indeed is progress, but the end is already “in full actuality accomplished”. Our sole task, therefore, according to one school of Hegelian philosophers, could only be to correct the error that tilings are other than they ought to be. These disciples of Hegel constituted the more conservative group, among whom one might mention Erdmann and Roscnkranz, and their interpretation of the master appeared to be in full harmony with the doctrine of the Church. Erdmann interpreted him as displaying the whole content of existence as the expression of abstract categories, conceiving the movement of thought as the law of the universe. Roscnkranz held that the real object of the dialectical method was to show that all things are intimately interconnected to form a great totality, as are the thoughts in the mind, and that the essence of existence is: Everything is spirit, and spirit is everything. This made the task of philosophy the recon¬ ciliation of man to things as they are.

The Left, which was of far greater importance for the development of thought, drew radical conclusions from the teaching of Hegel, both in the philosophy of religion and in the philosophy of law and society. They were known as the Young Hegelians, and Marx was of their company. They were a most remarkable group of able men who for many years worked closely with Marx, and influenced him profoundly, even though he subsequently came to differ from them. It is impossible to comprehend the development of Marx’s ideas unless we can sec them as emerging from the philosophical discussions of these Young Hegelians.

Marx understood the Logic as showing the movement of thought reproducing the movement of being and bringing it to its true form. Hegel was dealing not with ideas as distinct from reality, for the 1 Engels, Auti-Duhring. 2 Hegel, Encyclopoedie.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

23

identity of thought and existence means that he is always dealing with real things. The interplay and motility of the notions reproduce the concrete process of reality.

Hegel also held that every particular existence is essentially different from what it could be if the potentiality were realised. The difference between the reality and the potentiality was the starting-point of the dialectical process.

How radically Marx was to develop these fundamental notions of Hegel remains m be discussed, but the supreme importance of the Hegelian dialectics for Marx’s thoughts is unquestionable.

When we think of this group of philosophers, as Marx knew them in those early years, we must see them not as the men of twenty years later, most of them in opposition to Marx, but as young men of talent, even, some of them, of genius, working out their philosophy in endless argument, and learning much from one another. There they were, their views by no means fully developed, good friends, young, vigorous, intoxicated with their theories, alive with gaiety and enthus¬ iasm, more united in their hostility to convention and to the reactionary Hegelians of the Right than they were divided among themselves.

They were all agreed that the idea of progress was paramount. They argued that if, as Hegel had said, the rational was the real then society as they saw it, being far from rational, was not yet the complete realisation of the Idea, and^had to be made so. Its development was not complete. This realisation was to be accomplished by correcting the illusions of the mind, and above all by criticising religious error. Those who interpreted Hegelianism in this sense included Bruno Bauer, David Strauss, Arnold Ruge and Moses Fless. It was only when Feuerbach and Marx came on the scene that it was fully realised that the criticism of religion would only be completed by radical social criticism.

Marx as soon as he came to Berlin threw in his lot with the Young Hegelians and joined the famous Doktor Klub of vigorous, critical young thinkers, who poured contempt on the church, on the bour¬ geoisie and even on the state. Marx was only twenty at the time, but he soon became the centre of the group. He enjoyed the rich cultural life of Berlin in company with his friends, attracting all by his audacity and wit, not a little feared as an ironical and bitter controversialist.

In 1839 Bauer went to Bonn as Lecturer in Philosophy, with every prospect of a professorship; and it was the intention of Marx to follow him and teach philosophy there, joining Bauer in the publication

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

24

of a critical journal. Meanwhile, Marx was busy with his doctoral thesis on the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. Bauer was anxious for him “to polish this off” and come and join him in Bonn. He was finding things dull after Berlin and he missed the exuberance and gaiety of Marx. He had never laughed so much in Bonn, he wrote, as he had in Berlin in no more than crossing the street with Marx. But a change in the Ministry of Culture led to vigorous intervention against the Left Hegelians whose attacks on religion were causing great offence, and Bauer lost his promotion. Marx decided not to take his doctorate in Berlin, and submitted his thesis to the University of Jena, which awarded him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on April 15th, 1841. But all hopes of a career at Bonn and of the radical philosophical journal were at an end.

Nevertheless, it was here that he settled in March 1842, and he “remained to annoy the orthodox” after Bauer’s enforced departure. An unexpected opportunity opened up new vistas. In 1842 he became the editor ofa new liberal journal, the Rheinische Zeitung, which was pub¬ lished in Cologne, and he left Bonn to take up his editorial work there.

When Marx took over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung he was twenty-four years old. He had already made a great impression on his friends. Hess wrote of him to the author Auerbach, “You will enjoy meeting a man here who also belongs to our group, although he lives in Bonn, where he will soon be holding lectures. He is a charac¬ ter who made an imposing impression on me, though I work in the same field; in short, you can be prepared to meet the only living real philosopher; when he appears before the public (in his writings as well as lectures) he will draw the eyes of Germany upon him. Dr. Marx is still a very young man who is going to give the death-blow to medieval religion and politics; he combines the profoundest philo¬ sophical seriousness with a cutting wit.”

What sort of man was this young philosopher and editor? We know that he was at all times a tremendously tenacious and thorough worker. His notebooks show how persistently he worked at problems, how insatiable was his thirst for knowledge, how inexhaustible his capacity for research. But he united this with a far from dogmatic attitude. And he was not a dour or over-serious man; on the con¬ trary he was full of gaiety and good humour, delighting in long country walks with his friends and in convivial gatherings.

The editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung came to Marx at an opportune moment and in a rather strange fashion. The new

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

25

journal represented the industrial, Protestant and liberal interest in the rapidly developing Rhineland, as against the more feudal and reactionary Catholic forces, which were considerable. Moreover Prussia, of which the Rhineland was a province, was anxious to further North’ German interests in the Rhineland, and was resisting the Catholic policy of separatism and of opposition, on purely reactionary grounds, to the development of railways. The Cologne merchants and bankers founded the new journal, and appointed two Young Hegelian lawyers to edit it. Moses Hess also played an important part in its political direction, and the Berlin group of Young Hegelians including Marx, were contributors. The Prussian Government at this time were prepared to put up with a good deal of vigorous liberal writing in order to counteract the Catholic policies of which they disapproved; while the shareholders were impressed by the practical attitude of the most vigorous of the Young Hegelian contributors, Marx. Accordingly, in October 1842 he was made editor of the paper and entered public life. When he assumed the editorship he moved to Cologne and there he was given the opportunity of showing whether a philosophical understanding of actual events, giving society a consciousness of itself, showing it the reason for its conflicts, could actually play an effective part in bringing about radical social change.

The "policy Marx adopted was not the advocacy of extreme views, and not general theoretical discussion of liberty and the state, or of religion, Marx always held that theory and practice must be rooted in actual conditions and must contribute to the elucidation of practical problems. He therefore strongly disagreed with the Berlin group of Young Hegelians, whom ill luck with the authorities seemed to have driven into extreme forms of irresponsible literary protest. Bauer was even prepared to advocate that the state, private property and the family were to be dissolved ! This appeared to Marx a mere itch for self-advertisement, and a kind of political romanticism for which he had no use at all. He called their contributions to the paper “world- uprooting scribblings, empty of ideas and written in a slovenly style”. Nor was he at all impressed by their savage onslaught on religion. “I asked them,” wrote Marx, “to criticise religion by criticising political conditions rather than the other way about, because religion, quite empty in itself, lives from earth and not from heaven and will disappear on its own once the inverted reality whose theory it represents is dissolved.”1 In fact, said Marx, this “Berlin gas-baggery deals with ' Marx to Ruge, November 1842.

2 6

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

nothing but its own clique concerns, and is of no use to anybody.”

Marx saw that the next step was the achievement of constitutional power, and on this he could unite a great number of free-minded and practical men. This was next on the agenda, and he strongly objected to any policy which would split the progressive front into fragments. Ultimate theoretical problems, he said, only become proper for news¬ paper treatment in so far as they have become practical problems. He calls therefore for “less argumentation, grandiloquent phrases, complacent self-admiration, and more examination of concrete con¬ ditions, more factual knowledge”.1 If they want to criticise religion let them do it through the criticism of political conditions rather than criticise political conditions through the criticism of religion; and let them cease playing about with the label “atheism”— behaving “like children who tell everyone they are not afraid of the bogeyman”.

But when religion entered the field of politics, in the Catholic opposition to railways, Marx strongly criticised the pretensions of the church to treat such secular matters as if they were spiritual. There was no cowardly compromise, but fearless courage in his editorship, which all too soon brought down upon his head the wrath of the Prussian Government. The paper failed to rally against the threatened censorship a self-confident revolutionary middle-class movement. The liberals were timid in the face of authority and fearful of too much help from the Left and especially from the working class.

Other practical issues of a social character, the peasant and vine- growers’ grievances, enlisted his aid and aroused more opposition. Nevertheless the circulation rose from 800 to several thousand. Marx wrote article alter article, and the special supplements, containing more theoretical material, which appeared on alternate days, were usually from his pen.

Running through all these articles was the intention of freeing the apparatus of the state from the control of particular class interests; but out of his experience and study there was growing the under¬ standing that the state was itself the organ of a particular class and that constitutional forms were a product of property-relations. It was the injustices inflicted by the Diets on the peasants and vine-growers that aroused him to challenge their claim to speak and legislate for the whole community, whereas in fact they represented definite ruling-class interests.

It was in these articles too that he raised the important question of

1 ibid.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

27

the freedom of the press, a topic on which he had just written a power¬ ful article for Arnold Ruge (which, however, owing to the censorship, was not published until 1 843). In this earlier article he severely criticised the new Instructions to the Censors of Frederic William IV, which had a specious air of liberalism about them. The Censors were instructed to be generous and tactful in the exercise of their authority, to allow reasonable criticism if it was expressed in serious and modest terms. Candid treatment of political affairs was permissible provided it did not “present in a favourable light any party working for the over¬ throw of the existing system of government”. Religion might be discussed “provided that it was not done in a frivolous, hostile or fanatical manner”. Criticism of the government was permissible “if its tendency was well meaning, and if it did not incite suspicion against classes of society or individuals”.

This may have seemed liberal in spirit to many of those to whom it was addressed; not so to Marx, who tore it to pieces in a brilliant piece of polemical writing which expressed his belief in the sacredncss of the rights of individuals and the inalienable sovereignty of the people. In it he asserts that the end does not justify evil means nor does political authority turn wrong into right. A sound condition of the public mind, he declares, cannot be induced by measures that reduce freedom. Maladies of the press should be left to the natural cure that freedom brings; the censor can but amputate.

Coming to the new concessions allowed to the censors, Marx declared that he preferred precise statements of w'hat was allowed and disallowed to protestations of liberalism which in the last resort depended on what the censor happened to think reasonable. To allow what is written in a “serious” and “modest” style or what is “well meaning in tendency” may mean anything. It is a purely subjective standard, said Marx, and a reactionary censor could exclude more on these instructions (1842) than on those of 1819. And it was absurd to allow “candid criticism” so long as it was not subversive. No affairs can be candidly discussed under such conditions. And then, as to matters of religion, where the treatment must not be frivolous or hostile or fanatical, a frivolous criticism does not touch the essence but any other attack is hostile to the essence; to Catholics all Protestant criticism is both hostile and fanatical, while all Catholic criticism is so to Protestants. So no criticism at all is possible. Then again, all regu¬ lations based on “tendency” are anti-political, branding in advance whole schools of thought, and so stifling the reason of the community

28 THE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

Censorship, he concludes, is incompatible with the very essence of law, with public discussion and personal responsibility.

In the Rheinische Zeitung of May 1842, he returned to this question. His defence of the rights of the press now went beyond his earlier criticism of the censorship, and raised the question of the hired journalist.

“Is a press which degrades itself to trade, free? A writer must certainly earn money in order to exist and write, but he should not exist and write in order to earn money. The first freedom of the press must consist in its emancipation from commerce. The writer who degrades the press to a material means deserves as a punishment for this inner slavery that outer slavery which is the censorship, or perhaps his very existence is his punishment.”

All his life Marx lived up to these principles and to the standard which he demanded from others. And now he was to experience for himself the impossible limitations under which he was trying to work. The censorship had from the first pursued a policy of petty interference which annoyed not only those who worked for the paper but its subscribers. All the hopes that had followed the accession of Frederic William IV to the throne of Prussia had faded. Journal after journal was suppressed, and the Rheinische Zeitung came under the strongest condemnation when Marx proceeded to discuss the King’s plan for alteration in the Divorce Laws before its actual publication.1

The radical movement was not to be intimidated, and opportunity for political expression was found in a scries of Yearbooks and Annuals which were edited by Arnold Ruge. These so-called “Annuals” were a device for evading the censorship, which, although it applied strictly to shorter publications, excepted larger works, even when they came out in serial parts. The Annuals appeared, as a rule, as four-page sheets and could subsequently be bound up. The periodicals which Ruge edited contain the most important source material of the intellectual history of Germany during the period of Marx’s formative years. The Hallische Jahrbucher first appeared in 1838, and represented the rising liberal criticisms of the Young Hegelians. The last of these publications was the Deutsche-Franzosischen Jahrbucher (The Franco-German Year¬ book) to which Marx and Engels made important contributions, and

1 Marx was opposed to easy divorce where children are involved, because marriage was concerned with the welfare of the family. While, therefore, if no children are involved the dissolution of a marriage should no more concern the state than the dissolution of a friendship, the state still has certain responsibilities in regard to marriage.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS 29

which was published in Paris in 1843 under the editorship of Marx.

Arnold Ruge was sixteen years older than Marx, and had suffered five years in a fortress for his liberal views. He was Voltairean, secu¬ larist, cosmopolitan and saw Hegelianism as the culmination of the rationalism of the eighteenth century. As the editor of the Halle Yearbooks he was considered to be the standard-bearer of the philo¬ sophical vanguard. When in 1841 his journal was suppressed, he moved to Leipzig and began to issue the Deutsche Jahrbucher. In all these publications he brought to mature and vigorous expression not only the views of the younger philosophers but the political aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie. The force behind this literary effort was the dialectical philosophy of Hegel as interpreted by the Left Hegelians, undermining orthodox allegiances to the existing order and its culture. If you reflect on any situation, said Ruge, you find yourself transcending it, passing beyond it into what it must become. This will confront you with alternative possibilities and with the demand for decisive action. Ruge began to define those immediate objectives: to demand a legal opposition, to criticise the existing legal theories; but as Marx was to discover later, his understanding of social and economic affairs was inadequate; he failed to discern the importance of the emergent social forces and dismissed such an important event as the revolt of the weavers in Silesia as of no significance. In the end he saw political activity within the framework of the existing state as the sole instru¬ ment of social reform. Against Ruge, Marx was to formulate his very different theory of the state. But these differences only emerged later.

Until Marx took the post of editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, his acquaintance with the practical politics and economic realities of capitalism, with industry and agriculture in Germany, was of the slightest. The Young Hegelians indeed had not come to grips with politics and social problems. Only Ruge was beginning to see that when philosophy works from abstractions to historical realities it is putting things the wrong way round. “The alliance of philosophy and politics is the only way in which modern philosophy can become truth.”

Before the journal fell under the axe of the censorship it was begin¬ ning to consider wider aspects of social reform than those which concerned only the Rhineland. Hess had written an article in which he declared that new problems were everywhere emerging. England at least had reached a stage at which liberalism had no adequate answer to the question of poverty. Three more articles appeared

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

30

describing the consequences of English industrial development — unemployment and political unrest amongst the workers. Hess also wrote on French conditions and Marx must have read Hess’s brilliant description of the socialist and communist movement in Paris in the Augsburger Zeitung. Before any further advance could be made in this direction the government decided at the end of 1842 to suppress the paper and it ceased publication at the end of March 1843. This was felt as a personal insult by the whole population of the Rhineland. Petitions with thousands of signatures were sent to Berlin, but in vain. Marx’s opinions were, according to the Berlin officials, “in utter contradiction to the principles of the Prussian state”.

