A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  14.On the various revolutionary associations, see Otto Büsch, Die frühsozialistischen Bünde in der Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1975).

  15.On the police spies’ reports, see Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, p. 7.

  16.Letter from Marx to Ruge, September 1843, MEGA III/1, p. 56. The letter is not reproduced in Collected Works; it is, on the other hand, in the Marxist Internet Archive: ‘Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge in Dresden’, Marxists.org.

  17.Peter C. Caldwell, Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) describes how Marx was preferred as editor over Hess, p. 47. The great Hess biography is Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966).

  18.Letter from Hess to Marx, 3 July 1844, MEGA III/1, pp. 434f.

  19.Weitling, Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit. 1842, accessible at archive.org. On progress as natural law XI; on property as the origin of all evil, p. 18; on the second Messiah, p. 243; on the children who would be part of a school army, p. 188. Regarding the latter, compare with Charles Fourier, Slaget om de små pastejerna: skrifter i urval (Stockholm: Federativs klassiker 9, 1983), the chapter ‘Industrial Armies’, pp. 116–19. On women, pp. 184–7; on freedom of the press, pp. 214–8; on freedom of choice, p. 225; on the people’s monarchy p. 251.

  20.Kurt Aspelin, Det europeiska missnöjet: samhällsanalys och historiespekulation: studier i C.J.L. Almqvists författarskap åren kring 1840 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1979), writes about utopian mysticism, pp. 19–26. The same tradition is described in a more general manner in Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World. See, for example, the section on Enfantin, pp. 615–40.

  21.Heine’s letter to Marx, 21 September 1844, MEGA III/1, pp. 443f. On the world turned upside down, see for example Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During The English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984) and Le Roy Ladurie, Karnevalen i Romans: från kyndelsmäss till askonsdag 1579–1580 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1982 [1979]).

  22.On the economic background to early German industrialization, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2, Von dem Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ 1815–1845/49 (München: C. H. Beck, 1987), pp. 585–684. On Gerhart Hauptmann’s drama, see Hans Schwab-Felisch, Gerhart Hauptmann: Die Weber: Dichtung und Wirklichkeit (München: Ullstein, 2000). Käthe Kollwitz’s images from the weavers’ uprising are richly represented in the Käthe Kollwitz museums in Berlin and Cologne.

  23.There is a great deal of literature on pauperism. See, for example, Karl Williams 1981 and Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber, 1984).

  24.Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”’, MEW 1, pp. 392–409, CW 3, pp. 189–206.

  25.Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen der Kultur, vol. 14 Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1948 [1930]).

  26.On the consciousness of the weavers and Weitling’s efforts, see ‘Kritische Randglossen’, MEGA I/2, pp. 458f, MEW 1, pp. 404f, and CW 3, pp. 201f.

  27.Letter from Weitling to Marx, 18 October 1844, MEGA III/1, p. 445.

  28.‘Vorwort zur Gesamtausgabe’, MEGA I/1, pp. 18ff. The person who went furthest in emphasizing the distance between Marx and Engels is Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx contra Engels (Oxford and Santa Barbara: Clio Books, 1975). Even more broadly arranged is Norman Levine, Dialogue within the Dialectic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), in which the author goes up through Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and their way of (poorly) managing the inheritance from Marx. Above all, Tristram Hunt exaggerates the importance of Engels for Capital, for example in Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), pp. 234f.

  29.Late in life, Engels remembered in a letter to Franz Mehring that initial ‘distinctly chilly meeting’ with Marx; letter from Engels to Mehring, end of April 1895, MEW 39, p. 473, CW 50, p. 503.

  30.On the environment in Manchester, see Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class.

  31.‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, MEGA I/3, pp. 467–94, MEW 1, pp. 499–524, CW 3, pp. 418–43, and on liberal theory, pp. 472, 502, and 421.

  32.Engels on Smith as Luther, MEGA I/3, p. 476, MEW 1, p. 503, and CW 3, p. 422.

  33.On the theory of value and the importance of inventions for the forces of production, ibid., pp. 477ff, 507ff, and 426ff. Smith opens the text of Wealth of Nations itself (Book I, Chapter 1) with the assertion that the greatest improvement of the ‘productive powers’ of work is the increased division of labour, Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 4.

  34.‘Entzweiung’ (dichotomy), Engels, MEGA I/3, p. 481, MEW 1, p. 511, and CW 3, p. 430.

