Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Proudhon, for instance, had maintained that there was a contradiction between the use of a commodity and its market value: the larger the harvest, the more food there was, the more useful for humanity, but the lower the price of food would be. Marx’s sharp retort was to point out that Proudhon’s contradiction was really no contradiction at all, since price was formed by the working of supply and demand, and Proudhon had just discussed supply but had nothing to say about demand. If demand increased sharply, then prices could go up, in spite of a rise in supply.39 Marx proceeded to analyze other basic concepts, thrashing Proudhon’s account of the paradoxes in the labor theory of value, the division of labor and the use of machinery, the rise of ground rent, as opposed to the decline of interest, or the potentially inflationary effects of union organizing and strikes. In each of these instances, Marx carefully demonstrated his mastery of basic Ricardian concepts—the determination of goods’ value by the amount of labor expended in producing them, or rent on land as the difference in return between the most and the least fertile property.40

  If Marx had little patience with his target’s understanding of Ricardo, his patience with Proudhon’s understanding of Hegel was even shorter. In a derisive passage, Marx caricatured Proudhon’s philosophical development of economic concepts:

  . . . impersonal reason . . . is forced . . . to pose, oppose and compose itself—position, opposition, composition. To speak Greek, we have thesis, antithesis, synthesis . . . Hegel’s . . . sacramental formula: affirmation, negation, negation of the negation. . . . Apply this method to the categories of political economy, and . . . you will have translated economic categories, known by everyone, into a little known language, in which they look as though they had emerged, newly formed, from a head of pure reason. . . . 41

  It is one of the more peculiar features of the history of Marxism that thesis, antithesis, synthesis—the phrase Marx used to mock Proudhon’s misunderstanding of Hegel—would come to be regarded as the quintessence of Marx’s methodology.

  Rather, this assertion of Proudhon’s misunderstanding of Hegel brought up the central theme of the entire work. Marx, employing the ideas he and Engels had worked out in their manuscript about Feuerbach but never published, accused Proudhon of granting abstract philosophical concepts priority in understanding economics over the actual material conditions of production. Proudhon’s work was in “the old Hegelian manner . . . not a profane history, a history of men . . . a sacred history, a history of ideas . . . man is nothing but an instrument, which the idea or eternal reason exploits in order to develop itself. . . . If you pull the curtain of this mystical language, it comes to be said that M. Proudhon gives you the order in which economic categories are arranged in his head.”42 Admittedly, Marx thought that Proudhon did a much poorer job of arranging these mental categories than Hegel ever had, but disdain for Proudhon’s mental untidiness was subordinate to criticism of his placing abstract concepts ahead of concrete material production in understanding economics.

  As with Marx’s assertions in The German Ideology, the criticism of Proudhon was an externalized form of self-criticism. Marx had persistently described himself as an admirer of Proudhon’s ideas from his time as editor of the Rhineland News through the publication of The Holy Family, and had tried to recruit Proudhon to his communist committee of correspondence. Proudhon’s project of providing a Hegelian critique of political economy was very similar to what Marx was trying to do in the Paris manuscripts.

  Although The Poverty of Philosophy was not the critique of political economy that Marx had been promising since 1845, it was the first time that basic concepts of Marxist economics, such as use value, exchange value, and modes of production, made their appearance. Just as The Holy Family provided short, published summaries of Marx’s longer and more complex theorizing in the unpublished Paris manuscripts, The Poverty of Philosophy included briefer, published versions of a number of ideas in the unpublished chapter on Feuerbach in The Germany Ideology.

