A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Hegel’s defence of the monarchy and the nobility could lead to the misconception that he was a traditionalist. But Marx did not make that mistake. He emphasizes that Hegel’s view of society is modern. Bourgeois society, the society of trade and manufacture and formation of public opinion, constitutes the dynamic force in its development. The task of the state is to settle the disputes that would result in life-and-death competition between different wills.98 Marx accused Hegel of adapting to actually existing Prussia with its mixture of monarchy, class rule, and incipient modern middle classes. It is ultimately, private property – whether inherited or acquired – that was to be protected in Hegel’s state.

  Marx professed himself an adherent of democracy. The content he placed in the word cannot be precisely defined apart from the obvious: democracy meant that the people as a whole were involved in governing the country. We know nothing about, for example, whether Marx counted women among ‘the people’, just as little as whether he was thinking of a representative democracy. But even in 1843, recommending democracy in general terms was a radical standpoint. Not only conservatives or open reactionaries but also most good liberals feared democracy, as everyone would be part of it and make decisions. The fear of the mob – le peuple – associated with the excesses of the French Revolution was still strong. But Marx saw democracy as ‘the essence of all state constitutions’ – its highest form. He compared it with Christianity, which in his world of ideas with its European markings constituted the essence of religion.

  Marx saw democracy as the only way to overcome atomized, or individualistic, bourgeois society. It is worth quoting what he wrote about individualism: ‘Present-day civil society is the real principle of individualism; the individual existence is the final goal; activity, work, content, etc., are mere means.’ These words from 1843 could also have been said about early twenty-first-century society.

  Against individualism, Marx asserts ‘the communist being in which the individual exists’. While Hegel’s state only seemingly included everyone through mistaking the state with the people, this communist essence would actually embrace everyone.99 It may seem as if Marx, with such words, is only building on the etymology in the word ‘communism’, from the Latin communis, the common. But communism was a movement of the period that soon won new adherents. In Rheinische Zeitung he had distanced himself from it. Now, in Bad Kreuznach, he began to change his mind.

  Marx’s criticism of Hegelian philosophy of law remained unfinished. When, in October 1843, he and Jenny moved to Paris, he was still harbouring plans to finish it and publish it. But in Paris he only wrote one shorter article: ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’. According to his plans, it was to precede the mass of text we have just scrutinized.

  The new article begins with fanfare: the criticism of religion has essentially finished in Germany. Now it was a matter of religion’s worldly forms of revelation – in brief, criticism of society. Marx repeated Feuerbach’s main idea in the criticism of religion: it is humanity that created religion, and not the other way around. In religion, the essence of humanity is realized in a fantastic (that is, distorted) manner, ‘because the human essence has no true reality’.

  It is thus the shortcomings of earthly life that constitute the breeding ground of religion. Marx expressed this in the wonderful prose that he was capable of when he managed to leave the profusion of details in the excerpts and the dry precision of abstract concepts. He wrote: ‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

  It sometimes happens that the final words are incorrectly translated as ‘opium for the people’. That expression would mean that the powers that be offer regular people a calming drug instead of a good life. But the context, as is evident, is unambiguous. It is a tormented humanity that itself creates a comforting imaginary world. Even in religion, there is a protest against the wretchedness of the world.

  Opium had made its entrance into Western consciousness towards the end of the eighteenth century. It had first been regarded as a promising medicine, and played a central role in several fashionable cures. The Scottish doctor John Brown recommended it as a kind of universal cure. His recommendations, and those of other doctors, proved to be particularly effective as regards alleviating pain. Its simultaneously habit-forming, apathy-inducing, and over the long term directly disastrous effects became obvious only after several decades. It was at that time that opium began to play a decisive role in British efforts to make the population of China passive. In the history of imperialism, the drug can really be called an opium for the people. But it was long afterwards that Marx spoke of opium of the people. The expression ‘opium of the people’ had, moreover, been used many times before Marx. Kant had used it, as had Herder, Feuerbach, and Heine. Hegel used it in speaking of Indian religion.100

  Now that criticism of religion had been completed, it was time to go further to ‘the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion,’ Marx said. More specifically, German reality stood in focus for the work whose introduction he was now publishing. Germany was behind the times. In 1843, it had not yet managed to reach the stage France attained in 1789. The criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of right, which was indirectly a criticism of Germany (Marx spoke about Germany although there was no such country yet), was criticism of an outmoded system. It was only a preliminary stage for criticism of modern politics and social reality in which the relationship between industry and finance on the one hand, and politics on the other, was the main problem. It is only in philosophy that Germans were contemporary; in philosophy, they could imagine their own future. But it was now a question of making good on the insights of philosophy. In this way, philosophy could be escaped by realizing it.

