Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Even without these detours, Marx always tended to work slowly and revise constantly. He had difficulty getting the final version of his thoughts down on paper, so it is no surprise that he never developed the critiques of society and intellectual disciplines first planned in 1845. The results of his theoretical deliberations are frustrating to interpret, albeit for opposing reasons in different branches of knowledge. Marx’s writings after 1850 on philosophy, society, and history were fragmentary: snippets of journalism or suggestions from correspondence, relevant passages in political polemics, or economics treatises. In spite of occasionally mentioned plans, he never produced an extensive theoretical work, which has led commentators and interpreters to focus their attention on his 1840s manuscripts—incomplete, but at least substantial. By contrast, the problem with the writings on economics is that there was too much. Two books were published in Marx’s lifetime: On the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, and Capital, Volume One, of 1867. The latter, as anyone who has ever picked it up knows, is lengthy and dense. Besides the material that appeared in print, Marx left behind an enormous array of manuscripts on economics that Engels sorted through and edited into Volumes Two and Three of Capital. Further manuscripts on the history of political economy were later published as Theories of Surplus Value. But reducing the mass of handwritten manuscripts even to three thick books meant leaving out a large volume of unpublished writings, to say nothing of Marx’s extensive notes on economics and the many discussions of economic questions in his correspondence.

  For this intellectual labyrinth, simultaneously fragmentary and overwhelming, a useful guide is Ferdinand Lassalle’s pithy description, written in 1851, of Marx as a thinker: “Ricardo become a socialist; Hegel become an economist.”1 At the very beginning of a two-decade period of theoretical contemplation and development, Marx’s perceptive disciple had focused on two key themes. He was undisputedly a follower of Hegel, but what did it mean to be a Hegelian after 1850, when a new and distinctly non-Hegelian philosophy—that of positivism—was in the ascendant? This new development posed a problem not just for philosophy per se but for an understanding of human history and human society. The other point of Lassalle’s remark was that Marx’s understanding of economics was shaped by the ideas of David Ricardo, the great English political economist and chief disciple of Adam Smith. In the two decades after 1850, if not beyond, Marx would attempt to elaborate his version of Ricardo’s deeply pessimistic view of the future of capitalist development. He would create from it a system of political economy demonstrating how a capitalist economy would, as a result of its own inner workings, give way to a socialist one. This was a difficult task in itself, but even more challenging because it took place in a very different time: not the crisis-ridden era of the early nineteenth century when industry came to England, but the twenty-five-year period of prosperity and accelerated economic growth following 1850. Marx’s efforts to affirm his own version of the Hegelian legacy while incorporating the positivist intellectual trends of the time is the subject of this chapter; the creation of a communist version of Ricardo’s political economy in a rather different era from that in which Ricardo lived and worked is the topic of the next.

  POSITIVISM INITIALLY APPEARED AT the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it quickly advanced to a leading status in European intellectual and cultural life only after 1850. Positivists, and many contemporaries who did not use that term, saw human knowledge emerging from empirical perception of the world. Unlike the eighteenth-century empiricists, whose ideas were heavily criticized by Kant and Hegel, positivists understood empirical knowledge as a result of scientific procedures—experiment, organized data gathering, and mathematical analysis—rather than simple sense perception. At first, the physical sciences provided the model for positivist epistemology, but after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, evolutionary biology became a steadily more important template for the acquisition of knowledge. Contemporaries took these scientific models and applied them to every imaginable intellectual discipline, from anthropology and sociology to literary criticism; perceptions of human history were recast in terms of evolutionary stages of the advance of science.2

  This development represented a particular problem for Marx. His socialism was wissenschaftlich, but the Wissenschaft he had in mind in making these claims was the Hegelian scholarship that he had joined at the University of Berlin and that was still intellectually dominant in the 1840s. The rise of positivism by the 1850s and 1860s was producing a very different form of Wissenschaft. Marx, who along with Engels followed scientific developments closely, was very much aware of this intellectual transformation. Could his theories continue to be wissenschaftlich while still being Hegelian, or would he jump on the positivist bandwagon as well?

  For Marx’s onetime comrades the Young Hegelians, the new intellectual trends were painfully apparent. Marx had little sympathy with their complaints. When Bruno Bauer visited Marx in London at the end of 1855, he observed, as Marx wrote with amusement to Engels, that “In Germany—horrible indeed!—nothing more is purchased and read than miserable compilations from the field of the natural sciences.” A couple of years later, Arnold Ruge announced that he was planning a new version of the German Yearbooks. According to Marx, “Its main task is to be a struggle against materialism, in industry and the natural sciences, also against comparative linguistics, which is sprouting up everywhere, in short, against everything for which exact knowledge is necessary.”3 These remarks sound distinctly positivist, the attitudes of a man abandoning his own previous allegiance to Hegelian thought for a new worldview, based on the empirical findings of the sciences.