Marx himself was not sorry to go. He wrote to Ruge: “The atmo¬ sphere was becoming too oppressive for me. It is a bad thing to work in servitude and to fight with pin-pricks instead of with the sword. I am tired of the hypocrisy. Now the government has given me back my freedom. There is nothing more 1 can do in Germany. One debases oneself there.”

Driven from the public stage by the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx “retired to the study”. If his journalistic responsibilities had interfered with the intellectual work lie was eager to engage in, he had greatly profited by his close acquiantance with the real con¬ dition of men and the actual functions of the state. His attention had been turned from abstractions to realities. This meant great theoretical progress, for he had now to link these practical problems to his philosophy, and then to remould his philosophy as the theory of his practical policies.

Marx first considered Switzerland as the home of his future activity. But Ruge, who was already planning a revival in a new form of the Annuals which had been appearing in Germany, favoured Paris, where there was a large German colony and living was cheap. Marx was to be married in June and after that was to settle down with his wife in the same house as Ruge and the poet Hcrwcgh, and share a kitchen and a cook.

The young couple were married on June 12th, 1843, and spent their honeymoon in Kreuznach where Jenny and her mother had been living. They went to Paris on November nth.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARX’S THOUGHT

The giants of German philosophy and poetry, Hegel and Goethe, had passed from the scene in 1831 and 1832. The spirit of the times underwent a change. The new watchword was emancipation — moral, intellectual and political. The influences that went to the making of the mind of Marx have been indicated ; it remains to show how his thought developed, and the part played in this development by his young Hegelian friends.

The key to his thinking is contained in a letter which he wrote to his father in 1837, in which he says: “I went on from idealism — which, by the way, I equated with Kantian and Fichtean idealism, since I drew it from that source— to search for the Idea in reality itself. If previously the gods dwelt above the earth, now they were at the centre of it.”

Kant’s great contribution to philosophic thought was his insight into the essential activity of mind, as Marx explains in his first l hesis on Feuerbach. Materialists like Feuerbach conceived the human mind as passive, simply reflecting as in a mirror the external material world. There was no adequate recognition of the part which men played in reacting upon, altering and transforming their environment. 1 hey regarded the mind as simply reflecting the external world and moulded by it. This leaves man impotent to affect the course of things, and does not therefore account for the redirectivc activity of mind, for the fact that man was not merely a product of his environment but the creator of it, first in the form which went to his own making, and now, in remaking it, so that the new world of his creation in turn remakes man yet again.

Marx never accepted the naive materialism which regarded thought as mere ineffectual reflection of the external world. His approach was dialectical, recovering “the active side” of knowing as developed by idealism”,1 and showing how in man knowing and acting go together.

Fichte, Kant’s great disciple, exerted a powerful influence on Marx 1 Theses on Feuerbach, No. 1.

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

32

and all the Young Hegelians. He went beyond Kant, asserting that man does not merely comprehend things with the activity of mind, but realises himself in willing and working. It is the practical faculty which lies at the root of the ego. In the process of self-actualisation, the ego creates an objective, resistant world over against itself.1 This implies an obstacle whose resistance has to be overcome. We realise our liberty and independence through the successful overcoming of this resistance.

But Fichte extends the field of actualisation from the life-history of the individual to the life-history of the human race. Man’s self- realisation thus became the theme of a philosophy of history. Hegelianism was the high point of this development.

It is clear how much of Fichte there is in the activism of Marx, and in his fundamental idea of the self-realisation of man, not in the pure realm of mind, but in changing the world.

When Marx had turned to Greek philosophy for his doctoral thesis, it was the idea of self-realisation that was in his mind. The theme was the opening up of new and wider horizons to the human intellect, beyond the intellectual limitations of Hellenism and the social limita¬ tions of slavery; the reaction against ‘‘a demoralised age in which its passions were without truth and its truth without passion”. It was at the same time a parable for his own times, pointing to a new task for human thought — not the contemplative understanding, pf things, but their radical transformation, a new phase in human history in which a man should at last begin both to think his life and live his thoughts.

Marx turned to the later Greek philosophers because, rejecting the idea that in them Greek philosophy like a bad play had come to a tame ending, he believed that the three great closing phases, Epicur¬ eanism, Stoicism and Scepticism, represented the final achievement of self-consciousness, coming after the theoretical achievement of Aristotle in accounting for the universe in a comprehensive system of thought, and completing philosophy’s task by applying it to actuality. These philosophies sought to achieve that victory over the external world which vindicates the freedom and security of the mind and makes us equal to the gods. We can see in this assertion of the will and

1 It is in this process of the ego bringing into existence a world over against itself and then overcoming the limitations with which it is confronted that Fichte finds the sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This is of course a Fichtean, not an Hegelian, formula.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARX S THOUGHT

33

the self, confronted by all the powers of the external world, the influence of Fichte. It was to inspire Marx’s Promethean defiance of the powers that be.

The completion of thought is the awakening of the will, and the realisation of the ideal in action. When the philosopher has created his rational ideal, and we understand how far the world falls short of it, what is to be done? There are two possibilities. We may accept the irrationality of the world and alter our philosophy accordingly, arriving at the philosophy of irrationalism in the service of reaction; or, on the other hand, we may set to work to change the world. But by thus bringing philosophy into the realm of action we change its character.

We have arrived, says Marx (in the preliminary studies for his dissertation), at one of the key points in its development at which philosophy assumes a practical attitude towards the world and as “subjective consciousness” revolts against reality. “That which was an inner light becomes a consuming flame, turned outward.” Thus the philosophical idea is transformed into a will tr> r&un 1 world not_yct shaped m the image ot thatidca. As Prometheus, in revolt against the gods and delying tiicm, steals fire from heaven and comes down among men to make a new world, so does philosophy in this day and age.

But this is the end of philosophy. “By liberating the world from the unphilosophical condition, men at the same time liberate themselves from philosophy, which hi the form of a definite system has held them in fetters.”

At first sight these reflections would appear to have little to do with Democritus and Epicurus, but in fact they are the key to Marx’s understanding of those philosophers. Democritus, the first atomist, he shows to be involved in a fatal dualism. The ultimate reality is the atom — but we never see it or know it. What we know is only the object of perception, appearance, which is not the ultimate reality. Thus the atom, the truth, is not brought into any relation with what we actually know. Moreover, since the atoms act upon one another in a strictly mechanical way, the world is revealed as subject to a complex of iron laws determining every event.

Epicurus introduces an important modification into the materia¬ listic scheme of Democritus. The atom possesses a capacity for self- determination. Atoms in association behave differently from atoms conceived in mechanical interaction. What appears, therefore, is not a

TIIE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

34

mathematical resultant but differentiation, originality, new qualities. The scientific value of this theory is found in its escape from the eternal regress of causality .^The natural world is in a perpetual process of dissolution and rebirth. This opens up an immense field of possibility — whatever is could be otherwise. Here is the vindication of man’s power to assert his own freedom and attain his own endsTj

Much was yet to be worked out, but it is clear that Marx is inter¬ preting both the materialism of the atomists and the philosophy of Hegel in an entirely new way. They do not involve us in a finished, rational whole hi which everything is determined, but direct us to an unlimited war against the existing world, a united effort to change it, to reorganise it. It is a demand to make the world philosophical. It is a sweeping indictment and rejection of earthly reality on the ground of its “unphilosophical condition”.

Between his resignation as editor and his arrival in Paris, Marx had spent five months of quiet retirement at Kreuznach, which was also inevitably a period of intensive study. He was already planning with Arnold Ruge, who had financial means, the new Deutsche-Franzosischen Jahrbiicher which were to succeed the earlier Yearbooks or Annuals which had appeared and disappeared during the past few years. (The Deutsche Jahrbiicher had been suppressed in January 1843.) The intention of Marx was to produce something new in philosophical thinking, something in harmony with life and humanity (here speaks Feuerbach). The heart must be French and the head German. The head must reform and the heart revolutionise. Only where there was movement, emotion, passion and feeling could there be vitality. So said Marx in his letter to Ruge of March 13 th, 1843.

They eventually decided to publish the Yearbook in Paris, as being closer in touch with German life than any other likely centre. Marx at once began to plan his own articles and to push vigorously ahead with reading and reflection which marked the next stage in his development.

Wc have the record of these months of research in the notebooks which he made at the time.1 He was reading a great deal of history, especially that of England and France. He studied with special care the French Revolution. It was now, for the first time, that he made a thorough and critical study of Rousseau, Montesquieu and Machiavelh.

Rousseau had taken precisely the critical line towards the existing structure of society which Marx was taking to the Hegelian state. Society did not in its present form reconcile the interests of its 1 Photostats arc preserved in the Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARx’s THOUGHT 35

members ; it left them incompatible. The problem was to reform and reconstruct society until it did in fact defend and protect the person nfeach member. Only in such a society can the individual both accept the demands of society and still obey himself alone. Helvetius, who was highly thought of by both Marx and Engels, said very much the same thing and had asserted that if the so-called “general interest” was actually inconsistent with individual interests then the laws of society would inevitably be broken and crime would break out. The wise legislator is he who overcomes this separation, and establishes a society in which the interests of the individual and the community coincide.

Montesquieu showed Marx that there was no absolute system of law governing man’s social activities. All laws arc relative and changeable, and develop with direct reference to particular environments, by which he meant not only geographical differences and economic resources, but the level of industrial development, commerce, customs and political institutions. Their nature was variable and their essential characteristic adaptability. Particularly as regards the theory of the state, Montesquieu broke away entirely from the idea that its authority was from above, and bore no special relation to actual conditions of social development. The state was itself a natural growth subject to the law of change.

From Machiavelh Marx learned a great deal about the autonomy of politics, which owes no allegiance to moral rules outside the law of social necessity. The only criterion of action is within society and is the correct evaluation of the actual forces which must be employed to achieve the good of society at that historical moment. This holds with special force in times of political change, when institutions and rules must not dictate to statecraft, but must be adapted to serve man’s needs. There is no general principle of morality overriding the good of society. If the statesman holds by existing moral rules he will do far more harm than good. Here was the first clear-headed advocate of the application of conscious systematic realism to political affairs, showing that reality is obedient to its own stern necessity and that all mere ideas arc powerless when faced with its relentless logic — but not, of course, the ideas that arc relevant to the actual demands of society. Like Montesquieu, Machiavelh was also conscious that there was no constant pattern of society, that all things are in continual motion. Therefore, new situations are constantly arising in which, since men themselves are the only judge of their needs, they must also be the only judge of the means to satisfy them.

\Tt was during this period too that Marx discovered from his

3^ THE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

comparative study of political constitutions that social and political structures are dependent upon property relations^ He had followed with close attention the development of democracy in the United States and especially Hamilton’s argument on the danger of revolution arising from the universal franchise. It was clear that Hamilton’s primary concern was to guarantee the rights of property owners against the majority of the people. Those with no property, it was argued, could not be regarded as having a will of their own. The common people indeed, are unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel, and we should be ruled by the natural autocracy of the wise, the rich and the good— from which it appeared that the rich might be regarded as necessarily possessing the other qualifications.

These notebooks arc an important indication of the growth of Marx’s thought during these months. He retained from Hegel the dialectical historical approach, but in the place of the Absolute he had now placed human society as the reality. The “first mover”, as Aristotle had called it, was society itself, which had become its own moving spirit. It is often supposed that Marx began his philosophical career as an Hegelian idealist, but gradually changed or developed his views in a materialistic direction. But there is no evidence that Marx ever thought that world history was an expression or incarnation of the unfolding of the Absolute Idea, or that he hypostasised abstractions by treating as self-subsistent entities general ideas, or principles, as if they could have an existence in themselves not derived from experience of the concrete world. The rational whole which Hegel believed in was, for Marx, not a truth about reality (Hegel had only imagined its realisation) but a programme. The existing world wras far from being philosophical. It was not a world in which man could come to experi¬ ence himself as a godlike being, as Hegel declared it to be.

Nor is it the case that Marx took from Hegel the idea of the inevitable progress of thought and reality through the succession of thesis, anti¬ thesis and synthesis. Hegel’s Logic cannot possibly be reduced to this simplification.

It is just such a use of the so-called “triad” by Proudhon that Marx ridicules in his Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon had attempted, to use his own words, to “make history not according to the order of time but according to the succession of ideas”. But as Marx says: “He thinks to construct the world by the movement of thought, while all that he does is to reconstruct systematically and range under the absolute method the thoughts which are in the heads of everybody.”

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARx’s THOUGHT 37

This mystical theory, which reveals an immanent process of develop¬ ment in history as merely the embodiment in reality of a logical pro¬ cess, is utterly foreign to the thought of Marx, who never attempted to draw patterns for history out of logic. “Nor”, as Plekhanov says, “does it at all play even in Hegel’s work the part which is attributed to it by people who have not the least idea of the philosophy of that great thinker. Not once in the eighteen volumes of Hegel’s works does the triad play the part of an argument, and anyone in the least familiar with his philosophical doctrine understands that it could not play such a part. ... It was not at all a distinguishing feature of his philosophy.”1 Nor when we turn to Hegel’s Philosophy of History do we find any such mechanism of development exemplified. Hegel shows us history as the development of freedom, which in his view is identical with the moral reason in man, as a cosmic process in which the world comes to realise itself “in self-consciousness”.

When Alexei Mikhailovich Voden, Russian man of letters and translator, asked F.ngels whether Marx was ever a Hegelian, Engels declared emphatically that he never was. This, said Engels, is clearly shown in the doctoral thesis of 1841, which reveals the fact that although Marx had already completely mastered Hegel’s dialectical method, he had completely emancipated himself from it. In the doctoral thesis he was applying it in a very different manner from Hegel, and that in the very sphere in which Hegel was strongest — the history of thought. The conclusions Marx arrived at with regard to the later Greek philosophy were in fact opposed to Hegel’s estimate of this school of thought. Engels adds that Marx had a high opinion of the dialectics of Plato and Aristotle, and, in modern philosophy, of the dialectics of Leibniz and Kant, and had intended to continue his study in the history of Greek philosophy.

Marx developed his criticism of Hegelian idealist dialectics on the basis of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the 1844 essay entitled Critique of The Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole.

Marx arrived in Paris towards the end of October 1843, his notebooks full of materials and with the manuscripts of the Critique of Hegel and at least two articles in draft form for the Deutsche- Franzdsischen Jahrbiicher which he was to edit for Arnold Ruge.

It was his first intention, to^oniiiiua fih ^iudies m-economics-and French socialist literature; and it was at this time he became a Socialist- Evidence of the change is to be found in his letter to Ruge, subsequently

1 Plekhanov: The Development of the Monist Theory of History.

38 THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

published in the Jahrbiicher, in which he says: [This system of acquisi¬ tion and commercialism, of possession and the exploitation of mankind, is leading even more swiftly than the increase in population to a break within the present society, which the old system cannot heal, because it has not the power to heal or create but only to exist and enjoy.”"] This was the first step, but in the following months he made rapid progress towards the clarification and consolidation of his position. In one of his letters from Kreuznach (September 1843) he had already- revealed his acquaintance with Fourier, Proudhon and others. In contradiction to the utopian tradition of French socialism he was beginning to see his task as a new interpretation of the struggles and aspirations of the age. There were forces already at work, but they needed to be brought to a clearer self-consciousness. “We only make clear to men for what they arc really struggling, and to the conscious¬ ness of this they must come whether they will or not.” The thinker propounds no fresh problems, brings forward no abstract dogmas, but awakens an understanding for the growth of the future out of the past, inspiring men with the awareness of their task and its necessity. “We must not say to the world: stop your quarrels, they arc foolish, and listen to us, for we possess the real truth. Instead we must show the world why it struggles.”

