But the work was not just an attack on Dühring; it was also designed to provide a positive representation of Marx’s ideas. In 1880, one section was reprinted as a separate piece, “The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Wissenschaft,” or, as it is usually known in English, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” In it, Engels presented Marx’s ideas as a positivist science, analogous to Darwin’s biology, in which the progress of stages of modes of production in human history corresponded to the progressive evolutionary development of species in natural history, occurring with the same scientifically determined necessity. This version of Marx’s ideas was absorbed by an entire generation of socialist intellectuals and political leaders entering public life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Karl Kautsky, the Austro-German socialist leader and theorist, who became known as the “Pope of Socialism,” the leading Marxist intellectual at the beginning of the twentieth century, asserted that no other work had contributed as much to his understanding of Marx’s ideas as the “Anti-Dühring.” His understanding of Capital and Marx’s other major works, Kautsky added, ran through Engels’s interpretation of them.5
Engels’s influence on the shaping of what would come to be called “Marxism” was thus considerable. Norman Levine, the author of a challenging if at times exaggerated study of the differences between Marx’s and Engels’s ideas, has even suggested that most “Marxism” was really “Engelsism.”6 One need not agree with Levine’s contention to assert that Engels’s version of Marx’s ideas tended to iron out Marx’s own ambivalence about positivism, and to pass over his Hegelian criticism of the conceptual understanding of the natural sciences. The earlier, more Hegelian writings, which might have offered a different view of his intellectual universe, were either long out of print and rarely available, or still in manuscript form and quite unknown.
This state of affairs was more than a temporary quirk, because the twelve years between the death of Marx and that of his friend saw the development, for the first time in European history, of a mass labor movement. Nineteen socialist and labor parties were founded in Europe between 1880 and 1896, along with nationwide trade union federations. These groups counted, literally, millions of supporters. The political parties sponsored the creation of a “Second” International in 1889, with far more membership, organizational stability, and international influence than the IWMA ever could have hoped for. Taking over Marx’s role as adviser and experienced councilor, Engels worked closely with the leaders of these different socialist organizations, both in their nascent state and as they began to blossom into mass movements.
The combination of a mass labor movement with political and intellectual leaders learning Marx’s ideas from Engels’s writings created Marxism as an ideology and as a political movement. The place of Marx’s ideas in different European socialist parties was greatest in the central and eastern portions of the Continent; to the west, competing anarchist and syndicalist ideas in the Mediterranean countries, and the persistent hegemony of the Liberal Party in the United Kingdom, by no means eliminated this emergent Marxism, but they did restrict its influence. Still, everywhere, evocations of Marx appeared in speeches, newspaper articles, and pamphlets; pictures of the bearded prophet became a common sight.
The influence of Marx’s ideas, as inflected by Engels, was particularly pronounced in Germany and Austria-Hungary. There, the positivist and Darwinian version of his theories helped resolve the problem with which Marx himself had wrestled in his 1879 open letter to the German Socialist Party leadership. How could socialists strike a proper balance between implausible demands for immediate revolutionary action, and the abandonment of revolutionary aspirations and the class struggle, in favor of seeking reforms in the existing capitalist society and reconciling social classes? Since the broad sweep of socioeconomic and political developments was moving with scientific inevitability in the direction of socialism, there was no need either to mount dangerous revolutionary challenges to a heavily armed existing order, or to abandon the socialists’ principles by compromising with other political parties on reforms. This policy, worked out in loving theoretical detail by Karl Kautsky, became a way for ostensibly revolutionary mass labor movements to co-exist with authoritarian empires in the center of Europe. Increasingly, under the influence of the German social democrats, the largest, best organized, wealthiest, and most influential of the socialist parties, this policy became the operating principle of the Second International.7
Further to the east, in the Russian Empire, the very same positivist-inflected Marxism came to play a major role in the socialist movement as well, although there it could be interpreted not only as a justification of political passivity, but as an incentive to radical revolutionary initiatives in a regime lacking the constitutional governmental institutions of central Europe. Lenin, the leader of the most radical element in the Russian socialist movement, was every inch the positivist, repeatedly citing the “Anti-Dühring” and Engels’s other theoretical writing, while advocating drastic measures to overthrow the government of the czar. After he and his Bolsheviks succeeded in seizing power in the social and political chaos brought about by the impact of a total war on a Russian state and society not up to its challenges, they founded a Third, Communist International. They brought to it both the Marxist iconography and the positivist, “scientific” Marxism of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European labor movement, spreading it across the globe. As long as both twentieth-century communist and socialist parties identified themselves as Marxist, it was Engels’s interpretation of Marxism that they had in mind, which is as significant a point as any in a study of the doctrines called “Marxism.” The intellectual challenge to this Marxism, stemming from a greater acquaintance with the more Hegelian texts written by Marx before 1850, those texts generally read in existentialist fashion, began in the 1920s. It reached a degree of intellectual maturity in the last third of the twentieth century, coinciding with the end of Marxist political parties.