  For Germany’s part, it was not yet a question of total liberation, but for the time being only a political revolution that would clear away the old regime. Bourgeois society could thereby liberate itself, and the ruling bourgeois class could for a time be hailed as liberators. But even they had their own definite interests. Only the proletariat had nothing of their own to defend except their own humanity. The hope of human liberation therefore lay with the proletariat.101

  The hypothetical figure that was the basis for this reasoning would come to be important for Marx. Only the person who owns nothing could stand for universal liberation.

  It is obvious that Marx had quickly changed much in his outlook when he arrived in Paris. The difference is already evident in relation to the manuscript for which he planned to use the text as an introduction. Nothing had yet been said there about the proletariat and its role, and nothing about the impending bourgeois revolution in Germany. The contours of a programme had developed out of his criticism. What had happened?

  Before we go into this question, another text also published in Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher should be scrutinized: ‘On the Jewish Question’. It was placed before the introduction to Hegel’s philosophy of right in the journal, but we do not know if it was written before the introduction. Many of the fundamental ideas are the same. But the subject is radically different.

  ‘On the Jewish Question’ is Marx’s first dispute with Bruno Bauer, who had once led him into the Young Hegelians’ world of ideas. Now Marx abandoned his companion and entered into a sharp polemic with him. In a few smaller publications, Bauer had taken up the so-called ‘Jewish question’, asserting that it would find its solution if the Prussian state stopped demanding a profession of the Christian faith from its citizens. In that case, everyone – both Jews and non-Jews alike – would be on the same level in relation to political power. It was not only the Jews who needed to be emancipated; it was everyone. The privileged position of Christianity had to be abolished.

  Marx credited Bauer certain points
. He was a splendid theologian. His account of the Jewish faith was excellent. On the other hand, his political analysis was deficient. Bauer believed that the secular state contained the solution. We could then practise our religion for ourselves, and at the same time be good citizens of the state. Bauer thereby contents himself with political emancipation. In and of itself, that was a big step. But it was humanity that needed to be liberated! The origins of religion are not the state, but the distorted lives that workers and capitalists – everyone, in fact – were forced to live. These lives had to be brought into focus. Everyday life was solid ground; the state (like religion) was above it like some distant heaven.

  If the state were secularized, it would not mean that humanity’s religious faith would wither away. The United States offered a splendid example. There, Marx said, there was no state religion. But ‘North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity’. This was completely natural: when people are liberated from state management of religion, the religious become even more religious. Only when the Americans liberated themselves as humans could they also liberate themselves from their religion. ‘The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.’

  This basic idea is completely in agreement with Marx’s application of Feuerbach’s philosophy. The foundation of religion is a society in which people cannot realize themselves and become completely human. What made the article scandalous in the eyes of posterity (as far as is known, the age in which he lived did not react) is the way in which Marx wrote about Jews, their religion, and their activities. Bauer wanted to solve the Jewish question in Prussia through making the state secular. Then the Jews could become citizens among the others. But Marx objected: it was not enough to regard the Jew as he was on the Sabbath. The everyday Jew devoted himself to endless bartering. It was not enough to open the path to political recognition for Jews. It required the Jews liberating themselves from the tyranny of self-interest. Only then could they become free as people.

  But – and here comes the dialectical expression of the article that is far too rarely noticed: ‘The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.’ In the extremely religious United States, God was worshiped with the same ardour as Mammon. Marx leaned towards the British colonel and author Thomas Hamilton, who in his 1833 book Men and Manners in America asserted that bartering had become the entire content of a normal American’s life; the American ‘talks only of interest and profit’. In fact, Hamilton said, even the office of the priesthood had become a commodity.

  Similar elements can be found in every country where the bourgeois revolution moved victoriously forward, Marx interjected. Individuals, full of egoism, remained. Christianity is a further development of Judaism and therefore, according to Marx, stands higher as a religion (the idea of progress is an obvious starting point for him). In real life it was still Judaism, practical in its nature, that was victorious. Egoism permeated society. Only in another kind of society could it become better. Only when humanity understands itself in its social being is emancipation complete.102

  In the article, Marx makes use of the customary vocabulary of anti-Semitism, already worn out in 1843 but still in circulation in the early twenty-first century. Jews barter. They have eyes for nothing but money. Even in their religion, self-interest is allowed to rule. Marx himself was of Jewish origin. As far back as it has been possible to follow his family tree, there has not been a single non-Jew among his relations. His own father had converted to Christianity with his family. But he had not escaped anti-Semitism for it, and his son Karl also experienced it throughout his life.

  Posterity can see Marx as one of the first in a brilliant tradition of researchers and authors with a Jewish background. Many of the representatives of that tradition would make their mark not only on the intellectual development of Europe, but of large parts of the world from the mid-1800s onwards. In his superb 1992 book Redemption and Utopia, Michel Löwy talks about a ‘siècle d’or’, a golden century that met its grisly end in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. He mentions the names ‘Heine and Marx, Freud and Kafka, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin’, and – as we know – he could have added Einstein and many others. Of course, Marx could have had no idea of the tradition whose beginning he was part of. He was primarily keen on being completely secularized, and he shared that ambition with many of those like him.