The double number of the Jahrbiicher was to prove its one and only issue. But among those who contributed to the new publication were Heine, Her wegh, the revolutionary poet, Hess, Ruge and Marx, and also Friedrich Engels, the youngest of them all, who wrote an important article entitled Outlines of a Critique oj Political Economy, and reviewed Carlyle’s Past and Present in a second article describing the situation in England. Engels declared that Carlyle’s volume of essays was the only book worth reading out of the literary harvest of a whole year.

But disheartened by the defeat of liberalism in Germany, Ruge and his friends were confused and disillusioned. Marx on the other hand was studying the social forces which were giving rise to condi¬ tions incompatible with the existing state of affairs. He declared that they would either compel the reaction to become even more reaction¬ ary, which would be suicidal, or would set in motion new forces within the culture of reaction itself. Far from despairing of the people of Germany, he says that even here, where reaction was strong, and social development backward, in protest against injustice and exploita¬ tion men will inevitably resist in order to preserve their existence. Two things arc necessary for revolutionary activity — the objective

39

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARx’s THOUGHT

renditions and the feeling of self-respect, the desire for freedom. Only.

arising when social forces arc ripe for change, can traas^ snrlctv into a community of free men. A feeling mankind which thhE and a thinking mankind which feels, will know where to find the instruments of social liberation.

Though the venture thus came to a premature conclusion, the essays contained in the Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrbiicher are of the greatest importance. They include Marx’s Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, and The Jewish Question.1 The former, together with the Critique itself, which was never published, must have been written much earlier, since Marx offered it to Ruge in March 1842 for publication in his Anekdota Philosophica.

Marx’s fundamental criticism of Hegel, however, is to be found in a later essay, which was written in 1844 and not published until after his death.2 It is entitled Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole. It is in fact an examination of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. This is one of the most difficult and yet the most interesting of Hegel’s works, and Marx finds in it the key to the science of society. But Hegel presents the cause of social change as an activity of pure thought, reflecting itself or manifesting itself in history. Marx recon¬ structs the theory in terms of the origin and development of capitalist society. But, far from rejecting it, he regards it as invaluable — when it has been restated in the terms of social history instead of pure thought.

In the Preface to the second edition of Capital he repeats the key conception of this critique. He says: “For Hegel, the thought process (which he actually transforms into an independent subject, giving to it the name of ‘Idea’) , is the demiurge of the real, and for him the real is only the outward manifestation of the Idea. In mv view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed" and translated inside the human head.” Here he abruptly finishes, and the statement in this highly condensed form is not sufficiently enlightening. But he tells us immediately where to look for the full exposition of this criticism. “Nearly thirty years ago,” he says, “when Hegelianism was still fashionable, I criticised the mystifying aspect of the Hegelian dialectic. As this Preface was written in T873, that would indicate the Critique of 1844.

I11 Hegel’s Phenomenology the process of self-realisation of the

1 See Chapter V. .

2 Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus, cd. by Landshut and Mayer, Leipzig, 1932, and later in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe and in English translations.

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

40

Absolute manifests itself in historical reality as exhibiting a dialectical form and rhythm, as involved in self-development. It is a merciless criticism of whatever is regarded as permanent and invincible. Nations, systems, creeds — they are all unstable and doomed to be fugitive. Science and religion, morality and art, logic and history — they are all shown in process of inevitable change, through the contradictory ^elements within them and their resolution. It is precisely this internal 1 opposition which sets things in motion, which is the mainspring of development, which calls forth the latent forces of whatever we are considering. In every case when the contradiction reveals itself, cvolu- tion or revolution to a higher level of existence begins.

This process of change involves not only a dialectical way of under¬ standing the changing world, as though it were dialectical thinking which was responsible for the world being apprehended as developing, but the realisation that reality possesses an independent nature not conforming to static ways of thinking, but rather exacting submission from the mind and compelling as to think dialectically. The world itself is in process of endless change. Hegel’s world considered in its totality as the universal, is evolving in this way, but this universal is not, as it is for most forms of idealism, a transcendental reality lifted above the actual world of experience. Hegel’s universal is in the concrete. There is only one world not two, not a world of spirit and a world of matter, not even a world of moral ideals and a world which fails to come up to it — the conflict of what ought to be and what in fact is. Hegel sought to transcend all the dualisms that have plagued the history of thought — between mind and matter, consequence and law, individual and society, thought and the is, by presenting them all as equally objective aspects of continuing process. Thus in his philo- sophy Hegel brings thought, and being, reason and the universe, into the closest connection and agreement, as inseparable from each other. The task of philosophy is to comprehend wliat is. Hegel was no abstract thinker, divorced from actuality, and speculating at large. Rather he set himself to give material content to the Idea, to make it concrete. The idea without reality, or reality without the idea, seemed to him absurd. Accordingly, his logic could not deal merely with the laws of thought, but must at the same time take account of the laws of social and cosmic evolution. He therefore created a science of thinking, which formulated not only the laws of thought, but also the laws of evolution. Unfortunately, he did so in a language which offered immense difficulties to his readers.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARx’s THOUGHT 41

One can now see why Marx was so powerfully influenced by Hegel; why the Phenomenology is the work with which Marxism js immediately affiliated. But where did he disagree with Hegel? This is most clearly seen in the Critique. Hegel had tried to show that the very nature of man is the result of human productive labour, which has the effect of confronting man with estranged objects hostile to himself. But it is really abstract thought with which Hegel is con¬ cerned. It is the opposition within thought of thinking and the object thought. Nevertheless, he sees in this process the secret of the creation of civilisation and of the development of history.1 In this sense man makes himself. But this extemalisation of himself in what he creates is, says Hegel, a loss ; man is drained of himself in creation, it is a process of deprivation, alienation. The world which man creates stands over against him as an enemy, so that he is ruled and destroyed by his own creations. Then Hegel tries to show that man can repossess himself by coming to understand that the whole process is the way in which the Absolute Idea realises itself. But Hegel, says Marx, has got the whole .thing upside down. Hegel’s conception of a self-alienated God is really a portrait of man as an economic producer. In the Phenomenology Hegel had shown man as creating himself in produc¬ tivity — “labour is the self-productive act of man”. But Hegel considered all productivity as no more than an expression of the thought process. As a consequence, says Marx, “he has only discovered the abstract, logical and speculative expression for the movement of history, but not yet the real history of man”. In fact, what Hegel sees as spirit producing itself in work and finding itself confronted with an alien world, is man producing himself and finding himself in an alien¬ ated condition. Thus the history of production is not anything so mystical as the process of spirit’s becoming in terms of knowledge. The dialectic stands on its head. “You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.”

This Marx proceeded to do. taking Hegel’s tbrnry-effialiejaaiami^is thp n-)r)del nf bis qy/n philosophy of history, the model which, in spite of the inverted form which Hegel gives it, is the indispensable key to the actual sequence of events in economic and social development.

1 It is impossible in a few words to do justice to “the secret of Hegel”. But however complex the theory (and it is extremely complex), it is, as Marx saw, much more than a metaphysical speculation. It is the actual course of history stated in mystical form. Every step in the argument reflects some real aspect of human life and development.

4

MARX IN PARIS

When Marx left the Rhineland in 1843 he had not arrived at any clear understanding of socialism. lie had still an open mind about whatever was called “communism”. Ilis philosophy was still in process of reconstruction. He was working critically through the legacy of Hegel, profoundly influenced by Feuerbach’s materialism, but also by the social and political struggles in which he had vigorously parti¬ cipated. He had learned much from Fichte and Hess of the philosophy of action as the completion of the philosophy of understanding. lie had already repudiated the utopian programme of realising an ideal created solely by the imagination. Above all, a new feeling of passionate indignation and sympathy for the struggle of the dispossessed was deepening and inspiring his spirit of revolt. He had fought the battle of the forest-dwellers and the vine-growers, and now, in Paris, he was to meet for the first time the revolutionary elements of the working class. “Among these people,” he says (1844), “the brotherhood of man is not a phrase, but truth, and from their faces hardened by affliction, the whole beauty of mankind looks upon us.”1 And a year later, “one must experience what are the studies, the mental hunger, the restless impulse for development in the French and English workers, in order to be able to form a notion of the human nobility of the movement.”2

The Paris in which he arrived was utterly different from anything that he had known before. The Revolution of 1789 had been followed by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, which was in turn over¬ thrown by the revolution of 1830 and replaced by the rule of King Louis Philippe, the son of the Duke of Orleans — Citizen Equality, who had taken part in the great revolution. In four years’ time the third revolution of 1848 was to replace the monarchy by the republic and give a powerful impulse to the bourgeois transformation of Europe.

The monarchy of Louis Philippe represented and defended the interests of the wealthiest section of the big bourgeoisie, the aristo¬ cracy of finance. In Paris there was evidence of vigorous financial

1 Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe III. 2 Marx and Engels, The Holy Family.

MARX IN PARIS

43

and industrial progress, but also of ruthless corruption, in which for¬ tunes were being rapidly made and suddenly lost. Against this back¬ ground there was the seething activity of emigres, socialist reformers, poets and writers, among whom were some 85,000 Germans. There was an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and passionate protest against injustice and political tyranny. There was condemnation of reaction, of commercialism, of philistinism, and a warm defence of human rights. Argument and discussion went on continuously, pamphlets were written, journals published, debates raged, and com¬ mittees were formed. The mood was exalted and optimistic.

Marx and his wife had arrived in Paris at the end of October 1843, and his first task was to complete and publish his two contributions to the Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrbucher, this was accomplished by January 1844. He then quickly established contact with the French democrats and socialists, the leaders of the German revolutionary society, the League of the Just, and many other societies and groups. We must picture him not shut up in his study, not merely discussing affairs with leading intellectuals, though his studies were varied, exhaustive and continuous, and he met everybody of importance, but as attending meetings and immersing himself in a more vigorous and lively workers’ movement than anything he had seen in Germany. Ruge says of him at this time that Marx was reading a tremendous amount and working with unusual intensity, often not going to bed for three or four nights in succession. He was studying the French Revolution, and also the French liberal historians of that period: Mignet, Guizot and Thierry.1 It was in their work that he obtained a new and fundamental insight into the driving force of historical development which became fundamental to his whole position and which he had never understood before.

1 Guizot, the most distinguished of these historians was a remarkable man — historian, statesman and orator, he was the master spirit of Louis Philippe’s administration for eight years, the longest administration and the last which existed under the constitutional monarchy of France. He was a liberal of the extreme right and eventually a conservative. A considerable scholar, he wrote histories of the English Revolution, a study of Cromwell, and a history of the civilisation of Europe and of France. As a statesman he was the opponent of Thiers and confronted his political enemy with indomitable courage and elo¬ quence.

Thierry was a disciple of Saint-Simon and supported the July revolution. Ilis historical work deals with the Third Estate, the rise of the French Commune, the Norman Conquest, and the English parliamentary struggle against Charles 1.

Mignet, the friend of Thiers, wrote a History of the French Revolution in support of the liberal cause.

44

THE LITE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

The French historians, looking at the history of Europe, both empirically and as liberals who supported the Revolution of 1789, found something far more concrete, understandable and convincing than Hegel’s development of the Idea in a sequence of historical epochs — tjie conflict of class interests. When in the course of history the bourgeoisie were struggling to assert their supremacy they had no reluctance in explaining in such terms what was happening. They spoke of the class struggle with enthusiasm; they were not horrified at the thought of revolution: “God gave justice to men only at the price of struggle”, said Thiers in his History of the French Revolution.

Thierry reached the same conclusion in his essay on The French Revolution. The war was started and maintained, he argued, “for positive interests; the rest was only pretext or appearance”. Political revolutions, he argued, arc the consequence of the struggle of classes fighting for their positive economic intcrestsTPropcrtv relations are the bases' of political movements.

Marx always insisted that the economic basis of historical change was not his discovery, but that he learnt it from Guizot’s theories which threw a flood of light on the problem which had been engaging him in his essays on Hegel and his reflections on the rising revolutionary movement in Europe. It was not the appearance of a new idea in the political form that inspired revolutionary change, as if dialectical logic could itself produce it, but the actual struggle of masses of people against misery and oppression. Nor was this enough, for there had been such misery in every age. When does such a movement actually arise in a form so effective as to bring about a revolutionary change in society? Of course the conditions must be such as to provide the opportunity and constitute the necessity; “ripeness is all”. But what are these conditions and how do they ripen?

To this question the French historians had no answer. If political and revolutionary struggle depends on property relations and a clash of interests, on what do these in their turn depend? The answer that Marx was to give depended on what he was now to learn about the development of industrialism from Friedrich Engels and from his profound study of French socialism.

Arriving in Paris with no knowledge of socialism at the time that Engels was turning to communism, Marx admits that he was following in Engels’ footprints when the overwhelming importance of the doctrines of the great French socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier dawned upon him.

MARX IN PARIS

45

EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM

The founders of French socialism grew up under the influence of the too-confident optimism which characterised the early stages of the Revolution of 1789. They had excessive faith in the possibilities of human progress and perfectibility; they knew little of the true laws of social revolution. “To crude conditions of capitalist production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. The solu¬ tion of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in un¬ developed economic conditions, the utopian attempted to evolve out of the human brain.”1 But it is foolish to treat their work with derision. “For ourselves,” says Engels, “we dchght in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their covering of fantasy.” What were these illuminating thoughts?

Comte Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), the founder of French socialism, saw the whole course of history as the progress of mankind in the satisfaction of its various needs through the development of technology. Human institutions arise to correspond to the requirements of a particular stage of invention and production, therefore the insti¬ tutions of past ages must not be condemned out of hand, since they came into existence to function under particular historical conditions. jjSociety is in constant change ; periods of consolidation give place to periods of criticism and destruction. And in every age there are the people who matter, who represent what is coming, and the people who don’t, who represent what is dying away. In our day we are entering a new scientific age, which will mean a new industrial age, and to correspond with it we shall sec new people arising, scientifically qualified and equipped, created by the advance of technology^

This demands a total reorganisation of society: politics will give way to economics and the government of man will be replaced by the administration of things. All idlers, parasites, speculators and swindlers will be eliminated — “All men ought to work”. The waste of com¬ petition will give way to planning and co-operation, and the new society will look after the welfare of its people.

The system of Francois Fourier, born in 1772, was in many respects different from that of Saint-Simon. If the latter represents the principle of authority, Fourier stressed the importance of local and individual freedom, and advocated a delightful but impracticable system of

1 Engels, Anti-Diihring.

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

46

decentralised utopian communities, with co-operative output and individual choice of labour. Fourier regarded with dismay “the frenzy of speculation, the spirit of all-devouring commercialism”, which the reign of the bourgeoisie had introduced, belying all the promises of the revolution. The new abundance provided by the machines had led only to an increase in poverty. But in the poverty of the working class he saw only poverty, he did not see the revolutionary possibilities in it.

For the last ten years of his life he waited in his apartment at noon every day for the wealthy capitalists who should supply the means for the realisation of his scheme.

In England this form of utopian socialism was represented by Robert Owen, a successful cotton manufacturer, philanthropist and educa¬ tional reformer, -who believed that the way to make people good was to give them a good environment and education. This he proceeded to do for his own 2,500 employees in New Lanark (1800-29). The machine, said Owen, now makes it possible for my 2,500 workers to produce as much as 600,000 hand workers. Where does the surplus go? It should raise the standard, physical and spiritual, of the whole working population. Owen fought for the new Factory Acts. He was President of the First Congress of Trade Unions. He advocated consumers’ and producers’ co-operativcs and Labour Banks in which the currency consisted of cheques for the amount of work each man had done. Finally, disappointed at the failure of the authorities to accept his scheme, he set up model communist societies, which inevitably failed. His great contribution to socialist thought was the realisation that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution. Engels describes him as “a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. . . . Every social movement every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of Robert Owen.”

