The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The revolution that had been expected (in some quarters) throughout “the hungry forties” finally erupted in 1848 in a number of cities but soon petered out. As the failures mounted, and the conservatives regained the upper hand, Marx was arrested and tried in Cologne for subversion. A brilliant speech won over the jury and he was acquitted. In May 1849 he was in trouble again and was expelled from Prussia, his new periodical being closed down. He tried Paris one more time, was expelled again and, in the summer of 1849, “acknowledging the failure of the ‘deed,’” crossed the Channel to London. He remained there till he died, never losing his hunger for revolution.33

  MARX’S NEW PSYCHOLOGY

  Marx thought of himself as a democrat but the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt condemned him as one of the “terribles simplificateurs” of history. To an extent, Burckhardt was right. Marx gave almost no regard in his writing to the protection of individual rights, assuming that in communist society there would be no need for such a device. “He does not move in the tradition of a John Locke, a James Madison, or a John Stuart Mill, with their concern for a system of checks and balances on the human proclivity to power; their definition of ‘liberty’ and Marx’s is far apart.”34

  Although he was a man without a country, Marx was a very German writer. Much influenced by Hegel and his examination of human self-alienation imposed by religion, Marx chose criticism—the German scholarly method—to examine alienation in this life. His main focus was Germany and the hoped-for revolution in that country. Germany, he insisted, though backward practically, was “ahead in thought.” The failed revolutions of 1848 played their part in his thinking: one could not expect a revolution from the bourgeoisie—they were simply not up to playing their historical role. A new actor—or hero—must be found. This new actor was to be the proletariat. “A class must be formed,” Marx declared, “which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society…” He was only too well aware that the proletariat was “only beginning to form itself in Germany.” “Only if the bourgeoisie would play its assigned supporting role, be a proper villain, would the new heroic class develop…For one class to be the liberating class par excellence, it is necessary that another class should be openly the oppressing class.”35 These sentiments are crucial to understanding Marx.

  It was while he was in Paris in 1844 that Marx finally came to grips with English classical economic theory and began to use a material basis for his critique of Hegel, though we should never forget that it was Engels who exposed the dismal actuality of the factory system in Manchester, also in 1844, in the Condition of the Working Class in England (published 1845). While Engels concentrated on the grime of Manchester, Marx spent his time analyzing Adam Smith. Marx’s key section is where he sets out to show that the increased wealth of society means inevitable poverty and degradation for the individual. (Smith himself wasn’t deaf to this threat, though on balance he thought that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.) Marx, however, thought that the pursuit of self-interest by employers would always win out and would distort the market.36

  Marx was always a philosopher as much as an economist. His basic contention was that the worker becomes “all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” Marx insists that the worker is poorer “even if better paid,” because of an increase in alienation. The worker has become impoverished as a human being. And so he developed the concept of alienation, arguing that it originated in labor and had four defining aspects: (1) labor is no longer the worker’s own under capitalism, it is an alien entity, dominating him; (2) the very act of production alienates the worker from his own nature—he becomes less than a man; (3) the needs of the market—and of the factory—estrange men from other men; and (4) from his surrounding culture. Marx believed these forces of alienation were producing a new psychology.37

  In 1845 Karl and Jenny were living in Brussels, Jenny pregnant with Laura. Engels moved next door and the two men made a six-week visit to England, mostly in Manchester, observing and reading. Back in Brussels they embarked on Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology), a book that never found a publisher in their lifetime and was abandoned in 1846 (it finally appeared in 1932). Though disappointed, Marx later felt that the book had served its purpose—helping the two of them achieve a measure of self-clarification. “He was too modest,” says Bruce Mazlish, “the theses of The German Ideology were to gnaw away at the foundations of capitalism.”38

  Marx’s first achievement was to write as if he had discovered a new science, one that revealed a new stage in mankind’s development, a new level of Hegelian self-consciousness. To “make history,” Marx argued, men must live, and that meant they must satisfy their needs. In the industrial stage, a certain mode of cooperation is required, a certain set of social arrangements, and this mode of cooperation has consequences. He gives credit to the French and English for first grasping that history is the history of industry and exchange, making economic history central. He dismissed political history, there was no social contract as such, à la Rousseau: only economic relations “tie man to man.” “Such a view marks a profound revolution in political science.”39

  Marx also argued that this financial division of labor underlies “the emergence” of the state. The state offers what is in effect an illusory communal life.40 Families and classes exist, offering some identity, but “it follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.” Political life is but “a veil” for the “real struggles” based on the division of labor and private property, and this is a further cause of estrangement. This leads Marx to a famous passage addressing the ruling ideas in a society: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Because of this, the alteration of men “on a mass scale” can be achieved only by an act, a revolution. “Only in the activity of revolution itself [does] man make himself into a new man, cleansed and purified.” The division of labor, private property, and intellectual self-understanding of the state are put together “in one arching synthesis.”41

  The German Ideology was followed by the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto), in 1848, which was even more aggressive in predicting the coming revolution. The League of the Just had been formed in 1836 by German radical workers living in Paris. It was a small secret society dedicated to revolution in Germany. After an unsuccessful uprising in 1839, most of its members left Paris for London where, in 1847, the society’s name was changed to the Communist League. At their annual congress in 1847, the league—riven by factions—commissioned Marx and Engels, recent adherents, to draft a manifesto.

