Part One
From Idealism and Revolutionary Democracy
to Dialectical Materialism
and Scientific Communism
Part Two
Laying the Foundations of Dialectical
and Historical Materialism
Translated from the Russian by Yuri
Sdobnikov
Designed by Anatoly Khmelyakov
T. H. OfiaepMan
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MapKCH3Ma
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0302020000~ [4]Contents
Preface.......................................................................................................
9
Introduction.............................................................................................. 11
PART ONE
FROM IDEALISM AND REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY TO DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM
Chapter One. The Shaping of the Revolutionary-Democratic Views of Marx and Engels and Their Philosophical Substantiation ............................... 31
1. Some Features of the First Stage in the
Making of the Marxist Philosophy:
Idealism and Revolutionary
Democracy............................................................. 31
2. Marx's School Essays. The Traditional
Views Which Marx Soon Abandoned.
Reflections on His Vocation................. 40
3. Karl's Letter to His Father. Advance to
the Young Hegelians. The "What Is"
and "What Ought To Be" Problem
and Hegel's Idealist Dialectics.............. 44
4. Marx's Doctoral Dissertation "Difference
Between the . Demotritean and
Epicurean Philosophy of Nature".
Epicureanism as the Enlightenment of
Antiquity................................................. 48
5. Doctoral Dissertation. Marx's and
Hegel's Conceptions of Ancient
Atomistics. Philosophy and Religion.... 55
6. Doctoral Dissertation. Self-Consciousness
and Empirical Reality, Theory and
Practice, Philosophy and Revolution.
Dialectics and the History of
Philosophy.............................................. 61
7. Revolutionary-Democratic Critique of
the Prussian Order. Dialectics as an
Instrument of Revolutionary Critique
of Romantico-Feudal Illusions.............. 69
8. Engels's Advance to Atheism. Formation
of His Revolutionary-Democratic
Views ...................................................... 73
9. Engels Joins the Young Hegelians.
Revolutionary-Democratic I nterpretatkm
of Hegel's Philosophy ........................... 80
10. Engels's Struggle Against Schilling's Irrationalism. His Attitude to Hegel, the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach.........
87 511. A Preliminary Summing-up. Marx and Engels and the Young Hegelian Movement in the Late 1830s-Early 1840s....................................................... 98
Chapter Two. Beginning of Transition from Idealism and Revolutionary Democracy to Materialism and Communism....................................................... 103
1. Marx's Work in the Rheinische Zeitung.
Action in Support of the Oppressed
and Exploited Masses. Attitude to
Utopian Socialism and Communism.... 103
2. The Revolutionary-Democratic View of
the Role of Philosophy. Philosophy
and Religion. Attitude to Feuerbach.
Critique of Reactionary
Romanticism ......................................................... 114
3. Freedom and Its Necessary Expression
in the Press. The Ideal and the
Material, Substance and Appearance.
The Nature of the State and Its
Relation with Private Interests. The
Problem of Objective Regularity.........
131
4. Engels's Break with Young Germany.
Beginning of Separation from the
Young Hegelians................................... 147
5. Material Interests and Ideal Principles,
Classes and Parties. Prospects for a
Social Revolution. Start of Advance to
Materialism and Communism .............. 154
Chapter Three.
Final Advance to the Dialectico-Materialist and
Communist World Outlook................................. 163
1. On the Threshold of the New,
Philosophico-Scientific and Communist
World Outlook. Marx's MS, "
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Law"............................... 163
2. Engels and Utopian Socialist Doctrines
in France and England......................... 184
3. Preparations for Publishing Deutsch-
Franziisische Jahrbucher. On the
Threshold of Dialectical and Historical
Materialism............................................. 192
4. Human Emancipation and the
Proletariat's Historical Mission.
Consciousness and Being, The Ideal and the
Material. Socialist Revolution and the
Overcoming of Alienation .................... 201
5. Engels's Articles in the Deutsch--
Fran
zosische Jahrbucher. Critique of
Bourgeois Political Economy and Carlyle's
Historico-Philosophical Conception..... 217
6. Marx and Bourgeois Political Economy.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844. Alienated Labour and Private
Property.................................................. 224
7. Antagonism of Labour and Capital.
Critique of Egalitarian Communism.
Diversity of Forms of Man's Social
Activity.................................................... 238
8. The Materialist View of Nature and
Man. Assessment of Feuerbach's
Anthropological Materialism. Critique of
Hegel's Idealist Dialectics...................... 247
9. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Anti-Marxist Interpretations of Marxism ................................... 265
10. Engels's Communist Views. Critique of Bourgeois Democracy and the Liberals' Pseudo-Socialist Declarations.......... 282
PART TWO
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF DIALECTICAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Chapter One. Theoretical Substantiation of the DialecticoMaterialist and Communist World Outlook. Struggle Against the Philosophical and Political Conceptions of Bourgeois Radicalism........ 291
1. Critique of Speculative Idealism and
Idealist Dialectics. The
DialecticoMaterialist Solution of the
Fundamental Philosophical Problem. Marx's and
Engels's Historico-Philosophical
Conception .................................................... 291
2. Critique of the Young Hegelian Theory
of ``Heroes'' and ``Crowd''.
Uniformity of the Growing Role of the Masses
' in History. Problems of Materialist
Dialectics................................................. 313
3. Critique of Young Hegelian Criticism of
Proudhonism. Evaluation of
Proudhon's Doctrine. Scientific Communism
and the Tasks of Critically
Overcoming Bourgeois Political Economy........ 327
4. Engels's The Condition of the Working
Class in England. Historical
Materialism and Concrete Social Studies.......... 334
5. Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" ............... 344
6. Marx's and Engels's The German
Ideology. The Communist Correspondence
Committee. Critique of Welding's
Sectarian Stand and Kriege's
PseudoCommunism ........................................... 355
7. Final Criticism of Young Hegelian
Idealism. Critique of Stirner's
Anarchism and Its Philosophical Principles .... 363
8. New Aspects of the Materialist Critique
of Feuerbach's Philosophy.................... 371
9. Basic Premises of Historical Materialism.
The Objective and the Spontaneous
in the Development of Society.
Freedom and Necessity................................ 376
10. Historical Development of Forms of
Property. Contradiction Between the
Productive Forces and Relations of
Production. The Problem of State and
Revolution .............................................. 390
11. Social Consciousness and Social Being ... 400
12. Critique of the Political Theory of
German Bourgeois Radicalism. Socialism
and Democracy...................................... 407
Chapter Two. Materialist Substantiation of Scientific Socialism and Critique of Petty-Bourgeois Utopianism ....................................................................... 416
1. Proletarian Communism and
PettyBourgeois Preaching of Non-Class
Socialism................................................. 416
2. Marx's Critique of Proudhon's Economic
Utopia and the Question of the
Historically Transient Nature of Capitalist
Relations................................................. 428
3. Materialist Dialectics and Proudhon's
Philosophy of Poverty................................. 438
4. The Communist League. Engels's Princi-
ples of Communism................................. 450
5. Manifesto of the Communist Party............... 458
Conclusion...............................................................................................
470
Bibliography............................................................................................
479
Name Index.............................................................................................
~^^48^^-t>
Subject Index.........................................................................................
488
8 __ALPHA_LVL1__ PREFACEThe first edition of this monograph appeared in 1962. The numerous reviews in Soviet and foreign periodicals, the discussion of the questions it posed on the pages of specialist works on the history of philosophy, and the publication of the book in several foreign languages were all an indication, at least, that the need for a scientific comprehension of the early writings of Marx and Engels and so of the whole historical process which led to the formation of the Marxist philosophy was well ahead of the writing and publication of the relevant studies.
Since then, there has been a marked increase in the number of highly valuable studies on various aspects and problems of this subject, and when I was preparing the second edition of this book an analysis of them helped me to amplify and give greater precision and concreteness to some of my own propositions.
The second edition of the works of Marx and Engels in Russian and German was in the main completed in the recent period, and this made available some of their letters, articles and other writings which had not been published before. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee has published a new and most complete edition of Chapter One of The German Ideology, which is theoretically the most important part of the work that first defined the Marxist doctrine of society as the materialist view of history. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these publications for a study of the making of the Marxist philosophy.
The 150th anniversary of the birth of Marx, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Engels, and the centenary of the 9 birth of Lenin were marked by the publication of highly important studies summing up earlier research. At the head of the list are the scientific biographies of Marx and Engels produced by researchers at the Institute of Marxism-- Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee.^^*^^ Both works not only introduce into current scientific usage a number of new and previously unknown documents but also establish some theoretically very important conclusions, which I have made a special effort to take into account when preparing this book.
In 1968, UNESCO marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marx by arranging a highly representative conference on his doctrine. I attended it and carried away the conviction that most serious-minded researchers frequently, even regardless of their political orientation, had largely come to recognise the importance of Marxism for world history and to realise that it was impossible to advance the science of society while ignoring the doctrine. However, as was to have been expected, this merely intensified the ideological struggle. That is why when preparing the second edition I naturally gave considerable attention to a critical analysis of the latest non-Marxist interpretations of the making of the Marxist philosophy.
In conclusion, I should like to express deep gratitude to the Soviet scientists El. P. Kandel and N. I. Lapin, who kindly agreed to read the MS of the new edition and whose critical remarks helped me to complete my work. I should also once again like to thank my French friend Auguste Cornu, the dean of students of the history of Marxism, for our numerous conversations and his remarks in connection with the German edition of my book, which I found highly instructive.
T. I. Oizerman Moscow
_-_-_^^*^^ Karl Marx. A Biography, Progress Publishers, 1977 (this is a translation of the second Russian edition, Moscow, 1973, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee; written by P. N. Fedoseyev [chief], A. I. Bakh, L. I. Golman, N. Yu. Kolpinsky, B. A. Krylov, I. I. Kuzminov, A. I. Malysh, V. G. Mosolov, Ye. A. Stepanova); Frederick Engels. A Biography, Progress Publishers, 1976 (this is a translation of the Russian edition, Moscow, 1970, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee; written by L. F. Ilyichev [chief], Ye. P. Kandel, N. Yu. Kolpinsky, A. I. Malysh, G. D. Obichkin, V. V. Platkovsky, Ye. A. Stepanova, B. G. Tartakovsky).
10 __ALPHA_LVL1__ INTRODUCTIONThis is a study of the origination of the Marxist philosophy. The formation of Marxism is a historical process that differs qualitatively from the subsequent stages of its development, which has gone forward on its own theoretical basis. When working out their doctrine, Marx and Engels had first of all critically to absorb and digest the advances in social thought before them. Its subsequent development is based mainly on an analysis of the socio-historical process, a summing-up of the experience of the proletariat's emancipation movement, and a philosophical comprehension of the advances in natural science.
What is the reason for the lively interest in the early works of Karl Marx, in the period of the emergence and crystallisation of his doctrine? This interest is seen everywhere, not only on the part of Marxists but of their opponents as well. As we see it, the reason is the scientific essence of Marxist theory and of the Marxist approach to social study.
The probing interest in the early works of Marx (including those written in his late boyhood) would have been inexplicable outside the context of the great power of attraction of modern Marxism and the timeless relevance of the subjects it^ encompasses, its science-grounded humanitarian appeal, and its steadily rising influence even on its opponents.
Marxism has blended philosophy and political economy. It has blended exalted social ideals with a sound, grassroot study of the process of history; it keeps well away from any 11 and all utopianism. Marxism is the synonym for a science of society as an integral, continuously growing system of social relations whose objective, law-governed change leads to radical transformations and to passage from one social system to the next. History as a science owes it to Marxism that it has become an economically substantiated and philosophically conceptualised study of social development, so does political economy for becoming a science of the laws of development and of the transformation of economic structure of social production. For the first time in history have philosophical ideas acquired an economic and historical or, more precisely, a practical groundwork.
Socialism which began as a scientific theory is now a socio-economic and political fact. The extraordinary progress of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in building a new exploitation-free and oppression-free society is, indeed, a fact that no anti-communist propaganda can detract from. No longer do the present-day advocates of the bourgeois way of life venture to claim that capitalism and division of society into antagonistic classes with the accompanying existence of an exploited mass of working people, is inevitable, natural, and everlasting. The more far-sighted of them say the capitalist system is growing into a non-capitalist, classless, post-capitalist society, which, as all will agree, is an involuntary admission in socialism's favour.
Socialism's victory in the Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries is a victory for Marxism, for the Marxist scientific and philosophical outlook. And this, naturally, directs the attention of all people of goodwill to the history of Marxism and the history of socialist construction.
The making of Marxism is a historical process which has a beginning and an end, while the development of Marxism, which naturally starts from the time of its origination, has no end. That is why in his work, The Historical Destinies of the Doctrine of Karl Marx, Lenin said that the first stage in the development of Marxism began in 1848.
Lenin attached prime importance to the analysis of the development of Marxism, in general, and of the shaping of the Marxist philosophy, in particular. His writings, among them Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, The Three Sources and the Three Component Parts of Marxism, and The Historical Destinies of the Doctrine of Karl Marx are of fundamental importance for a study of the origination and development of Marxism. 12 It was Lenin who drew a line of fundamental distinction between the early and later writings of Marx and Engels, and also gave the classical characterisation of their most important works in their formative years. While some of their early works were first published after Lenin's death (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, a sizable part of The German Ideology, Engels's articles against Schelling, and so on), Lenin's indication of the principal specific aspects of the shaping of the Marxist philosophy remains of paramount importance.
__FIX__ Underlining: top two lines:A .characteristic feature of the shaping of Marxismis its emphasis on philosophical problems, in contrast to tFe political and economic problems that were mainly dealt with in the subsequent period. Hence, the special significance of studies on the formation of the philosophical views of Marx and Engels, because these took shape before scientific communism and the political economy of Marxism were formed. Such is the objective logic in the making of Marxism, and its study has been one of my key tasks.
A unique light is shed on the whole historical process which led to the formation of Marxism by the early works of Marx and Engels, which is not just a term used to designate a definite sequence in time but is a key methodological conception within the framework of the given period.
It stands to reason that Marx and Engels did not all at once become the creators of the scientific philosophical world outlook, which differed fundamentally from all the earlier, including progressive, philosophical teachings. The earliest literary documents of their intellectual biography, dating from the second half of the 1830s, show them to be forward-looking men who expressed the philosophical and socio-political views that subsequently came to be known as pre-Marxist. This ``pre-history'' of Marxism led to the formation of philosophical and political positions which, as the historical facts show, became the starting point for the incipient advance in 1842 by Marx and Engels from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism. The end of the transition in 1844, signalled by the publication of their well-known articles in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbiicher and the production of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, should be seen as the culminating point in the historical formation of Marxism.
13The second basic stage was the theoretical substantiation of the premises for the new, dialectico-materialist and scientific communist world outlook, which entailed a struggle against the philosophical teachings with which Marx and Engels had had various connections in the preceding period. This new stage opened with the brilliant The Holy Family and closed with the Poverty of Philosophy and the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
The study of the making of the Marxist philosophy is designed to show how the scientific philosophical outlook was forged in fundamental distinction both to the preMarxist philosophical teachings, in general, and the philosophical views the two men had held in their early days. This is a distinction which is inherent in the whole making of the philosophy of Marxism and which is expressed above all as an impassioned negation of philosophy---in the traditional sense of the term---a point which is, however, at first not always self-evident, and which is clarified only through analysis.
The negation, whose dialectical nature becomes clear (and is comprehended) in the formation of Marxism, also implies sublation of the negation, that is, it implies a historical and logical continuity. Consequently, the shaping of the Marxist philosophy is a resolution of the specific contradictions in the formation of the doctrine which, while being a direct and immediate continuation of the most outstanding philosophical, economic and socialist theories of the early 19th century, is simultaneously their negation. It is a negation historically prepared by the development of the pre-Marxian doctrines, so that their negation is simultaneously their development.
The relation of dialectical continuity between the Marxist philosophy and its antecedents took shape and was established gradually through contradictions, struggle and the overcoming of the limitations of the pre-Marxian teachings. A distorted interpretation is frequently put upon this fact not only by opponents of Marxism but even by some Marxists. Some overrate the continuity aspect, especially with respect to the relation of Marxism and the German classical philosophy, while others, by contrast, overemphasise Marxism's negation of the earlier philosophy. Both these one-sided, undialectical approaches to this intricate historical process of continuity result in a loss of the positive content 14 of Marxism's revolutionary advance in philosophy. The student of the making of the Marxist philosophy should first of all abandon the idea that opposites like the abolition of philosophy in the old sense of the term (as a "science of the sciences", in contrast to the special sciences and practice) and the critical and revolutionary absorption of mankind's philosophical legacy are incompatible.
The antithesis between the starting point in the making of the Marxist philosophy and its end result took shape and was expressed in a unique way. The fundamentally new content of the philosophical doctrine being worked out by Marx and Engels only gradually acquired the corresponding mode of expression. So, virtually on every hand one discovers a discrepancy between the objective content of the philosophical conceptions they were formulating and their form, which in effect was largely borrowed from the old philosophical teachings.
It is, of course, the researcher's duty to record such discrepancies wherever they occur, as otherwise the objective content of the new and fundamental propositions may be simply overlooked, or---which is worse---incorrectly interpreted. But the task does not boil down to separating the new content from the discrepant forms of exposition: let us recall that form is substantial. Inadequate forms of exposition show that the new content has yet to be fully defined and separated from its philosophical origins. So there is a need for a critical analysis of this new content, which also reveals features of the still surviving past. Such an analysis helps to explain the nature of the inadequate form of expression, which is far from accidental (and this means not merely subjective).
That is why it is of fundamental importance to draw a line between the early writings of Marx and Engels and the mature Marxist works, for this is not just a matter of chronology but of basic historical fact: Marx and Engels rose to materialism and communism from idealism and revolutionary democracy. Those who ignore these essential facts usually make no such distinction and assert that all of Marx's works, including those he wrote as a youth, like the works produced in the light of idealism, should be seen as Marxist writings. What is not taken into account is that when working on The German Ideology, in which they parted company with the old materialism, Marx and Engels 15 emphasised the need to settle scores with their past philosophical conscience.
An analysis of the making of Marxism helps not only to show up the flimsiness of the view which, in effect, denies the very notion of the "early writings of Marx and Engels" as a concept, but also to give it concrete form. Some of their early writings are informed by idealism, a second group marks the start of their advance to materialism and communism; a third completes the process; and a fourth contains the fundamentals of the dialectico-materialist and communist world outlook. Accordingly, for any correct understanding of the shaping of the Marxist philosophy, the early writings of Marx and Engels need to be considered apart and comparatively analysed.
Today, Marx's doctrine is a great asset for progressive humanity, and regardless of ideological orientation every thinking person must feel the need in some way to comprehend and absorb this wealth of ideas. There is a growing recognition of its outstanding scientific importance even among non-Marxists, which is not to say that the urge intellectually to absorb Marxism is always equivalent to the urge to tackle socio-political problems in its light. However, one can well understand the scientist in some special field of knowledge which is not directly connected with scientific communism or Marxist political economy who will emphasise the general scientific significance of the Marxist philosophy.
That is an approach which Marxists must welcome, because while rejecting the narrow interpretation of Marxism, which shuns socio-political conclusions, one must realise its tremendous ideological and methodological importance for every field of scientific endeavour.
The US philosopher Kenneth A. Megill says: "I see one of the primary tasks of philosophy today to be to work out an interpretation of Marx which can be generally accepted" (93; 74).^^*^^ This statement reflects the deep-seated spiritual crisis of contemporary bourgeois society. Megill does not seem to realise that it is quite impossible to have an _-_-_
^^*^^ Here and elsewhere italicised figures in round brackets indicate the number in the bibliographical annex, followed by the number of the volume, wherever there is more than one, and the page of the book comes after the semi-colon.
16 interpretation of Marxism that is acceptable to one and all. Bourgeois thinkers emphasising the outstanding importance of the philosophy of Marxism usually make a point of contrasting it with its economic and communist doctrine. No wonder, therefore, that such an ideological approach quite often proves to be an attempt to neutralise Marxism and to square it with the capitalist society. Soon after the Second World War, Emmanuel Mounier, the leader of the French personalists, wrote: "It is undoubtedly the task of the coming years to reconcile Marx and Kierkegaard" (99; 108). The opponents of Marxism have not, of course, solved this problem, but then they have not abandoned this kind of Utopian approach either. For decades now, they have been trying to find the answer in the writings of the young Marx.Above I mentioned those who deny the need to draw a line between the early writings of Marx and Engels, and the works of mature Marxism. Actually, however, they do draw a line, because they seek to assess Marxism in the light of the early writings, arguing that these express most adequately the quintessence of Marxism. What have they discovered in these writings? First of all, things like existentialism, personalism, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, etc., which are just not there. When the clerical Marxologist Erich Thier solemnly exclaims: "The young Marx is a discovery of our day!" (114; 3), one may well ask what sort of discovery he has in mind. Is it the discovery of Marxism? But its founders published their principal works over a century ago. So this is an effort to discover in Marxism something that is alien to it. It is being done with the use of Marx's early writings, but not because they are alien to Marxism, but because they do not yet contain any formulation (or only an inadequate one) of the Marxist standpoint. The critics of Marxism ignore the obvious fact that in 1843, say, Marx, according to Lenin, "was only becoming Marx, i.e., the founder of socialism as a science." (5, 14; 336).
In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels did not yet call themselves communists, although they were actually such already. Eschewing Utopian, and especially egalitarian, communism, they say that their doctrine is "real humanism". And we find the opponents of Marxism declaring that this is a negation of communism, and ignoring the fact that The 17 Holy Family is unquestionably communist in content.^^*^^ In that work, Marx and Engels elaborate the key proposition about the proletariat's class struggle as the motive force in the transition from capitalism to communism. While opposing Young Hegelian idealism, they had still to shed Feuerbach's anthropological materialism. What is more, they say that it is precisely in Feuerbach's philosophy that "man is recognised as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations" (1, 2; 93). This "Feuerbach cult", as Marx himself termed it, is characteristic of The Holy Family, and it has proved to be a windfall for some interpreters of Marxism. One of them declares: "The young Marx's anthropologism contains propositions which have not become obsolete in any sense even today" (96; 33).
Philosophical anthropology regards the substance of man as an aggregation of ``natural'' qualities, which are merely modified in the course of human history. The reduction of social problems to anthropological ones helps to interpret the cataclysms of capitalist society as disharmony which is rooted in human nature itself. It is not surprising that the opponents of Marxism have worked hard to discover the most tenuous similarity with this kind of anthropological conceptions in Marx's early writings, for otherwise it is impossible to reconcile Marx and Kierkegaard. That is why their concentration on the young Marx is a specific form of struggle against Marxism.^^**^^
Consequently, the efforts to contrast Marx's early writings and the mature Marxist works, and those to obscure the qualitative distinctions between them ultimately square with each other. The former suggest that Marx rejected the humanistic credo of his young days and became an _-_-_
^^*^^ In The German Ideology, let us note, Marx and Engels explicitly declared: "real humanism", i.e., ``communism'' (11; 70), when rejecting Bruno Bauer's attempt to interpret "real humanism" in the spirit of speculative idealistic philosophy.
,
^^**^^ The West German critic of Marxism, D. Heinrich writes: "The return to the young Marx is a requirement of the Marxist opposition which is aimed against Lenin. It is the password of Ernst Bloch and his followers and also of the French Marxists outside the party and many Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav intellectuals" (73; 7). It is indicative that the contrasting of Marx's early writings and of mature Marxist works is presented as a struggle against Leninism, a valuable admission which reveals the ideological meaning of the revisionist "Back to Marx" slogan.
18 ``economist"; the latter that throughout his life Marx retold Hegel's ideas, which allegedly constitute the main content of his early writings.^^*^^ A third group of critics claim that the young Marx worked out a system of views radically differing from dialectical and historical materialism. But all these critics are unanimous on one point, which is to present scientific communism as a speculative and predominantly Hegelian conception, very tenuously connected with concrete analysis and summing-up of historical experience, economic facts, and so on.Of course, the charge that Marx was a Hegelian is not a new one in the history of the ideological struggle between Marxism and its adversaries. But in the past, the critics of Marxism did not, as a rule, claim that Marx and Engels had borrowed from Hegel not only his dialectics but also the principal ideas of the communist doctrine.^^**^^ Nowadays, they try ever more frequently to reduce the content of scientific communism to Hegel's philosophy of history. Even the historical, economic and political view of Marx and Engels are very often presented as a specific interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history. Here is a typical and categorical statement by the Neo-Thomist Giorgio La Pira, who says: "The Communist cosmology is based integrally on the Hegelian" (101; 2). What has forced the critics of Marxism to ignore the Marxist analysis of Hegel's view of history and to claim that the most important ideas of Marx and Hegel are fundamentally identical? There is only one answer, and it is the objective logic of the bourgeois fight against Marxism.
_-_-_^^*^^ The Neo-Thomist Pierre Bigo tried to prove that Marx's Capital is a politico-economic interpretation of Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes: "The phenomenology of spirit has been simply converted into the phenomenology of labour, the dialectics of man's alienation, into the dialectics of the alienation of capital, the metaphysics of absolute knowledge, into the metaphysics of absolute communism" (51; 34). Let us recall, however, that in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx already gave a fundamental critique of the speculative idealistic construction of the Phanomenologie.
^^**^^ Let us note that one of the earliest attempts to interpret Marxism in the spirit of Hegel's philosophy of history was made in 1911 by the German Hegelian Johann Plenge, who wrote: "Hegel continues to live in Marxism. Like Hegel, Marx regards history as a history of social reason, which comprehends itself in its science and consummates itself at its highest stage in a social organisation" (102; 139-40).
19In the early years of this century it was not only the opponents of Marxism but even some leading SocialDemocratic theoreticians who believed that Marxism was not a philosophical but an economic doctrine. Karl Kautsky wrote: "I regard [Marxism] not as a philosophical doctrine but as an empirical science, as a special conception of society" (81; 452). It had not yet occurred to anyone at the time to deny the organic bond between Marxism and the working-class movement. Even those who asserted that historical materialism was, strictly speaking, not a materialist view of history, as a rule stressed that it was hostile to any a priori postulates and constructs and was firmly based on empirically established historical facts.
Nowadays, it is no longer being said that Marx and Engels had no philosophy of their own. The much more frequent assertion is that the whole of Marxist doctrine consists of philosophy alone. Accordingly, Marx's Capital, which the opponents of Marxism earlier regarded as nothing but an economic analysis, turns out to be more of a philosophical than an economic work interpreting Hegel's speculative scheme with the aid of economic facts and terms. Marx has been converted into a purely Hegelian philosopher. Jean Hyppolite, a front-runner in this ``new'' reading of Marxism, compares Capital with Marx's early writings, and brings out only Hegel's ideas, to draw the conclusion that Marx remained true to the views of his young days throughout his life. He says: "these initial approaches of Marx's are to be found in his Capital, and they alone help to correctly understand the meaning of his entire theory of value" (79; 145). The reduction of the Marxist political economy to young Marx's ideas, which are in no sense economic, and then to Hegel's concepts, is aimed directly against scientific communism and is a denial of the economic substantiation of its basic propositions.
The evolving interpretation of Marxism is highly indicative: it shows that in the current ideological struggle, problems of world outlook and philosophy tend increasingly to come to the fore, and this adds importance to an analysis of the historical shaping of the Marxist philosophy, whose main content is the struggle carried on by Marx and Engels against the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world outlook.
The study of the making of Marxism's scientific philosophical outlook is a highly gratifying task, for it carries 20 the student into the heart of the creative laboratory of the brilliant makers of this world outlook and gives a more concrete and definite understanding of how its basic propositions were elaborated. As one follows Marx and Engels's advance from the idealistic teachings of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and from Feuerbach's anthropological materialism to dialectical and historical materialism, one gains a deeper understanding of the revolution in philosophy which Marxism brought about.
Engels used to say that the study of the history of philosophy provided a good schooling in theoretical thinking. Elaborating on this idea of Engels's, one could say that a study of the formation of the Marxist philosophy provides a schooling in dialectico-materialist thinking. History,' L. I. Brezhnev has emphasised, "knows of tens and even hundreds of examples when theories, concepts and whole philosophic systems which had laid claim to renewing the world did not pass the test of time, fell to dust and perished ignominiously upon coming into contact with life". (6; 69). Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which has stood the greatest historical test, multiplies its transformative power through the closest alliance with practice, historical experience and the advance of the whole body of scientific knowledge. A study of the making of the Marxist philosophy helps in its creative comprehension, which is incompatible with the unhistorical, dogmatic approach to Marxism.
Among the prominent studies of the early writings of Marx and Engels produced in the period of the Second International are those by Georgi Plekhanov, Franz Mehring and G. Mayer. One of the Second International's traditions was neglect of philosophical and ideological problems. Despite his opportunistic mistakes, Plekhanov was, in effect, the only leader of the Second International who attached primary importance to the propaganda and elaboration of dialectical and historical materialism. His brilliant works (From Idealism to Materialism, The Development of the Monistic View of History, For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death, among others) consistently show the objective necessity of the origination of Marxism and its connection with earlier philosophical, economic and socialist theories. He wrote: "Marxist materialist philosophy was a genuine revolution, the greatest revolution in the history of human thought" (Wla, 11; 423).
21Mehring's monograph, Karl Marx, A History of His Life,^^*^^ is one of the best Marxist studies of the history of Marxism. About a third of the book (the first five chapters) deals with the formation of Marxism, and while it is now somewhat outdated, because Mehring had no knowledge of some of Marx's works that were published after his book had come out, it remains a profoundly scientific approach to the key problems.
Mayer, who published a large number of documents characterising the life of Engels, is the author of a circumstantial biography of Engels.^^**^^ A recent Soviet biography of Engels says: "He presented Engels's life against the setting of historical events and introduced new, highly relevant facts" (68; 12).
In the Soviet period, many valuable studies were added. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were the works of Yu. Steklov, V. V. Adoratsky, M. B. Mitin, P. N. Fedoseyev, V. I. Svetlov, Ye. P. Sitkovsky, N. G. Rokhkin,^^***^^ which criticised the simplist interpretation of the making of the Marxist philosophy suggesting that Marx and Engels merely combined Hegel's dialectics with Feuerbach's materialism. This view was countered with the scientific approach to the problem that recognises the unity of the Marxist theory and the practice of the working-class emancipation movement, and also the unity of the component parts of Marxism in the process of their formation. In this context, they showed the importance of Marx and Engels's revolutionary-democratic approach at the first stage in the formation of Marxism and the role that their adoption of the positions of the working class had in the subsequent shaping of the Marxist philosophy. . Among the other histories of Marxism are Ye. A. _-_-_
^^*^^ Franz Mehring, Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Lebens, Leipzig, 1918.
^^**^^ G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Erne Biographie, Haag, 1934, Bd. 1-2.
^^***^^ Yu. Steklov, Karl Marx, His Life and Work, Moscow, 1918; V. V. Adoratsky, Selected Works, Moscow, 1961; M. B. Mitin, Issues in Materialist Dialectics, Moscow, 1936 (all in Russian); P. N. Fedoseyev, "The Philosophical Views of the Young Engels", Pod znamenem marksizma, No. 11, 1940; V. I. Svetlov, "The Philosophical Development of Marx and Feuerbach", Ibid., No. 6, 1934; Ye. P. Sitkovsky, "Marx and Engels---the Creators of Dialectical Materialism", Ibid., No. 12, 1936; G. Rokhkin, Feuerbach and Marx, Moscow, 1925 (in Russian). A detailed bibliography of Soviet (and foreign) studies of the origination and development of Marxism will be found in N. I. Lapin's The Struggle Over the Legacy of the Young Marx, Moscow, 1962 (in Russian).
22 Stepanova's Frederick Engels, M. V. Serebryakov's Frederick Engels in His Young Days, Ye. P. Kandel's Marx and Engels, the Organisers of the Communist League, D. I. Rosenberg's Essays on the Development of the Economic Doctrine of Marx and Engels in the 1840s, A. I. Malysh's The Formation of the Marxist Political Economy, and M. I. Mikhailov's A History of the Communist League.Among studies by foreign Marxists, the most important is, undoubtedly, Auguste Cornu's three-volume Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Their Life and Work, which was published in Russian consecutively in 1959, 1961 and 1968.^^*^^ Soviet scientists gave a high appreciation of his work, as will be seen from Cornu's election as an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In the first volume of his work, Cornu gives a fundamental analysis of the historical situation in Germany on the eve of the origination of Marxism, describes the childhood and youth of Marx and Engels, and gives a critical characterisation of the ideological trends in that period, especially of Left-wing Hegelianism, in which he for the first time in Marxist writing identifies the various groupings connected with the names of Eduard Cans, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess and Max Stirner. In that volume, he also shows the development of the views of Marx and Engels; some of his chapters deal with the Rheinische Zeitung, the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbilcher and other milestones of that period. In his second volume, he analyses the revolutionary activity and works of the founders of Marxism in 1844 and 1845, and ends his third volume with an analysis of The German Ideology.
In a foreword to the German edition of his work, Cornu says that "it could be useful as a collection and partly as a new arrangement and use of the abundant material, and also as a basis for a later biography of Marx and Engels" (62; 7). Actually, his work is much more than that, for in it we find a number of new points characterising the historical conditions in which Marxism originated, Marx and Engels's attitude to u-topian socialism and the philosophical and economic teachings of the first half of the 19th century, and also a _-_-_
^^*^^ Let us note that this work of Cornu's differs substantially from his earlier works on the same subject (A. Cornu, Karl Marx. L'homme et I'oeuvre. De I'hegelianisme au materialisme historique, Paris, 1934; A. Cornu, Moses Hess et la gauche hegelienne, Paris, 1934).
23 thorough theoretical analysis of some of their early works. As a whole, however, Cornu has produced what he had set out to produce: a historical biography which says relatively little about the shaping of the Marxist dialectics, philosophical materialism and the materialist view of history.Anyone who studies the shaping of the Marxist philosophy is faced with some specific difficulties which the biographer of Marx and Engels can to some extent avoid, for he has at his disposal the archives, reminiscences, letters of third persons and other matter which enable him to re-establish unknown or incorrectly presented facts. But most of these documents do not, as a rule, provide information about the philosophical views of Marx and Engels in the initial period of their scientific and socio-political activity. Some of their early works (or their outlines) of whose existence we have now learned from their letters, have apparently been lost. This applies to the unfinished treatise on religious art on which Marx worked in late 1841 and early 1842. Some of the relevant statements in Marx's letters and articles dating from the period leave no doubt that this is one of Marx's most outstanding early works.
Marx's letter to his father on November 10, 1837, does much to clarify his early philosophical views. However, his other letters to his father have not come down to us. We have the letters to Marx of Bruno Bauer, Karl Kottgen, Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, Otto Liming, Hermann Kriege, Georg Jung, Heinrich Burgers, Ludwig Bernays and many other prominent Germans of the 1830s and 1840s, but a sizable part of his replies to them may now possibly never be discovered.
Engels's letters to the brothers Graeber (1838-1841) are an important source for characterising the intellectual quest of Marx's brilliant friend and associate. But regrettably virtually nothing has remained of his other letters dealing with philosophical questions of the period.
As a young man, Marx developed the habit of making extensive extracts from the books he read, and we have at our disposal his Bonn and Kreuznach notebooks with extracts from the books of many authors, including some minor ones. But we do not have his summaries of Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes, Wissenschaft der Logik and Philosophic des Rechts, that is, the works which show Marx's brilliant knowledge in the early 1840s.
24Marx's preparatory work for his dissertation (notebooks on the history of epicureanism, scepticism and stoicism) shed light on his philosophical views just before his first publications in the press. But we do not have any other similar preparatory material, that is, the summaries, outlines, etc. We know of his thorough preparation for his lectures at Bonn University, but apart from short extracts from Aristotle and Trendelenburg virtually nothing has remained of the other material giving an idea of his effort. Nor do we have any of young Engels's summaries, outlines or rough notes, although his letters to< the Graebers show that he made a close study of Hegel's Philosophic der Geschichte, Strauss's Das Leben Jesu and the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the student of the making of the Marxist philosophy finds it very hard to reproduce some essential aspects and transitions in this intricate and contradictory process. Now and again, one is left with the impression that some ideas which are of considerable importance for the system of Marx and Engels's views occurred to them overnight, without having been prepared by earlier development, so that they may appear to be casual statements, although they are, in fact, a summingup of painstaking research.
However, I do not believe that these difficulties are insuperable. A study of the published works of Marx and Engels and the available letters and other material, the works of those who wrote just before and in the lifetime of Marx and Engels (especially those to whom they refer, whose merits they emphasise or with whom they polemicise), and a close analysis of the historical situation, of the trends and struggle of ideas over the whole of this period all help to some extent to fill the gaps.
In the recent period, we have had some Marxist studies of the shaping of the philosophical views of Marx and Engels. Apart from those mentioned in the foreword to the biographies of the two men, written by researchers at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee, there are the biographies published in the German Democratic Republic, and Soviet monographs and collective works. Still, the coherent and multifaceted process which led to the formation of the Marxist philosophy with all its principles and basic conceptions in their organic interconnection 25 is still to be reproduced, and a concrete analysis of the conditions and motive forces behind the process is still to be made.
One should bear in mind that the philosophical and sociological conceptions which Marx and Engels combated in the 1840s are being revived in the present-day bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. The Young Hegelian "critical criticism" which sets up negation as an absolute and puts a subjectivist interpretation of it has been continued in the "negative dialectics" of Th. Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, whose theoretical constructs are frequently spread about in the capitalist countries as ``neo-Marxism''. Existentialism, especially its German' version, is a revival of romantic anti-capitalism, which a closer look reveals to be a species of anticommunism. Present-day philosophical anthropology, whose representatives frequently refer to Marx's early writings and claim to have made their authentic interpretation, is the antithesis of the materialist view of history.
German petty-bourgeois socialism, which denied the class struggle on the pretext of humanising society and overcoming alienation, is being continued by right-wing socialist theoreticians, who are quick to quote the early writings of Marx and Engels particularly because these have been broadly accepted by the "new Left" movement. The latter point needs to be emphasised: the early works of Marx and Engels have often helped the most consistent members of the "new Left" to adopt the Marxist stand. Any underestimation of the theoretical content and ideological import of these outstanding works would be tantamount to farming them out to the adversaries of Marxism. In contrast to those who claim that these early writings contradict the actual content of Marxism, one should stress that they are a way leading to Marxism, and not only in the past, but often also in the present.
An evaluation and analysis of the remarkable wealth of ideas in the early work of the founders of Marxism is a key task in studying the formation of the Marxist philosophy. They should not be modernised, as some Marxist writers are apt to do, who usually try and find ideas which are not yet there and which the founders of Marxism developed only later. What is also ignored is the presence of ideas in these early works which the two men later abandoned. Despite its good intentions, this approach leads to distortions and 26 mistakes. Here is one example. Characterising the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, V. M. Pozner asserts that they contain a "profound analysis of the regularities of the capitalist economy" and even "o thorough and detailed analysis of every aspect [my italics---T. O.] of capitalist production, with Marx passing a relentless judgement on the capitalist system". But within a few lines the author contradicts himself by correctly stating that in these MSS "Marx takes the first few steps towards the discovery of the social relations of production" (32; 492, 493). How can there be an analysis of the regularities of capitalist economy, or a thorough and detailed analysis of every aspect of capitalist production when only the first few steps are being taken towards the discovery of the social relations of production? Pozner has quite obviously discovered in Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 something that is not yet there, while unfortunately failing to find what they actually contain, and what is, in fact, typical of that stage in the formation of Marxism.
Furthermore, one must avoid underestimation of the early writings. Lenin showed that these works contain a classical formulation of some Marxist propositions, so that only if one eschews the one-sided approach can one make a correct assessment of their early works.
It is a task of Marxist studies of the early works of Marx and Engels to disprove the anti-Marxist interpretation of the historical shaping of the Marxist philosophy and give a positive solution to the problems they pose. This applies, first of all, to the problem of alienation. There is a need to show the specific content with which Marx and Engels invested this conception and to arialyse its development and their advance from it to the basic conceptions of historical materialism and scientific communism.
Inasmuch as Marx and Engels started their advance to the scientific philosophical and communist world outlook from idealistic and revolutionary-democratic positions, there is also a need to study the shaping of these initial theoretical and political views, and not, as some do, simply to regard them as something that is there ready-made. The shaping of Marxism is uninterrupted struggle by Marx and Engels against the liberal-bourgeois and then against the pettybourgeois ideology and constant dissociation from temporary fellow-travellers.
27 ~ [28] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ PART ONE __ALPHA_LVL1__ FROM IDEALISM ANDMarxism has its historical roots in the epoch in which the capitalist mode of production was established and bourgeoisdemocratic transformations in the West European countries completed. In the 1830s and 1840s, the industrial revolution, whose beginnings in Britain date from the late 18th century, spread to France, Germany and other West European countries; it inevitably resulted in the emergence of largescale industry and formation of the industrial proletariat. The main socio-economic premises for the origination of Marxism were the early crises of overproduction, the rise of the strike movement, the antagonism between labour and capital, and the earliest political action by the working class.
I do not see any need here to go into the historical conditions in which Marxism originated, because the abovementioned studies by Mehring, Mayer, Cornu, Serebryakov and others give such an ample view of the historical situation and the intellectual atmosphere of that period that I feel free to confine myself to studying the formation of dialectical and historical materialism.
__FIX__ Underlining: lines 6 through 10Marx and Engels developed their doctrine by critically digesting the outstanding achievements of earlier social thinkers and theoretically summing up the historical experience of capitalist development. They took a definite jpcial approacb__to this tremendous research^ etfgECsgjtst-T the
(which was, of course, of crucial importance). Marxism
emerged in an epoch, according to Lenin, "when the
revolutionary character of bourgeois democrats was already
31
__FIX__ Underlining: lines 3 through 8
passing away (in Europe), while the revolutionary character
of the socialist proletariat had not yet matured" (5, 18; 26).
Marx and Engels were thr firc«t to---rjealise_jJiat bourgeois
deniQcracy, in the countries with developed rapitalism-at-any
already~spent itself^.s_a^e^oJutiQnaEy_f orcg^ and
fighter _for___boltL_ socialism arKLdemoeracy. In its earliest
revolutionary action, they discerned a trend leading to the
development of the struggle for democracy into a struggle
for socialism. The founders of Marxism, Lenin says, "both
became socialists after being democrats, and the democratic
feeling of hatred for political despotism was exceedingly
strong in them" (5, 2; 26).
Marx and Engels wrote their first journalistic works as revolutionary democrats. At the time, they advocated idealism, and not, of course, idealism in general, but a definite theory, namely, Hegel's dialectical idealism, as interpreted in the spirit of its left-wing continuators, the Young Hegelians.^^*^^
__FIX__ Underlining: Lines 1 through 3 The split of the Hege]^" ^honl into a left and a jjght
wing became an obvious fact with the publicjmojMaH'cfSSof
StraussV-£)as Labon yujrafmth Hegel as his reference point,
Strauss refuted botfT" the orthodox and the rationalistic
interpretation of the Gospel Stories, according to which the
supernatural events they describe were to be seen as a
subjective view of what were far from supernatural events.
^^*^^ One cannot agree with Emile Bottigelli, who assumes that Marx and Engels did not develop their ideas from the Young Hegelians but from Hegel himself (54; 9, 10). Bottigelli suggests that the emergence of the Young Hegelian movement coincided with the start of the theoretical activity of Marx and Engels, but this applies only to the Bauer group. David Strauss expressed his views as early as 1835, while the prominent left-wing Hegelian Eduard Cans was Marx's favourite professor at the Berlin University. Cornu quotes the following extract from Gans's 1836 book: "Just as the antithesis was once between master and slave, and later between patrician and plebeian, and then seignior and vassal, so now the antithesis is between idler and working man.... Is it not, after all, slavery for man to be exploited as an animal, even if he is left the alternative of starving to death" (62; 103). I believe Louis Althusser is right to emphasise the following: "The Hegel with whom Marx argues ever since his doctoral dissertation is not the Hegel taken from the library shelf, the Hegel whom we now ponder in our studies. It is the Hegel of the New Hegelian movement, who had already become an insistent need for the German intelligentsia of the 1840s, the Hegel by means of whom it seeks to comprehend its own history and its hopes. It is a Hegel already placed in contradiction with himself, appealing against himself, at cross-purposes with himself" (45; 62).
32 __FIX__ Underlining: lines 2 and 3 Without casting doubt on the existence of Jesus Christ as a historical figure,_ StraHasrafgiied that the'r^ispeL&tories about him were a rnyth^spTii^ nut within the earjy_ Christian communities. This myth, he wrote, was "not a conscious 1>r deliberate invention of some individual, but a product of the common consciousness of a whole people or religious society.... In the myth ... the idea arises only as the story unfolds or, more precisely, he, the teller, became conscious of the idea only in the form of the story he told, for in its pure form he was still unable to comprehend it" (112; 77-78). __FIX__ Underlining: lines 1 and 3Srnum's wnrfr firinwfd th'nt t*v» ^f>vfilopment of Hegel's ideas-Jed^ up to conclusions which were incompatible with his system. Strauss`ltafted' from Hegel`s'' convJction tEat Christianity contains the absolute truth, even if in inadequate form. Hegel saw the Gospel stories not as a description of actual events, but as allegories and myths expressing a ``substantial'' phase in the development of the "absolute spirit" which had yet to attain self-consciousness. But a closer look shows Hegel's "absolute spirit" to be mankind taken in the full scope of its historical development. For Hegel philosophy, presented as the truth of religion, is adequate self-consciousness of the "absolute spirit''.
The right-wing Hegelians, taking Hegel's idea of the unity of philosophy and religion as their starting point, argued in the struggle against Strauss's mythological concept that philosophy was not entitled to pass judgement on religion, because it was based on the latter. However, Strauss was attacked not only by Hegel's conservative supporters, but also by Bruno Bauer, who had switched to the left Hegelian position. He criticised both Strauss's conclusions and the philosophical conception on which his analysis of the Gospel stories was based, namely, that the development of religion and the whole of mankind was a ``substantial'' unconscious process. But the substance, according to Hegel, was developing reality, which ultimately became the subject, the selfconsciousness.
Like Strauss, Bauer relied on Hegel, asserting that world history (and this meant the history of Christianity as well) was the product of the developing self-consciousness, mankind's conscious creative power which obtained its necessary expression in the activity of its outstanding spokesmen. Hence, the Gospel stories were not legend passed on in __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 2 - 185 33 tradition, but inventions by means of which selfconsciousness expressed and asserted itself at a definite stage in its advance.
__FIX__ Underlining: First 10 linesBauer went muchjiatthejl than Strauss in his critique of the Gospels, and denied the existence of Christ as a historical figure. His ^philosophy of selt-consciousness''^^wriicrr he contrasted with Strauss's "philosophy of substance", turned^ thg__role of the subjective, conscious aspe^t_^f_the_historical process into an absplute,JemrjHSIs£g tfiai-sell-ee»sciaus»e8s, np\ipr "safisfjert with whaLhas been achieved, _cJ£g±rctyed-the diverse----religious, philosophical an^jjoiiticalsstfornisaf its self-expression and self-assertionTConsequently, the most important- content of the "activity of self-consciousness was formed through "the workings of erosion", that is, a critique of all existing things, without which philosophy was unable to attain the universality of self-consciousness. According to Bauer, criticism arose as the opposite of theological apologetics, countering the latter with an analysis of the Holy Scriptures, in which it sought to discover the traces of self -consciousness. In its subsequent development, criticism became the universal activity of mankind and, once a special scientific task, was transformed into a world principle.
Bauer believed that Strauss had to be credited with relieving criticism "from the danger and torment of immediate contact with the earlier orthodox system", and assumed that, having overcome Strauss's ``substantialism'', criticism now "should turn against itself and, for that reason, the mystical substantiality in which it hitherto existed is dissolved in that to which the development of substance itself strives: to the universality and definiteness of the idea and to its actual existence---the infinite self-consciousness" (47; VIII).
__FIX__ Underlining: First 4 linesurffe on the part of the more radical section of the_C»e_niian bourgeoisie to take "the historical initiative in---a period---ki whkti__the revolutionary situation was coming to a head. Young l3egeiianism, tngels said, "brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abstruse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, 34 and thus it was that the 'Young Hegelian' writers enjoyed a liberty of the press unknown in every other branch of literature" (2, 1; 309-10).
__FIX__ Underlining: First 4 lines The Youilg IlLgdi
was-increasingly developing into
whuQjjanctiiied
``philosophy ot actionT they argued the need for active
effort to advance social progress. While Hegel's
announcement that the constitutional monarchy was the supreme form
of statehood heralded the oncoming political domination of
the bourgeoisie, the Young Hegelians propounded
republican ideas, in however speculative a form, and insisted on the
need to apply the principle of development not only to
mankind's past history but also to its present and future.
In 1886, summing up the history of the Young Hegelian movement, Fngpki i riirnrl i il thnt in the lal£_L"*lb_?rif* earty 1 840s tlrosp involved in it had h^^jT_j^^^^~n~7r7mT^ eolo and reliion tocriticism of the social and state system in Germany. The~Lett"wing, the so-called Young Hegelians, in tKeir tigTTt with the pietist orthodox and the feudal reactionaries, abandoned bit by bit that philosophical-genteel reserve in regard to the burning questions of the day which up to that time had secured state toleration and even protection for their teachings. And when, in 1840, orthodox pietism and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne with Frederick William IV, open partisanship became unavoidable. The fight was still carried on with philosophical weapons, but no longer for abstract philosophical aims. It turned directly on the destruction of traditional religion and of the existing state" (2, 3; 343).
__FIX__ Underlining: Last 8 linesHowever, Young Hegelian radicalism proved to be incapable of true revolutionary action against aggressive reaction. In 1842 and 1843, the governments of Prussia and the other German states stepped up their persecution of liberal political figures, writers and publishers. ,Some newspapers and journals were banned. Bauer and his followers saw the absejiceof any popular dra^omanT measures as system^JThe absolutisation of self^consciousness, which ``Had'' once
~~ under theTeaHership of
35 __FIX__ Underlining: First line. now unequivocal condemnation-joL^ny, popular, mnvemept an3 uncritical eulogy of the "critical critics", who were proclaimed to be the makers of history. __FIX__ Underlining: Last 6 linesI intend to consider this final stage of the Young Hegelian movement and its collapse in Part Two, and merely emphasise at this point that ia__l&44 and t64&~Marx_^nd resoju^f-ly broke with _ thg_Yniing Hpgplians not they had beca ^ rhe_yniing tw, bourg^ok Hpmngrats, conservative fore.
Because some researchers do not understand the Young Hegelians' inherent failure to act on their ideas, and do not see that this contradiction was bourgeois-rooted, they have given a one-sided evaluation of this trend which does not square with the facts. Some, while correctly emphasising that at certain historical periods words were equivalent to deeds, simply characterise Young Hegelianism as a revolutionary bourgeois ideology. By contrast, others stress the discrepancy between Young Hegelian theory and its political practices, arguing that the trend was hostile to revolutionary struggle. These mutually exclusive evaluations are one-sided because they do not take adequate account of the changing social content of the movement.
In a study to which I have already referred, Cornu remarks on the existence within the Left Hegelian movement of essentially distinct trends, despite their common philosophical platform. Gans, who may be regarded as a founder of the Left Hegelian movement, applied Hegel's principles to jurisprudence and connected them with the political conceptions of bourgeois radicalism, on the one hand, and with Saint-Simonism, on the other. Hess, looking not only to Hegel, but also to Feuerbach, sought to give a philosophical interpretation and to develop the ideas of Utopian socialism and communism.^^*^^
Ruge, who was mainly engaged in publishing, brought political issues to the fore in his journalistic writings, believing that the main task of the current political struggle was for the opposition to win legal status and to become an _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1851, Engels said that the "eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt at least the outward show of Socialism, was caused by a great change that had come over the working class of Germany" (2, 1; 215).
36 organic element of the state structure. Cornu quotes Ruge as saying: "We defended free development, the true principle of philosophy, while the old school stood up for reaction in politics and religion. In the religious sphere, Strauss began a liberation with his Das Leben Jesu, as I did in the political sphere with my critique of Hegel's philpsophy of law" (62; 153). This is somewhat of an exaggeration, because even before Ruge Gans had begun to criticise Hegel's philosophy of law, and this was also done after him by other left-wing Hegelians. Ruge became well known back in the 1820s as a participant in the bourgeois-democratic movement, which the reactionaries called a "movement of demagogues". He was convicted in a ``demagogues'' trial and spent four years in prison. From 1838, Ruge published the Hallische Jahrbucher fur deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, a journal which became the organ of the Young Hegelian movement. Under another name---Deutsche Jahrbiicher fur Wissenschaft und Kunst---it was published in Leipzig from 1840 until it was banned in January 1843.It was Mehring who gave a correct assessment of Ruge's activity. He says that Ruge "had some qualities of a good journalist---philosophical training, industry, vigour, combativeness, and was amply the crude wedge that fitted the crude trough of reaction. Still, behind the dolts, oafs and ass heads that literally poured from his lips, there was more a blustering and disputatious philistine than a true revolutionary" (94, 1; 93, 94). It was, of course, Bruno Bauer who was the central figure of the Young Hegelian movement.
Feuerbach's anthropological materialism was the most important philosophical outcropping of the left Hegelian movement. As early as 1839 he had moved to materialism, and in 1841 published his famous Das Wesen des Christenthums (The Essence of Christianity), which brought out the duality of the Young Hegelian criticism of religion, because it was idealist.
From the beginning of their participation in the Young Hegelian movement, Marx and Engels acted as revolutionary democrats and this was expressed in their approach to the basic philosophical problems.
In contrast to the liberals (and to some extent also to the radicals), revolutionary democrats, ideologists of the broad working masses, did not shun revolutionary methods in fulfilling bourgeois-democratic tasks, and while they 37 frequently shared a host of illusions (Concerning the effects of bourgeois transformations, they resolutely rejected the way of reform or compromise with the reactionary feudal forces, and sought to carry the bourgeois revolution to an end. The most outstanding spokesman for the revolutionary-democratic ideology in Germany on the scene just before Marx and Engels was undoubtedly Georg Buchner, who wrote: " Revolution is the only way of bringing about a republic" (57; 67).
Young Hegelian idealism, on the one hand, and revolutionary democracy, on the other, should be regarded not only as the outcome of earlier development in philosophical and socio-political thinking in Germany, but also as a definite phase in the ideological development of Marx and Engels. That is why my immediate task must be to study how these theoretical and political beginnings took shape.
Some students recognise the existence of several stages in Marx's advance from Hegel's philosophy to Young Hegelianism. Konrad Bekker believes that at first Marx "followed the romantic philosophy" (48; 130). Cornu feels that Marx went "from enlightenment to romanticism and then on to Hegelianism" (62; 104).
I cannot agree with this, although one does feel the sway of romanticism in the young Marx's poems.
In his well-known letter to his father in 1837, he tells of Kant's and Fichte's influence on him before he adopted Hegel's philosophy. Still, considering that even in 1837, that is, at the age of 19, Marx adopted Hegel's idealism, the fractioning of the two preceding student years does not seem to be justified. Neither Marx's school essays, nor his other writings in the 1835-1837 period, which are, unfortunately, very scarce, suggest that either enlightenment or idealistic romanticism was Marx's world outlook in that period. Here, it would be more correct to consider the shaping of his world outlook in general, meaning, on the^^*^^ one hand, the overcoming of the views which were being imposed on him by the whole of his environment (family, school, etc.) * and, on the _-_-_
^^*^^ I do not mean reactionary but the liberal bourgeois-democratic views which have to be broken with for the adoption of communism. The spirit of bourgeois enlightenment prevailed in Marx's family. Like other Prussian liberals, Heinrich Marx held progressive bourgeois-democratic views together with a faith in the historical mission of the Prussian monarchy. In his article, "Karl Marx", Lenin says: "The family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary" (5, 21; 46).
38 other, the adoption of dialectical idealism as virtually the first philosophical conception which he adopted on his own at the end of his first year at the Berlin University.I believe that this methodological approach is also the only correct one for studying the formation of Engels's philosophical views.