  35.Atoms, the human species being, and stock exchange speculation, ibid., pp. 484f, 515f, and 434f. On John Dalton, see Arnold Thackeray, John Dalton: Critical Assessments of His Life and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

  36.On the society of the future, MEGA I/3, p. 476, MEW 1, p. 505, or CW 3, p. 424. On Fourier and peaceful rivalry, ibid., pp. 485, 516, and 435.

  37.The final words in the article, ibid., pp. 494, 524, and 443.

  5The Manuscripts

  1.Marcuse’s early article in Herbert Marcuse, ‘Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des historischen Materialismus’, Die Gesellschaft 9 (Berlin 1932), pp. 136–74.

  2.Roger Garaudy, Humanisme marxiste (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1957). Jean-Yves Calvez, La pensée de Karl Marx (Paris: Points, 1956). Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

  3.T. I. Oizerman, ‘Das Problem der Entfremdung in Zerrspiegel der bürgerlichen und revisionistischen “Kritik” des Marxismus’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1962, p. 9. On the French scene, see for example Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  4.In the MEGA critical edition, it was decided to reproduce Marx’s manuscript in two versions – first in the order Marx probably wrote down his notes (MEGA I/2, pp. 187–322) and then in a more logical structure (MEGA I/2, pp. 323–438). Both versions will be of use here. The MEW version is found in Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 467–588. The English version is found in CW 3, pp. 229–346.

  5.‘Vorrede’, MEGA I/2, pp. 325f, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 467–70, CW 3, pp. 231–4.

  6.On Hegel’s reservations regarding forewords and other unsystematic descriptions, see Hegel 1977, 1ff and G. W. F. Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1, Hegels Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969 [1831]), ‘Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage’, pp. 19–34.

  7.Letter from Engels to Marx, 20 January 1845, MEGA III/1, pp. 260f, CW 38, p. 17.

  8.Letter from Jung to Marx, 18 March 1845, MEGA III/1, pp. 458f.

  9.Moses Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), p. 191.

  10.Quote MEGA III/1, p. 335, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 479, CW 3, p. 343. Wilhem Schultz, Die Bewegung der Production: eine geschichtlich-statistische Abhandlung zur Grundlegung einer neuen Wissenschaft (Zürich och Winterthur: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), p. 72. Schultz, Die Bewegung der Production.

  11.On working wages, MEGA I/2, pp. 327–38, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 471–83, CW 3, pp. 234–46. Cf. the chapter ‘On the Wages of Labour’, Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 82–104.

  12.Section ‘Gewinn des Kapitals’, MEGA I/2, pp. 338–51, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 483–97, CW 3, pp. 246–58. Pecqueur’s most important writings are now available as an electronic r
esource. Marx cites Constantin Pecqueur, Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale et politique, ou Etude sur l’organisation des sociétés (Paris: Chapelle, 1842). On Pecqueur in Capital, see Das Kapital, MEGA II/6, p. 562, CW 35, pp. 609, 749.

  13.Section ‘Grundrente’, MEGA I/2, pp. 351–63, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 497–510, CW 3, pp. 259–70.

  14.The text ‘Estranged labour’ is reproduced in MEGA I/2, pp. 363–75, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 510–22, and in English in CW 3, pp. 270–82.

  15.The ‘concept’ is the subject of systematic treatment in G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1, G.W.F. Hegels Werke bd 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969 [1831]).

  16.On Marx at Steffens’s lectures in Berlin, see Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels: leur vie et leur œuvre, bd 1, Les années d’enfance et de jeunesse, La gauche hégélienne: 1818/1820–1844 (Paris: P.U.F., 1955), pp. 81 and 89. Heinrich Steffens, Anthropologie (Breslau: Josef Mar, 1822), p. 8. Steffens, Heinrich. Anthropologie, vol. 2.

  17.The sections ‘Private property’ and ‘Private Property and Communism’ can be found in MEGA I/2, pp. 376–99 and MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 523–46, and in English translation in CW 3, pp. 283–306.

  18.The section on the different kinds of communism in MEGA I/2, pp. 386–9, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 534–7, and CW3, pp. 294–8.

  19.Moses Hess had formulated the criticism of raw communism in, for example, an article in Kölnische Zeitung on 27 September 1843, and in other quarters as well. Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), pp. 173 and 198.