FRIEDRICH ENGELS

It was through Engels that Marx became acquainted with Robert Owen’s work and the political and industrial struggles of the British working class. Engels was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, who owned mills in Barmen and Manchester — the first in the Rhine¬ land to install British machines. His son was intended to enter the business and it was proposed that after his military service he should go to Manchester where the firm of Ermen and Engels had established their British branch. The young Engels was a man of great natural

MARX IN PARIS

47

charm, with a wide range of friendships. Musical, a lover of literature and the arts, he combined these accomplishments with a considerable grasp of philosophy.

He came to Berlin in the spring of 1841 to serve his year in the Army. The Young Hegelians welcomed him, and he became one of the boldest radicals among them. When the Rheinische Zeitung was launched he became a contributor, audit was in the offices of the journal in Cologne that he first met Marx. Their first meeting was not parti¬ cularly cordial. Marx, who was at that time at odds with the Young Hegelians in Berlin, may well have thought that Engels shared their views. It was not until they met in Paris after the suppression of the paper that they came thoroughly to understand one another.

When his term of military service was up in 1842, Engels was duly despatched to Manchester. He did not neglect his business there, but he became deeply interested in British industrial conditions and very quickly reached the point of associating himself closely with militant trade unionism and the advanced political movements oi the time. He became familiar with the work of Robert Owen; he read the revolu¬ tionary journals Northern Star and The New Moral World, and he knew the Chartist and socialist leaders, John W atts and George Julian Har¬ ney. He made a thorough study of the political economists of the day, particularly Ricardo. He was thus in a position to acquaint Marx when he next met him in Paris with the picture of an advanced industrial economy.

It is not surprising that when he met Hess, who was a fervent socialist, on his next visit to Cologne, he left Hess a passionate communist”.

When he came to Paris in 1843 he had reached very definite con¬ clusions. He was shocked by “the brutal indifference, the unfeeling egotism” of his business acquaintances, “each concentrated on his own private interests”.1 He believed that all real social progress in England could be attributed to Robert Owen and the Chartists. But while he admired the Chartists, he found them too confident of the effectiveness of politics and insufficiently aware of the importance of economics and the trade union movement.

Before he left England2 he wrote two important essays for the Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrhucher. The first was his Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, and is an introduction to the theories of Ricardo

1 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. a Late 1843 to January 1844.

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

MARX IN PARIS

49

48 _

and Adam Smith, which attempted to explain the contradictions of bourgeois economics from their source in private property. He pointed out the inhuman effects of competition and the failure of advancing industrialism to emancipate humanity, so that “the people starve from sheer abundance”. As a result, he declares, we have that “hideous blasphemy against nature and humanity”, the Malthusian theory of population, which argued that poverty results from over¬ population.

|It was this essay that opened the eyes of Marx for the first time to the economic structure of capitalism and the contradictions which arise in an acquisitive society based on private property!!

Engels’ second contribution to the Jahrbiicher described the social situation in England on the basis of Carlyle’s Past and Present. He draws attention to Carlyle’s caustic comments on the paradox of over¬ production and under-consumption; but is amazed that so powerful a mind cannot sec that all these evils are rooted in the institution of private property. Engels secs clearly that the only solution of the econo¬ mic problem is for men to produce consciously as men and not as atomised individuals without social consciousness. “The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means at its disposal, and in the light of the relationship of this productive power to the mass of consumers it will determine how it has to raise or lower production, how far it has to give way to, or curtail luxury.”1 f' Engels returned to Germany in August 1844, travelling home through Paris. It was now that he really cjyne to know Marx, and their friendship was never afterwards broken.\Thc two men complemented one another — Marx was more profound and searching in his thoughts ; brilliance and obscurity are often fused together in his writing. Engels wrote rapidly and lucidly, his phrases run unhesitatingly, but he always acknowledged that Marx had the master mind. Yet at this time it was Engels who taught Marx the importance of economics, showed him on what battlefield the decisive struggle was to be fought out, and ^helped him to know the living realities of the world of industryTJ

When Marx left Germany for Paris he had declared that his aim was to make the petrified conditions dance by singing to them their own tunc”. He meant that within the conditions which appeared incapable of movement were actual forces maturing and developing ; but something was necessary to make them effective. They must be brought to consciousness and to the recognition of the significance

1 Engels, Outline of a Critique of Political Economy.

f their own movement. Engels showed Marx how this was to come about. None of the French socialists could conceive of the workers themselves acting as an independent force. Most socialists looked upon the workers as a sore or as a pitiful mass whose sufferings were to be alleviated by appeals to benevolence, or reason, or such denuncia¬ tions as Carlyle and Ruskin made so eloquently. They even thought of stopping the development of industry, of doing what was possible to turn the wheel of history backwards so as to abolish the proletariat. Marx and Engels now began to base all their hope on its continuous growth. Their aim was “to teach the working class to knowjgglf, 'Tr m be conscious of itself and to put science in the place of dreams”.1

Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in Bar- men in the winter of 1844-45. He was perhaps the first man in the centre of modern industry who had opened his eyes to the significance of these conditions. Most of the book is taken up with a description of the working class in its various strata— factory workers, miners, agri¬ cultural labourers. There is a chapter on the great cities, and an impor¬ tant section on the effect of competition on the proletariat. The book concludes with an enquiry into the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. He now saw the inevitability of revolutionary' struggle if the effects of commercial crisis were allowed to drive the workers to action; “if the bourgeoisie does not pause to reflect”.

Fifty years later (1892) he wrote a new Preface in which he was able to judge how far his diagnosis had proved correct. He may be forgiven if at the age of twenty-four his enthusiasm sometimes over¬ came him, but as he says, “The wonder is not that a good many of these prophecies proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right.” Once again he declared that a worsening of conditions and immediate collapse of the system was by no means inevitable. There can be temporary improvements which arc lost, however, when unemployment worsens, and even permanent improvements for factory workers and trade unionists; but for those outside the unions things are bound to get worse.2 In fact, during the period of England s industrial monopoly, the working class has shared in its benefits, hence the slow growth of socialism. But what will happen when that monopoly breaks down? Then we shall see socialism in England.

1 Lenin : Friedrich Engels.

2 Marx also in later years, contrary to what is often stated, qualified his antici¬ pation of “increasing misery” by making due allowances for countervailing tendencies such as trade union pressure.

50

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

lie doubted, however, whether the bourgeoisie would ever gc farther than futile middle-of-the-road reforms. “The prejudices of a whole class cannot be laid aside like an old coat.” But if the revolution must come, its pains may be mitigated to the extent that the proletariat has absorbed socialist and communist elements. “If, indeed, it were I possible to make the whole proletariat communists ... the end would be very peaceful”; meanwhile, he anticipated “enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communist party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal elements of the revolution and prevent a ‘Ninth Thcrmidor’.”1 This is so because communism goes far beyond the mere bitterness and exasperation which are the feelings of the enraged but uncompre¬ hending populace. £The communist, while fully aware of the cruelties of capitalism, knows perfectly well that the individual capitalist cannot act otherwise under existing circumstances than he docs act/'moreovcr, in a sense, the communist stands above the strife bctweerThourgcoisie and proletariat”, in the midst of which there may be recognised “only its historic significance for the present, but not its justification for the future , since the aim. of communism is not rn rreatc class antagonism (that dogsjLotJaaye to Te. created by communists since it is created, fostered and fomented by capitalism!. but to do away with ir, by going forward to socialism. Of course communism is now the essential instrument for social change, but its aim is the deliverance of humanity, the emancipation of society at large, and it is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, hi his later preface Engels points out that however true this is, it lias little chance of convincing the wealthy. Although therefore (as Marx and Engels were m rep^ m The Communist Manifesto), some few of the better elements will .billjdiC^orkcrs, the revolution jyill have to he prepared and fought out by the working class itself.

M-n-n. -W.a.' ngyqfc a utopian : his Hegelian outlook made him immune to all eternal truth and final social forms. But there was utopian think- mg in Engels until Marx explained to him the meaning of political and social conflicts. His early writing on economics and his Condition of the Working Class, powerful and important though they were, are in the same category as the writings of Proudhon and Robert Owen. They all sought to expose the contradictions of the economic system, not in order to discover in them the hidden force making for the progress of society, but to condemn them in the name of justice. But 1 Ninth Thermidor, the fall of Robespierre, July 27, 1794.

MARX IN PARIS

5 1

Engels found the solution of the social problem in Marx, whom he rewarded with a lifelong friendship and devotion. Marx for his part had been thinking in too philosophical, too general terms. Now the various concepts with which he had been working, even the concept of the proletariat, are filled with the content of experience, the actual blood and tears of the working-class movement. “Theory without practice is empty, and practice without theory is blind.” Now theory and practice had found 011c another. Marx now saw clearly that the Hegelian system as he understood it was working itself out before his ver\' eyes in the most actual and dramatic fashion. At this moment Marxism comes to life, Marxism is born.

Marx believed that what was desirable and historically possible could be significantly determined only when it was thus related to the actual. The advent of socialism depends upon the gradual emergence of the objective conditions of its feasibility. These arc bound up with the development of the economic system. Man can realise his aims only with the material that society provides him with. Marx now knew Tiow, when and under what conditions socialism could be realised.

It is his conception of human emancipation that inspires him. He hates the fetters that pervert the practical and spiritual life of man and is seeking always how to overcome the barriers that lie in the way of achievement of “human society or social humanity”. This passionate belief in the dignity of man was the abiding inspiration of his life.

The two years Marx spent in Paris were fruitful. Not only did he write some of the most searching and constructive of his theoretical works, but he was fortunate in being able to meet on terms of equality and friendship a number of distinguished figures who were in a certain sense his equals. This was not to last. The counter-revolution on the continent broke up these progressive circles and disheartened all but the most convinced. Among those he met and knew in Paris were Proudhon, Bakunin, Hcrwegh, Hess, Heine and, of course, Arnold Ruge. The intellectual world in Paris was dazzling, almost confusing in its richness of ideas and pregnant with the socialist ideal. In London Marx was unable to find any group among whom he could move in this way, exchanging views, discussing theories.

Marx had a great love for the poets and he became the warm friend of Heine, encouraging him while during the year 1844 he was writing his Winter Fables, the Song of the Weavers, and his famous satires on the German Government. He knew Heine for a fighter, whereas so many other literary figures were to collapse in the face of

52

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

opposition and persecution. Heine for His part glories in the fact that the working-class movements could claim great philosophers like Marx as leaders.

Heine’s satires had appeared in the Paris Vorwdrts, to which Marx had also contributed a reply to a scurrilous article by Ruge attacking him; and the Berlin Government, stung to fury, then intervened and per¬ suaded Guizot to expel the editors and contributors from France. Guizot secured the exception of Heine, but Marx and Bakunin had to go.

Marx was expelled from Paris in January 1845. He packed his bags, and, with his wife and his one-year-old daughter Jenny, set out for Brussels. There Engels joined him and they lived next door to each other in a working-class suburb. Never again did they work in such close contact as in these years before the revolution of 1848, when they were working out their final position in economics, in philosophy and in practical politics.

5

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS

Marx arrived in Paris at the end of October 1843 and was expelled on January 16th, 1845, reaching Brussels with his family in February of the same year. During these months, Marx wrote not only his articles for the Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrhiicher (the Franco-German Yearbooks), but a number of contributions to the German paper Vorwdrts, the actual occasion of his expulsion, and a series of important Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,1 known under this title or more shortly as the ‘Paris Manuscripts’. These essays cover three closely inter¬ related topics : firstly we sec him grappling with the economic problem in a scries of studies of Wages, Profit, Competition and Rent, which almost certainly followed his reading of Engel’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (late 1843): secondly, his thinking centres around the problem of estrangement or alienation, of the depcrsonalisation of man under the wage system: finally he relates this topic to Hegel’s study of The Phenomenology of Mind, being particularly moved by the idea that estrangement is a phase of the dialectical process, and that by experiencing and overcoming it man creates his own self and then fulfils himself as man. But Marx parted company with Hegel. He was not concerned with alienation in the strictly Hegelian sense but with its role in the contemporary world, especially in relation to man’s economic and social position under capitalism. It should be remembered that during this period he began those studies of economics which continued until 1853. His notebooks are filled with excerpts from and commentaries upon the works of the principal writers upon economic subjects in England, France and Germany. We have already mentioned his Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philo¬ sophy of Law and his article on The Jewish Question, which was really a study of the Hegelian doctrine of the state. These works, taken together, mark the first creative phase of the work of Marx.

1 The early writings of Marx were published as early as 1912 in the four volumes of Mchring’s Nachlass. The first English translation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts appeared in 1959-

54

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

It is important to note that during this time Engels was writing his Condition of the Working Class in England and contributed his essay- review on Carlyle’s Past and Present to the Jahrbiicher. The first of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts follow immediately from his conversion to the economic field of study, and it is from a new and intense realisation of the situation of the wage-earner under capitalism that he passes over to the study of alienation. If we wish to find the link, it will of course be Carlyle’s fierce denunciation of the reduction of all human relation¬ ships to that of '‘the cash-nexus” to which Engels had drawn attention in his review. Carlyle had launched a forthright and eloquent attack on “the dismal science” of political economy as it was then presented by James Mill, MacCulloch and other leading economists. “Supply and demand is not the Law of Nature: Cash Payment is not the sole nexus of man with man — how far from it!” From the pursuit of monetary aims man wall utterly fail to achieve happiness. “Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred, isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men discern that the thing which he attain, however golden it look or be, is not success, but the want of success ... We, with our Mammon Gospel have come to strange conclusions. We call it a society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness, but rather, cloaked under due laws of war named ‘competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.”1

^t was the purpose of Marx to show that the normal operation of the economic system necessarily produced an impersonal mechanism, which, created by man, now became his mastcrj Hegel had long pondered the fact that men seemed to have been ncreft of their per¬ sonality — “Spirit estranged from itself” — and his whole philosophy sought to explain it and the ultimate resolution of the contradiction. Marx ridiculed all attempts to explain it in these terms. His concern was not with alienation as a process within an abstract conceptual system but with the actual and concrete conditions of economic life under capitalism; not as idealistic socialists would make it out to be, but as the capitalist economists themselves insisted that it was.

The money economy was a system in which above all things labour is bought and sold and embodied in a commodity that man has produced, which therefore contains something of himself, and becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him. Even the instruments of labour, machines, confront the worker as 1 Carlyle: Past and Present.

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS

55

nacre mechanism that dominates and pumps dry his living labour

^ Iii his later work Marx completed his study of the labour process of which this is but the beginning. When in the exposition of his developed system he describes labour-power as a commodity ^ that its possessor, the worker, surrenders up to capital and declares: The exercise of labour-power, labour, is the worker s own life-activity, his own life expression. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather the sacrifice of his life.”1 This is but the picture of alienated labour in the Manuscripts of 1 844. This splitting of man, he points out, we also sec in the separation of the interests of the individual from those of the community, and in the separation of intellectual and manual activities. Moreover, this economic process brings into existence destructive economic forces of the market, of overproduction, of economic crises, which men can neither understand nor control — “an utterly alien power, an inhuman force” that holds sway over the whole of human existence.2

It has sometimes been stated that in his later work Marx abandoned this criticism of the destructive effect of capitalism on human person¬ ality: a view that suggests lack of familiarity with Capital. Here what was originally described as the passion of greed is not denied but emphasised and expanded. The inhumanity of capitalism is drawn with a descriptive powder far surpassing that shown in the Paris Manu¬ scripts. The only difference is that he speaks of wage-labour instead of alienated labour— the latter term having lost its currency. Capital shows with even greater force, because it is now set before us con¬ cretely with a great mass of factual data, man being dehumanised and destroyed by a tyrannical force of acquisitiveness that is part of his

nature as capitalist man. _

How is this to be overcome? In the Paris Manuscripts, as in all his later work, he declares that the problem is “to organise the empirical world in such a manner that man experiences in it the truly human, becomes accustomed to experience himself as a man, to assert his true

1 Marx, Capital, Vol. I. .... r

2 Professor Hayck in his defence of the economics of capitalism in a tree society declares that men must discipline themselves to accept “the anonymous and irrational forces of society. . . . Craving for intelligibility produces illusory demands which no svstem can satisfy”, and he deplores the increasing unwilling¬ ness to bow before any moral rules whose utility cannot be rationally demon¬ strated” ( Individualism : True and False).