  One aspect of The Poverty of Philosophy distinguished it from all of Marx’s previous works: Marx wrote the book in French. He saw the intellectual significance of the circles of Parisian socialists and radicals he had encountered before his expulsion from the French capital as so great that he needed to intervene directly in it, writing a book in French (while all German intellectuals could read French, the opposite was not the case), soliciting assistance in perfecting his French style, and paying the costs of publication himself. Marx’s aim was never fulfilled, because the book never reached its intended destinations; the publishers took Marx’s money but did not send any free publicity copies to Parisian socialist leaders as he requested. A few copies circulated hand to hand among German émigré intellectuals in Paris.43

  Marx had revised and expanded the materialist critique of Hegel and the post-Hegelian vision of a communist society he had developed in the years in Kreuznach and Paris. He had replaced Feuerbach’s human species essence with a conception of humans as collective producers, working in distinct forms of social and economic organization with associated levels of technology. In turn, these features interacted to produce a society partitioned by the division of labor into different and antagonistic social classes. A communist future and a working class that would bring it about in revolutionary fashion had been tied much more closely to the history of the French Revolution of 1789 and to the doctrines of political economy—and not so much to the socialist critics of these doctrines as to their orthodox defenders, particularly the English economist David Ricardo. Marx had reached these results through a series of increasingly bitter criticisms of his contemporaries, criticisms that were implicitly directed at his own, earlier views, suggesting they were not tough-minded and practical enough. Yet his efforts to bring his increasing theoretical clarity to the attention of a public consisting primarily of radical German intellectuals and their French counterparts had been largely unsuccessful, partly as a result of the difficulties in publishing, but also a consequence of his own problems in formulating consistent accounts of his ideas, and of his penchant for launching vehement polemics—witty and cutting, but also lengthy and obsessed—that could become an end in itself. This polemical edge would also appear in the personal and political conflicts in which he became involved over the course of 1846.

  MARX’S EFFORTS TO RALLY support through his projected communist committee of correspondence and his connections with the London communists also led to breaking off contacts with former political associates. Favorable observers have described these breaks as necessary steps toward theoretical clarity and unity of action; more hostile ones attribute them to Marx’s dictatorial tendencies and his desire to turn allies into subordinates. There were certainly elements of both motives, but they primarily reflected Marx’s attempt to carve out a position for himself among émigré German radicals who were on their own in foreign countries, generally in difficult personal and financial circumstances, all the while facing the constant pressure of hostile Prussian and Austrian governments. Since these émigré radicals were, at best, very loosely organized, political action occurred in informal personal relations, so that political conflicts were invariably personalized. Three substantial clashes accompanied Marx’s political course in 1846 and 1847: with Friedrich Engels and Moses Hess, with Wilhelm Weitling, and finally, with Karl Grün.

  The first of these, a little-known episode that took place around the beginning of 1846, began with a personal slight, Jenny von Westphalen’s disparaging remarks about Engels’s mistress, the Manchester factory girl Mary Burns. Jenny’s hostility toward Burns, whom she described to Karl as an “intriguing, ambitious woman, a Lady Macbeth,” was pronounced; two years later, well after Marx and Engels had reconciled, she insisted on sitting on the opposite side of the room from Mary at public events. By contrast, Jenny was quite friendly with Hess’s female companion, Sybille Pesch, also from a working-class background, who spent a lot of time with the family during the months that she and Moses lived
in Brussels. Among other things, she helped to take care of the Marx children. But Pesch was a figure with a dubious past; the rumor was that Hess had met her when he was a customer at a brothel in Cologne where she worked. Hess, well aware of these issues in view of his own companion’s background and the stories told about her, saw Jenny’s attitude toward Mary Burns as upper-class contempt for a worker who did not know her proper place. Both Hess and Engels blamed Marx for the situation, asserting that Karl was not acting like a proper male head of the household, but was letting his wife’s prejudices determine his opinions.