Althusser takes a special view of the influence exerted by Kant and Fichte on the shaping of Marx's ideas, assuming that from 1840 to 1842 they were dominated by a "liberal-rationalistic humanism closer to Kant and Fichte than to Hegel" (45; 230). In my view, which I intend to substantiate below, Marx had parted with the ideas of Kant and Fichte even before the start of this period. In the letter to his father, to which I shall return later, he not only disapproves of the subjectivism of Kant and Fichte, but explicitly declares his espousal of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx's doctoral dissertation (1839-1841) was written in the light of Young Hegelianism, his early articles in the Rheinische Zeitung (1842) show that he connected Hegel's philosophy with important political issues and that here he already began to turn to Feuerbach. However, Althusser insists that from 1840 to 1842 Marx was mostly under the influence of Kant and Fichte. I feel that he says so because he tends to reduce the whole content of Marx's writings in that period to the sole antithesis of the abstract humanistic ideal and the social reality of the day, which is known to have been characteristic of Kant and Fichte. But Althusser seems to ignore the fact that the "Fichtean self-consciousness" (1, 2; 254), as Marx subsequently said, was one of the elements of Hegel's philosophy. The Young Hegelian interpretation of Hegel's philosophy (especially in the form with which it was invested by Bruno Bauer) included an antithesis of the Fichtean element of Hegel's system and its Spinozaist element. That is why the abandonment of the ideas of Kant and Fichte did not rule out an emphasis on "Fichtean self-consciousness", in the form in which it was adopted and transformed by Hegel and his school. The ideas of Kant and Fichte had a definite role to play in Marx's intellectual development before the beginning of the process which led to the shaping of the philosophy of Marxism, but this should not be dated from the early literary documents of Marx's intellectual development. I want to emphasise the qualitative distinction between the starting point in the formation of the 39 Marxist philosophy (Hegel's philosophy in its left-Hegelian interpretation and revolutionary democracy) and the preceding short period of Marx's intellectual biography which I shall now proceed to examine.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 2 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX'S SCHOOL ESSAYS.The first few documents which give an idea of the young Marx's intellectual make-up date from 1835. They help to bring out the ideas which he gave up in the course of his subsequent spiritual development.
It may appear that any circumstantial analysis of Marx's school essays has no bearing on the analysis of the making of the Marxist philosophy, but that is far from being so, because they contain ideas which he had to overcome before adopting the revolutionary-democratic stand or making any further advances in formulating the scientific theory of Marxism.
His school essay on religion, entitled "The Union of Believers with Christ according to John", says that, as the whole of history shows, only in communion with Christ does man rise above his limitations to a genuinely virtuous life. Marx regards the Christian creed as an imperative for morality, which cannot rest on the individual's sensual requirements or urges, as these lead him astray from virtue. ",..The striving for knowledge is supplanted by a base striving for worldly goods, the longing for truth is extinguished by the sweetly flattering power of lies; and so there stands man, the only being in nature which does not fulfil its purpose, the only member of the totality of creation which is not worthy of the God who created him" (1, I; 637). But man has a natural inclination for good, for the truth, and a yearning for the Supreme Being of which "the greatest sage of antiquity, the divine Plato", speaks (1, 1; 636). Through the "union with Christ", these noble needs vanquish sinful acts and thought. "...Union with Christ consists in the most intimate, most vital communion with Him, in having Him, before our eyes and in our hearts, and being imbued with the highest love for Him, at the same 40 time we turn our hearts to our brothers whom He has closely bound to us, and for whom also He sacrificed Himself" (1, I; 638).
Thanks to the "union with Christ", he goes on, moral behaviour becomes a free and joyous activity, while the stoic doctrine makes virtue appear as a "sombre monster" which is repellent to man. The Christian creed destroys the harsh notion of duty existing in the pagan religion, by uniting duty with love. "Therefore, union with Christ bestows a joy which the Epicurean strives vainly to derive from his frivolous philosophy" (7, 1; 639). Let us note this evaluation of Epicureanism, because within a few years, studying it more closely, Marx would take a totally different view of it.
So, we find in his school essay a religious and moral concept which should apparently not be identified with his own views. But he must have given his own high appreciation of the ``divine'' Plato's idealism and rejected the materialism and atheism of Epicurus.
Some have assumed that this essay on religion (like the Latin essay, which I shall deal with below) does not at all express the schoolboy's own views. Ye. Kandel, for instance, says: "We should be extremely credulous if we took a school essay on religion written on an official subject for the purpose of obtaining a school-leaving certificate to be a literary memorial showing what the young Marx actually thought" (13; 15). Of course, in that essay Marx set forth views which his teachers had put in the pupils' minds, but there is no reason to think that the schoolboy Marx had no view of his own of these problems. That is why this essay should not be ignored. It would be more correct, I think, to try and establish the peculiarities which in a sense characterise the author of the essay. Thus, he hardly deals with the dogmatic aspect of the Christian teaching about the union of believers with Christ.^^*^^ Christianity is presented as a definite conception of morality, and this, in effect, shows that religious questions were of as little concern to the schoolboy as they were to the other members of his family. Georg _-_-_
^^*^^ This explains the teacher's comment on the essay: "It is rich in ideas, a brilliant and forceful exposition deserving of praise, although the substance of the union which is being considered has not been indicated, the cause of it has been dealt with from only one angle, and the necessity of it, less than fully" (42; 18).
41 Mende is quite right that the essay shows the start of Marx's departure from religion, which ended by the time he wrote the well-known letter to his father (96; 26-27).In his Latin essay, "Does the Reign of Augustus Deserve To Be Counted Among the Happier Periods of the Roman Empire?", he says that it was a most remarkable period of Ancient Roman history, despite the fact that "all freedom, even all appearance of freedom had disappeared, institutions and laws were altered by order of the sovereign, and all powers, previously held by the people's tribunes, censors and consuls were now in the hands of one man". It is true that Augustus, who epitomised all the parties and offices, was prudent and gentle, so that "the Romans believed they themselves ruled and that emperor was only another name for the powers which the tribunes and consuls previously possessed, and they did not see that they had been deprived of their freedom" (1, 1; 640-1).
None of this as yet reveals any democratic hatred for tyranny and absolutism. He says: "The state, as Augustus instituted it, seems to us the most suitable for his time, for when people have grown soft and the simplicity of morals has disappeared, but the state has grown greater, a ruler is more capable than a free republic of giving freedom to the people" (1,1; 642). He does say that the state has a duty to secure freedom for the people, but says nothing about it being impossible to secure freedom for the people through undemocratic ways. It appears that in 1835 Marx was still far from able to think on these lines.
His third school essay "Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession", is the most interesting one because it shows the noble spirit of the future great leader of the working class. The subject has a most immediate bearing on the young man himself, who is about to graduate and so has to consider the meaning of life, a man's vocation and the choice of a profession.
Man differs from the animal, in particular, in that he is free to choose his own destiny. While the animal has to move within a confined sphere of activity preordained by external circumstances, man makes himself and chooses his own vocation. The possibility and necessity of making a choice (for man must choose) is his great privilege over the other creatures. But this choice is also fraught with danger: it may prove to be an act which makes man unhappy or even 42 destroys him. Consequently, he must be fully aware of his responsibility to himself and to mankind. One must discard all extraneous considerations, petty ambitions and vanities, and choose one's profession in calm and unhurried concentration. "We must therefore seriously examine whether we have really been inspired in our choice of a profession, whether an inner voice approves it, or whether this inspiration is a delusion, and what we took to be a call from the Deity was self-deception" (1, 1; 3-4).
The choice of a profession implies not only a sober evaluation of one's own capabilities, but also an unconditional readiness to dedicate oneself to the ideals of humanity. The urge to perfect oneself, without which there can be no true vocation, and to work for the well-being of mankind do not contradict each other: man can approach perfection only by working for the well-being of his contemporaries. If a man works only for himself and is guided by self-interest, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man. Marx concludes his essay with these words: "If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people" (1,1; 8-9).
These lofty and courageous works of the 17-year old youth adumbrate the characteristic features of Marx's genius, and reveal---even if in an indefinite and abstract humanistic form---an urge to dedicate himself to struggle for the people's happiness, which he regards as man's duty and the only possible source of satisfaction for himself.
One does not have to argue that his ``Reflections'' are informed by an idealistic notion of society, the individual and choice of profession. Mende is right when he says that the composition reveals a deistic, bourgeois enlightenment frame of mind (96; 17), which is expressed, for instance, in the assertion that "to man, too, the Deity gave a general aim, that of ennobling mankind and himself, but he left it to man to seek the means by which this aim can be achieved" (1,1, 3). But the following remarkably sober and realistic idea is much more important: "But we cannot always attain the 43 position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them" (1, 1; 4). Quoting these works, Mende remarks: "The conception which Marx tirelessly analysed till the day he died had been found: 'our relations in society'." (96; 18). This is in no way borne out either by the extract quoted above or by the whole content of the composition itself. A different assumption would be more pertinent, namely, an influence of the teachings of the French Enlighteners about man's dependence on the social environment. Besides, the youth must have known that the barriers that then existed in Germany between the estates inevitably limited the choice of profession. Consequently, alongside the influence of the French Enlightenment, we find an independent and critical assessment of German reality, but all this is still a far cry from historical materialism.
It would grossly distort the actual content of the `` Reflections'' if one were to link its abstract humanistic ideas and Marx's subsequent revolutionary-democratic ideas, to say nothing of his communist views. The loftiest but politically vague frame of mind may well go hand in hand with mediaeval romantic illusions, which is why Marx's subsequent philosophical conclusions should not be seen as elaborating---but as transcending---the ideas expressed in his school essay.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 3 __ALPHA_LVL3__ KARL'S LETTER TO HIS FATHER.The most important document of this period in Marx's intellectual development is the letter to his father of November 10, 1837. Unfortunately, no other letters of his relating to the period have come down to us. That is why this unique document should be analysed as thoroughly as possible. In the opening lines of his letter, he says that some moments in a man's life are like turning points. He deals with one of these and so indicates a new line of departure. He sums up a year of studies at the Berlin University in a spirit of utmost self-criticism. Franz Mehring wrote: "This 44 remarkable document shows us the whole man in the youth giving every bit of his spiritual and physical strength to the fight for the truth. He reveals an insatiable thirst for knowledge, inexhaustible energy, relentless self-criticism and that embattled spirit that still only deafened the heart where it seemed to have erred" (95; 16).
Marx begins by most sharply censoring his own poetical essays, manifesting a sobriety in assessing his own writing which is so rare among fledgeling poets: his verse is purely idealistic, with a romantic contrast of the subjective ideal and the reality. This kind of ``idealism'' is meaningless just because it is out of touch with life. "Everything real became hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines. All the poems ... "are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts" (7, 1; 11). This is a description not only of his verse, but also, in a sense, of his philosophical views. He is coming to realise that it is not right to make an abstract contrast between what ought to be and what is, a contrast which was the distinctive feature of the idealism of Kant and Fichte.
The whole letter shows that his criticism of the concept of the subjective "what ought to be" is directly connected with his study of the philosophy of Hegel, whose whole tenor is undoubtedly directed against the Kantian-Fichtean moralising critique of reality and the notions of "what ought to be". He tells his father of his law studies during that year at the University and emphasises that he was unable to confine himself to a study of Heineccius, Thibaut and other prominent German academic lawyers. In his efforts to gain theoretical understanding of the basic legal conceptions, Marx tried to elaborate a "philosophy of law", prefaced with a "metaphysics of law" which set forth the "basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law" (1, 1; 12). Here again, the obstacle was "the same opposition between what is and what ought to be, which is characteristic of idealism" (1, 1; 12). The difficulties in gaining a philosophical comprehension of the problems of law, his steadfast efforts, without consideration of time and health, and constant overstrain, all this, together, made him ill and he had to go for a rest in 45 Stralow, a Berlin suburb. There he read Hegel and some works by his followers, and got to know the members of the Doctors' Club set up by the Young Hegelians of Berlin. "In controversy here, many conflicting views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy [meaning the philosophy of Hegel and his school, the Young Hegelians---T. O.] from which I had thought to escape" (1, I; 19).
Marx had met Hegel before his trip to Stralow, but, as he says in his letter, he had not then been drawn to Hegel's philosophy but had, in fact, been repelled by it: its "grotesque craggy melody... did not appeal to me" (1, Ij 18). Hegel regarded law, the state and all the other social relations as forms of the self-consciousness of a super-human "absolute spirit". It is not surprising, therefore, that Marx turned his back on a philosophy which called for respect for reality as being an embodiment of the absolute. He did not like the conservative side of Hegel's philosophy.
The "what is"---"what ought to be" problem confronted Marx in'his study of the statutes, laws and legal norms. What had they to do with men's real life? Because he had initially assumed an insuperable contradiction between what ought to be and what is, he rejected not only Hegel's idealistic proposition concerning the immanent reality of 'reason, but also the realistic trends in his philosophy. But when Marx realised that the dualism of the "What ought to be" and "What is" did not help to understand the substance of law, he turned to Hegel's philosophy. "And again it became clear to me that there could be no headway without philosophy" (1, 1; 17). He meant Hegel's philosophy, and that is the philosophy about which he bitterly says in his letter that he had had "to make an idol of a view" that he hated (1, 1; 19). His approach to Hegel was a painful process: he had to abandon the idea that social reality could be bent to what was morally imperative.
Marx was already fully aware that Hegel's philosophy could not be simply discarded, and that it helped, to a much greater extent than all the earlier teachings, to understand law as being not something that was extraneous and opposed to empirical reality, but as its product. Marx wrote eloquently about this ``return'' to Hegel. "Once more I wanted to dive into the sea but with the definite intention of establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, 46 concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body. My aim was no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day" (1, 1; 18).
His study of Hegel at once revealed the flimsiness of Kant's and Fichte's view of the relation between self-- consciousness and empirical reality, a view which, on the one hand, tended to impoverish reality, and on the other, to devastate self-consciousness. Rejecting legal and ethical subjectivism, Marx wrote: "From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre" (1, 1; 18). It was quite obvious that "seeking the idea in reality itself" here meant taking the standpoint of Hegel's objective idealism. That was not repudiating idealism generally, but merely rejecting a definite idealistic conception.
During his stay in Stralow, his studies led him to a high appreciation of Hegel's dialectical method, as an instrument for analysing the immanent movement of reality itself. It is true that the letter to his father did not contain any elaborate exposition of dialectics, but what it does say on the matter is highly remarkable. Marx objects to oversimplifying any theoretical demonstration, when "the author argues hither and thither, going round and round the subject dealt with, without the latter taking shape as something living and developing in a many-sided way" (1, 1; 12). In philosophy, Marx says, there is a need to study the movement, the development of the object, so that the conclusion reached by t theory is a reflection of the real process. "The object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary divisions must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself and find its unity in itself" (1, 1; 12). Here we find Marx emphasising one of the most important aspects of dialectics.
Finally, Karl's letter to his father contains an embryonic element of divergence from the Young Hegelian "philosophy of self-consciousness". Bauer and his adherents were inclined to revive the Fichtean view of what ought to be as endlessly rising over and above empirical reality. Whereas, according to Hegel, consciousness is in unity with the spiritual being (which exists independently of human 47 consciousness), according to Bauer, self-consciousness alone is rational, besides being almighty and independent of being, which is irrational in virtue of its distinction from reason and so must be recast by the latter.
Marx's letter testifies to his urge to gain a dialectical understanding of the relation between "what ought to be" and "what is", that is, to discover both their contradiction and unity. He does not enlarge on this in his letter, and only in his doctoral dissertation---over three years later---is the idea of the dialectically contradi- tory unity of selfconsciousness and being systematically, even if idealistically, substantiated.
I have gone at length into Marx's letter to his father because it is exceptionally important in showing his ideological development. Still, it does not give any grounds for the conclusions which some researchers alien to Marxism tend to draw. Thus, Landshut and Mayer assert that the letter "already contained the whole of Marx's conception in embryo". (85, XV), This suggests that Marx's doctrine can be logically deduced from the propositions (and they are idealistic propositions) contained in the youth's letter. Landshut and Mayer quite obviously seek to reduce Marx's doctrine to general humanistic statements, ignoring its concrete philosophical, economic and socialist content. This approach has been carried to a logical conclusion by Breuer, who claims that everything that led Marx to communism was already "to be found from before in the make-up of his personality" (55; 64). Actually, this letter belongs to the ``pre-history'' of the Marxist doctrine, that is, it marks no more than the start of his advance to the philosophy of Hegel and its revolutionary interpretation.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 4 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX'S DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONAlthough Marx had, at his father's insistence, to study law, his main interest at the University was in philosophy. He did attend the lectures of Savigny, the most prominent representative of the so-called historical school of law, and also the lectures of Eduard Cans, who took the left Hegelian view of 48 law, but he was not interested in any special aspects of juridical science. When his father died in May 1838, Marx finally gave up the idea of specialising in law, and devoted himself entirely to philosophy, a congenial atmosphere for which pursuit was provided by his constant contacts with members of the Doctors' Club, and especially by his friendship with Bruno Bauer.
From 1839 on, Marx got down, with his usual thoroughness, to studying the history of the philosophy of antiquity, above all Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism, that is, the philosophical schools of the epoch in which ancient society was disintegrating, schools which in a sense paved the way for the emergence of Christianity. The Young Hegelians, mainly engaged in historical criticism of Christian sources, naturally took a lively interest in these philosophical schools. Karl Koppen, a friend of Marx's at the Doctors' Club, dedicated to Marx a book he published in 1840 under the title Friedrich der Grofie und Seine Widersacher (Frederick the Great and His Adversaries), which portrays Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism as trends constituting the inner substance of the ancient social organism. Koppen held that these trends had declined with the disintegration of the ancient social system (83; 172).
The Young Hegelians believed Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism to be the initial historical forms of the "philosophy of self-consciousness", whose highest stage of development they saw in the teachings of Fichte, Hegel and their own philosophical theory. Epicureanism, and also Stoicism and Scepticism were indeed to some extent peculiar forms of enlightenment in antiquity. Despite the critical attitude to enlightenment which they had inherited from Hegel, the Young Hegelians carried on enlightenment in pre-revolutionary Germany. This explains why Koppen claimed that enlightenment "was the Prometheus who brought the divine light down to earth in order to enlighten the blind, the people, the laity, and to release them from their superstitions and delusions" (83; 157).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ In his monograph on Marx, Mehring says that the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Sceptics "opened up distant horizons for the human spirit, broke down the national framework of Hellenism, and destroyed the social edges of slavery, which still fettered both Aristotle and Plato. They impregnated primitive Christianity, the religion of the suffering and the __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 50. 49
The Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics expressed ideas that were congenial to the Young Hegelians. The chief of these was the individual's free self-consciousness, an abstract idea which originated during the disintegration of the ancient polls, and which became for the Young Hegelians an expression of the demands of the bourgeois consciousness of law. Consequently, Marx's interest in these philosophical trends was connected with the Young Hegelians' general ideological orientation.
Initially, Marx intended to analyse all three philosophical teachings, but then decided to confine himself to a narrow sphere, which constituted the subject-matter of his doctoral dissertation, namely, "Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature", which he submitted to the University of Jena, and for which he received his doctoral degree in April 1841.
Marx's dissertation and the preparatory work for it---his notebooks on the history of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy---give an idea of his views of ancient philosophy and reflect the development of his political and philosophical views and attitude to the burning social issues in Germany in that period.^^*^^
His dissertation, although it is written in the light of Hegel's idealism, is an outstanding contribution to the study of ancient philosophy. It proved for the first time that the _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 49. oppressed, which recognised the authority of Plato and Aristotle, only after it had degenerated into a church of exploiters and oppressors" (95; 30). There is no doubt that the philosophy of ancient enlightenment did offer some basis for the Young Hegelian opposition to feudal despotism, particularism, absolutism and the estates system.
^^*^^ This was noted by R. Sannwald, who said that Marx "makes use of his knowledge of the processes in antiquity to analyse the contemporary epoch" (107; 63). However, it would be wrong to assume that in his dissertation Marx dealt with the meaningful issues in German political life and the philosophical struggle only to the extent to which it went beyond the framework of his thesis. The point is that Marx took an interest in the philosophy of Epicurus largely because he saw it as a naive approach to the social problems which the outstanding minds of the new period were seeking to solve. Marx, says M. Lifshits, "regards the natural-philosophical doctrine of the atom as a reflection of the principle of the private individual and independent political citizen, a principle solemnly proclaimed by the French Revolution. As a follower of Hegel's, Marx sought to derive from the concept of ``atom'', of ``Being-for-Self'', the contradiction between bourgeoisdemocratic ideas and reality, which came to light during the revolution and immediately after it (23; 173).
50 teaching of Epicurus on nature is a creative development and not an epigonic reproduction of the atomistics of Democritus, as Leibnitz and other outstanding scientists believed.Marx believed that the idea of the atom's random declination was the most important aspect of the atomistics of Epicurus: "In it is expressed the atom's negation of all motion and relation by which it is determined as a particular mode of being by another being" (1, 1; 51). In other words, this is a concretisation of the ancient conception of the atom through the assumption of an inherent elementary and spontaneous motion which is called its law. The atom's fall in a straight line, which is inherent in all bodies, cannot be an expression of the specific nature of this elementary particle. Only its departure from this motion which is common to all bodies can express the "soul of the atom", "the concept of abstract individuality", as Marx put it (1, 1; 50).^^*^^
Characterising the atom as an "abstract in-itself-being", he applies to atomistics the categories of Hegel's "Science of Logic", and links the concept of the atom with Hegel's doctrine of being, i. e. of the immediate, and in this context defines ancient atomistics as conceptual philosophy, despite the fact that its basic concepts---the atom and the void---refer to sensual non-perceptibility. There is the peculiar contradiction of Epicureanism, which, Marx says, stems from the abstract nature of the initial principle. This is highly meaningful. The atomistic principle was advanced by the thinkers of antiquity to explain the sensually perceptible diversity of objective reality, and not to negate the latter. But the abstract view of atoms (absolutely indivisible, only outwardly differing from each other, located in an absolute void, etc.), an inevitable view for that period, made it impossible to produce a concrete interpretation of the diverse and sensually perceived reality, for whose explanation the hypothesis was produced in the first place. Hence the leaning of Democritus towards scepticism, of which Marx writes. Epicurus knew no such vacillations because he _-_-_
^^*^^ Because Marx still takes the idealistic approach, he puts an idealistic interpretation on Epicurean physics, regarding the motion of the atom along the straight line as an expression of its materiality, and its declination, as the ideal in-itself-being of the atom.
51 regarded atomistics not so much as a physical hypothesis but as a principle which is required to substantiate human freedom.The atom's declination from the straight line and spontaneous motion, according to the doctrine of Epicurus and his follower Lucretius, are not only a property of these primitive minute particles. Declination and repulsion are a necessary expression of individuality and independence. Marx writes: "Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness, it corresponds therefore to that self-consciousness which conceives itself as immediate-being, as abstractly individual" (1, 1; 52). The Epicurean principle of declination is necessary, therefore, not only to explain how atoms combine with each other in the process of their motion, but also to substantiate the relative free will which is inherent in the individual and which is interpreted by Epicureanism as deviation from necessity. This view of freedom is abstract and nondialectical: freedom turns out to be not an activity, but ataraxy, which, in effect, means calm. Marx criticises this conception: "Abstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being" (1, 1; 62). True freedom lies in all-round contacts between man and man, and the development of human requirements, not in their abandonment. "According to Epicurus, no good for man lies outside himself; the only good which he has in relation to the world is the negative motion to be free of it" (1, 1; 446). But freedom from the world is no more than an illusion of the abstract self-consciousness, which locks in upon itself despite its own nature, which requires contacts with other individuals, because "man ceases to be a product of nature only when the other being to which he relates himself is not a different existence, but is itself an individual human being, even if it is not yet the mind" (7, 1; 41).
Marx also gives a critical analysis of Epicurus's attempt to establish the concept of freedom by revising the concepts of necessity held by Democritus and other materialists of antiquity. To overcome the fatalistic conclusions which follow from these concepts, Epicurus contrasted to the concept of necessity its objective negation, chance, which he saw as the possibility of any concurrence of circumstances, the absence of any straightforward definiteness, and the availability of choice. Epicurus, Marx writes, failed to give any physical ground for such a view of chance; in general, it is not a 52 deduction from definite physical facts but a necessary postulate to substantiate ataraxy. "Epicurus therefore proceeds with a boundless nonchalance in the explanation of separate physical phenomena" (1, 1; 44), subordinating it to the tranquillity of the subject. There is no interest in analysing the real basis of objects, and every explanation is designed to back up his earlier conclusion: nothing can upset ataraxy, the imperturbable freedom of the spirit. Thus, in his theory of meteors, Epicurus asserts that the heavenly bodies are not eternal, in itself a reasonable conclusion that is derived from a premise which has nothing to do with the content of the matter: recognition of the eternity of the heavenly bodies is incompatible with ataraxy. Indicating the connection between the theory of meteors with the doctrine of freedom, Marx notes: "In the theory of meteors therefore appears the soul of the Epicurean philosophy of nature. Nothing is eternal which destroys the ataraxy of individual selfconsciousness" (7, 1; 72).
Marx's study of the doctrine of Epicurus in relation to the Democritean philosophy of nature leads him to important theoretical conclusions which, on the one hand, testify to the profundity of his historico-philosophical approach, and on the other, fully explain why it was Epicurus that had attracted the close attention of the future founder of the scientific theory of the emancipation movement of the working class. The first of these conclusions flows from Marx's analysis of the atomistic solution for the problem of beginnings in philosophy. Marx writes: "Aristotle has already in a profound manner criticised the superficiality of the method which proceeds from an abstract principle without allowing this principle to negate itself in higher forms" (7, 1; 426). The atomistic principle is precisely such an abstract beginning. The abstract principle demands a dialectical self-negation, whereas Epicurus universalised it, applying it to human life, freedom, etc. Although in 1841 Marx was still unable to appreciate the importance of atomistics for substantiating the scientific world outlook, his understanding of the need for a dialectical negation of the abstract principle remains important. His view does not merely reproduce Aristotle's but elaborates on it. The dialectical negation of the abstract fundamental principle contains within it the seeds of the critique of idealism whose initial assumptions amount to unproved assertions. It is true that Fichte and 53 Hegel had, in effect, already realised the need for concretely developing the abstract principle from which a philosophical system stems. Hegel's "absolute idea" was not only the first but also the last concept of his "Science of Logic", and at the end of its path it appears with the rich content of its preceding development. Nevertheless, in Hegel's doctrine the starting point of the system essentially remains unchanged because the "Absolute Idea" cannot and does not actually develop; all it does is to comprehend its own infinitely diverse content.
Marx still failed to see the fundamental untenability of the basics of Hegel's idealism, but his critique of the speculative solution of the problem of beginnings in philosophy contains in embryo the materialist approach to the basic philosophical question of the relation of spirit and matter.
While bringing out the limitations of the abstract Epicurean conception of the freedom of the individual, Marx believed, however, that Epicurus had to be credited with the formulation of the problem which could and had to be solved only in the recent period. "Epicurean philosophy is important because of the naivete with which its conclusions are formulated, without the bias characteristic of the new period" (42; 86). So one should draw a distinction between the questions posed by Epicurus (and by the whole of the Ancient Greek philosophy generally) and the answers they suggested at the time. They were unscientific, but that does not minimise the importance of the problems which the Ancient Greeks first formulated. On the contrary, the naivete of Ancient Greek philosophy, which was a far cry from speculative sophistry, merely brought out the importance of the problems it formulated. "The Greeks will for ever remain our teachers by virtue of this magnificent objective naivete, which makes everything shine, as it were, naked, in the pure light of its nature, however dim that light may be" (1, 1; 500); Marx points to the naive dialectical character of Ancient Greek philosophy and, accordingly, to the historical importance of the dialectical tradition in producing a qualitatively new dialectical world outlook (which is equally remote from naivete and from idealistic speculation).
Marx's second important conclusion from his critical analysis of the teaching of Epicurus is that the subordination of physics to ethics is an untenable principle because this sets 54 the actual condition of things on its head and leads to an arbitrary and biased interpretation of natural phenomena. This conclusion contains in embryo the anti-idealistic tendency, because idealism always tends to subordinate nature to a spiritual element which is allegedly independent of it.
Those are some of the important conclusions drawn by Marx from his studies of Ancient atomistics, which were of great importance in the subsequent. development of his philosophical views.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 5 __ALPHA_LVL3__ DOCTORAL DISSERTATION.One should try to gain a correct understanding of the fact that Marx had chosen the teachings of the great materialists of Ancient Greece---Democritus and Epicurus---as the subject of his doctoral dissertation. It does not at all indicate that at the time he had already adopted the ideas of materialism. One of the reasons for his interest in these systems was considered above. Let us now look at the other: his negative attitude to speculative philosophising and his atheism.
We have no reason to assume that in the 1839-1841 period Marx was an advocate of the atomistic hypothesis. He regarded the atom as an empirical image of the individual consciousness. That is why he was very much more interested in Epicurean atomistics than in Democritean, which he saw as being no more than a physical theory.
Nowhere in his dissertation does he call Democritus and Epicurus materialists. In 1841, he had not yet realised that there were two basic and opposite trends in philosophy, the materialist and the idealist. For him the teaching of Democritus is a philosophy of ancient natural science. By contrast, he defines the teaching of Epicurus as a philosophy of self-consciousness, whose main purpose is to "establish the freedom of self-consciousness". "For Epicurus," he says, "the sound of his own voice drowns the thunder and blots out the lightning of the heavens of his conception" (1, 1; 420).
55The most important point about this assessment of Epicurus and Democritus is Marx's disagreement with Hegel. Lenin points out that Hegel took a frankly hostile attitude to the systems of Democritus and Epicurus, asserting, among other things, that the latter is "devoid of thought" (72, 18; 513). One cannot say that in writing his dissertation Marx was already aware that Hegel had been wrong about Ancient Greek atomistics. Here and there, while not sharing Hegel's extreme conclusions, he does on the whole accept his notion of the historical place of atomistics in the development of Ancient Greek philosophy. The assessment of atomistic materialism as a theory of the abstract individual selfconsciousness stems from Hegel's historico-philosophical conception. But Marx still finds Hegel's interpretation of the teaching of Democritus and especially of Epicurus to be obviously inadequate and perhaps even unsatisfactory. In his Foreword to the dissertation, dated March 1841, he says: "To be sure, Hegel has on the whole correctly defined the general aspects of the above-mentioned systems. But in the admirably great and bold plan of his history of philosophy, from which alone the history of philosophy can in general be dated, it was impossible, on the one hand, to go into detail, and on the other hand, the giant thinker was hindered by his view of what he called speculative thought par excellence from recognising in these systems their great importance for the history of Greek philosophy and for the Greek mind in general. These systems are the key to the true history of Greek philosophy (1, 1; 30-31).^^*^^ The final sentence shows the difference between Marx and Hegel, who never saw the teachings of Democritus and Epicurus as providing the key to the history of Greek philosophy. What made Marx reach a conclusion which is in no way derived from Hegel?
He sought to comprehend "spiritual nature" as necessary and concrete, and as having the same definite forms as "corporeal nature". This urge, which is the opposite of Hegel's speculative approach to the history of philosophy, evidently helped Marx, despite the idealism and the influence of Hegel's historico-philosophical conception, to gain a deeper insight into Greek atomistics.
_-_-_^^*^^ This remark fully refutes the assertion by M. Rubel, who says: "Marx has a sense of contempt for Democritus" (105; 30). This clearly ascribes to Marx the orthodox Hegelian view of the materialism of Democritus.
56Hegel held that in the reality opposed to it speculative thought seeks and finds itself, i. e., thought, reason, as the objective substance of everything that exists. Consequently, speculative thought is thought about thought. Thought is not only the subject (that which thinks) but also the object (that which is thought), so that as the object it is independent of the consciousness of the thinking individual. If thought is oriented upon the external, the sensually perceptible, material world, it has still to rise to its true subject.^^*^^ We find that Hegel's view of the speculative starts from the proposition on the identity of being and thought. He locks thought in upon itself, so minimising the role of sensual experience and the importance of practice as man's conscious influence on the external world, which is independent of thought. By contrast, Marx shows in his dissertation that philosophy naturally develops into practical activity, and so rejects the speculative thesis about philosophy being engaged in thought alone. Marx asserts that in itself reality is not something rational. Only human reason, only the self-consciousness transforms what exists into the rational, which accords with rational human requirements. Consequently, philosophy cannot stop at its cognition of reality; the latter needs to be rationally transformed. From this standpoint, which is the keystone of the whole dissertation, philosophy, at the highest stage of its development, at any rate, is in principle anti-speculative and is the motive force behind social creativity. "The first necessity for philosophical investigation is a bold, free mind" (1, 1; 460), which is inherently a negation of religion. Philosophy begins at the point at which the religious view of things ends, where man rises above the consciousness produced by fear and ignorance.^^**^^ Epicurus explicitly indicates the beginnings of true philosophy: a rational attitude to reality which rejects superstition. "Epicurus," says Marx, "is therefore the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment" (1, 1; 73). Gassendi, who revived the Epicurean philosophy in the 17th century, failed _-_-_
^^*^^ "Every activity of the spirit is therefore only its comprehension of itself, and the purpose of every true science consists only in that the spirit in everything that exists in the heavens and on the earth cognises itself" (72, 10; 10).
^^**^^ "Stupidity and superstition also are Titans" (1, 1; 68), says Marx in this connection.
57 entirely to understand its true meaning, because he tried to reconcile Epicureanism with religious notions.According to Marx's dissertation, a rational view of the world, contrasted with the fantastic, religious view of it, is the theoretical basis for the negation of religion. Unreason, the true substance of religion, is visually expressed in the fact that each religion proclaims itself to be the only true one, and looks down on the rest as superstition. "Come with your gods into a country where other gods are worshipped, and you will be shown to suffer from fantasies and abstractions. And justly so" (1, 1; 104).
All meil have the same reason, and everywhere it confronts religion as a hostile and vanquishing force. "That which a particular country is for particular alien gods, the country of reason is for God in general, a region in which he ceases to exist" (1,1; 104).
The view of religion as irrational, ordinary consciousness, and of philosophy (reason) and religion as fundamental opposites is, says Marx, the basis for refuting every kind of speculative, including rationalistic, ``proofs'' of the existence of God. These ``proofs'' testify to an urge to use reason to refute the rational view of reality. That is why they are no more than hollow tautologies (1,1; 104), as instanced by the ontological argument of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, who deduced from the meaningless concept of an all-perfect being the necessity of its existence. Hegel saw the contradiction in the effort to adduce logical proof of an alogical concept, but did not have the heart to refute it to the end. "Hegel has turned all these theological demonstrations upside-down, that is, he has rejected them in order to justify them" (1, 1; 103). While theologists argued that chance ruled the world and arrived at the conclusion that there is an absolutely necessary "true being" or God, Hegel, by contrast, asserted that the world is not ruled by chance, but by necessity, by the absolute, which equally led to the conclusion about the existence of God.
Consequently, Marx not only refuted the rationalistic theology, but also Hegel's theological conclusions, without realising as yet, however, that there is a close bond between idealism and religion, despite the evident distinction between them. In the dedication of his dissertation to Ludwig von Westphalen, Marx declares that "idealism is no figment of the imagination, but a truth" (1, 1; 28). This truth, he says, is 58 revealed, in particular, in the untenability of all the proofs of the existence of God, which "are proofs of the existence of essential human self-consciousness, logical explanations of it, take for example the ontological proof. Which being is immediate when made the subject of thought? Selfconsciousness.
``Taken in this sense all proofs of the existence of God are proofs of his non-existence. They are refutations of all concepts of a God" (1,1; 104-5). But from the fact that theological notions are alogical, it does not at all follow that they have no power over human beings. Like all the other Young Hegelians, Marx was inclined to see religion as almost the chief force that was enslaving man. "Did not the ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks?" (1, 1; 104).
Marx has yet to say that the power of religious notions is objectively rooted in the reality which they reflect. Religious notions are not arbitrary, as will be seen, for instance, from the fact that they constitute a specific form of social consciousness. Consequently, their roots lie outside the consciousness. That is a question the Young Hegelians did not consider, for they saw religion as an immanent, even if transient limitation of the human self-consciousness. Marx does not yet question this view but still tries to show, that the false consciousness is not the only source of religion. He says that theologists should start from the fact that the world is badly ordered, in which case they could to some extent explain the existence of religious notions. He makes the ironic remark that the real proofs of the existence of God should run as follows: "Since nature has been badly constructed, God exists", "Because the world is without reason, therefore God exists", "Because there is no thought, there is God". But what does that say, except that, for whom the world appears without reason, hence who is without reason himself, for him God exists? Or lack of reason is the existence of God"^^*^^ (1,1; 105). It is the task of philosophy to overcome the objectively existing unreason and make the world and man himself rational. Marx believed that the establishment _-_-_
^^*^^ As D. Baumgardt correctly observed, "here it is a case of the probably most audacious and inspired overturn of the traditional proofs of God that the history of philosophy has ever known" (47a; 109-10).
59 of atheism is the most important part of this global task of reason.In the Foreword to his dissertation, Marx writes: "Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus: 'Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious'.
``Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:
In simple words, I hate the pack of gods, is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other besides.
``But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparendy worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes:
Be sure of this, I would not change my state
Of evil fortune for your servitude.
Better to be the servant of this rock
Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.
``Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar" (1, 1; 30-1). These proud and profound words clearly express the young Marx's love of freedom, which cannot be reconciled with any oppression, and also contain a formulation of his philosophical credo: atheism and struggle not only against the celestial but also against the terrestrial gods, that is, struggle against every brand of despotism and man's oppression of man.^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ R. Sannwald quotes these words of Marx's and says: "This conclusion goes beyond Feuerbach, because Marx's apotheosis of reason, as will be seen from the polemic against Plutarch, coincides with the actual abolition of religion, while Feuerbach still regards his anthropological reduction above all as the consummation of religion and intends to proclaim a religious atheism of the heart, instead of true atheism" (107; 143). It is true, of course, that as early as 1841 in contrast to Feuerbach Marx did not leave any room even for a "religion without God". However Sannwald did not realise that Marx failed to give a consistent critique of religion because he still took the idealist approach.
60 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 6 __ALPHA_LVL3__ DOCTORAL DISSERTATION.Marx proclaims the revolutionary mission of philosophy while still taking the idealistic approach, and consequently, while still blind to the material roots of man's religious and every other kind of oppression. He believes that selfconsciousness, intellectual activity, whose highest form is not theoretical thinking but revolutionary practice based on it, is the force that can put an end to all oppression. In this context, he naturally considers the relation between philosophy, self-consciousness and the surrounding reality. This is, in effect, the basic question of philosophy, which the young Marx saw mainly in terms of the history of philosophy and answered in a spirit of idealism. "In the general relationship which the philosopher sees between the world and thought, he merely makes objective for himself the relation of his own particular consciousness to the real world" (1, 1; 42). At some stage in the development of self-consciousness, the idealistic contraposition of reason and will to external, material reality is a necessary expression of human activity and firm resolve to transform the world in the light of reason. Idealism alone "knows the true word capable of conjuring up all the spirits of the world''.
This very broad view of idealism has, of course, very little in common with Marx' and Engels's subsequent view of it. What we have here is an implacable struggle against all oppression of the individual, a struggle informed by humanistic ideals, but still based on idealistic premises.
When considering the transition from theoretical, chiefly philosophical, activity to revolutionary practice, Marx says: "It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it" (1,1; 85). From this standpoint, philosophical systems, or mankind's selfconsciousness, arise and develop to a certain stage independently of the empirical reality, but having attained an integral understanding, and having become a free theoretical spirit -in itself, philosophy necessarily turns to the external 61 world in order to make it philosophical and rational. By organically blending with life, philosophy acquires the higher integrity. This blend of philosophy and life, and its transmutation into flesh and blood is, on the one hand, a self-negation of philosophy, and on the other, an introduction of discord and contradiction into a sphere of life which is alien to philosophy.
So philosophy (self-consciousness) is relatively independent of men's practical life. It ceases to be so whenever it is itself connected with life as a result of its immanent development and the organic requirement which arises on that basis. This reveals that philosophy is not free of the faults which it seeks to eliminate, and that it can do so only by overcoming its own shortcomings, notably, its aloofness from the world of practice, its systematic speculation, etc.
Marx seeks to throw a new light on the relation of philosophical theory and social practice. The point is not simply to apply theory to practice or to subordinate practical transformations to the ideals created by philosophy, but also to remould philosophy itself. Only by turning to practice does philosophy overcome its own shortcomings which it once regarded as merits.
Marx still puts an idealistic interpretation on the unity of theory and practice, of self-consciousness and reality, for he asserts that "the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical" (1, 1; 85). The practical attitude to reality, into which philosophy is transformed, is defined as a critique of that reality.
Marx characterises philosophy's action against the world of phenomena as will and reflection^^*^^ Since self-consciousness does not exist on its own but in the minds of real people, who think, act and philosophise, the conflict between philosophy and outward reality, like the inner discord within philosophy itself, is expressed in the contradictions between men and between their different philosophical trends, and in the consciousness of the individual. This conflict between men's consciousness and their real existence, between the requirements of their reason and their unreasonable life, _-_-_
^^*^^ He says: "Its relationship to the world is that of reflection. Inspired by the urge to realise itself, it enters into tension against the other. The inner self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards" (/, 1; 85).
62 says Marx, is a false relation, assuming that consciousness and being, philosophy and life should not, by their very nature, contradict each other.Men have to overcome not only the living relations against which philosophy comes out; philosophy itself, in its concrete historical form, as a system tends to fetter human reason and so also needs to be negated. That is why philosophy must be critical both of the external world and of itself. Marx goes on to explain the contradictory development of the philosophical self-consciousness and its consequences and says: "That which in the first place appears as an inverted (verkehrtes) relationship and inimical trend of philosophy with respect to the world, becomes in the second place a diremption of individual self-consciousness in itself and appears finally as an external separation and duality of philosophy, as two opposed philosophical trends" (1, 1; 86).
It is quite natural, therefore, for two opposite trends to exist in philosophy, and Marx derives their necessity from the antithetical relation of philosophical self-consciousness to the world, on the one hand, and to itsrlf, on the other. He does not deal here with the fundamental question of philosophy or the struggle between materialism and idealism, but with the antithesis between the revolutionary and conservative parties in general. It is true that he calls them the liberal and the positive parties.^^*^^ At that time, there were still no political parties in Germany, and Marx gave the name of "liberal party" to the ideological and political movement against the dominant feudal reaction and its ideological spokesmen. The "liberal party", among whose leaders Marx ranked the Young Hegelians in the first place, criticised the existing state of things and sought to realise the requirements of philosophy, while the "positive philosophy" party dug a gap between reason and the world, that is, refused to change the world in accordance with the requirements of reason. Marx notes that "only the liberal _-_-_
^^*^^ In the Germany of the 1830s and 1840s, ``positivists'' was the name adopted by reactionary philosophers and ideologists of the romantico-feudal reaction (Christian Weisse, Franz Baader and Johann Fichte, Jr., among others) who claimed, in contrast to Hegel, that it was not philosophy but religion that was the highest form of self-consciousness. They defined philosophy as a theory which was incapable of proving the reality of the objects it dealt with. Accordingly, philosophy was ``negative'' knowledge, in contrast to the ``positive'' knowledge of the Christian dogma.
63 party achieves real progress, because it is the party of the concept" (1, 1; 86), but draws a distinction between the "liberal party`s'' philosophical principles and the views held by those of its adherents who did not dare consistently to practise these principles.What, in that case, follows from the principles of classical German philosophy, for that is what Marx has in mind? He says that great philosophical teachings produce critical epochs, which are titanic times following "in the wake of a philosophy total in itself and of its subjective developmental forms, for gigantic is the discord that forms their unity" (1, 1; 492). Marx goes on to reject the views of the " halfhearted minds" which seek to compromise and to restrict themselves to a "peace treaty with the real needs", whereas "Themistocles, when Athens was threatened with destruction, tried to persuade the Athenians to abandon the city entirely and found a new Athens at sea, in another element" (1, 1; 492). In this way, he emphasises the need for demarcation within the general democratic movement. Against those who advocate a compromise with the ruling reactionary forces he ranges those who realise the need for a titanic struggle.
The contradictions springing from the development of self-consciousness and the conflict between self-consciousness and the existing forms of social life sooner or later reach a point at which they can be resolved only through titanic struggle. There should be no fear of this struggle, for it alone leads to a happy epoch. Meanwhile, some Hegelians converted moderation into a category which is "the normal manifestation of the absolute spirit" (1, 1; 491). Ridiculing the moderation of Hegel's followers who feared a revolutionary storm, Marx writes: "But one must not let oneself be misled by this storm which follows a great philosophy, a world philosophy. Ordinary harps play under any fingers, Aeolian harps play only when struck by the storm" (1.1; 491). On the whole, this illustrates the shaping of Marx's revolutionary-democratic views, and this is most vividly expressed in his criticism of the non-revolutionary members of the "liberal party". He also censures some Hegelians--- apparently Young Hegelians because the Old Hegelians took a conservative stand.
The contrasting of self-consciousness to the philosophy of the empirical reality, which was characteristic of the 64 approach taken by Bruno Bauer and his followers, though professing to be a "philosophy of practice", resulted in some underestimation of practical political struggle. While Hegel held that the Reformation had done (and in the best way) for Germany what the 1789 Revolution had done for France, Bauer assumed that the struggle against religion constituted the most important content of revolution, which is why it was a revolution in consciousness. Marx's dissertation gives a more concrete and dialectical understanding of the relation of self-consciousness and reality, and so helps to understand the "historical necessity" (Marx's own term) of practical political revolutionary action.
Marx holds that self-consciousness ultimately belongs to the same social reality which it criticises, while its conflict with reality is a contradiction immanent in it. Hegel's reconciliation of self-consciousness with reality tended to be an apology of it. The contrast between self-consciousness and reality, if raised to an absolute, contains within itself the danger of a separation from reality; actually the unity of self-consciousness and reality is contradictory and so cannot be reduced to any unilateral relation. This unity necessarily passes through various stages: the harmony achieved through the development of self-consciousness gives way to conflict; its resolution re-establishes the accord between self-consciousness and being, which is also transient. "That which at first appears as a contradictory relationship between philosophy and the world, between self-consciousness and the concrete reality," A. Cornu writes, "proves under closer scrutiny, according to Marx, to be an inter-relationship. The two antithetical elements are not metaphysical, ossified entities, and are rather to be conceived in their dialectical unity. After separating from the world, philosophy reintegrates with it by altering it; then it separates from the world anew as ah abstract totality and again determines the world's further development by its critical opposition to it" (62; 171).
These views, which Marx expressed from 1839 to 1841, are still a long way from the materialist view of consciousness, and are based on an objective idealist interpretation of the world as a unity of consciousness and being, whose main features coincide with Hegel's teaching of reality as subjectobject. But in contrast to Hegel, Marx does not regard the conflict between self-consciousness and reality as the lowest __PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 3 - 185 65 stage in the development of self-consciousness, which gives way to reconciliation, but as a necessary condition for the development of self-consciousness, and so also of reality itself. In effect, he discards Hegel's notions of "absolute idea" and of "absolute spirit". But while still remaining an idealist, he regards self-consciousness as the highest expression of nature's spiritual substance, whose regularities he interprets as rational relations inherent in things themselves. The spiritual does not exist outside the material world; the two constitute a unity of opposites in which the spiritual is the definitive side, the substance, the purpose.
He seeks to purge Hegel's idealism of its theological premises and fatalistic conclusions, something that cannot be done within the bounds of idealism, but the antithesis between atheism and idealism in the young man's world outlook paves the way for a materialist world view.
His dissertation thus shows that he stood out among the Young Hegelians both because of his revolutionarydemocratic attitude and his deeper understanding of the relation between self-consciousness and being. Furthermore, his analysis of this relation shows that the young Marx also understood the substance of Hegelian dialectics more deeply than his friends the Young Hegelians.
Paying tribute to Hegel's idealistic view of dialectics, Marx says that "dialectic is the inner, simple light, the piercing eye of love, the inner soul which is not crushed by the body of material division, the inner abode of the spirit" (1, I; 498). But in the next breath he stresses that "dialectics is also the torrent which smashes the many and their bounds, which tears down the independent forms, sinking everything in the one sea of eternity" (1, I; 498). This gives some indication of the two basic aspects of Hegel's dialectics. One of these is reconciliation and neutralisation of opposites, and the other, their antithesis, negation and struggle. All of this suggests that Marx is most concerned with the latter aspect of Hegel's dialectics.
He also seeks dialectically to comprehend the history of philosophy as a process, and formulates some profound ideas whose subsequent development in the light of dialectical and historical materialism was highly important in the making of the Marxist philosophy. The most cogent of these is the need scrupulously to separate the objective content of a philosophical doctrine from its subjective form of 66 construction and exposition, which, like the philosopher's own personality, need to be understood from his system. So it is not a psychological analysis of the philosopher's personality but an analysis of the principles underlying his doctrine and the separation of the objective from the subjective, of the essential from the inessential that help to understand the development of philosophy. Referring to philosophical historiography Marx says: "Its concern is to distinguish in each system the determinations themselves, the actual crystallisations pervading the whole system, from the proofs, the justifications in argument, the self-presentation of the philosophers as they know themselves; to distinguish the silent, persevering mole of real philosophical knowledge from the voluble, exoteric, variously behaving phenomenological consciousness of the subject, which is the vessel and motive force of those elaborations. It is in the division of this consciousness into aspects mutually giving each other the lie that precisely its unity is proved. This critical element in the presentation of a philosophy which has its place in history is absolutely indispensable in order scientifically to expound a system in connection with its historical existence, a connection which must not be [overlooked precisely because the [system's] existence is historical" (1, 1; 506).
Marx does not confine himself to indicating the importance of sorting the objective content from the subjective form in which a philosophical system is expressed and, as the above extract shows, believes it necessary to show the connection, the unity and interdependence of the two. So the point is not at all to neglect the mode of exposition or the structure of the philosophical system: all the specific features of its form must be derived from its content, from its principles. Marx holds that here special importance attaches to a consideration of the philosophical system within the context of history. Without such a critical analysis, any history of philosophy becomes an empirical description, and the historian of philosophy, "a copying clerk" (1, 1; 506).
From this angle, he makes a critical assessment of the notion widely accepted by the left Hegelians concerning the sources of Hegel's conservative political conclusions, which they reduced to the philosopher's personality, i. e., did not connect them with his doctrine. Marx says that this is psychological hair-splitting, and adds: "...In relation to Hegel 67 it is mere ignorance on the part of his pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one word, explain it in terms of morality" (1,1; 84). Thus, while Hegel tended to absolutise the constitutional monarchy, some Young Hegelians who rejected the idea claimed that it had no connection with his teaching but only with his personal qualities as a Berlin University professor. While this explanation does contain a grain of truth, it is, on the whole, unsatisfactory, because it glosses over the contradiction between Hegel's system and his method.
Objecting to this insufficiently critical approach to Hegel's philosophy and to the history of philosophy generally, Marx says, first, "how unscrupulous is their attempt to reproach the Master for a hidden intention behind his insight" (1,1; 84). Second, and this is, of course, the main point, he notes that Hegel's conservative conclusions were connected with the inadequacy and inconsistency of the principles of his philosophy. "It is quite thinkable for a philosopher to fall into one or another apparent inconsistency through some sort of accommodation; he himself may be conscious of it. But what he is not conscious of, is the possibility that this apparent accommodation has its deepest roots in an inadequacy or in an inadequate formulation of his principle itself" (1,1; 84).
Consequently, Marx no longer confines himself to bringing out the contradiction between Hegel's philosophical principles and his ultimate conclusions. He goes beyond these to show that the theoretical roots of the contradiction lay in the inadequacy and inconsistency of Hegel's principles, i. e., of his dialectics. At the time, Marx was still unable to show just what this inadequacy and inconsistency were, because he still took the idealistic approach and failed to see that the basic flaw in Hegel's dialectics was its idealism. But what is important is the formulation of the need for a critical analysis of Hegel's dialectics in order to overcome its inadequacy, i. e., to develop the dialectical method.
It is also obvious that the objective content of a philosophical doctrine can be separated from its subjective form of expression, and their interconnection analysed, only insofar as the objective content of the doctrine is regarded as a reflection of some objective reality. However, Marx drew a distinction between objective content and subjective form 68 only within the consciousness, within the philosophy. But because he posed the question of the relation between philosophy and the world, between self-consciousness and being, between theory and practice, he indicated a way for going beyond the limitations of the idealistic speculation.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 7 __ALPHA_LVL3__ REVOLUTIONARY-DEMOCRATIC CRITIQUE OFMarx's first consideration of concrete political issues--- "Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction", which he wrote in early 1842 and which appeared in 1843 in a collection issued in Switzerland by Ruge^^*^^---was another milestone in his ideological development. From there, he went on to expose the feudal bureaucratic police state.
The Instruction of 1841 epitomised the hypocritical concern displayed by Frederick William IV for the `` flourishing'' of literature. It said that there should be no undue constraint on the activity of writers and urged the observance of Article II of the 1819 censorship decree, according to which "the censorship should not prevent serious and modest investigation of truth, nor impose undue constraint on writers, or hinder the book trade from operating freely". Both the Instruction and Article II enjoined those who engaged in literary activity to be well-intentioned, serious and modest. The vagueness of these requirements gave the censors as much latitude as they needed to harass writers not for any specific statements but for a lack of ``seriousness'', and so on.
Marx explained that the requirement that the writer should be modest in his investigation was a veiled demand that he should abandon any serious quest of the truth. What kind of modesty was the writer required to display? "The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter's essential nature"- (1, 1; 113). Was that the kind of modesty that was required? Of course, not. The Instruction _-_-_
^^*^^ See Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophic und Publicistik, Bd. I, 1843. It consisted of articles banned by the censors for publication in Germany.
69 enjoined the writer not to seek the truth directly, but to reckon with the general preconceptions, i. e., to be modest with respect to falsehood. But the substance of the spirit was exclusively truth in itself, whereas the Instruction emphasised modesty and good intentions and also ``seriousness'', which was taken to mean abandonment of the critical attitude to the existing order in Prussia, to the religion which sanctified it, and so on.Marx contrasts these hypocritical statements with the rationalist cult of reason and truth, which was implacably opposed to anything that sought in any way to fetter free thought and that aspired to truth alone. "Truth includes not only the result but also the path to it. The investigation of truth must itself be true; true investigation is developed truth, the dispersed elements of which are brought together in the result." (1, I; 113).
The Instruction prohibited any criticism of religion, covering up this ban with a vague statement about intolerance of "anything aimed in a frivolous, hostile way against the Christian religion in general, or against a particular article of faith". In this context, Marx elaborates an idea he expressed in his preparatory notes for the dissertation and goes to the substance of religion: "...it is already contrary to the general principles of religion to separate them from the positive content and particular features of religion, since each religion believes itself distinguished from the various other would-be religions by its special nature, and that precisely its particular features make it the true religion" (1, 1; 116).
This idea is of especial interest, for it shows the difference between Marx's approach to religion and Feuerbach's, who regards the substance of religion as consisting of emotion, so that when its general content is analysed, the distinctions between one religion and another become secondary. However, every religion has its own dogmas, which constitute both its form and content. The contradictions between religions, their refutation of each other, are necessary expressions of their intrinsic contradictions (which will be found in any religious consciousness generally). While this standpoint, which Marx developed in his 1842 and 1843 writings, does not reject the principles of Feuerbach's critique of religion, it rules out the idea of some ``rational'' religion without a god.
Marx asks: why does the Prussian state protect religion 70 from criticism? Religion sanctions the existing state of things. The reactionaries call Prussia a Christian state. This means that Christian dogmas, that is, the distinction between Christianity and any other religion, its specific essence, are declared to be the measure of the state. "You want," Marx says, "to base the state not on free reason, but on faith, religion being for you the general sanction for what exists" (1, 1; 118).
Like B. Bauer, Marx argues that the state, as a rational organisation of social life, and religion (unreason) are organically hostile to each other. This makes nonsense of the notion of a Christian state, and that of defence of religion by the state an anti-state practice. Still, his approach differs somewhat from Bauer's, because he emphasises that the rationality of the state is based on the reason of the members of society.^^*^^
Bauer, Ruge and other Young Hegelians followed Hegel in putting the state, as the sphere of reason realising the universal, absolute purpose, above the "civil society" with what they believed to be the prose of its private interests. In his commentary on the Instruction, Marx did not yet reject this conception. But in criticising the feudal state as an expression of the interests of the individual estates which, he believed, contradicted the essence of the state, he argued that only the people's interests were not private or selfseeking interests. That is why he said that laws against the people were imaginary laws, contradicting this conception. He believed the censorship decree to be that kind of law, rather, a privilege of the ruling estate. "The law against a frame of mind is not a law of the state promulgated for its citizens, but the law of one party against another party.... It is a law which divides, not one which unites, and all laws which divide are reactionary. It is not a law, but a privilege" (1,1; 120). This is an idealistic proposition because the connection _-_-_
^^*^^ The following illustrates Marx's revolutionary democratic convictions: "The moral state assumes its members to have the frame of mind of the state, even if they act in opposition to an organ of the state, against the government. But in a society in which one organ imagines itself the sole, exclusive possessor of state reason and state morality, in a government which opposes the people in principle and hence regards its anti-state frame of mind as the general, normal frame of mind, the bad conscience of a faction invents laws against tendency, laws of revenge, laws against a frame of mind which has its seat only in the government members themselves" (1, 1; 120).