50 THF, LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

Individuality”. This will only be possible where the. means pf_prodiir. don are communally and not privately owned, which provides th» basis for genuinely co-operative human relations and a society that i<; really human.

Nor is it the case, as has frequently been alleged, that in his later writings Marx abandons his early concern for the full development of the individual — “the unfolding of man”. On the contrary he con¬ tinued to believe that only common ownership can restore the human relations in industry so that “all the faculties and powers of the individual are developed”. It is in Capital that he speaks of “the self-realisation of the person” and of “fully developed human beings”.1 One could without difficulty find hundreds of statements in Capital which express Marx’s deep concern, for the value of the individual and his consistent determination “to overthrow all conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, despised and rejected being”.2

It is not individualism that fulfils the individual, on the contrary it destroys him. Society is the necessary framework through which freedom and individuality are made realities, but not, as Hegel thought, society as such, as found in the state, but only a socialist society. Marx emphatically declared that “above all one must avoid setting ‘society’ up again as an abstraction opposed to the individual” (as Hegel had done). “The individual is the social entity. His life is therefore an expression, a verification of social life.”3

It was in his article on The Jewish Question* that Marx raised once again a question he had first dealt with as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. In his defence of the rights of the Rhineland peasantry he had severely criticised the governing authority known as the Diet which represented the “state” and claimed to represent the good of society and its members, standing as an impersonal authority above the interests of any particular section of the people. This is the Hegelian conception of the state. This is “a great organism in which legal, moral and political freedom receives its realisation, and in which the individual citizen obeys, in obeying the laws of state, only the natural laws of his own reason”.

But as Marx saw clearly at this time, the privileged classes, who held all real economic and political power in their own hands, had no difS-

1 Lenin also speaks of socialism as not merely “the method of adding to the efficiency of production, but the only method of producing fully developed human beings” (Lenin, Karl Marx).

2 Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.

3 Paris MSS. 4 Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrhiicher.

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS 57

culty in persuading themselves that the state, which was in fact serving their interests at the expense of the workers, really represented the interests of “the community”. Now he takes up the same question on the basis of his wider experience and deeper knowledge. ^

The aim of his essay was to deal with Bruno Bauer s contention advanced in a book he had just published on the Jewish question, that if both Christians and Jews would give up their religious prejudices, then political emancipation would follow because Christians and Jews would then be free men and at last able to establish a free political

system. . , ,

Marx was not interested in Jewish questions as such. His lather had

early emaniepated himself from Jewish orthodoxy and became nominally a Christian. The elder Marx always regarded himself as a German rather than a Jew, as did Marx himself. His whole upbringing and education was moulded by the German liberal and intellectual tradition. It is in vain that we search his works for traces of any specific Jewish attitude or sentiments. Therefore when Marx replied to Bruno Bauer the problem he dealt with was not primarily a religious but a social one. “We do not turn secular questions into theological questions: we turn theological questions into secular ones. Religious prejudices remain even where, as in the United States, political Jiberty is found. Why is this? It is because ofthe nature of the state. Religion flourishes as a manifestation of social defects within a democratic state. “We explain the religious backwardness of free citizens in terms of their social narrowness in order to abolish their social fetters. We assert that they will abolish their religious narrowness as soon as they abolish their social fetters. . . . The limits of political emancipation are evident in that the state can free itself from its fetters without men getting really free of it. The state can be a free state, without man becom¬ ing a free man.”1

The emancipation of us all, Christians and Jews alike, depends on our emancipation from the rule of money, of the commercial spirit, and the twisted ideas and irrational prejudices it gives rise to.2 It is never enough to argue against religion. Deep at the heart of society is quite another god than that of religion itself— money has dethroned ail the

gods. .

But if “the state can be a free state without man becoming a tree

1 Marx, The Jewish Question. .

2 Marx hastened to add that of course wc are right in advocating the immediate

extension of civil rights to Jews.

58 THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MAllX

man”, what is the cause of this contradiction? It lies in the doub] existence of man. In his real life, in his work, his practical relations man is a member of “civil society”, he is governed by private interest' by egoism. It is only in his political aspect, as a member of the state' that he appears as a social being. But these two aspects are governed by opposite principles. This state in which theoretically, ideally abstractly, he is an integrated member of a society in which he can fulfil himself, is only a dream, an imaginary heaven. There remains a basic contradiction within man in society as a competitive individual estranged from others and from himself, the victim of inhuman pressures, so that he is only the abstract citizen. Human emancipation has not yet been achieved even though a constitutional state exists, nor will it be finally achieved until man becomes in his economic relations not a warring atom but a social being. His private resources must become social forces. Of course, “Political emancipation is a great step forward. It is not, indeed, the last form of human emanci¬ pation, but it is the last form of human emancipation within the existing social order.” But it is the existing order itself that must now be changed.

Marx again makes clear the importance he attaches to the rejection of all forms of society where man is subject to conditions which he cannot control and which do not express the common interest of humanity. He had yet to discover how the transition is to be effected, what state of economic development prepares the ground and make necessary the advance to socialism, and above ail what human forces, what sections of society, will be called upon to effect this revolutionary change. He was to move nearer to an answer in his second article in the Deutsche-Franzdsischen Jahrbiicher, “The Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”.1 Here the central problem is the relation between theory and practice, ideas and reality; and in it for the first time Marx defines the alliance between the philosopher and the proletariat. The article sparkles with phrases which have become some of the most precious jewels of Marxism.

He begins by raising once again the question of religion. This was by no means a secondary question for Marx, because religion was the inevitable creation by the troubled mind of man in a topsy-turvy world

1 Marx had already written a critical review of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, commenting paragraph by paragraph on the sections dealing with the state (this was published in 1927, but there is no English translation). In 1842 Marx wrote an essay on it, but this has been lost. All that we have is his Introduction to such a Critique.

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS

“All the mysteries which drive thoughts towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this

K ”1

practice.

Hegel had made man and the world the emanation of pure Idea. Feuerbach had declared that man had depersonalised himself by projecting his essential manhood onto the deity. He contended that thought does not create man, but proceeds from man, who creates God in his thoughts by attributing to God all that he could be but is not. To enrich God he becomes poor. Bereft of all the ideal attributes that are conceived to belong not to him but to God, man has nothing left of value in himself. It seemed to Feuerbach that the only escape from this deprived condition would be the emancipation of man from religion. Thus man would bring back the qualities he had projected into heaven and actualisc them in himself as a human being.

This is where Marx takes up the argument. Is man’s unhappy con¬ dition really the result of an intellectual or psychological error? Or is the truth that, finding himself impoverished, deprived, estranged for quite other reasons — social and economic — he consoles himself by creating an imaginary wTorld of his lost happiness?

It is man asjxploited who is bereft of his manhood, of his personality. And he will continue to console himself with the idealisation of his own humanity in God so long as he remains in servitude. Therefore, to start with removing the religious illusion, which has always been the aim of rationalists and secularists, hoping that by so doing man will recover his full human personality, is to put the cart before the horse.

It is not religion that makes man a degraded being; it is be- cause man is degraded that he consoles ihmseh with religion. “Religion”, said Marx, “is precisely the self-awareness and self- consciousness of man who has not achieved himself, or has lost him¬ self.” Society produces religion, “the topsy-turvy world conscious¬ ness of a topsy-turvy world”. It is the imaginary realisation of human perfection, necessary because in our world the fulfilment of human personality is not possible. The struggle against religion is therefore the struggle against the world, ^ protest

against his condition in society. “It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, "the kindliness of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual condition. It is the opium of the people.”

By this Marx docs not mean that man’s oppressors provide him

1 N/Iarv 't'UiXi'c /in Vrurrhorh

6o

THF. LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

with religion to drug him into acquiescence, but that oppressed man turns to religion to enable him to endure life’s ills. It is not even a consolation for his poverty; it is a consolation for his non-humanity it is a substitute for being a fully developed man.

Marx goes on: ‘‘The removal of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for its real happiness. The demand that it should give up illusions about its real conditions is the demand that it should give up the conditions which make illusion necessary. Criticism of religion is therefore at heart a criticism of the vale of misery for which religion is the promised vision. Criticism has torn away the imaginary flowers with which his chains were bedecked, not in order that man should wear his chains without the comfort of illusion, but that he may throw off his chains and pluck the living flowers.” y- What Marx calls for, therefore, is not primarily the emancipation of man by critical thought, but the recon struction~of society. Feuerbach had failed to realise that human relationships, the" com¬ munity, is not characterised by love and friendship but by the anta¬ gonism of classes. Feuerbach could envisage a perfected humanity resulting from an intellectual deliverance from error which would permit man to find himself in comradeship — society being seen as a happy family just waiting to receive him. Marx, on the contrary, saw a society in which men are exploited, in which the very source of their being is corrupted, in which they are stripped of their full personality. Revolutionary reconstruction of society was necessary at one and the same time to establish a truly human society, and banish the illusion of religion.

In the political revolutions which had taken place hitherto, one clpss. raising itself to a dominant position, at the same time undertakes the general emancipation of society. This requires the acceptance of the values of this class by the rest of society. It feels itself the represen¬ tative of the whole of society. At the same time all the defects of society will be felt to be concentrated in the class that is now to be overthrown so that liberation from its rule is felt to be general self-emancipation.

Will any class fulfil this task in Germany? Not until its actual situa¬ tion forces it to do so; but when this is the case that class will be the emerging proletariat, the class which claims no historical right but a human right, a class which cannot emancipate itself without revolu¬ tionising the entire structure of society.

FIcre is that element in society that is tending towards practical- critical activity; and insofar as its aim is a conscious one, the aim of the

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS

6 1

is the philosophical aim of the thinkers. But once it is ceases to be a programme, a plan, a philosophy, since it is a do we liquidate philosophy by realising it.

As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy. Theory itself becomes a material force when it takes hold of the masses; but theory is realised by a people insofar as it is the realisation of the people’s needs.

In the thought of Marx this is the working out of the philosophy of Hegel, who had conceived of the embodiment of reason and freedom in concrete reality, the realisation of philosophical truth, that is to say its embodiment, its manifestation in history, so that it no longer remains a distant, unattained idea or ideal.

All the works of Marx in this period look forward to sociological studies of modern capitalism and the strategy of revolutionary struggle, not backwards to philosophical reflections upon religion or human history. Therefore, the question immediately arises in his mind: What arc wc to do, here in Germany, to change these social conditions? A further question, which is more closely linked with the political problem, may also be asked: What is the importance of philosophy in relation to the social and political struggle?

There is a peculiar situation in Germany, Marx replies. Conditions arc backward, they are “beneath the level of history ’. Only in philo¬ sophy has Germany moved forward; but this is because the Germans have thought in politics what other people have done”. Nevertheless, this philosophising is by no means without significance. It is the “theoretical consciousness” of the other peoples. German history, broken off fifty years ago in politics, has in philosophy continued up to the present. “German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history.” If Germany has to pass beyond her backward political and social position, she certainly possesses that advance already in her philosophy. The task now is not, as the philistines vainly declare, to abandon philosophy and continue German political existence from where it is, but to see in contemporary philosophy the living reality of Germany and the programme for the future. It has to be realised not abandoned— and that is the way in which philosophy will be abolished.

But how' arc we to realise this philosophy, seeing that the German bourgeoisie has long since missed the occasion for political advance seized by the French bourgeoisie in 1789 and by the British before that? The German bourgeoisie can no longer genuinely represent humanity.

proletariat realised it <

fact. Thus

62

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

j/d&tL-

fvCdlJf'

But there has been born another class which can — the proletariat jThus Marx arrives at his programme for emancipation. The pro. letariat is already there, and alone can now claim to represent humanity and bring to its own redemption that high sense of the justice of its claims which is necessary for a successful revolution^

“The proletariat is the actual dissolution of the old world order. For when the proletariat demands the abolition of private property, it only establishes as the principle of the whole society what is its own social principle.”1 But how was it that Marx came to understand the political role of the proletariat? Undoubtedly, an important contri¬ bution to his thinking came from Lorenz von Stein, a conservative Hegelian, who had been commissioned to study the new French doctrines of socialism and communism. His study2 commenced with Babcuf and at once drew attention to the emergence of a new and ‘dangerous class’ in the French revolution, the propertyless mass, which bore within itself the seeds of the total overthrow of European society founded on the principle of property. Marx’s concept of the role of the proletariat undoubtedly derives from Stein ./He endows this class with the very attributes Stein had seen in it. It is proud, resentful and defiant, possessing that “revolutionary valour which hurls in the face of the adversary the insolent challenge — I am nothing but I shall be everything”.3 \

Von Stein "Had been quite right in tracing the proletarian movement back to Babeuf, who stands at the divide between primitive and modern socialism, not charting the details of an ideal society but devising and organising the means for winning and maintaining power. Babeuf appealed directly to the working class of Paris: he developed an elaborate propaganda machine; he formed secret cells in the Army and the police. Since the rich will never voluntarily surrender their power, he said, it must be taken from them by force. Babeuf actually launched his revolt. It failed and Babeuf himself died on the guillotine; but he left an enduring legacy; and it was Marx who inherited it, even though he profoundly modified it. Babeuf’s immediate follower, however, was Blanqui, another conspiratorial socialist, who placed his faith in a putsch accomplished by a small disciplined group of professional conspirators. This surprise assault was to be launched without any

1 Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.

2 Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialisnnis und Cotninunisnuis des heutigen Frankreichs (1S42).

3 Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy if Law.

THE PARIS MANUSCRIPTS

63

reliminary attempt to educate or prepare a large number of workers P support it. Blanqui marks the transition stage from utopian socialism * revolutionary Marxism. Marx and Lenin both thought highly of him and learnt much from him, which Lenin was to make effective use of in Russia in 1917; hut fey totally rejected hisidcaofji^ing class war without the support of. an informed jmd. organised

■TTHffTmffclass movement. .

radical theory is needed. Just as the theory is useless

without the rise of a class to grasp it and embody it, so that class is impotent unless inspired by the idea. “Theory becomes a material

force as soon as it lays hold of the masses. , .

Thus philosophy and the proletariat come together Both drive to the same results, both have the same mtercsts. As philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds m philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning o thought has struck deep into the virgin soil of the people, the Germans will emancipate themselves and become men. 1

1 Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.

6

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

The original division of the Hegelians into the more conservative and the more radical wings, which we may call Right and Left was followed by a division of the Left into a group which followed Feucr- bach, and among these was Marx, while another group consisted of the three Baucrs: Bruno, Edgar and Egbert— the “Holy Family” and their friends. A third tendency was represented by Kaspar Schmidt who under the name of Max Stimcr wrote a book entitled The Ego and Ilts Own (DerEinzige und sein Bigenthum) which was a statement of philosophical anarchism. This was fiercely and exhaustively criticised by Marx in part of the two-volume work known as The German Ideology, which was not published in Marx’s lifetime.

