Marx and Marxism

CHAPTER 1

The Young Karl

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in the small Rhineland city of Trier, near the French border, which then had about 12,000 inhabitants.¹ Until recently the largely Catholic, liberal-leaning town had lived quite happily under twenty years of French occupation. Many of its citizens, including Marx’s future father-in-law, Ludwig von Westphalen, harboured sympathies for revolutionary principles and even, in the 1830s, for the socialist schemes of Henri de Saint-Simon’s followers. Marx’s father, born Hirschel ha-Levi Marx, came from a long line of rabbis; but, renamed Heinrich Marx, he practised law as a Protestant convert (from around 1817), after the kingdom of Prussia, in which Trier was then located, forced Jews out of such professions. He too had liberal sympathies, urged wider political representation and assisted in local poor-relief schemes. His wife, Henrietta, came from a family of Dutch rabbis.

The young Karl spent most of his schooldays with classical authors like Homer and Ovid. He was not a particularly distinguished student. His school director was a republican who sympathized with Rousseau and Kant and saw the French Revolution of 1789 as extending Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality. Marx imbibed such principles, one of his first essays (1835) insisting that choosing a profession should be guided by ‘the welfare of mankind and of our own perfection’, the happiest person being ‘the man who has made the greatest number of people happy’ (1:8). We witness here, at the age of seventeen, a desire to define ‘the nature of man’ by ‘the spark of divinity in his breast, a passion for what is good, a striving for knowledge, a yearning for truth’ (1:637)²–as good a definition of himself throughout his life as any Marx ever provided. Thirty-five years later he wrote to his daughter Laura respecting the Irish question that while he desired to accelerate the class struggle he was also ‘acted upon by feelings of humanity’ (43:449). The latter thus remained a dominant motif in his life. ‘Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity. One of his favourite sayings was: “Work for humanity”’, recalled his son-in-law Paul Lafargue.³ To term him a ‘cosmopolitan humanitarian’ would not be a misnomer. Yet he always fought shy of the romantic implications of such sentimentalism.

In October 1835 Marx left Trier to study law in Bonn. Seemingly destined for an academic post, he led the traditional riotous student life, drinking to excess, duelling and spending a night in gaol for rowdiness. In October 1836 he moved to Berlin, where his focus shifted from law to philosophy. Nine days after submitting his dissertation on ‘The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, Marx was awarded his doctorate of philosophy in 1841 (by the University of Jena, after he had grown disenchanted with Berlin). Epicurus was regarded as a forefather of Enlightenment French materialism, though Marx also portrayed him as anticipating a Hegelian idea of self-consciousness, which his preface termed ‘the highest divinity’ (1:30).

Hegel and the Young Hegelians

The newly minted doctor viewed the world as an oyster to crack. In these years Marx saw himself as at the cutting edge of modern philosophical development, and capable of reconciling the most radical paradoxes that had been created by the Enlightenment collision with what he would soon term ‘bourgeois society’.⁴ This confidence resulted most directly from his confrontation with the greatest German philosopher of the age, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and his followers.

Approaching Hegel via Marx we need to know something about four themes in particular: Hegel’s metaphysics; his philosophy of history; his political theory; and his method, the famous ‘dialectic’. Following Plato, Hegel’s philosophical starting point was pure Idealism: only the world of Spirit or Mind (Geist), or self-conscious reason, was real. ‘Things’ did not exist, ‘for “thing” is only a thought’.⁵ Hegel’s chief concern was to define both human nature and history in terms of mankind’s desire for freedom. This he portrayed partly in terms of Spirit’s coming to awareness of its own free nature. As Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) plotted it, humanity progressed from naïve empiricism, knowing only what our senses present to us, to its logical end, an eventual stage of knowing the Absolute (or God, or Mind’s own nature). Spirit’s progress towards self-consciousness was ‘dialectical’ insofar as every stage constantly evolved into the next through a process of contradiction, by negating the previous stage while preserving something of it, a process Hegel called Aufhebung, or ‘sublation’. Each stage involved self-consciousness ‘alienating’ itself in nature, developing in history and emerging again in the self-consciousness of humanity, in a progression from lower to higher.

Few modern readers find this scheme comprehensible in such abstract terms. If we see Mind as a metaphor for progressive human development, and as describing an empirically verifiable desire for freedom occurring through real social institutions and relations, however, the theory makes more sense. Hegel’s goal, Charles Taylor writes, was thus to define ‘a whole, integrated life in which man was at one with himself, and men were at one with each other in society’.⁶ No small ambition! In the former sense, this meant unifying our own alienated souls with God, the Absolute, as well as recognizing the world as our own creation, and thus overcoming ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung), the failure to achieve such recognition. In the latter, it meant achieving ‘consciousness of belonging to a community’.⁷ Here the ideal was Periclean Athens, whose ‘spontaneous harmony’ has been called Hegel’s ‘utopia’.⁸