71 between legal decrees and the interests of definite classes and parties is here regarded as something that contradicts the laws. Marx believed that true laws expressed the universal common interests of the people. There is no doubt that these propositions were of a revolutionary-democratic character.According to the Instruction, harassment of the press in Prussia allegedly occurred only because of the failure to observe the censorship decree, Why then was not the decree observed? To say that this is due to the negligence or ill-intent of the censors, Marx says, is to ascribe to individuals the defects of a definite institution. "It is the habit of pseudo-liberalism, when compelled to make concessions, to sacrifice persons, the instruments, and to preserve the thing itself, the institution" (1, 1; 110). But the whole point is that "there is a basic defect in the nature of the censorship which no law can remedy" (Ibid.).
While many German liberals were delighted with the Prussian Censorship Instruction, regarding it as a progressive step on the part of the monarchy, Marx exposed the reactionary essence of the concession, which merely went to strengthen the absolutism. "The real, radical cure for the censorship would be its abolition; for the institution itself is a bad one, and institutions are more powerful than people" (7, 1; 131). I think that this last point is highly essential to gaining a historical perspective of the making of Marxism. Indeed, he comes close to understanding that it is men themselves who create the conditions that determine their life and that dominate them.
Marx's article about the Instruction is a splendid specimen of revolutionary-democratic journalism, and a vivid example of the critical-dialectical analysis of the contradiction between appearance and substance, between subjective form and objective content.
It gave Marx an opportunity to attack the reactionary romantic ideology, which helped to veil the attempts by the ruling feudal estates to cover up their political domination with references to the good old customs, whose destruction would allegedly result in general corruption. Marx showed that the vagueness, the refined sensitivity and subjective exaltation of romanticism frequently had definite political implications.
This critique of political romanticism was a highly 72 important element in the making of the Marxist philosophy. His attack on the Instruction was only the start of his struggle against the ideology of reactionary romanticism. He continued it in his critique of the historical school of law and feudal pseudo-socialism.
So, in early 1842 we find Marx a revolutionary democrat implacably hostile to Germany's social relations. He was also clearly prepared to advance without flinching in the face of any revolutionary conclusions and their practical consequences.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 8 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S ADVANCE TO ATHEISM.Engels's ideological and political development and the formation of his revolutionary-democratic convictions began in the same period, independently of Marx.
In his first published article, which I consider below, he sketches out a picture of his home town of Barmen and neighbouring Elberfeld, which in the 1830s were large centres of textile production in the Rhine Province. The spiritual life of these outposts of German capitalism, as of the whole of the Wuppertal Valley (which Engels calls ``Muckertal'', the valley of hypocrites) was dominated by clericalism and philistinism. "This whole region is submerged in a sea of pietism and philistinism" (7, 2; 25). But this did not prevent the pious manufacturers from ruthlessly exploiting both adults and children. "The wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience, and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist's soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all" (7, 2; 10). Only one thing can be said about the cultural standards of the local rich: "Not a trace of education; anyone who plays whist and billiards, who can talk a little about politics and pay a pretty compliment is regarded as an educated man in Barmen and Elberfeld" (7, 2; 20).
That was the state of Engels's native town, which he described as a youth of nineteen with keen insight into the spiritual wretchedness of the prosperous bourgeoisie, a circle 73 to which his own family belonged. The atmosphere in the home of the industrialist Engels did not apparently differ very much from that which the young man described in his "Letters from Wuppertal", despite the fact that on his twentieth birthday his mother gave him the works of Goethe, about whom the local pietists knew only one thing, namely, that he had been an atheist.
In an 1839 letter to a school friend, Wilhelm Graeber, Engels wrote that the religious orthodoxy, implanted in his mind at home and at school, naturally aroused a sense of protest,^^*^^ which grew with the efforts of his teachers and parents to develop in his mind a pietistic antagonism to all non-religious ideas. Lenin said: "He had come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high school" (5, 2; 7).
The school certificate from the Elberfeld gymnasium (he did not complete the course, because his father had insisted on his going into business) says that Engels "has taken pains to be of very good behaviour and has commended himself to his teachers particularly by his modesty, frankness and good-natured disposition, and equally displayed commendable endeavour, supported by good talents, to acquire the most comprehensible scientific education possible". It adds that he stood out with his "religious feeling, purity of heart, agreeable habits and other prepossessing qualities" (1, 2; 584, 585).
In 1838, his father sent him to Bremen to study commerce. There, at the office of a local industrialist and merchant, the young man found the time for self-education, journalism and the writing of verse and prose, some of which was published in 1838 and 1839. His letters to his sister Marie give an idea of the remarkable range of his pursuits. Apart from writing articles and stories, he also went in for drawing, musical composition, foreign languages and sport. In one of his letters, he says: "We now have fencing lessons, I fence four times a week" (1, 2; 517).
_-_-_^^*^^ "If I had not been brought up in the most extreme orthodoxy and piety, if I had not had drummed into me in church, Sunday school and at home the most direct, unconditional belief in the Bible and in the agreement of the teaching of the Bible with that of the church, indeed, with the special teaching of every minister, perhaps I would have remained stuck in some sort of liberal supranaturalism for a long time" (1, 2; 466).
74While pietism was incompatible even with moderate' secular ideas, the development of Engels's philosophical and political views, first under the influence of the Young Germany literary group, and then through his contacts with the Young Hegelians, made any compromise with religion impossible. At this stage of his ideological development, the relation between faith and reason, between religion and science becomes of paramount importance. This is quite natural: in pre-revolutionary Germany, the struggle against religion and clericalism was one of the chief ideological expressions of the bourgeois-democratic movement. And as I showed above, this question was also of much importance for Marx, when he was working on his dissertation. But Marx had not been brought up in an atmosphere of pietism and did not have to overcome the "Wuppertal faith", so that for him the reason-faith relation was mostly a theoretical problem. For Engels it was a matter of his own reason and his own faith, and at the early stages, in any case, he was not concerned with the theoretical aspects of the problem, but had to face a personal conflict with his "Wuppertal faith''.
Religion is the cardinal problem in his letters to the brothers Graeber (1838-February 1841), a most valuable source for studying the early stage of Engels's intellectual development. It is true that in these letters we do not find any explicit super-naturalism, which flatly claims (like Protestant fundamentalism today) that every word of the Holy Scriptures must be taken literally. But then Engels does not deny it either, and still regards himself as a moderate super-naturalist who is hostile only to pietism. He writes: "Well, I have never been a pietist. I have been a mystic for a while, but those are tempi passati. I am now an honest, and in comparison with others, very liberal, super-naturalist. How long I shall remain such I don't know, but I hope to remain one, even though inclining now more, now less towards rationalism" (1, 2; 423).^^*^^
That was an extract from a letter he wrote in early April 1839. At the end of April, while still calling himself a super-naturalist, he inclines to a rationalistic interpretation of religion and opposes religious orthodoxy. He writes: "I _-_-_
^^*^^ This explains his interest at the time in the mysticism of Jacob Bohme and in religious poetry (see 1, 2; 394-5).
75 cannot understand how the orthodox preachers can be so orthodox since there are some quite obvious contradictions in the Bible.... This is not surrendering reason in obedience to Christ, as the orthodox people affirm; no, it is a killing of the divine in man to replace it with the dead letter. I am therefore just as good a super-naturalist as I was before but I have cast off orthodoxy. Thus, I cannot now or ever believe that a rationalist who seeks with all his heart to do as much good as possible, should be eternally damned. That is at odds with the Bible itself" (/, 2; 426).The attempts to give religion a reasonable form, and to rationalise its dogmas are undoubtedly evidence of a crisis of faith, as the history of religion and the history of philosophy both show. Engels's assault on the dogmatic form of religion is an unwitting assault on its very core. And this not only because in religion as everywhere else form is inseparable from content, but also because, as Marx realised in 1841, dogma was both the form and the content of religion. A religion free of dogma is possible only in the mind of a philosopher. Engels's attempt to give religious dogmas a rationalistic reading produced unexpected results: together with the collapse of blind faith came the collapse of all religious faith. Thus, objecting to Friedrich Graeber's insistence on the need to accept the truths of revelation without doubt or sophistry, Engels writes: "Dear Fritz, just think:---this would be nonsense and God's reason is certainly higher than ours, but still not of a different kind, for otherwise it would no longer be reason. The Biblical dogmas also are to be understood by using reason.---Not to be able to doubt, you say, is freedom of the mind? It is the greatest enslavement of the mind. He only is free who has overcome every doubt concerning his convictions. And I am not even demanding that you refute me. I challenge all orthodox theology to refute me" (1, 2; 459).
This July 1839 letter reveals to Engels himself that his struggle against Christian orthodoxy is fraught with doubt concerning the truth of religion generally. This discovery came as a shock, for he had assumed that rationalism purified and strengthened the religious feeling. "I pray daily, indeed nearly the whole day, for truth, I have done so ever since I began to have doubts, but I still cannot return to your faith. And yet it is written: 'Ask, and it shall be given you'.... Tears come into my eyes as I write this. I am moved 76 to the core, but I feel I shall not be lost; I shall come to God, for whom my whole heart yearns" (1, 2; 461).
Although Engels says there that he finds it impossible to return to "your faith", that is, the religious orthodoxy of the brothers Graeber, he himself feels that the matter has much greater depth. Hence his confusion and hopes of a return to religion. But no return is possiblej because religious faith as such tends to collapse together with the "Wuppertal faith". This will be seen from his last letters to the Graebers, in which he deals less and less with religious matters. And while he does not yet profess his atheism, it is quite obvious not only that his hope of a return to God has not come about, but also that he is no longer worried about it.
Thus, from 1839 to 1841, Engels travelled the way from religious super-naturalism to atheism, which is quite explicit in his pamphlets against Schelling. The main factor in this process is his growing awareness (largely under the impact of Young Hegelianism) of the injustice of the social relations which religion sanctifies.
In an enthusiastic letter to the Graebers in 1839, he writes: "Like a thunderclap, came the July revolution, the most splendid expression of the people's will since the war of liberation" (1, 2; 420). At that time, his sympathies were attracted to the Young Germany, which had for its guiding spirits Ludwig Borne and Heinrich Heine, then both in exile. In the main, he approves of its political ideas, the chief of which he believes to be participation by the people in the administration of the state, that is, constitutional matters; further, emancipation of the Jews, abolition of all religious compulsion, of all hereditary aristocracy, etc. (/, 2; 422). He gives a high appreciation of Karl Gutzkow, a talented dramatist, journalist and publisher of the Young Germany journal, Telegraph fur Deutschland. He is also attracted by the man's moderation with respect to religion, because at the time he did not go beyond this rationalistic idea: "I can only regard as divine a teaching which can stand the test of reason" (1, 2; 454).^^*^^ His sympathies naturally went out to the Young Germany, whose members were being persecuted and their writings banned in Prussia, especially since at the _-_-_
^^*^^ Engels notes that for Gutzkow "the highest aim in life is to find the meeting point between positive Christianity and the culture of our time" (1, 2; 455).
77 time he could find no other active force in the socio-political and literary arena (see 1, 2; 422). This explains his announcement in a letter to Friedrich Graeber: "I must become a Young German, or rather, I am one already, body and soul." (7, 2; 422).^^*^^ This left a terrible impression on the devout and moderate Graebers (one of whom he calls in his letter "a nightcap in politics"). While not daring openly to object to the Young Germany's bourgeois-democratic ideas, Wilhelm Graeber seeks to prove that the cause of progress should not be prodded. This argument, which was more characteristic of liberals than of reactionaries, was attacked by Engels with youthful verve which revealed the single-mindedness of the future revolutionary. He writes: "First of all I protest against your insinuations that I have been giving the spirit of the times one kick after another in the hindquarters in order to speed its progress.... No, I'm leaving it well and truly alone; on the contrary, when the spirit of the times comes along like a hurricane and pulls the train away on the railway line, then I jump quickly into a carriage and let myself be pulled along a little" (1, 2; 465).The young man's feelings and hopes are best expressed in his simile of the spirit of the times coming along like a hurricane, and it is futile to seek any haven to escape it. Engels tells the Graebers: "You will yet be drawn into politics, the current of the times will come flooding over your idyllic household, and then you will stand like the oxen before the mountain. Activity, life, youthful spirit, that is the real thing!" (1, 2; 514)
Engels was eagerly looking to the revolutionary storm, and his advance to atheism was due not only to his realisation that religion was irrational but that it also tended to fetter _-_-_
^^*^^ In a letter dated July 30, 1839, Engels deals with the persecution of the Young Germany and declares that the group is "enthroned as queen of modern German literature" (I, 2; 465). But in the spring of 1840, in an article entitled "Modern Literary Life", Engels already has some important critical remarks to make about the Young Germany leaders. He points out, in particular, T. Mundt's political philistinism and says that in his novels "the ideas of the times appeared with trimmed beard and combed hair, and submitted in the frock-coat of a suppliant a most abject petition for most gracious assent" (1, 2; 85). Referring to the polemics between Gutzkow and other Young Germans, in which personal motives had come to the fore, Engels rebuked the Young Germany for lacking principle and compared it with the Young Hegelians, who were uniting in the struggle against the reactionary social forces (1, 2; 92-3).
78 the human personality. In one of his 1839 letters, he summed up the development of his views at that stage in these words: "Man is born free, he is free!" (7, 2; 456).That same year, Telegraph fiir Deutschland carried his article "Letters from Wuppertal", in which he showed the direct connection between the working people's piety and the merciless exploitation to which they were subjected. "Work in low rooms, where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen---and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six---is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness" (1, 2; 9).
In his "Letters from Wuppertal", Engels does not yet consider the proletariat as a class apart from the mass of the exploited and oppressed, but in contrast to the liberals, which included the Young Germany leaders, with the exception, perhaps, of Borne and Heine, he had no illusions about the bourgeoisie's readiness to do something to improve the working people's lot. Engels stressed that the industrialists had no concern for the condition of the workers: they were not worried by the terrible spread of tuberculosis, drunkenness and mysticism among the workers. And while he still castigates mainly the atrocious arbitrariness of the factory-owners, he is, in effect, already aware that the interests of the working people and of the ``employers'' are incompatible. This expressed the shaping of his revolutionary-democratic views: recognition of the irreconcilable contradiction between the oppressed and the oppressors, and awareness of the need for resolving this contradiction in a revolutionary way.
In his letters to the Graebers, Engels expresses his admiration for the 1830 French revolution, and says that there must be a popular uprising against German absolutism. In February 1840, he declares: "I hate hirn [ FrederickWilliam III---T. O.] with a mortal hatred, and if I didn't so despise him, the shit, I would hate him still more.... There never was a time richer in royal crimes than that of 1816-30; almost every prince then ruling deserved the death penalty.... I expect anything good only of that prince whose ears are boxed right and left by his people and whose palace 79 windows are smashed by the flying stones of the revolution" (1, 2; 493).
While the liberal bourgeois is terrified at the prospect of revolutionary action by the oppressed and the exploited, regarding these as breaches of "law and order", for the revolutionary democrat Engels the people are a mighty force working for historical justice. This is one of the starting theoretical tenets in the young Engels's revolutionary democratism.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 9 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS JOINS THE YOUNG HEGELIANS.In the spring of 1839, Engels informed Friedrich Graeber about his philosophical pursuits, notably his study of the book by David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus). Engels's examination (in his letters to the Graebers) of the contradiction between reason and the Christian dogmas apparently stems from his study of that famous work, which started the division of the Hegel school. But as these letters show, almost until the end of 1839 Engels regarded Strauss's analysis of the Evangelical myths in a spirit of deistic rationalism, which had yet to break completely with religious super-naturalism. This apparently explains the strong impression which Schleiermacher made on Engels in 1839. Having studied his teaching, Engels drew the conclusion that rationalistic theology is incapable of comprehending the substance of religion. He writes to Friedrich Graeber in July 1839: "If I had come into contact with this teaching before, I would never have become a rationalist" (1, 2; 457).
Schleiermacher consistently opposed the rationalistic interpretation of religion, and asserted that only feeling, rather, religious ecstasy alone, was capable of revealing to man the truth of religion. This view must have influenced Engels; his own experience had evidently led him to understand that religious doubt could not be resolved by reason. This explains why he wrote in the same letter: "Religion is an affair of the heart and whoever has a heart can be devout; but those whose devoutness is rooted either in their understanding or in their reason, have none at all. The tree of religion sprouts from the heart, overshadows the 80 whole man and seeks its nourishment from the air of reason. But its fruits, which contain the most precious heart-blood, are the dogmas, and what goes beyond them is of the Evil one. This is what Schleiermacher teaches and I stand by it" (1, 2; 462-3). But a few lines earlier, while saying that the latter is a great man, Engels adds: "I only know one man now living who has equal intelligence, equal power, and equal courage---and that is David Friedrich Strauss" (1, 2; 462). He has still to realise that the teachings of the two men are incompatible, but this may be due to the fact that despite his criticism of the New Testament in Das Leben Jesu, Strauss says that the principles of Christianity are ultimately identical with philosophical truth. Engels's subsequent acquaintance with Young Hegelianism and with Hegel's philosophy itself increasingly reveals to him the gap between the "religion of feeling" and reason. Christianity, which he had but recently regarded as the truth that organically stems from man's loftiest emotions turns out to be, according to Strauss, no more than a collection of myths spun out impulsively within the early Christian communities. That is why in a letter to Wilhelm Graeber in October 1839, Engels declares: "I am now an enthusiastic Straussian.... Yes, Guillermo, jacta est alea [the die is cast---Ed.] I am now a Straussian; I, a poor, miserable poet, have crept under the wing of the genius David Friedrich Strauss. Just hear what a fellow he is! There lie the four Gospels in a crisp and colourful chaos; mysticism lies in front of them and adores them---and behold, in comes David Strauss like a young god and brings the chaos out into the light of day---and Adios faith! It is as full of holes as a sponge. He sees too much myth here and there, but only in unimportant matters, otherwise he is a man of real genius" (1, 2; 471).
Engels's eulogy of Strauss dates from the period of his spiritual development in which he had yet to become an atheist, so that when he did become one, and the problem of reason and faith, of philosophy and religion became of no more than theoretical interest, Strauss's teaching, which was largely confined to theological problems, could no longer satisfy him. Strauss's importance now lay in the fact that he had helped him to advance to Hegel's philosophy. In November 1839, Engels wrote to Wilhelm Graeber: "I am on the point of becoming a Hegelian. Whether I shall become one I don't, of course, know yet, but Strauss has lit up lights 81 on Hegel for me which make the thing quite plausible to me. His (Hegel's) philosophy of history is anyway written as from my own heart" (1, 2; 486). It is true that in that same letter Engels says that Hegel's rhetoric is ``dreadful'', which may be an indication that from the very first he had found much of Hegel's teaching unacceptable.
His next letter in December 1839 makes it clear that he rejects the right-Hegelian interpretation of Hegel's teaching and sides with the Young Hegelians. From Engels's standpoint, Hegel's view of God is pantheistic through and through, but while traditional pantheism identifies God and Nature, according to Hegel "humanity and divinity are in essence identical" (1, 2; 490).^^*^^ Here, Engels, like some other Young Hegelians, clearly goes beyond Hegel, ascribing to him some of his own views, which are already essentially atheistic.^^**^^
Consequently, Strauss turns out to be a half-way house for Engels in his advance to Hegelian philosophy, whose most important significance, according to Engels, lies in its view of world history as progressive development of human freedom, in its identification of divinity and humanity, and consequently, in its view of humanity as a force that is immensely powerful, independent of everything and capable of (and actually) realising the ideals of reason.
In an article entitled "Retrograde Signs of the Times" (1840), Engels notes that the reactionaries assert that nothing essentially new occurs in the world. However, mankind does not stand still and, despite various obstacles, is in constant advance. What is more, the pace of historical development accelerates. "History begins its course slowly from an invisible point, languidly making its turns around it, but its circles become ever larger, the flight becomes ever swifter and more lively, until at last history shoots like a flaming comet from star to star, often skimming its old paths, often intersecting them, and with every turn it approaches closer to infinity" (1, 2; 48). Wherever, at first sight, there seems to be _-_-_
^^*^^ This explains what Engels says in the same letter: "The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the 'modern pantheists', as Leo and Hengstenberg say, knowing well that even the word pantheism arouses such colossal revulsion on the part of pastors who don't think" (1, 2; 489).
^^**^^ Let us recall that in his dissertation Marx also expressed the idea that humanity and divinity were identical.
82 a repetition of the past in the course of humanity's historical development and narrow-minded obscurantists hasten to celebrate their triumph, the ascent to new summits actually continues. The champions of the past fail to see that "history only rushes onwards by the most direct route to a new resplendent constellation of ideas, which with its sun-like magnitude will soon blind their feeble eyes" (1, 2; 48). Engels believed that the philosophy of Hegel and his followers, the Young Hegelians, was just such a new resplendent constellation of ideas. Its main element was an inspired and inflinching faith in an idea, which could not be put down by political reaction, whose illusory victories could deceive no one. In Germany, Hegel's philosophy was becoming what the ideas of the enlighteners had been in France, namely, anticipation of the revolution, which was already at the door. "Do you not hear the trumpet, whose sound overturns the tombstones and makes the earth shake with joy, so that the graves burst open? The Day of Judgment has come, the day that will never be followed by another night; the spirit, the eternal king, has ascended his throne and at his feet are gathered all the peoples of the earth to render account of their thoughts and deeds; new life pervades the whole world, so that the old family-trees of the people joyfully wave their leafy branches in the morning air, shedding all their old foliage" (1, 2; 70).But if the truth does disperse the darkness, it does not win by itself. Efforts are made to suppress it, and to contrast it with elastic pseudo-truths, like the old adage about their being nothing new under the moon. Without struggle, the truth cannot prevail, because "if a new genuine truth rises on the horizon, like the red morning sky, the children of night know full well that it threatens the downfall of their kingdom and they take up arms against it" (1, 2; 47). The reactionaries go over from theoretical struggle against the truth to physical means of suppressing it. In this context, Engels raises the question of the relation between theory and practice, philosophy and life, and Hegel's doctrine and the political struggle against absolutism. While Marx regarded the transition from philosophy to practice as a necessary result of the development of philosophy, Engels concentrated on another aspect of the matter: he emphasised that the ideals engendered by the development of philosophy could not be realised without a struggle against the 83 reactionary social forces standing in the way of progress. In his letters to the Graebers, Engels had said that Borne was an outstanding fighter for freedom. When he joined the Young Hegelian movement, he continued to believe that "the task of our age is to complete the fusion of Hegel and Borne" (1, 2; 144). He goes on to explain: "The man of political practice is Borne, and his place in history is that he fulfilled this calling perfectly" (jf, 2; 144).^^*^^ Engels says that this task is, in a sense, being tackled by the Young Hegelians and was already considered by some of the best men of Young Germany (1, 2; 144, 145). Strauss was the first to apply Hegel's philosophy to a critique of religion, while E. Cans and A. Ruge used it for a critical analysis of political practice. Those in power did not even suspect that Hegel's philosophy would dare to emerge from the sheltered haven of speculative theory into the tempestuous sea of contemporary events. But after Hegel's death, a fresh breath of life ran through his doctrines. Hegel's followers (and through them, Hegel's philosophy itself) were drawing the sword to attack the existing social order. This means that the reconciliation of Hegel's philosophy with the existing state of things in Germany was no more than temporary, because the "new teaching must first root itself in recognition of the nation before it could freely develop its living consequences" (1,2', 143).^^**^^ The free and consistent development of the "living consequences" of Hegel's philosophy and their conjunction with progressive political ideas and political practice _-_-_
^^*^^ This does not mean that Engels regarded Borne as a practitioner who shunned theory. "In him, theory wrested itself free from practice and revealed itself as the latter's most beautiful flower" (1, 2; 267). Engels considers the conjugation of the progressive ideas of Hegel's philosophy and Home's republican-democratic political programme. The main condition for such a conjunction was to draw a fundamental distinction between the progressive and conservative aspects of Hegel's philosophy, between his method and his system. That in the early 1840s Engels had already drawn such a distinction will be seen from his article "Alexander Jung, 'Lectures on Modern German Literature'''.
^^**^^ Here Engels, like Marx, seeks to identify the stages in the development of Hegel's doctrine in their intrinsic necessity and with respect to the historical conditions. The doctrine, stemming from definite requirements, could turn against the culture from which it sprang only as a result of subsequent development. Engels takes the idealistic view that the epoch which determined the necessity of Hegel's doctrine was a necessary stage in the development of the people's spirit,
84 inevitably led to an ever more resolute attack by the new on the old.Engels did not yet see the struggle of these opposites as a relation between classes. For him it was an antithesis of the generations. The young people are fostered on new ideas and the country's future depends on them, because they alone, inspired with these ideas and fired with youthful enthusiasm, are capable of resolving the ever-deepening contradictions. In an article, "Immermann's Memorabilien", at the end of 1840, Engels writes: "We have a touchstone for the young in the shape of the new philosophy; they have to work their way through it and yet not lose the enthusiasm of youth" (1, 2; 168).
To master the new philosophy is to cut one's way sword in hand through the jungle of philosophical speculations to the palace of the idea and to waken the sleeping princess with a kiss; those who are incapable of doing this, will not be recognised by this age as its sons. In order to perform this feat, there is no need to immerse oneself in speculative reasoning about what is ``in-itself'' and what is ``for-itself''; the thing is not to fear the work of the mind, the dark clouds of philosophical speculations and the rarified air of the summits of abstraction. For the whole point is to fly, like the eagle, to meet the sun of truth. And contemporary young people, Engels emphasises, are capable of performing this great feat, because they have "gone through Hegel's school, and in the heart of the young many a seed has come up splendidly from the system's dry husk. This is also the ground for the boldest confidence in the present; that its fate depends not on the cautious fear of action and the ingrained philistinism of the old but on the noble, unrestrained ardor of youth. Therefore let us fight for freedom as long as we are young and full of glowing vigour; who knows if we shall still be able to when old age creeps upon us!" (1, 2; 168-9).
Taken by themselves, these impassioned calls by the young man may appear to be vague. Actually, as I have partially shown above, Engels not only calls for a conjunction of the progressive philosophy and progressive political practice, but also explains what this implies. It implies realisation of the bourgeois-democratic programme for reuniting Germany in a revolutionary way. In his article, "Ernst Moritz Arndt", he says that this is the German people's prime need and 85 constitutes the basis for its future freedom. "So long as our Fatherland remains split we shall be politically null, and public life, developed constitutionalism, freedom of the press, and all else that we demand will be mere pious wishes always only half-fulfilled; so let us strive for this and not for the extirpation of the French!" (j, 2; 150). The expression "developed constitutionalism" used by Engels---and under a press censorship---could mean only one thing: a democratic republic. It is quite safe to say that the demand for an end to the numerous German monarchies and the establishment of one democratic republic was put forward in the 1840s (and even later) only by the revolutionary democrats. During the 1848 Revolution, it was one of the key points of the "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany" proclaimed by Marx, Engels and their associates.
In the same article, Engels resolutely opposes, on the one hand, German nationalism (Teutonomania) and, on the other, cosmopolitanism, which was especially being preached in that period by the South German liberals. Engels explains that Teutonomania is a distorted patriotism and a negation of the great gains of the French Revolution; it tends to take the German nation "back into the German Middle Ages or even into the primeval German purity of the Teutoburger Wald" (1, 2; 141). This Teutonomania exposed its own futility by making pretentious nationalistic declarations, which amounted to the claim that the whole world had been created for the sake of the Germans, and that they themselves had long since risen to the highest stage of development.
However, cosmopolitanism was equally dangerous because it rejected national distinctions and underestimated the task of Germany's national unification. The French Revolution, which some were inclined to present as a source of cosmopolitan ideas, actually inflicted a heavy defeat on them, because its most important significance lay in "the restitution of the French nation in its position as a great power, whereby the other nations were compelled to close their ranks as well" (1, 2; 142).
Among other things, Engels regarded as Borne's historic achievement the fact that he had "torn the ostentatious finery off the Germanising trend and also unmercifully exposed the shame of cosmopolitanism, which merely had impotent, more pious wishes" (1, 2; 142). Engels counters 86 nationalism and cosmopolitanism with a revolutionarydemocratic programme for transforming Germany into a unified democratic state. He has yet to realise that this undoubtedly primary task cannot provide a basis for doing away with man's exploitation and oppression. The social evil, of which Engels wrote with such indignation in his "Letters from Wuppertal", would not disappear with the abolition of absolutism, aristocratic privileges and other institutions of feudal society.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 10 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S STRUGGLE AGAINST SCHELLING'S IRRATIONALISM.In the autumn of 1841, Engels moved to Berlin to do his military service. In the course of a year, he studied the science of artillery, attended lectures at the Berlin University, and met and became intimate with the Young Hegelians in the city. At that time, the Prussian government had started a drive against Hegel's philosophy and had invited Schelling, who had long since gone over to the camp of the feudal-monarchist reaction, to lecture at the Berlin University in an effort to make short shrift of Hegelianism in its own philosophical sphere.
The famous philosopher's lectures aroused the liveliest interest not only in academic circles. Among those who came to the Auditorium Maximum of the University, where Schelling delivered his lectures, were the Austrian Ambassador Metternich, the future Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. Engels describes the atmosphere at the Berlin University as follows: "German, French, English, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, modern Greek and Turkish, one can hear all spoken together---then the signal for silence sounds and Schelling mounts the rostrum" (1, 2; 182).
Engels regularly attended Schelling's lectures not because he believed them to be an important contribution to philosophy. On the contrary, he was fully aware of the reactionary nature of Schelling's ideas, but he saw these as important evidence that the reactionaries, forced to recognise their adversaries' real strength and aware of the fact that reason was not on their own side, had mounted an open 87 drive under the banner of anti-intellectualism. Consequently, what was at stake here was not just the fate of Schelling, who had once played an outstanding role in philosophy and had then sunk into a state of spiritual prostration and lapsed into theosophic fantasy. Engels realised the political necessity of fighting Schelling's "philosophy of revelation", and was the first among the opponents of neo-Schellingianism to attack its irrationalism.
Throughout the second half of 1841 and in early 1842, Engels prepared three works for the press: "Schelling on Hegel", "Schelling and Revelation" and "Schelling, Philosopher in Christ". These pamphlets were published one after another, some anonymously and some under a pen-name, and created a great impression on forwardlooking men in Germany and also to some extent even abroad. These pamphlets, written in the light of Young Hegelianism, stood up for the progressive aspect of Hegel's philosophy and accused Schelling of abandoning the principles of reason and science, of preaching a mystical revelation and slavishly serving absolutism.
Engels saw Schelling as a traitor to the cause of freedom, for which he had fought in his young days, however inconsistently. He had then had faith in the power of human reason and social progress, but was now subordinating reason and philosophy to religion, and claiming revelation to be the source of truth.
All of Schelling's lectures were keynoted by the assertion that because philosophy starts from reason it is, in principle, incapable of proving the existence of the objects about which it reasons. The logical process can produce only the idea of the world, but not the world itself. Philosophy tells us what things are, what their substance is, but their existence is made known to us not by philosophy but by experience or revelation (depending on the objects being considered). Engels explains: "Hence according to Schelling it necessarily follows that in pure thought reason has not to deal with really existing things, but with things as possible, with their essence, not with their being; so that its subject is God's essence, but not His existence" (1, 2; 201). With such an approach, philosophy is a negative discipline which should be subordinated to the positive discipline, the philosophy of revelation; the latter, based on Holy Writ, on divine revelation, has good grounds for asserting that which cannot 88 be proved to exist by means of theoretical reason or philosophy in the ordinary sense of the word. Hegel's mistake consisted, consequently, in his efforts to derive from logic nature and God himself. By contrast, Schelling asserted that thought did not in any sense precede being; on the contrary, being preceded thought and engendered it; but Schelling's being was God's eternal being, i. e., not material reality or nature. In this way, Schelling attacked the Young Hegelian critique of revelation and religion in general as an ever deepening mistake of Hegel's, an attempt to refute by logical argument that which was fundamentally incomprehensible for reason and was revealed only to the believing soul.
Schelling's criticism pinpointed some of the vulnerable spots in Hegel's idealistic construct. Schelling had good grounds for rejecting Hegel's claim of deriving nature from thought and arguing that being was immanent in thought. Schelling remarked: "To retreat into pure thinking means in particular to retreat from all being outside thought" (1, 2; 183). But Schelling rejected Hegel's thesis concerning the primacy of thought with respect to being in order to counter it with his irrational and idealistic solution for the basic question of philosophy, asserting that thought was a derivative of divine being, of the spiritual in its irrational form, which was beyond the reach of thought. While rejecting Hegel's view of thought as the objective substance of things, Schelling did not reject the idealistic view of substance, but merely substituted a reactionary form of idealism for the historically progressive one. This was a critique of Hegel's idealism from the right.
What is also obvious is that Schelling's critique of dialectical idealism contained the formulation of a problem which is altogether insoluble in the light of idealism and of metaphysical materialism as well. Indeed, thought cannot prove the existence of the external world or derive it from the conception of being, pure being and so on. Social practice alone, and not just directly but through its entire historical development, proves the existence of objective content in our sensory perceptions and thought. Consequently, whereas irrationalism counters abstract thought with ``concrete'' revelation, dialectical materialism points to practice, which is the opposite of thought, but not in any absolute sense at all, because it is not at all transcendental but is the 89 activity of conscious and thinking beings aimed at definite material objects and making use of material instruments.
Of course, in 1841, Engels could not yet have had a dialectico-materialist approach in arguing the existence of objective reality, an approach first clearly formulated by Marx in 1845 in his "Theses on Feuerbach". Engels criticised Schelling in the light of Hegel's dialectical idealism interpreted in the left-Hegelian spirit. He insisted that "existence belongs indeed to thought, that being is immanent in the mind" (1, 2; 186). But even with this approach, which was clearly inadequate for a positive solution of the problem, ' Engels exposed the reactionary substance of Schelling's "positive philosophy", which subordinated reason to faith, and science and philosophy to religion.
While Hegel asserted that all rational was real, and all real rational, Schelling stressed the weaknesses of panlogism and argued that the rational was merely possible. Engels contested this central point of the "positive philosophy" and explained that the rationality of the real is its regularity, while the reality of the rational is a regularity of the rational reconstruction of the world. From Schelling's propositions it followed that reason (and the whole of man's conscious activity in general) was powerless because the world was allegedly irrational. Engels writes: "Up to now, all philosophy has made it its task to understand the world as reasonable. What is reasonable is, of course, also necessary, and what is necessary must be, or at least become, real. This is the bridge to the great practical results of modern , philosophy" (1, 2; 200).
Subsequently, in his work, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels demonstrated that Hegel's thesis concerning the reality of the rational and the rationality of the real contained within itself a revolutionary and a conservative trend. In the early 1840s, Engels had not yet noticed the duality of the thesis, which allowed for opposite conclusions. However, in his critique of Schelling, Engels already brings out the revolutionary trend, relies on it and ties it in with political tasks.
Engels criticises Schelling as an apologist of the German status quo and, in contrast to his retrograde philosophy, calls for a struggle to establish the new, the rational, the necessary. "Hence we shall rise confidently against the new enemy" (7, 2; 187). Consequently, Engels saw the critique of 90 Schelling as an urgent political task.
He shows that Schelling converts the possible and the real, the potential and the actual, capability and existence into absolute opposites. Because every possibility is two-fold (it may or may not be realised) reason, which according to Schelling deals merely with the potential of being, never knows whether it will actually be realised. Engels qualifies these conclusions as a mixture of mysticism and scholasticism.
In his pamphlet, "Schelling, Philosopher in Christ", Engels sarcastically ridicules irrational idealism and its theological premises. The pamphlet is a parody of the essay of a pietist who approves of Schelling's switch to the obscurantist camp and regards this as a miracle of divine grace, the hand of the Saviour imposed on the sinner, who had long wallowed in the abomination of pantheism. Obscurantism, says Engels, lauds Schelling for having "immediately and with open visor attacked philosophy and cut away its ground, reason, from under its feet" (1, 2; 248), proclaiming that "natural reason is incapable of proving the existence of even a blade of grass; that all its demonstrations, arguments and conclusions do not hold water and cannot lead up to the divine, since in its heaviness it always remains prostrate on the earth" (1,2; 248). Engels says ironically that Schelling has crucified reason, something that it is much harder to do than crucifying the body. After all, reason leads to the most horrible consequences, as will be seen from the French Revolution, which set up reason, like the whore of old, upon the throne of God. "Schelling has brought back the good old times when reason surrenders to faith, and worldly wisdom, by becoming the handmaid of theology, of divine wisdom, is transfigured into divine wisdom. 'And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted' (Matthew, 23:12)" (1, 2; 250).
However, the pietist announcing the miracle of Schelling's transfiguration, does not confine himself to the panegyric but makes some critical remarks about the philosopher. After all, he says, despite all his criticism of reason, Schelling, insofar as he still remains a philosopher, has not totally abandoned his old false wisdom: he is still unable completely to overcome the haughtiness of his own reason and make short shrift of theoretical thinking for good. But let us hope that the Lord, who has so miraculously shown his 91 mercy with Schelling, will wash away that stain as well.
Engels's articles about Schelling are of interest to us not only as a critique of irrationalism at an early stage in the making of Marxism, but also as evidence of the young man's attitude to Hegel, the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach, for it is here that Engels first makes sufficient explicit statements on these questions.
We have seen that Engels stands up for the principles of Hegel's philosophy, interpreting it in the spirit of Young Hegelianism. He believes that the Young Hegelians carried Hegel's philosophy into the broad social arena, directly involved it in the struggle against reaction, and sifted its progressive principles from the conservative political conclusions. Engels assumes that these conclusions do not of necessity follow from Hegel's philosophical system. Whereas the system had in the main been completed by 1810, Hegel's political views took final shape by about 1820 and so carried the imprint of the Restoration period. Hegel did not understand the "world-historical necessity" (I, 2; 196) of the July 1830 revolution and found English institutions, which epitomised political compromise, to be much more congenial.
Engels asserted that Hegel's socio-political views would have been totally different, that is, they would not have been conservative if he had held to the principles of his own philosophy* ignoring the demands of the powers that be. "Thus his philosophy of religion and of law would undoubtedly have turned out very differently if he had abstracted himself more from the positive elements which were present in him as a product of his time, and had proceeded instead from pure thought. All inconsistencies and contradictions in Hegel can be reduced to that. Everything which in the philosophy of religion appears too orthodox, and in the philosophy of law too pseudo-historical, is to be understood from this point of view. The principles are throughout independent and free-minded, the conclusions---no one denies it---sometimes cautious, even illiberal. Now some of his pupils appeared on the scene who kept to the principles and rejected the conclusions where they could not be justified" (1, 2; 196).
Consequently, Engels linked Hegel's conservative political views with his personal shortcomings, and still failed to see their connection with a definite social stand that could not be reduced to the individual frame of mind.
92Considering the history of the Young Hegelian movement, Engels remarked that for some time its leaders had not dared openly to voice the radical conclusions they had drawn from Hegel's philosophy. The reactionary Leo, who had published a loud pamphlet entitled The Hegelians, did the Young Hegelians a great service: he accused them of that which reflected their actual substance, thereby forcing them to admit what they were seeking to conceal. Whereas at first, the Young Hegelians disowned Leo's conclusions, now "not one of them thinks of denying his charges, so high has their audacity risen these past three years. Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums, Strauss's Dogmatik and the Deutsche Jahrbucher show the fruits of Leo's denunciation; nay, Die Posaune demonstrates the relevant conclusions even in Hegel. This book is so important for Hegel's position if only because it shows how often the bold, independent thinker in Hegel prevailed over the professor who was subject to a thousand influences" (1, 2; 197).
Consequently, Engels regards Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums as a work that does not break with Young Hegelianism, and so also with idealism. He also says Bruno Bauer, who in his pamphlet Die Posaune des jiingsten Gerichts iiber Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen ascribes to Hegel some Young Hegelian ideas, merely exposes to the whole world the true secret of Hegel's philosophy. Engels abandoned this exaggeration, which was inherently Young Hegelian, in mid-1842, in his article, "Alexander Jung, 'Lectures on Modern German Literature'''.^^*^^
Engels regarded Feuerbach as a Young Hegelian ( Feuerbach had, indeed, been a left Hegelian before becoming a materialist), but still set him apart from the other leaders of the movement, emphasising the importance of his critique of Hegel's philosophy, while not yet indicating that the materialist Feuerbach was criticising Hegel's idealism.
There is much interest in Engels's remark that Hegel was being criticised from opposite angles: the conservative and _-_-_
^^*^^ "Is there anything for which poor Hegel has not been made responsible? Atheism, the omnipotence of self-consciousness, the revolutionary theory of the state, and now Young Germany as well. But it is perfectly ridiculous to connect Hegel with this coterie" (1, 2; 286). This was aimed directly against Jung and other Young Germans, but it also shows the defects of the Young Hegelian view of Hegel's philosophy, something that Engels was not yet aware of in 1842.
93 the radical. Schelling attacked Hegel for allegedly departing too far from the old. By contrast, Feuerbach rebuked Hegel for being still too deeply bogged down in the old. Engels joined Feuerbach but made a reservation. Feuerbach, he wrote, should have taken into account that "consciousness of the old is already precisely the new, that the old is relegated to history precisely when it has been brought completely into consciousness. So Hegel is indeed the new as old, the old as new. And so Feuerbach's critique of Christianity is a necessary complement to the speculative teaching on religion founded by Hegel" (1, 2; 237).In calling Feuerbach Hegel's continuator, Engels had in mind Hegel's view of religion as an inadequate expression of the Absolute Spirit. That was the starting point for the Young Hegelians, and it also had an influence on Feuerbach. But Engels does not point out the difference between Hegel's and the Young Hegelian philosophy of religion, for the latter led to atheism. Feuerbach's materialist conception of religion was fundamentally opposite to Hegel's according to which philosophy is the truth of religion. In his exposure of idealism, Feuerbach argued that it was, in effect, speculative theology. That, according to Feuerbach, was the basic defect of idealism, to which he opposed the materialist philosophy as a radical negation of theology and religion. Engels did not yet realise this antithesis between Feuerbach's materialism and Hegel's idealism. He remarks, it is true, that Feuerbach reduces religious notions to human emotions, so arguing that the mystery of religion does not spring from theology but from anthropology. But Engels did not regard Feuerbach's anthropologism as a form of the materialist world outlook, and approximated it with Strauss's theory of myths.
Still, it would be wrong to assume that in 1841 Feuerbach's materialism did not have any effect on the young man. Feuerbach's anthropologism, whose importance for a critique of religion was emphasised by Engels, is inseparable from materialism. Engels's articles on Schelling contained the first few hints of his materialist approach to the question concerning the nature of consciousness. Fully in the spirit of Feuerbach, Engels writes: "The conclusion of modern philosophy, which was at least among the premises of Schilling's earlier philosophy, and of which Feuerbach first made us conscious in all its sharpness, is that reason cannot 94 possibly exist except as mind, and that mind can only exist in and with nature, and does not lead, so to say, a life apart, in separateness from it, God knows where" (1, 2; 209). Elsewhere in the same article, "Schelling and Revelation", he says that "the infinite can only rationally exist in reality when it appears as finite, as nature and spirit, and that any other-worldly, extra-mundane existence of the infinite must be relegated to the realm of abstractions" (7, 2; 236). However, we should not exaggerate the proximity of these ideas to the materialist view of nature: the main thing in them is negation of the transcendental, which is, in fact, feasible within certain limits from an idealist standpoint as well. It is not accidental, therefore, that in his criticism of Schelling Engels refers to Hegel as a thinker who, in his view, came to comprehend the true relation of spirit and nature.
Schelling, says Engels, is unable to grasp the relation of the idea to nature and spirit, because he "conceives the Idea as an extra-mundane being, as a personal God, a thing which never occurred to Hegel. For Hegel the reality of the Idea is nothing but---nature and spirit" (1, 2; 216). So Engels does not reject idealism as such, but the idealistic-theological notion of existence outside the world of the spiritual primary principle. He agrees with Hegel's understanding of' the Absolute Idea as spiritual content inherent in nature and humanity.
The materialist trends in Engels's articles against Schelling should be regarded as an attempt to de-mystify Hegel's dialectics. In his view, dialectics is not a process taking place in the bosom of the Absolute Idea, but is the development and motive force of thought, of humanity's selfconsciousness. "The Hegelian dialectic, this mighty, never resting driving force of thought, is nothing but the consciousness of mankind in pure thinking, the consciousness of the universal, Hegel's consciousness of God. Where, as with Hegel, everything produces itself, a divine personality is superfluous" (1, 2; 236).
Of course, Engels's view of dialectics as the self-movement of thought does not go beyond the framework of idealism, but, as Marx does in his dissertation, he contrasts idealistic rationalism with the theological interpretation of the spiritual. This cannot be consistent, because historically and logically idealism is connected with theological premises. But 95 it is the impossibility of separating idealism from religion that helps to realise that it is invalid. Indeed, Feuerbach's achievement lay precisely in the fact that, starting out as an idealist, he understood that every idealistic philosophy had a religious lining to it, and broke with idealism by becoming and atheist.
In 1841, Engels, like Marx, was yet to see the organic connection between idealism and religion. But in one sense he went beyond Feuerbach: he highly valued Hegel's dialectic and got down to its critical assimilation. He applied dialectics to the solution of various philosophical problems and, in particular, wrote: "Only that freedom is genuine which contains necessity, nay, which is only the truth, the reasonableness of necessity" (/, 2; 236).^^*^^
Schelling rejected Hegel's conception of dialectics and held dialectics to be no more than a means of reasoning, of demonstration. Engels objected as follows: "Hegel's objective logic, however, does not develop the thoughts, it lets them develop themselves, and the thinking subject is, as mere spectator, quite accidental" (1, 2; 217). This emphasis on the objective substance of dialectics as a regularity inherent in all things is, it is true, somewhat one-sided, because the qualification of the cognising subject as an accidental observer of the objective dialectical process pushes into the background the question of subjective dialectics, of the dialectical method. But it would be wrong to seek in Engels's early writings any definition of dialectics that was consummate from the standpoint of dialectical materialism.
The analysis of Engels's writings against Schelling helps us to establish that he is in the main still a Young Hegelian. In the closing section of his article, "Schelling and Revelation", he proclaims self-consciousness to be the greatest creative force: " The self-consciousness of mankind, the new Grail round whose throne the nations gather in exultation and which _-_-_
^^*^^ Although this is directed against the Schellingian reduction of freedom to licence, and in the main coincides with Hegel's well-known definition, it still has to be distinguished from the latter. Hegel regarded freedom as cognised necessity, but asserted that necessity "in itself" is freedom and, consequently, freedom is primary, because "freedom is the substance, the essence of spirit" (72, 11; 44). This view of freedom is connected with his conception of the Absolute Idea, in which freedom and necessity allegedly coincide. Engels, for his part, rejected the conception of the Absolute Idea, of God.
96 makes kings of all who submit to it, so that all splendour and might, all dominion and power, all the beauty and fulness of this world lie at their feet and must yield themselves up for their glorification. This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom" (1, 2; 239). Engels says that self-consciousness is most powerful and that it triumphantly advances through a horde of enemies barring its way. Engels draws this conclusion: if there is nothing higher than self-consciousness, there is no God (1, 2; 239-40).^^*^^ There is no divine revelation, there is man's revelation to man, which in its highest expression also comes to self-consciousness. "The Idea, the self-consciousness of mankind, is that wonderful phoenix who builds for himself a funeral pyre out of all that is most precious in the world and rises rejuvenated from the flames which destroy an old time" (1, 2; 239).Hardly any of Engels's Young Hegelian friends of the period could have formulated with such impressive forcefulness and youthful drive the philosophical credo of that movement. Engels was able to do this because he combined the Young Hegelians' radical philosophical ideas with his own revolutionary-democratic political convictions. He declares the unconditional truth of atheism and calls for a revolutionary struggle against feudalism and absolutism. It is true that in the censored press he was unable to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, but his contemporaries understood very well what he meant by his call to "stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war''.
In early 1840, Engels wrote in a letter to Friedrich Graeber: "It often happens to me that I cannot endorse in a subsequent letter things I said in an earlier one because they belonged so very much to the category of preconception of which I have freed myself in the meantime" (1, 2; 489). This admission does not suggest any kind of uncertainty and confusion, but speed of spiritual development.
_-_-_^^*^^ Ye. A. Stepanova says quite rightly in her monograph, Frederick Engels: "In criticising Schelling's reactionary mystical philosophy, Engels was the first Young Hegelian openly to raise the banner of atheism" (38, 18-19).
__PRINTERS_P_97_COMMENT__ 4 - 185 97 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 11 __ALPHA_LVL3__ A PRELIMINARY SUMMING-UP.In sum, the start of the scientific and socio-political activity of Marx and Engels is marked by their involvement in the Young Hegelian movement, in which they took a revolutionary-democratic stand. This was a period in which their initial theoretical and socio-political views were shaped, views whose development led to materialism and communism. One of the key features of their intellectual development in that period was their break with the traditional ideological conceptions: religious, liberal-enlightenment and romantic. One need merely ponder Engels's struggle against the "Wuppertal faith" to understand the extent to which this break he.lped to form his revolutionary-democratic convictions.
The adoption of atheism and the contrasting of philosophy and religion (the dominant ideology at that time), relentless criticism of the semi-feudal order, and theoretical research coupled with political action against the existing state of things,---those were the basic features of that stage in the shaping of the world outlook of Marx and Engels.
The combination of Young Hegelian idealism and revolutionary democratism was inevitably contradictory. The latter, the ideology of the "lower social orders", implied a political programme which put a high value on the struggle by the oppressed and exploited masses, which was written in the light of it, and which expressed its requirements. But Young Hegelian idealism continued to give practical-political issues a speculative twist in Hegel's manner. While proclaiming the need for a "philosophy of action", and appearing as such, Young Hegelianism interpreted practice as a special kind of theoretical activity with important socio-political problems as its object. On April 6, 1841, Bruno Bauer wrote to Marx: "At present, theory alone is the most effective practice, and we cannot even imagine to what extent it will become practice" (59; 250). The speculative-idealist approach to vital political issues (due, it is true, partly to the urge to mislead the censors) turned the Young Hegelian struggle against the ruling reaction into an esoteric philosophical exercise.
98The Young Hegelians rejected Hegel's theses concerning the harmony of philosophy and religion, but remained idealists, while declaring the need to criticise and overcome religion. Marx and Engels, having declared atheism to be the genuine philosophical standpoint, came to see the contradiction in their earliest writings. Feuerbach, who had proved that an idealistic substantiation of atheism was impossible, helped them to find the way to the materialist world outlook.^^*^^ It is true that at the stage in the making of the Marxist philosophy dealt with in this chapter, Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology was not yet regarded by Marx and Engels as a specific brand of materialism. They saw it, rather, as a consistent development of the anti-religious and antispeculative ideas that appeared to be fully compatible with the Left-Hegelian interpretation of philosophy. Only in the subsequent period did Marx and Engels reach the conclusion that Feuerbach's philosophy was, in principle, the opposite not only of Hegel's but also of Young Hegelian idealism.
But neither the Young Hegelians nor even Feuerbach proved able to digest Hegel's teaching critically and absorb its progressive element. This was done by the founders of Marxism. Engels subsequently said that "out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, however, there developed still another tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. And this tendency is essentially connected with the name of Marx" (1, 3; 361). This does not mean, of course, that as early as 1840 and 1841 Marx and Engels were already aware of the need to do what they subsequently did, for in that period they were still idealists and in the main shared the views of the Young Hegelians, and in particular, their view of the relation between philosophy and religion. Marx and Engels differed with their comrades, the Young Hegelians, only on a few points whose importance became obvious later. Thus, as I have shown, Marx did not confine himself to analysing the contradictions between Hegel's basic _-_-_
^^*^^ Engels said that one of the things that had induced him to write his work, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, was the urge to pay due tribute to Feuerbach's doctrine: "A full acknowledgement of the influence which Feuerbach, more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher, had upon us during our period of storm and stress, appeared to me to be an undischarged debt of honour" (1, 3; 336).
99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1981/MMP495/20091123/199.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2009.11.23) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ propositions and the final conclusions of his system, but strove to understand these conservative conclusions as expressing the inconsistency of Hegel's method, so suggesting the need for a critical analysis of it and for a more consistent development of. dialectics.I also emphasised that Marx had his own view of the problem of self-consciousness and being, the central one for the whole Young Hegelian movement. He does not contrast self-consciousness with everything that exists but only with a definite social reality, with definite social forces, so that his contrast is free from the subjectivist trend to denial and debasement of everything that lies outside the consciousness, a trend which ultimately led to Stirner's voluntarism and anarchism and to the collapse of the Young Hegelian movement as a whole.
Even in 1840 and 1841, many Young Hegelians regarded Marx as an outstanding German philosopher and admired his powerful mind. Bruno Bauer, the recognised leader of the Young Hegelian movement, with whom Marx then had friendly relations, strove to secure Marx's co-operation and stressed in every way his certainty that Marx was a philosophical genius. The elder of the two, Bauer anticipated the political obstacles that Marx may meet with and advised his friend not to include in his dissertation "anything at all that transcends philosophy". Concerning the famous stanza from Aeschylus, which Marx quoted in the Foreword to his dissertation, Bauer wrote: "On no account must you now leave this stanza from Aeschylus in the dissertation" (43; 252). Marx took his friend's advice and removed the Foreword when defending his dissertation. He must have written it when preparing the paper for the press.
K. F. Kopoen said in a letter to Marx that Bauer's article, "Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit" (The Christian State and Our Epoch), which appeared in the Hallische Jahrbucher in 1841, clearly showed Marx's influence.
When the anonymous pamphlet, "Die Posaune des Jungsten Gerichts iiber Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen", was published it was assumed, even among the Young Hegelians, that it had been written by Bauer together with Marx. The correspondence between Marx and Ruge, and also indirect evidence, suggest that Marx did not actually take part in writing the pamphlet but appeared to 100 have suggested to Bauer, the author, many interesting ideas.^^*^^
The well-known letter from M. Hess to the writer B. Auerbach on September 2, 1841, gives the most striking testimonial of the impression which the young Marx made on his Young Hegelian friends, most of whom were his elders. The letter has been quoted many times over in studies by Soviet and foreign authors, but I feel that I must quote this eloquent document once again. It refutes the assertions that the young Marx was a student of Hess's. It was Hess who wrote to a friend in 1841, before Marx had published a single piece of research: "You can look forward to becoming acquainted with the greatest, perhaps the only living, real philosopher. Shortly, as soon as he starts to publish his writings or to lecture, the whole of Germany will look to him. Both in trend and philosophical knowledge, he surpasses not only Strauss, but also Feuerbach. And that is saying something. If I could be in Bonn when he starts his lectures on logic I would become the most assidious member of his audience. I wish I could constantly have such a man as teacher in philosophy.
``Dr. Marx---that is my idol's name---is still a very young man (he is barely over 24 years); he will deliver the final blow at medieval religion and politics. He has the most profound philosophical gravity, combined with the subtlest wit. Just imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel blended in one individual; I say blended and not mixed, and this should give you some idea of Dr. Marx" (43; 261).
Hess may have read Marx's dissertation, and this high assessment (which undoubtedly shows Hess's own perspicacity) may also have been the result of personal contacts with the young man, but one thing is clear: Marx stood out among the Young Hegelians.
Engels's writings, which were considered above in detail, suggest that in 1841 he was prominent among the Young Hegelians not only as a revolutionary democrat but also as a thinker who produced the penetrating and profound _-_-_
^^*^^ In a letter to Arnold Ruge on March 5, 1842, Marx says: "With the sudden revival of the Saxon censorship, it is obvious from the outset that it will be quite impossible to print rny "Treatise on Christian Art", which should have appeared as the second part of the Posaune" (1, 1; 382).
101 critique of Schelling's irrationalism.^^*^^ Because Engels had used a pen-name in his articles against Schelling, for a long time they were ascribed to various prominent members of the democratic movement. Ruge wrote F. Oswald (the penname) a letter in which he gave a high evaluation of his work on Schelling and insistently urged him to write for the Hallische Jahrbiicher. An article by V. Botkin in Otechestvennye zapiski in 1843, entitled "German Literature", shows that Engels's writings about Schelling had a considerable influence on Botkin, himself a well-known figure in the bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia.Consequently, at the very start of their scientific, political and public activity, Marx and Engels were outstanding representatives of the historically progressive Young Hegelian movement, which Engels subsequently called the "extreme philosophical party" (2, 1; 312) in Germany.
