Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx’s pessimistic prognosis appears in his attitudes toward a less orthodox contemporary, whose writings helped shape his view of industrialization. This was the German radical Wilhelm Schulz, a friend of Ruge and Fröbel, whose Movement of Production—even the title sounds like Marx’s version of economics—published in 1843, was quite influential in the Paris manuscripts, arguably more so than Engels’s essay on economics that appeared in the Franco-German Yearbooks. Decades later, in writing Capital, Marx would continue to praise Schulz’s work.62 Schulz explained, in powerful and evocative detail, how the progress of manufacturing in Great Britain, and the parallel expansion of national production, went along with the impoverishment and even physical deformation of the working class as a result of factory labor, condemning as sophists those who attempted to prove statistically that the workers were becoming better off. He asserted (with considerable impact on Marx) that even if workers’ real wages were rising, their relative poverty was increasing; that is, the workers’ share of national income was declining.63

  Where Marx did not follow Schulz, though, was in the latter’s contention that mechanization was decreasing the amount of difficult physical labor workers would have to perform. Nor did he consider Schulz’s suggestion that founding workers’ cooperatives might help mitigate their condition. Marx certainly did not agree with Schulz’s attacks on the Young Hegelians’ atheism and his call for religiously inspired social and political reforms.64 In his selective reading of Schulz’s book, singling out the darkest passages that made up a relatively small part of the work, Marx was demonstrating his fundamental agreement with the views of mainstream political economists—both their skepticism of reforms that interfered with the operations of the free market and their dark portrait of the ultimate end of free market economic activity.

  Marx criticized mainstream economists for having devised “laws” of economic development, but not “conceptualiz[ing] these laws, i.e., they did not follow out how they proceeded from the essence of private property.” Both conceptualizing and proceeding from an essence were fundamental to the Hegelian project of understanding intellectual disciplines as part of a philosophical system. This is what Marx undertook, albeit using his own version of Feuerbach’s materialist reformulation of Hegel, in the philosophical part of his economic and philosophical manuscripts.

  Marx observed that political economy had shown that “The worker becomes all the poorer, the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in extent and strength. . . . With the valuation of the world of things, the devaluation of the world of man increases in direct proportion. Labor does not just produce commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity. . . .”65 Marx interpreted philosophically this interrelated process of society’s enrichment and the proletariat’s impoverishment as a threefold alienation.

  One form of alienation was the emptying out (Entäusserung) of workers into the product of their labor, commodities and capital, which became alien to workers and possessed power over them. This process in economics was “just as in religion,” Marx noted, reiterating the Young Hegelians’ critique of religion as humanity alienating its essence in an imaginary divinity and subjecting itself to that divinity: “the more objects the worker produces, the less he can possess and the more he comes under the domination of his product, of capital.”

  Workers were not just alienated from the product of their labor; the process of labor itself had become alienated. There is a distinct twentieth- and twenty-first-century tendency to understand this “alienated labor” as referring to mechanical, repetitive, monotonous work, of the sort performed on assembly lines. Of course, there were no assembly lines in the 1840s, and Marx had no personal acquaintance with earlier forms of repetitive labor, such as textile workers tending a mule jenny, since the workers with whom he associated in Paris were skilled craftsmen, who toiled in small workshops lacking steam-powered machinery.66 Rather, Marx asserted that the process of labor was alienated and externalized because its product was alienated and externalized: labor was the “activity of externalization.” He continued: “The activity of the worker is not his self-activity. It belongs to another, it is the loss of his self.” Marx even criticized Charles Fourier for his denunciation of “leveled out, parcelized and thus unfree labor” as just a rejection of a “particular form” rather than of all forms of labor in a capitalist society. Fourier’s concept seems similar to a contemporary understanding of alienated labor as boring, unskilled, repetitive work, but Marx specifically rejected this concept as an inadequate understanding of the alienation of the labor process.67

  The third version of alienation Marx diagnosed from the conclusions of political economy was the alienation of human “species being” or “species essence” (in German, Gattungswesen). This was a rather more mysterious notion than the alienation of the product of labor or the alienation of the labor process. It was, as so often in Marx’s work in this period, a concept stemming from the Young Hegelian critique of religion, Ludwig Feuerbach’s idea of what was being alienated and externalized both in terms of human notions of a divinity and Hegel’s concept of Absolute Spirit. Marx reinterpreted Feuerbach’s concept, writing Feuerbach in August 1844, as the work on the Paris manuscripts was well advanced, to say that Feuerbach’s work provided the “philosophical basis of socialism” and that the “concept of the human species . . . is the concept of society.”68

  “Alienated labor,” Marx stated, “alienates man from the species; it makes his species life into the means of his individual life . . . life activity, productive life appears only as a means for the satisfaction of needs, the need for the preservation of physical existence.”69 This was the further development of a point Marx had made a year earlier, when he had contrasted, in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, the particular purposes of individuals and families in civil society with the universal purposes of the state. In a capitalist system, individual labor was alienated from the interests of human species understood as society; it did not express these human species interests. Alienated labor, Marx continued, alienated “man from man”; it was labor separated from human society.

