And finally: Why does Marx feel compelled to take up Hegel in the Manuscripts? In the foreword, he himself declared that the reason was because the Hegelian dialectic still held a strong position in Germany. But there was also another reason indicated by the text itself, which has to do with what Marx now seemed to have arrived at. Marx was still following in Feuerbach’s footsteps, and Feuerbach had asserted that philosophy – particularly Hegel’s – related to people’s reality in the same way as religion does. Behind the ideal greatness that in religion is called God and in philosophy the Absolute actually hides humanity as it could be in an ideal society. Now Marx placed political economy in the same scheme. The national economists and Hegel were in agreement on one point: labour is the driving force in history and society. But neither Hegel nor the national economists could see the negative side of labour, because they did not begin from the point of view of a person performing the work but from an abstract idea. The political economists’ view of labour can thus be inserted into Feuerbach’s scheme alongside the God of religion and the Absolute Idea of philosophy.
This new insight prepared the ground for an in-depth study of economic theories and the reality that they both revealed and concealed. But Marx let that study wait for a time yet. Instead, it was Hegel’s radical pupils who became the subject of his next great writing project.
He laid the Manuscripts aside, incomplete.
6
The Years of Ruptures
After Marx abandoned his work on the Manuscripts, he completed three larger works in rapid succession, two of which found publishers and thus a circle of readers. In the first, The Holy Family, Engels made a smaller contribution, while his role in the second – The German Ideology – was equal to Marx’s. On the other hand, the third – The Poverty of Philosophy – was exclusively Marx’s work.
These three works are our focus here. But as always, the author’s own life forms an important background to what he achieved on the path of writing. The years between 1844 and 1847 were turbulent ones in Marx’s life. He was deported from Paris early in 1845, the city he loved most, and was forced to take refuge in Brussels, which lay some distance away from the centre of events. The deportation hit him hard, and with all certainty contributed to the harder polemical tone that characterized his writings in Brussels. His political standpoint also became more clean-cut and pushed him into feuds with people he had previously praised.
The Holy Family
When Friedrich Engels came to Paris at the end of August 1844, Marx was still working full-time on the Manuscripts. The visit from the man who had inspired him to pounce on political economic literature also got him to set aside his work. A new joint writing project took form over the ten days Engels stayed in Paris, and both new friends set immediately about their self-imposed task.
The joint plan concerned a clever little pamphlet. Engels had already written his share – a little over fifteen pages – during his time in Paris. But, for Marx, the writing project grew, and it occupied him well into November. He had then reached more than 200 pages, and the pamphlet had become a book. It would be called Kritik der kritischen Kritik: gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten (Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company).1 But the publishers, Joseph Rütten and Zacharias Löwenthal, found the title abstract and not a very easy seller; in a letter to Marx, Löwenthal suggested the book be rechristened Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family).2 And so it was. What had previously been the main title became the subtitle.
The change alarmed Engels. He was at home in Barmen-Wuppertal, among his strictly religious family, and now both the blasphemous title and his own name were shown on a book cover that anyone could see in the bookstore. He already found it odd that his name stood alongside Marx’s – even first, according to alphabetical order. His own contribution had been quite modest.3
Later readers could agree with him on the latter point. In essence, it is Marx’s book. Engels contributed a few short sections, kept in somewhat the same style as Marx’s but significantly tamer.
For the new work, Marx had the use of his intensive economic studies. When, for example, he answered the criticism of Proudhon as it was formulated in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, he interspersed bits of text that are easily recognizable from the Manuscripts. But this, and similar sections, do not carry the account forward. Marx only demonstrated his newfound knowledge that was already miles superior to that of his opponents.
As a whole, on the other hand, the text is marked by tireless energy and sparkling humour in its attacks on his old friends among the Young Hegelians. The parodical device is pervasive and carried out with great consistency. Bruno Bauer and the others appeared on a metaphysical stage on which the Last Judgement is immediately at hand. This device, of course, has its background in the fact that Bauer was a theologian, although with negative overtones as time went on. Only a few years earlier, as we have seen, he had published a pamphlet called The Trumpet of the Last Judgement, and in general his texts were full of Biblical allusions. The direct target of attack for Marx and Engels was the aforementioned monthly periodical with the engaging title Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung – a venerable name borne by an earlier German periodical that was influential in its time. Bauer and his fellow thinkers in the group that now called itself Die Freie (The Free) published it between December 1843 and October 1844. It cultivated what Bauer called ‘pure criticism’ in contrast to other, clearly more sullied criticism that was flourishing at the time. Marx forced the expression to parodic heights by calling the activity ‘critical criticism’.
With particular ardour, Marx objected to the negative, and often condescending, declarations ‘Die Freien’ were scattering about regarding the workers and what they called ‘the masses’ despite calling themselves socialists. Edgar Bauer, Bruno’s younger brother, argued that the workers who had united in England and France had shortcomings in their thinking. Marx responded that these workers could not argue away their degradation in practice through pure thought. On the contrary, they were experiencing the painful difference between ‘being and thinking, between consciousness and life’.4 They did not stop being wage workers through any theories. Bauer’s idealism constituted the difference between his socialism and that of the workers.