_-_-_^^*^^ The well-known Hegelians, Professors C. Michelet and Ph. Marhinecke of the Berlin University referred in their lectures to Engels's attack on Schelling and accepted his views (119; 1235). Michelet, in particular, emphasised the solid grounds for Engels's criticism of Schelling's teaching of potentials and quoted the relevant passages from his pamphlet, "Schelling and Revelation" (see 119; 1239). Under the influence of Engels's pamphlet, Ruge characterised Schelling's lectures as a "betrayal of philosophy" (Ibid.). We find, therefore, that Engels's writings drew the attention of broad circles of those who were concerned with philosophy.
[102] __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter Two __ALPHA_LVL2__ BEGINNING OF TRANSITIONFollowing the defence of his doctoral dissertation, Marx intended to lecture at the Bonn University. He moved from Berlin to Trier and then on to Bonn and worked hard on his future lectures. This must have led to his study of A. Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchungen, Aristotle's De Anima, Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and Correspondence, David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Rozenkrantz's A History of Kantian Philosophy and other works (see 43; 107-36).
Bauer's letters to Marx, when the latter was working on his doctoral dissertation in Berlin, show that the Young Hegelian leader argued that work at the University would be the best choice. At the time he himself was an assistant professor at the Bonn University. He pinned great hopes on Marx's arrival in Bonn for making joint attacks on the theologists, publication of the journal Archives of Atheism, and so on. Unfortunately, we do not have Marx's replies to Bauer, but a study of his letters suggests that Marx was not sure that work at the University was the most suitable field for scientific, political and public activity. That is why, apparently, Bauer wrote to Marx on March 31, 1841: "It would be absurd for you to devote yourself to practical activity" (43; 250).
In early 1842, Bauer was dismissed from the Bonn University, and this showed very well that it was impossible to work at a German university while carrying on a struggle against the religious and political ideology prevalent in the country. Marx abandoned the idea of becoming a lecturer 103 and threw himself into the political struggle and revolutionary-democratic journalism. In April 1842, he became a contributor of the Rheinische Zeitung on politics, commerce and industry, and in October of that year, its editorin-chief.
This was a new and important stage in his ideological development, and he himself subsequently wrote: "In the years 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests. The proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag on thefts of wood and parcelling of landed property, the official polemic which Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, opened against the Rheinische Zeitung on the conditions of the Moselle peasantry, and finally debates on free trade and protective tariffs provided the first occasions for occupying myself with economic questions" (2, 1; 502).
His study of political economy and criticism of its bourgeois limitations were of tremendous importance in shaping his materialist view of history. As V. I. Lenin notes, the articles in the Rheinische Zeitung show "signs of Marx's transition from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism" (5, 21; 80).
The Rheinische Zeitung was set up by a group of Cologne liberals and its first issue appeared on January 1, 1842. The group which set up the joint-stock company did not so much want to engage in anti-government activity as to create a counter-weight to the ultra-Montagne Kolnische Zeitung, whose influence in the Rhine Province was a source of dissatisfaction in Prussian government circles. The publishers also felt that the paper should help to strengthen and extend the Zollverein (the Customs Union). They invited a wellknown bourgeois economist, F. List, to fill the post of editor-in-chief. When List declined the invitation, the Rheinische Zeitung in effect became an organ of the Young Hegelians. Engels characterised its political line as follows: "And while in the Deutsche Jahrbiicher the practical ends were still predominantly put forward in philosophical disguise, in the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842 the Young Hegelian school revealed itself directly as the philosophy of the aspiring radical bourgeoisie and used the meagre cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship" (2, 3; 343).
104Frederick William IV, who had hypocritically declared in 1841 that he loved a sober-minded opposition, at once saw the Rheinische Zeitung as an attempt on the foundations of the Prussian state. The paper's shareholders were ordered at once to remove the editor-in-chief, the Young Hegelian A. Rutenberg, although, as Marx said, "he was not a danger to anyone but the Rheinische Zeitung and himself" (1, 1; 394). It was not Rutenberg, but the leaders of the Young Hegelian movement and Marx, of course, who decided on the paper's political line. Engels wrote that Marx's "criticism of the proceedings in the Rhenish Landtag had excited very great attention" (2, 3; 78). When Rutenberg left, the post of editor-in-chief was offered to Marx. Lenin wrote: "The newspaper's revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx's editorship" (5, 21; 47.).
The keynote of Marx's articles in the paper was defence of the interests of the oppressed and exploited and struggle for democratic change, for "the poor, politically and socially propertyless many" (7, 1; 230). While taking an implacable revolutionary stand, Marx also took a sober view of the conditions in which the paper had to be published. There is 'a need, he says in one letter, to make full use of the extremely limited opportunities in Prussia for progressive journalism, because "such a clear demonstration against the fundamentals of the present state system can result in an intensification of the censorship and even the suppression of the paper" (/, 1; 392).
The government should not be provided with the desired opportunity for putting down the paper. Accordingly, Marx objects to the loud pseudo-revolutionism displayed by the Berlin Young Hegelians, who had joined in a group they called "Die Freien" (The Free), and vociferously trumpeted the earth-shattering importance of the "philosophy of self-consciousness". E. Bauer, E. Meyen, L. Buhl, M. Stirner and other members of the group, whose appearance signalled the break-up of the Young Hegelian movement, had installed themselves in the Rheinische Zeitung when Ruthenberg was editor. As Marx wrote to A. Ruge, they sent to the paper "heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and seasoned with a little atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied)" (7, 1; 393). When Marx became editor, he refused to publish 105 articles of that kind, believing them to be, first, meaningless, and second, at variance with the actual conditions, which had to be reckoned with if the paper was to come out. He wrote: "I demanded of them less vague reasoning, magniloquent phrases and self-satisfied self-adoration, and more definiteness, more attention to the actual state of affairs, more expert knowledge. I stated that I regard it as inappropriate, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms, etc., and that I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all" (LI; 394-95).^^*^^
Here one should first of all note Marx's conviction that communism must be discussed fundamentally and not in passing, in pieces of semi-fictional writing, as "The Free" were doing. One should also bear in mind his attitude to communism at the time, brought out over an article in the Augsburg - Allgemeine Zeitung, which accused the Rheinische Zeitung of communism for carrying an article by M. Hess in June 1842. This kind of accusation just fell short of being a report to the police, and Marx duly responded to that reactionary pro-Austrian newspaper. In an article entitled "Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung", Marx rejected the charge and said that the Rheinische Zeitung "does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider it possible" (1, 1; 220).
What he meant, of course, was Utopian communism (and also Utopian socialism, for there was mention of Fourier and Considerant, among others): at the time there were no other socialist or communist theories. The Utopians believed that private property had resulted from the human spirit's erring on its way to the absolute truth and justice. Marx, who had a profound grasp on Hegel's historical approach, was naturally unable to accept such anti-historical views, and not because _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1895, Engels wrote to Mehring that "Marx ... came out against the Bauers, that is, objected to the Rheinische Zeitung being mainly an organ of theological propaganda, atheism, etc., instead of being an organ of political discussion and action; he also objected to Edgar Bauer's catch-word communism based solely on the desire of 'acting in the most extreme manner', which soon gave way in Edgar's writings to other radically sounding phrases" (4, 39; 473).
106 he did not see the social cataclysms engendered by private property (his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, as I intend to show later, expose the antagonistic contradictions to some extent), but because he opposed Utopian conceptions, which sprang from an abstract antithesis between that ought to be and what existed, an antithesis whose flimsiness he had come to realise back in 1837.But while rejecting the Utopian views of contemporary communists and socialists, he believed that the question of communism had assumed pan-European importance. Consequently, there was a need to draw a distinction between the facts and their interpretation, which was, in that instance, unsatisfactory because it was Utopian. Such was the conclusion to which Marx was moving. Furthermore, there was a need to discover a real solution for the social problems which had not simply been raised by Utopian socialists and communists, but which sprang from the development of society, especially from the development of large-scale industry. "That the estate that today owns nothing demands to share in the wealth of the middle classes is a fact which, without the talk at Strasbourg, and in spite of Augsburg's silence, is obvious to everyone in Manchester, Paris and Lyons." (1, 1; 216). In this context Marx says: "We have not mastered the art of disposing by a single phrase of problems which two nations are working to solve" (1, 1; 219). Marx has the French and the English in view. He believes that the strength of the communist movement lies above all in its ideas and their theoretical substantiation. He writes: "We are firmly convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous, whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken possession of our minds, ideas to which reason has fettered our conscience, are chains from which one cannot free oneself without a broken heart; they are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to them" (1, 1; 221). All this amounts to the recognition of the outstanding importance of Utopian communism, although Marx goes on to add that the Rheinische Zeitung intended to criticise the doctrine.^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ In 1859, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx recalled his polemic with the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung and stressed that __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 108. 107
In the light of the ideas expressed by Marx in his article "Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung", one will fully understand his sharp remarks addressed to the Berlin "The Free" and their dilettantist attempts to discuss communism in passing. He countered these, superficial and peremptory reasonings with the demand for a serious discussion of the questions raised by the Utopian socialists and communists, taking account of the specifics of a daily newspaper and the censorship, which it would be absurd to ignore. He writes: "Such writings as those of Leroux, Considerant and above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon cannot be criticised on the basis of superficial flashes of thought, but only after long and profound study" (/, 1; 220).
Marx urges the need for thoroughness not only in considering the question of communism, which was new and insufficiently clear to the Germans. Religion and the state should be -discussed in concrete terms, involving an analysis of the definite facts reported by the newspaper. He writes: "I requested further that religion should be criticised in the framework of criticism of political conditions rather than that political conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion, since this is more in accord with the nature of a newspaper and the educational level of the reading public.... Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label `atheism' (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people" (I, 1; 394-95).^^*^^
_-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 107. then, in 1842, he had not had an adequate knowledge of the writings of the Utopian communists and socialists. "At that time, when the good will 'to go further' greatly outweighed knowledge of the subject, a philosophically weakly tinged echo of French Socialism and communism, made itself audible in the Rheinische Zeitung. I declared myself against this amateurism, but frankly confessed at the same time in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not permit me even to venture any judgement on the content of the French tendencies" (2, 1; 503).^^*^^ M. V. Serebryakov is quite right when he says in this context: "The experience of stubborn and exhausting struggle against the censorship, the Oberprasidem and the Ministry showed Marx very well the tremendous importance of political struggle. It also convinced him that the Berlin Young Hegelians were not capable of being serious and courageous allies in this struggle" (36'; 102).
108Although Marx here refers mainly to newspapers, his differences with "The Free" went well beyond the question of the form of exposition. The Young Hegelians were inclined to reduce the whole struggle to a criticism of religious ideology, while Marx believed that the criticism of religion and theology was subordinate to the solution of vital political problems.
How did "The Free" respond to these serious critical remarks? In the above-quoted letter to Ruge, Marx tells of the answer he received from Meyen in which he is warned that he is laying himself open to "being accused of conservatism". Meyen insisted, Marx says, that "the newspaper should not temporise, it must act in the most extreme fashion, i.e., it should calmly yield to the police and the censorship instead of holding On to its positions in struggle, unseen by the public but nevertheless stubborn and in accordance with its duty" (1, 1, 395). This was severe condemnation of pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, which did not convince anyone because it was meaningless, but which nevertheless drew reprisals which the progressive forces were still unable duly to repulse.
What the Young Hegelian Meyen, who was out of touch with the real revolutionary struggle, irresponsibly called ``conservatism'', was actually a well-considered policy pursued by Marx, who quite rightly believed that "in order to save a political organ, one can sacrifice a few Berlin windbags". Despite the "most horrible torments of the censorship" and "howls from shareholders" over the Rheinische Zeitung's revolutionary line, Marx continued the struggle against reaction. He wrote: "I remain at my post only because I consider it my duty to prevent, to the best of my ability, those in power from carrying out their plans" (1, 1; 395).
Consequently, at the very beginning of his activity as editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx came out against "The Free" of Berlin, and this conflict marked the start of his break with the Young Hegelians grouped round Bruno Bauer, who wrote to Marx concerning his critical remarks addressed to "The Free": "Before sending off your letters you should keep them in your drawer for at least a day" (43; 292). Not only Bauer, but also Ruge, who took a negative attitude to the behaviour of "The Free", with their loud literary battles in Berlin beer-halls, failed to 109 understand the true meaning of Marx's critical remarks.^^*^^ While keeping his distance from "The Free", Marx did not yet break with Young Hegelian idealism. In November 1842, he published a review of Gruppe's pamphlet, Bruno Bauer und die akademische Lehrfreiheit (Bruno Bauer and Academic Freedom of Teaching), and stood up for the Young Hegelian leader in face of the foolish attack of the reactionary author. In a letter to Ruge on March 13, 1843, he gives a high assessment of Bruno Bauer's book, Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Case), which appeared in 1842.^^**^^ Marx, like Engels, broke with Young Hegelian idealism and began a struggle against this philosophical theory of German bourgeois radicalism only in the course of his subsequent ideological development, as he moved towards dialectical and historical materialism.
Marx set for his view of the concrete political approach to theoretical matters and declared that "quite general theoretical arguments about the state political system are more suitable for purely scientific organs than for newspapers. The correct theory must be made clear and developed within the concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things" (1, 1; 392). His articles in the Rheinische Zeitung are a remarkable specimen of this kind of concrete theoretical analysis of political issues. In an article on the debate in the Rhenish Landtag on freedom of the press, Marx exposed the spokesmen for the princely and nobiliary estates who were horrified at freedom of the press, the people's independent action and democracy. The reactionaries looked down on freedom of the press and civil rights in general, as a source of moral dissoluteness. A spokesman for the princely estate, for instance, claimed that the press produced revolutions. "Which press? The progressive or the reactionary?", Marx asks (I, 1; 143). In this context, he considers the legitimacy of revolutions, which are not accidental because they are necessarily engendered by the development of the people's spirit. "Charles I went to _-_-_
^^*^^ Ruge thought that Marx was merely condemning the behaviour of "The Free" and wrote: "I hope that you will save Bauer from this atmosphere" (43; 289). He failed to understand that their behaviour and views were closely connected with the subjectivist philosophy of Bruno Bauer, who soon after his return to Berlin became head of the group.
^^**^^ "In my opinion, he has never before written so well" (1, 1; 400).
110 the scaffold as the result of divine inspiration from below" (1, 1; 156), he remarks ironically.Marx censured the attacks of the serf-owners against the people's political activity and said that the half-way liberalism represented by the bourgeois urban estate was naturally impotent. Its members tended to regard the press as a trade, as an application of capital and believed that there had to be freedom of the press like freedom of private enterprise. To this Marx flatly objected: "Is the press free which degrades itself to the level of a trade?" (1, 1; 174).^^*^^ It is not surprising, therefore, that as a revolutionary democrat he wholeheartedly backed up the "ill-humoured but excellent speech" by a member of the peasant estate, who declared that "the human spirit must develop freely in accordance with its inherent laws and be allowed to communicate its achievements, otherwise a clear, vitalising stream will become a pestiferous swamp." The people, says Marx, must fight for freedom with all the means at their disposal, and not only with spears but also with axes (/, 1; 180-1).^^**^^
Marx's critical analysis of the debate on freedom of the press in the Rhenish Landtag led to the formulation of important theoretical questions: concerning the people's role (people's spirit) in history, the importance of the press in social development, the correlation of the ideal and the real, the motive forces of society's development, the influence of the class (estate) condition on ideological conceptions, etc. Here I merely list these questions, and shall specially consider them below.
In October and November 1842, Marx published an article in the Rheinische Zeitung on the debate in the Landtag on the bill on thefts of wood, a bill which qualified the collection of _-_-_
^^*^^ At the same time, Marx points out that his recognition of freedom of the press as the equivalent of freedom of enterprise is preferable "to the empty, nebulous and blurry arguments of those German liberals who think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firmament of the imagination instead of on the solid ground of reality. It is in part to these exponents of the imagination, these sentimental enthusiasts, who shy away from any contact of their ideal with ordinary reality as a profanation, that we Germans owe the fact that freedom has remained until now a fantasy and sentimentality" (I, 1; 172).
^^**^^ This first article of Marx's carried by the Rheinische Zeitung left a tremendous impression on his contemporaries. A. Ruge, for instance, declared that "this is undoubtedly the best of anything that has ever been written on the subject" (43; 276).
111 fallen wood by the peasants as theft of the forest-owners' property. Marx ridiculed the references by the advocates of the bill to the "customary rights" of the landowners, and said that these were "customary rightlessness" and lawlessness. Championing the peasant masses, he referred to the "customary right" of the poor which, he maintained, sprang from their social condition, that is, had an objective basis, and which legislation must in all cases take into account. "We demand for the poor a customary right, and indeed one which is not of a local character but is a customary right of the poor in all countries. We go still further and maintain that a customary right by its very nature can only be a right of this lowest, propertyless and elemental mass" (1, 1; 230). In this connection, Marx considers philosophical and sociological problems, among them the following: the objective basis of legislation and the development of society in general, the antithesis of poverty and wealth, the attitude of the state to private property and private interests, form and content, and the nature of feudalism.In his next article, "Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel", Marx stood up in defence of a Rheinische Zeitung correspondent who had reported the grave economic condition of the Mosel wine-growers. The report enraged the Oberprasident of the Rhine Province von Schaper and was later used as one of the pretexts for the subsequent closure of the paper. Marx refuted von Schaper's claim that the peasants were themselves to blame for the disasters, and declared that it was the existing social order in Prussia that objectively made for the grave condition of the Mosel peasantry. This particular question of the condition of the Mosel wine-growers provided Marx with an opportunity for considering the over-all sociological question concerning the objective nature of social relations. Engels later wrote that the question and the debate on the bill on thefts of wood induced Marx to make a close study of the economic foundation of social life, and this led directly to the formulation of the materialist view of history and of scientific socialism.
A basic feature of Marx's articles is their consistent party spirit. "Without parties there is no development, without demarcation there is no progress" (I, 1; 202).^^*^^ But because _-_-_
^^*^^ The question of party spirit became most acute when Freiligrath (who was subsequently an associate of Marx and Engels for a short time) __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 113. 112 he was still an idealist Marx saw the party-spirit principle as the standpoint of reason and universal interest, as contrasted with the ruling minority's unreason and self-seeking. There are good grounds for such an approach: the party spirit of the revolutionary class expresses the interests of society's development.
The revolutionary articles in the Rheinische Zeitung naturally led to constant clashes with the censors and the authorities. The censorship of the paper was intensified: the relatively liberal censor was replaced by a rabid advocate of the Prussian government's reactionary policy. Still, despite the threat of a ban, the Rheinische Zeitung continued, thanks to Marx's guidance, to raise fundamental political issues and to spread---naturally in a veiled form---the idea of the need for a revolutionary solution to the vital social problems. Engels later wrote: "Ten newspapers with the same courage as the Rheinische Zeitung ... and the censorship would have been made impossible in Germany as early as 1843" (2, 3; 70).
Finally, in January 1843, the Prussian Council of Ministers decided to stop the publication of the Rheinische Zeitung on April 1 of that year. In an effort to ease the paper's position, Marx resigned, and on March 18 published a statement to that effect, saying that he was leaving the post of editor-- inchief because of the "present conditions of censorship" (1, 1; 376).^^*^^ In Berlin, reactionary circles noted this with satisfaction because, as government leaders there used to say, "Marx's ultra-democratic views are quite incompatible with the basic principles of the Prussian state" (95; 57). The post went to the highly moderate and mediocre D. Oppenheim, _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 112. declared in one of his poems that freedom from the party spirit was an attribute of the poetic view of the world:
The poet stands on a tower which is higher
Than the steeple of the party.
In February 1842, the Rheinische Zeitung replied with a verse by Georg Herwegh, who resolutely stood up for the idea of the party spirit in literature:
Oh, my party, you are the proud foundation
And mother of numerous brilliant victories!
How can the poet fail to understand the most sacred word,
How can he fail to comprehend the great?
^^*^^ Herwegh wrote: "The scoundrels have now killed the Rheinische Zeitung as well ... Marx, an editor, who sacrificed everything to the paper and who, judging from today's letter, is prepared to end this affair on a loud note, finds himself in a painful situation. He has written me to say that he can no longer work in Prussia" (76: 161-2).
113 but even this no longer helped the paper and its last issue came out on March 31, 1843.^^*^^In a letter to Ruge, Marx says that the banning of the Rheinische Zeitung is indirect evidence of some progress in the political consciousness, and this for its part shows that the paper has fulfilled its mission. At the same time, he says that he personally cannot see what else he can do in journalism in Germany: "I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere. It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging and hair-splitting over words.... I can do nothing more in Germany" (1, 1; 397-8). Marx suggested to Ruge that there was a need for a German publication abroad to develop and spread revolutionary views without fear of censorship and in relative freedom. The Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher became just such a journal.
In the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx stood up for the interests of broad masses of working people, formulated a political programme for revolutionary democracy, and elaborated the key philosophical and sociological problems. The impression of fragmentariness in the approach to these problems, which was inevitable because they were not the actual subjectmatter of this or that article, disappears as soon as one regards them and the problems they deal with as a single whole.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 2 __ALPHA_LVL3__ THE REVOLUTIONARY-DEMOCRATICMarx did not believe that work on a newspaper meant leaving the sphere of philosophy for one of alien interests. _-_-_
^^*^^ The Rheinische Zeitung was banned by a special ministerial decree as allegedly lacking the established permit to publish. "As though," Marx wrote to Ruge, "in Prussia, where not even a dog can exist without its police number, the Rheinische Zeitung could have appeared even a single day without fulfilling the official conditions for existence" (1, 1; 396-7).
114 In the process of such work, philosophy itself tends to change, simultaneously transforming .the character of the press, which becomes more meaningful, rational, and capable of seeing the ways and means for a rational restructuring of social life. Such a change in the character of philosophy and the press accords with the natural development of the human spirit, which comes to realise the necessity that Marx considered in his dissertation.So, the world becomes philosophical and philosophy, secular. Men are increasingly concerned with the interests of reason, and philosophy, shedding its speculative neglect of the concrete reality, is filled with a real, chiefly political content. The appearance of philosophy in the broad social arena is an indication of its maturity and also of the fact that society is faced with important problems which cannot be ignored even by the opponents of philosophy. "Philosophy," Marx says, "comes into the world amid the loud cries of its enemies, who betray their inner infection by wild shouts for help against the fiery ardour of ideas. This cry of its enemies has the same significance for philosophy as the first cry of the new-born babe has for the anxiously listening ear of the mother; it is the cry testifying to the life of its ideas, which have burst the orderly hieroglyphic husk of the system and become citizens of the world" (1, 1; 196).
In one of its editorials, the Catholic Kolnische Zeitung accused the Rheinische Zeitung that, contrary to tradition, it was discussing on its pages not only current events, but also the most important questions of philosophy and religion, which allegedly are no topic for a newspaper. Marx replied in "The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kolnische Zeitung" and exposed the real meaning of these charges: it was condemnation of a philosophy which fought against religion that was regarded as the foundation of the state. Consequently, the Kolnische Zeitung was not merely objecting to the discussion of philosophical and religious matters in newspaper articles, but sought "to combat philosophical views and spread religious views" (7, 1; 186).
Marx explains that the emergence of philosophy in the newspaper was not at all accidental. There was also good reason why there was growing discussion of religious matters in the press. "When religion becomes a political factor, a subject-matter of politics, it hardly needs to be said that the newspapers not only may, but must discuss political 115 questions. It seems obvious that philosophy, the wisdom of the world, has a greater right to concern itself with the realm of this world, with the state, than has the wisdom of the other world, religion" (1, 1; 198).
The emergence of philosophy in the broad public arena is In accord with its essence and the whole course of its development, which brings out that essence. Philosophy does not hover outside the world, just as the brain is not to be found outside the man. Every true philosophy represents the living soul of culture, the spiritual quintessence of its time. That is why there necessarily comes a time when philosophy enters, not only internally (in content) but also externally, into interaction with the world that has engendered it and that it seeks to change and make rational. It is true that German philosophy (as all philosophy in general) is inclined to close itself within the systems it produces, to engage in impassive contemplation, and to contrast itself with the empirical reality as being something not worthy of its attention. "True to its nature, philosophy has never taken the first step towards exchanging the ascetic frock of the priest for the light, conventional garb of the newspapers" (7, 1; 195). What is more, "philosophy had even protested against the newspapers as an unsuitable arena, but finally it had to break its silence; it became a newspaper correspondent" (7, 1; 197). Consequently, philosophy's aloofness from the socio-political struggle and the universal proclamations of its being free from the party spirit do not adequately express its substance, which has developed to self-consciousness. Contrary to the notions of the Kolnische Zeitung, mature philosophy is not in any sense an esoteric doctrine of a handful of men, of sages who are alien to secular life; it is a mighty ideal force which springs from reality itself, from the development of its intrinsic spiritual content and which directs the activity of the people. "Philosophers do not spring up like mushrooms out of the ground; they are products of their time, of their nation, whose most subtle, valuable and invisible juices flow in the ideas of philosophy. The same spirit that constructs railways with the hands of workers constructs philosophical system in the brains of philosophers" (7, 1, 195).
Marx says philosophy is the highest expression of the human spirit arid seeks to show its essential unity with all the other forms of men's creative activity. That is why the 116 comparison between the activity of the philosopher and the work of the proletarian is of especial interest because it illustrates Marx's democratic view of the role of philosophy.
How then is the influence of philosophy on social life expressed? Marx points, first of all, to its role in developing the secular, non-religious consciousness and the corresponding socio-political theory with which definite types of statehood are connected. Throughout its existence, philosophy has dealt with the secularisation of the human consciousness. Thus, Francis Bacon released physics from theology, and this made it productive. Philosophy has done the same with political views, having demonstrated that the state and all the other social institutions are the handiwork of man, and consequently, can and must change in accordance with human requirements and the demands of developing reason. Thanks to philosophy, men began to look for the centre of gravity of the state within the state itself, and "earlier ... Machiavelli and Campanella, and later Hobbes, Spinoza, Hugo Grotius, right down to Rousseau, Fichte and Hegel, began to regard the state through human eyes and to deduce its natural laws from reason and experience, and not from theology" (7, 1; 201). In this sense, the philosophy of the new period has continued the work started by Heraclitus and Aristotle. Consequently, the struggle against the theological world outlook and the political practices attendant upon it "constitute the main content of the history of philosophy.
Marx believes that philosophy not only determines humanity's spiritual face; the concrete forms of relations among men, institutions and legislation also have definite philosophical conceptions as their source. Thus, "the French Napoleonic Code was derived not from the Old Testament, but from the school of ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, and Montesquieu, and from the French Revolution" (7, 1; 201-2). Consequently philosophy, which at the early stages of its existence is merely counterposed to reality subsequently overcomes this self-alienation through its own development. Its mission in history is to make the world philosophical, that is, rational, and so to abolish philosophy as reason opposed to the world. Philosophy fulfils its task in a struggle against religion, which alienates and distorts human relations and makes them hostile to men. Elaborating the ideas which he first expressed 117 in his dissertation, Marx asserted that, regardless of its concrete content, philosophy has everywhere and always been hostile to religion. He opposes theological rationalism and the related deism, which produces the notion of a general spirit of religion allegedly independent of the specific dogmatic content of the individual religions that are ranged in hostility against each other. Marx assumes that religious strife and wars show that the most essential thing for each religion is that which contrasts it with every other. Every religion proclaims its distinction, its specific content to be the only true one. That is why, for instance, the Protestant theologists rebuked Feuerbach and Strauss more "for regarding Catholic dogmas as Christian than for declaring that the dogmas of Christianity are not dogmas of reason" (1, 1; 197). Thus, religion is a negation not just of some system of philosophical views but of philosophy in general.
For the time being, Marx does not yet consider the notion, which is common to all religions, about the transcendental, super-natural, spiritual original cause of the world. Nor does he point out that idealism, like "theological rationalism", starts from the idea of the spiritual origin of the world. From Marx's standpoint, philosophy is by nature incompatible with any religious view of the world. This kind of contrast between philosophy and religion is, of course, insufficient because it fails to analyse the unity of these opposites in idealist philosophy. That is a shortcoming that we do not find in Feuerbach's writings, because his materialism exposes not only the specific features of Christianity but also that which is common to Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism and the other religions.
While still being an idealist, but already an atheist, (he has yet to become aware of the contradiction between the basic premises of idealism and atheism), Marx regards not only Epicurus but also Socrates and Aristotle as being opponents of religion. Although he loses sight of the kinship of idealist philosophy and the religious world outlook, he correctly emphasises that philosophy, at any rate in form, which is, of course, substantial (and has a definite influence on the content), always differs from religion because it engages in analysis, whereas religion proclaims dogmas, so ruling out in advance the legitimacy of any other standpoint. Philosophy appeals to the human reason, and religion, to emotion. 118 Philosophy does not promise anything except the truth, does not demand belief in its conclusions and insists on their verification. By contrast, religion promises its votaries the joys of paradise, demands blind faith in its dogmas, and threatens, curses and condemns those who disagree. That is why even the teachings produced by believing philosophers were treated as godless, because philosophical argumentation introduces into religion the standpoint of reason, that is, something that contradicts religion. And so Marx emphasises: "All the philosophies of the past without exception have been accused by the theologians of abandoning the Christian religion, even those of the pious Malebranche and the divinely inspired Jakob Bohme" (), 1; 190). The peasants of Braunschweig thought that Leibnitz did not believe in anything, while the English philosopher Clarke openly accused him of atheism. Consequently, Protestant theologians have good reason to assert that religion does not accord with reason. Religion counterposes faith to reason, while philosophy counterposes reason to faith.
Marx compares the role of philosophy and religion in the history of humanity and shows that the periods of upswing in social life were connected with outstanding achievements in philosophy, whereas religion has not produced a single great historical epoch. "Greece flourished at its best internally in the time of Pericles, externally in the time of Alexander. In the age of Pericles the Sophists, and Socrates, who could be called the embodiment of philosophy, art and rhetoric, supplanted religion. The age of Alexander was the age of Aristotle, who rejected the eternity of the `individual' spirit and the God of positive religions. And as for Rome! Read Cicero! The Epicurean, Stoic or Sceptic philosophies were the religions of cultured Romans when Rome had reached the zenith of its development" (1, I; 189). But while the outstanding historical epochs are connected with achievements in philosophy and the decline of the influence of religion, the crisis of ancient society could not be caused by the erosion of its religious consciousness. "It was not the downfall of the old religions that caused the downfall of the ancient states, but the downfall of the ancient states that caused the downfall of the old religions" (1, 1; 189): This shows that Marx is about to reach beyond the idealistic view of history: religion is seen not as the cause but as the effect of definite social processes. Such an assessment of the 119 historical role of religion in the ancient world gives a more concrete understanding of Marx's attitude to Feuerbach in the Rheinische Zeitung period.
Feuerbach believed that radical social change was connected with transitions from one religion to another.^^*^^ Religion, he said, was alienated form of reflection of the basic human requirements, emotions and sufferings, and also of the urge for happiness, and insofar as all of these cause historical events, religion is a motive force of history. In the Rheinische Zeitung period, Marx, like Feuerbach, took an idealistic view of the historical process, but he did not accept the anthropological view of religion and did not overestimate its connection with basic human requirements.
Anthropological materialism cannot explain whether socioeconomic or anthropological circumstances have the definitive role to play in shaping the religious consciousness. Feuerbach deals with both but does not show the relationship between them. By contrast, Marx holds that the secular content of religion cannot be reduced to the anthropological characteristics of the individual. Religion is not everlasting, and its basis---not human life as such, but distorted social reality----is equally transient. The latter is not created by religion and cannot be eliminated by it. In late 1842, he wrote Ruge that religion in itself is "without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself" (1, 1; 395).It is true that Feuerbach also has a conception of distorted social reality, but he is inclined to assume that it is religion that mainly distorts human life. But according to Feuerbach, religion not only distorts human relations but also expresses man's urge for happiness, love and sensuality in general. That is why he frequently considers the need for a substitution of a true, philosophical religion, a religion without God, for religious superstitions. "If philosophy is to replace religion, it must become a religion, while remaining a philosophy" (69, I; 409).
_-_-_^^*^^ He wrote: "Changes in religion are the only distinction between periods of humanity. The historical movement goes to the very roots only when it goes to the human heart. The heart is not a form of religion, as otherwise it, too, would have been located in the heart; the heart is the substance of religion" (69, I; 407). It should be emphasised that this is akin to the Young Hegelian notion of the role of religion in history.
120Marx spurns the inconsistency of Feuerbach's atheism and believes that the substance of religion is rooted in "distorted reality", a conception which (while still being unclarified) will be easily seen as the embryonic scientific conception of the antagonistic social relations which produce the religious consciousness.^^*^^
Of course, outside the context of historical materialism, "distorted reality" is not a scientific conception. Historical materialism regards socio-economic formations as lawgoverned stages in society's natural-historical development. The slave-holding, feudal and capitalist modes of production were necessary and progressive and not in any sense distorted social relations. The "distorted reality" conception has the imprint of anthropologism, because it implies the existence of social relations that contradict human nature. But, as Marx was soon to show, human nature is the totality of historically changing social relations.
Judging from Marx's letter to Ruge of March 20, 1842, one could say that while he shared Feuerbach's chief thesis concerning the real, that is, non-supernatural but earthly content of religion, he believed that it was hostile to man, and not human in any sense. In Prussia, he says, "the degradation of people to the level of animals has become for the government an article of faith and a principle. But this does not contradict religiosity, for the deification of animals is probably the most consistent form of religion, and perhaps it will soon be necessary to speak of religious zoology instead of religious anthropology" (1, 1; 384). Thus, Marx was dissatisfied with Feuerbach's denial of divine religion for the purpose of proving its human character, and saw in the religious alienation of human sensuality the evidence that religion was anti-humanistic. Does this mean that Marx had already discarded Feuerbach's view of religion? No, it does not. On the contrary, he elaborates Feuerbach's doctrine of religious alienation and gives a dialectical explanation • of alienation.
_-_-_^^*^^ K. Becker wrote: "While the other Young Hegelians moved from the criticism of the abstract conception of consciousness, which is intrinsic in the idealistic philosophy, only to the criticism of the concrete religious and political form of consciousness, Marx sought to consider the problem in more fundamental terms" (48; 14). This was expressed above all in the fact that Marx moved from criticism of consciousness (speculative, religious, political) to criticism of "distorted reality" on which it rested.
121Marx links up the criticism of religion with exposure of the distorted social reality and in the same letter to Ruge says that "a transcendental state and a positive religion go together" (7, 1; 382-3). In virtue of its hostility to man, the reactionary state needs a religious garb. Consequently, in 1842, Marx already regarded the existing state as `` transcendental'', that is, as alienation, as distortion of the human substance, so giving concrete expression to the conception of distorted social reality. Like the other Young Hegelians, he believes that religion tends to distort the substance of the state, but he does not apparently reduce the substance of the state (which he regards as a purposeful organisation of society) to religious alienation. That is why, evidently, he gives precedence to criticism of the state and politics over criticism of religion, a trend which undoubtedly expressed the Young Hegelians' advance to a more concrete formulation of vital socio-political problems.
The liberal opposition demanded no more than a constitutional monarchy. Informing Ruge of an article he was preparing on criticism of Hegel's natural law, Marx emphasises that the gist of it is "the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself" (1, 1; 382-3).
It is true that in his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx does not specially consider the question of the constitutional monarchy but, as we shall see later, he criticises the political domination of private property.
Informing Ruge in a letter of March 20, 1842, about a treatise of religious art which he was preparing (with an annex containing criticism of reactionary romanticism), Marx tells of his differences with Feuerbach within the framework of their common view of the earthly content of religion: "In the article itself I necessarily had to speak about the general essence of religion; in doing so I come into conflict with Feuerbach to a certain extent, a conflict concerning not the principle, but the conception of it. In any case, religion does not gain from it" (1, I; 386). We have here an important idea about the general essence of religion, something Marx had earlier not been aware of. The idea of the general essence of religion, which Feuerbach systematically elaborated, helps to bring out the speculative-theological premises of idealism. It will be easily seen that idealism expresses in conceptual form that which is common to all religions, and 122 not that which distinguishes one from another. Many may have differed with Feuerbach over the concept of alienation (this is no more than an assumption, because the said treatise has not come down to us). According to him, religious alienation is a secondary social phenomenon based on distorted reality, on a distortion of the state system.
So, in 1842, Marx regards religion as a reflection of socio-political alienation and has discovered the flaw in Feuerbach's criticism of religion in that it is simultaneously not a criticism of politics. However important this .may be, for it raises the criticism of religion to a new and higher theoretical level, one should bear in mind that Marx elaborates Feuerbach's doctrine of the earthly content of religion. Marx still criticises religion from the standpoint of idealism, while the materialist Feuerbach reveals the kinship of idealism and religion. And though the latter, as distinct from Marx, failed to carry his criticism of religion to criticism of the distorted reality, which is independent of it, he naturally rejected the "Christian state", because he saw the substance of the state as consisting not in religion but in its negation. In 1842 he wrote: "We have now come to comprehend the practical atheism which unconsciously constitutes the basis and mortar of the state. Nowadays people seize upon politics because they see Christianity as a religion which deprives man of political energy" (65; 220-21).
Feuerbach's Essence of Religion, which appeared in 1841, made a tremendous impression on Marx, as Engels later noted. He wrote: "We all at once became Feuerbachians" (2, 3; 44).
This question naturally arises: why was Marx so impressed with the Essence of Religion? After all, in 1841-1842 he still took an idealistic approach and, in consequence, could not yet fully appreciate Feuerbach's materialism. There is only one answer: in that period, Marx (like Engels, judging from his criticism of Schelling's irrationalism) put a high value on Feuerbach's work because of its attack on the speculative substantiation of religion, on speculative theology, religion and the romantic-feudal ideology in general. While the reactionary romanticists rejected speculative theology but sought to preserve and strengthen the ``integral'' religious feeling (one free from erosive reflection) Feuerbach discarded idealistic speculation as an attempt to entrench the religious feeling with the aid of reason. Marx and Engels 123 became Feuerbach's allies even before they became materialists because of the anti-romanticist, anti-speculative tenor of the Essence of Religion.^^*^^
Analysts of Marx's attitude toFeuerbach in the Rheinische Zeitung period usually refer to an article entitled "Luther as Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach", which was published under the pen-name of ``Non-Berliner'', in the second volume of a collection issued by Ruge in 1843, Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophic und Publicistih (Anecdota in the Latest German Philosophy and Journalism), Despite the fact that the article was not included in a re-edition of Marx's works in his lifetime, or in the literary legacy of Marx and Engels published by Franz Mehring, D. Ryazanov suggested that the article had been written by Marx and included it in the international edition of the works of the founders of Marxism in German (MEGA), after which it has repeatedly been published in Russian and other languages. Ryazanov based his decision mainly on the content of the article showing that it could have been written only by a thinker who had a profound comprehension of and highly valued Feuerbach's struggle against speculative philosophising and saw the distinction between his doctrine and the Young Hegelians'. There was no reason to assume that the article had been written by Feuerbach himself, first, because it contains an ecstatic assessment of his role in the history of philosophy, and second, because it appeared to be illogical to assert that Feuerbach, who, judging from his letters, did not think it necessary to polemicise with Strauss, attacks him incognito. The style also appeared to back up Ryazanov's conclusion, which until recently was apparently shared by all the students of the history of Marxism. In the first edition of this monograph I also held that the article had been written by Marx.
The grounds for reviewing the authorship of the article were provided by a letter of Feuerbach's to Ruge of _-_-_
^^*^^ In a letter to Feuerbach in October 1843, that is, in a period when Marx stood on the threshold of dialectical and historical materialism, he emphasised Feuerbach's opposition to romanticism, notably the teaching of the latter-day Schelling. He asked Feuerbach to write an article against Schelling, and said: "You are just the man for this because you are Schelling in reverse" (1, 3; 350). Marx said that Feuerbach's view of nature, in contrast to the latter-day Schelling's romantic conception, was truly philosophical and true.
124 February 15, 1842, which was first published in 1964. Feuerbach says in it that he sends Ruge his remarks concerning Strauss's stand, leaving it to him to use it as he sees fit, like inclusion in a review of the Essence of Religion, which Ruge had prepared for the above-mentioned collection. However, an analysis of the review does not warrant the conclusion that Ruge used it in the review.H. M. Sass, who published Feuerbach's letter in Volume 30 of the new German edition of Feuerbach's works, made a special study to determine the authorship of the article (1, 1; 108-19). He assumed that in 1842 Marx was well ahead of both Strauss and Feuerbach in his understanding of religion, so that he could not accept the anthropologism of the article, which is contrasted with Strauss's concept of miracle. It was also characteristic of Feuerbach to turn to Luther as arbiter in the controversy over the concept of miracle, for in the second edition of his Essence of Christianity, which was prepared in 1842, he repeatedly quotes Luther for indirect confirmation of his anti-religious view of Christianity and of religion in general. Having analysed Feuerbach's letter to Ruge and also Marx's letters to him, in which he deals with the articles he was working on, Sass drew the conclusion that "Luther as Arbiter..." was written by Feuerbach. He is supported by the German Marxist W. Schuffenhauer in the second edition of his monograph Feuerbach und der junge Marx (Feuerbach and the Young Marx) (110; 17, 155-56). Other Marxist researchers do not consider the matter as having been finally clarified.^^*^^
I myself think that the article was written by Feuerbach, so that it should not be used in analysing the formation of Marx's philosophical views. Nevertheless, the authorship issue is highly indicative because it provides indirect evidence of the profound ideological propinquity of Marx and Feuerbach in that period. The author of the article says that Feuerbach's philosophy is a "fiery brook" (a play on the words Feuer and Bach) through which one has to pass to be purged of theologico-speculative preconceptions, while Marx, in The Holy Family, deliberately uses a similar play on words __FIX__ Footnote printed very l i g h t . _-_-_
^^*^^ N. 1. I.apin, for instance, writes: "The arguments marshalled by the author of this hypothesis [i.e.> by Sass---T.OJ are not adequate for a final decision on the question but they do deserve careful study" (22; 58). The same view is taken by the authors of A Contribution to the History of \tar\i\t-l ntimat Philosophy in Germany (82; 127).
125 describing Feuerbach's doctrine as a "fire pot" (Feuerkessel). In other words, in 1845, Marx was to some extent in the same frame of mind as the author of the "Luther as Arbiter" article, so that one could agree with Schuffenhauer's following summing-up of the issue: "In the Rheinische Zeitung period, Marx already had a very good knowledge of Feuerbach's doctrine and was under his influence. The development of his philosophical views in 1842 and 1843 is marked by an advance from radicalised Hegelianism to the anti-speculative turn already carried out by Feuerbach, which included the result of Feuerbach's criticism of religion and speculation contained in his Essence of Religion" (110; 38).I said above that Feuerbach's philosophy was not only anti-speculative but also anti-romanticist. In this context, Marx's article, "The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law", which he wrote in the summer of 1842 and which was published (only partly because of cuts by the censor) in the Rheinische Zeitung, is of special interest. While Feuerbach criticised mysticism (``theosophistics'', as he called it) of the romanticists, Marx analysed the writings of H. Hugo, the founder of the "historical school of law''.
Hugo, like his continuators (F. Savigny, K. Haller, F. Stahl, H. Leo) tried to justify feudal relations by means of the ``historical'' method, assuming that only age-old tradition, length of existence and habituation constituted the real basis of social institutions and relations. Marx says: " Everything existing serves him as an authority" (1, 1; 205). This means that the old, the moribund is regarded as natural and historically rooted, while the new is declared to be something that contradicts history, that is unnatural, and that springs from the subjective human reason, which allegedly neglects the real, the established and the traditional.
It is highly indicative that this reactionary romanticist ideology criticised Hegel's doctrine of the rationality of the actual and the_ necessary. From Hugo's standpoint, Marx says, "no rational necessity is inherent in the positive institutions, e.g., property, the state constitution, marriage, etc., ... are even contrary to reason, and at most allow of idle chatter for and against" (1, 1; 204). This means that all that exists is valid not because it is rational and necessary. Marx disputes this view, which he sees as a reactibnary denial of the possibility of any rational restructuring of society.
126Hugo declared himself to be a continuator of Kant's and asserted that it followed from Kant's philosophy that the conceptions of truth and rationality were not applicable to social institutions and relations among men. Marx rejects this interpretation of Kant's philosophy, which he calls "the German theory of the French revolution", while Hugo's theory of natural law should be regarded as "the German theory of the French ancien regime" (I, 1; 206).
Hugo does not discourse on the irrationality of existing social institutions to prove the necessity of their substitution. Social institutions, which exist over the centuries, do not require, in virtue of that historical fact, any support from the subjective human reason. He propounds a historical relativism, according to which one thing is positive in one place, and another, in another place, both being equally irrational. The only juridical distinctive feature of man, he asserts, is his animal nature, so that slavery is as natural as any other relation among men. He also declares man's animal nature to be the basis of marriage. Matrimonial relations have no spiritual substance. While moral requirements have some justification in the relations between the spouses, they are not 'in any sense rational.
Marx exposes this combination of romanticism and cynicism---fairly typical of the reactionary---and sees this as evidence of the disintegration of the feudal system, which is expressed "as debauched frivolity, which realises and ridicules the hollow lack of ideas of the existing state of things, but only in order, having got rid of all rational and moral ties, to make sport of the decaying ruins, and then itself to be made sport of by_ them and dissolved" (7, 1; 205).'
However, one should bear in mind that criticism of the romantic pseudo-historical approach becomes scientific and conclusive only with a materialist understanding of the objective, natural-historical uniformity underlying social development. Marx criticised Hugo in the light of idealism, and this, as Engels subsequently noted (3; 424-25), made it difficult for him to bring out the rational element in the philosophico-historical conception of the romanticists. In contrast to the anti-historical idealisation of the feudal system, which is characteristic of the "historical school of law" Marx declares that the real basis of social life is mankind's historically developing reason.
The romanticists stood up for the feudal economic order 127 in defiance of Germany's capitalist development and claimed that the economic form constituted the basis of the whole of the people's life, including the state system. However, by economic form they did not mean the concrete historical type of economic relations but some allegedly irrational mode of existence, which was rooted in the soul of the people and which radically distinguished it from all the other peoples. Engels said that the romantic philosophy of history boiled down to assertions that "feudal society produces a feudal political system", drawing the conclusion that "the true economic form is the feudal one" (3; 425).
Present-day critics of Marxism totally ignore the struggle carried on by its founders against the reactionary-romanticist view of history. What is more, they frequently assert that Marx and Engels borrowed their principles of historical materialism from the romanticists. Such claims were made even in their- lifetime, and they are far more widespread today. Thus, M. G. Lange says that Marx followed Hegel in adopting the basic tenets of the romanticists' conservative historical approach and borrowed his idea of the crucial role of the masses in the development of society from their teachings (86; 5). This is an untenable assertion because it converts some of the romanticists' guess-work into a system of views, something they, in fact, never had. The point here is that diametrically opposite views are being identified with each other. The romanticists stood up for obsolete social institutions (feudal property, craft-guilds, estates, the monarchy, etc.) and argued that none of these had been imposed on the people but were its own handiwork. The people was presented as a great conservative force, while any attempt at a revolutionary change of social relations was brushed off as being alien to the people's spirit. The liberation movement of broad masses of people and peasant wars were either ignored or distorted. That is why criticism of the romanticists' historico-philosophical conceptions is one of the essential aspects in the shaping of Marxism. It is regrettable that these matters have not yet been fully brought to light in special Marxist writings, despite the revival of reactionary romanticism in present-day bourgeois philosophy and sociology.
Thus, we have considered Marx's articles in the Rheinische Zeitung in which he elaborates on the ideas to some extent outlined in his dissertation, goes on to analyse the relation 128 between philosophy and social reality, contrasts philosophy and religion, and gives a revolutionary-democratic interpretation of the tasks of philosophy. In his dissertation, he emphasised that Christianity was a "consummate philosophy of transcendence" (1, 1; 498), and in place of the religious outlook argued for the unity of self-consciousness and a reality in which the rational had yet to become consciousness. In these articles, he characterises self-consciousness as conforming with the spiritual nature of things. Development, which runs of objective necessity, overcomes the inevitable resistance, and it is naive to assume that "it could make the newly developing spirit of the times disappear by keeping its eyes closed so as not to see it" (1, 1; 190). Necessity is universal, and not only individuals but also the state, which "cannot go against the nature of things" (1, 1; 257), must concert their actions with it.
Elsewhere, Marx writes: "For intelligence [by which he means the spiritual, reason---T. O] nothing is external, because it is the inner determining soul of everything" (1, I; 305). With this objective-idealist approach, he seeks to show the regularity, the necessity which is intrinsic to reality. Universal human nature does exist like the universal nature of plants, stars, etc. There is also a legal nature of things, which is the starting point for the law-maker. Philosophy, too, must start from the objective: "Philosophy asks what is true, not what is held to be true" (1, 1; 191). There must be an objective standard not only in appraising human notions but also practical activity.
In an effort to express the conception of objective in concrete terms, Marx says that it is the general, the rational, the necessary, which is the opposite of the individual, the subjective and the sensuous. Such a conception of the objective (which, certainly, has a rational element in it) was formulated by the classics of German idealism, who regarded the objective as being independent of subjective arbitrary acts, that were usually identified with sensuousness. In the Rheinische Zeitung period, Marx, too, contrasted the objective and the sensuous, which he regarded as the lower, so to say, subjective form of the spiritual.
The sensuous, or the subjective, he says, is the specific characteristic of the child, which "does not go beyond sensuous perception, it sees a thing only in isolation, and the invisible nerve-threads which link the particular with the __PRINTERS_P_129_COMMENT__ 5 - 185 129 universal" (1, 1; 135). The subjectiveness of the sensuous attitude to the world is expressed, he feels, as a naive and simultaneously superstitious notion of natural processes. "The child believes that the sun revolves around the earth; that the universal revolves around the particular. Hence the child does not believe in the spirit, but it believes in spectres" (1, 1; 136). The essential, the typical and.other specific features of the objective are adequately expressed only in categories (see 1, 1; 155). All of this gives an idea of the difference between the epistemological views of Marx and Feuerbach, who in his struggle against idealistic speculation tended clearly to underestimate theoretical thinking. Feuerbach assumed that only sensuous data helped to overcome the errors into which abstract thinking tends to run: "Every doubt and dispute end at the point where the sensuous begins" (63; 148). However, one should bear in mind that Marx's propositions concerning the conditions of epistemological objectivity do not yet go beyond the limits of the idealistic world outlook, and here again we find Marx contrasting belief in the spiritual (idealism) and the belief in ghosts (religion) and characterising religion as mankind's childhood consciousness, and idealism as rational human consciousness which has attained maturity and which bends nature to its power.
The idealistic reduction of substance to reason, which is allegedly immanent in things themselves, the identification of practical activity, insofar as it is rational, with the substance of things, both of these are views akin to Hegel's panlogism. Marx writes: "The character of a thing is a product of understanding. Each thing must isolate itself and become isolated in order to be something. By confining each of the contents of the world in a stable definiteness and as it were solidifying ethe fluid essence of this content, understanding brings out the manifold diversity of the world, for the world would not be many-sided without the many one-sidednesses" (/, 1; 233). Marx says that understanding brings out the diversity of the world so that it would be wrong to regard his idea that "the character of a thing is a product of understanding" as subjectivist. It is the standpoint of objective idealism, which holds that the necessary connection between phenomena of nature reveals the reason intrinsic to it, which, in contrast to reason as self-consciousness, is understanding, that is, the lower stage of the rational.
130Marx rejects Hegel's doctrine of the Absolute Idea, that is, of a super-natural basis of the world, and avoids the reduction of the objective to the subjective, which was typical of most Young Hegelians. In this way, he invests idealism with a naturalistic form, but because of his idealistic starting point he has yet to see the dialectics of the subjective and the objective, of man and nature, by means of which the specific material basis of social life exists and develops, a basis created by the aggregate activity of men, while being independent of their will and consciousness.
Marx opposes the naturalistic conceptions of mechanistic materialism, which tends directly to subordinate man to nature. He feels that this materialism makes a fetish of nature, and this helps to justify the self-seeking, animal element in man himself. In his critique of the draft bill on the theft of wood, Marx brands as "abject materialism" forest-owners' attempt to turn into a law their own selfish interests (1, 1; 262). It should also be noted, however, that in this case the term ``materialism'' was probably not being used in its philosophical sense. In the following section we shall show that signs of a transition to materialism from the idealistic position formerly held by Marx began to appear in his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 3 __ALPHA_LVL3__ FREEDOM AND ITS NECESSARY EXPRESSION IN THE PRESS.The press, and more precisely, a free popular press, is a necessary expression of self-consciousness and its intrinsic intellectual freedom that, according to Marx, is the basis of all freedom. Consequently, the problem of freedom of the press is not some particular issue: it involves the substance of the popular spirit and of man in general. No animal, let alone a rational being, is born in fetters. This means, he says, that freedom is "the generic essence of all spiritual existence ... for only that which is a realisation of freedom can be humanly good" (1, \; 158-59). Every man is faced with the danger of losing himself, which is why absence of freedom 131 of the press poses a mortal danger to man. Consequently, freedom is not a special property or special right of man, for it "includes not only what my life is but equally how I live, not only that I do what is free, but also that I do it freely. Otherwise, what difference would there be between an architect and a beaver, except that the beaver would be an architect with fur and the architect a beaver without fur?" (1,1; 166-7).
Marx draws a dialectical distinction between freedom and arbitrariness, and rejects the oversimplified view of freedom as activity which is independent of necessity. He defines freedom as a law-governed expression of the universal, the substantial, because it is spiritual (rational), while arbitrariness (whether of the individual, social group or state institution) is an expression of subjectivism, egoism and narrow-mindedness. The antithesis between the universal, rational and objective, on the one hand, and the individual and subjective, on the other, is expressed in the contradiction between freedom (realised necessity) and the arbitrariness which resists necessity. Any limitation of real (necessary) freedom is arbitrariness. Whenever any freedom is put in doubt, there is a threat to freedom in general.
According to Marx's definition, for individuals the press is the most general mode for unfolding their spiritual being. That is why it must be free, because only a free press is an authentic expression of the people's spirit, while a fettered press is the "characterless monster of unfreedom; it is a civilised monster, a perfumed abortion" (1,1; 158). Freedom of the press follows from its substance. "The essence of the free press is the characterful, rational, moral essence of freedom" (1, 1; 158). That is why the press can fulfil its mission only if it is not fettered by censorship, only if its own inner laws, of which it cannot be deprived, are recognised. Attempts to prescribe anything from outside, ignoring the needs of its own development, are unreasonable. The press becomes capable of harmoniously uniting all the true elements of the people's spirit only through its independent development.
The reactionaries in the Landtag who attacked freedom of the press tried hard to limit the range of questions which could be freely discussed. But, Marx explains, the press can be an instrument of culture and intellectual education only if its scope keeps growing. Responding to the discourses about 132 the harmfulness stemming from freedom of the press, which is allegedly bound to have serious defects, Marx explains that it is absurd to require actually existing institutions to be perfect. "Freedom of the press is as little able to promise to make a human being or a nation perfect as the physician. It is itself no perfection. What a trivial way of behaving it is to abuse what is good for being some specific good and not all good at once, for being this particular good, and not some other. Of course, if freedom of the press were all in all it would make all other functions of a nation, and the nation itself, superfluous" (1,1; 142-3).
The main thing here is Marx's resolute insistence that the press must serve the people and be its mouthpiece. "The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people's soul, the embodiment of a people's faith in itself.... It is a people's frank confession to itself, and the redeeming power of confession is well known. It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom. It is the spirit of the state, which can be delivered into every cottage, cheaper than coal-gas. It is all-sided, ubiquitous, omniscient. It is the ideal world which always wells up out of the real world and flows back into it with ever greater spiritual riches and renews its soul" (1,1; 164-5). Although Marx does speak here of the ideal world welling up out of the real world, this is an idea, which immediately, at any rate, still falls far short of materialism. What he means there is, in effect, only that the ideal world is intrinsic in reality, that ideal is immanent in the real.
Furthermore, a characteristic feature of these ideas of Marx's is that, on the one hand, they determine the essence of self-consciousness, freedom, and the press, as such, regardless of the concrete social conditions, and on the other, state that the empirical being both of freedom and of the press, that is, their existence in definite conditions, contradict their substance. This means that Marx emphasises the contradiction between the ideal substance of law, legislation and state power, and their empirical existence. What is the root of this contradiction? It does not follow from the substance but is determined by the empirical conditions in which the press, law and the state exist. But, in that case, does substance determine existence? If it does not, then the empirical is independent of the ideal, or the ideal is 133 not the substance of the empirical.^^*^^ Marx is inevitably faced with all these questions, and this is the starting point for his transition to materialism and communism.
