The Condition also played an important role for Marx. The empiricism in it was crucial, especially for his great work on capitalism that was now constantly in progress.
Engels would soon enough come to Brussels in person, thereby inaugurating a few years of intensive collaboration. Even Moses Hess joined the little colony. For a time, they all lived in three adjoining houses on Rue d’Alliance in Brussels.
But the neighbourliness was not entirely good. Both Engels and Hess lived together with their lovers. Engels had Mary Burns from Manchester with him, and Hess had Sibylle Pesch, who – according to stubborn rumours – he had met in a bordello. Jenny Marx would come to hate Mary Burns intensely – certainly not because she was a factory worker, but because according to Jenny she was blunt and a gossip. Things were better with the cheerful Sibylle Pesch.
It was inevitable that Friedrich and Karl, but indirectly also Moses, would be drawn into the conflict. We best know the nature of the discord through a letter from Heinrich Bürgers that has been preserved (the same Bürgers who accompanied Marx to Brussels but was now in Cologne). The letter was written at the end of February 1846, when Marx had been living in Brussels for just over a year. Evidently, Marx had given Bürgers a careful account of what had happened in a letter that is now lost, and Bürgers repeated and commented only on what his friend had told him. Engels had complained that Marx was too bound to his family, and gave Jenny the blame for it. If Jenny had not been there, Karl would have admitted the advantages of untethered relations, Engels was to have said. Nor had Hess been without blame. Bürgers asserted that Engels had a ‘shallow nature’, while Hess did not understand the problems of daily life and therefore endured his friend’s stupidities without grumbling. In fact, Marx had criticized not only Engels’s moral superficiality but also his intellectual limitations. Bürgers wrote: ‘Your judgment of Engels’s intellectual condition surprised me less than his other exploits. Distancing himself from philosophy and speculation has much less its ground in his insights about their essence than it has in the trouble they would involve for his scarcely persevering intellect.’ It was only possible to defend oneself against such an attitude with ‘the exorcism of contempt’. Engels had to get a clear idea that ‘he could go no further with his style, just as little as Hess could with his apparently profound meditations’.18
Another of Marx’s loyal friends, the doctor Roland Daniels, had clearly also received a similarly indignant letter at the same time. Daniels’s letter was in the same style as Bürgers’s. Engels is called ‘the tall fellow’, which is a coarse allusion to his military past. ‘The tall fellows’ was the popular name for the Prussian king’s special guard. Another sobriquet that also surely originated with Marx and occurs in Daniels’s letter is ‘l’ami des prolétaires’ (friend of the proletarians), who had to wear such fine clothes because contemporary society was so wretched. Daniels said that the unphilosophical Engels was no good for a criticism of philosophy. Hess also came in for his share of scorn. He was called a ‘kitchen sponge’, sucking up everything in its way – a rather unfair term, considering that Hess actually also inspired Marx, and not just the other way around.19
Marx must have been deeply wounded when he wrote those words to some of his most loyal friends. We do not know for certain what caused his wrath towards Hess, other than that Hess seems to have echoed Engels’s complaint about Jenny. Karl’s all-consuming love for his wife could not be criticized, just as little as could his bonds to his family. For his part, Engels could not tolerate his relationship with Mary Burns being subjected to reproach, or Mary being treated with contempt.
These emotional storms broke at a time when Marx and Engels found themselves in the middle of their work on the tremendous manuscript known to posterity as The German Ideology. Work on it began in September 1845 and continued until the next summer. The assessments of Engels’s unphilosophical nature are particularly surprising, considering that philosophy plays such a large role in The German Ideology. It is tempting to imagine internal feuds between the both of them while they were writing. But, here, the source material runs out on us. We know only that the most important target of attack for the work, Max Stirner’s 1844 book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own), was judged differently by the both of them from the beginning. When he was still in Germany, Engels had written a rather enthusiastic letter to Marx about the book, which had just been published. Stirner was the most talented of the Young Hegelians, he wrote. But it was also easy to show that his ‘egoistic man is bound to become communist out of sheer egoism’. Now it was for us to build further upon him by turning his intellectual construction upside down. In his now-lost response, Marx evidently painted a significantly more negative picture of what Stirner had achieved, and Engels quickly yielded and confessed that he himself had been mistakenly carried away during his reading of the book.20
Barely six months later, in September 1845, they both began their work in which Stirner’s book played the main role. Moses Hess was also brought into the project at the beginning and wrote a shorter text, most of which has been lost. It did not take long before he was set aside. His name shows up in the manuscript, and then in anything but flattering terms. What he achieved in theory was ‘quite vague and mystical’, and he himself was a half-educated man among other half-educated men.21 But Engels and Marx continued untiringly side by side, despite the fact that one of them, in the middle of their work, could accuse the other of being unphilosophical. Something other than lifestyle and depth of thought must have been – and remained – the grounds for their collaboration.