When Edgar Bauer asserted that Proudhon had not thought through his attitude towards society, Marx snorted with contempt before such conceit. He was no less contemptuous of Bruno Bauer’s criticism of the masses. Bauer saw the masses as the real enemies of Spirit. Marx’s retort was that people ‘must know the studiousness, the craving for knowledge, the moral energy and the unceasing urge for development of the French and English workers to be able to form an idea of the human nobility of this movement’.5 Implied: Bauer did not know, while Marx himself did (though as regards the English, only through Engels).
Bruno Bauer was concerned about the chasm that separated him from ‘the crowd’. Pure criticism aimed at feeling and knowing everything. But how could he convey his insights to the ignorant? It was there he saw his great and difficult task. Full of sarcasm, Marx distanced himself from these concerns.6
In his periodical, Bauer had attacked Marx’s article on the Jewish question. Marx replied that Bauer could not see the difference between political and human emancipation. It was now, as we know, a crucial difference for Marx. Political liberation concerned people’s relationship to state power; human liberation their relationship to their labour, to each other and ultimately to their own egos.7
Marx also took the time to polemicize against Bauer’s view of history. Bauer had spoken of ‘ideas that produced the French Revolution’, and Marx responded: ‘Ideas cannot carry out anything at all.’ For that, people who could realize what they desired in practice were required. Here, Marx drew out the revolution’s most radical advocates from the shadows: people like François-Noël Babeuf and others. They were people and movements who had become important for him when, in Paris, he studied an impressive amount of literature on t
he French Revolution. He regarded the revolutionaries who stood furthest to the left as the forerunners of communism.8
Bauer saw each individual in society as an atom, alone in its orbit. Marx replied that this was an idea that an egoistic individual could use to make themselves feel more important. But in fact it was ‘a need, a necessity’ that drove people together.9 The reader may recognize the insight from the Manuscripts that a person must be a social being before she can become an individual.
Marx also entered into a battle on the history of philosophy. But there, in The Holy Family, he took up a different attitude than he usually did. Following Feuerbach, he sees radical empiricism (or sensualism) as the very basis of the materialist tradition. Francis Bacon was its forefather and John Locke was an important person in the tradition, whereas Hobbes was a more dubious figure who made geometry out of reality and thereby developed materialism into a ‘misanthropy’. Materialism was civilized with the thinkers of the French enlightenment; it took form and became eloquent.
In a direct polemic with Bauer, Marx banishes Spinoza from the history of materialism. This was something new, and possibly his understanding became more incisive in the heat of battle. He evidently wanted to place maximum distance between himself and not only ‘The Free’ but also Hegel and his historical writings. It also made it possible for him to emphasize that French and British socialists and communists were carrying on the tradition from Bacon and d’Holbach. Humanism and materialism ran together in them (in the Manuscripts, Marx had spoken about humanism and naturalism; the difference is unimportant).10
The Bauer brothers were the most important target of attack in The Holy Family, but Marx had his eye in particular on one of their companions: ‘Herr Szeliga’, who was actually named Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski and was not only a Young Hegelian but a Prussian officer. In the most crushing manner, Marx summarized Herr Szeliga’s way of writing: ‘His art is not that of disclosing what is hidden, but to hide what is disclosed.’ Szeliga’s particular sin was that he held the novels of Eugène Sue in high regard, and that he seemed to see important truths in them about contemporary society.11 Marx, on the other hand, is contemptuous of Sue’s sentimental depictions of the metropolitan slums in Mystères de Paris. Marx therefore attacked an article by Szeliga on the hero in Sue, named Rudolph von Gerolstein. The polemic runs over a long chapter that is rather impenetrable to a modern reader.12 Only after that comes the final chapter, with a much more distinct depiction of ‘the Critical Last Judgement’, in which the conditions from Revelations are joined together with a bombastic statement taken directly from Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on the contemporary era as the age of decision. The medieval hymn Dies irae (Day of Wrath) sounds, and the sign of the Bauer brothers (Bauer means ‘farmer’ in German) is shown, together with the French words of wisdom ‘With the oxen paired together, Ploughing goes much better!’.
And now the world ought to come to an end, but in a ‘Historical Epilogue’ Marx stated that it was not the world that disappeared, but Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.13
The Holy Family is the first book by Marx (as well as by Engels) that went into print. It was no brilliant debut. It contains witticisms and biting irony, but it is long-winded in places and entirely too comprehensive in relation to its relatively limited subject. Even Engels, the co-author, was frightened at the format; Georg Jung, their friend from Cologne, let Marx know in a letter that the many enumerations of inessentials were tiring. At the same time, Jung sweetened the bitter assessment with an admission that the criticism of the Young Hegelians was a reward for the reader.14
The question that above all has to be asked is why Marx found it so important to write all those pages about the Bauer brothers and Szeliga. The purely psychological explanation that it concerned a kind of escapism – it was easier to settle accounts with old friends from his youth whose arguments he had mastered to perfection than to complete a work that touched on new and difficult themes – is insufficient.
