Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  This is obviously youthful bravado. Writing for a newspaper published in England, Engels felt unconstrained by any fear of censorship, and uses language that Marx would be careful to avoid in his own writings published under censorship conditions in Germany or France.

  Many years later Marx did refer, albeit it in a cursory way, to how crucial the critical study of Hegel had been for his intellectual development. In the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859—the first rough draft of what would eventually become Das Kapital—he wrote:

  The first work which I undertook to seek a solution to the doubts that assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of law [Rechtsphilosophie], a work the introduction to which appeared in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher [German-French Annals]. … My investigation led me to the conclusion that legal relations, such as forms of state, can be grasped neither only in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human spirit, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Enlightenment and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of “civil society” [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]; that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.

  There is an interesting paradoxical admission in this statement: Marx admits that his road to a radical critique of existing society led through a theoretical critique of Hegel—not through a social analysis of actually existing conditions. But his account belittles the intensity with which he both internalized so much of Hegel’s social terminology while going beyond it and in the process undermining the whole edifice of Hegelian political philosophy.

  The reference to the short-lived journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, or DFJ, is revealing in more than one sense, as actually Marx contributed two essays to that collection. The second essay is titled “On the Jewish Question,” and it too is deeply anchored in an internal critique of Hegel’s political philosophy. But it also attests to Marx’s complex relationship with Judaism and Jews and became later—and still is—an avatar for numerous debates and criticism. One can only speculate why in 1859 Marx did not even mention it.

  There is, though, a further aspect to the titles Marx gave to these two essays in the DFJ. Both serve as the theoretical foundation for his call for a revolutionary overthrow of the existing social system by the proletariat: but nobody would guess this from the rather anodyne titles he gave to the essays—“Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction” and “On the Jewish Question.” It is reasonable to assume that, by hiding his radical call for a revolutionary social and political transformation, Marx hoped to avert the eyes of customs and censorship officials; the collection was printed in Paris, with the intention of smuggling it across the Rhine into Germany. If this was the reason behind giving such quasi-academic titles to what were in fact revolutionary treatises, it failed: most of the copies were confiscated by Prussian customs officials, and only a few reached readers in Germany. For all the importance of the two essays to Marx’s own intellectual development, they were hardly known at the time (although he did try, unsuccessfully, to republish them later).

  THE PROLETARIAT—THE NEW UNIVERSAL CLASS

  To understand how much Marx was indebted to Hegel’s philosophy while radically transforming it, a quick glance at one of Hegel’s distinct contributions to political philosophy is necessary.

  In a nuanced and complex argument against the legacy of political and social philosophy from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith, Hegel argued in his Philosophy of Right that human relations cannot be subsumed under one dimension or consideration (self-interest, fear, or rational calculation); nor can they be explicated by an uncritical willingness to obey authorities legitimized by traditional allegiances, be they religious or dynastic. Instead he proposed a differentiated, multilayered system of allegiances, each motivated and legitimized by a distinct set of considerations. They are family, civil society, and the state. It is the balance among these allegiances that to Hegel characterizes the modern age.

  In a somewhat schematic way one can characterize these three spheres of human relations as follows:

  Family—particularistic altruism

  Civil society—universal egoism

  State—universal altruism.

  The family—be it the modern nuclear family or the more traditional extended family or clan—is held together by the willingness of each member to act out of a feeling of altruism toward other persons, express solidarity with them, and be willing to do things out of these considerations. The family, according to Hegel, is not just a set of biological relations (obviously husband and wife are not biologically related), nor is it just a relationship of economic or sexual exchanges. The willingness of any member to work not just for himself but also for the benefit and welfare of others, the burden parents take upon themselves in providing for the sustenance and education of their children, the willingness of children to care for their parents in old age—all these cannot be viewed through considerations of maximizing one’s own self-interest. However, this altruistic solidarity is limited within a prescribed circle of people, and hence its particularistic nature. While it may appear as an internal contradiction, it appears that altruism and particularism can go together, though their scope is obviously different in the case of a modern nuclear family compared with the more traditional, almost tribal families of pre-modern societies.

  The family disintegrates precisely when this altruism and willingness to do things for the benefit of others ceases to function, and when some—or every—member of the family cares only for himself.

  The dialectical antithesis to this altruistic particularism is universal egoism. This, to Hegel, is the sphere of civil society, where every member looks only for his self-interest: a grocer sells bread not because he cares for the welfare or health of his customers but because their needs are the vehicle he uses for his own profit; the financier is involved in his transactions not in order to enrich society but in order to enrich himself.