The idea that the substance of law, legislation and the state contradicts their empirical existence is the theoretical basis for Marx's revolutionary-democratic criticism of existing social relations. Hence the political demand for a transformation of the existing social institutions in accordance with their rational substance that has been distorted by the rule of self-seeking interests. Consequently, this is a more concrete expression of the distorted-reality conception considered above: the rule of self-seeking interests of definite social groups. The contradiction between substance and existence ultimately turns out to be a contradiction within the substance itself. But in that case can one regard substance as ideal? Is it perhaps rather a mental substance, an abstraction, an ideal at best, of a definite social group confronting the empirically stated interests of other social groups? Perhaps the conflict between ideal substance and empirical existence is merely an expression of the contradiction between the idealistic view of social life and the actual facts? Marx has yet directly to formulate these questions, but his consideration of the contradiction between the ideal and the real certainly helps to formulate them.
In his article on the Rhenish Landtag debate on freedom of the press, Marx shows the interests of the various estates which are at the back of this debate. "The debates provide us with a polemic of the princely social estate against _-_-_
^^*^^ In his article, "The Divorce Bill", Marx characterises the relations between ideal substance and empirical appearance, which, according to idealistic notions, is determined by this substance: "All moral relations are indissoluble according to the concept, as is easily realised if their truth is presupposed. A true state, a true marriage, a true friendship are indissoluble, but no state, no marriage, no friendship corresponds fully to its concept.... Just as in nature decay and death appear of themselves where an existence has totally ceased to correspond to its function, just as world history decides whether a state has so greatly departed from the idea of the state that it no longer deserves to exist, so, too, the state decides in what circumstances an existing marriage has ceased to be a marriage" (1,1; 309). What is most important here, alongside the general idea, is that the state which has substantially departed from its concept is doomed to destruction. But does not such a view of the essence of the state, marriage, etc., amount to a re-establishment of the principle of ideal necessity? I think that this is an essentially different, even if idealistic, standpoint, for it indicates what is, and not simply what should be.
134 freedom of the press, a polemic of the knightly estate, and a polemic of the urban estate, so that it is not the individual but the social estate that conducts the polemic. What mirror, therefore, could reflect the inner nature of the Assembly better than the debates on the press" (7, 1; 138). It is obvious to Marx that the views and arguments of the participants in the debate reflect the material interests of definite social groups which are more or less hostile to each other. He defines the interests of the ruling estates as self-seeking. Accordingly, spokesmen for the princely and knightly estates do not oppose freedom in general, but only freedom for the people. Marx refers to Voltaire, who said that any discourse on the freedoms implies privilege, and stresses that no one ever campaigns against freedom in general, and it is always a struggle against freedom for other persons. "It is not a question whether freedom of the press ought to exist, for it always exists. The question is whether freedom of the press is a privilege of particular individuals or whether it is a privilege of the human mind" (1, 1; 155). Marx says that freedom should not be an exclusive right of the few, because it is the substance and meaning of human life. The fact that the Landtag deputies have stood up only for the interests of the estates they represent means that they are in contradiction with the immanent reason of reality. It is true that, in contrast to the princely, knightly and bourgeois deputies, the peasant deputy has stood up for universal interests.While backing the stand of the peasant estate's deputy, Marx does not yet think that consciousness of necessity reflects men's social being. He condemns the princely, knightly and urban (bourgeois) estates' deputies because they seek to defend private interests. He wants the political attitudes taken by deputies to be determined by the interests of society as a whole, instead of private material interests. Therein lies the overriding importance of the free press, because "it transforms the material struggle into an ideological struggle, the struggle of flesh and blood into a struggle of minds, the struggle of need, desire, empiricism into a struggle of theory, of reason, of form" (1, 1; 292). This is, of course, an idealistic view. Still, Marx has established the actual state of affairs- and moves forward to materialism, to an understanding that social consciousness is determined by social being in a law-governed manner.
135This materialist trend is even more pronounced in Marx's article on the debate on the thefts-of-wood bill, which reflected self-seeking interests. But, says Marx, "the law is the conscious expression of the popular will" (1, 1; 309), so that any law which runs counter to the people's interests is unlawful. Genuine legislation is based on spiritual, moral necessity, of which the state is the highest expression.
But the idealistic conception of the state conflicts with the state authorities' suppression of the people, a fact which is of fundamental importance for Marx because he does not see philosophical theory as an end in itself, but as a means for explaining the facts which indicate that "the forest owner prevents the legislator from speaking" (1, 1; 225), that is, private property, private interests contradict the ideal substance of legislation and the state, if one at all exists. "All the organs of the state become ears, eyes, arms, legs, by means of which the interest of the forest owner hears, observes,, appraises, protects, reaches out, and runs" (1, 1; 245). What, in that case, is the state in general, and the Prussian state in particular?
Hegel said that "the state is divine idea as it exists on the Earth" (72; 71). Marx rejects the deification of state power, with all the conservative conclusions that this suggests, and sets the task of "transforming the mysterious, priestly nature of the state into a clear-cut, secular nature accessible to all and belonging to all, and of making the state part of the flesh and blood of its citizens" (1, 1; 318). His consideration of the question concerning the substance and purpose of the state is elaboration of the ideas of the great Enlighteners of the 17th and 18th centuries, who began with the assumption of a theory of natural law and went on to expose the feudal, theological conception of the state. But in contrast to most Enlighteners, Marx, like Rousseau, believes that the state is not only the handiwork of man designed for the common good; the true substance of the state is the people's power, which is why it cannot be exercised by anti-democratic means.
Marx combines his revolutionary-democratic conception of the state, as contrasted with its absolutisation, with Hegel's concept of the state as the embodiment of reason, freedom and morality, a concept which he sees as an outstanding achievement of the philosophy of the new period. "In a true state there is no landed property, no industry, no material 136 thing, which as a crude element of this kind could make a bargain with the state; in it there are only spiritual forces, and only in their state form of resurrection, in their political rebirth, are these natural forces entitled to a voice in the state. The state pervades the whole of nature with spiritual nerves, and at every point it must be apparent that what is dominant is not matter, but form, not nature without the state, but the nature of the state, not the unfree object, but the free human being" (/, 1; 306).
Hegel's view of the state as a rational moral organism is filled with a revolutionary-democratic content. His conception of the true state (a state which corresponds to its ideal substance) is the theoretical premise for his critique of the existing Prussian state, which clearly is not in accord with the conception of the true state, because it is politically ruled by property owners. Accordingly, Marx reaches the conclusion that "a state that is not the realisation of rational freedom is a bad state" (1, 1; 200).
Marx does not yet realise that in any state made up of opposite classes, the state is the political rule of the class which owns the basic means of production. He sees rule of the property owners as a distortion of the substance of the state, because "private property does not have means to raise itself to the standpoint of the state" (I, 1; 240), while the mean soul of private interests cannot be imbued with the state idea. Private interest seeks to debase the state to the level of its instrument. "If the state, even in a single respect, stoops so low as to act in the manner of private property instead of in its own way, the immediate consequence is that it has to adapt itself in the form of its means to the narrow limits of private property" (1, 1; 241).
To gain a better understanding of Marx's view of the state and his attitude to private interests, one should emphasise that a basic idea of Hegel's philosophy of law is the antithesis between the state and the civic society which covers the sphere of economic life and private interests in general. It would be wrong to identify Marx's view of this matter with Hegel's conception, although there is certainly a connection between the two.
Hegel's contrast between the state and the civic society is pivoted on his idea that the latter is the alienated and, hence, unauthentic being of the state. Marx, for his part, does not at all regard production, commerce and so on as the lowest 137 sphere of human activity. He does not contrast the state with the people's economic life but with the private interests, with the interests of the ruling propertied classes. It is true that Hegel's conception of the state is connected with the concept of popular spirit about which he frequently pronounced mutually exclusive judgements. In some cases he characterised the people as the absolute power on the earth, and in others as a shapeless mass whose actions are spontaneous, irrational, wild and terrible. This inconsistency was a reflection of the class stand of the bourgeoisie, and especially of the contemporary German bourgeoisie.
By contrast, Marx took a revolutionary-democratic view of the people's role in history. He opposed the reactionary attempts to provide a theoretical justification for the need for an estate structure on the plea that the differences between the natural elements were organic.^^*^^ Like the difference between the natural elements, differences between the estates, says Marx, are an empirical expression of the people's spirit, the one inner basis. "Just as nature does not confine itself to the elements already present, but even at the lowest stage of its life proves that this diversity is a mere sensuous phenomenon that has not spiritual truth, so also the state, this natural realm of the spirit, must not and cannot seek and find its true essence in a fact apparent to the senses" (1,1; 295).
Marx used dialectics to invalidate the reactionary notion that the separation between the estates was everlasting, and came out against the metaphysical concept of nature. Of course, he was still using idealistic dialectics in which the ideal unity is contrasted with the sensuous distinction, the division, the separation. However that may be, dialectics serves Marx to combat those who believe that "in the actual state the people exists as a crude, inorganic mass, apart from some arbitrarily seized on differences of estate" (1, 1; 296). His revolutionary-democratic rejection of estates is even more pronounced in another passage in the same article, "On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia": "It is not the basic rational mind of the state, but the pressing need of _-_-_
^^*^^ "Even the elements do not persist in inert separation. They are continually being transformed into one another, and this transforming alone forms the first stage of the physical life of the earth, the meteorological process. In the living organism, all trace of the different elements as such has disappeared" (1, 1; 295).
138 private interests that is the architect of the political system based on estates." (1,1; 303). Although development has long since deprived the estates of their erstwhile importance, they continue to exist, and this is fresh evidence of the contradictory nature of social development, which is based, Marx believes, on the conflict between the developing human reason and the empirical conditions engendered by its earlier activity.Consequently, we discover the materialist trends in Marx's views in the Rheinische Zeitung period in his analysis of material interests and the corresponding political demands by the various social groups. He exposes the apology of private interests and puts forward the concept of popular power, which alone could make the state power rational and moral, and the governing force of society. Laws established in that state would correspond to their concepts because true laws "are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion" (1, 1; 162).
It is highly characteristic that Marx calls the state in which private interests predominate a feudal one, which means using the concept of feudalism in a very broad sense. Although bourgeois society does not have any estate divisions, craft guild regulations, and so on, it is not at all free from the power of private interests, and this means that feudalism has yet to be eliminated. He says: "Feudalism in the broadest sense is the spiritual animal kingdom, the world of divided mankind, in contrast to the human world that creates its own distinctions and whose inequality is nothing but a refracted form of equality" (1,1; 230).
So, bourgeois society is also "a world of divided mankind", and Marx ironically adds: "Whereas in the natural animal kingdom the worker bees kill the drones, in the spiritual animal kingdom the drones kill the worker bees, and precisely by labour" (1,1; 231). Consequently, the bourgeois society has not managed to eliminate feudalism, and has revived it in a new form. This is the characteristic stand of the revolutionary democrat who goes beyond the liberal bourgeoisie in the fight against feudalism. We find Marx contrasting bourgeois society and the "human world" that rules out social inequality and parasitic living. Although the concepts of "human world" and "a world of divided mankind" are insufficiently definite, they reveal communist 139 trends in Marx's revolutionary-democratic outlook. He wants only the political privileges of private property abolished, but not yet private property itself. But when considering the true state, Marx does not at all have in mind the advanced bourgeois states of his day. He does not believe that the British and French states correspond to the concept of state, which can be established only through a revolution whose social nature he has yet to clarify.
His articles in the Rheinische Zeitung show a steady intensification of the materialist trend. One need only compare an article published in October and early November 1842, with his last article, of January 1843. In the first article---on the Rhenish Landtag's debates on the law on thefts of wood---the arguments are clearly idealistic. Thus, Marx asserts that nature itself provides a specimen of the antithesis between poverty and wealth: nature's wealth is the flowering forest, and its poverty, the dry branches and trees. "It is a physical representation of poverty and wealth. Human poverty senses this kinship and deduces its right to property from this feeling of kinship. If, therefore, it claims physical organic wealth for the predetermined property owners, it claims physical poverty for need and its fortuity" (1, l~, 234). As Marx later noted, this line of argument shows that he still lacked economic knowledge. He regards the windfall collected by the peasants as the unformalised aspect of property which is qualitatively distinct from forest as the property of the owners. There are things, he believes, that by their nature do not constitute private property established beforehand, but the whole point is that private property, like any form of property, is not in the least determined by the natural properties of things; as Marx was later to demonstrate, property is not a thing, but a social relation expressed in things.
Marx's arguments in defence of the peasants' right to collect windfall do not relate to the question of the origins of the landowners' title to the forest, or to the expropriation of the land which had been held in common. These arguments are mostly juridical, which means that Marx argues in the light of the existing system of law, seeking to find within it a legal ground for establishing the peasants' traditional right to collect windfall. One such argument is his assertion that windfall does not constitute the forest-owners' property, because property is something that is established in advance, 140 that has been measured and that has a definite value; all these definitions can be applied only to the forest but not to the windfall. "Whereas personality, whatever its limits, is always a whole, property always exists only within a definite limit that is not only deter minable but determined, not only measurable but measured. Value is the civil mode of existence of property, the logical expression through which it first becomes socially comprehensible and communicable" (1, 1; 229). Marx goes on to emphasise that "this objective defining element", that is, value, is "provided by the nature of the object itself", that it, its natural properties.
While the forest, says Marx, is the property of the forest-owner, windfall is not his property if only because it is not forest. When windfall is collected "nothing has been separated from property.... The gatherer of fallen wood only carries out a sentence already pronounced by the very nature of the property, for the owner possesses only the tree, but the tree no longer possesses the branches that have fallen from it" (1,1; 227).
Marx protests at the application of the category of theft to the collection of windfall by peasants and proves that this broad interpretation of a very definite legal concept tends to obliterate the boundaries between crime and law. "The people sees the punishment, but it does not see the crime, and because it sees punishment where there is no crime, it will see no crime where there is punishment" (1,1; 227-28). This means that application of the law to suit private interests tends to undermine its foundations, because law, Marx says, is a necessary expression of the common interests of all the members of society.
Consequently, Marx's revolutionary democratism is here directly expressed as defence of the law against the arbitrary acts and the lawlessness of the ruling class of landowners. While the advocates of the princely and knightly estates hold forth about the sacrosanct right in private property, Marx emphasises that the working people are deprived of such a right. So it is not sacrosanct, because the existence of private property among some implies the absence of such property among others, the bulk of the population. "If every violation of property without distinction, without a more exact definition, is termed theft, will not all private property be theft?" (1, 1; 228). Marx explains that private property 141 expresses the contradiction between the propertied and the unpropertied: "By my private ownership do I not exclude every other person from this ownership? Do I not thereby violate his right to ownership?" (1, 1; 228). Thus, private property causes the emergence of propertyless sections of the population, and the usurpation of the state power by the propertied minority, in consequence of which the substance of the state and law is distorted. Marx ridicules the liberal concepts of private property as the basis of universal prosperity. We find, therefore, that in this article dating from the end of 1842, his criticism of the feudal property of the forest-owners tends to grow into criticism (but not yet rejection) of private property in general.
In this article, Marx's arguments are closely tied in with his view of the state as man's generic, rational substance, in contrast to the subjectivism of the individual, and of individual social groups and estates.^^*^^ From this angle, a bill reflecting the interests of a minority, which conflict with those of the greater part of society, is aimed against the state. The interests of the majority are above all those of the broad masses of propertyless and deprived people. Consequently, by its very nature the state is designed to oppose private interests, which Marx calls petty, trite and egoistical. The private interest regards the people as enemies, while the state regards the members of society as its flesh and blood. "Therefore, the state will regard even an infringer of forest regulations as a human being, a living member of the state, one in whom its heart's blood flows, a soldier who has to defend his Fatherland, a witness whose voice must be heard by the court, a member of the community with public duties to perform, the father of a family, whose existence is sacred, and above all, a citizen of the state" (1,1; 236). That is the line of argument characteristic of Marx's first few articles in the Rheinische Zeitung. Let us now consider his last article, "Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel". It criticises the subjectivist view according to which the condition of the state or of any of its parts depends chiefly on the activity of the officials entrusted with the business of _-_-_
^^*^^ In that period, Feuerbach expressed roughly the same ideas: "The state is the fulness of the human being realised, developed and revealed.... The chief of state is a representative of the universal man" (64; 78). But Feuerbach did not go on to draw any revolutionary-democratic conclusions from his concept.
142 administration. Marx shows that this is a preconception which springs from the bureaucratic system. While Hegel saw the bureaucracy as a necessary ``universal'' element of the state, Marx characterises it as a form of human ``alienation''.Criticism of the bureaucracy was already an important element in his "Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Institution". In the "Justification..." he exposes the bureaucratic structure of the state power. The law of the bureaucratic hierarchy, he says, and the theory, according to which citizens are divided into two categories---active citizens, who administer, and passive ones, who are administered---are complementary. The bureaucratic hierarchy principle condemns any criticism of administration by citizens who are not installed on the corresponding rung of the hierarchical ladder as a breach of the established order and even as a threat to its existence. Every bureaucratic instance is subordinate to the next, higher instance, which has the right to demand, to point out shortcomings, and to inflict penalties on the subordinate instances while being in a similar relationship with the higher instance. Accordingly, persons who do not belong to the bureaucratic caste (and this means the bulk of the population) cannot influence the administration of any part of the state, let alone the state as a whole. The entire business of administration has been monopolised by the officials. The people are kept away from the administration of the state and so the bureaucratic administration produces the subjectivist idea that the state of society depends on the officials appointed to administer it. The official "thinks that the question whether things are all right in his region amounts to the question whether he administers the region correctly. Whether the administrative principles and institutions are good or not is a question that lies outside his sphere, for that can only be judged in higher quarters where a wider and deeper knowledge of the official nature of things, i.e., of their connection with the state as a whole, prevails" (1, 1; 345). Marx counters this subjectivist notion of the motive forces of society by asserting that social phenomena are objectively interrelated.
Oberprasident of the Rhine Province von Schaper, enraged by the Mosel correspondent's report on the plight of the wine-growers, regarded the Rheinische Zeitung's exposes only as attacks on his official activity in administering the 143 province. Marx explains that the causes of the plight of the Mosel peasants cannot be reduced to the negligence of officials, but are rooted in the objective relations, in the system, whose defects cannot be corrected, by any zeal, efficiency or administrative activity on the part of officials. "The more zealously and sincerely, therefore, a government endeavours---within the limits of the already established administrative principles and institutions by which it is itself governed---to remove a glaring state of distress that embraces perhaps a whole region, and the more stubbornly the evil resists the measures taken against it and increases despite the good administration, so much the more profound, sincere and decisive will be the conviction that this is an incurable state of distress, which the administration, i. e., the state, can do nothing to alter, and which requires rather a change on the part of those administered" (1, 1; 346).
The bureaucratic illusion is that the distress of the working people (where the officials have done their duty) is either their own fault, or has been caused by something accidental, like natural circumstances. Every social good springs from administration, and every evil, from the administered themselves, or at any rate, from something which lies outside the sphere of administration. But from this it does not follow that the administered are allowed any kind of initiative going to the roots of society. The governed may only try to improve their condition within the framework of the existing system.
Marx considers the contradiction between the system of administration and the actual reality, whose development does not conform to the prescriptions of the system. The distress of the Mosel area is distress, i.e., failure, of the system of administration itself. That is why there is a need to "recognise the powerful influence of general conditions on the will of the acting persons" (1, 1; 354), these conditions, as he emphasises, being invisible and coercive forces. "Anyone who abandons this objective standpoint falls victim to one-sided, bitter feelings against individual personalities in whom he sees embodied all the harshness of the contemporary conditions confronting him" (1, 1; 354).'
What then are these general, objective, coercive relations which determine the acts of individuals and are also the basic cause of the existing state of things? We do not yet find Marx giving a concrete, in particular economic, characteristic 144 of these social relations. He has yet to consider, even in abstract form, the question of relations of production and their influence on other spheres of social life, but he clearly means the social relations which take shape spontaneously, and which, while being created by men themselves, are not created deliberately, and for that reason are the result of their deliberate activity independent of their consciousness and will.
Marx writes: "In investigating a situation concerning the state one is all too easily tempted to overlook the objective nature of the circumstances and to explain everything by the will of the persons concerned. However, there are circumstances which determine the actions of private persons and individual authorities, and which are as independent of them as the method of breathing. If from the outset we adopt this objective standpoint, we shall not assume good or evil will, exclusively on one side or on the other, but we shall see the effect of circumstances where at first glance only individuals seem to be acting. Once it is proved that a phenomenon is made necessary by circumstances, it will no longer be difficult to ascertain the external circumstances in which it must actually be produced and those in which it could not be produced, although the need for it already existed. This can be established with approximately the same certainty with which the chemist determines the external conditions under which substances having affinity are bound to form a compound" (1, 1; 337).
I cannot agree with those who regard the above as amounting to a materialist view of social life, but it would be an even greater mistake to underestimate the importance of this thesis, which clearly expresses the incipient transition to materialism. The main point here is recognition of the objective reality of social relations, and their identification as the definitive conditions for human activity. Men----the succession of generations---themselves create the objective conditions which determine the face of society. His next crucial step towards historical materialism was to identify within the aggregation of social relations the social relations of production, that is, the social form in which the productive forces develop.
In the above-quoted extract, Marx still draws an analogy with natural processes, which does not mean, of course, that he took a naturalistic view of social phenomena. The analogy 145 merely emphasises the initial epistemological premise: recognition of the existence of objective social relations. But why are they objective? This is a problem which he still considers in the most general terms: the objectiveness of the phenomena of social life, that is, of phenomena produced by human activity, results from the interaction of men. For the time being he does not yet analyse the interaction among men in the process of production, the relation between current activity and past activity as materialised in the results of human work. For that reason, the overall consideration of the objective character of social relations does not yet amount to a materialist view of society.
Consequently, the extract from Marx's last article in the Rheinische Zeitung may be said to sum up his ideological development at that stage. In his earlier articles, he dealt with the spiritual nature of the institutions of state and law, but here his emphasis on the objective nature of social relations marks a transition to the materialist view of history.
In the preceding section, I considered Marx's attitude to Feuerbach in the context of the social content of religion. The analysis of Marx's view of the substance of state and law shows that he surpassed his outstanding contemporary as early as 1842 and 1843 on a number of other questions as well.
Marx subjected to revolutionary criticism the socioeconomic relations in Germany and connected philosophical problems with concrete political issues. A spirit of class struggle pervades his articles. In a letter to Ruge on March 13, 1843, he writes: "Feuerbach's aphorisms seem to me incorrect only in one respect, that he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. That, however, is the only alliance by which present-day philosophy can become truth." (1, I', 400). Marx says only in one respect. In other words, he is satisfied with these aphorisms in every other respect. That is why in the same letter he remarks: "But things will probably go as they did in the sixteenth century, when the nature enthusiasts were accompanied by a corresponding number of state enthusiasts" (Ibid.). This means that Marx does not so much point to Feuerbach's mistake as to his inadequate formulation of the question. Still, this remark implies criticism of the anthropological principle, for in backing up the alliance of philosophy and revolutionary politics, Marx 146 stresses that that is the only way along which "present-day philosophy can become truth". This is a highly important remark.
But it would be wrong to assume, however, that without having yet become a materialist, Marx had already overcome Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, whose influence one feels in his Rheinische Zeitung articles. Thus, in one of them he asserts that "man always regards as his highest being that which is his true being" (1,1; 230). That is one of Feuerbach's starting points in his criticism of religion. Elsewhere Marx says: "Arms and legs become human arms and legs only because of the head which they serve" (1,1; 172).
Anticipating the analysis below, I could say that Feuerbach's influence on Marx grew in 1843-1844, as Marx became a materialist, and was overcome as the fundamentals of dialectical and historical materialism were elaborated.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 4 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S BREAK WITH YOUNG GERMANY.The incipient trends in Engels's writings against Schelling were further developed in 1841-1842. His urge to provide a philosophical substantiation for a revolutionary-democratic programme, which induced him to join the Young Hegelians, also helped him to break with the Young Germany. The members of this literary group propounding republican and partly also Saint-Simonian ideas which they had come to adopt under the influence of the July revolution in France, were now regarded by Engels as inconsistent advocates of democracy. Here one should take into account that under the impact of police reprisals, a large part of the Young Germans began to re-appraise their old political convictions. Laube, for instance, condemned the revolutionary struggle against the existing system, and this naturally had an effect on Engels's attitude to the Young Germans. Whereas in 1839-1840, Engels had assumed that the Young Germany was a genuine continuator of Borne's revolutionary ideas, he now felt that the latter had not, on the whole, exerted any considerable influence on the Young Germans, who never actually managed to rise to his 147 revolutionary views. Engels writes: "Borne is the John the Baptist of the new period, who preaches repentance to the self-satisfied Germans and tells them that already the axe is laid to the root of the tree and that one mightier will come, who will baptise with fire and mercilessly sweep away the chaff from the threshing-floor" (1, 2; 290). By contrast, the Young Germans' political line was inconsistent and irresolute. The movement emerged in a period of vague political ferment. Since then life had marched on, while the Young German trend "lost all the intellectual content it may still have had" (1, 2; 291).
In his article, "Alexander Jung, 'Lectures on Modern German Literature'", Engels criticised the Young German Jung for seeking to unite opposite political standpoints. After all, "all extremes are evil in general, and only his beloved conciliation and moderation are of any value. As if extremes were not consistency pure and simple!" (1, 2; 285). '
At the time, Engels regarded the Young Hegelians as the extreme political and philosophical party, while the Young Germany could be no more than a temporary associate: "In every movement, in every ideological struggle, there is a certain species of foggy mind which only feels comfortable in confusion. As long as the principles have not yet been worked out, such people are tolerated; as long as everyone is striving for clarity, it is not easy to discern the predestined lack of clarity of such people. But when the elements become separated, and principle is counter posed to principle, then it is high time to bid farewell to these useless people and definitively part company with them, for then their emptiness becomes appallingly obvious" (1, 2; 284).
Engels gives this cutting appraisal of the Young Germany leaders and of the advocates of the juste-milieu in general, because he must have seen them as opponents of revolution, which horrifies them as an inadmissible extreme. There is good reason why Engels remarks that Jung is not against pietism but against its extremes. Engels characterises this ideological-political stand as ``positivism'' with the same meaning with which it was invested by the young Marx. He writes: "The poor positivists and people of the juste-milieu see the wave of negation rising ever higher and higher; they cling fast to one another and cry out for something positive" (1, 2; 293). The whole point, Engels says, is that these 148 advocates of moderation fear the advance of world history and regard negation as being just short of disaster. But negation is the emergence of the new, it spells progress. "One has only to take the trouble of looking more closely at the disparaged negation and it will be found that it is itself entirely positive" (/, 2; 293).
Jung tried to interpret Hegel's philosophy in the spirit of the Young Germans' bourgeois-democratic aspirations, and this provided Engels with the opportunity to criticise the Young Germans' subjectivism. "...Herr Jung is at pains to prove that the fundamental feature of the Hegelian system is the assertion of the free subject as opposed to the heteronomy of rigid objectivity" (1, 2; 287). Engels rejects such an interpretation of Hegel and evidently hints that he is no longer satisfied with the absolute counterposition of self-consciousness to empirical reality, whether by the Young Germans or by a large part of the Young Hegelians. But nothing is as yet being said about the Young Hegelians. Arguing with Jung, Engels emphasises: "one need not be particularly knowledgeable about Hegel to know that he laid claim to a far higher standpoint, that of the reconciliation of the subject with the objective forces; that he had a tremendous respect for objectivity, that he regarded reality, the actually existing, as far higher than the subjective reason of the individual, and demanded that precisely the latter should recognise objective reality as rational. Hegel is not, as Herr Jung supposes, the prophet of subjective autonomy" (1, 2; 287).
It would be an oversimplification to assume that there Engels takes a positive view of Hegel's reconciliation with Prussian reality. What he has in mind is not more than a concerting of human action with objective necessity, and not in any sense with everything that exists. He draws a distinction between freedom (as realised necessity) and the subject's arbitrary acts, which do not amount to freedom, for the subject fetters himself with his own whimsicalities and accidental motives. Engels contrasts this dialectical view of freedom with the Young Germans' subjectivism, but his negation of subjectivism and the high evaluation of objective necessity do not in the least reduce his revolutionary spirit, as will be seen from the following conclusion: "It is to be hoped that he [Jung---T. O.] has now realised that we are neither inclined nor able to fraternise with him. Such 149 miserable amphibians and double-dealers are useless for the struggle, which was started by resolute people and can be carried through only by men of character" (7,2; 296-97). This means that one must take account of the objective course of history to substantiate one's revolutionary action, and not to pin all of one's hopes on the spontaneous flow of events.
In attacking Schelling's irrationalism, Engels insisted that the spiritual actually existed only in nature. He regarded reality as a subject-object, as unity of consciousness and matter, characterising the spiritual as the substance and the motive force of the material. In his article against Jung and the Young Germany, Engels in the main still took this idealistic approach.^^*^^ At the same time, expressing his concept of the spiritual-material relationship in more concrete terms, Engels takes yet another step towards the materialist world outlook.
Jung attempted to prove that in his criticism of Christianity, Feuerbach took a limited, earthly stand, whereas the universe amounted to more than this earth of ours. Ridiculing this objection to materialism, Engels declares: "A fine theory! As if twice two were five on the moon, as if stones were alive and ran about on Venus, and plants could talk on the sun! As if a different, new kind of reason began beyond the earth's atmosphere, and the nature of the mind were to be measured by its distance from the sun! As if the self-consciousness at which the earth arrives in mankind did not become world consciousness the very moment it recognises its own position as an element of the latter!" (1, 2; 296). Here Engels takes "world consciousness" as humanity's comprehension of the world as a whole in its development, including humanity's own development as the most essential. It is too early to speak of materialism, but the materialist trends are already there.
In this connection, interest attaches to a pamphlet in verse, entitled "The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible", which Engels wrote together with E. Bauer in June and July 1842, that is, just when he wrote his article against Jung. Despite its jocular nature, this poem is, I think, _-_-_
^^*^^ He stressed, for instance, that "thought in its development alone constitutes the eternal and positive whereas the factual, the external aspect of what is taking place, is precisely what is negative, evanescent and vulnerable to criticism" (1, 2; 293).
150 a specimen of self-criticism within the Young Hegelian movement by its more radical representatives. The friendly lampoons of some of the Young Hegelians frequently turn out to be satirical portraits, and if the pietist, the story-teller in the poem, compares the -Young Hegelians with the Jacobins, the authors of the pamphlet do not apparently share his view. Of course, the gibes at the declarative revolutionism of some Young Hegelians do not come from the pietist himself. The confusion among the Young Hegelians following Bruno Bauer's resignation is not a joke but the statement of a fact: the Young Hegelians were not, in fact, capable of duly responding to this direct blow from reaction.The poem shows Engels's critical attitude to the Young Hegelian movement, an attitude which, for the time being, is developing within the movement itself. Engels designates himself as the one who is "right to the very left", a special position expressed in his criticism of the inconsistencies and inconclusiveness of liberalism. But Engels does not claim to be an adversary of liberalism in general, and uses the term also to characterise the views which are, in effect, hostile to liberal views.
It is typical of Marx and Engels in the early period of their ideological formation to allow some contradiction between their terminology and its content, a fact that needs to be emphasised if we are not to make mistakes in appraising their views. I think that such a mistake is made by Cornu, when he says that in 1840-1842 Marx and Engels politically took a liberal stand (see 62, 1; 71), which is clearly at variance with his highly valuable indication that in the early 1840s a contradiction between the liberals and the democrats was already in evidence in Germany (especially in the Rhine Province).
This helps to clarify Engels's article, "North- and SouthGerman Liberalism", which was published in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. Engels criticised South German liberalism with its characteristic particularist tendencies and contrasts it with North German liberalism, one of whose essential features he?> believes to be an awareness of the need for Germany's riational unification. I think that this appraisal of North German liberalism, although it obviously exaggerated its historical importance, does nothing to cast doubt on the young Engels's revolutionary democratism. In 151 pre-revolutionary Germany, some bourgeois liberals (one need merely, mention J. Jacoby) were allies of the revolutionary democrats. Only in the course of the revolutionary struggle of 1848-1849 did bourgeois liberalism as a whole begin to develop into a counter-revolutionary force. Later, in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, which appeared at the start of the 1848 revolution, Marx and Engels wrote: "In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie" (1, 6; 519). This idea, expressed in a classical work of mature Marxism at a time when Marx and Engels were already at the head of the Communist Party, which they had founded, indirectly also sheds light on the attitude of revolutionary democrats to bourgeois liberalism.
A vivid example of Engels's revolutionary democratism will be found in his article, "Frederick William IV, King of Prussia", "which he wrote in 1842, shortly before his departure for Britain. He says that the revolution is at hand and that it is necessary. It does not spring from the fact that the king, who initially flirted with the liberal opposition, had completely exposed himself as a rabid reactionary who was pushing Germany back to the Middle Ages. Nor is it a matter of his personal qualities, but of the fact that the Prussian state itself was reactionary, with the king merely expressing its nature through his acts. "Frederick William IV is altogether a product of his time, a figure wholly and solely to be explained by the development of free thought and its struggle against Christianity. He represents the extreme consequence of the Prussian principle, which is seen in him in its latest garb but at the same time in its complete impotence in the face of free self-consciousness" (1, 2; 361).
» Let us note that Engels points to the contradiction between the free self-consciousness (social consciousness, as he sees it) and the political system dominant in Prussia. This contradiction is deeply rooted in history, and is, in consequence, not something accidental springing from the king's personal qualities. The Prussian state does not rest on reason or self-consciousness, but on Christianity, in particular, Christian tlreology. "The essence of theology, especially in our day, is the reconciliatien and glossing over of absolute opposites" (1, 2; 361). This is an antithesis between reason and 152 religious unreason, which theology seeks to justify by means of reason. "In the sphere of the state, this theology has its counterpart in the present system of administration in Prussia" (7, 2; 361). The government seeks to introduce the religious spirit into every sphere of social life so as to suppress the protests against the existing order. An absolute monarchy which has done with feudal separatism seeks to set up the person of the king as a divinity in the state. But legitimism's reactionary romantic Utopia is exploded by historical developments. Prussia's contemporary condition, Engels says, "closely resembles that of France before... but I refrain from any premature conclusions" (1, 2; 367).
The idea that German absolutism is connected with theology and as a "Christian state" contradicts the ideal (reasonable, hostile to religion) essence of the state is a basic Young Hegelian tenet. Here Engels refers to Bruno Bauer, who circumstantially elaborated the idea. But Bauer and other Young Hegelians asserted that the state could be transformed by means of criticism. Bauer wrote: "The revolution requires the guillotine in order to refute the backward and corrupted elements of the movement. We must do this in a spiritual way" (109; 331). So, while Bauer confined himself to, one could say, the terrorism of pure thought, Engels went much farther. He argued that only a revolution carried out by the people could put an end to the "Christian state". The Prussian state was not merely infected with the religious spirit, theology had become its essence. Consequently, criticism was inadequate; there was a need for revolution.
Does this mean that Engels has already abandoned Hegel's and the Young Hegelians' view of the state as an organism which is rational and essentially moral? No, it does not, for he still holds to the idealistic formula, using it, like Marx, to criticise the Prussian state as being alien to its concept and, for that reason, unworthy of existence. Engels believes that a state conflicting with its own essence can exist because humanity's advancing self-consciousness (the people's spirit) runs into conflict with the forms of its being which have lost their vital content and moves on, ahead, creating new and more perfect forms.
153 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 5 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MATERIAL INTERESTS AND IDEAL PRINCIPLES, CLASSES ANDAt the end of 1842, Engels moved to Manchester in England to become an employee at a spinning mill, of which his father was a co-owner. On his way to England, Engels called at the editorial offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, where he met Marx. The meeting, as Engels subsequently wrote to Franz Mehring, was cool, because Marx then saw Engels as an ally of The Free, whom he had so resolutely attacked (4a, 39; 473). Still Engels made an arrangement with Marx concerning his contributions to the newspaper and upon his arrival in Manchester at once began to post short items on the situation in England, which first appeared in early December of that year.
Even before his departure from Germany, Engels voiced some views that were drawing closer to socialism, in an article, "Centralisation and Freedom", which he wrote in September 1842. Thus, he stressed that world history had turned the English workers into "the standard-bearers and representatives of a new principle of right" (1, 2; 357). This principle was development of the freedom of the individual confronting the existing state, "and it calls for a different form of realisation than the state" (1, 2; 359). His arrival in England marked a turning point in his ideological and political development. There Engels first came face to face with a proletariat that had been produced by the industrial revolution and the development of large-scale capitalist industry. Engels comes to know the Chartists and begins to study England's economic condition, English political economy and Owen's socialist doctrine. Lenin says: "It was not until he came to England that Engels became a socialist. In Manchester he established contacts with people active in the English labour movement at the time and began to write for English socialist publications" (5, 2; 23).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ Some researchers assert that Engels became a communist in Germany under the influence of M. Hess, whom he met before his departure for England. That is the view expressed by M. Adler in his Engels as a Thinker (Moscow, 1924, in Russian). It is shared by M. Rubel (see 105; 112). The main argument offered for this conclusion is usually Hess's letter to __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 155. 154
In the 1840s, England was the classical country of capitalism, where its endemic antagonistic contradictions were most pronounced. The capitalist society, in which the feudal estates that still had a considerable role to play in lagging Germany had given way to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was developing on a new and unique economic basis. As early as 1825, England was hit by the first economic crisis. Petty-bourgeois ideologists confronted with the `` incomprehensible'' effects of capitalist development, urged a return to the "good old days", and were echoed by the conservatives. By contrast, bourgeois economists sought to prove that crises of overproduction would disappear in the near future. But some of them did believe that the poverty of the working people was an inevitable evil which made for the wealth and power of the nation.
While Germany had no organised working-class movement and the proletariat did not yet stand out in the mass of artisans, the English workers already had their own, Chartist Party. Lenin wrote: "Britain gave the world Chartism, the first broad, truly mass and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement" (5, 29; 309). When in Germany, Engels had no clear idea of all this, and even upon his arrival in Britain it must have taken him some time to understand capitalist development and its social consequences.
In his first article for the Rheinische Zeitung, Engels speaks of the "weak foundation on which the entire artificial edifice of England's social and political well-being rests" (1, 2; 368). What then is eroding the foundation of English society? The whole point, he says, is that in England "people know nothing of struggles over principles and are concerned with only conflicts of material interests" (1, 2; 371). But if material interests tend to push ideal motives into the background, does it not follow that the ideal is not in any sense the definitive force? Engels still has to go a long way to reach such a conclusion; he merely assumes that this is an _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 154. B. Auerbach of June 19, 1843, which says: "Last year, as I was preparing to go to Paris, he (who now lives in England and is working on a big study of it) was on his way from Berlin via Cologne; we discussed contemporary problems and he, a revolutionary for a year now, left me a most zealous communist. That is how I carry out my devastations" (75; 466). Hess did have an influence on Engels but it is only Engels's articles from England that testify to his actual advance to communism.
155 expression of traditional English pragmatism, which fails to see the inner substance of phenomena behind their outward husk. "There is one thing that is self-evident in Germany, but which the obstinate Briton cannot be made to understand, namely, that the so-called material interests can never operate in history as independent, guiding aims, but always, consciously or unconsciously, serve a principle which controls the threads of historical progress" (1, 2; 370).I must note that Engels, like Marx in his articles of that period, does not merely set forth idealistic views, but opposes the domination of private-property interests in society and condemns the ruling classes of England, whose self-seeking shows them to be incapable of being genuine leaders of the state. He takes the Corn Laws and the struggle over them as an example to show that the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie have no concern at all for the interests of the nation. The aristocracy backed up the Corn Laws because it wanted to sell corn at three times the old price; the bourgeois was fighting the laws because it realised that a drop in the corn prices would help to reduce workers' wages. The workers alone were free from this ugly self-seeking, had no private purposes and yearned for justice. The English proletarians fought the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie and for universal suffrage, which, Engels believes, could deprive these classes of their political domination. "Thus, in England, the remarkable fact is seen that the lower the position of a class in society, the more `uneducated' it is, in the usual sense of the word, the more closely is it connected with progress, and the greater is its future. In general, this is a feature of every revolutionary epoch" (I, 3; 379-80).^^*^^
Engels writes about the spiritual poverty of the bourgeoisie. Political economy, which was a source of pride for the English, has degenerated into Malthus's wild theory of population. No ``self-respecting'' Englishman now reads Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Byron or Shelley. But they are read by the workers. "At first one cannot get over one's surprise on hearing in the Hall of Science the most ordinary workers speaking with a clear understanding on political, _-_-_
^^*^^ In Germany, Engels says, things are quite different. "In Germany, the movement proceeds from the class which is not only educated but even learned" (1, 2; 380), a conclusion apparently based on the fact that contemporary Germany had no mass revolutionary movement.
156 religious and social affairs; but when one comes across the remarkable popular pamphlets and hears the lectures of the Socialists, for example Watts in Manchester, one ceases to be surprised. The workers now have good, cheap editions of translations- of the French philosophical works of the last century, chiefly Rousseau's Contrat social, the Systeme de la nature and various works by Voltaire, and in addition the exposition of communist principles in penny and twopenny pamphlets and in the journals. The workers also have in their hands cheap editions of the writings of Thomas Paine and Shelley" (1, 3; 387).The proletarians are beginning to be aware of their strength. It is true that they are not yet aware of the need of a revolution, and together with the Chartists want to secure a Charter by legal means alone. But no revolution, by its very nature, can be legal, because it overthrows the existing laws. The English workers have the traditional respect for the law but the rapidly advancing poverty is bound to dispel this feeling, and then the revolution will become inevitable.
Engels believes that there must be a revolution in England because it is dominated by private interests, or---which is the same thing---the interests of a propertied, privileged minority. The people's growing moral consciousness runs into irreconcilable conflict with this basic manifestation of social injustice. This is a conflict between the spiritual and the material, the new and the old, the progressive and the reactionary.
Engels believed that the domination of material interests was the chief sign of feudalism (an idea which Marx had .also expressed in the Rheinische Zeitung). Consequently, capitalist England was also a feudal state and to a much greater extent than any other, less developed country. "Is there any other ' country in the world where feudalism retains such enduring power and where it remains immune from attack not only in actual fact, but also in public opinion?" (1, 2; 371). The English state, Engels declares, "lags some centuries behind the Continent" and is "up to the neck in the Middle Ages" (1, 2; 371).
His paradoxical assessment of the state of England, then the most developed capitalist country, sprang from his notion that ideas and principles were definitive in the life of society, while private, or material, interests tended to split society, which is why they could not be of definitive 157 importance. This is a view which bears the mark of the influence of the 18th-century Enlighteners, who criticised the feudal society, among other things for the fact that in it every estate, corporation and group stood up for its own specific interests without giving any thought to the interests of society. The Enlighteners assumed that the abolition of feudalism would usher in a social order in which the common weal would become the dominant force. Engels, however, shunned these illusions of the bourgeois Enlightenment, for he had before him a full-fledged bourgeois society without feudal estates or any other of the basic features of feudalism. But in that bourgeois society, freedom turned out to be formal, while parliament did not in any sense express the people's actual will.^^*^^ That is why Engels classifies as feudal institutions the bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliament in which, he finds, private interests continue to prevail.
Like other socialists in that period, Engels draws a distinction between political and social revolution. Political revolutions substitute one power (or form of government) for another. The social revolution has the task fundamentally to change the conditions of human life and to end the poverty of the masses. "This revolution is unevitable for England; but as in everything that happens there, it will be interests and not principles that will begin and carry through the revolution; principles can develop only from interests, that is to say the revolution will be social, not political" (1, 2; 374).
Utopian socialism at the beginning of the 19th century reflected the disappointment of the masses with the bourgeois revolutions which, far from realising the promises of the Enlighteners, in fact intensified the working people's enslavement. The Utopians asserted that these had been merely political revolutions, whereas the working people's emancipation required a social revolution. Of course, the bourgeois revolutions were not only political but also social, but they were social revolutions of the bourgeoisie, and this _-_-_
^^*^^ "Is the much-vaunted English freedom anything but the purely formal right to act or not to act, as one sees fit, within the existing legal limits?... Is not the House of Commons a corporation alien to the people, elected by means of wholesale bribery? Does not Parliament continually trample underfoot the will of the people?... Can such a state of things persist?" (/, 2; 371).
158 is something the Utopian socialists failed to understand, and so expected them to do what they could not do. Disappointed with the results of the bourgeois revolutions, the Utopians reached the conclusion that society could be restructured on socialist lines only through social reform.For Engels the notion of social revolution was linked with a struggle against the ruling classes of England. Its task was to establish true democracy, which would put an end to the domination of private interests and the struggle of classes. Engels saw that the struggle between the parties expressed the conflicting interests of the various classes and groups in English society. He stressed that "in England parties coincide with social ranks and classes; that the Tories are identical with the aristocracy and the bigoted, strictly orthodox section of the Church of England; that the Whigs consist of manufacturers, merchants and dissenters, of the upper middle class as a whole; that the lower middle class constitute the so-called `radicals', and that, finally, Chartism has its strength in the working men, the proletarians" (1, 3; 379). He saw the struggle of parties and classes not as a-'general regularity but as a specific peculiarity of the history of England.
He censures all those who advocate and justify private interests, and contrasts these with the interests of society, drawing a fundamental distinction between the self-seeking interests of the ruling classes and the material interests of the proletariat, whose condition "is becoming daily more precarious" (1, 2; 378). There is a steady growth in the number of unemployed in England, and Engels believes that this is due to the system of production established in the country. He is still to find out the actual workings of capitalist production, which inexorably produces unemployment. He speaks of England's one-sided industrial development so that it produces many more manufactured goods than its population can consume. The external markets are shrinking, as once-lagging countries set up their own industry and protect it from English competition by means of high tariffs. Nor can the colonies consume the growing mass of products turned out by English industry. England, however, cannot reduce its industrial production because that is the basis of its national wealth. That, Engels believes, is "the contradiction inherent in the concept of the industrial state" (7, 2; 372), that is, a contradiction inherent not only 159 in Britain, but in capitalism generally. "...Although industry makes a country rich, it also creates a class of unpropertied, absolutely poor people, a class which lives from hand to mouth, which multiplies rapidly, and which cannot afterwards be abolished, because it can never acquire stable possession of property. And a third, almost a half, of all English people belong to this class. The slightest stagnation in trade deprives a considerable part of this class of their bread, a large-scale trade crisis leaves the whole class without bread. When such a situation occurs, what is there left for these people to do but to revolt? By its numbers, this class has become the most powerful in England, and woe betide the wealthy Englishmen when it becomes conscious of this fact" (7, 2; 373).
His articles in the Rheinische Zeitung show that he is on the side of the English workers in their struggle against capital. His first-hand study of English reality and the influence of the Chartist movement and English Utopian socialism increasingly make him advance towards materialism and communism. Subsequently, he wrote: "In Manchester it was brought home to me that the economic facts that had played little or no role until then in historical writing, are a determining historical power---at least in the modern world; that they are the basis for the class contradictions of today, and that in countries where they have fully developed, namely in England, these class contradictions are in turn the basis for the appearance of political parties, for the political contention between them and, therefore, for the whole of political history" (4a, 2; 211).
Of course, Engels did not reach these key theoretical conclusions in 1842 and 1843, but much later. In the early period of his stay in England he still regarded men's material interests as outward, even if necessary, manifestations of humanity's substantial spiritual forces.^^*^^ What Engels saw in Manchester cut across his convictions. The idealistic notions which he was still to overcome prevented him from seeing _-_-_
^^*^^ G. M. Orudzhev characterises Engels's articles in late 1842 and early 1843 as follows: "According to Engels, the state expresses the interests of the ruling classes and is not an embodiment of the Absolute Spirit or a reality of the moral idea" (28; 102). However, as I have shown above, Engels believed that the English state expressed the interests of the economically dominant class, and he criticised it as contradicting the substance of the state.
160 the sharp class differentiation of English society as a necessary expression of social progress, whose antagonistic character appeared to him to be obvious regress. At that time, Engels was not yet aware that the productive forces are the crucial force in social development, which is why the polarisation of classes in capitalist England and the struggle between the parties appeared to him to be almost a mediaeval particularism. But Engels's genius and his revolutionary-democratic sense made him discern a universal content and significance in the specific class interests of the English proletariat. He not only joined the Chartist movement but also gave thought to how to unite it with the teaching of Owen, most of whose followers. took a negative attitude to the Chartist political programme.In his Letters from London, Engels remarks that the English socialists are more consistent and practical than the French: they do not compromise with religion, fight the Church and rally sizeable groups of the working people. Engels put a high value on the critical statements of the English Utopian socialists and communists against the capitalist system and was especially delighted with the English workers who discussed socialism and communism at their meetings with a knowledge of what they were talking about. "In the Socialists, English energy is very clearly evident, but what astonished me more was the good-natured character of these people, I almost called them lads, which, however, is so far removed from weakness that they laugh at the mere Republicans, because a republic would be just as hypocritical, just as theological, just as unjust in its laws, as a monarchy; but for the reform of society they are ready to sacrifice their worldly goods and life itself together with their wives and children" (1, 3; 389).
Engels emphasises that the socialist and communist teachings are the most outstanding phenomena in the spiritual life of England and other countries. He regards them as an expression of humanity's most profound humanistic urges, but this does not prevent him from giving them a critical evaluation. Here is what he says about Owen: "The founder of the socialist movement, Owen, writes in his numerous booklets like a German philosopher, i.e., very badly, but at times he has his lucid moments and then his obscure writings become readable; moreover, his views are comprehensive. According to Owen 'marriage, religion and property are the __PRINTERS_P_161_COMMENT__ 6 - 185 161 sole causes of all the calamity that has existed since the world began' (!!), all his writings teem with outbursts of rage against the theologians, lawyers and doctors, all of whom he lumps together" (1, 3; 386-87). But Engels accepts the most important anti-capitalist conclusions of Utopian socialism. However, Hegel's school of dialectics taught him to consider social phenomena in development, while the Utopians metaphysically contrasted an abstract socialist idea with the whole of past history. Hence his critical attitude to the theory of Utopian socialism.
The ideas Engels elaborated in his 1841-1842 writings have much in common with Marx's ideas of that period. Still, his way to materialism and communism differs somewhat from Marx's. While Marx began his advance to materialism and communism chiefly through his critique of the speculative constructs of German classical philosophy and analysis of political and economic problems in backward German reality, Engels made a study of the most developed capitalist country in that period and moved toward materialism and communism under the direct influence of Chartism and Owen's Utopian socialism.
[162] __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter Three __ALPHA_LVL2__ FINAL ADVANCE TO THE DIALECT1CO-MATERIALISTMarx's work in the Rheinische Zeitung confronted him with basic socio-economic and political questions for which no answer was provided either by Hegel's philosophy or Young Hegelianism. If, by nature, the state was rational, why did it in practice conflict with reason? If reason was the definitive and immanent power of reality, what was the origin of the irrational social decrees? What was it that divided and ranged against each other the members of society, which, by nature, was a purposeful community of human individuals? What was it that caused the division of society into the propertied and the unproperded, into estates and classes? Did law constitute the real basis for human life or was it determined by relations independent of it? Was the existence of private property compatible with a democratic structure of society which ruled out privileged status for any group of men? What were the ways for a rational restructuring of society in which what was good for some was bad for others?
According to the Young Hegelians, the contradiction between the humane substance of the state and the empirical existence which was inadequate to it was due to the fact that the state turned religion into its mainstay, while religion distorted its nature. Marx agreed that there was a need to expose the "Christian state"~^^*^^ but went beyond this because he believed that religion was not the cause but the effect of a _-_-_
^^*^^ In a letter to Arnold Ruge on March 13, 1843, Marx writes: "The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational (1, 1; 400).
163 distorted social reality. The nature of the state was distorted because it consisted of the political power of private property. While the introduction of universal and equal suffrage and, consequently, the abolition of the property qualification, may eliminate the political power of private property, it does not in any way affect its economic power.Let us recall that in his article, "Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel", Marx says that the organs of the state act in the way they do because of the state's objective nature, which is independent of the will of statesmen. But does the fact that the organs of the state serve the landowners testify to a distortion of its nature? Is this not perhaps a natural expression of the substance of the historically established state? It will be easily seen that a scientific answer to these questions entails abandonment of the idealistic view of the state as an organism that is, by nature, rational and moral. Indeed, the most important line of Marx's ideological development in the period of his final advance to dialectical materialism and scientific communism consists in his overcoming of the idealistic conception of the state.
Aftejr he left the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx temporarily retired into "his study-room", as he put it. His work on the newspaper suggested the conclusion that economic and political facts had a much greater part to play than that which was usually attributed to them. This was a conclusion that did not square with the idealistic views he still held. This explains the following: "The first work which I undertook for the solution of the doubts which assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of right, a work the introduction to which appeared in 1844 in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbucher" (2, 1; 503). In it he considered the main problems of a study of Hegel's philosophy of law, which he began in 1842. On March 5, 1842, he wrote Ruge about his work on the article, which criticises "Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal political system" (1, 1; 382). That same month, he wrote: "...I was not able, of course, to send herewith the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law for the next Anekdota" (I, 1; 385). In a letter to D. Oppenheim in August 1842, Marx mentions an article he was preparing for the above-mentioned collection "against Hegel's theory of constitutional monarchy" (1, 1; 385). Two years later, in a letter to Feuerbach, to whom he 164 sent his article, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction", he stressed that it outlined some elements of his "critical philosophy of law. I had already finished it. once but have since revised it in order to make it more generally comprehensible (7, 3; 354). This may mean the completion and subsequent reworking of the Introduction. But what was the state of his main work? Was it completed by Marx? The letters to Ruge and Oppenheim leave the impression that Marx had written the bulk of it. In the published Introduction, Marx says that it is to be followed, by the publication of a study of "the German philosophy of state and law" (1, 3; 176). But that same year, in his Preface to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he refers to the reasons for which he had given up the idea of writing his critique of Hegel's philosophy of law.^^*^^ Consequently we only have an unfinished manuscript which was published in 1927 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee with the title: " Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law". It is a detailed analysis of Section -Three of Part Three of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, his doctrine of "internal state law". Marx quotes one paragraph after another and analyses each in such depth and substance that, for all its incompleteness, his work turns out to be a fundamental study in which the critique results in highly important positive conclusions.
From the standpoint of analysing the basic stages in the shaping of Marxism, it is important to establish the period in which the MS was written. Many researchers believe that it _-_-_
^^*^^ "I have already announced in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law. While preparing it for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover, the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, Would have given the impression of arbitrary systematism. I shall therefore publish the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and afterwards try in a special work to present them again in a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and lastly attempt a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material" (1, 3; 231).
We know now that Marx did not realise this idea.
165 was written at Kreuznach in mid-1843.^^*^^ Some refer to the above-quoted Introduction to Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he says that after leaving the Rheinische Zeitung he got down to a critical analysis of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. But the result of that effort was the above-mentioned "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction", which appeared in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. In it he already formulates some initial propositions for the materialist view of history and scientific communism, which is why the Introduction is qualitatively distinct from the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law''.The MS does, in fact, consider the questions which Marx indicated in 1842 when describing the article he was working on in his letters to Ruge and Oppenheim: Hegel's doctrine of internal political structure and constitutional monarchy. But other highly important questions, which Marx does not mention "in his letters, are also prominent in the MS. Among these, Marx's critical analysis of Hegel's dialectics is especially important because it makes the MS qualitatively distinct from his earlier writings. These passages in the MS could not have been written before 1843, as N. I. Lapin correctly notes, because they show the incipient antithesis between Marx's dialectics and Hegel's idealistic dialectics.
In a letter to Ruge on March 5, 1842, Marx says that his MS on the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law requires the rewriting of a fair copy and, in part, some corrections. (1, I; 383). The subsequent letters, which I have already quoted, show that in 1842 Marx did not do so, and one could assume that he first got down to it only in 1843, i.e., nearly a year later, which is why he did not confine himself to making a clean copy of it and inserting some corrections, but added some new and in the main already materialist propositions which he could not have made in his 1842 writings.^^**^^ So we _-_-_
^^*^^ This' is specially argued by N. I. Lapin in his interesting article, "About the Period of Marx's Work on the MS, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law'" (2Z; 155-8).