  20.On sursumer, see Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière, Hegeliana (Paris: P.U.F., 1986), pp. 102–20.

  21.On Spinoza and Marx, see Yovel 1989, 78–103. For a criticism of Yovel’s interpretation of Marx, see Allison 1992.

  22.John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), primarily § 25–51, pp. 303–20.

  23.Quote from MEGA I/2, pp. 392f; MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 539f; CW 3, pp. 299f.

  24.‘The forming of the five senses’ and music ‘awakens in man the sense of music’, MEGA I/2, pp. 294f, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 541f, CW 3, p. 302. There is rather extensive research into Marx’s relationship with the arts, especially literature. The great pioneering work is Mikhail Lifshitz’s book on Marx’s aesthetic thinking. Lifshitz, who was close to Lukács, developed a fairly conservative conception of the arts; it is hardly likely that Marx would have shared it, had he been a contemporary of Lifshitz. But the book is exhaustive and scholarly. See Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (London: Longwood Publishing Group, 1980). On Lifshitz’s aesthetic conservatism, see Stanley Mitchell, ‘Mikhail Lifshits: A Marxist Conservative’, in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (London: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 28–44. There is an odd synthesis of Marx’s philosophy of art – or, more correctly, that of the dominant Marxist tradition – with Proudhon’s and Picasso’s by the German art historian Max Raphael. Max Raphael, Proudhon-Marx-Picasso: Three Studies in the Sociology of Art (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980); on Marxism, pp. 75–112. A comprehensive review of Marx’s relationship, primarily to literature, is S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). An important section deals with the manuscripts, pp. 71–85. An intelligent, independent account of how Marx, and the traditions after him, related to culture in general and literature in particular is Raymond Williams, Marx och kulturen: En discussion kring marxistisk kultur- och litteraturteori (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1977). Marx talks numerous times about Mozart, above all in his newspaper articles. For example, see Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, pp. 255f. Marx could also refer to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ fit the revolutionary hopes of 1848; so it was in his article ‘Die revolutionäre Bewegung’ (The Revolutionary Development), published on New Year’s Day 1849, MEW 6, p. 148, CW 8, p. 213. Marx’s views on Wagner were more critical and ironic. When, in 1876, Marx and his youngest daughter, Eleanor, were on the way to Karlsbad to take the cure and considered spending the night in Nuremberg, they found that there was not a single hotel room available. The city was filled with people ‘from all corners of the globe, who were setting off from there for the fools’ festival with the town musician Wagner in Bayreuth’, he wrote in a letter to Engels. In a postscript, he added drily, ‘Just now everything’s future here after the drums of the music of the future at Bayreuth.’ His words give no hint of any appreciation of Wagner’s music. Letter of 19 August 1876, MEW 34, p. 23, CW 45, p. 137. Wagner turns up again in a later letter to his daughter Jenny Longuet in which Marx talks about Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who abandoned her husband, the conductor von Bülow, and became Wagner’s wife instead. You could not imagine a better libretto for an Offenbach opera, Marx exclaimed. Letter of August–September 1876, MEW 34, p. 193, CW 45, p. 143.

  25.‘The open book’, MEGA I/2, p. 396, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 542, and CW 3, p. 302.

  26.Regarding ‘sensuous, alien’, ibid., p. 397, p. 543, and p. 303, respectively.

  27.Regarding ‘a chimerical illusion’, see ibid., pp. 397, 543, and 303, respectively.

  28.Regarding ‘for the socialist man’, MEGA I/2, p. 398, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 546. Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971).

  29.Regarding ‘A dwelling …’, see MEGA I/2, p. 420, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 548, CW 3, pp. 307f.

  30.The sections ‘Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property’ and ‘The Power of Money’ respectively are found in MEW Ergänzungsband 1, pp. 546–67, and in CW 3, pp. 306–26. In MEGA I/2 with its different grouping, we find them on pp. 429–38.

  31.Regarding ‘a mere thing’, MEGA I/2, p. 437, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 565, and CW 3, p. 325.

  32.The section on Hegel’s dialectic is found in MEGA I/2, 399–418, MEW Ergänzungsband 1, p. 568–88, and CW 3, p. 326–46.

  33.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958).