  In drawing this revised distinction between the particular and the universal, Marx was also revising Feuerbach’s conception of human species essence or species being as incorporated in physical, reproductive love, to one in which species essence consisted of productive labor: “It is precisely in the manipulation and transformation of the objective world that man proves himself to be genuinely a species being. This production is his working species existence.” As Marx put it at a later point in the manuscript, “We see how the history of industry and the objective existence of the development of industry is the open book of human essential powers. . . .” Marx developed the idea that the basis of human existence in society was collective and cooperative labor, transforming products of nature from notions put forth by Moses Hess as reinterpreted in the light of the works of classical political economy. First articulated in the Paris manuscripts, this concept would remain central to his philosophical, historical, and economic analysis for the rest of his life.70

  Communism, as Marx understood it in the Paris manuscripts, was the abolition of the threefold alienation of labor stemming from private property. In discussing the consequences of the abolition of private property, Marx was careful to distance himself from “crude communism” and the “animalistic form” of communism, the community of women. (The accusation that communists wanted to make women into men’s collective property was a common form of conservative attack on communism, in the 1840s and later.) Rather, his communism had more Hegelian, philosophical elements:

  positive abolition of private property as human self alienation and thus as the genuine appropriation of human essence by and for man. . . . This communism is . . . the true dissolution of the clash between man and nature, and between man and man, the true dissolution of the clash between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confir
mation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself as this solution.71

  Marx’s communism was the materialist form of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. It was also the new version, inflected by Marx’s reading of political economy, of the “democratic” state he had described as a political ideal in his critique of Hegel. Marx had even referred to this democratic state as the “solution to the riddle of all constitutions,” just as he described communism as the solution to the riddle of history. In communism, as in the earlier description of a democratic ideal, the distinction between particular private activities and universal human activities would be abolished.

  Marx’s understanding of society and social existence had been influenced by his experiences with radicalized Parisian workers. In a telling passage, he described how meetings of communist workers presaged a future communist society:

  When communist artisans unite, at first doctrine, propaganda, etc. is the purpose of their meetings. But as they meet, they appropriate a new need, the need for society, and what appeared as a means now becomes an end. One can observe this practical movement in its most shining results, when one sees a meeting of socialist French workers. Smoking, drinking, eating, etc. are no longer there as means of connection and as connecting means. Society, the association, the conversation, which, in turn, has society as its goal, suffices for them. The brotherhood of man is no phrase, but a truth to them and the nobility of humanity shines out at us from figures hardened by labor.72

  This distinctly romanticized description of the meeting of a secret society marked a new stage in Marx’s invention of the working class. Not just the necessary instrument of revolutionary political change, as he described the workers in the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” they were now the group whose social practices were articulations of the future social and political order Marx envisaged. Both these steps in his evolving perception of the nature and historical significance of the proletariat reflected his Parisian experiences: his encounters with socialist workers and his intense reading of political economists.

  THE PROCESS OF WRITING the economic and philosophical manuscripts clarified Marx’s ideas and gave him an intellectual agenda. In an introduction to the manuscripts composed toward the end of his reflections, rather than at the beginning, he announced his intention of writing a series of short pieces, criticizing in Feuerbach’s version of Hegelian philosophy “justice, morality, politics, etc.” He would begin this critical series with a short work on political economy. In early 1845, Marx signed a contract with the left-wing Darmstadt publisher Karl Julius Leske, to write such a book, A Critique of Politics and Economics. There was considerable interest among Marx’s Cologne acquaintances, and among German-speaking socialists throughout Europe, in the proposed work.73

  This plan to publish critiques of different aspects of the bourgeois and capitalist society in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, beginning with economics, remained a project Marx would pursue for the rest of his life. It was a difficult task for an author who had trouble completing any work he began, and who was frequently distracted from his long-term goals. Marx never got beyond the initial critique of political economy. His research and writing on economics of the 1850s and 1860s culminated in the enormous and ultimately unfinished Capital, whose subtitle was “A Critique of Political Economy,” which represented the first stage of the original critical project.

  If the project got off to a slow start in 1845, it was not just Marx’s work habits that were to blame. Rather, it was the long arm of the Prussian monarchy, reaching out to harass its enemies, outside of Prussian jurisdiction. The Prussians threatened Marx’s publisher (who resided in Hessen outside Prussian territory) and forced him to insist that Marx tone down the political implications of his book, and ultimately to cancel the contract altogether. This action was directed against Marx personally; much more difficult was the result of an action by Count Arnim, the Prussian ambassador in Paris, aimed at German radicals there more generally. Arnim wanted the French government to expel a group of them who had published anti-Prussian writings. François Guizot, the moderate-liberal French prime minister, may not have wanted to give in to the demands of a conservative government and endorse its attitude about freedom of the press, but as an enemy of the French radicals and socialists, he was not altogether happy about having foreigners of similar opinions circulating in the capital. After lengthy negotiations, he agreed to issue expulsion orders for five Germans: the founders and current editor of Forwards! as well as Marx and Ruge, editors of the defunct but distinctly anti-Prussian Franco-German Yearbooks. The French Ministry of the Interior did not actually know where Marx resided to serve him with the expulsion order, so Marx voluntarily turned himself in to the police after hearing about the orders from the other dissidents. Well ensconced in Paris, pursuing his studies of history and political economy, working on the left-wing German-language newspaper, and trusting that the French liberal government would hardly give in to its reactionary Prussian counterpart, Marx did not take the expulsion order seriously. Then, to his dismay, he found that he had one week to leave the country.74