  This is of course the opposite of the altruism of the family, and hence—this is an interesting Hegelian insight—the same person can be a loving husband or parent at home while being a ruthless and ferocious competitor in the marketplace; the two go together and even complement each other.

  To regulate the marketplace, one needs general rules and laws: standard weights and measures, property laws, regulations about economic transactions, debt, and credit. This is the universal aspect of civil society—the need for objective general laws and their enforcement, enabling people to act in their own legitimate self-interest under well-established expectations. To Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” Hegel adds the necessity for the regulatory functions of civil society.

  The German term for civil society—bürgerliche Gesellschaft—grants a special deeper meaning to it, as it means not only civil society but also bourgeois society (something which later created some problems for English translators of Marx, as rendering it as mere “bourgeois society” detracts from its much richer connotations).

  It is at this point that Hegel introduces his major contribution to modern political philosophy—and distances himself from the Hobbesian and Lockean tradition. He argues that anchoring the legitimacy of the state merely in individual self-interest of “life, liberty, and property” (or “the pursuit of happiness”) misses the point. If this is the basis for the legitimacy of the state, why should people be forced to pay taxes, which in many cases means taking money from some people to cover the expenses of others? Moreover, what are the legitimacy and ethical justifications for the obligation to serve in the army and possibly jeopardize one’s own limb and life in the process?

  The conventional argument that people should pay taxes so that they can get public services—like policing or education—in return does not make sense, since some people, especially the rich, may claim that they can take better car
e of their interests on their own, yet it is not acceptable that they opt out of the public realm of the state. Similarly, and more dramatically, to argue that in serving in the army one defends himself and his family from the enemy is obvious nonsense: in terms of self-interest, the most rational thing for a person to do in a war situation is to get out of the country and take his family to a safer place and not endanger his life and possibly make his wife a widow and his children orphans.

  The fact that this is not the way states operate suggests to Hegel that the attempt to legitimize the political realm—and the very existence of the state—by considerations of self-interest is a fallacy: such considerations are anchored in civil society, but do not operate in the political sphere. While it is legitimate to try to take out one’s money if one’s bank is about to go bankrupt, it is not considered legitimate to leave one’s country when it is threatened by war; usually this is called treason.

  It is for this reason that Hegel suggests that the legitimacy of the state lies somewhere else—in solidarity with one’s fellow citizens, in what can be called universal altruism in the sense that it applies to all citizens of the polity. This is the political will to live in a community with other people, to be ready to bear burdens—financial or even existential—for the sake of this commonality; the state is a commonwealth, a Gemeinwesen, a res publica as against the res privata of civil society. It is more encompassing than either the family or civil society, but it does include these spheres within its wider scope. Hegel devotes considerable space in his Philosophy of Right to show how the two spheres of family and civil society should be integrated into the political realm.

  Seen in this perspective, the state is in a way similar to the family in having altruism and solidarity at its core. But beyond the difference between the family’s particularism and the state’s universal norms, they are based according to Hegel on different foundations: the family’s particularism is anchored in love, with its subjective ingredients, while the state is based on freedom and its objective institutions.

  Out of this complex edifice Hegel developed his theory of social classes. He posits two kinds of social classes: on one hand are the traditional classes—peasants, the aristocracy, artisans, tradesmen, and merchants—each of whose members engages in their legitimate pursuit of their individual self-interests as members of civil/bourgeois society. But then Hegel adds a novel ingredient: the bureaucracy, which echoes the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a professional civil service in Napoleonic France (carrière ouverte aux talents) and then in the reformed Prussia of the 1810s and 1820s. This modern bureaucracy, according to Hegel, is on the one hand a class of civil society, but its actions are aimed at the common good: hence it should be guaranteed a fixed salary, and be recruited according to its merits, thus freeing it from worrying about its own interests in carrying out its duties in pursuing the policies of the commonwealth. Hence the bureaucracy to Hegel is both a class of civil society but also a “universal class,” representing the general interests of the commonwealth.

  While this is obviously a highly idealized vision of the bureaucracy, positing a class that is a vehicle of linking the individual self-interests of the various groups of civil society with the general good, it is Hegel’s response to the transformation of the state from a patrimonial or semi-feudal structure to one responding to what he sees as the major characteristic of the modern state, with an independent bureaucracy balancing the various interests and ensuring that the state will not become a mere reflection of civil society interests.

