Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Both in Paris and in Brussels his life ran on two parallel though connected levels: on one hand, he was involved with a whole range of radical associations and groups, which drew the attention of the political police both in Belgium and in his native Prussia, but whose impact on political and social developments was minimal. But as part of this association, Marx, the perennial student and intellectual, worked hard to clarify his own thoughts, and this intellectual effort—part of which was published at the time, but most was confined to manuscript notes published only later, in some cases decades after his death—is a testimony to the breadth of his knowledge and the complex trajectory of his intellectual development. It was also at that time that his family grew step by step: in May 1844 his first daughter, Jenny, was born in Paris; after having moved to Brussels, his second daughter, Laura, was born in September 1845; in December 1846 his son Edgar was born.

  Not having any fixed employment or source of income during these years, Marx’s financial situation was obviously precarious. He was occasionally paid for some of his articles, and in July 1845 a radical publisher in Darmstadt advanced him 1,500 francs on account of a planned book on politics and political economy (which was never delivered, despite extensive preparatory studies). But in many cases he depended on family funds—some through his wife’s dowry, in many cases through unpleasant haggling with his tightfisted mother. Brothers-in-law in Maastricht lent him 150 francs in September 1847, but only in February 1848 did he succeed in getting a settlement of 6,000 francs of inheritance from his father. This was a significant sum at the time, but continuing financial squabbles with his mother followed him for many years.

  Intellectually and politically the years in Paris were indeed a turning point for Marx; after the Bourbon dynasty was replaced in 1830 by the Orleanists, a more liberal France became the refuge for radicals from all over Europe. German artisans and workers as well as Italian and Russian revolutionaries found asylum in the French capital, where the revolutionary traditions had not been totally eradicated during the post-1815 Restoration. It was here that Marx met Heinrich Heine and other democratic and radical exiles, and it was from Paris that Marx and his Young Hegelian colleague Arnold Ruge launched the DFJ.

  It was in Paris that Marx became better acquainted with the Saint-Simonians, and also met the French socialists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Pierre Leroux, as well as the legendary Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, with whom he became extremely close.

  It was also in these years that Marx began his close association with Friedrich Engels, who became the lifelong collaborator and friend of Marx, who usually managed to quarrel with most of his closest colleagues. They came from different backgrounds and were personally as far apart as possible: Marx the intellectual and philosopher, Engels the down-to-earth industrialist and brash man of affairs; one with a complicated Jewish background, the other from a Lutheran self-assured family; one was drawn to socialism through his philosophical studies, the other through his day-to-day contact with the working class in Manchester. Yet their bond was deep and lasting, and it was Engels who for many years helped to keep the Marx family above water during the first difficult years in London after 1849, and continued to support Marx also after his financial situation got more secure. Engels deferred to Marx’s intellectual brilliance and superiority, and Marx always acknowledged his enormous debt to the crucial support of his rich friend. In the annals of political and intellectual partnership, it was indeed a unique relationship, though the differences in some aspects of their approach to politics and history cannot be overlooked: Marx came from the humanities, Engels from practical economic activity, with a lasting interest in natural sciences.

  Engels occasionally traveled from Manchester to Paris (and later to Brussels), and the two began their collaboration in writing during these visits. It was mainly through Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, that Marx became better acquainted with the real-life conditions of the industrial workers, helping him to move from the somewhat abstract philosophical endorsement of the proletariat as the “universal class” in the DFJ essay on Hegel to a concrete social analysis of the actual working class.

  The literary production of Marx in the Paris and Brussels years was prodigious. He and Engels published The Holy Family in 1845, and then they continued their criticism of the Young Hegelians in what was later called The German Ideology, although this book was never published at the time. Decades later Engels justified the fact that the book had not been published by arguing that the 1848 revolution upset their life and plans, and that in any case these pages merely helped to clarify their own thoughts, so they both were happy to leave them “to the gnawing criticism of the mice.” In 1847 Marx published in French his critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, but his most extensive work, the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, written in 1844, did not see the light until the late 1920s, and was not fully published in a critical edition until after World War II. An accompanying short manuscript, the seminal Theses on Feuerbach, was similarly published only posthumously by Engels in the 1880s. Besides these works, Marx wrote numerous articles for various radical newspapers (Vorwärts in Paris and then the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung). Toward the end of 1847, again with Engels and with some help from Hess, Marx prepared The Communist Manifesto.

  This is a lot, but it is a mixed bag. Some of it is focusing on obscure and mostly irrelevant polemics with long forgotten Young Hegelians, and bears out Engels’s comment about a well-deserved gnawing criticism of the mice. But among the jejune in-house polemics against erstwhile colleagues, one can find gems of thought-provoking and original ideas. Some of these pieces are justly viewed as part of the core of Marx’s theories of history and society—even though, as in the case of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts or the Theses on Feuerbach, they were not published in his lifetime but provide the building blocks of some of his later ideas.