BOTH MARX’S OWN IDENTIFICATION with his Jewish background and his contemporaries’ identification of him with it were faint throughout most of his life, largely a result of attitudes toward Jews as a group characterized primarily by cultural and religious affiliations. As we have seen, Marx himself generally vehemently rejected these affiliations. In his (few) milder moments, he viewed them ironically. The rise of social Darwinist conceptions of human history and society in the last quarter of the nineteenth century led to a different view of Jews, as a group characterized by common biological descent. Such attitudes were already apparent in the last decade of Marx’s life, as interviewers noted his Semitic features, people recalled them in their memoirs, and the obituary of his wife discussed the difficulties of the engagement between Jenny von Westphalen and the young Karl Marx in terms of the latter’s “Israelite” ancestry.
In the decades after Marx’s death, these attitudes only intensified and increasingly acquired strong political connotations. Anti-Semitism became steadily more popular in right-wing circles, precisely as a new opponent of rightists was coming to the fore: rapidly growing socialist parties and a labor movement, brandishing pictures of Marx and claiming to be inspired by Marx’s ideas. In such circumstances, it was logical for right-wing enemies of socialist parties and the labor movement to emphasize Marx’s Jewish descent. An extreme example of the culmination of this intellectual and political trend was Adolf Hitler, who made it clear that Jewish Marxism was his deadliest enemy; but the hostile, racialized, and politicized identification of Marx as Jewish was widespread in the first decades of the twentieth century.
One less familiar example might help to make the point. In 1932, the marginal utility theory economists of Austria and Germany met at a conference in Dresden, held, in the wake of the Great Depression, to assert the superiority of their approaches to economics over the ideas of the Historical School and the Marxists. One of the participants, Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, professor of political economy
at the University of Berlin, denounced Marx’s work as a “cabbalistic solution to the problem of value.” Whatever one may think of Capital, it is difficult to see it as an example of medieval Jewish mysticism—unless, of course, Marx’s racial Jewish identity is taken as self-evident.8
The identification of Marx as a Jew did not just proceed from enemies of his doctrine, but at least as much from its adherents. The locus of this development was the Russian Empire, wracked, as Marx had suspected in his last years, by growing social and political discontent. Rather contrary to the way Marx perceived the world, nationalist and socialist demands, particularly among the empire’s non-Russian nationalities, coincided instead of conflicted. Disproportionately large numbers of Jews, members of a group with particularly strong grievances about czarist rule, who were increasingly inclined to see themselves in national (and even racial) rather than religious terms, embraced socialist ideas. They understood the man who invented these socialist ideas as one of their own, a sort of Jewish folk hero, if you will.
As might be expected, these ideas were particularly pronounced among supporters of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire. One of the founders of this Jewish socialist movement, Aron Liberman, originally from Vilna, proclaimed: “In the spirit of our people, the great prophets of our time, such as Marx and Lassalle were educated and developed.” In the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Bund newspaper announced that “the Jewish proletariat has already received [a political Torah] from Karl Marx and his followers.”9 Jews who joined, also in disproportionate numbers, the socialist parties claiming to represent all the nationalities in the czar’s empire often perceived their political affiliation as a way to escape their ethnic and national identity; yet their renunciation of that identity was eased by their perception of the founder of their movement as one of them. These attitudes, along with the Jewish leftists expressing them, were carried over into the communist movement in Europe and North America. They generally manifested themselves in unspoken fashion, or at least in unofficial remarks, since they were hardly compatible with the official party line, to say nothing of the increasing hostility of the USSR toward its Jewish citizens in the decades following the Second World War.10
The large role that Jews played in the social and political world of twentieth-century revolution and in the mental world of that revolution’s most extreme enemies, combined with an understanding of being Jewish as biological and immutable in nature, gave the iconic representative and titular founder of these revolutionary movements a distinctly Jewish character. But only in retrospect. Marx certainly did not see himself as a Jewish folk hero—to say the least—and disillusioned twentieth-century Jewish leftists have often been disappointed about that. Yet the inverse position of seeing Marx as a twentieth-century anti-Semite, whether of Nazi or Stalinist persuasion, leads to problematic conclusions, since it ignores the nineteenth-century context in which Marx’s attitudes—expressed in his writings on the Jewish Question, or in the hostile comments about Jews, prominent and obscure, scattered through his correspondence—were embedded.
THE PERCEPTION OF MARX as practitioner of positivist social science modeled on the natural sciences has some reflection in Marx’s own ideas, although it seems rather one-sided, overlooking his doubts about positivist, scientific attitudes, and the distinctly anti-positivist Hegelian underpinnings of so much of his thought. Understanding Marx as a Jew, whether with friendly or hostile intent, almost completely escapes the reality of his own perception and much of the perception of him by his contemporaries—to say nothing of broader understandings of what it meant to be a Jew—prevalent during most of his life. By contrast, the perception of Marx as intransigent and uncompromising, as a revolutionary opponent of the existing social and political order, is much closer to reality.