  Engels did most of the work on the draft but then Marx realized this was the perfect vehicle to make known their views to a wider world. In imposing his vision on Engels’s draft, he made the Manifesto a classic “confession of faith.”42

  He began, famously: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” At the time, says Bruce Mazlish, there were perhaps between twenty and one hundred communists in London, yet Marx treats them as though they are “the only alternative to the status quo.” After this stirring propaganda, Marx provides a grand sweep of history, informing us, with the certainty of a scientist, how the bourgeoisie rose in opposition and, at the expense of the feudal aristocracy, transformed the technology of production and its system of financing, expanded and transformed the market, and created a different civilization, based on international trade and exchange. In doing so, skills came under threat, and so the bourgeoisie “created the conditions of its own doom.” The requirements of the bourgeoisie called into existence the modern working class—the proletarians. “The bourgeoisie has simplified the class struggle, which Marx claims to be �
�the history of all existing society,’ into a final Manichean struggle of only two classes: the haves and the have-nots, the capitalists and the proletarians.”43 The conflict is almost biblical in its simplicity.

  Given the horrors that have gone on in—or been attributed to—Marx’s name, it only seems fair to point out that, aside from the abolition of property in land and the right of inheritance, Marx’s list of practical measures seems hardly radical today: a progressive or graduated income tax; centralization of credit in the hands of the state; nationalization of communication and transport; the combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; free education of all children. These measures were perhaps overlooked because of the stirring language, the sheer firepower of the drama he claimed to see unfolding all about him, and for his conclusion: “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!…Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”44

  And then, there was Das Kapital. There is no question, says Bruce Mazlish, that this book was Marx’s greatest achievement, or that it is a great work. “The question is: in what sense is it a great work?”45

  Its central ideas are: (1) a labor theory of value, (2) a theory of surplus value, (3) a theory of capital accumulation and its consequences, and (4) a law of “increased misery.” The idea of a labor theory of value was initially conceived not by Marx but by Adam Smith—in fact, it was commonplace in the early nineteenth century and made Marx seem very up-to-date. However, no sooner had Das Kapital been published than another revolution overtook economics: this was the so-called marginal utility theory, a mathematical approach that undermined the labor theory of value and is one reason modern economists pay so little attention to Marx’s economic theories.

  Marx held that all value was created by the laborer, who wasn’t allowed to keep the full value of his work but had part of it—the larger part—expropriated from him, subjecting him to a life of misery and degradation.46 The central problem, he said, was profit. “If the capitalist gets back the capital he started with, and the laborer gets the rightful value of his work put into the commodity, how can ‘profit’ be extracted from the productive process?” Only by paying the worker much less than what he is worth can the capitalist secure his profit. For Marx this counted as exploitation and “Workers who never read Capital nevertheless could now trust that there was a scientific underpinning to their feeling of being exploited.”47

  There were many shortcomings in Marx’s arguments. For example, if surplus value arose because capitalists undervalued labor, how was it that industries using a lot of machinery, and very little labor, were frequently more profitable than labor-intensive industries? Marx never came up with a satisfactory answer.

  He kept some of his most vivid prose for his account—and critique of—the accumulation of capital. Where does it originate? For him, it arose not from the capitalist’s hard work and savings, but from “brutal confiscation, slavery and rapine…Capital comes into the world covered in blood from head to foot…accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.” There was no way out. Capital, he insisted, will become more concentrated, in fewer hands, added to which there will also be a long-term decline in profit as competition grows. The end result, one end result anyway, is that the law of increasing misery shows itself. Marx called it a “law,” but in fact in most capitalist countries the conditions of most workers have improved. 48

  But is Das Kapital intended to be read as a dry textbook? Not really. “It is a passionate drama, an epic poem, in which we descend into capitalism’s innermost circles, go through its purgatory fires, in order to emerge at the end with a glimpse of its downfall and a promise of future salvation. It is Marx’s imagery…which grips us.”49

  The other flaws in Marx’s theories are now well known. The most important is his assumption that all political power is in the hands of the capitalist, to the exclusion of the worker, that “bourgeois democracy is a sham.” Yet the very parliamentary inquiries into working conditions that Marx himself used to damn the capitalists actually produced important improvements (slow in coming, it is true) and in 1867, the year Das Kapital was published, urban workers were given the vote in Great Britain. Steadily, if slowly, in the bourgeois European democracies, a “welfare state” came into being. We are now at a sufficient distance from Das Kapital to be able to generalize that, when workers have had a clear political voice, they have never voted to overturn the capitalist industrialist system, rather for a greater share of its “surplus.” Even this is to misread and misunderstand the purpose of Das Kapital, which was, as Engels saw, the Workers’ Bible, part of a campaign to kindle revolution.