  Most of Marx’s writing in this period, both published as well as manuscript notes, is devoted to distancing his thought from his former Young Hegelian colleagues. His main argument against them is that they remain stuck in philosophical and theological matters, while he—as he mentioned later in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy from 1859—had moved, through an internal critique of Hegel, to the understanding that one has to relate to real social conditions and not just to their reflection in intellectual discourse.

  The very title The Holy Family—or the Critique of Critical Critique drips with heavy-handed irony. Its disdain for the Christian concept of a “holy family” is also aimed at the Bauer family—Bruno and Edgar Bauer, who established themselves as the mainstay of the Young Hegelian school—and the wordplay on the term “critique” highlighted what to Marx was their sham radicalism, which to him meant that they never transcended the world of philosophy, theology, and literary criticism. The agenda of the book is pithily encapsulated in its opening paragraph, written in somewhat carefully crafted coded language, as Marx and Engels hoped their book, published in Germany, would somehow avoid the eyes of the censors:

  Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes “self-consciousness” or the “spirit” for the real individual man.

  The italics in the original give the game away: the point is to go beyond the spiritual to the material, real conditions—and for that reason the book goes with a fine comb through the writings of the “spiritual” or “speculative” Young Hegelians, suggesting that their writings are irrelevant as a critique of real life: they are only criticizing criticism, not life.

  We have already seen how Marx used this tool in dismantling Bruno Bauer’s argument that the way for Jews to gain equal rights is first of all to convert. It was not the real-life conditions of the Jews or their civil and political rights in the here-and-now that concerned Bauer, but their faith: this is an argument out of theology, not real life—and hence, according t
o Marx, irrelevant.

  Going beyond the controversy with Bauer and his colleagues, Marx devotes a lengthy section of Chapter 6 to comments on the French Revolution and its Jacobin phase. It is interesting because both some German radicals—and certainly the French republican tradition—have viewed the Jacobin leaders Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just as a possible model for a future radical revolution, even applauding the Reign of Terror (Lenin and his followers did the same). In a surprising critique of the Jacobins, Marx argues that the Reign of Terror was itself a testimony of the failure of Jacobin politics because of their wrongheaded fascination with classical Rome, encapsulated in Saint-Just’s call to “Let revolutionary men be Romans” or his nostalgic complaint that, since the Romans, “the world is a void, and only their memory fills it and prophesizes liberty.”

  This to Marx is not only empty romanticism but would also be responsible for the Jacobins’ shift toward terrorism: the Roman republican tradition focused exclusively on political arrangements in the state, whereas modern societies have to grapple with the tension between civil, bourgeois society and the political realm—an issue totally unknown in Roman history. The tragedy of the Jacobins—and those in Germany and France who have not learned from their failure—was that because they tried to impose quasi-Roman solutions on a modern society with its modern class structure, they drifted toward terrorism in a futile attempt to force their historical model on a totally different society, which proved utterly recalcitrant to being molded according to the Roman example.

  This criticism of Jacobin terrorism is both intellectually and politically of high significance, and would accompany Marx all his life. As we shall see in his programmatic sections of The Communist Manifesto, Marx believed that social developments and economic transformations would lead to a different society, transcending the class struggles of capitalism; but any attempt to use force when conditions are not ripe for internal change are doomed to the tragedy—and cruelty—of the Jacobin terror. To Marx the failure of the Jacobins was inherent in their ahistorical approach: to craft an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century society according to a Roman model of the first century B.C. is irresponsible, dangerous, and doomed to failure and bloodshed. Some people and movements who maintained that they were following Marx’s revolutionary prescriptions fatally overlooked his strictures against the futility and dangers—moral and political—of revolutionary terrorism.

  HOMO FABER AND ALIENATION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

  Marx’s most significant corpus of writing from the Paris period was never published in his lifetime, nor was it meant to be: this was the so-called Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Like the Kreuznach critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the manuscripts were aimed at clarifying Marx’s own thoughts, partially through a meticulous critical reading of texts by other authors. Few nineteenth-century revolutionary thinkers paid similar attention to reading other people’s writings: this method gave extraordinary depth to Marx’s writing, but also much delayed his ability to arrive at final, publishable conclusions.

  The notebooks of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM) are very different in form and content from one another: some, especially those dealing with economic issues, are straightforward summaries of books by various economists; others present Marx’s own thoughts on the role of labor as the foundation of human existence and the sources of human history; some are dry economic accounts, while others provide dramatic descriptions of the alienation of the worker in modern industrial society; finally, some lead to almost poetical visions of the redemptive promises of communism. All of this is accompanied by another critique of Hegel’s thought and especially his dialectics.