Right at the beginning of their time in Brussels, during the summer of 1845, they both took a trip to England, specifically Manchester. It was Marx’s first visit to the country where he would spend half his life. For the first time he could see, with his own eyes, contemporary capitalism in full bloom and experience the enormous vitality and human misery of a purely industrial city. It was a reality in which Engels moved like a fish through water. Through his excellent survey of this in The Condition of the Working Class in England, he had a better overview than perhaps anyone else. In such an environment, he had to serve as a guide and introducer for his travelling companion. In addition, the language was completely natural to him, whereas for Marx English was a reading language in which he was less fluent than in French, Italian, or Spanish (or Latin or Greek …). In 1844, Marx was still getting his excerpts on most British economists from French translations, while he readily excelled in quotes from Dante and Cervantes in the original. In this, he was a typical educated continental European of his time. Engels’s knowledge profile was different; he had gone into commerce, knew how an industry worked from the inside, and knew the environment of the factory and the factory worker like the back of his hand. The most important woman in his life worked in a spinning mill.
But if the trip had significance for their joint project – how was it that it would, once again, concern German philosophy and not the world that spread itself out before their eyes in London and Manchester? The question The Holy Family had already roused had to be posed with even greater clarity before The German Ideology. Why did Marx (and Engels) go in for these projects? Why did Marx not write further in his work on economics and politics, which Engels recently so eagerly encouraged him to complete and evidently was so important to him himself? Moreover, one of the aims of the England trip was that he would collect literature for precisely that work.22
Before it is possible to answer these questions, we must look more closely at the new text that grew out of their joint labours.
The German Ideology
The title The German Ideology was not chosen by Marx and Engels for the enormous manuscript they left behind.23 It is the creation of the editors of the first complete publication in 1932. It is apt, since the expression ‘German ideology’ occurs in numerous places in the text. In addition, it turns up in a notice concerning the work which Marx published in Trierische Zeitung on 9 April 18
47.
The authors had the idea of publishing the manuscript in two volumes: the first would be a comprehensive study of the Young Hegelians; and the second, significantly shorter volume would be an attack on the group that appeared under the designation ‘true socialism’.
In the present-day printed editions of the work, the important section on Feuerbach – which in certain editions is also called an introduction – comes after a brief foreword. The section was in fact written last, in the autumn of 1846. It is, as Michael Heinrich points out, also purely objectively the result of the work and not a starting point for it.24 It is therefore reasonable to go into this section by way of a conclusion.
The German Ideology is the most comprehensive evidence of a sweeping change in their views on history, society, and politics that both Marx and Engels underwent during 1845 and 1846. The changes are the ones that garner the most attention in the whole of the literature on Marx. In Soviet and East German schoolbooks and handbooks, it was seen as the most decisive step towards the understanding that Marxism–Leninism would much later adopt as correct, true, and scientific. The French philosopher Louis Althusser, a major Marx scholar in the 1960s and 1970s, maintained that during 1845 Marx had made a great new discovery: he had seen a new continent that he called History. Between the ‘young Marx’ – who, following Feuerbach, had spoken of humanity’s essence and of alienation – and the mature, real Marx whose work culminated in Capital, there was a decisive difference. The Marx of alienation was still imprisoned in the speculative mist of German idealism; the Marx of The German Ideology was on the path towards creating a new science.25
Other interpreters have asserted, on the contrary, that substantial features of Marx’s theory can already be found in the Manuscripts and that the theory of alienation constitutes an indispensable and often neglected element of this theory. Joachim Israel, István Mészáros, and Bertell Ollman can be cited among the influential advocates of this interpretation. An original variation can be found in the Japanese economic historian Takahisa Oishi, who in his book The Unknown Marx (2001) argues that Marx’s great economic project is moulded in one piece and that its substantial elements are already found in the Manuscripts. In Oishi’s perspective, The German Ideology does not represent anything decisively new, whereas Marx’s great settling of accounts with Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy, on the other hand, is given a key role.26
Michael Heinrich, on the other hand, has embraced the opposite standpoint that there is a clear break in Marx’s development – several, in fact, of which this was the first. Heinrich concedes that even much later, Marx used the word Entfremdung – alienation – but argues that it was no longer a question of alienation from the essence of humanity.27 This is a problem that will occupy us later on.