^^**^^ In 1846, Marx wrote to K. W. Leske: "It goes without saying that if an author continues his work he cannot publish, half a year later, what he had written half a year before, without making any changes" (4, 27; 449). There is no reason to assume that in 1843 Marx took a different view. His letters of the early 1840s show that he kept reworking some of his writings. In a letter to Feuerbach on May 15, .1844, Ruge says that Marx "works with __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 167. 166 reach the conclusion that the MS was written by Marx partly in 1842 and partly in 1843, and (judging by a photostat copy of the MS) in 1843 Marx did not so much correct what he had written earlier as added new pages to it. This must explain why some idealistic propositions, which Marx had given up in 1843, will still be found in the MS. When he says, for instance, that "once it has ceased to be an actual expression of the will of the people the constitution has become a practical illusion" (/, 3; 57), this must date from 1842. Nor is this, as I intend to show, the only example, and I feel sure that it offers a cardinal piece of evidence that a large part of the MS was written in 1843.
In 1960, N. I. Lapin insisted that the MS had been written by Mafx "mainly in the summer of 1843" (20; 158), and in his 196& monograph, The Young Marx, he says that Marx twice analysed Paragraph 303 of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: having copied out the text of Paragraphs 304-307, he "interrupts his analysis of these paragraphs with a long insertion, and returns to a consideration of Paragraph 303.... Being apparently dissatisfied with his earlier analysis, Marx felt the need to approach the subject from another angle. What was the origin of his dissatisfaction and urge?
``One should also note that Marx now has many new arguments in favour of his overall view of the origin and content of alienation.... What is the source of these new arguments, this concreteness, the abundance of material, etc.?
``Finally, it is noteworthy, that at precisely this point in the MS we notice Marx's enhanced attention to the civil society and its inner structure" (22; 177). Lapin adds: "One could draw the conclusion that Marx introduced corrections into his initial scheme. What caused these corrections?" (Ibid.). I think the answer to these questions is that the MS was written party in 1842 and partly in 1843.
Let us now examine the MS of the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law". The first thing he analyses is Hegel's view of the state and its relation to the family and the civil society, which provides him with the opportunity to criticise Hegel's idealist dialectics and to formulate his own, basically already materialist _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 166. exceptional intensity ... but does not finish anything (106; 343), and keeps going back to a study of other writings on the subject and reworking what he has himself written.
167 methodological principles. Hegel regards the state as an "actual idea" which alienates from itself its finite sphere, the family and the civil society, so as then to "return into itself, to be conscious of itself". But that which it ultimately reaches turns out to be no more than the state existing in Germany, which is therefore presented as the culmination of the idea's self-development. All of this fully brings out not only the social meaning, of Hegel's philosophy of law but also the logico-pantheistic mysticism, which is its theoretical basis. Hegel starts from an absolute idea which is allegedly independent of mankind and deduces from it the distinctions constituting the state. Marx writes: "The `concept' is the Son in the `idea', in God the Father, the agens, the determining, differentiating principle. `Idea' and `concept' are here hypostatised abstractions'" (1, 3; 15). However, the idea---not idea in general, but the idea of the state---has to be derived from the distinctions actually existing in society. But Hegel converts the idea into a self-sufficient subject, and the actual distinctions constituting the state into a product of its imaginary activity, of the activity of thought. This means that "the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product" (/, 3; 9). Marx says that the speculative method up-ends the actual relations. The idea is contrasted with that of which it is the idea, to that from which it is abstracted. In this way, the initial fact is converted into a mystical result of the idea. Consequently, the logico-pantheistic mystification consists in reducing real, empirical facts, which are independent of thought, to the `idea', which is declared to be their substance and cause. Hegel "does not develop his thinking from the object, but expounds the object in accordance with a thinking that is cut and dried---already formed and fixed in the abstract sphere of logic" (1, 3; 14).Hegel uses empirical facts as the underpinning for the categories of his Science of Logic, which is why his philosophy of law turns out to be no more than a supplement to his logic. He sees his task not in elaborating a given, definite idea of a political system, but in relating the political system to the abstract idea and turning it into a link in the development of the idea. "Not the logic of the matter, but the matter of logic is the philosophical element. The logic does not serve to prove the state, but the state to prove the 168 logic (1, 3; 18). Hegel, Marx says, gives his logic a political body, but does not give the logic of the political body, that is, he fails to analyse the inner regularities of the development of the state. "The sole interest is in rediscovering the `idea' pure and simple, the 'logical idea', in every element, whether of the state or of nature, and the actual subjects, in this case 'political constitution', come to be nothing but their mere names, so that all that we have is the appearance of real understanding. They are and remain uncomprehended, because they are not grasped in their specific character" (1, 3; 12). Concrete political definitions are transformed into abstract thoughts, but scientific comprehension of any real process "does not consist, as Hegel imagines, in recognising the features of the logical concept everywhere, but in grasping the specific logic of the specific subject" (1, 3; 91).
Anyone who has read Feuerbach will see that Marx's critique of Hegel's speculative methodology is an elaboration of the anti-speculative method worked out by Feuerbach, who said that his method of criticising idealistic speculation was transformative: it did not merely reject the idealists' propositions, but showed how the truth is brought out by standing the speculative propositions on their feet. He wrote: "The method of reformative criticism of speculative philosophy as a whole does not differ in any way from the method already applied in the philosophy of religion. All we have to do to obtain the truth in its unconcealed, pure and evident form is put the predicate in place of the subject and the subject in place of the object and principle, that is, invert speculative philosophy" (67; 70).
While being quite right about the need materialistically to invert idealistic assertions, Feuerbach oversimplifies the matter by suggesting that inversion alone yields the pure truth. Marx goes farther and in addition, unlike Feuerbach, finds in Hegel's mystification of actual reality, notably of the state, not only a speculative-theological but also a political conception. Marx did not specifically consider the question of the theological premises of Hegel's idealism apparently because this had been done by Feuerbach. It is much more important therefore to show that Hegel's speculative constructions reflect a definite social reality and a very definite attitude to it. A materialist understanding of nature is enough for discerning refined elements of theology in Hegel's philosophy, whereas a materialist understanding of 169 philosophy itself as a reflection of social being is essential for fulfilling the task set by Marx. Feuerbach confined himself to reducing Hegel's idealism to religious consciousness; Marx considers the question of the material basis of philosophical consciousness, above all of Hegel's philosophy of law, and exposes the apologetic trend which marks it. This is clearly expressed in the speculative substantiation of the ``natural'' need for the nobility (as allegedly an estate of natural morality), for bureaucracy, for the right of primogeniture, etc., all of which is an expression of "the whole uncritical character of Hegel's philosophy of law" (/, 3; 37).
Marx exposes as a sophistic trick the logical ``deduction'' of the need for peers, for entailed estates, as the mainstay of the throne and society, from the concept of Absolute Idea. Hegel's deduction of the need for a hereditary monarchy from the concept of monarch is just as sophistic. The reproduction of the royal line turns out to be the hereditary monarch's supreme constitutional act. It turns out, therefore, that instead of clarifying the substance of the given empirical fact (hereditary monarchy), Hegel enshrines the Junker preconceptions as the supreme philosophical truth. The inevitable outcome of this is that an empirical existence is uncritically accepted as the actual truth of the idea; for it is not a question of bringing empirical existence to its truth, but of bringing truth to an empirical existence, and so what lies to hand is expounded as a real element of the idea (1, 3; 39). Empirical existence becomes speculation, and speculation, empirical existence. In this way Marx shows not only the theoretical but also the practical political import of Hegel's philosophy of law: a compromise with the ractionary social forces standing up for the mediaeval (animal, says Marx) social order. "Hegel wants the medieval-estates system, but in the modern sense of the legislature, and he wants the modern legislature, but in the body of the medieval-estates system! This is the worst kind of syncretism" (1, 3; 95).
Marx describes the apologetic trends in Hegel's philosophy of law as the "crassest materialism" (1, 3; 105). Despite this unscientific terminology, this is, in effect, a materialist idea: the speculative propositions of the philosophy of law reflect the social being, the interests of definite social groups. Hegel assumed that the philosophy of law did not deal with the empirical reality of social life but with its ideal substance. 170 ``Nature," according to Marx, "avenges itself on Hegel for the contempt he has shown it. If matter is no longer to be anything for itself against the human will, so the human will here no longer retains anything for itself but matter" (1, 3; 105).
Thus, the "Contribution..." shows us Marx's advance to the materialist view of history, a transition which is still far from complete. But as compared with his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, it marks a considerable stride forward, to the very threshold of dialectical and historical materialism.
Marx's methodology, which is materialist in its prevalent tenor, enables him to come close to the scientific view of the substance of the state and its economic basis.
In the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx regarded the state in the spirit of Hegel's secularised idealistic conception, i.e., as the ideal basis of the civil society, but in the MS the civil society, i.e., the sphere of material, private interests, is regarded as the actual premise for the state. Contrary to Hegel's deduction of the real state from his "absolute idea", Marx asserts: "Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy things are inverted" (1, 3; 8).
Engels subsequently wrote: "Setting out from Hegel's philosophy of law, Marx arrived at the conclusion that it was not the state termed by Hegel the 'crown of the edifice' but much rather the 'civic society' treated by it in such stepmotherly fashion that constituted 'the sphere in which one should look for the key to an understanding of the process of historical development'" (4, 16; 362). In his MS Marx stops just short of this conclusion, which he clearly formulated in 1844.
According to Hegel's philosophy of law, the system of private law (family and civil society) and the system of universal interests (the state) ultimately constitute a dialectical identity, the vehicle of concrete freedom and thus also of the immanent aim of the human race. But within this identity, there is a distinction between them, a distinction which even develops into a contradiction, because both family and civil society are only the natural, finite spheres of the spiritual substance, of the state. The antithesis between the state and its finite sphere is expressed as alienation within the unity, as a contradiction between the outward necessity and the immanent goals. Hegel held that it was not 171 the real antithesis of classes, not the rule of one class by another, but the Absolute Spirit which constituted the real substance of the state, Marx writes: "Family and civil society are conceived as spheres of the concept of the state, namely, as the spheres of its finite phase, as its finiteness. It is the state which divides itself into them, which presupposes them, and it does this 'so as to emerge from their ideality as explicitly infinite actual mind'" (1, 3; 7).
Thus, Marx.rejects Hegel's view of the state as the primary spiritual social reality, which engenders the civil society and the family, "Family and civil society constitute themselves as the state. They are the driving force" (1, 3; 8, 9). But Marx does not yet characterise the actual premises of the state as specific material, economic relations. The real basis of the state is made up of the human individual, a multitude of individuals, possessing consciousness and will, and acting accordingly; "the fact is that the state issues from the multitude in their existence as members of families and as members of civil society" (1, 3; 9).^^*^^ Consequently, in contrast to Hegel, Marx emphasises the empirical basis of the state, but he does not yet give a materialist analysis of this basis. That is why, for instance, he declares: "Family and civil society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences of the will; they are modes of existence of the state" (7, 3; 8). Nevertheless, his reasoning, especially his critique of Hegel's antithesis of the "political state" (state power) and the "non-political state" (civil society) carries him to the materialist view of social life. Accordingly, in the MS we find a definition of civil society as the "actual material of the state" (1, 3; 8). One must note that this definition, which occurs elsewhere in the,MS, appears when he considers the question of private property.
Getting down to his analysis of Hegel's view of state . system, Marx gives a positive evaluation of Hegel's view of _-_-_
^^*^^ Like Feuerbach, Marx characterises the state "as the supreme actuality of the person, as the supreme social actuality of man" (1, 3; 39). Elsewhere in the MS he says: "The human being remains always the essence of all these entities" (Ibid.), i.e.; the essence of family and civil society. Thus, the starting theoretical point is the conception of the human individual from which society and the state are deduced. Marx subsequently took a different view of society, taking the aggregation of social relations, instead of the human individual, as the starting conception for the materialist view of history.
172 the state as an organism, i.e., as a unity and not as a mechanical combination of organs and functions. However, the general idea of organism, integrity and unity does not yet show the substance of the state, because it fails to bring out the distinction between the political organism and any other, say, animal organism. What Hegel says about the idea of organism can be equally applied to political system and the solar system, which is also a definite unity of a differentiated whole. "No bridge has been built whereby one could pass from the general idea of organism to the specific idea of the organism of the state or the political constitution, and no such bridge can ever be built" (7, 3; 14).Apart from the methodological importance of this idea, which exposes one of the chief flaws of Hegel's speculative method, let us note that, as Marx shows, Hegel needs the idea of organism to deduce the concept of sovereignty, which he identifies with the monarch, a view which Marx criticises in substance.
According to Hegel, the state, as an organism, is a subject which can be understood only as a person, namely, the person of the king. The hereditary monarchy allegedly follows of necessity from the concept of state. The sovereignty of the state is identified with the person of the monarch, a sophism which Marx rejects, and formulates the real alternative suggested by life itself: "Sovereignty of the monarch or sovereignty of the people---that is the question" (1, 3; 28).
Wherever the sovereignty belongs to the monarch there can be no question of the people's sovereignty. A state in which the people is not sovereign is not a true state, but an abstract one. That is why it is not monarchy, but democracy (which Marx characterises as the people's state selfdetermination) that is the state which corresponds to its conception. He explains this as follows: "Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is one species, and a poor one at that" (I, 3; 29).
Such a view of democracy does not yet signify a break with idealism, for it springs from the notion that the state is the realm of freedom or, at any rate, has to be such, in accordance with its concept. That is why, in determining the concept of democracy, Marx asserts that the state system appears "as what it is, a free product of man" (I, 3; 29). According to Marx, "democracy is the essence of all state 173 constitutions" (1, 3; 30) so that "all forms of state have democracy for their truth and ... they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy" (1, 3; 31).
He does not yet describe democracy as a definite class structure of society, but rather contrasts it to the latter, which he designates as the political state. He holds that true democracy is a negation of the political state. That is the only kind of democracy, a non-political state, that fulfils social tasks, that is, effects the working people's social emancipation.
Bourgeois radicals contrasted the monarchy with the republic, as a state form which allegedly made any oppression impossible. Marx has no such bourgeoisdemocratic illusions and says: "The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a struggle within the abstract state. The political republic is democracy within the abstract state form" (7, 3; 31). He goes on to explain that the monarchy is a consummate expression of man's alienation, while the republic is a negation of this alienation in its own sphere.
Hegel put the state outside the sphere of alienation, because he saw the alienated spheres of the state (family and civil society) as the untrue state. Marx objected to this idealistic absolutisation of the state which is fraught with an apology of the domination of the exploiting classes. What Marx saw in the Rheinische Zeitung period as a contradiction between the ideal substance and the empirical existence of the state, he now comes to see as a contradiction which is intrinsic to the alienated form of the state's existence, in which it is not the people, the real basis of the state, but a minority exploiting the people that is the dominant force.
In contrast to Hegel, Marx regards the state as a product of the self-alienation of family and civil society, a result of the development of their inherent contradictions. Consequently, Marx demystifies the concept of state. It is true that he still takes an abstract view of the substance of the bourgeois state and its predecessor, the feudal state, which he describes as "completed estrangement", because its basis is the unfree man, the serf. Marx assumes that in the feudal state there was a unity of the people and the state, because the political power was an attribute of landownership and the serfs were immediately and personally dependent on the feudals. In the recent period, he says, the state system has 174 developed to the point of particular actuality alongside the actual life of the people. In other words, the state power confronts the people as an alien and transcendental force which dominates it. And while serfs no longer exist, alienation has not been abolished, but assumes new forms, and the chief of these is the bureaucratisation of the state.
Let us recall that Hegel put a high value on the bureaucratic state system, and was clearly unable to imagine any other, democratic form of state centralisation. By contrast Marx saw bureaucracy as distorting the nature of the state which was determined by society's division into various groups or corporations, with their own specific, private interests. The bureaucratic system strove to unite the opposed corporations and bend them to one purpose, and it did this in the only way it could, namely, formally. That is why bureaucratic centralisation did not in the least do away with the antithesis between the interests of the various social groups, and was in fact based on it. Marx writes: "The same spirit which creates the corporation in society creates the bureaucracy in the state. Hence, the attack on the spirit of the corporations is an attack on the spirit of the bureaucracy; and if earlier the bureaucracy combated the existence of the corporations in order to make room for its own existence, so now it tries forcibly to keep them in existence in order to preserve the spirit of the corporations, which is its own spirit" (7, 3; 45).
Bureaucracy signifies the introduction of the corporate spirit into state affairs and the transformation of the state power into an instrument used by a group against the others. Marx still assumes that the domination by one class of the others conflicts with the substance of the state, but while this view was still informed by idealism, it correctly established the function of the bureaucratic machine in the capitalist society.
Although the bureaucracy, Marx says, appears to be a system which serves the basic purposes of the state it is actually hostile to it. "The actual purpose of the state therefore appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the 'formal state spirit' [Hegel's expression---I.O.]. The bureaucracy therefore turns the 'formal state spirit' or the actual spiritlessness of the state into a categorical imperative.... It is therefore obliged to pass off the form for the content and the content 175 for the form. State objectives are transformed into objectives of the department, and department objectives into objectives of the state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape" (1, 3; 46).
Marx caps his criticism of bureaucracy and its attendant illusions with the conclusion that the antithesis between power and the people, which is characteristic of the oppressive state, is inseparable from the bureaucratic system. But it is not the bureaucratic system itself, but private interests, the interests of private property that constitute the actual basis of the oppressive state, its "crass materialism", which appears to be ``spiritualism'', because of the semblance of the state's independence from private interests.
In this case, Marx does not use the concepts of materialism and spiritualism in the philosophical sense, so that the inadequate mode of expression is completely compatible with the assertion, which is basically materialist in tenor, that in the bureaucratic state "the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims" (1, 3; 48). In a society based on private property, the state is always an apparatus for class domination. Marx recognises the truth of this with respect to the bureaucratic and "political state", where private property, wealth and, in consequence of this, those who represent them, have political domination.
Hegel analysed and even deified the state, claiming that the state power dominated private property and bent it to its ends, to the interests of the whole, the universal. That is why he justified the primogeniture system, regarding it as real confirmation of his conception. Marx notes that Hegel transformed the cause into the effect, and the effect into the cause, that is, stood the real social relation on its head. Marx asks: "What then is the power of the political state over private property? The power of private property itself, its essence brought into existence. What remains for the political state in contrast with this essence? The illusion that the state determines, when it is being determined" (1, 3; 100). These are perhaps the most important ideas in the Contribution, for they show how Marx breaks with Hegel's idealistic conception of the state, how he advances to materialism.
Marx considers the question of the material basis of the oppressive state and discards Hegel's view that the state tends to reconcile opposite interests. It is true that he does 176 not yet speak of opposite classes, but o"f the antithesis between the state and the civil society, of the contradictions between the interests of the various estates, but even so we see the outlines of the materialist proposition about the state being dependent on the civil society in which privateproperty relations are predominant.
Hegel asserted that thanks to representation of estate private interests of the individual estates secured the state's recognition and were satisfied by the state. By their mediating activity they eliminated the contradiction between the government and the people. Actually, Marx explains, the division of society into estates and the representation of the estates corresponding to that division are a necessary expression of the contradiction. "The estates are supposed to be `mediation' between monarch and executive on the one hand and the nation on the other, but they are not that, they are rather the organised political opposite of civil society" (1, 3; 92).
Marx does not merely establish the antithesis between the state power and the people, but goes on to draw the conclusion that the contradiction lies within the very substance of the "political state", i.e., a state in which private property is predominant not only in the "civil society", but also in the political sphere. Accordingly, the determination of the state by the civil society turns out to be its determination by private property. It is not the state or the estates that create the antithesis between the propertied and the unpropertied; it cannot be eliminated by the state, let alone by the representation of the estates. Consequently, the representative system is important not because it eliminates the contradiction of the civil society, but because it brings out and deepens the contradiction, so creating premises for its resolution. "The representative constitution is a great advance, since it is the frank, undistorted, consistent expression of the modern condition of the state. It is an unconcealed contradiction" (1, 3; 75). This idea cautions against idealising the bourgeois-democratic transformations of the representative system which cannot put an end to social inequality.
So, while rejecting Hegel's notion of the state which resolves the social contradictions, Marx does not believe them to be insoluble and emphasises that "for a new constitution a real revolution has always been required" (/, 3; 56). Hegel also sought to prove the need for a unity of 177 the new and the old. Marx quotes his view that the development of the state is "something apparently tranquil and unnoticed" and remarks: "The category of gradual transition is, in the first place, historically false; and in the second place, it explains nothing" (1, 3; 57).
Consequently, Marx's criticism of the reactionary aspects of Hegel's philosophy of law enables him to consider the distortion of dialectics in Hegel's system. Even in the preparatory work for his dissertation, Marx said that Hegel's indulgent attitude to the reactionary German reality was not due to his personal inclinations but to the inadequacy of his method. Now, Marx systematically elaborates this idea which he had expressed en passant.
In his Science of Logic, Hegel argued that gradual qualitative change was impossible, but in his Philosophy of Law he frequently expresses ideas in the spirit of the metaphysical conception of development. This is also expressed in his formulation of the problem of contradiction, of the struggle of opposites. By regarding the relativity of opposites as an absolute, Hegel underestimated the sharpness of the contradiction, which turns out to be no more than appearance that disappears in substance. Marx writes: "Hegel's chief error is to conceive the contradiction of appearances as unity in essence, in the idea, while in fact it has something more profound for its essence, namely, an essential contradiction" (1,3; 91).
In Marx's view it is not enough to state the contradictions: there is a need to show their origins, to understand them as essence and to trace their development---the struggle of opposites. Hegel's opposites are not actually joined in real battle.
Marx makes an in-depth analysis of Hegel's doctrine of the mediation of opposites, which allegedly occurs with the help of a third element in which the opposites are reconciled. Of course, if one reduces the real opposites to the relation of the general and the particular, within the structure of an inference, the third element mediating the relation will turn out to be the specific. Indeed, that is what Hegel actually does in his Philosophy of Law, asserting, for instance, that the estate representation ``mediates'' and neutralises the antithesis between the universal state interests and the private interests of the members of the civil society. Actually, the estate representation does not reconcile these opposites but is 178 a form of their development. In this connection, Marx draws a conclusion which is of outstanding methodological significance: "Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common, they do not need each other, they do not supplement each other. The one does not have in its own bosom the longing for, the need for, the anticipation of the other" (7, 3; 88). Of course, this is still an imperfect formulation, because it gives no indication that mutually exclusive opposites can also be in a relation of interdependence, when they constitute different aspects of one and the same whole. But Marx has in mind opposites of another type which, to be sure, he does not quite adequately described as true or actual opposites: "True actual extremes would be pole and non-pole, human and non-human species" (7, 3; 88). He draws a distinction between these actual extremes that require no mediation, and the contradictions and opposites which are inherent in the essence of phenomena. Thus, "north pole and south pole are both pole; their essence is identical; similarly, female and male sex are both one species, one essence, human essence. North and south are opposed aspects of one essence---the differentiation of one essence at the height of its development. They are differentiated essence. They are what they are only as a distinct attribute, and as this distinct attribute of the essence" (7, 3; 88). However, once again, contrary to Hegel's doctrine, the mediation of opposites occurs not through the presence of a mediator, i.e., a third, reconciling element, but through their interaction, intertransition and interdependence. Hegel's conception of the mediation of opposites seems to be borne out at first sight by the common conviction that extremes tend to meet. It is asserted, for instance, Marx writes, that "every extreme is its other extreme. Abstract spiritualism is abstract materialism; abstract materialism is the abstract spiritualism of matter" (7, 3; 88). As Lapin shows very well (22; 194-95), Marx objects to this identification of actual opposites, which are not equivalent to each other. Between them there is no allocation of both truth and error. One extreme, Marx says, gains the upper hand over the other. The property of a given phenomenon of being the opposite of something else is determined by its substance, in consequence of which that of which it is the opposite appears as the opposite only within the framework 179 of the given relation. For "it lies only in the essence of one of them to be an extreme, while for the other this has not the significance of true actuality" (1, 3; 89), Thus, religion and philosophy are ``extremes''. But in truth religion does not form a true opposite to philosophy. For philosophy comprehends religion in its illusory actuality.... There is no actual dualism of essence" (I, 3; 89)
The importance of these propositions lies in Marx's concrete and profoundly dialectical formulation of the problem of opposites, a formulation which, in principle, rules out any confusion of actual opposites, like truth and error, poverty and wealth, war and peace, without denying the dialectical relation between them. Obliteration of the antithesis between "abstract spiritualism" and "abstract materialism" well illustrates this sophistic distortion of dialectics. Marx comes out strongly against such a juggling of concepts and shows that in the given relation of actual extremes the truth is on the side of materialism. An abstract concept, being no more than an abstraction of something else, has no significance of its own. "Thus spirit, for example, is regarded as merely the abstraction of matter. Then it is self-evident that precisely because this form is to constitute its content, this concept is rather the abstract contrary, the object, from which it is abstracted, in its abstraction, which constitutes the real essence, in this case abstract materialism" (Jf, 3; 89).
We find that the dialectical analysis of the relation of opposites which does not fit into a hard-and-fast pattern enables Marx to draw the highly important conclusion concerning the untenability of spiritualism, which abstracts itself from matter and claims its abstraction to be a positive definition of some fundamental substance. Marx argues the truth of materialism, refuting both spiritualism and the attempts to reconcile philosophical trends. The term " abstract materialism" appears to establish his critical attitude to earlier materialist philosophy and to show his awareness of the need for its dialectical development, He does not confine his critique of Hegel's dialectics to showing that the idealistic interpretation of mediation as the way of resolving contradictions is wrong. He says that it is not right to identify differences within one and the same substance with the "hypostatised abstraction" into an independent substance on the one hand, and with the actual opposition of mutually 180 exclusive substances, on the other, and brings out the threefold error of Hegel's idealism, which was dialectical idealism and the most elaborate and important in content. First, it consists in the fact "that since only the extreme is said to be true, every abstraction and one-sidedness thinks itself true, whereby a principle appears only as an abstraction of something else, instead of as a totality in itself" (I, 3; 89), Second, "the sharply-marked character of actual opposites, their development into extremes, which is nothing else but their self-cognition and also their eagerness to bring the fight to a decision, is thought of as something possibly to be prevented or something harmful" (1, 3; 89). And finally, third, the error which arises from the very attempt to ``mediate'' that which in consequence of the specific nature of the given contradiction rules out mediation.
Marx's critique of Hegel's doctrine of contradiction and its mediation is central to his analysis of idealist dialectics, which is, I think, the most mature part of the MS (in the sense of the advance towards dialectical materialism).
The shaping of Marx's materialist views of society naturally coincides with his advance from revolutionary democratism to scientific communism. The main thing in this process is his negation of the idealistic view of the state, reduction of the state to its actual basis, and substantiation of the need to revolutionise the civil society by abolishing the domination of private property and establishing genuine democracy. Accordingly, "it becomes necessary that the movement of the constitution, that advance, be made the principle of the constitution and that therefore the real bearer of the constitution, the people, be made the principle of the constitution" (1, 3; 57).
He refutes Hegel's assertion that in the constitutional monarchy the state interest coincides with the interests of the people and explains that the people itself can and must carry out the universal endeavour of the state. It is not enough to substitute a republic for a constitutional monarchy; there is a need for a state in which "the nation itself is a matter of general concern; in this case it is a question of the will, which finds its true presence as species-will only in the selfconscious will of the nation" (1, 3; 65)''.
Marx's analysis of the various historical forms of law leads him to the conclusion that they have all been, directly or 181 indirectly, based on private property. Roman private law is the law of private property. Feudal law also rests on private property. The establishment of a constitutional system works no change in this relation because the state remains a "constitution of private property" (1, 3; 108). Consequently, the constitution of the state is the constitution of private property.
Marx has yet to consider the origins of private property, but he has no Utopian notions about private property having originated from human error. He is clearly aware that the struggle between rich and poor, the contradictions within the civil society and the antithesis between the state and civil society have their origins in private property.
One should bear in mind, however, that Marx did not yet consider this private property as a historically rooted form of property in the means of production. He has not yet developed the concept of relations of production, economic structure of society and" economic basis. Hence his very broad use of the concept of private property: "The different subdivisions of trade and industry are the private property of different corporations. Court dignities, jurisdiction, etc., are the private property of particular estates. The various provinces are the private property of individual princes, etc. Service to the country, etc., is the private property of the ruler. The spirit is the private property of the clergy" (7, 3; 109). The wide range of phenomena covered by Marx's concept of private property is closely bound up with his critique of the mediaeval order, and this shows that he has not yet fully drawn the distinction between the socialist idea of abolishing private property and the democratic idea of abolishing feudal privileges.
One of his main conclusions can be formulated as follows: the abolition of the domination of private property is simultaneously abolition of the sphere of society alienated from the state, which Hegel called the civil society. The state, which is opposed to the people and is based on the civil society whose principle is war of everyone against all, goes down together with it. Marx did not yet call himself either a communist or a materialist, but he was certainly moving to these qualitatively new positions.
The MS of Contribution was completed at Kreuznach, where Marx arrived at the end of May 1843 to visit his fiancee, Jenny von Westphalen, where he was married and 182 where he lived until the beginning of October. There Marx studied history and the classical works in philosophy and the history of philosophy of the French 18th-century materialists Montesquieu and Rousseau, and of Machiavelli. We have five of his note-books (usually called the Kreuznach note-books) containing extracts from these works, running to a total of over 250 closely written pages. Unfortunately, these notebooks contain virtually none of Marx's own ideas, but the extracts and especially his subject-index grouping. His extracts on the various problems show precisely what he found of interest in that period and to what he attached the greatest importance.
Marx made long extracts from the works of Heinrich and Schmidt on the history of France, from W. Wachsmuth's two-volume History of France in the Epoch of Revolution and from books by K. Ludwig, K. Lancizolle and Chateaubriand, which also dealt with the revolutionary transition from feudalism to capitalism in France.^^*^^ He also made a circumstantial study of the history of Germany, England and the United States. He was interested above all in the development of private property, the transition from the feudal estates to the class structure of bourgeois society, and bourgeois revolutions, which establish the capitalist system that is qualitatively distinct from feudalism. Marx's interest in the French revolution of 1789 was so great that at one time he intended to make a special study of the history of the Convent, that is, the period of the Jacobin dictatorship in France.
Special interest, as I see it, attaches to Marx's extract from Rousseau's Contrat social, where Marx emphasises his ideas about the inalienability of the people's sovereignty and the distinction between the general will, by which the state must be guided, and the will of all. Marx also quotes Rousseau as saying that the distinction between the two types of will is relative.^^**^^
_-_-_^^*^^ C. C. Heinrich, Geschichte von Frankreich, Vols. 1-2, Leipzig, 1802-1803; E. A. Schmidt, Geschichte von Frankreich, Vol. I, Hamburg, 1835; W. Wachsmuth, Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionsalter, Vols. 1-2, Hamburg, 1840; C. Ludwig, Geschichte der letzten funfzig Jahre, Part 2, Altona, 1833; K. Lancizolle, Uber Ursachen, Charakter und Folgen der Julitage, Berlin, 1831; F. Chateaubriand, Ansichten iiber Frankreich seit dem Juli 1830, Leipzig, 1831.
^^**^^ "There is frequently a considerable distinction between the will of all and the general will. The latter safeguards only the general interests, and __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 184. 183
In an interesting paper, "Karl Marx's Study of World History in 1843 and 1844 as a Source of the Formation of the Materialist View of History", V. G. Mosolov says quite rightly "that his study of world history, above all, of the history of the French revolution, in 1843 and 1844, had an important role to play in the shaping of the materialist view of history. This (together with Marx's economic studies, which he began at the time) marked an important stride forward in his clarification of the objective character of the motive forces of history, in his comprehension of the role of forms of property in history and their influence on the development of political institutions and the policy of the various classes and social groupings, and in his understanding of the historical development and historical role of classes" (27; 105).
Some parts of the MS of Marx's Contribution show that his study of world history and the works of Rousseau and other outstanding thinkers helped him not only to bring out Hegel's mistakes but also to counterpose to his doctrine a new view of society, of the state and of social development. His articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, which I analyse below, already contain a theoretical summing-up of recent history with dialectico-materialist and communist conclusions.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 2 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS AND UTOPIAN SOCIALIST DOCTRINES IN FRANCE ANDIn November 1843, the Owenist weekly The New Moral World and Gazette of the National Society carried a long article by Engels which was then reprinted, with some abridgements, by the Chartist newspaper Northern Star. It was entitled "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent", and was a milestone on Engels's way to scientific communism.
He starts with a reference to the broad spread of communist views: "There are more than half a million of Communists in France, not taking into account the _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 183. the former, private interests, and is only a sum-total of the expressions of the will of individuals. But discard from these expressions of will the mutually cancelling out extremes; as a result of the addition of the remaining discrepancies you will have the general will" (104; 5).
184 Fourierists, and other less radical Social reformers; there are Communist associations in every part of Switzerland, sending forth missionaries to Italy, Germany, and even Hungary; and German philosophy, after a long and troublesome circuit, has at last settled upon Communism" (/, 3; 392).One should bear in mind, however, that on the eve of the 1848-1849 revolution, the radical elements of the bourgeoisdemocratic movement in the West European countries frequently styled themselves socialists and even communists. Lenin made the following point: "Everybody in Germany at that time was a Communist---except the proletariat. Communism was a form of expression of the opposition sentiments of all, and chiefly of the bourgeoisie" (5, 24; 556).
Engels arrives at this high figure by putting the broad interpretation on socialism and communism which was prevalent in that pre-revolutionary epoch, but the immaturity of his communist views did not prevent him from discerning the objective content of the communist movement: "A thorough revolution of social arrangements, based on community of property, has now become an urgent and unavoidable necessity" (1, 3; 392). Consequently, Engels rejects the liberal interpretation of socialism and communism, of which even a thinker like Feuerbach was not free.^^*^^
Engels has yet to express in concrete terms the concept of collective property or to raise the question of socialising the means of production, for at that stage in the shaping of Marxism, even in such a general form the concept fully met the task of breaking with the bourgeois world outlook, which perpetuated private property in every form.
.:
In his earlier articles about England, Engels spoke of a thorough revolution which was determined by the specific features of its historical development. Now he defines the task of restructuring society on communist lines as an international one: "communism is not the consequence of the particular position of the English, or any other nation, but ... it is a necessary conclusion, which cannot be avoided to be drawn from the premises given in the general facts of modern civilisation" (1, 3; 392).
_-_-_^^*^^ In the early 1840s, Feuerbach wrote: "What is the essence of my principle? It is the Ego and Alter Ego, `egoism' and `communism', for both are connected with each other like head and heart. Without egoism you have no head, without communism, no heart" (66, 2; 413).
185Engels jettisons the bourgeois-democratic illusions suggesting that the abolition of the estates and the establishment of civil rights and freedoms is completion of the historical process of emancipation of the individual. His acquaintance with English bourgeois democracy leads him to the following conclusion: "Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery--- that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality---that is, Communism" (1, 3; 393). There Engels quite clearly speaks of a democracy which, while proclaiming the equality of all the members of society, maintains social inequality and exploitation.
The main purpose of his article was to inform readers of the various trends of Utopian socialism and communism. Engels did not express his attitude to each of these trends, as this would -have required a much longer study, which he had just begun. Following his criticism of bourgeois democracy, Engels mentioned the French Communists, who advocated the republican form of government. He also set forth the key ideas of Proudhon's book, Qu'est-ce que la propriete? (What Is Property?).
While the article does not contain a full elaboration of the questions of communist theory, its significance lies in the fact that it shows the formation of Engels's own communist views. We find that on the whole he takes a negative attitude to Saint-Simonism, whose main defects, he believes, are mysticism and a non-revolutionary approach to economic problems, expressing a compromise with the capitalist structure of society. It is true that Engels remarks on the flashes of genius in the writings of Saint-Simon and some of his followers, but that does nothing to alter his overall assessment: "Saint-Simonism, after having excited, like a brilliant meteor, the attention of the thinking, disappeared from the Social horizon. Nobody now thinks of it, or speaks of it; its time is past" (I, 3; 394).
He contrasts Saint-Simonism with Fourierism, that is, the 186 other form of Utopian socialism, which was not free of mysticism either. But, Engels declares, if Fourier's mysticism and extravagance are discarded, "there will remain something not to be found among the Saint-Simonians---scientific research, cool, unbiassed, systematic thought, in short, social philosophy; whilst Saint-Simonism can only be called social poetry" (1, 3; 394). He believes that Fourier was the first to establish the great axiom of social philosophy: if the inherent urge of each individual for some useful social activity is fully met, laziness and parasitism are impossible. It is in human nature constantly to strive for activity; there is no need to coerce men to it; one need merely give the right direction to this natural urge through reasonable social organisation. All that makes work arduous springs not from the substance of labour but from the individualistic social organisation which, Fourier argued, has to give way to collectivism and association.
Engels's high appreciation of Fourier's idea concerning the historically transient character of the antithesis between labour and pleasure, and town and country on the whole correctly identifies the rational element in Fourier's teaching. At the same time, Engels points to yet another of Fourier's main defects. It is "his non-abolition of private property. In his Phalansteres or associative establishments, there are rich and poor, capitalists and working men" (1, 3; 395). Engels criticises this inconsistency because it allows of the possibility for a revival of the old, i.e., capitalist system "on improved plan''.
He criticises the French Utopian socialists also for converting their doctrines into religious teachings and for proclaiming as an axiom the idea that Christianity and communism are identical. "This they try to prove by the Bible, the state of community in which the first Christians are said to have lived, etc.". Refuting these arguments, he emphasises: "if some few passages of the Bible may be favourable to Communism the general spirit of its doctrines is, nevertheless, totally opposed to it, as well as to every rational measure" (1, 3; 399).
Engels condemns the attempts to combine socialism and religion and explains that for socialism to be transformed into a scientific and revolutionary doctrine it is not enough to put paid to religion; there is a need above all consistently to reject private property, as required by French Utopian 187 communism, which he calls the most important and radical party in France. He connects the origination of communism, from Babouvism to the teachings of Cabet, with the history of bourgeois revolutions, which were carried out by the oppressed and the exploited and were repeatedly turned against them. The proletarians eventually come to realise that political transformations in themselves did nothing to change their condition; there was a need for a social revolution to abolish private property.
Engels fully accepted this conclusion of the French communists, which set them above the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists. But he was not yet sure that a communist transformation of society necessarily implied the revolutionary use of force. The secret societies, conspiracies and uprisings of the French communists had invariably failed. Engels already appears to be aware that the conspiratorial tactic is hopeless, but he has yet to contrast it with the workers' organised mass revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.
Engels then goes on to give a brief description of German communist theories. Thomas Mtintzer, for instance, already asserted that community of property was the only fitting state for a society of Christians. The antithesis between Mvintzer and Luther expressed the basic contradiction between the people and its oppressors. Luther may have started out as a man of the people, but then began to serve its oppressors. Analysing the situation in Germany in the 1840s, Engels says that Wilhelm Weitling, a proletarian, is "to be considered as the founder of German Communism" (1, 3; 402). He assumes that the communist doctrine will, "very soon unite all the working classes of Germany" (7, 3; 403).
Engels devotes special attention to so-called philosophical communism, which he sees as a natural result of the development of German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach. The political revolution in France went hand in hand with the philosophical revolution in Germany. Its highest achievement was Hegel's philosophy, which contained within itself a profound contradiction between method and system. It was expressed in the division of the Hegelian school into the Young Hegelians and the Old Hegelians, and helped those followers of Hegel's who emphasised the progressive aspects of his philosophy to move to the left. "The Young Hegelians of 1842 were 188 declared Atheists and Republicans" (/, 3; 405). The reactionaries who were everywhere persecuting the opposition were celebrating their victory prematurely, because "from the ashes of political agitation" rose communism (1, 3; 405). Engels believes that as early as the autumn of 1842 some of the Young Hegelians (and he apparently includes himself as well) came to realise that it took more than political transformations in society to realise their historiophilosophical principles and ideals: there was a need for a social revolution to institute community of property. Bauer, Feuerbach and Ruge, "the leaders of the party", did not agree with this. "Communism, however, was such a necessary consequence of New Hegelian philosophy, that no opposition could keep it down, and, in the course of this present year, the originators of it had the satisfaction of seeing one republican after the other join their ranks. Besides Dr. Hess, one of the editors of the now suppressed Rhenish Gazette, and who was, in fact, the first Communist of the party, there are now a great many others; as Dr. Ruge, editor of the German Annals, the scientific periodical of the Young Hegelians, which has been suppressed by resolution of the German Diet; Dr. Marx, another of the editors of the Rhenish Gazette; George Herwegh, the poet whose letter to the King of Prussia was translated, last winter, by most of the English papers, and others: and we hope that the remainder of the republican party will, by-and-by, come over too.
``Thus, philosophical Communism may be considered for ever established in Germany, notwithstanding the efforts of the governments to keep it down" (/, 3; 406).
What Engels says there needs to be examined in detail. He does not merely express a definite standpoint about the Young Hegelians' attitude to Utopian communism, but does this as a member of the Young Hegelian movement who is, in fact, advancing to communism, a fact which leaves a definite imprint on his evaluation of the Young Hegelian teaching. What must also be taken into account is that at the time Engels, like other advocates of socialism and communism, interpreted these doctrines in very general terms. Apart from negation of private property and recognition of social property as the main condition for restructuring society, he infused them with exceedingly general humanistic concepts.
As I said above, in the Germany of the 1840s communism was an expression of opposition. This is especially true of 189 ``philosophical communism", which was not connected with the working-class movement, did not address the workers, and did not regard them as the chief force in the communist transformation of society. German "philosophical communism" consisted of different elements. Alongside those who actually accepted the ideas of Utopian socialism and communism (among them Hess, in the first place), the movement included some bourgeois radicals as well. Engels subsequently said that "there was then no separate republican party in Germany. People were either constitutional monarchists, or more or less clearly defined Socialists or Communists" (2, 1; 316). This trend was most pronounced in "philosophical communism", which, being abstract and uninvolved in any concrete criticism of capitalist production, was most frequently inclined to. resort to socialist and communist terminology. Such was the ``communism'' of Feuerbach, who at best expressed his sympathies for the communist movement. As for Ruge, he was an opponent of the working-class movement, as will be seen from his attitude to the Silesian Uprising of 1844. What has been said up to now shows that Marx and Engels took a special stand, for they were truly moving towards communism.
Engels does not give a critical analysis of "philosophical communism" possibly because he still shares some of its illusions. Like Hess, he declares: "There is a greater chance in Germany for the establishment of a Communist party among the educated classes of society, than anywhere else. The Germans are a very disinterested nation: if in Germany principle comes into collision with interest, principle will almost always silence the claims of interest.... It will appear very singular to Englishmen, that a party which aims at the destruction of private property is chiefly made up by those who have property; and yet this is the case in Germany" (1, 3; 407).
In his first few articles from England, Engels said the country was backward and bogged down in feudalism. Now, for the most part, he gives up this view. However, he is still fully to realise the universal importance of the principal features of England's capitalist development. This explains his illusion about the possibility of Germany's travelling a special way, which would evade or, at least, ease the social cataclysms. He speaks of the German national character and the prevalence of ideal principles in Germany: backward and 190 semifeudal Germany, which is still to be fully awakened by the development of capitalism, is for him a country where the ideal predominates over the material (and, in fact, feudal relations do, to some extent, have this appearance).
His assertion that the spread of communist ideas in Germany is determined not so much by material requirements and interests as by spiritual motives is also connected with the idea that different countries could travel totally different ways to communism. He assumes that the English came to accept communism "practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country: the French politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality ... the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles" (1, 3; 392-93).
I must emphasise that in saying this Engels does not contrast the German, English and French teachings with each other, but, on the contrary, points to their fundamental unity, in effect anticipating the Marxist proposition about the international character of communism. He also suggests that the communist doctrine springs from the economic, political and philosophical development of the major countries of Western Europe, that it is a necessary result of social progress, and that no nation can reject communism if it is not to repudiate all that is progressive in its cultural legacy. It is true that Engels still regards the connection between communism in Germany and German classical philosophy as a direct one, because he does not consider the material basis of the historical continuity and class content of these teachings. But one must agree with him when he declares: "Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless---worse than useless; or, that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up as the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism" (1, 3; 406). Indeed, German classical philosophy is one of the sources of scientific communism, and Engels is already aware of it.
This question naturally arises: was Engels a Utopian socialist at that time, i.e., just before his advance to the positions of dialectical materialism and scientific communism? I have already quoted some of his statements in the spirit of Utopian socialism. However, he found the system of 191 views of the Utopian socialists and communists unacceptable. M. V. Serebryakov shows very well that in the article here being considered Engels "criticised the apolitical approach of the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, shunned the Chartist democratic illusions and condemned the conspiratorial tactics of the Btanquists. Finally, Engels was independently probing for the 'foundation and motive forces' of social development and saw these in material interests. Consequently, in 1843 he already stood head and shoulders above the various Utopian socialists" (37; 244).
To say that the creation of scientific socialism implied a preliminary stage of Utopian socialism would be to oversimplify and schematicise the actual process. Of course, scientific socialism did not spring up overnight, but in the course of the creative assimilation of Hegel's philosophy, which, as Georgi Plekhanov rightly noted, "mercilessly condemned Utopianism" (lOla, 111; 604). From the outset, Marx and Engels took a critical attitude to the teachings of the Utopian socialists and communists. It derived, among other things, from their study of political economy and the understanding that private property was not an aberration of the mind but a historical necessity, under definite historical conditions, at any rate. Of course, they felt the influence of the Utopian socialists and communists and accepted some of their propositions, including those which they later dropped. But at the very beginning of their scientific activity they had mastered the historical approach, which in principle rules out the basically nihilistic attitude to humanity's past history, a frame of mind that was characteristic of the Utopian thinkers. This conclusion is borne out by the analysis of Engels's article, "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent", in which the influence of Utopian socialism and communism is most pronounced.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 3 __ALPHA_LVL3__ PREPARATIONS FOR PUBLISHING DEUTSCH-FRANZ\:OSISCHEWhen the Rheinische Zeitung was closed down, Marx decided to leave Germany and said as much in a letter to Ruge in January 1843. In another letter in September of 192 that year he declares: "The atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity" (1, 3; 142).
Marx and Ruge discussed in their letters the publication of a revolutionary organ abroad. Ruge invited Marx to become its editor with a salary of 550-850 thalers provided the publication appeared as a monthly and ran to 15 signatures (43; 295). It was decided to call the journal DeutschFranzosische Jahrbucher^^*^^, a name, Ruge believed, would suggest the task of bringing the two nations spiritually closer together. At one time, the idea was to publish it in Strasbourg, but then it was decided to do so in Paris. "And so---to Paris, to the old university of philosophy----absit omen!---and the new capital of the new world! What is necessary comes to pass" (7, 3; 142).
Ruge believed that its main task was to "transplant radical philosophy to the soil of freedom of the press" (43; 296), i.e., to use the opportunities provided by a publication abroad to carry on opposition activity. As Ruge's letters show, he strove to involve in the publication not only bourgeois radicals but also socialists, and especially French socialists (53', 47-60). In a letter to Marx he suggests that the Young Hegelians should also be invited to contribute (43; 320). In another letter, Ruge says that Bauer is willing to take part in the new "active organ of radicalism" (43; 309).
Engels was also invited to take part and was quick to accept. By the time the first issue appeared Engels had inserted an item in The New Moral World saying that the new theoretical organ stood for a complete restructuring of society.
When the first issue was being prepared, Marx wrote to Feuerbach inviting him to take part in the new periodical. He asked Feuerbach to write an article about Schelling, for he believed Feuerbach to be the best author for such an article, because what had been a fantastic youthful vision for Schelling was realised in the philosophy of Feuerbach. Marx writes: "Schelling is therefore an anticipated caricature of you, and as soon as reality confronts a caricature, the latter must dissolve into thin air. I therefore regard you as the necessary, natural---that is, nominated by Their Majesties Nature and History---opponent of Schelling" (1, 3; 351). What he _-_-_
^^*^^ The name was undoubtedly suggested by Feuerbach's idea, expressed in 1842: "The true philosopher who is not out of touch with life, with man, must be of the Gallo-German race" (67; 81).
__PRINTERS_P_193_COMMENT__ 7 - 185 193 evidently means is that Feuerbach's materialist philosophy is the true philosophy of nature in contrast to Schelling's natural philosophy.Lenin points out that in this letter to Feuerbach Marx gives a specimen of partisanship in philosophy, setting up with remarkable clarity the basic lines in philosophy and resolutely condemning Schelling's claim to encompass and so to surpass the opposite philosophical doctrines. Marx writes: "How cunningly Herr von Schelling enticed the French, first of all the weak, eclectic Cousin, then even the gifted Leroux. For Pierre Leroux and his like still regard Schelling as the man who replaced transcendental idealism by rational realism, abstract thought by thought with flesh and blood, specialised philosophy by world philosophy! To the French romantics and mystics he cries: 'I, the union of philosophy and theology', to the French materialists: 'I, the union of flesh and idea', to the French sceptics: 'I, the destroyer of dogmatism', in a word, 'I ... Schelling!'" (1, 3; 350).
According to Marx, says Lenin, partisanship is consistency in applying the philosophical principles, steadfast advance along a sharply defined philosophical way and refusal to reconcile oneself with any eclectic attempts to reconcile opposite philosophical doctrines (5, 14; 337). What the eclectic regards as narrowness and one-sidedness, is, in effect, principled consistency and genuine fearlessness of philosophical thought which carries its conclusions to the end. Partisanship, Lenin says, is Marxism's greatest and most valuable tradition, and we find its foundations being laid in that early document on Marx's ideological development.
In his reply to Marx, Feuerbach, in effect, set out in concrete terms Marx's characteristic of Schelling, but he refused to write an article about Schelling, believing that he had already said all there was to say on the matter. Nor did he express any desire to write some other articles for the Jahrbiicher.
In the autumn of 1843, Marx moved to Paris, then a centre of political life, where he had the opportunity of establishing direct contact with the working-class movement and outstanding spokesmen for contemporary socialist and communist theories. Marx noted later that at the time he maintained personal relations with "the leaders of most of the French secret workers' societies, without, however, joining any of them" (4a; 14; 439).
194The publication in February 1844 of the first two double issues of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher was an important event, and Daniels, who had worked with Marx in Cologne (and who subsequently became a member of the Communist League) wrote that Marx's articles which appeared in the journal were seen by German democrats as "the greatest and finest gift of German genius to the French" (41; 2).
The journal opens with a foreword by Ruge and letters written by Marx, Ruge, Feuerbach and Bakunin, discussing the aims of the publication. Marx's letters show him to be a thinker who towers over his outstanding contemporaries and who is profoundly aware of the revolutionary situation taking shape in Europe. In a letter to Ruge he says, in particular, that Germany is on the eve of a revolution, and formulates the tasks of revolutionary democracy. Ruge's reply to Marx shows that he did not believe that a revolution in Germany was at hand, or that it was at all possible, for the Germans were allegedly lost to history; they had borne despotism with the patience of sheep, and even with patriotism; the past thirty years had made Germany politically more insignificant than ever. Ruge concluded his reply to Marx as follows: "Our people has no future before it" (42; 560).^^*^^
In a reply letter Marx criticises this "funeral song" which, he says, contains nothing political at all. He counters Ruge's pessimism with the conviction of the revolutionary based on a sober analysis of the state of affairs. Indeed, Germany is bogged down in philistinism. "The philistine world is a political world of animals ... is the dehumanised world" (1, 3; 137). Such a state of affairs fully accords with Germany's state system, because the philistine is material for a monarchy, while the monarch is the king of philistines. Montesquieu was wrong in asserting that honour is the _-_-_
^^*^^ Feuerbach's letter, published in the journal, shows that he was closer to Ruge than to Marx in assessing Germany's prospects. He wrote: "It will be a long time before we in Germany score any success. Everything is spoiled through and through, one thing in one way, another, in another" (42; 571). Bakunin wrote in a somewhat different way: "Oh, I do agree that a German 1789 is still a long way off! But when have the Germans not lagged behind the times? This does not mean, however, that it is now time to sit with folded arms and despair pusillanimously. If men like you no longer believe in Germany's future, and no longer wish to work for it, who, in that case, is there to believe and who to work?" (42, 566).
195 principle of monarchy. This is also a mistake when a distinction is drawn between monarchy, a despotism and tyranny, because these three words, in effect, mean the same thing. The principle of monarchy is a despised, despicable and dehumanised man. But does this mean that the Germans are doomed to remain philistines and slaves of monarchy? Marx rejects such a conclusion and asserts that the development of the contradictions inherent in the world of philistinism and monarchy will explode this distorted world. Besides, "the system of industry and trade, of ownership and exploitation of people, however, leads even far more rapidly than the increase in population to a rupture within present-day society, a rupture which the old system is not able to heal, because it does not heal and create at all, but only exists and consumes. But the existence of suffering human beings, who think, and thinking human beings, who are oppressed, must inevitably become unpalatable and indigestible to the animal world of philistinism which passively and thoughtlessly consumes.``For our part, we must expose the old world to the full light of day and shape the new one in a positive way. The longer the time that events allow to thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering mankind for mobilising its forces, the more perfect on entering the world will be the product that the present time bears in its womb" (1, 3; 141). Of course, this still contains a great deal of what Marx is soon to discard, but it does contain the formulation of a highly important question concerning the transient character of Germany's petty-bourgeois development, and the role of large-scale industry in overcoming this pettybourgeois element.
So, the question of revolution is on the order of the day, and that is the light in which Marx considers the tasks before the journal. The chief of these is relentless criticism of the existing state system from the standpoint of the revolutionary masses opposing it. Consequently, this is not abstract Young Hegelian "critical criticism", which is inevitably sectarian, but real political struggle in which sober account is taken of the objective conditions and the trends of social development.
Marx says that diverse doctrinaires, ignoring historical experience, try to invent logical formulas and universal recipes for solving all the social problems, and decree the 196 future social order. The new journal must refrain from such dogmatic claims. It will not liken itself either to the reformers, who imagine that they have a precise knowledge of society's future arrangement and the ways of achieving it, or to the philosophers who proclaim that their system contains the full and final truth. Marx explains that "it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its -mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally, but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be" (1, 3; 142).
These vivid aphoristic statements sound the knell of utopianism, dogmatism and sectarianism in politics and in social theory, and what is equally important, in philosophy as well. Philosophy needs to end its neglect of practice and the unscientific claim to absolute knowledge. It should not be an "absolute science" but simply a science which develops and is enriched with new data. The unity of philosophy and practice, on the one hand, and the positive sciences, on the other, opens up before it the prospect of exerting an effective influence on the course of social life. Philosophy becomes, Marx says, a "critical philosophy", an instrument in the revolutionary transformation of society.
But it is not only up to philosophy to shed its dogmatic abstractions. The same task confronts the socialists and the communists, whose theories are unhistorical in their attitude not only to humanity's past but also to its future, which the Utopians regard as something immutable and cut and.dried.^^*^^ _-_-_
^^*^^ Present-day critics of Marxism constantly ascribe to Marx the views which he had systematically refuted. Thus, M. Lange claims that Marx's __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 198. 197 This explains Marx's assertion that "communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dezamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis---the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines---such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc.---arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle" (7, 3; 142-43).
It is highly important to note that when criticising Utopian communism Marx emphasises the need to abolish private property. Yet, Marx does not call himself a communist, because he refuses to accept the utopianism and dogmatism of contemporary communist teachings.
The Utopian socialists and communists reduced the main task of society's social restructuring chiefly to a redistribution of the material goods already produced and in the process of production. They clearly under-rated the need further to develop the productive forces, culture and science to fulfil the majestic tasks they themselves proclaimed. That is what Marx had in mind when he said that Utopian communism was not yet free of the influence of its opposite, private property, because it only sought to effect a ``fair'' distribution of it. Meanwhile, the task was actually to put an end to private property, i.e., to achieve a high level in the development of production that would make it possible to satisfy man's historically shaped requirements.
Marx emphasises the importance of political struggle and relentless criticism of the existing social system, and the need to formulate a new and truly revolutionary political line. He brings out these questions, which "according to the extreme Socialists, are altogether unworthy of attention" (7, 3; 144).
The Utopians assumed that it was possible to put through radical socialist (or communist) transformations at any time, and in the shortest historical period, as soon as they had won _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 197. notion of mankind's communist future "is secularisation of the theological interpretation of history" (86; 35). However, Marx never took an eschatological view of the ultimate goal of history, and, as we shall see later, he only spoke of the ultimate goal of the class struggle of the proletariat.