The original left-wing group were known as the Young Hegelians. Instead of emphasising the rationality of existing institutions they adopted a more revolutionary interpretation of the master. If history is the logical, progressive unfolding of absolute reason, all that exists must be incessantly superseded. They emphasised, therefore, the element of process in Hegel’s thought.

Three outstanding Young Hegelians played an important part in the development of Marx’s thought: David Strauss, who regarded Spirit as the unconscious myth-making power of the collective mind and interpreted Christianity in this sense; Bruno Bauer, one of Marx’s best friends for many years, who concentrated his efforts on changing the minds of men by criticism, holding that all social evils were due to the failure to grasp essential truth. He held that existence depends on consciousness, and that it was the function of criticism to purge the nnnd of error; Feuerbach, was the third. He regarded himself as a naturalist and a humanist, reversed Bauer’s position and held that the spiritual world is a creation of the imagination, a projection of human needs or their compensatory fulfilment.

MOSES HESS

One of the close friends of Marx whom Feuerbach profoundly influenced was Moses Hess; a Rhinelander of Jewish descent. It was

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS 65

Hess who threw open the world of socialism to Marx and Engels. Deeply influenced by Spinoza and Fichte, as well as by Hegel, his hi|osophy was eclectic, with ever-changing emphasis. When Feuer¬ bach showed him that man created an imaginary world of the spirit, and thus reduced himself to a deprived or alienated condition, Hess realised that the French socialists, Saint-Simon and Fourier, had in their turn revealed the fact that this deprived condition was due to exploita¬ tion. Thus Hess sought to complete the philosophical revolution of Feuerbach with the social revolution which alone could make Feuer¬ bach’s restoration of human self-consciousness a reality.

It was this idea that Hess passed on to Marx and Engels. Man, said Hess, had robbed himself of his humanity by turning his labour, his very self, into money-profit for his master. Money is externalised man. Li this process of exploitation both employer and employed are placed in a non-human relationship which can only be changed when men are associated in a co-operative way in production. In our world, said Hess, money has become the practical object of worship for us all. “God is only idealised capital and heaven only the theoretical commer¬ cial world.”

Hess was closely associated with the Rheinische Zeitung and later, in Paris, with the Deutsche-Franzdsische Jahrhiicher, and he it was who con¬ verted Engels to communism. His influence on Marx is plainly seen in the Paris Manuscripts and The Jewish Question. I he god of practical need and self-interest is money. Money dethrones all the gods of man, turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and his being. This alien being rules over him and he worships it.”1

Although Marx later found it necessary to criticise the socialism of Hess, which was called ‘True Socialism’, the latter long remained a close associate of Marx and was active in the First International. Personally, he was a man of singular purity of character— sensitive to every form of injustice, passionate in in his devotion to principles, and almost saintly in his everyday behaviour. He found himself unable to hate even those who had harmed him.

The theme of the power of money took hold of Marx. It appears again in the essay in the Paris Manuscripts on The Power oj Money in Bourgeois Society, and it occupies an important place in Capital. Here 1 Marx, The Jewish Question.

66

THE LIEF, AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

he repeats the argument of the r844 essay in briefer form. The them. • so basic to Marx’s thought that it deserves some attention He relaV* it to the position of women in society. The relationship of the sev shows how far man has become really human. Love is not love i r relics on anything other than the power to evoke a real response. Yon can only exchange love for love, trust for trust. You cannot buy them with gold. Unless you make yourself a loved person through a living expression of yourself, your love is impotent and the relationship you attain is a meaningless one and a tragedy. ^

He quotes the passage in Shakespeare’s Titnon of Athens i a p]av which shows money as the destroyer of social order,' beginning; ‘ '

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods,

I am no idle votarist.

Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,

Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant

Marx expounds it thus: My power is as great as the power of my money Money transforms my incapacity into its opposite. 1 may be unintelligent, but I can buy other peoples’ brains or win honour by my wealth I may be a coward, but I can buy men to fight for me. Uut this is utterly destructive of real social bonds. Every one of your relation¬ ships to men must correspond to something real and tangible m yourself, otherwise we arc left with a system of society divorced from

morality, an authority without responsibility, a power animated solely by self-interest. 7

TRUE SOCIALISM

True Socialism” was a somewhat vague political tendency among a group of literary men who had all been greatly influenced by Feuer-

dp i ThAUW°uTSt !nfluellt,al wcre Hess and Grun, who each developed Ins philosophy in his own way. Hess had been a close

collaborator with Marx, who thought very highly of him. He had gone nuch farther than Feuerbach by tracing man’s deprived condition the evils and injustices of the commercial system and he had derived from Fichte the notion that the philosophy of spirit must become a philosophy of action, that not only human thinking but the whole

^iai1 1 C t0 be llfted onto a pJane on which all radical oppositions would disappear. Fichte had energetically repudiated the arren enlightenment of merely rational criticism interested only in 1 Act 4, Scene 3.

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

67

nwn sapless concepts, and had called attention to the spirit working 4 us, an infinite force, a life, a light, leading towards a new age, a

reH«s™Tdfif revolution historically, from the point of view of Lialism. Ml the great civilised nations appeared to him to be moving towards the overthrow of reactionary authority and the liberation o mankind. In England, he saw the promise of the Chartist movement France the rising power of the socialist ideals of Saint-Simon and Proudhon, and now in Germany, with its bourgeoisie already striving for the defeat of political absolutism and a democratic constitution, there arose the demand for something more than a liberal revolution,

the great ideal of philosophical communism. . , ,,

But from this position he went on to preach the elimination of all conflict between man and man, and class and class. His gui mg Fm ciple was the conception of the true nature of man, man viewed as humanitv. But man cannot live as man until all institutions based on money and private property arc swept away and replaced hy co-operative activity of all individuals for common ends 1 her cfore the socialist movement would not appeal to the proletariat for matetia ends, but to all men in terms of every kin d of ideal gooc

Marx believed that this position was mistaken and had disastrous political consequences. Karl Grun, who largely agreed with Hess, differed from Marx on another, a purely political, issue. Marx saw clearly that in Germany the next item on the agenda of politics wa constitutional reform demanded by the bourgeoisie. He urged all socialists to support this demand even though after it had bee conceded the conflict would inevitably break out between the worker and the bourgeoisie. Marx held that the mam enemy of the movement was the feudal Prussian Government and that a victory for liberalism would represent a partial and temporary gain in the immediate interests of wide strata of the people. Not to fight for this democratic advance argued Marx, is political madness and aids reaction. What then was alternative policy of the True Socialists? It was to explain to the wor¬ kers that the real cause of social distress was economic and that to tight for political rights was a waste of time. What the workers needed wa education as to their real situation; it was to proclaim the ethica ideals of socialism on the basis of true human nature. Socialism wa the only system which was in harmony with human nature as - ideally was! The economic facts which were opening the way to socia - ism were ignored, the whole emphasis was on spiritual enlightenment.

68

the LIFE AND TEACHING of KARL MARX

All the assumptions behind these positions were challenged by Marv n the first place, on the political issue, it was a mistake to f0n0! ' political principles as if they were true under all conditions. Princin]/ are not derived from eternal truths but from actual experience La must be modified as changes occur. The principle of fighting the ourgcoisie at that moment held for France but not for Germany where the bourgeoisie was the most dangerous foe of the reactionary government. To attack it was to play the game of the Prussian mon¬ archy and disrupt the popular movement.

In the second place, Marx criticised their appeal to very general moral ideals as meaningless and ineffectual. A morality that is time¬ less and placeless does not reflect the urgent, actual needs of people and ignores the immediate, concrete means of alleviating their actual condition. General ideals of freedom, brotherhood and\he like can be readily accepted by the bourgeoisie and interpreted to suit their interests— -not hypocritically but quite naturally. The concrete needs of the working class must be the point of departure for its morality. Is this a purely selfish class interest if it wins a decent life first for the whole working class, and ultimately for everyone?

Marx strongly criticised their appeal to “human nature”. This, he said, is not something permanent, as they believed, but changing, t is not abstract human nature which determines the form of society. How could that be so, if human nature were always the same, for the form of society changes radically? On the contrary, it is society and the position one occupies in it that determines human nature. It is our task to remake human nature by changing society.

The political consequences of this view Marx saw as disastrous. The appeal was to be wholly to ideals above all class interests, whereas Marx was convinced that the proletariat must be the agent of social transformation since the advance to socialism was entirely in their interests, though it was also in the interests of society as a whole.1

THE HOLY FAMILY

Mrx pubIishcd a book of 300 pages which he entitled I he Holy Family. It was the first work in which Marx and

ngels collaborated. Engels wrote his part before leaving for Germany m September 1844. During their separation, Marx, who had not yet left Pans, continued to work on it and turned it into a work ofcon-

“Tn,e S°daliSm” " “ The Gemian IM*> The

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

69

•a ,hle size The whole was published in February 1845, in Frankfurt.

“ta target was the Bauer family, an influential group among the 1 r Hegelians who had decided that criticism was the really ®erbn 0 ’ ■ ,4-nncring the world and had launched an attack

journal the General Gazette fir Literature. Now this

°. ... W1c itself subjected to criticism. • 1 r

Bruno Bauer placed his entire emphasis purgrng the rmnd the wav not only to clarification of thought but the over comm* of social evils. He objected to agitation among the working Les and came to regard then parttetpation m events as a source of confusion. Only ideas make history, and these must never he ahow d o be affected by class interests, because tins could otdy concern .r e with particular evils, whereas the teal task concerned principles. Lc Hst y uke care of the casts bound to follow the success of the critical

mplied that this was a profound philosophical error, bound to LTthc acceptance of a world of ideas with an independent existence of Town Tbs could only open the door to supcrnaturaltsm and return to religion-hence he described the Bauers as The Holy Faintly. Marx accuses them of failing to see the close relation facts,

of history to industrial development, as though 1 P

in a world of their own and then made their impact on the workh The meat historical movements have always been determined by mass fntcrest and onlv in so far as ideas represented these could they pre¬ vail ’’ Thus the principles and ideas behind the French Revolution were effective because they corresponded to the class interests of the bour- fo Txhey T of no avail to the masses, altho ugh they had been dressed up 2s eternal prmciples and identified with ®'-rsal hun^ interests. The disappointment of the masses was mevUabk fo he real conditions of their emancipation are radically different from t conditions within which the bourgeoisie can ™anapammdf tmd societv” There is only one way tn which masses can be emancipated and that is when the proletariat abolishes its own poverty, abolishes

Sp“leS defence of Proudhon’s book What is WT^fd he attributed great importance. Proudhon not only foreshadowed Marx’s theory of surplus value hut developed a theory of conflicting dassTTan economic interpretation of history, and he reached the conclusion that “in the multitude of secret causes by which people

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

70

arc agitated, there is none more powerful, more regular and more unmistakable than the periodic explosions of the proletariat against property”. Marx declared that Proudhon was the first to criticise private property, the basis of all developments of political economy even though he tried to solve its problem within the system of private property itself.

EUGENE SUE AND “iHE MYSTERIES OF PARIS”

If Bruno Bauer had deduced human action from independently existing ideas, ideals and principles, much popular thinking follows the same unphilosophical course. An immensely popular novelist in Paris at this time was Eugene Sue, who had a reputation for being a progressive and even a revolutionary writer, and regarded himself as a socialist. His Mysteries of Paris (10 Volumes, 1842-43) narrate the adventures of Rudolf of Geroldstcin, who defends the poor against injustice and misery and attacks the wickedness of capitalism.

Hie book had been warmly praised by a friend of Bruno Bauer who wrote an enthusiastic interpretation of it— a singular example of the way life can avenge itself upon abstract thought. The hero shows how idealism and benevolence uplift and redeem the fallen. Marx criticises the philosophy behind these volumes because it attributes all effective human actions to principles of humanity which are abstractions from experience. As with Bauer and the Hegelians, first the abstractions arc created from experience and then the abstractions are treated as transcendental realities from which experience is derived. Marx points out that the characters in Eugene Sue’s novel thus become puppets of words, abstractions, principles and moral ideals, and have no integrity, no authenticity.

If, like these philosophers, says Marx, we reduce concrete things which we know well, real fruits— apples, pears, grapes— to the concept of fruit, and hold that this concept, existing apart from them, consti¬ tutes their essence, we make this concept the substance of the real fruits, and make the real fruits mere modes of existence of the concept. From now on what is essential in the apple or pear is not its real being but the concept or abstract idea we have substituted for it. It is io\\ ever, not as easy as some philosophers suppose to show how abstractions can bring into existence actual fruits in their particular variety. This is to try to conjure real rabbits from metaphysical top-hats.

In other words, philosophical speculation first converts real objects into concepts and then recreates them as expressions of the concept,

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

real l made a mystery, and the mystery arbrtranly tncar- = Se at aU, hut only the

richly illustrated from history.

LUDWIG FEUERBACH Feuerbach, th-on of an ^

By^SsoTt ™ dsrr that m

disagreement with the f|)n, ofchristhmly was the occasion

marked him as a radica , - - ^ j outlook of the

Of a philosophical revolution and changcdAe ent.re^^ ^ ^

Young Hegelians. He met - • > - • d n a voluminous

tation grew and his influence spread He earned on correspondence wuh leaders o< : drought 1Wtohave

It has been said that Feuerbach was H corrcction.

a Feuerbach; his whole system n«dd ^ ^

Feuerbach s criticism of the p 1 • , mistaken in holding

minds in Germany at that rime was that Hegel « nrutaken m g

that the world was an emanation of “man who'se frustrations rrary, the primary the realm of

Feuerbach reduced Absolute Sfjr^ ^ ^ ^

the foundation of nature . • 1 1. an became at once

Young HegeWi ^hmrasmwas g ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ frccdom rSeiighthis ‘brook of fire ” </--«), was the emphatic judgment of Marx Wr^t overestimated. In him

the LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

72

conception of a predetermined historical process. “Who”, said Marx

rh tniCnd ^ dljlectics of concepts, to the war of the Gods’

that the philosophers alone knew? Feuerbach. Who placed man in

stead of the former rubbish, driving away with the same stroke the infinite consciousness? Feuerbach, Feuerbach alone.”1

How much Marx owed to Feuerbach we realise when we remember that according to Feuerbach, God is the image of man; according to Marx, the sentiment and ideas of men arc the reflections of their conditions of existence. According to Feuerbach, the history of the gods .s the celestial repetition of the earthly progress of man; according » Marx hnman history is a reflection of the conditions of production ^ ,helc both tbe ,nitlal Ac revolution in thought whereby m total contrast to German philosophy, which descends from Heaven to earth we here ascend from earth to heaven”, and the advance far beyond that original idea.

rri!" the Tr8 !itS Marx had writtcn down the fct draft of his ft M ° • a“el f ” tl,e c,eTCn thescs “V discovered by Engels

Feucrf T 5 dCM' ^ ^ TheSCS' haVing poi'lted out thc defects of Feuerbach s undlalecncal matcrialism-that is, the mistake of treating

the mind of man as the passive recipient of sense-impressions whereas

m fret man constantly interacts with his environment and apprehends

the external world in terms of his present intentions, knowledg7

basic needs and level of technological development— Marx proceeds

to crmcise his conception of the nature of man. Feuerbach seems always

to consider man m thc abstract, as a manifestation of the “essence of

humanity ; but man is never abstract but always actual man, at a

particular stage of technological development and constituted by it

always 1„ a particular historical form of social relationships. Feuerbach’

constdermg man as such , can only see man as an isolated individual!

c as the same at any time and under whatever conditions

““ m“'S aCtual llfe' which is one Z„2f exp'01tatl0nyd al‘~> fie has no real explanation of the ahenated condition and therefore no remedy but the purely mental one of dispelling the religious illusion which he imagines 'to be its

2 SU°td ’I1 R MflrinS’s Nachlass von Karl Marx, etc. slip- "SsT a fmiIrd ^ pnbSLtl more polished

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

73

ruise. But once wc sec that it is in a class-divided society that man is robbed of his humanity, we can see that thc way to restore his humanity is to overcome the class di vision of society. Thus thc present condition of man ‘‘must be theoretically criticised and radically changed m prac¬ tice” If we consider thc true nature of man as constituted by his social activity and social relationship, we have risen above the notion of the isolated individual as he exists in society today and arrive at thc

true conception of socialised humanity.