  At the end of January 1845, Marx left France for Belgium, accompanied by one of his Cologne admirers, Heinrich Bürgers, who had been visiting Marx in Paris. As the two rode the postal coach through northern France, Bürgers thought it necessary to start singing, “in order to dispel the thoughtful and depressed mood” that Marx “sought in vain to master.”75 If Karl was depressed at his expulsion, his wife, left behind to wind up the family business in Paris, was stressed and infuriated. Just at the beginning of her second pregnancy, with little Jenny in tow, Jenny dashed around the city, trying in vain to get back the deposit on their rented apartment, hoping, apparently with equally little success, to arrange auctioning off the family’s furniture. “These are the wonderful consequences of this governmental, guizotian infamy,” she complained to Karl.76

  Jenny’s anger, like Karl’s depression, is easy to understand, but the targeting of her husband by the Prussian government was evidence of his increased political stature. Unlike the suppression of the Rhineland News, when the Prussian authorities were not quite clear who was responsible for the editorial policy of the newspaper, they now had Marx in their sights as an enemy of the state. There were standing orders to arrest him, should he set foot on Prussian territory.77 Not content with that, the Prussian government, as the demands of its ambassador in Paris show, was determined to harass and undermine Marx’s position, even if he was outside its immediate grasp.

  Marx could no longer live peacefully as an émigré. If he wished to remain on the Continent and continue his intellectual and political activities, he would have to fight back against the Prussian government, aiming at its overthrow. How such an anti-Prussian commitment would accompany the pro-communist one he had developed during his sixteen months in Paris was a question that would dominate the four and a half years of Marx’s life that followed his expulsion from France, the period of his most direct and intense revolutionary activity.

  5

  The Revolutionary

  THE LIVELY NIGHTTIME ENTERTAINMENT Marx and Engels had enjoyed after their meeting in Paris was not to be had in Brussels. Contemporary observers noted how the Belgian capital became “quiet, very early in the evening.”1 Entertainment aside, the enforced move from Paris to Brussels seemed to have thrust Marx into the margins, from the political and intellectual center of the Continent to the capital of a small, newly founded country, whose continued independence was chronically in doubt. But Brussels offered more possibilities than appeared at first glance. The Belgian capital became Marx’s home for three years, his longest continued period of residence in any one place between leaving the University of Berlin in 1842 and his arrival as a refugee in London in 1849. The time in Brussels was Marx’s revolutionary apprenticeship, preparing him organizationally, intellectually, and politically for his r
ole in the turbulent politics of the Revolution of 1848–49. Like all apprenticeships, this one had its share of false steps, difficult lessons, and wrong turnings. But as Marx learned his revolutionary craft and political circumstances turned more favorable, the value of the apprenticeship would become clear.

  IF NOT QUITE ON Paris’s scale, the quarter million inhabitants of Brussels during the 1840s created an urban world that was nothing less than substantial. Rather like the French capital, there was a German colony, consisting of some émigré intellectuals and a larger group of craftsmen. Also like Paris, radical and liberal political refugees from across the Continent had found their way to Brussels. The excellent royal library was convenient for Marx’s studies of philosophy and political economy. Brussels’s location, with easy access to Cologne, Paris, and London, the three foci of Marx’s political activity, was a decided advantage. Admittedly, the Parisian socialist scene was lacking. As one contemporary noted, “one has to search for socialists with a lantern” in Brussels.2 But in Belgium, whose independence in 1830 from the Netherlands had come simultaneously with the drafting of a constitution fully guaranteeing civil liberties, Catholic conservatives, liberals, and radicals all publicly and energetically propagated their views.3

  In Brussels, Marx continued and expanded the activities he had begun in Paris. One theme was to enhance ties with a radical secret society of German artisans. Marx also worked persistently on publishing projects designed to recreate an émigré political journal along the lines of the Franco-German Yearbooks. His intellectual efforts, including the projected work on political economy, and the unfinished political and philosophical commentaries on trends in German radicalism co-authored with Engels and Moses Hess, which has come to be known as The German Ideology, were closely connected to these publishing ventures. Marx would also meet and associate with political radicals from other countries, both refugees and Belgians, leading to the high point of his pre-revolutionary activity, his involvement in the Brussels Democratic Association, formed toward the end of 1847.