198 to their side a sufficient number of supporters. That is why they did not attach any importance to the political struggle, considering that it was not directly aimed at a socialist transformation of society. They saw the struggle for democracy as self-deception, because they had not the slightest idea of its importance for the historical preparation of the socialist revolution. Marx posed the question of a comprehensive transformation of the whole of society's material and---what is equally important---spiritual life, arguing the need for political struggle, which is organically connected with scientific revolutionary theory. "Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggle, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case, we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles" (7, 3; 144). We find that Marx formulates ideological principles without contrasting these (as the Young Hegelians did) with the real socio-historical process. He sees in capitalist reality itself the social forces fighting against it and connected his theory with "real, struggle''.The demand that criticism should be connected with criticism of politics, with the struggle carried on by the working people, the demand for partisanship, as opposed to the doctrinaire approach, is clearly aimed against the "critical criticism" of Bauer and his followers. Marx, for his part, believed that a study of the experience of the mass struggle and conjunction of theory with revolutionary practice was of crucial importance. He formulated the tasks on the strength of his analysis of the objective processes, of their direction, motive forces and trends. Lenin took these propositions to characterise the substance of the materialist view of the role of revolutionary theory, whose first task is "to be able to present this struggle objectively as the product of a definite system of production relations, to be able to understand the necessity of this struggle, its content, course and conditions of development" (5, 1; 328).
Marx's letter we here quote dates from September 1843. Was he at that time already a dialectical and historical materialist, had he already adopted the stand of scientific communism? The letter shows that the process is under way 199 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1981/MMP495/20091123/299.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2009.11.23) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ but is yet to be completed. Alongside dialectico-materialist and essentially communist propositions, the letter contains some idealistic statements stemming from the preceding stage in the formation of Marxism, a stage which is already being overcome. Thus, Marx still regards reason as the basis and criterion of existing social institutions. He writes: "Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal" (/, 3; 143).^^*^^
Marx establishes the contradiction between the real, material premises of the state (the civil society, private property, the family) and its "ideal purpose", and formulates a socialist programme for restructuring society as a task of transforming it in accordance with the demands of consciousness, which must itself become reasonable. "The reform (if consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be---as is also the case in Feuerbach's criticism of religion---to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.
``Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form" (1, 3; 144). Consequently, this entails a demystification not only of the religious but also of the political (it goes without saying) bourgeois social consciousness, and this task is seen as a continuation of Feuerbach's critical work. While the ideas elaborated in that letter, formulating a programme for the new revolutionary organ, are not yet entirely materialist and communist, they _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx goes on to say that the state "everywhere ... assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites" (1, 3; 144). One should bear in mind, however, that Marx's letters, like those of. the others, published in the Deutsch-Franzosisrhe Jahrbiicher do not apparently quite coincide with the authentic text which has not unfortunately come down to us. Engels subsequently emphasised "Marx's repeated statements that the letters were edited by Ruge, who inserted a lot of nonsense into them" (4a, 37; 527).
200 show that Marx stands on the threshold of dialectical and historical materialism and scientific communism. __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 4 __ALPHA_LVL3__ HUMAN EMANCIPATION AND THE PROLETARIAT'S HISTORICALOf the two articles which Marx published in the Jahrbiicher, the first---"On the Jewish Question"---was written in the autumn of 1843, before his arrival in Paris, and the second---"Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction"---in Paris in late 1843 and January 1844. Both deal with the problem of "human emancipation", i.e., the socialist transformation of society, and the critique of bourgeois-democratic illusions concerning "political emancipation". In this sense, the two articles constitute something of a single whole. But in the first nothing is said as yet about the class which is to effect the human emancipation. The idea of the proletariat's historical mission is put forward in the second, which, for that reason, marks a new and decisive stride along the way from revolutionary democracy to scientific communism.
The article, "On the Jewish Question", was written in connection with two articles by Bauer, in which he asserted that the social emancipation of the Jews, as of any other people, meant above all the abolition of its religion. Marx showed that this approach was idealistic and that Bauer had converted the problem of the emancipation of the Jews into a purely religious issue, as if the oppression to which they were being subjected, and their national traits were rooted in the Judaic religion. However, religion was not the cause but the effect of social oppression. This meant that Marx gave a consistently materialist answer to the basic philosophical question. "We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore we explain the religious limitations of the free citizens by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological 201 questions. We turn theological questions into secular ones.... The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation" (1, 3; 151).
Bauer and his followers saw religion, like unreason generally, as the main source of all social evil. They believed that the chief defect of the German state was that it was a "Christian state'',^^*^^ and accordingly held that the most important means for abolishing social oppression was abolition of the state religion, and separation of church from state. This shows, first, the idealism of Young Hegelian radicalism, and second, its duality. On the one hand, criticism of religion, of Christianity, as the official ideology of semi-feudal Germany, undoubtedly tended to undermine the foundations of the existing state. On the other hand, by reducing the struggle against the feudal system mainly to criticism of its religious garb, the Young Hegelians were wanting in their criticism of the political, and especially, of the economic structure of German society.
In contrast to the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach realised that the whole content of religion stemmed from the diverse human relations. But he interpreted these human relations anthropologically, i.e., not as historically definite and transient but as ``natural'', even if distorted. He was aware that religion is the instrument for the oppression of the masses by the ruling classes but did not realise that this oppression constituted the basis of the religious consciousness.
Marx takes a different approach and deduces the religious consciousness from antagonistic social contradictions. He not only gives a materialist explanation to the religious form of social consciousness, but also criticises the antagonistic social relations, which are not abolished either by a separation of church from state or by any political emancipation in general. There is a need for a fundamentally different social transformation', which Marx calls human emancipation.
Elaborating the materialist view of religion, Marx says in his article, "Contribution...": "Religion is the sign of the _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1840 and 1841, Marx held roughly the same view. Now he explains: "Not Christianity but the human basis of Christianity is the basis of this state. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because religion is the ideal form of the stage of human development achieved in this state" (1, 3; 159).
202 oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.``To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism, of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion" (7, 3; 175).^^*^^
The criticism of religion, Marx says, is a premise for every other kind of criticism, but it is no more than a premise. Exposure of religion merely rips the false flowers camouflaging the chains which fetter the people. The point is for the people to throw off the chains themselves. So the criticism of religion must become a criticism of politics. But this criticism in itself does not yet amount to a revolutionary endeavour, if it refutes only in theoretical terms that which has to be practically abolished. These ideas are of key political and philosophical importance as the dialectic o-materialist solution of the problem of the relation of consciousness and being, of the ideal and the material.... Marx deepens and elaborates on Feuerbach's thesis that it is not religion that creates man, but man that creates religion, and explains that religion is a fantastic reflection of historically definite and transient social relations. Marx contrasts one of the fundamental propositions of historical materialism to Feuerbach's conception of the abstract man: "Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world." Religion effects "the fantastic realisation of the human essence, because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the _-_-_
^^*^^ A Catholic critic of Marxism, M. Reding, seeks to show that the struggle carried on by Marx and Engels against religion was no more than an episode in the development of their doctrine, and that Marxism is "indifferent both to belief in God, and to disbelief". He poses this question: "Is Marxism, in its heart of hearts, atheism or is it necessarily connected with the latter?", and gives a negative answer, assuming that Marxism comes out against religion only insofar as it regards it as a spiritual force hostile to the working people. But in socialist society, says he, religion is no longer an instrument of the ruling class, which allegedly makes it possible for Marxism to abandon its struggle against religion (103; 160). He is quite wrong, because he regards atheism only as a political (and not as an ideological) position of Marxism.
203 world of which religion is the spiritual aroma" (1, 3; 175-7). So, the separation of church from state, freedom of conscience, etc., do not amount either to an emancipation of the Jews or of the Christians, because the oppression to which both are subjected is not rooted in religion but in their social condition and historical development, and is merely given a fantastic expression in religion. From this it follows that "political emancipation from religion leaves religion in existence, although not a privileged religion" (1, 3; 159). Marx cites the example of the United States to show that separation of church from state does not abolish religion but gives it a freedom which is based on the domination of private property. Religion can be truly abolished only together with the system from which it springs.Abolition of the state religion is an element of political emancipation, i.e., of bourgeois-democratic transformation. Does political emancipation amount to man's final emancipation, as the Young Hegelians insisted? Marx rejects these bourgeois-democratic illusions and shows the essence of political emancipation: "Hence man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property" (1, 3; 167).
In contrasting political emancipation to human emancipation and a restructuring of society on socialist lines, Marx does not in any way minimise the importance of democratic transtormations. Political emancipation (like the abolition of the property qualification for voters) is, of course, progress, but only within the bourgeois world order. "The state as a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political means that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished.... Nevertheless the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it" (1, 3; 153).
The state can be a republic without man being free, because the establishment of civil rights and freedoms does not yet signify man's true emancipation; it is at best only a partial emancipation which, for that reason, implies the continuation of slavery in one form or another. This kind of freedom is expressed in practice in the right to private property, whose realisation is man's enslavement of man. "None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond 204 egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community" (/, 3; 164).
Nominally, the bourgeois-democratic state annuls all privileges, and so, all inequality; actually, it preserves the inequality which constitutes its actual premise. Marx gives a brilliant analysis of the economic basis of all the states which had existed in history and defines the state as a political constitution of private property, so showing the inevitable limitations of all bourgeois revolutions, which substitute capitalist private property for the feudal form of property. This explains why in the course of bourgeois revolutions there surfaced new, revolutionary aspirations and attempt te> make the revolution urrintermiwent, KAt times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements composing this, society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man devoid! 0f contradictions. But it can achieve this only by coining into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and therefore the political! drama necessarily ends- with the re-establishment of reKgion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace" (I, 3; 156).^^*^^
Marx considers the question of private property in efcuse connection with the problem of alienation, which is, as I have said, a prominent one in German classical philosophy. In Kant, what must be contrasts with the alien empirical reality as the demand of pure moral consciousness (practical reason), and in Hegel, the ideal is primordialy present in the depths of world reason, which expresses itself in a succession of alienated forms of the natural and: the social Because nature and society are the opposites of purely spiritual, absolute being, they are an inadequate expression of it, its alienation, an existence, which contradicts its primordial substance. The most important content: of history, _-_-_
^^*^^ Reierring to the attempts to accomplish a permanent revolution until complete abolition of private property, Marx presumably refers to the Babouvists, and possibly the Jacobins, since the term "permanent revolution" was used by Marat. But Marx stresses the natural limitations, of bourgeois revolutions, thus, approaching the question of the fundamental difference between a social revolution of the proletariat and; a' bourgeois revolution.
205 therefore, is the overcoming of alienation, i.e., the antithesis between the absolute and its alienated other-being, between the ideal and the real, between the spiritual and the material. Hegel connected this idealistic conception with the real historical process and so brought out the contradictions which are actually inherent in it.I said above that Feuerbach materialistically interpreted religion as alienated consciousness.
In Feuerbach's doctrine the concept of alienation is meant to point up the human content of religion, which in religious concepts appeared as super-human and super-natural. Religion, Feuerbach held, is alienation of the substance of man, its conversion into something that is alien to him and that dominates him. He believed that one of the most important social tasks was to overcome this alienation of man, his dichotomy and devastation.
By contrast, Marx regards religion as a reflection of the alienation occurring in socio-political life. "The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics" (I, 3; 176).
Marx analyses the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen", proclaimed by the French Revolution of 1789, and shows the dualism of the state and the civil society in its distinction between man and citizen. "Why is the member of civil society called `man', simply man; why are his rights called the rights of man?" (1, 3; 162). He explains that the Declaration interprets the rights of man as the rights of a member of the civil society, i.e., egoistic man who is opposed to other men. Personal freedom in this sphere is the right of self-seeking, of which freedom of private ownership is the practical expression. Consequently, what the Declaration calls man is the bourgeois, and the rights of man, the rights of the bourgeois. "The real man is recognised only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognised only in the shape of the abstract citoyen" (1, 3; 167). Despite Hegel's philosophy of law, the contradiction between the civil society and the state is a contradiction within the civil society itself.
Marx abandons the characteristic Young Hegelian reduction of the cause of alienation of state power to the existence 206 of a ``Christian'', or monarchist, state, although he does believe that in a state in which the person of the king is sanctified by religion, "it is indeed estrangement which matters ... but not man" (1, 3; 158). But does alienation disappear in a democratic state? Of course not. Alienation is not rooted in the state, but in that which constitutes its basis. "Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and, bestowing the significance of an alien entity---money---on them" (1, 3; 174). The power of money, the alienation of the product of labour as commodity, the subordination of the individual's productive activity to alien interests, such in the most general form are the specifics of man's self-alienation in the economic sphere. These ideas contain in embryo the conception of alienated labour, which Marx subsequently worked out in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
The Young Hegelians, who reduced alienation to religion and the feudal enslavement of the individual, shared the illusions of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Marx shows the economic roots of alienation and so upsets these illusions, and establishes the need for human emancipation; "All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself.
``Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.
``Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised his 'forces propres' as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished" (1, 3; 168).
This proposition, formulated in the article "On the Jewish Question", is not quite free of Feuerbach's anthropologism. 207 Marx still sees the overcoming of alienation as elimination of the conflict between man's individual, sensual being, and his species-being. The term "human emancipation" itself also testifies to the influence of Feuerbach's anthropologism. But the main point on which Marx differs with Feuerbach is that he contrasts human emancipation and political emancipation, and this is crucial in determining Marx's political-class and theoretical stand.
As I have already said, this article makes no mention of the proletariat's historical mission, which is why human emancipation (socialist revolution) is seen only as consistent implementation of democratic tasks. Marx overcame this shortcoming in his second article in the Jahrbucher, " Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction". Here he also makes extensive use of Feuerbach's terminology, but he identifies the proletariat as a special class which differs from the other working classes, and says that the proletariat's social emancipation is the crucial condition for human emancipation. He also predicates his critique of bourgeois society on the objective need for a socialist revolution.
The Young Hegelians, Marx says, saw "in the present struggle ... only the critical struggle of philosophy against the German world". Consequently, they failed to see that philosophy, in the existing form, at any rate, "itself belongs to this world and is its complement". Marx says that this is an uncritical approach, a failure to understand the need for "the negation of hitherto existing philosophy". This is a philosophy which is contrasted with social reality as allegedly a force that rises over and above it.
__FIX__ Underlining in: last line.The basic flaw of Young Hegelianism, Marx says, is its assumption that "it could make philosophy a. reality without superseding it" (I, 3; 181). Marx urges the need to blend philosophy with revolutionary practice, with the proletariat's struggle. So the point is not merely to abolish or abandon philosophy. The task is to do away with philosophy in the old sense of the term, the philosophy which was for ages contrasted with the positive sciences, on the one hand, and with practice, ^specially revolutionary pracjjfv o_« the other.
Young Hegelian idealism, characteristically absolutising philosophy, Marx says, was not an accidental phenomenon in the history of Germany, which managed only theoretically to keep up with the development of .other, more advanced 208 countries, because of its long-standing and historically rooted economic and political backwardness. The Germans pondered in politics what the other nations did. The development of contemporary nations was attended in Germany only with abstract intellectual activity, without any active involvement in the real battles in that development; it shared the sufferings of that development without sharing its joys, its partial satisfaction. "For Germany's revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher" (1, 3; 182). The Reformation could not abolish man's oppression of man. The Peasant War, the most radical event in German history, foundered on theology. Now, Marx says, theology has been defeated by philosophy. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being" (1, 3; 182). However important these theoretical results may be, criticism is no substitute for revolutionary practice. There is a need that the theoretical urge for revolutionary transformation should become practical revolutionary action. "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a' material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself" (1, 3; 182). Although this passage is not yet free of Feuerbach's mode of exposition, it contains one of the most important propositions of historical materialism. Marx establishes the definitive importance of the material social force in fulfilling the revolutionary task and couples this with a high appreciation of the importance of revolutionary theory, which he regards in the light of dialectical materialism, according to which in definite conditions theory becomes a material force, the organisation and unity of the revolutionary masses. Social consciousness and social being constitute a dialectical unity.
What Marx means is that in order to grip the masses, theory must be revolutionary and express the people's vital requirements. The requirements of the peoples, Marx says, are themselves the decisive reason for their satisfaction. These 209 are above all the material requirements, which are inseparable from the development of social production. "The relation of industry, of the world of wealth generally, to the political world is one of the major problems of modern times" (1, 3; 179). The need for human emancipation is determined by the development of material requirements, and its realisation is bound up with the class through which these requirements are naturally expressed. In Germany, Marx says, no class of the civil society is able to comprehend the need for universal emancipation or to put through this revolutionary task, "until it is forced by its immediate condition, by material necessity, by its very chains" to do so (/, 3; 186). So the possibility of human emancipation lies "in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates" (/, 3; 186). The proletariat alone can be such a class. Being the product of the disintegrating feudal society, the proletariat is also the product of industrial development. Its own interests ultimately coincide with the interests of social progress as a whole; in the struggle for its own emancipation it represents the interests of all the other oppressed.
Human emancipation, much more than political emancipation, which is only partial, implies the existence of a class capable of giving leadership in social progress. The proletariat is such a class. "By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the proletariat, what, without its own co-operation, is already incorporated in it as a negative result of society" (1, 3; 187).
Thus, human emancipation coincides with the social emancipation of the proletariat which is achieved only through the proletariat's revolution that abolishes private property as the basis of social life, thereby ending the existence of the class which is deprived of the means of production. All of this makes human emancipation fundamentally distinct from the revolutions of the past.
The objective necessity of a socialist revolution and the historical role which it assigns to the proletariat effect a radical change in the status and tasks of philosophy. Earlier 210 on, Marx asserted that philosophy could become truly scientific only through a conscious and organic connection with politics. However, when he said that he was unable to designate the class with whose policy philosophy had to connect itself. In the open letters in the Jahrbucher, Marx says that philosophy has the task of providing ideological equipment for the fighting masses. However great the importance of this idea, which rejects the philosopher's claim to being non-partisan, it does not fully set forth the Marxist conception of partisanship in philosophy and theory generally, because it does not indicate which class is in struggle against which class. It is only in the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction" that Marx first declares that advanced philosophy can and must become the philosophy of the proletariat. "As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy" (/, 3; 187).
The proletariat's emancipation movement alone can translate into life the humanistic ideals worked out in the course of philosophy's development over the centuries, and it is only through the working-class struggle that philosophy can find its way to the people and cease to be an esoteric doctrine alien to the interests of the oppressed and exploited mass. That is the negation of philosophy in the old sense of the term, rather the negation of the negation, inaugurating a fundamentally new, philosophico-scientific world outlook. "Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality" (1, 3; 187).
Marx's article anticipates the historical perspectives in the development of Germany, which, he says, is reminiscent of France on the eve of 1789. That which in France and England had already revealed its transient character (bourgeois social relations), is still being variously idealised in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future. It is not enough merely to criticise the German order, not only because criticism alone is generally inadequate, but also because this order is beneath criticism. While German philosophy rises above the wretchedness of German life, it belongs to the bourgeois world, whose principles it formulates in a speculative manner.^^*^^ The German bourgeoisie lacked the _-_-_
^^*^^ In this context, Marx sums up his assessment of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, which is essentially different from that contained in the 1842-1843 MS __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 212. 211 consistency required by a revolutionary class, and the requisite courage and resolution, in short, the capability to -lead a popular movement and to express its interests for however short a period. For that reason, a victorious bourgeois revolution cannot take place in Germany. "In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage.... The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat" (1, 3; 187). This means that bourgeois-democratic transformations in Germany can be fully put through only in the course of the proletarian struggle for socialism. Indeed, the German revolution of 1848 was defeated chiefly because it was led by the liberal bourgeoisie. But one should bear in mind that in the Jahrbiicher Marx expressed the conviction that in Germany, as in other West European countries, the task of a socialist transformation of society was already on the order of the day. Only his subsequent economic research enabled him to correct his view of the historical perspectives of the socialist revolution.
I have already said that both articles of his in the Jahrbiicher still bear traces of the influence of Feuerbach's anthropologism, and their fundamentally new content was not yet cast in a corresponding form. He formulates the task of the socialist revolution mainly as one of abolishing alienation and implementing humanism, and the revolutionary tasks in Germany are determined accordingly. "The only practically possible liberation of Germany is liberation that proceeds from the standpoint of the theory which proclaims man to be the highest being for man" (1, 3; 187). This is quite in the spirit of Feuerbach's humanism^^*^^. But _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 211. in that it also emphasises the positive historical importance of the work. He writes: "The criticism of the German philosophy of state and law, which attained its most consistent, richest and final formulation through Hegel, is both a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole German political and legal consciousness as practised hitherto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of a science, is the speculative philosophy of law itself" (I, 3; 1£1).
^^*^^ In a letter tt^Feuerbach on August 11, 1844, Marx considers the latter's works, Grundsdtze der Philosophie der Zukunft, and Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luther's. Em Beitrag zum "Wesen des Christenthums", and says: "In these writings you have provided---I don't know whether intentionally---a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 213. 212 Marx reworks Feuerbach's concept of realising the human substance, arguing that the proletariat's emancipation movement can alone actually fulfil the humanistic task's which Feuerbach proclaims in an abstract form. Thus, despite Feuerbach's terminology and some propositions in the spirit of anthropological materialism. Marx's socio-political views differ fundamentally from the former's, Marx considers the antithesis between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolution. Marx's advance from revolutionary democracy to scientific communism is undoubtedly evidenced by his idea of the proletarian revolution and the proletariat's mission in history, the rejection of the bourgeois-democratic illusions and the establishment of the historically limited content of bourgeois revolutions.
The concept of proletarian revolution, as formulated in the Jahrbiicher, is not yet quite scientific because the proletarian revolution is contrasted to a political revolution. However, the question of power is the basic issue in any revolution (including a proletarian one). One will appreciate that the contrasting of the human and the political ( something that was very widespread in contemporary socialist writings) hampered consideration of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the question of the political content of the proletarian revolution. Indeed, in the Jahrbiicher Marx formulated the great idea of the historic mission of the working class without saying anything about the dictatorship of the proletariat. But within a few months, in August 1844, Marx says in an article entitled "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'", which appeared in the Vorwarts, that the proletariat's social revolution is political, and this takes him forward to the idea of a proletarian dictatorship: "Every revolution dissolves the old society and to that extent it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power and to that extent it is political" (1, 3; 205). He explains this as follows: "Revolution in general---the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of the old relationships---is a political act. But socialism cannot be realised _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 212. immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!" (1, 3; 354).
213 without revolution. It needs this political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution" (1, 3; 206).^^*^^It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this idea. It connects the negation of the economic basis of capitalism with a negation of its political basis, so that human emancipation appears directly as revolution effecting a fundamental change in society's economic structure and its political superstructure. This was a new stride forward towards the discovery of the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx has, in effect, already noted that the question of power is the main issue in any revolution. Of course, that is not the whole content of revolution, especially of the proletariat's social revolution, but the revolution cannot win without settling the issue of power. But bearing in mind the chiefly destructive tasks of the proletarian revolution---overthrow of the existing power and abolition of the old social relations---Marx does not yet consider the question of the proletarian dictatorship, assuming that once the old power and the old social relations have been abolished, socialism will have no need of any political form. He is yet to establish that the substance of the state is the domination of one class by another. He characterises the civil society chiefly as a war of everyone against all, in contrast to the state as a force cementing society. But he emphasises the antagonistic basis of the state: "slavery of civil society is the natural foundation on which the modern state rests, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation on which the ancient state rested. The existence of the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable" (1, 3; 198). This takes Marx to an understanding of the class substance of the state. His idea that the state is the opposite of the civil society marks a break with Hegel's conception of the state. Marx says that these two opposites determine each other. So the state does not overcome the antagonisms of the civil society. On the contrary, the state maintains man's _-_-_
^^*^^ This definition of socialist revolution still goes hand in hand with an anthropological-humanistic notion of its character and tasks. Accordingly, he says in the article that this revolution is "man's protest against a dehumanised-life, because it starts out from the point of view of a separate real individual, because the community, against the separation of which from himself the individual reacts, is man's true community, human nature. The political soul of revolution, on the other hand, consists in the tendency of classes having no political influence to abolish their isolation from statehood and rule" (1, 3; 205).
214 enslavement of man. It is a political expression of the antagonistic social relations which are predominant in the civil society. It is true that Marx does not yet say that the socialist revolution, which abolishes the ``civil'', i.e., privateproperty society, ushers in a new type of state which does not enslave but emancipates the working people. That is probably why he does not consider the question of the proletarian dictatorship and the need for a proletarian power not only to destroy the exploitative system but also to build a classless society.Let us note that all these important ideas were formulated by Marx in his polemics with Ruge, who financed the publication of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. By the time Marx's articles were printed, the publication of the journal had already been stopped, chiefly because of the fundamental differences between Marx and Ruge, which had come to light when the publication was being prepared~^^*^^ and which became even more pronounced when Ruge commented in the Vorwarts about the Silesian uprising of April 1844. Ruge saw the first major action by German proletarians as an episode without a "political soul", because the starved and desperate Silesian weavers had risen to struggle for their daily bread, and without any thought of establishing a republic. Replying to Ruge^^**^^, Marx wrote: "Confronted with the first outbreak of the Silesian workers' uprising, the sole task of one who thinks and loves the truth consisted not in playing the role of schoolmaster in relation to this event, but instead in studying its specific character. This, of course, requires some scientific insight and some love of mankind, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, impregnated with empty love of oneself, is quite enough" (1, 3; 202).
_-_-_^^*^^ Marx and Engels subsequently noted that the articles published in the Jahrbucher said something that was the very opposite of what Ruge himself had announced in the preface (4a, 8; 277).
^^**^^ Ruge's articles were signed with his pen-name of "A Prussian", and this could have suggested that they had been written by Marx, 'ftecause he alone of all those directly involved with the newspaper was a, Prussian subject. For that reason Marx believed it to be his duty to dispel such assumptions, and this explains not only the title of his article, but also the following note: "Special reasons prompt me to state that the present article is the first which I have contributed to the Vorwarts, K. M." (1, 3; 189).
215In contrast to Ruge, Marx sought to show the specifically proletarian features of the Silesian uprising. He says that the social revolution is man's protest against dehumanised life, which is why it was natural for the deprived Silesian weavers to act as its standard-bearers. "The Lyons workers believed that they were pursuing only political aims, that they were only soldiers of the republic, whereas actually they were soldiers of socialism" (1, 3; 204). This applies to an ever greater extent to the Silesian weavers, whose uprising was aimed directly against the bourgeoisie, and not against the King of Prussia. It is true that the liberal-bourgeois press expressed sympathy for the weavers, who had been driven beyond endurance, and even condemned the government's military measures. Here and there, bourgeois leaders even started collections in favour of the families of Silesian weavers who were killed in the armed suppression of the uprising. But this, Marx says, should not in any way obscure the true nature of the Silesian uprising, which "begins precisely with what the French and English workers' uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat" (1, 3; 201). Marx believes that none of the workers' uprisings in the past "had such a theoretical and conscious character as the uprising of the Silesian weavers" (1, 3; 201). These pronouncements somewhat overestimate the class consciousness of the German proletariat. They make no distinction between the economic, political and ideological forms of the class struggle of the proletariat. Nonetheless, Marx is basically correct, since the main point of his assessment of the Silesian .uprising is his emphasis on the anti-capitalist essence of the proletariat's emancipation struggle.
In this article, he considers " Weitling's brilliant writings, which as regards theory are often superior even to those of Proudhon, however much they are inferior to the latter in their execution" (1, 3; 201). This high appreciation of the writings of the first outstanding German Utopian communist is no exaggeration if we recall Marx's subsequent remark that they were the giant infant shoes of the proletariat. Marx contrasts Weitling and the bourgeois ideologists and says: "Where among the bourgeoisie---including its philosophers and learned writers---is to be found a book about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie---political emancipation--- similar to Weitling's work: Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit's' It is enough to compare the petty, faint-hearted 216 mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete" (I, 3; 201-02).
Thus, Marx's article against Ruge in which he elaborates the ideas expressed in the Jahrbilcher expresses in concrete terms the proposition concerning the proletariat's role in fulfilling the task of the revolutionary destruction of the bourgeois state and private property, its economic basis.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 5 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S ARTICLES IN THE DEUTSCH-FRANZ&SISCHE JAHRBUCHER.Engels's articles published in the Jahrbucher were written at the end of 1843 and in January 1844. One of these, "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy", was later described by Marx as "a brilliant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories". (2, I, 504). Lenin said that the outstanding importance of the ``Outlines'' lies in the fact that "he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property" (5, 2; 24). Unlike the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism, Engels does not contrast capitalist property and the property of the petty producer. He rejects the petty-bourgeois illusion concerning the stability and viability of their property and says that "large capital and large landed property swallow small capital and small landed property", which results in a "centralisation of property" (1, 3; 441). He says that this is a law that "is as immanent in private property as all the others" (7, 3; 441). We find, therefore, that he starts his analysis by recognising the objective economic laws of capitalist production. He credits Adam Smith and his school for having examined "the laws of private property" (7, 3; 421), and says that it revolutionised political economy, in contrast to the mercantilists, who stubbornly held that the whole wealth of society consisted of gold,and silver. But this 217 school produced an inadequate and one-sided analysis of the laws of private property because it took these for granted. This kind of science "ought to be called private economy, for its public connections exist only for the sake of private property" (1, 3; 422).
Consequently, without denying the scientific nature of classical political economy, Engels shows its organic connection with the interests of the capitalist class. He defines political economy as a science of enrichment, and trade as legalised fraud: "The perpetual fluctuation of prices such as is created by the condition of competition completely deprives trade of its last vestige of morality. It is no longer a question of value.... Where is there any possibility remaining in this whirlpool of an exchange based on a moral foundation?" (7, 3; 434)^^*^^.
This assessment of bourgeois political economy apparently reflects the influence of Fourier, a point I considered above. Engels does not yet draw a clear distinction between Smith and Ricardo, on the one hand, and the vulgar economists, on the other. He does point to the corruption of the bourgeois economic science: "The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty" (1, 3; 420). But because he has just begun to pinpoint the scientific content of English classical political economy, he does not yet adequately bring out its progressive historical importance.
The main content of his article is a socialist critique. of bourgeois political economy and private property, its actual basis.
Engels analyses the trends in the development of political economy and discovers in it the origins of Malthus's doctrine, which is "the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed" (7, 3; 420). It is unscientific because it blames poverty and hunger on a shortage of natural resources: if that were true, one should have to recognise that the world was overpopulated even a thousand years ago, when poverty _-_-_
^^*^^ D. I. Rosenberg is quite right when he says: "The `Outlines' still bear the mark of Utopian socialism, especially of its English version: in the article Engels frequently criticises capitalism from the standpoint of the eternal laws of morality and justice; he usually ends his deep theoretical analysis of the various economic phenomena with a moral condemnation of these: starting from abstract moral principles, he passes judgement on trade, competition, landed property, and so on" (33; 59).
218 and hunger already existed. However, "surplus population or labour power is invariably tied up with surplus wealth, surplus capital and surplus landed property" (7, 3; 438). Engels says that unemployment is natural under capitalist production, which periodically goes through the stages of upswing, crisis, overproduction and stagnation. So the cause is not a shortage of natural resources. "The productive power at mankind's disposal is immense" (7, 3; 436). What then hampers the steady growth of production and satisfaction of the requirements of the mass of working people? It is private property, Engels says; it has converted the worker into a commodity whose production depends on demand. "All this drives us to the abolition of this degradation of mankind through the abolition of private property, competition and the opposing interests" (7, 3, 440).The struggle against capitalism rests, he says, on the objective trends in the capitalist economy. Competition is independent of the will and consciousness of men. It is "purely a law of nature and not a law of the mind. It is a law which produces revolution". Periodic crises of overproduction are also a "natural law based on the unconsciousness of the participants. If the producers as such knew how much the consumers required, if they were to organise production, if they were to share it out amongst themselves, then the fluctuations of competition and its tendency to crisis would be impossible. Carry on production consciously as human beings---not as dispersed atoms, without consciousness of your species---and you have overcome all these artificial and untenable antitheses" (7, 3, 434). This does not imply that all one needs to abolish capitalism is to realise the need for planned production. Engels believes that planned production and distribution can be arranged only on the basis of social property.
The central concept of classical political economy is value. Engels rejects Smith's and Ricardo's definition of this category. He notes the discrepancy between price and value, and reaches the conclusion that the two men dealt with abstract value, whereas real value implies consideration not only of the expended labour but also of the utility of the thing. "The value of an object includes both factors, which the contending parties [he has in mind the classics of bourgeois political economy, on the one hand, and their petty-bourgeois opponents, on the other---T.O.] arbitrarily 219 separate---and, as we have seen, unsuccessfully. Value is the relation of production costs to utility" (1, 3; 426). He disagrees with Smith and Ricardo because their view of value sanctified commodity exchange and the relation between labour and capital as equivalent and, for that reason, just. In this sense, the rejection of the principle of value was to some extent inevitable until the time when it was established that equivalent commodity exchange did not preclude the exploitation of the proletarians.
Ricardo was aware that his theory of labour value resulted in contradiction: while implying an equivalent exchange of value, it held the formation of profit to be its result. Being a bourgeois economist, he did not analyse this contradiction, for his class instinct made him shun this dangerous ground. Engels took a different stand, which was close to that of th'e left Ricardians. Hence his rejection of the theory of labour value, which implicitly contains the .problems from which bourgeois political economy shied away.
It should also be added that this article does not yet contain a scientific view of philosophical materialism. Engels characterises materialism as a naturalistic conception for which man is only a natural being governed by the laws, of nature. The 18th century, he says, confronted abstract spiritualism with an abstract materialism that failed to eliminate the antithesis between man and nature or to show their unity. This materialism "did not attack the .Christian contempt for and humiliation of man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute confronting Man" (7, 3; 419). Despite his essentially .materialist analysis of capitalism, Engels does not say that his views are materialist, which is why evidently he objected in 1871 to reprinting his work. "It is altogether outdated and abounds in imprecisions that would merely confuse the reader. Besides, it is written entirely in Hegel's manner, which is now also absolutely unacceptable. This article may be of some importance only as a historical document" (4a, 39; 208). This assessment (which I believe to be much too harsh) does nothing to minimise the outstanding importance of the article in the formation of Marxism.
Engels's second article in the Jahrbiicher is "The Condition of England. Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843". Engels naturally took an interest in Carlyle's writings because as he advanced towards scientific communism he 220 came to realise the need for a demarcation from those who criticised capitalism from the right. Carlyle was the most outstanding of them.
Carlyle must have had some influence on Engels in the early years, of his stay in England. At any rate, the article emphasises that "Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view" (1, 3; 444). Carlyle hotly accused the bourgeoisie of plunging the English people into unprecedented impoverishment, degradation and moral evil. Capitalism has destroyed the religious spirit and the patriarchal relations of the Middle Ages, but what did it give the people in return? The Gospel of Mammon, the making of money. Exposing bourgeois democracy, Carlyle says: "The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at election-hustings, and saying, 'Behold, now I too have my twenty-thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver; will not all the gods be good to me?'---is one of the pleasantest" (1, 3; 455). Engels quotes this and other extracts from Carlyle's books and says: "This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle land-owning aristocracy which 'have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief, a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, 'captains of industry', are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates.... Everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility.---That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle's particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says" (1, 3; 456).
Engels finds Carlyle's criticism of capitalism valuable also because it is an admission wrung from a member of the ruling class. But Carlyle's class stand makes it impossible for him to take a revolutionary and scientific approach to the question of the ways of doing away with capitalist oppression. He holds that the social evil produced by the development of capitalism is rooted not in capitalism itself but in atheism and the self-seeking allegedly connected with it. Carlyle gives an idealistic explanation of the changes in socialist consciousness caused by capitalism; he presents the collapse of the old religious concepts, which reflects the 221 development of capitalism and the break-down of the feudal system, as the mainspring of the bourgeois way of life. He is aware that there can be no return to the past and so has visions of a new religion based on pantheism and the cult of labour.
Carlyle's panacea, Engels says, is a reactionary Utopia, because religion merely compounds the social evil engendered by capitalism. Engels counters Carlyle's complaint that capitalism tends to debilitate man and convert him into a being hostile to others by pointing out that no religion, including pantheism, can fill the void produced by capitalism, for religion also tends to debilitate and demoralise man.
Referring to Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, Engels says: "Religion by its very essence drains man and nature of substance, and transfers,this substance to the phantom of an other-worldly God, who in turn then graciously permits man and nature to receive some of his bounty" (1, 3; 461). There is a need to repudiate religion and find real satisfaction for those requirements which religion only appears to satisfy.
Religion presents the human as the super-human and divine. Although pantheism, Engels thinks, is the threshold of the free human view of the world, it inevitably debases man by confronting him with something that is allegedly higher than him. -But nothing is higher than man and mankind's history. We want to eliminate, he says, everything that claims to be super-natural and super-human because "the root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural" (7, 3; 463).
Of course, these ideas about the source of "all untruth and lying" are not materialist, and we find similar statements among the Young Hegelians. But in the context of the article, which, as we shall see later, contains the idea of the proletariat's decisive role in abolishing capitalism, this is no more than a survival of Engels's old views..
Engels considers the communist restructuring of society, on the one hand, in an abstract philosophical form, and on the other, in a concrete historical form in connection with his analysis of the class structure of bourgeois society. He writes: "The question has previously always been: what is God? and German philosophy has answered the question in this sense: God is man. Man has only to understand himself, to take himself as the measure of all aspects of life, to judge 222 according to his being, to organise the world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature, and he will have solved the riddle of our time" (1, 3; 464-5). Had Engels confined himself to this general humanistic approach, he would have, in effect, not gone beyond the framework of Feuerbach's theory. But this article is of outstanding importance precisely because it says that it is up to the emancipation movement of the working class "to organise the world in a truly human manner''.
Engels castigates the self-seeking and the blind acceptance of prejudice by England's ruling classes who turn their backs on all progress. Only the workers "are really respectable, for all their roughness and for all their moral degradation. It is from them that England's salvation will come, they still comprise flexible material; they have no education, but no prejudices either, they still have the strength for a great national deed---they still have a future" (1, 3; 445-6).
According to Carlyle, society must be saved from the social evil stemming from the capitalist civilisation by a "true aristocracy", which he distinguishes from the parasitic aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Engels ironically remarks: "Carlyle longs for a 'true aristocracy', a `hero-worship', and puts forward the second great problem to discover the apis-rot, the best, whose task it is to combine 'with inevitable Democracy indispensable Sovereignty" (1, 3; 460). He resolutely criticises the reactionary conception of the ``heroes'' and the ``mob'', which Carlyle sought to back up by pointing to the failure of democracy. In contrast to Carlyle,. an ideologist of feudal pseudo-socialism, Engels criticises bourgeois democracy from the left, arguing that once mankind has done with formal democracy, it will not go back, but forward, to a new and genuine democracy. Carlyle saw ``heroes'' towering above the working people, who are allegedly incapable of solving the social problems confronting them. Engels writes: "If he had understood man as man in all his infinite complexity, he would not have conceived the idea of once more dividing mankind into two lots, sheep and goats, rulers and ruled, aristocrats and the rabble, lords and dolts, he would have seen the proper social function of talent not in ruling by force but in acting as a stimulant and taking the lead" (1, 3; 466).
The working class, says Engels, has put forward, through its social leaders, the Socialists, the task of destroying 223 capitalism. It is true that the Socialists do not yet have a sound theoretical grasp of social life and are inclined to narrow empiricism and practicism. But they are "the only party in England which has a future, relatively weak though they may be. Democracy, Chartism must soon be victorious, and then the mass of the English workers will have the choice only between starvation and socialism" (1, 3; 467).
Engels concludes his article with a promise to get down soon to a more detailed study of the condition of England. "The condition of England is of immense importance for history and for all other countries; for as regards social matters England is of course far in advance of all other countries" (1, 3; 468). Let us recall that at the end of 1842 he said that England was a backward country, up to its ears in me'diaevalisrn. At that time, he did not see the connection between the level of social development and economic development; he did not yet see the advances of capitalist production in England and the existence of a numerous proletariat, together with the struggle between the workers and the capitalists, as indicators of social progress. This new and correct assessment of the condition of England does not merely show a change in his views on some points (however important); it shows that he has already moved from idealism and revolutionary democracy to materialism and communism.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 6 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX AND BOURGEOIS POLITICAL ECONOMY.Economic relations first came to Marx's attention when he was working on the Rheinische Zeitung; then his interest in political economy was further intensified when he arrived in Paris, became acquainted with the working-class movement in France and began to study socialist writings. His articles in the Jahrbiicher show that he regarded the abolition of private property and alienation as the condition and largely also the content of human emancipation. He had already come to realise the connection between private property and alienation, although he was yet to clarify their genetic relation. Engels's "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" left a 224 great impression on him. Lenin writes: "Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution" (5, 2; 24).
In 1932, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee published Marx's 1844 extracts from the works of English and French economists (Smith, Ricardo, Mill, McCulloch, Boisquillebert, Say, and others). These ^extracts together with Marx's critical notes, under the title Okonomische Studien (Exze`t'pte) open with a summary of Engels's above-mentioned work. Marx agrees with Engels's main proposition and adds that political economy starts from a recognition of private property which constitutes the real premise for the science and that it does so without analysing the premise but accepting it without substantiation, dogmatically. "Consequently, the whole of political economy is based on a fact whose necessity is not at all unconditional" (44; 449).
Like Engels, Marx sees Ricardo's theory of value, according to which commodities are exchanged in accordance with the quantity of the labour they contain, as idealising the capitalist system; the existence of private property makes it impossible to have any equivalent exchange of commodities, let alone equivalent exchange between capital and labour. Marx writes: "From this Proudhon draws the right-- conclusion that wherever there is private property a thing costs more than its value. That is the tribute to the private owner" (44; 497). Private property breeds competition and fluctuation of supply and demand, in consequence of which the coincidence of price and value is accidental; what is a regularity is the divergence of prices with what Ricardo calls natural value. This negative assessment of Ricardo's theory of value also points up the contradictions which the theory still has to cope with. Consequently, Marx to some extent already anticipates his own research tasks.
Bourgeois economists fail to see the antagonistic character of capitalist relations. Ricardo considers the worker's means of subsistence to be the natural price of his labour. He believes it to be a normal state of things for the proletarian to work only to secure his existence. Ricardo regards wages as a part of the costs of production, and proclaims profit and rent to be its purpose. This makes the worker no more than a means for the extraction of profit. Marx says that Ricardo __PRINTERS_P_225_COMMENT__ 8 - 185 225 should be given credit for this ``cynicism'', because it does not in any way embellish the relations between labour and capital.
For the bourgeois economist society is a trading company each of whose members is a commodity-owner. Relations between men are reduced to the relations between private owners. In other words, "this alienated form of social intercourse is established by political economy as the substantial and primordial one and as according with the human predestination". Manf uses the concept of alienated form of social intercourse to designate private property, capital, commodity exchange and money, which divide men and oppose them to each other. But man is a social being, and social intercourse is man's real substance. "It does not depend on man whether this social connection is or is not to be; but until man recognises himself as man and so organises the world on human lines, this social connection takes the form of alienation" (31; 24).
Value is the alienation of private property, and money is the sensual, objective being of this alienation. The alienated product of labour dominates over the producer, the human individual becomes an object of commerce, wealth breeds poverty, and poverty wealth. Consequently, labour turns out to be an alienation of life because "my individuality is alienated (ist entauflert) from me to such an extent that this activity is hateful to me, that it is torment for me, and rather only a semblance of activity. That is why labour is here only a forced activity and is imposed on me under 'pressure only from the external contingent need, and not in virtue of some internal necessary requirement" (31; 36). Such is the distorted reality which bourgeois political economy regards as a rational state of things. Actually, a rational social system can be established only on the basis of public property, which will help to make labour the free self-assertion of the human individuality.
So, in his remarks on extracts from economic writings, Marx considers the origins of private property and alienation, and introduces the concept of alienated form of social intercourse (antagonistic social, relations), contrasting the world of private property and the communist ideal, the universal transformation of the whole of social and personal life. All these questions are elaborated in detail in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. That is the title 226 under which the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee published in 1932 in the language of the original three of Marx's manuscripts. Some of their sections were titled by Marx himself ("Wages of Labour", "Profit of Capital", "Rent of Land", etc.) and others by the editors.
This is above all an economic study, but it also contains a fundamental critique of Hegel's Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Spirit). His analysis of bourgeois political economy leads him to a philosophical consideration of the role of labour and of material production in the development of the individual and of society as a whole. His critique of the methodology of bourgeois political economy, his analysis of alienated labour, which goes well beyond the framework of economic problems alone, his assessment of egalitarian Utopian communism and consideration of various aspects of scientific communism all go to explain why these MSS have been called "economic and philosophic". They are also an outstanding philosophical work.
In the Preface, Marx says that his MSS contain a further development of the ideas he expressed in the DeutschFranzb'sische Jahrbiicher. He says that his study is based on the works not only of French and English but also of German Socialists, Weitling, Hess and Engels in the first place. He considers Feuerbach's Grundsdtze der Philosophie der Zukunft and Vorlaiifige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie to be the philosophical substantiation of his scientific critique of bourgeois political economy. He writes: "It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, extensive, and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach's writings, the only writings since Hegel's Phdnomenologie and Logik to contain a real theoretical revolution" (/, 3; 232).
Marx counters the Young Hegelian "critical criticism" with the idea of a positive humanistic and naturalistic critique (which in the main coincides with the anthropological principle, insofar as he deals with Feuerbach). While Marx does, not use the philosophical concepts of materialism and idealism, he does, in effect, contrast the two. With Young Hegelianism in mind, he writes: "On close inspection theological criticism---genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement---is seen in the final analysis 227 to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological caricature" (1, 3; 233). This means that Young Hegelianism, despite its criticism of theology and Hegel's system, remained an idealistic philosophy, according to which religious consciousness constitutes the basis of all social contradictions and evils. With this kind of approach it is clearly impossible to produce a scientific critique of bourgeois political economy, whose categories have no direct connection with religious consciousness.
In contrast to the bourgeois concept of society as a commercial company, of man as a commodity owner, and of human relations as relations between buyer and seller, Marx presents his own view of man, of human life and human requirements and relations, and while he does not fully discard Feuerbach's view of these, his own concept is substantially different. Without contesting the substantial importance .of the anthropological characterisation of man, Marx pjucs it into the context of his materialist doctrine concerning the definitive role of production, a doctrine which he is in the process of formulating. He accepts Feuerbach's thesis of the unity of man and nature, but argues that social production is its specifically human form. This suggests a fundamentally new solution of philosophical problems, for with Feuerbach's anthropological approach, social production remained beyond philosophical analysis.
Marx's starting point in .his analysis of political economy is the antagonism between the proletarian and the .capitalist. This antagonism will be found in the direct relation between the worker's wages and the capitalist's profit. "Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker" (1, 3; 235). It is true that Ricardo also pointed to the hostile relation between the two: the higher the wages, the lower the capitalist's profit, and vice versa. But that is where he stopped, while Marx went on to analyse economic relations and to lay the foundations of the theory of the class struggle.
The contradiction between profit and wages determines the trend in the latter's reduction to the subsistence minimum. The bourgeois political economy proclaims the harmony of labour and capital, but actually "knows the worker only as a working animal---as a beast reduced to the 228 strictest bodily needs" (7, 3; 242). The worker has become a commodity, and he is lucky if he can find a buyer. The demand for human beings regulates their production, as of any other commodity. When supply is well in excess of demand, a section of the workers is doomed to live in poverty and even to die of starvation. The worker's labour, i.e., his vital activity, with all its natural, spiritual and social diversity, increasingly confronts him as alien property. Because the worker has been reduced to the condition of a machine, the machine confronts him as -a competitor.
Marx says that Adam Smith's definition of capital as accumulated labour is unsatisfactory, because it ignores private property, without which there is no capital. "Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital" (1, 3; 247). The power of capital over labour is the highest stage in the development of private prqperty, and this is paralleled by the polarisation of society in.to the class of owners and workers deprived of property.
Marx concentrates on the problem of private property, for . all the other problems depend on it. This is not only an empirical but also a most important social problem, and he says: "Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws; i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property" (7, 3; 270-71). Political economy does not explain why labour has been separated from capital, and capital from land. When characterising the relation of wages and profit of capital, economists merely say that each side (workers and capitalists) seek to obtain as much as possible for their commodity. Here they refer to competition, but this does not explain anything, because it does not go to the objective basis of competition.
Thus, Marx shows the methodological premises of bourgeois political economy in accordance with which the immediate inducements in the capitalist's activity, i.e., egoism and self-seeking, are the motive forces of capitalist production: "it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to 229 explain" (1, 3; 271). In contrast to the idealistic empiricism of bourgeois economists, Marx formulates the tasks of his analysis as a materialist: "Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, avarice, the separation of labour, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of men, of monopoly and competition, etc.---we have to grasp this whole estrangement connected with the money system" (I, 3; 271).^^*^^
To analyse private property, one has above all to analyse the form of labour which creates it. From the standpoint of the bourgeois economist, any labour, labour in general, creates goods, capital and private property. Marx rejects this undialectical view, which tends to perpetuate the economic foundations of the bourgeois society and explains that private property and everything that springs from it is not created by labour in general, but by alienated labour, a historically definite form of human activity.
The concept of alienated labour is undoubtedly central to the MSS. It not only makes Marx's approach to the problem of alienation basically distinct from Hegel's and Feuerbach's, but also constitutes one of the most important premises for the materialist analysis of the genesis of private property and so for the proof that it is historically transient.
Marx says that labour, material production is man's species-life, man "is not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being' (1, 3, 337). This specific distinction of man from animal is not a natural one but emerges and develops in the process of production throughout human history. "Admittedly animals also _-_-_
^^*^^ The fundamental importance of this materialist approach to the question of motive forces in capitalist production is well emphasised by D. M. Gvishiani, who says that in Volume IV of Capital Marx reproduces and elaborates the standpoint he first expressed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Present-day theoreticians of capitalist business, says Gvishiani, rehearse the arguments whose flimsiness was exposed by Marx over a century ago. "It is noteworthy that in all their reasonings about the aims and motive forces in the development of capitalist production, the ideologists of management studiously avoid any serious scientific analysis of capitalist reality.... Subjective intentions, ethical rules, etc., are presented as the chief motives of activity. This patently idealistic conception is supposed to refute the materialist conception of history" (8; 222).
230 produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom" (1, 3; 276).Production is impossible as an activity of an isolated individual, for it is essentially, a social process. This determines man's social nature. This approach to the question differs substantially from the anthropological view of man as a social being. Marx's conception of the unity of man and nature also differs from Feuerbach's, who kept emphasising that man was a natural being, a part of nature. Marx, for his part, shows the social substance of this unity: social production, whose laws are different from the laws of nature. Because of production "nature appears as his [man's---T.O.] work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man's species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created" (1, 3; 277). This should not, of course, be taken in the spirit of Young Hegelianism, for Marx regards as the handiwork of man only that part of nature which man has transformed, only the world of man-made things.
So, labour is the substance of man, that which makes him man, a social being capable of diverse activity and unlimited progress. Hegel, Marx says, expressed this key proposition, even if he did so in a false and speculative form. "The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phdnomenologie and its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man---true, because real man---as the outcome of man's own labour" (1, 3; 933).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ Marx says that Hegel saw labour as the unity of objectification (human activity) and de-objectification (nature), self-alienation and transcendence of self-alienation. These characteristics of productive activity, taken in its most general form, have no direct bearing on the concept of alienated labour, which Marx formulates, and this he himself emphasises a few lines later: __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 232. 231
If labour were only an activity creating commodities, the concept of alienated labour would not be of substantial importance. But once it has been established that labour has the crucial role to play in the historical development of "man's substantial forces", the concept of alienated labour becomes highly relevant: it shows the alienation of the human substance, of human life, and so brings .out the contradictions pervading the whole of human existence. This is an important point that bourgeois political economy tends completely to lose sight of, because it regards labour as a possible human occupation, an annoying necessity, at any rate for those who cannot obtain a living in some other way.
So, labour is, on the one hand, a specific human, creative force which shapes man and mankind, and on the other, alienated labour which distorts and degrades man and mankind. The substance of alienated labour consists in the fact that "the object which labour produces---labour's product---:confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as alienation, as self-alienation" (1, 3; 272).
The worker produces objects, wealth for others. He puts in all his strength, his whole life into labour, so that his life no longer belongs to him; it belongs to the object of his labour. This does not follow from the substance of labour in general, but from the substance of alienated labour.
The alienation of labour does not boil down to the appropriation of its product by the private owner. It takes place above all in the process of production itself and only _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 231. ``Hegel's standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man---as man's essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour" (1, 3; 333). The concept of alienated labour, which Hegel does not have, reflects the negative aspect of labour (determined by antagonistic social relations), which Hegel, Marx says, failed to see. Jean Hyppolite, who rebukes Marx for considering it necessary and possible to abolish alienated labour and its attendant forms of alienated consciousness (79; 102), clearly missed the point that Marx does not want to eliminate the contradictions of social development, but only the antagonisticsocial relations.
232 then in distribution. "The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the 'alienation, in the activity of labour itself" (1, 3; 274).Consequently, Marx considers the two main aspects of alienation: first, it is a definite objective relation between the worker and the product, of his labour; second, it is the relation of the proletarian and his labour. The corollary of both is alienation of nature, on the one hand, and alienation of vital activity, on the other. The latter means that in the worker's life labour comes to be something that does not belong to his substance, something that is external, arduous and coerced. "The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working, he does not feel at home" (1, 3; 274). Labour turns out to be not a means for satisfying the need for labour, but a means for satisfying other requirements, which in consequence of the alienation of labour become specific forms of alienation. "Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions" (7, 3; 275).
What is alienation of nature? Replying, Marx explains his view of the unity of man and nature. Man is a part of nature and only in it and through it does he realise his potentialities, requirements and vital activity generally. "Man lives on nature---means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die" (1, 3; 276). The more diverse a man's activity, as compared with an animal's, the more diverse his relations with nature. "The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body---both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object and the instrument of his life activity" (7, 3; 276). The alienation of nature means that it becomes only an instrument necessary for man's physical existence. All the other of man's diverse relations with nature are suppressed. And because labour and vital activity in general turn out to be no more than a means for the maintenance of 233 life, the individual's species-life is also subjected to alienation. Alienated labour, Marx says, alienates from man both the nature outside of him and his own nature, his body and his spiritual life.
If the product of labour confronts man as an alien but in no sense supernatural force, one may well ask, whose force is it? To answer this question, one has to move from Feuerbach's abstraction of man to real men, who differ not only by sex and age, but also by social status. "If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some man other than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man" (1, 3; 278).
Everything that has been said of man's relation to his labour, the product of his labour, and to himself, also applies to the relation between man and man, and to labour of another man and its product. Man's alienation, just as any other relation with himself, is brought out and realised only in his relations with other men. This means that alienation arid self-alienation (both of the product of labour and of labour activity itself) are social relations, and in the context of production, relations of production. Marx has yet to bring out the relation of man to the means of production, but he has, in effect, come close to the concept of antagonistic relations of production.
Thus, having commenced with the examination of private property Marx arrives at the concept of alienated labour. What is the relation petween the two? He shows, on the one hand, the relation of alienated labour and the worker, and on the other, the relation of the property of the non-worker to the worker and his labour. "Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations---the relation of the worker to labour and to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labour" (1, 3; 281). Does this suggest the conclusion that it is private property that produces alienated labour? Some students have drawn such a conclusion, even if with some reservations, because in capitalist society private property is the basis for the expanded reproduction of alienated labour. But the whole point- is that, contrary to the notions of bourgeois 234 economists, private property is not merely the product of labour, but a product of alienated labour. To assume that private property historically antedates alienated labour is to ignore the antagonistic character of this economic relation and to block the way to an analysis of its origins. But Marx's task was to clarify the origins, of private property, a question which bourgeois economists ignored. Of course, he could not provide an exhaustive answer to the question in a short piece about alienated labour, but he does most definitely draw the main conclusion concerning the origination of private property from alienated labour.
Marx says that the concept of alienated labour which he has formulated derives from "the result of the movement of private property.... But analysis of this concept shows that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal" (1, 3; 279-80). Consequently, one should not confuse the formation of the concept of "alienated labour" with its historical genesis. In his analysis, Marx advances from effect to cause, taking into account the fact that the relation of the two is no longer one-sided, but is an interaction which does not, however, obscure the historical distinction between the primary and the secondary: "Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself" (1, 3; 279). Later on, he once again emphasises that "estranged labour is the direct cause of private property" (1, 3; 280).
So one should draw a distinction between the initial form of alienated labour, which produced private property, and its subsequent historical form, which exists and develops together with private property and on its basis. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why the abolition of private property at a definite stage of social development also means the abolition of alienated labour.
One will understand the transient nature of private property if one realises that it is an effect, a definite historical product. But Marx goes on to prove that the key condition for abolishing private property is the proletariat's social revolution. "From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the emancipation 235 of society from 'private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation---and contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved, in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation" (1, 3; 280).