Hegel’s philosophy of history attracted many by explaining how subsequent stages embodied Spirit’s growing self-consciousness. History, in a word, possessed ‘meaning’. ‘What distinguished Hegel’s mode of thinking from that of all other philosophers was the exceptional historical sense underlying it’, thought Friedrich Engels (1820–95), Marx’s lifelong intellectual partner, recalling that Hegel had first posited ‘that there is development, an intrinsic coherence in history’ (16:474). Commencing with Persian despotism, where only the monarch is free, humanity passed through the Greek polis, where consciousness of freedom (for the few) first arose; to Rome, where slavery still shows that not all are free; to Christianity, and the recognition of mankind as spiritual beings; thence to the Germanic world, where after the Reformation it became clear that ‘the human being as such is free’.⁹ But how could the moderns hope to emulate the achievements of the ancients? Whereas virtue was civic, not merely private, in classical Greece, now there was no turning back. Modern individuality had staked its claims against ancient republicanism. The young Hegel was greatly impressed by the French Revolution. He had glimpsed the ‘world soul’ on horseback as Napoleon entered Jena in October 1806. Hegel’s glorification of reason has been seen as having its counterpart in attempts to found a Cult of Reason during the revolution.¹⁰ The older Hegel, however, believed that modern Prussia might exemplify the further progress of Spirit.

Nonetheless a major hitch in this otherwise soothing narrative was posed by the profound disharmony which potentially characterized the age of commerce and industry. Hegel was the first significant modern German philosopher to confront the reality of commercial society. Civil society, he thought, now recognized the positive value of individualism, as well as the growth of mutual dependency through the operation of ‘the system of needs and wants’. But its flip side posed a peculiar threat to any dreams of abolishing servitude and achieving freedom. This would become Marx’s starting point.

This threat first became evident to Hegel around 1793, when he began studying the chief eighteenth-century Scottish political economists, Sir James Steuart, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith.¹¹ What he discovered was potentially very disturbing. These writers broadly defined humanity’s progress from ‘rudeness’ or ‘simplicity’ to ‘refinement’. The newly emerging international market, new forms of machinery, an increasingly specialized division of labour and concentrated production in workshops–of which they were the first witnesses–were well designed to meet the growing demand for commodities and the limitless proliferation of needs generally. It was much less clear that the workers themselves actually benefited from these developments. Smith in particular would be associated with an ideal of increasing economic freedom and minimizing state interference. But he too was aware that great wealth might be created while the workforce became increasingly degraded. Specialization and poverty seemed paradoxically interwoven in commercial society. In 1803–4 Hegel lectured, paraphrasing Smith, that ‘in the same ratio that the number produced rises, the value of the labor falls; the labor becomes that much deader, it becomes machine work, the skill of the single laborer is infinitely limited, and the consciousness of the factory laborer is impoverished to the last extreme of dullness’. ‘Factories and workshops’, he added, ‘based their existence on the misery of a class’.¹² If this class were to become sufficiently large it would surely threaten any presumption that increasing freedom was humanity’s destiny.

Hegel did worry about this prospect. But he cannot be blamed for failing to foresee capitalism’s future course. The universal and explosive nature of the factory system was not yet obvious. Some thought it might be confined to Britain, the ‘workshop of the world’. Hegel also regarded inequality of wealth as ‘absolutely necessary’. Work might become ‘more mechanical, dull, spiritless’. But that was the price of progress.¹³ Classical Athens had after all been based on slavery, and surely the modern system was less oppressive. There was still the danger that the rabble might revolt. But there was no question here of challenging the right to property. This Hegel regarded as sacrosanct, as the offspring of appropriation. It was indeed the very ‘embodiment of personality’, ‘the first embodiment of freedom’. Modern selfhood was freed from earlier religious and personal obligations and focused instead chiefly on objective relations framed by property.¹⁴ The means by which individuality was realized was through such rights, implying that those without property were in effect not even human. In any case machinery might well replace mechanical human labour and ‘through the consummation of mechanical progress, human freedom is restored’. ‘Human beings are accordingly first sacrificed’, but afterwards ‘they emerge through the more highly mechanized condition as free once more’.¹⁵ This anticipates strikingly some of Marx’s later reflections on the problem.

Nonetheless spiritual freedom (Spirit’s self-knowledge) and social freedom (in society, at work and politically) now seemed poles apart. Indeed applied to a model of universal industrialization the freedom of the few seems contingent on the degradation of the many. Hegel’s chief political work, the Philosophy of Right (1821), purportedly resolved this problem. It assumed that the modern division of labour fulfilled demands both for individual freedom and for satisfying needs through exchange, thus substantially producing the common good through individuals pursuing their own private interest. But the state still needed to mediate between conflicting strands in civil society and tensions produced by the market, a view Marx upheld until 1843. To this end certain restraints on wealth accumulation were required. Social harmony would be safeguarded if the state used its bureaucracy as a ‘universal class’, protected by its own sense of Standesehre (collective sense of honour), to uphold ‘the universal interests of the community’. But could the bureaucracy live up to such expectations? And would the state tolerate growing demands for political representation and freedom of speech and assembly, or prove repressive instead?