There must have been more objective reasons as well. Something made Marx see it as necessary to put Young Hegelianism behind him once and for all. It soon also turned out that not even the more than 200 pages he devoted to the subject were enough; he was ready to throw himself into a new, even lengthier work on the same subject.
That work began when the scene of Marx’s life completely changed. That change must be accounted for before the question of what pushed Marx to yet another work on the Young Hegelians can even approximately be answered.
A Painful Farewell and a New Life
After proposals from Prussia, the French government under the leadership of Guizot decided to deport Marx from France. The decision came as a complete surprise to Marx. In the beginning, he took the deportation order lightly. Perhaps he could still remain? But when he realized that it was serious, he became deeply depressed. The Belgian capital of Brussels was the only reasonable place that now stood open for him – but what was Brussels compared to Paris? He had really loved the lively, multifarious environment in Paris, where he could freely move both among the salons and the secret political societies that stood farthest to the left on the political scale. He had made many new friends in Paris – everyone from Heinrich Heine to French socialists and communists. His working energy had been great; he had produced a large manuscript and nearly an entire book, at the same time as he devoted himself to exhaustive studies in economics and history. Moreover, he had had time for political meetings, nightly conversations and the odd evening in the salons of Madame d’Agoult.
Now all this would disappear before his eyes.
Brussels was not just much smaller than Paris. The cultural and intellectual environment was also significantly poorer. The city had become the capital of the new kingdom of Belgium only fifteen years before, after a revolution that began following a performance of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s rather new opera The Mute Girl of Portici at the La Monnaie theatre. The opera dealt with independence, and the Belgians burned for independence from the Dutch. The uprising quickly succeeded. A king was brought in from the extremely small German principality of Saxe-Coburg and crowned Léopold I.
Most in Brussels still spoke Dutch, a language that neither Karl nor Jenny had command of. One comfort for the family was that they were not alone in their situation. There were already numerous refugees and guest workers there, in particular German ones – a good breeding ground for radical political thinking. In addition, Brussels had the advantage of lying centrally between the metropolises of Europe. Karl would soon discover that it was excellently suited for building networks.
But when he left Paris, he saw nothing but wretchedness in his banishment. His melancholy was so great when he hastily set off that his travelling companion and friend, Heinrich Bürgers, tried to cheer him up with happy songs while they were both seated in the stagecoach for Brussels. We do not know if he succeeded.
For Jenny Marx, her spouse’s deportation meant even more acute problems. She was the one who had to dispose of the family’s small amount of property left behind in Paris in order to produce a little bit of cash. She was pregnant again, this time with their daughter Laura; by her side she had Jennychen, still an infant. In a letter to Karl, written in French, she described her endless and fruitless troubles. But she also talked about the friends who surrounded her: Heine, Bakunin, and in addition the poet and revolutionary Georg Herwegh. Not a word of complaint was directed at Karl; all problems are blamed on the infamous governments personified by Guizot and Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian minister in Paris (more famous for being a natural scientist and explorer).15
But Jenny and Jennychen would come to Brussels soon enough, and it was there that Laura was born. It was also in Brussels that a woman named Helene Demuth would make her entrance into the lives of the family Marx. Jenny’s mother had sent her over from Trier, well aware of all the hardships her daughter was encountering in her new daily life, particularly as the help she had had in Paris could not follow them to
Brussels. Demuth would soon become the family’s right hand, skilfully piloting them through all the trivial but painful problems that waited in the times to come. She also became a friend to the family, taking part in their joys and sorrows. She stayed patiently at her post for as long as Jenny and Karl lived.16
For her part, Jenny had developed an ability that was invaluable for her spouse. She was long the only one able to decipher his singular handwriting and was the one who copied it all out for him over nearly the entire remainder of her life. She was no passive copyist but became his closest partner in discussion, better informed of her spouse’s work than even Engels.
In the beginning of their time in Brussels, Engels kept Karl informed on what was happening in Barmen-Wuppertal. The picture he conveyed was a twofold one. On the one hand, his letters dealt with the great successes he met with in his home district with his communist propaganda. He was completely euphoric over the stream of interested people: soon there would be a hundred attending. He did not, however, mention the composition of his audience: it was the citizenry who were taking seats on the premises, not proletarians. His optimism at the future was not tarnished by that fact. He expressed the same kind of euphoria that Marx did during his time in Paris. The future was turning out to be splendid: ‘Wuppertal communism is une verité’.
But the meetings would soon come to the attention of the authorities, and they were forbidden without further ado. The success story ended just as hastily as it had begun.17
Engels’s letters also had another theme: the fury his father was developing over his son’s radical aberrations. I’m living a real dog’s life, Friedrich complained. The old man can’t distinguish between liberalism and communism, but he’s furious. Both are equally revolutionary in his eyes. The most important thing Engels achieved at that time was the great, nearly sociological investigation The Condition of the Working Class in England (in the original German, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England). In it, he depicted the hard, dirty, and precarious lives the new industrial proletariat was being forced to live in northwestern England and southern Scotland, in a manner that was simultaneously lucid and minutely accurate. In its way, it is a pathbreaking work; as a whole, it is the best book of which Engels was the sole author. He was still only twenty-five years old.
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