  As we have seen from Marx’s articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, most of his critique of Prussian legislation and social and economic conditions questioned whether the modern state actually does represent the common interests—or is simply the expression of particular interests of the stronger groups in civil society. Later this analysis would lead him to brand the state as “nothing else than the executive committee of the ruling classes.” To Marx this means that the Hegelian concept of the state as the guarantor of the common good is just a sham. These are the “doubts that had assailed” him that he mentioned in 1859: doubts about the veracity and adequacy of Hegel’s political philosophy when compared to reality.

  This is the underlying argument of Marx’s DFJ essay “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction.” It culminates in a dialectical internal critique of Hegel’s concept of a universal class: on the one hand he adopts this Hegelian concept, but he historicizes it. No longer is this concept limited to the role of the bureaucracy in the modern state: it becomes the foundation of Marx’s first critical theory of social classes. In each historical epoch, he argues, there is a class that represents the overall interests of society at large, but it is a dynamic concept, whose bearers change from epoch to epoch. Rather than a fixed term related to modern bureaucracies, the Hegelian term of a universal class becomes for Marx an explicatory tool for the understanding of historical change and social hierarchy. Eventually it would lead him to what became the canonical opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto: “All history is the history of class struggle.” Here is how Marx puts it in his essay on Hegel:

  No class in civil society can play this part unless it can arouse, in itself and in the masses, a moment of enthusiasm in which it associates and mingles with society at large, identifies itself with it, and is felt and recognized as the general representative of this society. Its aims and interests must genuinely be the aims and interests of society itself, of which it becomes in reality the social head and heart. It is only in the name of the general interest that a particular class can claim general supremacy … that genius which pushes material force to political power, that revolutionary daring which throws at its adversary the defiant phrase: I am nothing and I should be Everything.

  The ringing echo in the closing sentence—referring to the statement of Abbé Sieyès during the French Revolution about what the Third Estate aspires to become—is a clear challenge to bourgeois claims to speak for all of society. Two years later, in a manuscript not published in his lifetime and eventually known as The German Ideology, Marx further elaborated his historization of the role of universal classes, now using a more explicit revolutionary language, this being after all a draft not aimed at publication at that stage.

  For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aims, to represent its interests as the common interests of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form; it has to give its ideas the form of universality. … The class making a revolution appears from the very start … not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society.

  In the DFJ essay Marx went on to maintain that historically all classes that claimed universality were overthrown sooner or later, because their claim to represent the general interests of all of society were either overtaken by social development or were a false pretense from the start. But now, he claims, there appears to be a class that is truly representative of all society—and it is in this context that Marx first mentions the proletariat; one cannot fail to notice how strongly, and how many times, Marx attributes to the proletariat the attributes of being a truly universal class.

  A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status, a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself from all other spheres of society, without therefore emancipating all other spheres, which is, in short, a total loss of humanity which can only redeem itself by a total rede
mption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat. [italics added]

  This powerful passage in which the term “proletariat” first appears in Marx’s writing is not in an economic or social analysis of its life conditions, but attributes to the proletariat the role of being the true universal class in the Hegelian sense, because its sufferings are universal. Continuing his claim for the historical redemptive role of the proletariat, Marx argues that dialectically, the proletariat in its present condition already incorporates in a negative fashion its positive message to humanity—the abolition of private property. In this way, when first mentioning the proletariat, Marx also clearly links it inextricably to the abolition of private property—that is, to communism.

  When the proletariat announces the dissolution of the existing social order, it only declares the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of this order. When the proletariat demands the abolition of private property it only lays down as a principle for society what society has already made the principle for the proletariat, and what the latter already involuntarily embodies as the negative result of society.

  Marx ends his essay with a further embedding of the proletariat within the philosophical discourse by employing the Hegelian usage of the term Aufhebung. The nuances of this German word cannot be adequately rendered in translation, as it means both “keeping” and “raising to a higher level,” but also “abolition.” This complex meaning of the term in everyday German usage is employed by Hegel to signify the internal dialectics of development, when the realization of a concept also leads to its transcendence. In using this dialectical device, Marx suggests that on one hand the proletariat realizes, by its very existence, and eventual victory, the philosophical significance of being the true universal class, but this very fact also transcends philosophy by moving from theory to praxis, and thus abolishes philosophy itself as a separate sphere of activity because it will now be realized. Thus the emancipation of the proletariat—and with it of all society—is at the same time the actualization of philosophy as well as its transcendence and abolition.