  * * *

  COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (1848)

  In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborers, who only live as long as they find work, and only find work as long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who sell themselves by the piece, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. . . . In proportion as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage therefore decreases. Nay more in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases . . .

  * * *

  In his public pronouncements after 1850, Marx sounded a distinctly positivist note. If we juxtapose his description of the impoverishment of the working class in the Communist Manifesto with a similar examination sixteen years later in the Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association, we can clearly see the increasing positivism.

  * * *

  INAUGURAL ADDRESS (1864)

  Dr. Smith, the medical deputy, ascertained that 28,000 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen were the weekly allowance that would keep an average adult . . . just over the level of starvation diseases, and he found furthermore that quantity pretty nearly to agree with the scanty nourishment to which the pressure of extreme distress had actually reduced the cotton operatives. . . . The result of his researches . . . the silk weavers, the needle women, the kid glovers, the stocking weavers, and so forth, received on the average, not even the amount of carbon and nitrogen “just sufficient to avert diseases . . . of the agricultural population . . . more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of the carbonaceous food . . . more than one third were with less than the sufficiency of the nitrogenous food. . . .”4

  * * *

  The Manifesto described a dialectical process in which labor is transformed into its opposite, capital, and the workers’ labor impoverishes them as it is externalized in the capital it creates. Sixteen years later, dialectics was gone. In its place was a scientific definition of malnutrition, complete with the requisite number of grains of nitrogen, and the results of survey research. The transition from Hegelian to positivist fo
rms of representation leaps off the page.

  Many still influential older works of scholarship, often written without considering the Hegelian-inflected texts of the 1840s, simply treat Marx as a positivist.5 But looking more closely at his responses to developments in the natural and physical sciences after 1850, a more complex picture emerges, in which he both accepted and criticized new scientific advances. He accommodated his philosophical presuppositions to them, but also held fast to his philosophical basics, while articulating them in a form more acceptable to a positivist era.

  One of Marx’s first encounters with science after 1850 came from a close friend and political associate, Roland Daniels. In 1851, before the Cologne physician was arrested and indicted in the Cologne Communist Trial, he wrote to Marx about a theoretical work he was preparing, Microcosm: Draft of a Physiological Anthropology. Daniels’s starting point was the same as Marx’s had been in the 1840s, Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion of sensuous humanity as the basis of knowledge and historical development. But for Daniels, the sensuous human being of Feuerbach’s theories was a physiological human being: “the human organism is and remains my measure.” History and society were physiological, the reflex responses of human organisms to stimuli from their environment. Following in Feuerbach’s footsteps, Daniels wanted to create a physiological philosophy—a scientific, materialist, and practical atheism—sharply differing from the philosophical and idealist atheism of the Young Hegelians. Daniels understood socialism in physiological terms: “Interest [on loans] is a matter of indifference to me, but not the purity of my food.” A socialist society would aim to improve scientifically determined public and individual health, to their maximum extent. Daniels suggested that socialist demands could be summed up in one sentence: “Production according to strict scientific criteria solely with regard for the human organism.”

  Unfortunately, only Daniels’s side of the correspondence has been preserved, but Daniels’s comments on Marx’s replies are informative. Marx apparently told Daniels that his whole approach was “sometimes too mechanical, sometimes too anatomical,” that he was unable to integrate human consciousness into his explanation of history or to explain how society, if constituted by physiological laws, could ever be changed. Marx even asserted that he found Bruno Bauer more wissenschaftlich than Feuerbach—perhaps surprising given Feuerbach’s materialism and Bauer’s idealism.6 But this attitude certainly fit with a rejection of positivism. Feuerbach’s own later writings moved in a positivist direction, criticizing Hegel for stating that truth has to be found in a dialectical historical process rather than simply being available to perception. Marx showed considerable interest in Daniels’s ideas—he filled Daniels’s letters with underlinings and marginal emphases—but his rejection of explanations of human history and society, of the foundations of philosophy and the arguments in favor of socialism in terms of scientific physiology, suggest a skeptical attitude toward positivism.

  Perhaps he needed something more convincing than his friend’s physiological philosophy to move him. A logical place to look for such an impetus would be the greatest intellectual event of the positivist era, and the most significant scientific event of the entire nineteenth century. The publication of On the Origin of Species not only revolutionized science; it evoked emulation and repulsion in virtually all aspects of European cultural and intellectual life. As everyone knows, or thinks they know, Marx offered to dedicate Capital to Darwin, and repeatedly claimed that Darwin’s findings on nature confirmed his own on human society. Yet while Marx accepted the scientific validity of Darwin’s theories and endorsed them, in positivist fashion, for their support of atheism and ideas of progress, he also advanced a Hegelian criticism of Darwin’s concepts and showed skepticism about their application to the study of human history and society.