It is important to understand that a good portion of what was revolutionary and intransigent about Marx was not his advocacy of communism. Although Marx’s marriage to Jenny von Westphalen ultimately developed along fairly conventional lines, his passionate courtship, at a young age, of an older woman lacking a dowry was a direct challenge to German bourgeois understandings of proper relations between men and women. Marx’s hatred of authoritarian and absolutist monarchies, and the aristocrats, bureaucrats, and military officers through whom they exercised their rule—seen above all in his powerful hostility to both the Prussian kingdom and the Russian Empire—was the prime moving force in his revolutionary activity during 1848–49, and in the popular appeal of his politics then as well. Marx’s hatred of Prussia and Russia continued throughout his life, at times taking a bizarre course in his endorsement of David Urquhart’s conspiratorial theories about English Whigs and the czar, but remaining consistent. Unlike his fellow 1848 revolutionaries, Arnold Ruge and Ferdinand Freiligrath, who became reconciled to the Prussian kingdom when it proved to be the architect of German national unity, and even accepted pensions offered them by Bismarck, Marx could never tolerate Prussia and continued to hope for its demise down to the end of his life. His last years were enlivened by the hope that the reactionary power of the czar could be destroyed, not by a large-scale war the Western powers were reluctant to wage, but by a revolutionary uprising in Russia itself.
Although most 1848 radicals ultimately came to terms with the political developments of the two decades that followed, there were those who remained loyal to their earlier aspirations. Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi come to mind, and some authors of Marx’s obituaries compared him to them. The Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth was another figure of the 1848 revolutions who continued to be intransigent and irreconcilable. He never accepted Austrian rule over his homeland, even after the Hungarians attained autonomy in 1867, remaining, like Marx, an exile for the rest of his life. Of course, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth were all nationalists, whose appeal might have been limited to members of their national group, especially as European nationalisms became steadily more ethnocentric and mutually hostile over the course of the nineteenth century.
Yet this point should not be overemphasized. Both Mazzini and Garibaldi had trans-European, even transatlantic revolutionary reputations and an equally widespread iconic reach.11 On the other hand, Marx was for decades very much a German political figure, albeit, as was often the case in the first half of the nineteenth century, deeply involved in émigré politics outside Germany. Marx’s plans after 1859 for a political comeback were all centered on Germany, on issues of German nationalism. It was only his involvement with the International Working Men’s Association—in some ways even more the dissolution of the group than its foundation—and his defense of the Paris Commune that made him into an international figure. Following his death, Marx’s international appeal grew steadily, parallel to the development of a mass labor movement in Europe, while that of the other intransigent veterans of 1848 shrank along national lines.
Marx’s communist aspirations, stemming from Hegelian ideas about abolishing distinctions, between individuals and civil society, between oppressed and oppressor, between workers and the alienated product of their labor, were certainly as drastic and as radical as anything he might have thought about Russia and Prussia. But so many of Marx’s most radical ideas about a future society remained unpublished—the Paris manuscripts, the so-called German Ideology, the Grundrisse—or were designed for private circulation, as was the case with the March 1850 circular to the Communist League, and the “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Others were brief and cryptic, like the passages on the expansion of productivity in a communist society added to the second edition of Capital. Marx did sometimes make radical statements about a communist future, for example in the Communist Manifesto, with its concluding comments about communists disdaining to conceal their goals, or in his endorsement in the New Rhineland News of the Parisian workers’ uprising of June 1848, or his description in The Civil War in France of the Paris Commune as the model of a future society. But for most of his major episodes of radical politica
l practice, in Cologne during the Revolution of 1848–49, and in the IWMA, Marx was far more reluctant to provide a picture of a communist regime, and either downplayed his advocacy of communism or cloaked it in ambiguous language. When he openly came out with communist aspirations, it was at the end of two periods of intensified political activity, and a sign that he was contemplating abandoning these activities altogether. By contrast, he never moderated his hostility toward either Russia or Prussia.
Marx also never wavered in his aspirations for a dual recurrence of the French Revolution. First, he envisaged a literal replay in nineteenth-century central and Eastern Europe of the eighteenth-century overthrow of the absolute monarchy in France, generally also including a Jacobin-style republican, revolutionary regime and a great revolutionary war. Following on from this, he foresaw a nineteenth-century revolution analagous in its social dynamics to the French Revolution. The overthrow of the monarchy had led to the replacement of the pre-1789 society of orders with a capitalist society of property owners, dominated by the bourgeoisie; the social revolution would lead from capitalism to communism and replace the rule of the bourgeoisie with that of the proletariat. Marx devised various intellectual and political schemes to connect these two revolutions, which generally proved difficult to implement in practice. The exact contours of the two imagined revolutions and their mutual relationship tended to change over time; the growing importance of tensions in rural society in Marx’s plans for an anti-capitalist revolution is certainly striking. What remained constant was the French Revolution and its great moments in 1789 and 1793 as both an image and a model. Marx shared this orientation with fellow revolutionaries of his century but the use of the model of the French Revolution marked a pronounced backward orientation in his thought, a tendency to envisage the future in terms of the past.
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