Doubtless, The German Ideology is something new in relation to The Holy Family. As regards Marx, we can easily see that the change had already begun before the summer of 1845 – that is, right after he came to Brussels. The proof can be found in the famous Theses on Feuerbach that he wrote early in 1845. They are part of a notebook Marx kept between 1844 and 1847; they were published by Engels more than forty years later in 1888 as an appendix to Engels’s own work, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Engels did not doubt that these Theses (the designation is his own) signified the rupture in Marx’s development, and thereby indirectly in his own. He expressed himself a trifle bombastically: they were certainly ‘hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook’.
Engels was essentially right. With these eleven short, more or less aphoristic statements, Marx had taken a decisive step. In the first thesis, he said that the error in all materialism so far, Feuerbach’s included, was that it had only perceived reality as an object for a way of thinking, and not as ‘sensuous human activity, practice’. The materialists said that people were the result of circumstances and of upbringing, but forgot that ‘circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated’. In short, people are both active and passive in this process, an idea that Marx would express many times in the years to come.
In another thesis, he asserted that Feuerbach, with his emphasis on sensualism, forgot that this sensualism consisted of ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’; with that, Marx was ready for the decisive blow against the foundation of Feuerbach’s outlook that had recently also been his own: against the talk of the uniform essence of humanity. This essence was perceived only in the abstract, as something that existed within the individual; Marx said, ‘In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.’ Feuerbach, with his abstract concept, was forced to ignore history. But ‘all social life is essentially practical’. The mystery of the theory is solved in human practice and in the insights into it.
Marx saw materialism up to that point as an expression for bourgeois thinking. The thinking materialist appears as an indifferent observer of a reality that at heart is constant. But it is human activity that creates the world around us.
With that criticism, Marx has prepared the way for the final thesis, which has become by far the best known: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’28
There are two concepts in this little document that particularly stand out: praxis and history.
Praxis, with its derivation ‘practical’, has its origins in classical Greek, where it has to do with action in its broadest sense. It takes on special content in Aristotle, who distinguished between three different human faculties for knowledge: theory, practice, and technique. Theory, with the original meaning of seeing or scrutinizing, is the passive consideration of reality – more precisely that part of it, according to Aristotle, that we cannot influence: Nature and its laws. Technique, from the Greek téchnē, means the human ability to produce various kinds of objects through handicraft and art, whereas practice – práxis – has to do with relationships between people and thereby contains ethics with its subdivisions of politics and economics.
The distinction between praxis and technique, however, was difficult to uphold in the traditions from Greek antiquity. Even during the Middle Ages, they both often became blurred, and even more so during the seventeenth century and later. Kant, who was so careful with distinctions, tried to classify practical as simply an ethical concept. According to him, practical actions were either good or evil, and they were therefore performed only out of duty and not because they led to desired consequences of various kinds. When, on the other hand, insight was required into how something functioned, the actions according to Kant were technical-practical. It is an interesting hybrid form, which shows that not even for so scrupulous a person as Kant was it possible to make a sharp distinction between practical and technical. It was as if modern reality itself had created a transitional zone between ethics and technique.
With Hegel, this transition zone spread out, and in general he did not distinguish between praxis and technique. Humanity’s practical relationship with Nature was its ‘technical activity’. In the foreword to his 1811 work Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), Hegel spoke of a ‘Geist des Praktischen’, a spirit of the practical that encompasses all forms of natural and intellectual life. The difference between what Kant called the technical-practical and the practical was, in principle, obliterated.
Marx went a step further. The field of theory also became blurred with the technical-practical. Theory, which in Kant and Hegel had been a screened-off field, lost its independence. It appeared as an expression of human action. His encounters with down-to-earth British and French economic literature had certainly contributed to this new orientation. In it, the difference between theoretical and practical was partially erased.29
The boundaries of the concept of praxis itself are difficult to draw, and controversial. Is praxis only that kind of action that transforms human re
ality? Or is it all human activity, however routine, that through its enormous collective weight changes their conditions over the long term? Back in the Manuscripts, Marx pointed out that Hegel’s idea of labour was a permanent part of his thinking. In Hegel, it was actually a question of labour in its broadest sense. The earlier idea that only physical labours were to be designated as labour (‘to work by the sweat of one’s brow’) was on the point of giving way. The old nobility by birth had been contemptuous of work; on the contrary, the rising citizenry embraced it but perceived it in its broader sense. They especially counted their own toil on negotiations, business, and accounts as part of it. The activities of technicians and inventors, and gradually also that of scientists, were of obvious significance for industry and the new agriculture as well; the boundary was thereby crossed. By extension, all purposeful, reasonably strenuous human activity could be designated as labour.30
Labour and praxis evidently lie close to each other in Marx’s usage. But the question of the boundaries for praxis had not been answered in and through the brief, hastily written notes on the path away from Feuerbach’s philosophy. On the other hand, it is clear that he put focus on the praxis that changes or simply revolutionizes humanity’s reality.
A World to Win Page 21