  6The Years of Ruptures

  1.‘Critical criticism’ was in fact a concept that had been coined before Marx. See Bernd Kast, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, in Max Stirner, Der einzige und sein Eigentum (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, andra upplagan, 2013), p. 371.

  2.Letter from Löwenthal to Marx, 27 December 1844, MEGA III/1, p. 447.

  3.Engels’s reaction to the title in a letter to Marx, 22 February–7 March 1845, ibid., p. 269, CW 38, p. 25.

  4.On Edgar Bauer and the workers, MEW 2, pp. 55f, CW 4, p. 53.

  5.Regarding ‘the studiousness, the craving for knowledge …’, MEW 2, pp. 88f, CW 4, p. 84.

  6.On the chasm between Bauer and the multitude, ibid., pp. 105ff and pp. 99ff respectively.

  7.On the Jewish question, ibid., pp. 112ff and 106ff respectively.

  8.On ideas and revolutions, ibid., pp. 126 and 119 respectively. A systematic and critical study of Marx and the French Revolution is François Furet, Marx et la révolution françise; suivi de textes de Karl Marx réunis, présentés, traduits par Lucien Calvié (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), which also contains Marx’s texts on the subject translated into French. Furet starts from Marx’s sharp distinction between the social and the political (pp. 17, 24). If social conditions are decisive, how is it then that politics can take so many forms – that for a time Napoleon could be the man of the bourgeoisie, or that democracy could adopt such varied manifestations? Marx never gave such questions any systematic treatment, according to Furet (pp. 35, 41). It can be argued that Marx developed an understanding of the question, an understanding that, if anything, meant that it was not possible to reach a systematic treatment; see p. 94ff.

  9.On the individual and society, MEW 2, p. 127, CW 4, p. 120.

  10.On the history of materialism, Spinoza, and Hegel, ibid., pp. 131–41 and pp. 124–3
4 respectively.

  11.On Herr Szeliga, ibid., pp. 57–81 and pp. 55–77 respectively; the quote, p. 58 and p. 56 respectively.

  12.The chapter on Sue’s novel Mystères de Paris can be found in MEW 2, pp. 172–221 and CW 4, pp. 162–209.

  13.The final scene, ibid., pp. 222f and 210f respectively.

  14.Letter from Jung to Marx, 18 March 1845, MEGA III/1, p. 458.

  15.Letter from Jenny to Karl, 2 October 1845, MEGA III/1, pp. 453f, CW 38, pp. 525f.

  16.On Helene Demuth, see Heinrich Gemkow, Karl Marx: eine Biographie (Berlin: Dietz, 1967); Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan, 2009); and Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright, 2013).

  17.Letter from Engels to Marx, 22 February–7 March 1845, MEGA III/1, pp. 266–9, CW 38, pp. 21–6, and 17 March 1845, ibid., pp. 270–3 and pp. 26–30 respectively.

  18.Letter from Bürgers to Marx from the end of February 1846, MEGA III/1, pp. 506ff.

  19.Roland Daniels to Marx, 7 March 1846, ibid., pp. 513ff.

  20.Letters from Engels to Marx, 19 November 1844 and 20 January 1845, MEGA III/1, pp. 250–6 and 259–63 respectively, CW 38, pp. 9–14 and 15–20 respectively.

  21.On Hess in The German Ideology, see above all MEW 3, pp. 478f, CW 5, pp. 491f.

  22.On the goal of Marx’s and Engels’s trip to England, Rumyantsev, ‘Über die Studien von Marx und Engels während ihres Augenhaltes in Manchester im Juli/August,’ Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung 22, 1987, pp. 49–58, and Ljudmilla Wassina, ‘Die Manchester-Exzerpthefte von Marx im Sommer 1845’, Marxistische Studien. Jahrbuch des IMSF 12, 1987, pp. 141–51.

  23.Like much else that Marx (and in this case Engels as well) wrote, The German Ideology has the character of a project rather than a completed work. Terrell Carver has recently questioned whether in general we can speak of a unity, considering how the manuscript looks. Terrell Carver, ‘The German Ideology Never Took Place’, 2010, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). In addition, it could be said that Marx and Engels were undoubtedly striving to publish a book together, and that they also searched in vain for a publisher. The work they later left to the gnawing criticism of the mice (Marx’s words) is scarcely a rounded totality.