  The conflict quickly developed political ramifications. Marx let his friends in Cologne know that Engels lacked the intellectual ability to carry out the necessary theoretical work and philosophical criticism in which they were engaged. This judgment was accompanied by sarcastic remarks about Engels as the “friend of the proletarians,” his mistress in particular, and a “tall lad.” This last was a sarcastic denunciation of Engels as a Prussian, since the “tall lads” were the six-foot-tall soldiers that the eighteenth-century Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I had recruited for his army. Marx had nothing better to say about Hess, whom he described as a “sponge,” a dreamer and spiritualist incapable of practical political activity. It was Marx’s Cologne friends Heinrich Bürgers and Roland Daniels who asserted that Hess “carries around the ballast of so much nonsense in his head,” and that he aspired to be the “high priest” of communism; but their comments were undoubtedly reflections of Marx’s own attitudes.44

  Marx and Engels were able to reconcile, probably by working on the enormously lengthy chapter on Max Stirner for The German Ideology. By criticizing “Saint Max,” Engels could break with his own past—both his own friendship with Stirner, as fellow members of the Free Men, and his previous enthusiasm for Stirner’s work that Engels had perceived (somewhat oddly) as providing a theoretical basis for communism—and prove his philosophical capabilities to Marx’s satisfaction.45 The chapter on Stirner, enormously out of scale when compared to the rest of the manuscripts comprising The German Ideology, makes more sense if it served the purpose of restoring the two men’s friendship.

  Hess, by contrast, was not reconciled with Marx. He prepared to leave Brussels, which he did at the end of March 1846, to devote himself to socialist periodicals in the Rhineland, soon to be prohibited by the Prussian government. The break with Hess was by no means total. Hess’s behavior for the next few months—and, indeed, for the rest of his life—would oscillate between cooperation and being appalled by Marx. But the close working connection that marked the relationship in late 1845 and early 1846 was irrevocably gone, and the brief time in which the triumvirate of Marx, Hess, and Engels had held sway was permanently over.

  Marx’s second major clash, with the working-class socialist Wilhelm Weitling, is better known. A journeyman tailor, Weitling was one of the German artisans living abroad, belonging to radical secret societies, who had developed vaguely socialist ideas of unorthodox Christian inspiration. Unlike most of his fellow artisans, Weitling put his thoughts down on paper, writing two books—Guarantees of Freedom and Harmony and The Gospel of a Poor Sinner—that made him a well-known and influential figure among German émigrés. His imprisonment in Switzerland for advocating socialist ideas added a nimbus of martyrdom to his reputation.

  After being active with the League of the Just in Paris and London, Weitling came to Brussels in 1846 to work with Marx, who had previously written warmly about him. Their collaboration quickly collapsed, during one of the very first meetings of the Communist Committee of Correspondence, at the end of March 1846. Pavel Annenkov, a Russian émigré who was present, described how Marx, sitting at the head of the table, began to question Weitling sharply, and in steadily more critical fashion, about how he could justify his ideas. Weitling defended himself, insisting that his agitation was giving the workers hope in their misery and oppression. But Marx cut Weitling off and retorted that spreading confused ideas and dubious hopes among the workers, promoting concepts lacking in Wissenschaft, was “an empty and unconscionable toying with preaching sermons,” which would just lead to the ruination of the oppressed. The two men argued and Marx, growing steadily angrier, pounded on the table with his fist, stood up, and shouted, “Ignorance has never yet helped anyone!”46

  This episode is often reported as an example of Marx’s contempt for the workers he supposedly wanted to liberate and his anti-democratic, dictatorial tendencies. These accusations were first raised by Weitling himself, who let everyone know that Marx was planning to eliminate workers from the leadership of the communist movement and replace them with bourgeois intellectuals, because the workers were untrustworthy. Moses Hess, who was not present at the meeting, but received a letter about it from Weitling, described Marx’s treatment of Weitling as “nauseating,” and announced he would have nothing more to do politically with Marx. Characteristically, he changed his mind within a few months and began attempting a political reconciliation.47