  But despite such ambitions, many observers in this Jewish tradition have spotted elements of messianism – the belief in a coming historical catastrophe from which a saviour, a Messiah, would come forth. Elements of this tradition have even been seen in Marx. Löwy, who went deeper into the question than most, finds this supposition debatable and shallow, discovering much stronger messianic ideas in other representatives of the tradition.103

  Marx thus appears as quite thoroughly secularized. But this does not mean that he avoided the taunts of anti-Semitism. This is why it could seem so much more remarkable that he himself takes to the same low vocabulary. How can this be explained? The most far-fetched explanation is given by Arnold Künzli in his book Karl Marx: eine Psychographie. Künzli, who in a risky fashion here tried to narrow down Marx’s psyche from his life and work (or, more correctly, from certain works), asserted that Marx was characterized by self-hatred. Marx abhorred himself and his origins. Thus these diatribes against Jews.104

  There is no support for such an interpretation. Marx was a person who, despite many misfortunes in his life, maintained strong self-esteem. He spoke of his father with pride. He never hid the fact that he himself was of Jewish origin. And he objected to all discrimination, social or otherwise, against Jews. But the idea that ‘On the Jewish Question’ testifies to an explicit anti-Semitism lives on in other, less reasonable forms. Must Marx’s words be interpreted in this way?

  When he wrote ‘On the Jewish Question’, no one imagined that Jews formed a biologically specific group, much less a race. The biologistic viewpoint came as a waste product of the broad Darwinist movement. For Marx, as for his contemporaries, Judaism was, from beginning to end, a religious faith – a faith that Marx commented disparagingly on without exception. In addition, he associated this faith with an everyday life that wholly amounted to earning money.

  The decisive expression in the article on the Jewish question came, as I have already pointed out, with the sentence: ‘The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.’ The first part of the sentence is equally as important as the second. In the first part, Marx is talking about himself and all the others who left Judaism, thereby liberating themselves. In the second, it is a question of the victory of capitalism in contemporary Christianity. Money now governs the world, as it once governed the lives of the Jewish minority.

  It has been pointed out that ‘On the Jewish Question’ has the form of what was called a Judenwitz – a ‘Jewish joke’ – told by Jews among themselves, the gist of which is the fact that the first person pointed out goes free while someone else entirely is pilloried.105 It is possible that Marx had this in mind, but we do not know. The important thing is that the article is primarily an expression of anti-capitalism.

  That said, the fact remains that Marx was dealing casually with harmful stereotypes. ‘On the Jewish Question’ is not the only example of this. He also scattered about disparaging and prejudiced taunts about Blacks, the Polish, the Irish, the Indians, and especially the Germans. This did not prevent him from having close Jewish friends and a beloved son-in-law – Paul Lafargue – who had Black ancestry. He also had lively contacts, marked by appreciation and warmth, with people of every nationality that he otherwise disparaged as less capable.

  Ultimately, this kind of verbal abuse can be ascribed to a general incaution that in many areas got him into difficulties. Here, in particular, it was not his contemporaries but posterity that has realized how objectionable his use of slurs against differ
ent kinds of groups of people was. Those around him seem to have been blind to what such abuse could lead to. Nor did his many enemies have an eye for them. In fact, they constantly let him know that he was a typical Jew.

  The really fatal thing is that so many people in various socialist and communist traditions did not only indulge Marx’s linguistic recklessness but became both racists in general and anti-Semites in particular. There is a dark tradition, and within it Marx’s text could barely serve as a corrective. On the contrary such anti-Semites have been able to find support above all in ‘On the Jewish Question’.

  4

  In Paris

  A Simmering Environment

  Marx came to Paris in late October 1843. Under pressure from the Prussians, French authorities deported him in early February 1845. His stay thus lasted barely fifteen months. But they were fifteen months that meant a revolution in his life.

  The 1830s and 1840s were exceptionally creative decades. Paris was at the focal point for everything new. Social projects blossomed, at least in ideas and dreams. Most of Saint-Simon’s many followers were in Paris, Charles Fourier’s visions of the future drew people to the city, and it was here that Étienne Cabet’s plans for a new kingdom of happiness enjoyed success. Pierre Leroux, who helped redefine socialism, was in Paris. And another term, ‘communism’, was also turning up more and more frequently.1

  The new economic theories from England and Scotland had already made their entry into Paris a few decades earlier, chiefly through Jean-Baptiste Say, who had developed his own Gallic variant. They suited the new kind of society that was now beginning to take form in France as well, both through a modest but increasingly rapid industrialization and a growing finance sector. Those who desired a new kind of society had to take a position on the dynamic development of the economy.