Marx concludes his Theses by pointing out that hitherto “philosophers have only sought to interpret the world in various ways: thc point, however, is to change it”. Thus both Feuerbach and Hegel provide explanations of thc human condition which offer us no consolation except that of removing thc illusions which concea reality. With that reality, as seen correctly, wc have to be satisfice . The alteration is in our attitude to thc situation. Marx, on thc other hand, points out that the evils of human life have to be removed m reality by changing thc world, that is to say, by changing the pattern

of social relationships. . . . . , .

Feuerbach never investigated the actual pattern of social relationships

to discover to what extent thc qualities of man, the essence of the species”, were historical; nor did it occur to him that the emancipation of man, his deliverance from alienation, the achievement of com¬ munism, laid upon him a programme of action. In failing to do justice to thc historical elements in culture, he missed the factors which constitute thc levers of social change. He writes as if the demon¬ stration of truth and the exposure of error came to the same thing as passing sentence of death upon thc actual human condition. Thus Marx shows us Feuerbach, like so many other philosophers, as confin¬ ing his philosophical activity to thinking about ideas. He identifies philosophy with passionless thought, thought unrelated to practice. Marx, on the other hand, conceives of philosophical activity as action on behalf of human interests; such thought itself leads to that action which alone makes it possible to achieve a world in which alienation is overcome.

THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

After Marx and Engels had settled in Brussels they proceeded to deal in yet another work with a series of theoretical problems which included not only the philosophical errors of the young Hegelians and especially Feuerbach, but the socialism of Moses Hess, and the individualism of Max Stirner. It is an enormous book of some 800 pages. “It was composed by Engels and me in common,” says Marx, “and that for the sake of settling accounts with our former philosophical conscience.” Thus its aim was to clear up in its writers’ minds all the remaining uncertainties on their position with regard to the existing German philosophies and their own fresh outlook. Marx continues: “The manuscript was already in the hands of a Westphalian publisher when we were informed that altered circumstances rendered publica¬ tion impossible, whereupon we abandoned our manuscript to the gnawing criticism of mice. We did so with little regret because our main object had been achieved — we had come to an understanding with ourselves.” As a matter of fact, the mice did get at the manuscript, but its remnants arc sufficient to explain why its authors were not too depressed at the misfortune.1

Yet this is perhaps the most pregnant theoretical work that Marx and Engels ever wrote. For the rest of his life Marx worked out its theories in his exhaustive analytical studies of contemporary history and economic development, illuminating and systematising in magnificent fashion a world of complex and significant facts. But this was all the elaboration and explication of the basic principles first comprehensively set down in The German Ideology.

MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM

The first part, entitled Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialistic and Idealistic Outlook, is not a detailed criticism of Feuerbach, but a clear exposition of the philosophical basis of Marxism in a positive form,

J First published in the Marx-Engeh Cesamtausgabe 1.5 (1932). The English translation of Farts I and III appeared in 1938.

TiiF. GERMAN IDEOI-OGY

75

• 1 1 lirinns of all thought and all history. Marx

Ed£ md the "nying

and dependent political and t ^ ^ wcll_known two pages This exposition is concise / Fconotnv (1859), hut invaluable

in the Preface to the Criti^e The German

though that is, the full treatment of ^ ^

Ideology is indispensable dcvei tfe criticism of Feuerbach

In the first part Marx and E g subject of perception,

in the These, They see man not as the p^ nuking

acted upon by an extern^ for ^ docs not cxist in isola-

remaking the externa , n anj aRer and use, that enters

don from hint. Ev^ything tha^ ^ ^ sc,f.extcraaliSation

rrlt '^ect at a particular historical mnn^nt. ^

Man wrestles with nature to ^^"chtfiqne-the stone we find him doing this he is P ^ m a particular soaal

axe, the loom, the steam engm^d u^g P ^ he

form; and as he thus puts bmsdf imolns cn^ ^ ^ makes, so at the same [Jow does soc«l development

ment and his environment makes h . ueSj di5Covers new

come about? Because man impro revolutionise

sources of power invents new

production but demand new n ^10 Thus a new social

relations between the : ““ “0C"brought into being; £ rtT— ^nr generation enters and by it it is

“Thus does Marx replace

by the active social man wh ;_made form of production,

historically conditioned It is “essence” of man; and the

this man-made world, that determine the ^ ^ somcthing

“essence” of man is not therefore “ ” Lee of changes rnnstaut but is constantly changing. And m 4

"the source of historical development.

COMMUNISM

76 THE L I r- K AND TEACHING OP KARL MARX

exposition of the Marxist philosophy of history. Marx conceived of the succession of historical forms or societies as following a definite- pattern, each one being marked by a characteristic attitude towards the instruments and forces of production. It is the relations of production, the

forms of intercourse”, the way people are associated together m the production of their material means of life, which condition the general character of cultural life. As Marx subsequently put it in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society -—the real foundations, on which rise legal and political institutions and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.”

Marx is at pains to make it inescapably dear that this basis is not the technology, skills, tradition, is not the natural conditions which provide materials, not climate, race, geographical factors, but the way m which productive forces and productive conditions are organised by the social activities of man. Property relations are their legal expression. The relations may be those of serfs to manorial lords, &of individual hand-workers and peasants to one another, of wage- earners to a capitalist class which owns the factories. The particular patterns of intercourse in work constitute the economic basis of the institutional processes which govern the production and distribution of wealth, like the systems of slavery, feudalism and capitalism. And the capitalist structure involves the production of commodities for a market by workers who arc formally free to work or not, and who are themselves not the owners of the instruments they use. These com¬ modities arc produced for purposes of profit to those who own the

the iUmentS °fpr0duCtion and not for tIlc usc of those who produce

1 his, then, constitutes the analysis of the social form. But from this we pass to the dynamic analysis which shows how the economic foundation changes and how this changes the superstructure of ideas, culture, law, institutions. “According to this conception, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men, in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange;

they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the epoch concerned.”1

When Marx says that the origin of social change is not in ideas as such, ideas derived from speculative thought, from metaphysical 1 Engels, Anti-Duhring.

THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

77

reflection, he does not mean that social change takes place automatl- callv apart from ideas, but that the ideas that are effeettve ansc on of actual situations, as the result of thinking about the problems that rise and striving to understand the dangers and possibilities involved. Marx' is not sayfng that thought is impotent in shaping that fundamentally it is a seeking answers to questions set b> the c ditLs of contemporary society. Once it reaches a correct under¬ standing of the situation and what needs to be done, thought becomes

the force which reshapes the economic basis.

The ideas which change the basis of society arise when the existing economic structure definitely hampers the full use of the productive forces existing within it and fails to realise the possibilities of the new productive forces which are emerging. . Such is the state of affairs in con temporary capitalist society. Where great masses of human beings ^ confronted vnth the fact of economic stringency, a class . called forth which has borne all the burdens but does not enjoy the advantages of l production of wealth, and it becomes cleat to the most enhgh- tened that they must appropriate the existing totality of produce forces to safeguard their very existence, for at tins stage the produce forces have become destructive forces. Then there arises the con- sciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution

Thus the social and economic forms which production assumes become increasingly less adequate for the satisfaction of the needs of men, and the discrepancy between the productive forces of soaety and the capitalist mode of production becomes greater and greater There is an increasing conflict between the forces and the forms which restrict them. The forms, however, ate rigid and resent modification because they are artificially preserved beyond the point at which they arc economically useful by the owning and ruling class whose interest

theChange!etherefore, must be brought about by new social groups which have been brought into existence and developed by the existl g order and whose interests are linked with the most advanced produc

ssssssjSsts

to their full utilisation and further expansion. 1 Inis, one tiling can, its own development, turn into its opposite.

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

78

between the productive forces and the forms of intercourse. But this contradiction need not necessarily come to a head in this particular country. The competition with industrially more advanced countries brought about by the expansion of international intercourse, is suffi¬ cient to produce a similar contradiction in countries with a backward industry.”1

It is important to recognise that Marx is not saying that social change is uniquely determined by technological advance. The same technical forces, the modern machine, may be operated under different economic systems. And it is not the economic techniques which produce effects like monopolies and unemployment. These are consequences of the use of such techniques in an economy devoted to the quest for private profit. I11 the first place it is the mode of production itself that stimulates the development of techniques, but beyond a certain point further advance in efficiency demands a new mode of production, a new and more appropriate economic system to suit the now enlarged and developed productive forces and carry them forward to a higher and more fully productive stage. There is thus a dialectical relationship between the forces of production and the relations of production and neither can be considered as operating in isolation.

The movement of history is not imposed from without by the creative fiat of an Absolute Mind, nor is it the result of a dynamic urge within matter. It develops out of the re-directive activity of human beings trying to meet their natural and social needs. Human history may be viewed as a process in which new needs are created as a result of material changes instituted to fulfil the old.

Equally important to Marx s theory of history is the relation of the economic system to human nature and to the individual. This is worked out nowhere but in The German Ideology and it is basic to Marxism. When man makes history he makes himself — here is the fundamental idea which Marx derived from Hegel’s Phenomenology. Man has no original human nature. Least of all is that nature the competitive individual of Hobbes, Bentham and Adam Smith, for ever engaged in the war of all against all”, nor is he the egoistic hedonist of Max Stirncr. Marx repudiates the “economic man” of contemporary political economy as the essential human type. The type in any particular period is explicable, not by man’s original nature, but

1 I he German Ideology. This little-noticed statement of Marx throws light on the frequent assertion that he saw revolutionary change as necessarily occurring in the first place in the most advanced industrial countries.

THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

79

Intimately by the economic-structure ^^cie^YVl^il^Msto^change

.bis in order to go on living, m order to over ^ ^ ^ ^

Which limits his life, he hs ^to won ^ ^ md moral principles structed society that change , . i ty he found his real

and institutions. If man a class society

freedom (as HegelWiev^ he « forced ^ ^ he belongs to makes this impossible, so that tl ^ 'fetter something

is “a completely rllusory « then • -d fo den^ their free

standing over against men to e'“"to’end thc class structure of activity. It is only when man • P ^ in which individuals society that he achieves the real cc m ^ It is just fois obtain their freedom in and throug^ ^ conditions of the free combination of mdividua . | ' undcr t]lejr own control,

development and activity o 1 _ ^ £orms Qf intercourse, of

Thus the sequence of CC^n°^C_\WloJ UIUier which men produce” social relations— the defim e . - n(j individual freedom,

—is a progress towards human emanc p ^ ^ collditions of sclf- “ These various conditions, av ■ whole evolution of history

activity, later as fetters the coherence of which consists

a coherent series of forms of intercourse tne which has

in this : that in the place

become a fetter, anew one*? , ■ mode of the self-activity

productive forces and, hence, , fetter and is then

Pof individuals a form which m " every stage

replaced by another. Since these co , • forccs their history

re^ofZ & 0f w

life and work, belonging to any P nittem constituted by indivi-

the pattern of basic human re ations, ^ ■ P urc]iasc of labour as a

dualownership, competition, pro it see y ^ the ideas, the art

commodity, the institutes, the law the ^ ^

1 Marx-Engcls, The German Ideology.

law, the state system and the moral code— and all those creations of the mind and imagination: art, literature, music and philosophy itself which are determined indirectly and mediately.

It would be a complete mistake to imagine that this superstructure is merely a reflection of the basis and is itself powerless and ineffective On the contrary it consists of those institutions which form the coer¬ cive and defensive state power; and every system of law protects the interests of which it is the expression.

Thus the superstructure serves the purpose of maintaining the class system and resisting its supersession. The political institutions embody the rule of the class which is predominant in the economic field. The values and the moral code, equally with the law, help to uphold and sanction conduct in harmony with the needs of the established order.

But if this is so, it is also the case that the interests of a rising class determined to overthrow the existing economic order and construct a new one, will bring into existence a rival ideology, and the ideas and institutions which play a creative role in history will be those which are identified with living and growing social forces. And when victor^7 is won, the new ruling class must at once begin the long and difficult task of reconstructing the whole superstructure to express, maintain and develop its own new system of social relationships. Its new institutions, moral code, legal system and forms of culture will be indispensable forces for the making and moulding of the new society and the new man of the socialist world.

Marx and Engels were not unmindful of the fact that the superstruc¬ ture necessarily attains a considerable measure of independence once it has come into existence, and that there is of course no one-to-one correspondence between the particular forms of the cultural system and the underlying basis; nevertheless, by and large there is a real correspondence and reciprocal interconnection, and each plays an immensely important part in determining the other.

This important insight into the basis of culture, therefore, cannot be taken as an answer to every question. “All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined in detail, before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political, civil-legal, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc. notions corresponding to them.”1

Nor must it be forgotten that long after basic change has occurred relics of the old superstructure linger on; well-established institutions,

1 Engels, Letter to C. Schmidt, August 5th, 1890.

THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY Jj cwches run for centuries on their own momentum .philosophical

meaningful philosophy.

max stirner’s individualism

’=22;

was a JNictzscncan aeicncu directed against

of self-fulfilment of the indtvUual. In to fm as t w d« g

his criticism of natural rights was »!»7*^5^1’of,binaet

E

mav be little more than the freedom to talk, sibility does not fulfil the ego, but stultifies it. ) 1 b

indefensible; but its real stre ig 1 additional proof of how

from a high-flown ideology.

This, then, is The Genu.

82

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

exposition of a new interpretation of history and a new econon and political science. llc

The first part, dealing with Feuerbach, corrects the vague idealisation of humanity by establishing the social character and development of the individual. The second part, dealing with the Hegelian philosophy, furnishes a powerful criticism of the idealistic philosophy of the time, then generally regarded as final and conclusive. S timer’s individualism gave the opportunity to ground an historical theory on a principle of development which seeks to explain and unify the multiplicity of social and historical facts in a manner which is reminiscent of the Newtonian treatment of astronomy, though the field investigated obviously lends itself to less exact treatment. Finally, in the criticism of the “True Socialist”, Marx and Engels draw the practical and ethical conclusions of the new socio-economic philosophy. All these formed part of one remarkably consistent, comprehensive and articulate conspectus of sociological theory.

The work of Marx as a socialist theorist began in Paris in 1843 and reached the completion of its general formulation in Brussels in the summer of 1846 with The German Ideology.

PART II

his own nature. Marx

new society.