  What does not appear in Annenkov’s reminiscence is why Weitling and Marx were shouting at each other in the first place. Weitling, in his letter to Hess, explained their differences: Marx had insisted that “at the moment there can be no talk of the realization of communism; the bourgeoisie must first take control.” This was an issue that Marx was considering in his theoretical writings at the time, linking the onset of communism to the development of capitalist industry, in contrast to Weitling’s idea that communism had always been possible throughout human history. It was also an issue that had been debated among the London communists, who had roundly renounced Weitling’s view. Weitling’s trip to Brussels to work with Marx and Engels was designed to find a new field for his political activity, since his former supporters in the League of the Just had rejected his ideas and claims to leadership.48

  Weitling himself was in a difficult position at the time. He was broke, had sought to borrow money from Marx and was dependent on him for his meals. Even after the confrontation at the Committee of Correspondence, Weitling stayed in Brussels and continued to try to work with Marx and Engels. When this proved impossible, he needed money from them to leave. The funds were procured by Moses Hess from Marx’s friends in Cologne.49

  The dispute between Marx and Weitling reflected the insecure position of émigrés, lacking material support and an organized following, while striving for a dominant position in a radical political movement. Hess’s motives were quite similar. While he claimed to be appalled by Marx’s insistence on creating an approved doctrine and rejecting other points of view, just a few months earlier when he and Marx had been getting along quite well, he was very enthusiastic about the idea of establishing a definitive communist political program.50

  Such striving for a dominant position in the nascent communist movement was most apparent in the third of these confrontations, with the True Socialist Karl Grün. Although relatively neglected by historians, it was the most extensive, the most public, and the most controversial of Marx’s clashes at the time. Personal antipathy, political and intellectual differences, and personal rivalry were mixed together. While there was a strong element of petty nastiness in the confrontation, the issues raised would recur in major ways during the turbulent politics of the 1848 Revolution.51

  The controversy began shortly after Marx moved to Brussels, when he read a copy of Grün’s book on the socialist and communist movement in France and Belgium, designed as an introduction for educated German readers. Marx began making dismissive remarks about Grün, describing him as a dilettante and a hack writer rather than a serious author. Hess, who actually tended to agree with Marx on this point, nonetheless told Grün about these negative opinions. Marx was not content with merely muttering; he prepared a written attack on Grün that was integrated into the section on the True Socialists in The German Ideology, and ultimately became the only portion of the work to appear in print.

  The confrontation with Grün was woven deeply into the fabric of the add
itional communist committees of correspondence Marx was trying to set up. The letter to Proudhon in May 1846, inviting him to be Marx’s Paris correspondent, contained a postscript denouncing Grün as a “knight of the literary industry, a kind of charlatan who makes a business of dealing in modern ideas. . . . Watch out for this parasite.”52 Following up on this initiative, Engels was dispatched to Paris in August 1846, ostensibly to set up the Paris bureau of the Communist Correspondence Committee, in fact to do battle with Grün among the German artisans in the secret societies there.

  Grün, though, was not hapless like Weitling or dreamy and indecisive like Hess. He was an able writer and supple politician, ready and willing to fight back. Present in Paris, not exiled to Brussels, he was able to win the contest for access to Proudhon, in part by rank personal flattery. Proudhon roundly rejected Marx’s warnings about Grün, and let Marx know he would only cooperate with him in his proposed communist network if Marx would help Grün bring out a German translation of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty.53 Rather than agree to Proudhon’s terms, Marx attacked him as well by writing The Poverty of Philosophy, a decision that naturally angered the French socialist. He annotated his personal copy of Marx’s book with the words: “a tissue of vulgarity, of calumny of falsification and of plagiarism,” and moved closer to Grün, who steadily developed his reputation as Proudhon’s adviser and interpreter for the German-speaking world. Grün moved to fortify his position with the radical German artisans in Paris by, among other things, taking them on tours of the Louvre. Engels’s repeated assertions of his success in driving out Grün’s influence and his supporters were followed by frustrated observations of their recurrence. Engels’s heavy-handed manner, which included at one point a fistfight with a politically opposed artisan, cannot have helped his and Marx’s cause any.54