Hegel’s later system of thought could be taken to imply that the most rational state was modern Prussia. His more conservative followers, and the bureaucracy of this very state, were smugly satisfied with this conclusion. They were however confronted by a more radical group, the Young or Left Hegelians, who felt that the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and higher synthesis implied further progressive movement, chiefly by advances in theological and political criticism, with the first necessarily preceding the second, since religion provided crucial support for the established order.¹⁶ Though initially lukewarm about Hegel’s system, Marx encountered their views in 1837, at the Young Hegelians’ Berlin watering hole, the Doctors’ Club, where philosophy and drink intermingled freely. Exulting in their own cleverness and cocky in the extreme, the Young Hegelians agreed that reason could march still further onwards, and was quite possibly embodied in one or other of their group, who were all desperately keen to excel. ‘Young’ to them meant feisty, radical, sceptical, practical. Philosophy, they hoped, could now become ‘realized’, meaning that all thought was meaningful only if it eventuated in action, or ‘praxis… truth in concrete activity’.¹⁷ This would be a central principle for Marx, who became an exuberant member of the group before breaking with them around 1845.

At this point theology became a key sticking point dividing Hegel’s followers. The Young Hegelians were all interested in engaging with Hegel’s account of religion. The Right Hegelians were chiefly intent on defending it, seeing Hegel’s system as proving the truths of Christianity. The book which finally led Engels to shed his religious beliefs, the theologian David Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), also helped to shift other Young Hegelians further from orthodoxy by suggesting that much of early Christianity was mythological and, like all religions, reflected the community from which it sprang. Soon it became clear that criticizing religion was tantamount to undermining the state itself. When Prussia appeared increasingly reactionary after Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s ascent to the throne in 1840, and after the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who opposed Hegel, began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1841, three Young Hegelians–Bruno Bauer (1809–82), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) and Max Stirner (1806–56)–took up this line of criticism.¹⁸

Hegel’s erstwhile most accomplished student, and Marx’s close confidant at this point, Bauer considered Prussia as a key obstacle to freedom. He urged that Hegel’s political ideal should be replaced by a new republican ethos of civic duty which would negate the egoism of civil society. Bauer also regarded atheism as the logical terminus of Hegel’s system, a point he drove home in a savagely satirical pamphlet.¹⁹ He had already suggested that human self-consciousness was all that ‘God’ or ‘Absolute Spirit’ meant. His attack on the illusion, false appearance or self-deception created by religion, and his insistence on dispelling it, were soon central to Marx’s outlook. Bauer also thought egoism could be overcome through collective identification with self-consciousness. Going beyond Strauss he now denied the historical existence of Jesus Christ (although he admired the practical religion of the ancient Greeks). Then he plumped openly for atheism, and promptly lost his job. Bauer’s idea that religion represented an inverted reality was appealing to Marx, who had little respect for Christianity or Judaism. Marx now concluded that no philosophy was worth discussing unless it was atheistic, and planned with Bauer to found a journal called The Archives of Atheism. In 1844, following the same trajectory as Marx, Bauer attacked the division of labour and emphasized its interference with recognizing the collective nature of labour. But Bauer then turned against socialism and communism, warning that here the state would govern every detail of life and abolish ‘freedom in the smallest things’ by subjecting all to a dogmatic principle of absolute equality.²⁰ So he too would soon incur Marx’s wrath.

The idea that the biblical image of God was only human consciousness externalized, ‘the moral nature of man taken for absolute being’, became the great theme promoted by Ludwig Feuerbach.²¹ His Essence of Christianity (1841) portrayed God as a projection of human desires and denounced Hegelian philosophy as the last stage of religion. In 1843 Feuerbach criticized Hegel in two short articles, insisting that the attributes Hegel associated with Spirit were in fact only human. Theology was not about discovering God, Spirit or the divine element in the human, but about human self-understanding. This implied that philosophy must study humanity in its real, concrete relations. ‘The secret of theology is anthropology’ became the flattering slogan of the new view.²² Humanity was now at the centre of the universe, defined by Gattungswesen–‘species-being’, ‘species essence’ or ‘species existence’–a term adopted from Strauss.²³

There was sufficient ambiguity in this key term to allow it to perform many functions. To Feuerbach it meant identifying with the species, ‘the absolute unity of humanity’, knowing our true nature as that of the species, and subsequently actualizing human capacities within it, where this was alone possible. It implied overcoming subjective individuality and, through education (Bildung), achieving a kind of self-renunciation. It was at once a principle both of religion and of sociability. ‘All aspects of life that expressed man’s activity as a “species being” were “sacred”: marriage, love, friendship, labor, knowledge’, writes John Toews.²⁴