Marx

MARX IN BRUSSELS

It was in February 1845 that Marx arrived in Brussels with his family. That same spring Engels joined him, and the two friends shortly afterwards went together to England and stayed there for six weeks. It gave Engels immense pleasure to bring his friend for the first time into contact with British life and industry, the trade union movement and his Chartist friends. Engels, who was well known to George Julian Harney, the Chartist leader and editor of The Northern Star, became a regular contributor to that journal and in the attic es he wrote for it revealed a waning confidence in the middle class and a new fait h in the workers. It would be they alone, he now believed, who would carry through the impending revolution. Marx had already come to the view that radical change in the social order was dependent upon the proletariat, which, he said, was not only a suffering class but a fighting class that, bv the very conditions of its existence, was being converted revolutionary force. He and Engels found ample support for this conviction in the British working-class movement

The defeat of the Chartists in 1839 had been followed by the New¬ port uprising under John Frost in which a number of Chartists had been shot before the military suppressed it. It was the period of ic hungry forties, and the idea of a general strike was revived All over the country there was much unrest and violent repression of the wor¬ kers’ movement; and yet in spite of all setbacks it soil had high hopes

°^Engch ^worked energetically to establish contacts between the revolutionary elements in Britain and the socialists of the Comment In this he was helped by Ernest Jones, a poet and reformer whose youth had been spent in Germany and who found it easier than the other English labour leaders to understand Engels and Marx. Jones strove to transfuse tbe new blood of class conflict into the declining Chartist movement, while Engels became a contributor to Ins Notes

*° Revolution was certainly in the air and in 1 8.1 8 was to sweep through

86

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

Europe from one end to the other. Marx had given an undertaking to the authorities to have nothing to do with Belgian politics, but Brussels was something of an international centre and there was plenty to do. Not only was there a considerable colony of German workers but there was much coming and going between Brussels and Paris and London. Marx and Engels on their return to Brussels at once got in touch with the German colony, many of whom were communists in exile like themselves.

Insurrection had broken out in Germany, among the Silesian weavers, and in 1845 and 1846 socialism spread rapidly through the country and socialist periodicals and even socialist novels began to appear. France too was seething with socialist ideas. A spectre of com¬ munism was abroad in Europe. Engels’ economic studies had shown him that with the rapid expansion of industry periods of prosperity were invariably followed by slumps in which the workers fought with ever increasing bitterness against the iron law of wages, the bare subsistence, and the hopeless unemployment that was their lot.

When they returned to Brussels, Marx and Engels at once began to establish connection with the workers’ movement which they found there. They proceeded to penetrate every organisation they could find.

The steps that Guizot had taken against the radical writers living in Paris made Belgium the chief meeting-place for German communists. Besides Marx and Engels, there were about twenty others. In Brussels as in Paris, London and Switzerland there were also groups of German tailors, cabinet-makers and leather workers who were spending the usual years abroad to complete their training.

Brussels was at that time a transit station between France and Germany. German workers and intellectuals making their way to Paris usually passed through the city, and it was not difficult for Marx to establish contact between communists in all three countries. Many of these were loosely organised in revolutionary societies like the League of the Just, which had played an important part in Blanqui’s abortive insurrection of 1839; and Marx realised the importance of gaining influence in such groups — not always an easy task, since they had a deep distrust of intellectuals.

The most prominent of the French socialists at this time was Louis Blanc, who came to the fore in 1848 and was then given the oppor¬ tunity of starting the National Workshops. Blanc was convinced that his schemes could be put into operation within bourgeois society. He was very soon to be bitterly disillusioned. Then there were the

MARX IN BRUSSELS

87

followers of the utopian, Cabet, who had written a popular book describing the civilisation of the future. The Journey to lean. Within the ranks of the workers themselves there was Proudhon, the most

influential of them all. _

In London, Engels found three able Germans leading the Leag . the watchmaker Joseph Moll, the shoemaker Hemnch Bauer and Karl Schapper, now a teacher of languages. They were all to be close y associated with Marx in later years. Marx was also on good erms with the many Russians he found in Paris, some of them liberals or even revolutionaries-the most important being Bakunin. We have an admirable account of Marx as he then appeared from one of these Russians, Annenkov. “Marx belonged to the type of men who were all energy, force of will and unshakcable conviction. With a thick black mop of hair on his head, with hairy hands and a crookedly buttoned frock coat, he had the air of a man used to commanding the respect of others. His movements were clumsy but self-assured. I Iis manners defied the accepted conventions of social intercourse and were haughty and almost contemptuous. His voice was disagreeably harsh and he spoke of men and things in the tone of one who would tolerate no contra¬ diction, and which seemed to express his own firm conviction in his mission to sway men’s minds and dictate the laws of their being.

Marx certainlv aroused some opposition by his attitude to Weithng, a German tailor who had made a great reputation as a socialist propa¬ gandist and had written a book entitled Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1843) which was very highly thought of. Weithng was one of the most active and popular of itinerant agitators of that Marx

himself had praised him as the “fiery and brilliant propagandist who was the first to arouse the German workers.

But Weitling was to prove a bitter disappointment; Marx soon realised that he was doing little more than playing with fancy picture of the future socialist society, which he expected to be realised y violent insurrection in the near future. To this end he believed in the disruption of society by every form of agitation thosc most

likely to be aroused-the lowest stratum of the proletariat. He wa a man who regarded himself as the appointed leader of German prole¬ tarian communism, carrying in his pocket the recipe for establ.shing heaven on earth and under the delusion that it was the intention of

Marx to steal it from him. . , M

That he was an able propagandist, gifted with a certain talent, Marx

1 P. Annenkov, A Wonderful Ten Years.

88

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

did not deny; but he was equally aware of bis lack of education, of -m historical sense and of his inordinate vanity and fundamental irrespon sibility. All this came out when a meeting was arranged in Brussels for Marx and Wcitling to work out a common plan. It was a total failure. Wcitling enraged Marx beyond endurance by his endless stream of varied rhetoric, his scorn of theory, the lack of any considered basis for his revolutionary proposals. Marx abruptly stopped him: it was reckless of him to arouse the workers, to endanger their safety, without any conception of what line of social development was being worked out. Wcitling retorted that his speeches had aroused enthusiasm every¬ where. Marx replied that enthusiasm without scientific thought was folly. ‘'It is simple fraud to arouse the people without any social and considered class basis for their activity.” Then losing his temper he struck his fist on the table with great violence and leaping up he shouted, “Ignorance never helped nor did anybody any good.” All those present rose too. The conference was at an end. As they left, Marx still furiously angry was striding up and down the room. This outburst was characteristic of Marx. He appeared domineering, arrogant and dogmatic, but such boldness and ruthlessness were required to demolish the delusions of the age. His judgment certainly developed a searing trenchancy which wounded many. It often seemed as though the sharpness and force ofhis mind could best manifest itself in controversy, and that in overthrowing the errors of others he clarified and brought to birth his own ideas. There were times when he and Engels went on at enormous length, with a certain sardonic humour, knocking the philosophers’ heads together; but then indignation would supervene, as if the force of Marx’s argument would be dissolved and enfeebled if diffused by too much urbanity.

Marx was determined to rid the movement if he could of muddle- headed and irresponsible leaders. He was equally determined to have done with any more preaching of goodwill as the way to socialism, which was made clear by his devastating criticism of the “True Socialists” Grun and Hess, even though Hess had been a close friend of Marx and had been of great help in developing his ideas. Engels went to Paris and debated furiously with the followers of Grun and Proud¬ hon, but found the German workers who had fallen under their influence more petty-bourgeois than proletarian, anxious indeed to become, not employees, but independent master craftsmen.

1 he Paris communists were in constant touch with similar groups in London, Brussels and other cities and thus some sort of beginning

MAltX IN BRUSSELS

89

1 H been made of an international communist organisation. Marx t Brussels worked steadily at the task of linking up these scattered bands of communists. He had influenced the London Corresponding Committee by means of a scries of pamphlets mercilessly amusing the theories of the French and German communists, and the aew h s g oup were in process of reconstruction. In 1847 Joseph Moll, XCn watcher, arrived from London to the P=

of the London organisation in relation to Marx s ideas. form of organisation actually existed at the time in London was now reorganised as The Communist League and Marx and Eugeb were invited to join. Their first Congress, which was attended by Engels, was held in June 1847, when the aims and methods of the League were revised and it was resolved that it should cease to be something of

secret society and become an open propagandist society.

' There had been a good deal of activity in London. It. 1844 refugees Jm many countries formed a society of Fratema, wkch

met at the German Communist Working-men s Club 'onmty Lant This Society was active in discussing international affairs, and the Chartists who also joined found their understanding of contmenuli affairs considerably widened. A similar organisation was later started

^ Thc^Fratcmal Democrats called a meeting in November 1847 ,0 commemorate the Polish insurrection of 1830. It was held in th Drury Lane premises and was addressed by Marx himself, who had come to London with Engels to attend the Congress of the Con munist League, and also by Engels and the Chartist pS

and T0nes The meeting did not only concern itself with the Pc K sr in his speech, delivered in German, Marx dec W that the Fraternal Democrats in Brussels had instructed him to ask the London organisation to convene a Congress of Nations, a Congress of work- in! mCn to establish liberty all over the world Effect this grand object you workmen of England, and you will be hailed as the saviours of the

^mmcdritdVXr the meeting, and in the same room, the Second Congress of the Communist League took place, to adopt new statutes

.There is some doubt whether the original group,

Moll, Bauer aud other German communists ™ „f The

who represented it a, the

Congress of 1847.

2 Northern Star, December 4th,

90

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

and to consider an altogether new socialist programme which Mar and Engels had put before them after they joined the League. From these debates, after their second Congress at the end of November 1847, The Communist Manifesto was to emerge in 1848.

The year 1847 had been busy for Marx. Not only had he prepared many articles and lectures, but he had read with increasing impatience Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, and written a forceful reply which contained the clearest and most developed statement of his present position. He and Engels now had at their disposal a journal which appeared twice a week called the Deutsche-Briisseler Zeituttg. They were suspicious about the reliabilty of the editor, who might well have been an agent of the Prussian Government, but Marx scoffed at the reluctance of the socialists to make use of the paper. “An oppor¬ tunity for doing something, is nothing but a source of embarrass¬ ment for them,” he said. He and Engels had no such qualms and plunged into political controversy, writing a number of vigorously worded articles in the journal. It was the German political situation that was under discussion, and they pursued their usual tactics of supporting the bourgeoisie against reactionary feudalism and the monarchy and scornfully criticised the socialists who wanted to attack only the bourgeoisie, on the grounds that however radical the ultimate aims, the next step was to support the bourgeoisie in their struggle for constitutional rights. But Marx made no secret of his conviction that the rule of the bourgeoisie would be of brief duration and would be followed by the socialist revolution. Addressing the liberals in the issue of the Deutsche-Briisseler Zeituttg in January 1848, Engels makes no attempt to conceal his aims: “Fight on bravely, then, gentlemen of capital! We need your help, we even need your rule on occasions. You must clear from our path the relics of the middle ages. . . . Your factories must lay the foundations for the liberation of the proletariat. Your reward shall be a brief time of rule.”

Marx also attacked in the same journal a curious form of socialism which emanated from religious quarters and was becoming influential. What it amounted to was the belief that if the ruling class could be persuaded to show Christian benevolence and practise social justice a better world for the poor would appear. Marx replied in the Deutsche- Briisseler Zeitung :

‘Ihe social principles of Christianity have had eighteen hundred years in which to develop and they need no further development at the hands of the Prussian Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The social

MARX IN BRUSSELS

91

J be dLriSe The social principles of Christianity transfer the

tribulations which God in his own inscrutable wisdom causes the elect

to suffer. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardi« self-

proletariat is revolutionary.

the poverty of philosophy The revolutionary activity of Marx and his ceaseless Prarti“l lole”

what he read and his outlook never rose above his peasant bac groun .

92

THE LIEF. AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

And he was not really a socialist. He was fundamentally an individual¬ ist and an idealist, objecting to injustice and inhumanity, denouncing the rich and proclaiming the brotherhood of man.

Proudhon’s first book of any importance was entitled What is Poverty? and his answer: “Property is theft”, had a revolutionary ring. Put although he was opposed to the misuse of property when used to accumulate riches he still believed in it and wanted the peasant and the artisan to possess it. What he objected to was the rich taking the money from them and thus obtaining the power to exploit them.

Marx gave generous praise to this work and recognised the great impetus it gave to the working-class movement, an impetus, which, in fact, undoubtedly affected him also. He regarded it as a pioneer achievement in the economic field and the first scientific manifesto of the modern proletariat.

In 1846 Proudhon expounded his views in two substantial volumes entitled The System of Economic Contradiction or The Philosophy of Poverty. Like all his work it is forcefully written and wins attention by its paradoxes and antitheses. These he now advances in a philo¬ sophical form, which he claims to be Hegelian. His book swarms with philosophical formulae and such expressions as “thesis”, “antithesis”, antinomies”, “synthesis”, “dialectics”, “induction”. Proudhon had learned one thing from Hegel— that contradictions are involved in every concept. He saw in the contrast of riches and poverty the basic contradiction of contemporary society. Put wherever he looked he found contradiction — property is theft, the division of labour increases wealth but impoverishes the worker, in any system of economic relations there is a contradiction between the good side which affirms equality and the bad side which affirms inequality. How are such contradictions to be overcome? The conflict, said Proudhon, must be resolved in the synthesis of this antagonism between thesis and anti¬ thesis which will eliminate the evil side and retain the good. It is the errors and the evils in the system which have to be removed, while the elements which seem just and right must be retained and strengthened. He therefore appeals to the ideals of justice and brotherhood which will inspire the struggle to eliminate the evil side of the contradiction. 1 hen exploitation will cease and capital will no longer be accumulated.

W hat sort of social order would result? One. in which production would be organised by societies of workers who exchanged their goods among one another according to their equivalent in labour. To aid the formation of such co-operatives he advocated the establishment

MARX IN 1SRUSSBLS

93

Of credit banks which would lend them money without interest to ,uch a society, concluded Proudhon, government would no longer be nectary ‘‘The highest perfects of society it found m the nrnon

° 'Mat wat fury when Proudhon submitted his book to

him for criticism. He realised that Proudhon s ethical standpomt. his

act m and no support for the Polish Revolution Later the influence of Proudhon was seen in the emergence of French synd.cahsm and of anarchism. The syndicalists believed that socialism would be achieved bv industrial unions embracing all the workers in a particular mdustry. Vrx at once recognised the basic individualism m this anarchist

for whom Proudhon had intended it. , ,

In the Preface to his critique Marx declared that Proudhon ha been doubly misunderstood. In France they forgave hm b, iW economics on the strength of his German philosophy. In Germany they thought he was one of the best French economists and therefore

overlooked the weakness of his philosophy.

He undertook to correct both errors. His reply was entitled The

exposition of his developed theories, giving full weight to the cconomi understanding which he had spent many months m developing.

Marx detected behind Proudhon’s argument the assumption that basicfstructure of society, with the categories of property, competition

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

94

and so forth, is unalterable. Therefore all that we can do is to reconcile the contradictions that arise within it. Marx replied that once we accept this pattern of society its conflicting aspects are an inherent and necessary part of it. The good and evil at any particular stage in historical development originate from the system of social relations belonging to it, and the evil cannot be eliminated without introducing a new social system. But how does the social pattern change?

It is because as the forces of production develop, the classes into which society is divided find themselves more and more opposed. One of these classes, the working class, which in fact represents the ‘‘bad” side of capitalism, its exploitation, its poverty, grows unceasingly along with the development of the material conditions for its own emancipation. But simultaneously the inner contradictions are intensi¬ fied and a period of crisis supervenes.

The consequence is that the very contradictions that Proudhon lamented are the sources of social progress. It is what he called the “bad side” which calls into being the movement which makes for change, in that it brings the struggle between “good” and “bad” to a head. What happens is that the oppressed class which feels the brunt of the growing contradictions finds it necessary to bring into being an entirely new system of social relationships, in which the contradictions recognised by Proudhon have no place. What has gone wrong is that the old system is no longer appropriate to the developed productive forces but obstructs them, throws them into disorder, and disrupts society with crises and wars. Therefore, a pattern of society appro¬ priate to these productive forces must be brought into existence. This will be effected by the class which suffers under the old system taking the initiative in its own interests.

The type of society demanded by the economic situation is in fact a classless one — that is to say, a society in which the private owner¬ ship by one class and the wage labour of the other both disappear in the social ownership of the means of production.

The reason why the victory of the proletariat produces a classless society is not that