  Marx’s introduction to Darwin came from Engels, who had acquired a copy of On the Origin of Species within two weeks of its publication in November 1859. He read rapidly and enthusiastically and reported to his friend that the book was “just terrific . . . up to now there has never been such a wonderful attempt made to prove historical development in nature, at least not with such success.”7 It took Marx a year to follow Engels’s recommendation and actually read the book himself, which he did while nursing his wife through her bout with smallpox. “Although developed in a crude English way, this is the book that contains the basis for our views in natural history,” he told Engels. In January 1861, he wrote Ferdinand Lassalle that “Darwin’s writing is very important and suits me as the basis in natural history for the historical class struggle. . . .” Once awakened, Marx’s interest in Darwin’s ideas continued for years. He repeatedly discussed evolutionary theory with his friends and associates in London, attended lectures and studied the writings of Darwin’s chief popularizer, Thomas Henry Huxley, and avidly read authors who claimed to have developed improved versions of the idea of natural selection.8

  From this, it would be easy to conclude that Darwin’s writings had converted Marx to the positivist idea of natural science as the basis for knowledge. But there was a more skeptical side to Marx’s attitudes about the great biologist. After rereading On the Origin of Species, he wrote to Engels in June 1862 that

  with Darwin’s work, which I have looked at again, it amuses me that he says he is also applying the “Malthusian” theory to plants and animals, as if the whole point with Herr Malthus were not that his theory is not applied to plants and animals, but to humans—with geometric progression—in contrast to plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is . . . reminiscent of Hegel, in the “Phenomenology,” where bourgeois society appears as the “spiritual animal kingdom,” while in Darwin the animal kingdom appears as bourgeois.9

  This summary of Darwin’s work was the very opposite of positivism, in which the natural sciences provided a model for the understanding of the world. Instead, it took the Hegelian position that philosophy—or, in Marx’s version, a philosophically inflected political economy—could evaluate and criticize the conceptual basis of other branches of knowledge, including the sciences. As Marx considered the matter further, he became more skeptical about claims that Darwin’s theories provided a guide to economy and society. After his son-in-law Paul Lafargue met with Clémence Royer, Darwin’s French translator in 1869, and was disappointed at her capitalist (if otherwise left-wing and anti-clerical) credentials, Marx told him it was no surprise that she was “bourgeois.” Darwin had transposed the struggle for existence in English laissez-faire capitalism into the natural world, so Darwinists naturally saw this as reason “for human society never to emancipate itself from its bestiality.”10

  Marx came to see Darwinism as part of a positivist trend that was undermining the position of Hegelian ideas. In a well-known afterword to the second edition of Capital, he denounced contemporary German thinkers who saw Hegel as a “dead dog,” and insisted on the validity of his dialectical methods, which he had applied in his critique of political economy. Marx left those German thinkers so critical of Hegel anonymous in print, but in a letter to Engels he suggested that the problem began with Feuerbach, “who has a lot on his conscience in that respect.” In another letter to his friend Dr. Kugelmann, he called out the critics by name. Two were the economist Eugen Dühring, and the famous physiologist and experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner, whose experiments with stimuli and mathematical formulations about them were reminiscent of Roland Daniels’s proposals. Two more were prominent German Darwinians: Ludwig Büchner and Friedrich Albert Lange.11 Both of these men were leftists, and Lange was even a partisan of the labor movement, which he hoped to justify along Darwinian and Malthusian lines. But their rejection of Hegel’s dialectic in favor of a positivist view of the world, in which the biological sciences would be the model for cognition and social action, strongly aroused
Marx’s ire.

  If this were Marx’s view of Darwinians, why would he offer to dedicate Capital to Darwin? The answer is quite simple: the story that Marx tried to dedicate Capital to Darwin is a myth that has been repeatedly refuted but seems virtually ineradicable. It was Edward Aveling, the lover of Eleanor, Marx’s youngest daughter, who asked Darwin’s permission to dedicate to him a popularization of Darwin’s theories that he had written. Darwin’s negative response got mixed up with Marx’s papers when Eleanor sorted them out after her father’s death.12

  Marx did have a favorable opinion about some implications of Darwin’s theories. He saw them as yet another intellectual blow struck in favor of materialism and atheism, a point on which contemporary supporters and opponents of Darwin tended to agree. Marx was quite disappointed when Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s fierce polemicist, “opened a back door” to religious belief in a speech given in Edinburgh in 1868, and refused to admit the materialist implications of the ideas he was defending. Following with considerable interest the researches of German scientific followers of Darwin, such as the zoologists Gustav Jäger and Ernst Haeckel, Marx noted that in their work “the cell as primal form is given up” in favor of “clumps of protein” found in the fossil record. “This primal form must naturally be followed down to the point where it can be chemically manufactured. And they seem close to it.”13 This chemical analysis of living organisms was amenable to someone who in his 1844 Paris manuscripts had already speculated about materialist theories of human origin.