  Despite these shortcomings, Marx’s key insight was to grasp that the developing productive forces of a society create new social relations, binding economics and sociology together.50 Moreover, with his Hegelian background, he offered an evolutionary perspective.

  On a personal level, Marx was a great fighter, incorrigibly struggling for a better world. Marxism aside, Marx the man stressed—as Francke, Herder, and Hegel had stressed before him—that a society’s ethos and values are created by its members. This is the other German ideology and one that we still espouse, despite everything that has happened.

  “THE MOST LEARNED MAN IN EUROPE”

  Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, summed up Engels’s character in 1890, when he was seventy: “Next to his youthful freshness and kindness, nothing is so remarkable about him as his many-sidedness. Nothing remains foreign to him,” she wrote, “natural history, chemistry, botany, physics, philology…political economy and last not least, military tactics.”51 Theodor Cuno—founder of the Milanese section of the First International, and later a member of the American Knights of Labor, whose life had been saved by Engels when Cuno had nearly drowned swimming in the sea for the first time in 1872—also remarked of his savior that “His brain was a treasury of learned knowledge.” Marx too “was proud of Engels.” In fact, Marx regarded Engels as “the most learned man in Europe.”52

  Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 in the Rhenish town of Barmen, now part of Wuppertal. His father was a staunch Pietist, but Engels himself was more impressed by the incipient industrialization of the area, struck by the fact that, along the Wupper, a “vigorous, hearty life of the people,” with traditional folk songs, had been lost, unlike many other places in Germany. He left the Gymnasium before graduating, to work in his father’s office. He was sent to other company offices, all the while enjoying himself—riding, skating, and fencing; he joined a choral group and even tried composing.53 In his reading he was influenced by Schleiermacher, Fichte, and David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, which provoked his loss of faith. Then he encountered Hegel, which struck him like a religious conversion. He formed ties with the Young Hegelian circle of which Marx formed a part and in 1842 released “Schelling und die Offenbarung” (Schelling and Revelation), a pamphlet that attracted attention as far afield as Russia. Following that, he began writing more regularly for the newspapers, though his father suggested he spend some time in the company’s Manchester office to flesh out his commercial acumen.54

  In England, where, says Tristram Hunt, he found the “zest” for life much less than on the Continent, Engels nevertheless met his future common-law wife, Mary Burns, apparently a domestic servant, who introduced him to proletarian circles in Manchester, contacts that formed the background to his book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England).55 Returning to Barmen in 1844, Engels traveled via Paris, where he met Marx. Reaching home, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class, which David McLellan has called “a pioneering work in the relatively modern fields of urban geography and sociology.” We now know it to be a one-sided picture of the English working classes, exaggerating their prosperity before industrialization and propagandizing the impact of the machine
. Nonetheless, the text was vivid. “Perhaps no other book but Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton provides so graphic a description of the real evils the English working class suffered in this period.”56

  By the time of the revolutions of 1848, Engels and Marx had collaborated on Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family), Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) and the Communist Manifesto. In the revolution, while Marx went to Paris, Engels fought as a “line” soldier in “the last stand” of the democratic revolutionaries in Baden against Prussian soldiers, who had an easy victory. Engels actually took part in four battles, “discovering that he was more courageous than he had dared hope.” But then both Engels and the Marx family went into exile in England, the former taking up employment again for Ermen and Engels in Manchester, enabling him not only to support himself but to supplement Marx’s meager income. Later, as he earned more, Engels’s support of Marx “became quite substantial.” Apart from his collaboration with Marx, Engels—the former soldier—wrote on military affairs.

  At this point, and despite his experiences on the barricades, Engels was by no means a revolutionary. He rode to hounds, joined the Albert Club, named for Queen Victoria’s German consort, the membership of which was half English and half German, and, from 1860, was awarded a share of the profits of Erman and Engels, “adding to the irony that Marx’s principal source of income, at least at this time, was capitalistic.”57

  In 1870 Engels moved back to London and rented a house within walking distance of Karl and Jenny. He now found time to write his own books, based on his wide reading. These included Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; using Lewis Morgan’s well-known Ancient Society, which argued that production was the key to progress from savagery to civilization).58 The last of his own important works, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy), was published in 1886. This clarified his own and Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Feuerbach; he reiterated Hegel’s argument that truth develops over time “without ever arriving at an absolute conclusion” and Feuerbach’s idea that outside nature (which includes human beings), there is nothing, that philosophy and religion are “simply the reflections of humans’ own natures.”