  These basically reading notes and sketches are prefaced, however, by a programmatic introduction, which is actually the mission statement of Marx’s life project—of the magnum opus he never really managed to finish and of which Das Kapital would ultimately be supposed to be merely the first volume.

  I have already announced in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. … Now I will try to point out the overall connections … between political economy and the state, the law, morality, civil life etc. … It is hardly necessary to assure the reader that I have reached my conclusions by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.

  This is obviously a highly ambitious task, and Marx is well aware of the fact that it has to be based on an extensive study of the whole corpus of economic writing—which he does in the first three manuscripts, which deal with labor, capital, and land rent (issues that appear again later, in a slightly different order, in Das Kapital). At the same time Marx notes his indebtedness to French and English socialists, and also points out what he calls “the seminal writings” of Moses Hess on socialism and communism and his essay “The Philosophy of the Deed” [Die Philosophie der Tat], which focuses on the active ingredient in radical philosophy, going beyond the speculative writings of the Young Hegelians.

  The economic parts of the EPM, with their detailed analysis, especially of Adam Smith, are less interesting and original than what follows next, however—Marx’s first development of his philosophical anthropology.

  In a section called “Alienated Labor,” Marx sets out in dramatic and crystalline language his views of the specificity of human being (Gattungswesen): man to Marx is not Homo sapiens, but primarily Homo faber, the creative being who has a unique dialectical relationship to nature and to the objective world, which both sustains him and is also formed by his labor and his activity. This human activity constantly changes both nature and man himself.

  To Marx the major difference between humans and other animals is that animals are sustained by the means that nature puts at their disposal and are therefore constrained and limited by what nature offers them as food or shelter: their relationship to nature is basically passive, constant, and limited to their biological determination. Humans, on the other hand, shape nature, change it, and mold it to their need; in doing this, they also create new needs, whereas the needs of other animals are unchanged and strictly determined biologically. By creating new needs, humans also create history—as history is the developmental way by which they supply their needs through labor. Labor obviously needs a material, natural foundation, but it is changing nature, whereas animals just take from nature what it offers and leave it as it is. Without naming it “historical materialism,” this is the crux of Marx’s philosophical anthropology: labor is thus the foundation of human active consciousness: before being Homo sapiens, man is Homo faber.

  As becomes also clear from Marx’s straightforward description, he himself was losing the fetters of the speculative language he inherited from the Hegelian tradition:

  Of course, animals also produce. They construct nests, dwellings, as in the case of bees, beavers, ants, etc. But they only produce what is strictly necessary for themselves or their young. They produce only in a single direction, while man produces universally. They produce only under the compulsion of direct physical need, while man produces when he is free from physical needs and only truly produces in freedom from such needs.

  Humans’ labor enables them to transcend mere needs, which means they are not slaves to their needs: labor is not bondage, but constitutes real freedom and their essence as a species.

  Moreover, Marx argues that by processing nature and changing the natural object through labor, humans create external objects that stand apart from them—very different from what one sees in animals. Humans are also not limited to one method of relating to nature. Marx’s language borders on the poetic, without losing its empirical basis:

  The products of animal production belong directly to their physical bodies, while man is free in face of his product. Animals construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man knows how to
produce in accordance with the standards of every species and knows how to apply the appropriate standard to the object. Hence man can produce also in accordance with the laws of beauty.

  This humanistic basis of Marx’s philosophical anthropology serves as the foundation of his criticism of bourgeois society and modern capitalism. He shares the general criticism of other socialists who view capitalism as unjust and exploitative, yet he does not stop at this moralistic critique, which can be countered by arguing that every moral statement is itself a historically anchored social construct. Marx’s critique of capitalism goes further: industrial capitalism is not just oppressive; it basically dehumanizes every worker in a most fundamental way, by depriving them of their basic humanity, which is embedded in their being Homo faber, the creator of themselves and of human history.

  This historical contextualization of the role of the worker in capitalist society singles out Marx’s critique of capitalism and thus transcends mere moralism. Marx is of course aware that all previous modes of production were exploitative: but it is only in modern industrial capitalism that the producer is totally divorced both from his product and from his own role as producer.

  This is Marx’s theory of alienation, and here again he uses a Hegelian term (Entfremdung) but changes it totally: in the Hegelian tradition, alienation is a state of mind, of consciousness, which can be overcome by a change in consciousness. To Marx, the alienation of the worker results in total dehumanization: modern workers are alienated from the product of their work, from the process of production that is now mediated through machines, from their role as the creator of the actual human world through their labor—and from their own humanity. Only if one sees the essence of human beings in their role as Homo faber can one reach such a radical critique of what capitalism does to the modern proletariat.