In economic terms, the proletariat's social emancipation means above all replacement of private property with social property, which Marx calls truly human and social. But what is the source of the objective necessity for abolishing private property? What was the cause of the self-alienation of labour which preceded it? Unless these questions are answered it is impossible to prove that the abolition of capitalism is a law-governed necessity. After all, the objective necessity of proletarian revolution does not follow from the fact that capitalism" is distorted reality. "How, we now ask, does man come to alienate his labour? How is this alienation rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity's development.. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution``'(I, 3; 281).
Unfortunately, we do not find in Marx's MS a full-scale answer to, this question, in particular because the MS remained unfinished. But the formulation of the question itself suggests, in the most general, principled form, at any rate, the answer which is to a certain extent outlined in other parts of the MS, that deal with the development of man's essential powers, and this leads directly to the concept of productive forces, because "the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers" (1, 3; 302).
In the light of Marxism's subsequent development, in the course of which its founders specially analysed the historical origination of private property, one could say that the alienation of labour in its initial form resulted from the low level of development of man's essential powers. The sway of 236 elemental natural forces over men is a specific form of primitive man's enslavement for, as Lenin emphasises, he "was absolutely crushed by the burden of existence, by the difficulties of the struggle against nature" (5, 5; 111). The embryonic forms of labour in the pre-class society could not yet become man's requirement and free activity. With these primitive and undeveloped forms in mind, Marx says: "Labour is man's coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man" (1, 3; 333). Consequently, private property is engendered by the low level of the productive forces, although subsequently it becomes a specific form accelerating their development. The appropriation of the product of the labour of others effected by means of private property was initially carried out mainly through extra-economic coercion.
World history, Marx says, is the "creation of man through human labour" (1, 3; 305). Through labour activity and production man displays and develops his inherent speciesforces. This "active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being ... is only possible in the form of estrangement" (1, 3; 333). Only the long and progressive development of the productive forces and the mastery of the elemental forces of nature produce the objective necessity for abolishing alienated labour, of which private property, capital, and so on, are the inevitable historical forms. So there is, as Marx put it, "a historical necessity of private property", whose development, for its part, necessitates a "positive transcendence of private property" (1, 3; 297), i.e., abolition which is a qualitatively new form of social progress. Of course, the MSS do not contain the solution of all these problems, but their formulation does show the fundamental distinction between Marx's doctrine and all the earlier philosophical and sociological theories.
Lenin remarked that the Utopian socialists believed that they could back up their views by presenting a picture of the oppression of the masses under private property, by branding man's exploitation of man and showing the superiority of a system under which each would receive what he produced, an ideal system which corresponded. to the idea of a rational and moral life, etc. Marx proved that this view of socialism was unscientific and showed that the need for a socialist transformation was not subjective but objective and that, consequently, it did not spring from moral motives 237 but from society's economic development. That is why he sought to clarify, above all through objective analysis, both the historical necessity of private property and exploitation, and the objective necessity of their abolition. Marx, Lenin says, did not consider it possible "to content himself with asserting that only the socialist system harmonises with human nature.... By this same objective analysis of the capitalist system, he proved the necessity of its transformation into the socialist system" (5, 1; 158).
The -Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is a mil|«tone in the shaping of the truly scientific methodology.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 7 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ANTAGONISM OF LABOUR AND CAPITAL.I have shown that Marx regards the abolition of alienated labour and transition from private property to "real human" or social, property as a necessary result of the development of man's substantial, species forces. But that is only the historico-philosophical aspect of his analysis. The other, economic, and equally important, aspect is his analysis of the contradiction between labour and capital.
Capital and labour constitute a unity of opposites, in which one side constantly reproduces the other. In this relation of opposites, "the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore an indigent capital, one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life was and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The worker produces capital, capital produces him--- hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle" (1, 3; 283). The conceptual form of this proposition was still unsatisfactory from the standpoint of the political economy of Marxism, which was just taking shape. Here, no distinction is made between worker, labour and labour-power. The worker is characterised now as capital sui generis, now as commodity. There is also mention of the value of the worker, although it should be the value of labour-power, which is a specific 238 commodity, but not capital in any sense.^^*^^ Nevertheless, despite the fact that some of the fundamental problems of the political economy of Marxism remain unsolved, the basic idea of the above-quoted proposition is absolutely true: the capitalist and the worker, whom bourgeois economists present as two equal commodity-owners, freely exchanging their commodities, are in fact not equal at all, for the capitalist dominates the worker, who in virtue of the economic coercion is subjected to exploitation, and reproduces the relations enslaving him. The continuous reproduction of the labour-capital relation intensifies the antagonism between the two and paves the way for a revolutionary explosion. "This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relation" (1, 3; 285).
The antithesis of labour and capital, Marx thinks, is the highest stage in the development of the contradiction which is inherent in private property. Bourgeois economists have also indirectly indicated this contradiction when describing labour as the substance of private property, but ignoring the glaring fact that this substance and that which it' is the substance of constitute the two poles of economic life in capitalist society. ,He who works is deprived of private property, i.e., of that which he produces. Indeed, he has to work only because he is deprived of private property, while the private proprietor does not work precisely because he appropriates the products of labour without working. The class limitations of bourgeois political economy are expressed in the fact that, having declared labour to be the substance of private property, so recognising the latter as an attribute _-_-_
^^*^^ Louis Althusser is clearly wrong in saying that the MSS contain "all or nearly all the categories which we shall once again find in Capital, and which, for that reason, we could regard as anticipating Capital, nay, as its draft, and even as Capital in dotted lines, but in the form of an outline which does not have the fulness but which already has the spirit of the accomplished work" (45; 158). Althusser does not apparently take into account the fact that most of the categories of Capital will be found in the writings of the classics of bourgeois political economy. What Marx did was to produce a fundamentally new economic doctrine. I think that A. I. Malysh is quite right when he says the following about the extract quoted from Althusser: "This is, of course, an obvious exaggeration. One need merely point out that cardinal categories of Marxist political economy, like wage-labour and surplus-value are not merely not analysed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, but are not even mentioned" (24; 91).
239 of man, it considers the existence, of propertyless proletarians quite natural.Bourgeois political economy notes the antithesis between property and the lack of it, ignoring the fact that the one depends on the other, and the development of this contradiction which naturally grows into antagonism between labour and capital. This antagonism is no longer an "indifferent antithesis" between the existence and absence of property, but "an active connection", a struggle in,which private property emerges "as its developed state of contradiction---hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution" (1, 3; 294).
Marx shows the illusory form in which bourgeois political economy comes to be aware of the contradiction between labour and capital, and then goes on to clarify how the objective necessity for resolving this contradiction, is reflected in the doctrines of the Utopian socialists and communists. He is especially interested in the so-called crude egalitarian communism because it denied private property much more resolutely than the other Utopian teachings. Still, because of the extremely limited understanding of the task of communist transformation, it does not carry this negation to the end. The possession of things is said to be man's main purpose. That is why the principle of egalitarian or levelling communism is "universal private property" (1, 3; 294), or the equal right of all to existing private property. Hence the reduction of human requirements to a minimum, resulting in asceticism and ignoring of individual distinctions, capabilities and talents. "This type of communism---since it negates the personality of man in every sphere---is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation" (1, 3; 295).
Marx criticises crude egalitarian communism also for negating culture and civilisation and for preaching "the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it" (1, 3; 295).^^*^^ This helps to understand that levelling communism _-_-_
^^*^^ The ideologists of anti-communism claim that Marxism ignores the personality, the human individuality, and tends to reduce human life to a levelled down satisfaction mainly of material requirements, self-abnegation __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 241. 240 still has no idea of the material premises of socialism which take shape in the course of capitalist development.
Because this communism "has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it" (1, 3; 296).
Marx contrasts with levelling communism the "positive transcendence of private property" which implies the allround development of man's substantive -forces and, consequently, of material production as well.
Under capitalism, "the increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected". Only under socialism does the wealth of human requirements acquire truly human significance, because socialism transforms the new types and objects of production into a "new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature" (/, 3; 306).
Social production is not only the creation of things satisfying definite requirements. There is also spiritual or cultural production which, with the abolition of private property, ceases to be the production of spiritual alienation and becomes the production of spiritual intercourse, unity and collectivism. "Religion, family, state, law, mdrality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement--- that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social existence" (7, 3; 297).
Private property and possession in general is only one form of man's appropriation of the objects of nature and human activity. The predominant importance which the sense of possession has acquired and the urge to possess are evidence of the alienation of other human senses.^^*^^ "Private _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 240. for the benefit of society, etc. However, this extract shows that the shaping of scientific communism is organically connected with a critique of everything that the present-day critics of Marxism ascribe to its founders.
^^*^^ In this connection, Marx refers to an article by M. Hess published in 1843 in the collection Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, without giving its title, but it is apparently "Socialism and Communism''.
241 property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it" (1, 3; 300). However, "the* perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements---should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having" (1, 3; 299). With the transition to social property and the development of this qualitatively new basis for the life of man, the diversity of the potential forms for human assimilation of nature and human activity tends to develop in everyway. "Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man" (/, 3; 299). These propositions show Marx's philosophical comprehension of the essence of the communist restructuring of society.Man is a social being, Marx explains. This idea was also emphatically propounded by Feuerbach, who regarded the individual's social and species substance as consisting in his anthropological unity with all other individuals. By contrast, Marx regards material production as the specific, species and definitive form of human activity. It constitutes the basis of all the other forms of individual activity, which is why these are also social. Even "when I am active scientifically, etc.---an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with other---then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being" (1, 3; 298). Accordingly, one should not contrast ``society'', as an abstraction, to the individual, who is himself a social being. The individual differs from the social as a specific manifestation of the species-life, and the latter is the universal individual life.
Man has always been a social being. Does this mean that with the transition from capitalism to socialism there will be no change in man's social nature? No, thanks to the "positive transcendence of private property" and the abolition of alienation, man becomes a truly social being, i.e., his substance is adequately expressed because it is no longer alienated in the form of money, commodities, or private property.
242The private-property society limits and impoverishes man's sensual life, i.e., his immediate relation to nature and other men. A famished man, Marx says, does not have a human attitude to food, he devours it as an animal would. A man weighed down with trouble is indifferent to beauty. This is true not only of those who are worn out by heavy labour, but also of the capitalists, those for whom profit is the be-all and end-all of life.
Consequently, there is a need to humanise human emotions in accordance with the great wealth of the human substance.
The development of public property creates the material premises for the individual's all-round development arid spiritual enrichment. As a result, "in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life---the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need" (1, 3; 304).
In the private-property society, man's wealth is chiefly the things, the commodities, and the capital which belong to him. In the future society, which Marx calls "gesellschaftlicher Zustand" (social state)^^*^^ the wealth of society and of each of its members is above all the all-round development of human capabilities, man's substantive forces. In the world of private property, the measure of wealth is the quantity of materialised labour in the "social state", i.e., under communism, such a measure will be the extent to which human capabilities, knowledge and science are developed and applied.
He says that the natural sciences have scored outstanding successes and have become a mighty factor not only in education but also in production. "Natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the _-_-_
^^*^^ "We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering lose their antithetical character", Marx says, "and thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society" (/, 3; 302). This should not be taken to mean that there is no antithesis between them. In that period, Marx and Engels used these terms (notably ``materialism'') to designate definite living spiritual orders rather than philosophical trends.
243 furthering of the dehumanisation of man" (1, 3; 303). Human emancipation, i.e., the socialist restructuring of social life, creates a new economic basis for society and so constitutes man's all-round emancipation: "The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its' object has become a social, human object---an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment has consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere untility by use becoming human use" (1, 3; 300). There is much that needs to be clarified in this assertion, despite the fact that Marx uses italics to accentuate his main point. How are we to understand that the senses become human senses as a result of communist transformation? Were they not such before then? In what sense do the objects of human activity become human objects? The profound meaning of all this is obscured by the anthropological form of exposition and the absence of any full-scale historical analysis of social phenomena (based on the identification of socio-economic formation), by the conception of alienation and selfalienation, according to which the relations that are predominant in the epoch preceding communism are alien to man and are, consequently, distorted, inhuman relations, and by the elements of the abstract Feuerbachian view of the substance of man. Still, his analysis helps to understand that he uses the term ``human'' to designate the all-round development of man's substantive forces as a social being. He emphasises and, with good reason, of course (although with some exaggeration in the spirit of Feuerbach), that the triumph of humanism and the true development of the human personality are necessarily manifested as the wealth of sensual life. "For this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man" (1, 3; 301). Here, non-social man means a member of bourgeois society. But how does this square with Marx's theses that man is a social being by nature"? The contradiction between the sociality and asociality in man is due to the fact that human nature is 244 distorted by private property. That is why he determines the future society as "reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement" (1, 3; 296). This means that the "non-social man" is alienated man. Communist transformation is the restoration of the true human substance. This view of man does not yet mark a final break with anthropologism and the traditions of the teachings of the enlighteners about human substance as something given primordially in all its definiteness but which is distorted by the ``untrue'' arrangement of social life. Only abandonment of the universalisation of the alienation category puts an end to this ``essentialist'' trend and helps to understand the substance of man not as something that had been there before history but as the totality of historically changing social relations.Marx does not yet give his doctrine the name of communism, although he does Use the term now and again (like ``socialism'') to describe the future social system. He designates the scientific theory of the proletariat's emancipation movement on which he is working by the name of "fully developed naturalism". That does not mean that he rejects the concept of communism. In contrast to egalitarian, Utopian communism, he puts forward the idea of scientific communism, which he defines as "the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man---the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution" (7, 3; 296).
The adversaries of Marxism point to this and other similar formulations in his early writings which fall short of those of mature Marxism, and ascribe to him the undialectical assertion that communism means a final solution of all possible social problems and an end of society's development. But the 1844 MSS show very well that the positive abolition or transcendence of private property is not the ultimate goal of world history, but the basis for humanity's subsequent progressive development.
One should bear in mind, however, that Marx defines his doctrine not so much as communism as real humanism, and accordingly regards communism as the way to the consummation of humanism. ``Communism'', he writes, "is the 245 position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future. Communism as such is not the form of human society" (1, 3; 306). Here Marx evidently has egalitarian communism in mind. We can therefore view this statement as an assertion that the abolition of private property is not the ultimate aim of the proletariat.
Communism, he explains, "as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism" (1, 3; 341). The establishment of practical humanism entails the practical revolutionary act. "In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process" (1, 3; 313).^^*^^
Consequently, it is not enough merely to become aware of alienation: that does not remove it but makes it even more tangible. Alienation must be abolished in practice; that is the task of the emancipation struggle of the working class, in the course of which the proletarians rise above the limitations of bourgeois society, which divides men and pits them against each other. For proletarians, human brotherhood is no mere phrase, "but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies" (7, 3; 313).
The proletariat's emancipation struggle stems objectively from the economic structure of capitalism: "The entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical _-_-_
^^*^^ This is based on a materialist solution of the problem of the theory-practice relation: "We see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one" (/, 3; 302). Contradictions, which at first sight appear to exist only in theory, turn out to be contradictions of practical social life, which is why they cannot be resolved by means of theory alone. Hence the need for revolutionary practice.
246 and its theoretical basis in the, movement of private property--- more precisely, in that of the economy",(1, 3; 297).We find, therefore, that Marx, in effect, regards as a single task the overcoming of the limitations of Utopian communism and socialism, and the materialist substantiation of the communist ideal.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 8 __ALPHA_LVL3__ THE MATERIALIST VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN.The 1844 MSS contain a close scrutiny of Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes and of Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, and although this part of the MSS has remained unfinished, it says enough to identify Marx's philosophical views in that period.
While elaborating a fundamentally new, dialecticomaterialist world outlook, Marx is still under Feuerbach's influence. Though his-view and elaboration of Feuerbach's doctrine is critical, he still tends to over-rate the importance of Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel's dialectics. "Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude [of the others]" (1, 3; 328).^^*^^
It is common knowledge that Feuerbach failed to give a due appreciation of Hegel's dialectics, so in fact failing to make any genuine discoveries in this field. He did set himself the task of overcoming Hegel's doctrine and the whole of earlier philosophy in general, but did not cope with it. Why then does Marx give him such a high rating? He writes: "Feuerbach's great achievement is:
``1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;
_-_-_^^*^^ By "the others" Marx means the Young Hegelian group headed by Bauer, who styled themselves "critical critics''.
247``2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of 'man to man' the basic principle of the theory;
``3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself" (1, 3; 328).
Consequently, like Feuerbach, Marx uses the term philosophy to designate idealist philosophy. He feels that Feuerbach's great achievement was, first, the exposure of idealism as a refined religious world outlook; second, the countering of idealism with genuine materialism (which Marx also sees as the beginning of the scientific view of society); and" third, his criticism of the speculative approach to negation of the negation (by means of which that which is subjected to negation is re-established by means of `` transcendence'' or ``sublation'') and the contrast between Hegelianism and the sensually perceived reality from which science must start and which requires no logical deduction.
There again, Feuerbach's historical achievements are exaggerated, but we clearly see what it is that is so over-rated. Indeed, Feuerbach proved that theology was the secret of the speculative philosophy. He contrasted idealist speculation and the materialist world outlook, which was undoubtedly an advance in comparison with 18th-century materialism. His criticism of Hegel's dialectics helped Marx and Engels to discover its rational nucleus.
Although Feuerbach was not a dialectician, one should not over-simplify his attitude to dialectics. While rejecting Hegel's method, Feuerbach sought to understand the interconnection between natural phenomena and their change. He wrote: "Nature has neither a beginning nor an end. Everything within it is in inter-action, everything is relative, everything is simultaneously cause and effect, everything in it is comprehensive arid mutual" (66, 8; 129). It is true that this dialectical approach was not elaborated by Feuerbach, for he did not consider the various forms of interdependence of phenomena, nor analysed the categories in which dialectical processes are theoretically comprehended and generalised. He is not interested in these categories, which are such a prominent feature of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik.
The outstanding German materialist also recognised the development of nature, but there again he confined himself 248 to making a few statements and, on the whole, displaying no interest in this dialectical conception of development.
Feuerbach frequently spoke of the importance of negation in the process of development and in the creation of the new. "Only he has the power to create the new' who is bold enough to be absolutely negative" (65; 216). He did not contrast negation and historical continuity, and believed that it was possible to have "preservation in the form of negation" (65, 217). Because he did not elaborate on these ideas, they are at best embryonic potentialities. Did Marx have these ideas in view when he said that Feuerbach was a dialectician?
Let us also bear in mind that in 1844 Marx could not yet have had a coherent scientific view of dialectics. Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel's concept of alienation, the materialist interpretation of this concept, the discovery of real, living content in the fantastic images of religion, the ideas about the unity of man and nature and of man and man, those must have been the ideas which Marx at the time referred to dialectics, especially since there are. elements of dialectics in Feuerbach's approach to these questions.
Here is how Marx defined Feuerbach's attitude to Hegel's dialectics: "Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows:
``Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance (in logic, from the infinite, the abstractly universal)---from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in a popular way, that he sets out from religion and theology. "Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology).
"Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite---restoration of religion and theology.
``Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself---as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself" (1, 3; 329). Consequently, Marx also regards as one of Feuerbach's achievements his indication that for Hegel negation of the negation comes to be the instrument for structuring a system. Feuerbach understood 249 that Hegel's dialectics served to substantiate idealism, but that was as far as he went. He regarded negation of the negation and the struggle of opposites as no more than facts of consciousness, of thought, which attained to the truth zigzagging and overcoming its errors.^^*^^
The whole content of the MSS shows that Marx has no intention of stopping at the point reached by Feuerbach, but he does value his attempt at a critical demarcation with Hegel's dialectics. Young Hegelian idealism, Marx writes, "has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young Hegelianism---the Hegelian dialectic---and even had nothing to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. This shows a completely uncritical attitude to itself" (1, 3; 328). But the fact is that Feuerbach toppled the old dialectics and philosophy and, taking nature and man for his starting point, set before philosophy the task of showing their unity.
With Feuerbach as the starting point but transcending the limits of Feuerbach's doctrine, Marx analyses not only the natural, anthropological but also the social premises of man's unity with nature.
According to Hegel, spirit (and so man also) is not altogether at home in nature and seeks to overcome this alienated being of his and finds satisfaction only in the abstract element of thought and self-consciousness. In contrast to Hegel, Marx, like Feuerbach, asserts that man and nature are not two different substances which are alien to each other, but constitute a single whole. "History itself is _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx writes: "The positive position or self-affirmation and selfconfirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence---not an acknowledged position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of sense-certainty based on itself" (7, 3; 329). So we find Feuerbach interpreting negation of the negation anthropologically, as a definite state of consciousness of which uncertainty, doubt, hesitation, etc., are elements. He takes a similar view of contradiction and the struggle of opposites. He says: "Only where one concept supplants another, and one sensation another, where there is no final decision and no lasting definiteness, and where the soul is in a continuous succession of opposite states, only there does it find itself in the hellish torment of contradiction" (64; 159).
250 a real part of natural history---of nature developing into « man" (1, 3; 303-04).Man is a natural being shaped in accordance with the laws of nature; his emotions imply the existence of natural objects and his sensual life is also predicated on the diversity of nature. "As a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers---he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities---as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside of him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs---essential objects indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers" (I, 3; 336). To be real or, which is the same thing, objective and natural means having one's object outside oneself and seeking it; this also means being an object for another. The nature outside man is his nature, while his own life is also the life "of nature. In this sense, Marx says that man's sensations, passions, etc., are not only anthropological phenomena, "but truly ontological affirmations of being [of nature]" (/, 3; 322).
Nature exists not only outside of man but also within man himself, And through him it perceives and cognises itself. Human affects, which Spinoza held to be vague sensual notions about external things, modi of substance, are regarded by Marx as real expressions of the unity of man and nature, which is why these affects should be cultivated rather than overcome. "The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my life activity, is passion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being" (I, 3; 304).
Insofar as natural phenomena enter a man's life they become a part of it. "Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art---his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible---so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity" (1, 3; 275).
These ideas, which illustrate Marx's critical assimilation and digestion of anthropological materialism, have been interpreted by some critics of Marxism as being akin to the 251 irrationalist "philosophy of life", but this is shown to be untrue by this and other passages in the actual context of Marx's works. Again and again, he says that nature, the objects of sensory perception are independent of consciousness and sense organs. He emphasises the materialist premise and shows the unity of the subjective and the objective, of thought and being: "Thinking and being are ... certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other" (1, 3; 299).
The unity of the human and the natural, of the subjective and the objective, of thought and being is not a groundless correlation: it is based on nature, on the objective, on being. It is absurd, therefore, to ask how nature originated, and whether or not it was created. But the notion of man's creation is equally absurd, because it allows of a partial creation of nature, and nature is, after all, also man, just as man is nature.
To those who ask, who created nature and man, Marx replies: "Your question is in itself a product of abstraction.... When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing" (1, 3; 305).
Marx believes that the idealist view of the creation of nature and man is theoretically rooted in the notions of the ordinary consciousness, which is aware that every individual's life is a result of ``creation'' (childbirth) and that every natural phenomenon is limited in time and space. This notion, which is correct in itself, prpves to be untenable whenever it is separated from the individual and is set up as a universal principle rejecting the substantiality of nature. "The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life" (7, 3; 304).
Consequently, Marx rejects both the theological objectiveidealist concept of the creation of nature and man, and the subjective-idealist conception of nature and man, for he regards both as no more than a pseudo-problem, which disappears as soon as one comes to comprehend the substance of nature and the unity of man and nature. This does not, of course, imply a denial of man's origination as a definite species-being, and while the natural science of the 252 1840s had not yet solved the problem of anthropogenesis, Marx saw very well that humanity's history was a continuation of the history of nature.
The unity of the human and the natural is also expressed as man's relation to man. "The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature---his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which -the hurrtan essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man's, whole level of development" (1, 3; 296).
The unity of the biological and the social, in virtue of which man's relation to nature is his immediate relation to man, and the latter is equally his immediate relation to nature---this unity is effected in man's sensuous life, notably in the development of the human sense, organs. The latter's existence depends on the objects of these senses, i.e., the objective processes that are reflected by them. But the senses (and sensuousness generally) exist for man as human senses insofar as there is another individual. Human means social. "It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc." (1, 3; 301). The diversity of sensuous life, which is proper to man alone, and is impossible for animals, is a product of social development. "Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form---in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present" (1, 3; 301-02).
Feuerbach criticised Hegel for assuming that in his sense perceptions man is rather the object than the subject, and remarked on the specifically human nature of our 253 perceptions of the external world. However, he was unable to explain this fact. Marx does not confine himself to recognising the natural unity of man and nature, of man and man. Emphasising the importance of this natural foundation, Marx holds that the specific foundation of social life is the activity of man himself, viz. the objectification of human activity and the de-objectification of nature, in other words, production and the whole history of humanity whose product is everything that is inherent in the human being.
The immediate unity of man and nature, of man and man, is only the initial condition for the specifically human unity of society and nature, of social production, which helps to develop man's distinction from other living beings that are in immediate unity with nature and remain such as they are for millennia. " Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man.... <The nature which develops in human history---the genesis of human society---is man's real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged - form, is true anthropological nature,>" (1, 3; 303).
Marx's; terminology here can be correctly understood only in the whole context of the MSS and with an eye on the influence of Feuerbach's anthropologism. He has yet to find an adequate mode of exposition, and this, of course, is to some extent a characterisation not only of the form but also of the content of these passages. But it is clear that, when considering the shaping of nature into man, he has in mind, in contrast to the theological concept, the natural process in which man originated. This, he says, is the development in man of nature itself, which human activity transforms into "anthropological nature''.
Of course, nature itself does not possess human substance, is not transformed into man. The imprecision of his terminology springs from the still embryonic dialecticomaterialist conception of development, for he formulates, only the most initial concepts and in the most general form. But there is no doubt that these are materialist concepts, and that is why Marx gives Feuerbach credit for having founded true materialism. It is true that elsewhere, when defining his philosophical stand as "fully developed naturalism", he 254 draws a distinction between it and both materialism and idealism: "Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history" (1, 3; 336). This becomes clear when one bears in mind that Marx has not yet worked' out his historico-philosophical conception, according to which materialism and idealism are the chief and mutually exclusive lines in philosophy. He disagrees with the old materialism, which turned out to be incapable of presenting a materialist view of society. The idea of fully developed naturalism is the idea of building materialism "up to the top". When breaking with idealism, Marx sets apart dialectics, notably the principle of activity, of practice, which the contemplative, metaphysical materialism was incapable of developing. Consequently, there is here no eclectic combination of opposite lines, but the elaboration of "true materialism''.^^*^^
So, material production is the historically developing unity of man and nature, of man and man, a unity which determines the whole diversity of human life. Even at this stage in the shaping of his philosophy, Marx explains in detail that the objective necessity of production does not merely spring from the fact that men have to eat, drink, dress, have a roof over their heads, etc. This view of the role of production, which, incidentally, was • expressed before Marx's day, still fell far short of the materialist view of history. Marx shows something that is much more essential: production is the basis on which every aspect of men's life develops. "On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man's essential powers---human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers---that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object" (1, 3; 301). Even man's sensuous life, which is so immediately _-_-_
^^*^^ It is clear'•from this that J. Hyppolite is completely wrong in not differentiating between the objective content of this formulation which Marx has made and the subjective form of the statement about "the synthesis of idealism and realism" (79; 153).
255 connected with nature unfolds through the progress of production, "Only through developed industry---i.e., through the medium of private property---does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity" (1, 3; 322). Once again we find the beginnings of the new world outlook expressed in terms which do not accord with its actual content. Some critics of Marxism claim that expressions like "the ontological essence of human passion" make Marx the founder of idealistic anthropologism, of existentialism, etc. They extol Marx as an opponent of materialism, although the expression quoted above, in the context of the work being considered, of course, merely designates the natural (``ontological'') substance of human passions.Marx's ideas about the unity of the human and the natural differ essentially from Feuerbach's not only in that he shows production to be the basis of that unity but also in that his doctrine of alienated labour and the alienation of nature brings out the contradictory character of this unity. It is true that Feuerbach also indicates the alienation of nature from man but he interprets this social phenomenon as being a consequence of the religious mystification of nature, and for that reason sees it as existing mainly within the religious consciousness. For his part, Marx argues that the relation of man to nature is not determined by consciousness, whether religious or irreligious, but by socio-economic conditions.
Marx considers the dependence of man's anthropological (natural) development on social development, which is, for its part, determined by the advance of material production. This organically ties in the anthropological characterisation of the individual with the view of man's substance as the totality of social relations. Marx reworks Feuerbach's anthropologism and subordinates it to a higher standpoint, the materialist view of history. But he does not discard the anthropological characterisation of the individual, because the reduction of the individual to the social does not imply a denial of the individual, a distinction of individuals, a distinction between man and woman, etc. This `` unthropologism'' which one finds in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 should be seen not so much as a result of Feuerbach's influence as a necessary element in the multi-faceted view of man being elaborated by Marxism.
Dialectical and historical materialism is in principle, 256 incompatible with the idealistic philosophical anthropology of today, which in contrast to anthropological materialism starts from the notion of the primordial, substantial singularity of human being. But Marxism also rejects Hegel's idea, which has a religious origin, that the individual dissolves in the Absolute Spirit. The Marxist view of the unity of the individual and the social provides the theoretical ground for a restructuring of society in which, Marx and Engels say, the freedom of every individual will be a necessary condition for the freedom of all.
It should furthermore be emphasised that Marx's (and to some extent also Feuerbach's) anthropological characterisation of the individual is a characterisation of man outside the context of alienation, i.e., of the essential distinctions between men which are determined by private property, social inequality, the polarity of poverty and wealth, etc. A bourgeois democrat, Feuerbach uses the idea of the anthropological equality of all men to refute the preconceptions of the aristocrats claiming that their distinction from the ``mob'' is a kind of innate privilege. But he does not regard social inequality as a law-governed and historically inevitable phenomenon. For his part, Marx holds the historically rooted social distinctions to be even more essential, despite their historically transient character, for an understanding of man than his anthropological characteristics. The advance of production exerts an influence on man's anthropological nature, while estranged labour distorts the human personality, and alienates from it both nature and its own substance. That is why, for Marx, the anthropological characterisation of man is simultaneously a critique of the alienation of nature and of the human substance itself, and defence of the working people's right to a human life.
Thus, Marx's characterisation of man's anthropological nature is not opposed to the materialist view of history but is one of its essential elements. Man's substance, i.e., the totality of social relations, is not an abstraction that is separated from living men with all their anthropological peculiarities. It is not Marxism, but Hegelianism that separates the social from the anthropological and regards man merely as a spirit alienated from nature, from the natural element in man. Marx criticises this conception of Hegel's as the standpoint of alienation, i.e, as a theoretical expression (and justification) of the existing state of things.
__PRINTERS_P_257_COMMENT__ 9- 185 257Those are the key approaches to the problem of man in Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and they provide the basis for his critical analysis of Hegel's method and the main ideas in the Phanomenologie des Geistes.
The problem of alienation, Marx says, is central to Hegel's system. His Logik starts with pure being, that is presented as the alienation of the absolute idea, which reappears at the end of the Logik and at once alienates its being as nature. The whole of Hegel's Encydopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Marx says, is "in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement---i.e., comprehending itself abstractly" (/, 3; 330). The absolute idea, absolute knowledge and absolute mind or spirit (concepts which Hegel ultimately regarded as identical) first alienate their being as nature, i.e., material, non-thinking reality, and then overcome this self-alienation, i.e., return to themselves, to the element of pure thought, so as to comprehend themselves in the process of humanity's history, which is also interpreted as self-alienation and its transcendence. The result of this entire process, whose individual phases consist of anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, moral, aesthetic and, finally, philosophic spirit is ascent to absolute knowledge and the corresponding form of social being. But this being, Marx points out, is no more than a speculative abstraction.
Hegel errs most obviously in his Phanomenologie des Geistes, which, according to Marx's profound remark, is the source of his entire philosophy. In it, wealth, state power and other social institutions are regarded as alienations of the human substance, which is reduced to thought, to self-consciousness. But then alienation is no more than a mental process, i. e., something which occurs only in thought. "The whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i. e., absolute) thought---of logical, speculative thought" (7, 3; 331). The history of humanity becomes a history of philosophy, and all the living, historical collisions turn into contradictions, which arise and are resolved within absolute thought. Consequently, it is only the sensory image of negation that needs to be negated, and not the fact that "the human being objectifies himself inhumanly"' 258 (1, 3; 331). So "despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the genuine criticism contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phanomenologie as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel's later works" (1, 3; 331-32).^^*^^
It is true that Hegel brings out labour activity among the other forms of alienation and, as Marx notes, correctly regards it as the chief and definitive element in man and the history of society. <"In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man's act of selfgenesis---conceives man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life"> (1, 3j 342). But he also sees, labour as essentially a spiritual activity and as ultimately the activity of thought. That is why the alienation occurring in this sphere once again turns out to be the self-alienation of self-consciousness.
So Marx criticises above all the idealist premises of the Phanomenologie, which lead to the speculative conception of alienation and the transcendence of alienation. Idealist dialectics is a fantastic depiction of the actual process and a distortion of the real, problems. Man and man's substance are reduced to self-consciousness. The alienation of the human substance turns out to be no more than the alienation of self-consciousness. The object of consciousness is nothing but the objectified self-consciousness. "The estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression---reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought---of the real estrangement of the human being. Instead, the actual estrangement---that which appears real---is according to its innermost, hidden nature (which is only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness" (1, 3; 334). In contrast to Hegel, Marx regards the alienation of self-consciousness as a reflection of the alienation which goes on independently of consciousness within social life, above all in the sphere of material production. Real man cannot be _-_-_
^^*^^ A little later Marx once again emphasises that the Phanomenologie "is ... a hidden, mystifying and still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man's estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint" (1, 3; 332).
259 reduced to consciousness, to self-consciousness, to the spirit. "Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; it is not human nature that is a quality of self-consciousness" (1, 3; 334).According to Hegel, nature and society have no reality independent of the spirit, and are something negative, an immediate absence of spirituality, or, which is the same thing, are only an outward expression of the latter. From this standpoint, the object is posited by the selfconsciousness, and it has a positive significance only in that it helps the self-consciousness in its self-assertion. Knowledge is, in fact, the relation of self-consciousness to the object, and, according to Hegel, it alone is the objective relation.
Hegel's concept of alienation is one of the aspects of the idealist approach to the basic philosophical question; he sees objective reality as the objectivisation of self-consciousness. But the fact is that self-consciousness is possible only inasmuch as an objective world exists independently of it, a world which is not a negation of the self-consciousness but a self-sustained primary reality. Like human urges, requirements and emotions, self-consciousness implies objects existing independently of it, just as the life of plants implies the existence of the Sun.^^*^^
Marx opposes the idealist view of the external, the material, the objective world as an undifferentiated, abstract non-I with respect to the / of the absolute self-consciousness. He reworks Hegel's dialectics on materialist lines and develops the idea of the unity of subject and object, of the transformation of the subjective into the objective, and shows the objective basis of this interaction of opposites. Man is a part of the objective world, and human activity is a necessary stage in its development. Man masters the elemental forces of nature, turns them into his own forces, but they _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx formulates these materialist ideas as follows: "Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant---an indispensable object to it, confirming its life---just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power" (1, 3; 336-37). In contrast to the metaphysical materialists, Marx joins up recognition of the objective reality, which exists outside and independently of the object, and recognition of the dialectical unity of subject and object.
260 themselves are independent of his will and consciousness. The unity of man and nature is constantly reproduced and develops throughout mankind's history.That which Hegel sought to comprehend in the light of idealist speculation shading off into spiritualism is given a rational explanation in the dialectico-materialist conception of subject and object elaborated by Marx: "An objective being acts objectively.... He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects---because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this .objective being does not fall from his state of 'pure activity' into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being" (1, 3; 336). Let us recall that, according to the terminology in the 1844 MSS, to be objective means having the object of one's activity outside of oneself. So what he means here is that corporeal man exists in an objective world, which is independent of himself ("on the solid ground"), but also that the positing, the alienation is predicated not only on the subject's activity but also on the objects of his activity which are independent of the subject and which constitute the condition and the inducement to such activity.
Marx does not confine himself to criticising the idealist principles of Hegel's conception of alienation and their contrast with the dialectico-materialist approach, but goes on to show that the transcendence of alienation within the framework of Hegel's philosophy turns out to be no more than a speculative illusion: wherever the alienation is no more than mental its negation is likewise a process that runs only in the mind. This leaves real alienation intact. "Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object---the estranged essential reality of man--- is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely---estrangement's abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty supersession of that empty abstraction---the negation of the negation" (1, 3; 343). Thus, according to Hegel, man's political, juridical and civil being is his alienated being, which, as a result of negation and subsequent supersession or sublation of the negation, is not abolished but continues to exist, but in its true 'form. The whole point is that the 261 alienated, according to Hegel, is "the other of itself (andere seiner), which is why there is actually no real abolition of the alienation: the subject recognises himself in the alienated as his own flesh and blood. And it is this comprehension of the nature of alienation that is presented as its supersession.
It will be easily seen that his kind of supersession of alienation becomes its establishment. Thus, Hegel regards the state as a negation of the civil society with its war of everyone against all, but this negated civil society is maintained as a necessary sphere of the state. The supersession of religion, as an inadequate expression of the absolute, turns out to be the establishment of religion allegedly in its true form, as the philosophy of religion. Marx writes: "Here 15 the root of Hegel's false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology---but it has to be expressed in more general terms.... The man who has recognised that he is leading an alienated life in law, politics, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself---in contradiction with both the knowledge and the essential being of the object---is thus true knowledge and life" (I, 3: 339).^^*^^
Marx shows that Hegel's principle of overcoming the contradictions of reality through cognition is untenable: it is not a resolution of contradictions but reconciliation with what exists by means of its philosophical interpretation. Indeed, a consistently critical analysis of alienation necessarily suggests other conclusions: "If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated selfconsciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion" (1, 3; 339). The same applies to other forms of alienation which, being real social relations oppressing man, must be not just comprehended as a necessity but eliminated in practice. This approach to overcoming _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx writes in this connection: "There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of-accommodation on Hegel's part vis-a-vis religion, the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle" (2; 634). Let us recall that Marx formulated this idea in his dissertation.
262 alienation, which is qualitatively distinct from Hegel's, gives Marx's dialectics its revolutionary critical character.The critique of Hegel's approach to overcoming alienation is obviously also a critique of his interpretation of the negation and of the negation of the negation. The mental negation leaves its object intact, merely declaring it to be superseded. "In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject" (1, 3; 339-40).
Marx insists on true, revolutionary negation which destroys the old state. He views the negation of the negation as not a re-establishment of what was earlier negated but as further development of negation, which includes the development of the preceding stage. But that does not amount to a rejection of Hegel's conception of supersession. Here, as elsewhere, Marx corrects and reworks Hegel. Thus, pointing to the "positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic", he writes: "Supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being. In the same way atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism" (7, 3; 341). Consequently, Marx does not reject category of supersession, which he regards as a reflection of the real process of -negation, a necessary element of which is continuity, transformation of what existed earlier into something that is its opposite but that preserves and develops some of the earlier features. Marx holds that absolute negation amounts to a break with reality, oblivion of objective reality, flight from it. "But atheism and 263 communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world created by man---of man's essential powers born to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real emergence, the actual realisation for man of man's essence and of his essence as something real" (1, 3; 342).
Marx ends his MSS with an overall evaluation of Hegel's dialectic and system. Unfortunately, this evaluation is not elaborated, because the MSS remained unfinished. But even what we have shows Marx's attitude to Hegel's dialectic and the basic features of his materialism at that stage of its development.
Marx holds that a positive aspect of Hegel's logic is that it regards concepts in their relation with each other, for this makes the system of concepts an integral whole. This is the result of one concept being superseded by another: substance is superseded being, concept is superseded substance, etc. So when Hegel establishes the need for negation he exposes the contradiction between method and system, which pervades the whole of his philosophy. After all, if everything is subjected to negation it follows that absolute idea must be superseded as well. "It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to perform once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality of abstractions or the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself---abandon abstraction---and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite---at nature. Thus, the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that only nature is something" (7, 3; 343). This is, in effect, the earliest expression of Marx's view that Hegel's philosophy is materialism stood on its head. But this means that only that critique of Hegel's philosophy can be scientific which is carried on in the light of materialism.
We find, therefore, that Marx, like Lenin after him (and he had no knowledge of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which were published after his death), attached especial importance to the closing pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, where he says that absolute idea decides freely to release itself from itself in the form of 264 nature. In this context, Lenin writes: "The transition of the logical idea to nature. It brings one within a hand's grasp of materialism. Engels was right when he said that Hegel's system was materialism turned upside down" (5, 38; 234). That is essentially the same conclusion which Marx draws and which shows that Hegel's transition from logic to the philosophy of nature was a fantastic depiction of transition from idealist speculative abstraction to sensory perception of reality, i. e., to that which is the starting point in cognition. But this means that the idealistic abstraction of nature needs to be discarded so as to turn to real nature, which, as the primary reality, precedes all abstraction. Hegel was unable to effect this transition, for he regarded real nature, like real man, as a predicate, a symbol of some latent super-natural reality, and unreal man. Here, alienation precedes that which was alienated, the image precedes the object. So Marx has drawn this conclusion: Hegel's method needs to be stood on its feet.
Thus, despite the obvious imprint of Feuerbach's anthrppologism and that which Marx subsequently even called the cult of Feuerbach, and despite the survivals of old views that are subsequently to be overcome and of terms which do not accord with the content, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are, in effect, an exposition of the initial propositions of dialectical and historical materialism, of scientific communism and of proletarian humanism, which is closely bound up with it.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 9 __ALPHA_LVL3__ THE ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844The discussion over the young Marx which was started with the publication of the 1844 MSS is a specific form of struggle between the socialist and the bourgeois ideology. To gain a correct understanding of this struggle one has to understand why these MSS, and not any others, became what might be called the stumbling block. After all, even before their publication, there were printings of earlier works by Marx and Engels, and some of their later works (like The Holy Family) which are not works of mature Marxism either.
265The answer apparently lies in the nature of the ideological struggle over the 1844 MSS. Marx's dissertation could not have become the starting point for a radical anti-Marxist re-interpretation of Marxism simply because it is still a long way from Marxism. By contrast, The Holy Family is at the other pole of the historical process of the making of Marxism, as I intend to show later. It is true, that it also contains some propositions which Marx and Engels subsequently abandoned but this does not apply to its main content. The 1844 MSS differ fundamentally from Marx's dissertation because they already contain the Marxist approach, even if this does not apply to all the questions being considered. But the MSS also differ essentially from The Holy Family for in them the Marxist views are set forth in an inadequate form, are fragmentary, less than consistent and couched in terms which, far from bringing out the fundamental distinction between Marx's doctrine and Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology, in effect tend to obscure it. I have said enough on this question, and so will confine myself to a short resume.
As Guy Besse quite rightly emphasise, the 1844 MSS mark the completion of one phase in the shaping of the Marxist philosophy and the start of a new and qualitatively distinct phase. "Hence forth, the breach has been made, Marx's thought stands on the threshold of its maturity. That is what in fact makes the MSS interesting.... That is why we find the adversaries of Marxism probing these MSS in search of nutriment" (50; 102). In other words, it is the transitional character of the work, i.e., the presence within it of Marxist propositions alongside elements of anthropological materialism, that is of special interest to the bourgeois `` reinterpreters'' of Marxism. Explaining his view, Besse says: "The concept of productive forces, the concept of relations of production, the concept of dialectical link which necessarily unites the two constituent aspects of production are not yet formulated in scientific terms" (50; 107).
Another Marxist student, Manfred Buhr, emphasises that the 1844 MSS are characterised not only by the fact that they are a part of Marx's early writings. What is equally essential is that this work is not complete, but is preparatory for Marx's subsequent studies and differs from these in that Marx "subjects the politico-economic doctrines he studies and the contemporary economic life to a moral, not to say 266 moralising, judgement" (58; 816). That is why the concept of alienation is frequently used in the MSS in a moral rather than economic sense, i.e., as a characterisation of the immorality of bourgeois society.
This view of Buhr's is fully supported by Robert Steigerwald (111; 87-90). In the main I agree with this assessment of the 1844 MSS and shall try to show the sources of this ``moralising'' criticism of capitalism, which Marx subsequently held to be theoretically untenable. The substance of the matter, I think, boils down to one aspect of the concept of alienation as used in the MSS, namely, its anthropological aspect which Marx and Engels later dropped. On the one hand, the concept of alienation establishes the economic fact of the alienation of the product of labour and of productive activity itself. This content of the concept of the " exploitation of the working people by the owners of the means of production" is systematically developed in the works of mature Marxism. Here we have Marx's real discovery, the discovery of alienated labour as a historically necessary and transient antagonistic form of socio-economic progress. On the one hand, the concept of alienation is used in its Feuerbachian sense, i.e., to characterise the unnatural state of the individual, whose natural requirements are suppressed by the distorted order in society, which forces the individual to lead a way of life that does not conform to human nature, i.e., to satisfy his natural requirements unnaturally. That is what is called in the 1844 MSS alienation and self-alienation of the human substance. The latter is not reduced to the alienation of labour because the human substance is regarded as existing from the beginnings of history, instead of taking shape, changing and developing in the course of the historical process. In this sense, this is man's loss of his substance, while the abolition of alienation is characterised as man's return to himself, as his acquisition of the lost substance. From this standpoint, the antagonistic contradictions of the capitalist system turn out to be contradictions between man's nature and the economic and political relations which do not accord with it and which distort it. Accordingly, man's substance is characterised not as the totality of the historically defined social relations whose antagonistic character is expressed in the polarisation of society into classes. Meanwhile, the proletariat seeks to destroy the capitalist relations not because they are unnatural 267 but because they oppress it. The proletariat's struggle against capitalism is an objective necessity which is rooted in the historically transient character of bourgeois relations of production.
Below I intend to show that the latest anti-Marxist interpretation of Marxism based on the extremely one-sided view of the MSS as a rule starts from an anthropological description of alienation.
The earliest social-democratic commentators of the 1844 MSS, S. Landshut and J. Mayer, asserted that they were of "fundamental importance" and "in a sense Marx's most central work. It constitutes the main point of Marx's whole mental development, in which the idea of 'man's true reality' directly gives rise to the principles of his economic analysis" (85; XIII). What is more, the MSS are described as the supreme achievement of his genius. It is the only work "which reveals Marx's mental stature in its full magnitude" (85; XXVII-XXVIII). Landshut and Mayer insist that the importance of the MSS lies in the fact that they pave the way "for a new understanding" of Marxism, in the spirit of ethical socialism which rejects the ``gross'' idea of expropriating the expropriators and which proclaims the subjective necessity for "realising man's true predestination" (85; XLI). Is it worth while to argue that "man's true predestination" allows of the most diverse and even mutually exclusive interpretations? This formula will be found handy by any brand of present-day bourgeois humanism whose vocabulary squares very well with the actual suppression of the individual.
Landshut and Mayer were perhaps the first interpreters of the 1844 MSS who suggested that the doctrine of alienation and its supersession should be considered the nucleus of the materialist view of history. They paraphrased the famous opening proposition in the Communist Manifesto---the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles---as follows: "The whole of preceding history has been a history of man's self-alienation" (85; XXXIII).
In effect, they contrasted the 1844 MSS with the Marxist theory of the proletariat's liberation struggle, which meant that they did not merely interpret the Marxist doctrine in the spirit of an early work of Marx's but in fact distorted the real content of the Paris MSS, which, for all their immaturity and incompleteness, are a work of relovutionary communist 268 humanism. This distortion of the meaning and significance of the MSS fully accords with the social-democratic opportunist practice of repudiating Marxism.
Landshut and Mayer were followed by Herbert Marcuse, who in 1932 published his article "New Sources for an Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Historical Materialism". He claimed that Marx's MSS provided "new ground for the discussion concerning the origins and initial meaning of historical materialism and, indeed, of the whole theory of 'scientific socialism'" (90; 136). Marcuse held that the most redeeming feature of the MSS was that man was regarded not as a representative of some class but merely as a human being, an individual, a personality. In the light of what has been said about the content of the 1844 MSS, I think that there is no need to explain that Marcuse puts a highly one-sided interpretation on it. After all, what made Marx different from Feuerbach is that, having discovered the alienation of labour, he showed it to be oppression of the proletarian individual. From the standpoint of the 1844 MSS, the antithesis of labour and capital provides an essential characterisation of the human substance, and Marx repeatedly emphasises the tragic discrepancy between the anthropological unity of human beings and private property, which divides them into hostile classes.
However, Marcuse did not miss this point, but he himself regarded the human substance in the spirit of philosophical anthropology, interpreting any socio-economic relations as contradicting the human substance. And since Feuerbach's anthropologism still haunts the MSS, Marcuse also managed to find various formulations which fit his interpretation, and so followed Landshut and Mayer in contrasting the MSS and the works of mature Marxism.
According to Marcuse, the authentic definition of the concept of man merely shows that man is a suffering mortal being subjected to diverse urges, a being possessing will and reason. But why does Marx, who does not, of course, deny these obvious and most essential characteristics of the human being, attach so much importance to analysing the antithesis of labour and capital, the alienation of labour, and the condition of the proletariat? The whole point, Marcuse declares, is that for Marx "any economic fact generally turns out to be a distortion of the human substance" (90; 140). There Marcuse clearly distorts Marx, for in the 1844 MSS 269 specifically he substantiates the possibility and necessity of eliminating alienation on the basis of public property.
Marx believed (as I said above) that private property tends to distort and debase the human substance. This idea is in the main a correct reflection of the situation which takes shape in the course of the development of capitalism, although it still leaves in the background the fact (also mentioned in the MSS) that within certain historical boundaries private property is a necessary and progressive mode of development, an enrichment of the human substance. But Marcuse claimed that Marx ruled out in principle any possibility of eliminating alienation through socio-economic transformations. Since, according to Marcuse, the source of alienation does not lie in historically rooted economic relations but in any economy in general, the task is to eliminate the objective conditionality of social life with respect to social production or to economics. He contrasts the proletariat's social revolution with an anthropological ``revolution'' which would allegedly transform the human individual's instincts, urges and requirements. Marcuse claims that the fundamentals of this conception were elaborated by Marx and so presents him as one of his own predecessors, who is not all that consistent.
The anti-Marxist anthropological interpretation of the 1844 MSS was further developed by H. de Man in an article entitled "Marx Rediscovered", also published in 1932. This is a work of social-democratic revisionism which deserves to be considered in greater detail because it may have done more than the above-mentioned works in paving the way for the subsequent distortions of the MSS and the whole content of Marxism.
Like those before him, de Man claimed that the MSS were of fundamental importance for an understanding of the gist of the Marxist doctrine. This revisionist flatly declared that the MSS "provide a decisive impetus for reappraising the question of the attitude to Marxism as a question of Marx's attitude to Marxism" (89; 276). De Man tried to prove that Marx's true views were adequately expressed only in the 1844 MSS, and that these differed fundamentally from that which is designated and spread as Marxism. He urged the need to draw a distinction between Marx's "humanistic Marxism" and the subsequent "materialist Marxism", which, he says, is highly objectionable.
270So we find de Man contrasting the Marx of the 1844 MSS and the Marx of the subsequent historical period, the man who wrote Capital and Critique of the Gotha Programme. But de Man claimed that this contrast still left some common features between the ``humanistic'' and the ``materialist'' phases in the development of Marxism. He also asserted that all of the propositions in the 1844 MSS, without exception, should be regarded as a part of mature Marxism. But the whole point, he adds, is that these propositions were, in a sense, forgotten by Marx and were not included in his subsequent works. That is why one is left with the impression that Marx abandoned these propositions and that they are unacceptable from the standpoint of the man who wrote Capital. If this semblance is dispelled, if a demarcation line is no longer drawn between Marx's early and later works, de Man is prepared to give up his revisionism because he criticises Marxism from a position which "essentially coincides with the position of the humanistic Marx of the 1840s" (88; 276).
We find, therefore, that de Man formulated the programme for revising the basic propositions of Marxism with laudable frankness: the materialist and revolutionary solution of the 'problem of restructuring society on socialist lines must be abandoned on the plea of a return to the ``true'' Marx.
Earlier on in this chapter, I showed that in his 1844 MSS Marx sets forth and substantiates what is, in effect, a materialist and communist view, despite the fact that he has yet fully to separate himself from Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, something that is most evident in his mode of exposition and terminology. It goes without saying (and I have also emphasised this) that the mode of exposition was also a reflection of some of the gaps and. obscurities in the content of his propositions. This also suggests that the 1844 MSS cannot be considered a work of mature Marxism, because they still contain propositions which are, in principle, incompatible with the Marxist doctrine, together with propositions which were amended or formulated more correctly and scientifically in his subsequent works.
De Man converted the 1844 MSS into the starting point for a revision of Marxism and argued that this work was the only authentic expression of the Marxist standpoint. What is more, Marx later never quite rose to the level of the MSS 271 because of his illness, financial difficulties and other reasons (89; 275-6).
There is no doubt that the 1844 MSS are a brilliant work but to say that it is the most important of Marx's writings can only have one purpose, which is to play down the importance of his Capital and other works in which he systematically elaborated his doctrine and provided it with a scientific grounding. To present the MSS as the summit of humanistic Marxism, which is allegedly followed by economic Marxism is to distort the true humanistic content of the scientific ideology of the working class. F. V. Konstantinov is quite right in stressing the following: "However high our appreciation of the young Marx's early MSS, it is not only they, and not even chiefly they that contain the basic humanistic ideas, principles and mature substance of the Marxist revolutionary humanism" (18, 164).
One will understand the true meaning and importance of the 1844 MSS only by putting them within the context of Marx's preceding and especially his subsequent works, in which he elaborates and corrects the basic propositions of that earlier work of his. De Man took a very different line by seeking to assess Marx's later writings in the light of the 1844 MSS, and claiming that the flaw of the later works was that their basic propositions were incompatible with some ideas in the MSS.
De Man's mode of analysis is not strictly scientific for he takes some formulations out of context and contrasts them with the basic propositions of Marx and Engels which were systematically set forth in works that have now become classical, insists that the Feuerbachian terminology of the MSS is an adequate conceptual expression of their content, so ultimately turning Marx into a bourgeois humanist and an opponent of materialism.
When analysing the MSS, I said that at the time Marx did not yet call himself a materialist although he was, in effect, expounding materialist views. De Man makes use of this fact to claim that Marx is not a materialist but a ``realist'' who subordinates both spirit and matter "to the more comprehensive reality of life in its passive-active consciousunconscious integrality" (89; 272). This makes Marx an exponent of the irrationalist "philosophy of life" whose main philosophical concept is a concept of life which allegedly makes it possible to rise over and above the one-sided 272 antithesis of spirit and matter. De Man uses this interpretation of Marx's philosophical views in order to distort the materialist conception of history (whose beginnings are patently set out in the MSS) not as a philosophical doctrine that is the opposite of idealism, but merely an antispeculative interpretation of social life.
De Man starts with the assertion that Marx uses ``matter'' and ``material'' as terms to designate the real, the concrete, the sensuous (88; 226). He concludes by flatly declaring that from Marx's standpoint material production and the economy are the definitive basis of social development only under capitalism. With the abolition of private property and alienation, human requirements, feelings and emotions once again become the definitive forces in society's development, as they had allegedly been in the pre-capitalist epoch. "It is not economic interests---they are predominant only in the presence of private property as forms of dehumanisation (Entmenschlichung)---but the vital requirements which man can satisfy only through another man, and whose most consummate expression is man's love for man that are the fundamental and enduring inducements to human activity" (89; 272). This sentimental idealistic conception, which identifies production of material goods with the purely capitalist drive for profit, is presented as the essence of the materialist view of history and of Marxist humanism.
In his 1844 MSS, Marx explains that labour and production (and not only material, but also spiritual production) constitute the most important content of world history, while the social-democratic theoretician de Man has the founder of Marxism adopt the idealistic view that the individual's requirements, feelings and emotions constitute the basis of the socio-historical process. What is more, he clearly ignores the fact that man's requirements do not exist outside the context of history: their diversity and definite quality are determined by the world-historical process and its material basis.
I have deliberately considered de Man's conception in such detail, despite the fact that it was put forward over forty years ago, because it most clearly expresses the urge of the adversaries of Marxism to contrast Marx's early works with the works of mature Marxism.
Marxist criticism of the bourgeois and revisionist reading of the 1844 MSS, together with the contradictions into which 273 their anti-Marxist interpreters tended to run, finally made it obvious even to the non-specialist reader that it was wrong to contrast young Marx's writings and Marxism. The critics of Marxism were compelled to admit that the 1844 MSS would not have attracted such close attention of the part of alien (let alone hostile) students of Marxism, but for the existence of Marx's Capital and the other works of mature Marxism, but for the existence of the socialist ideology, which has been adopted by millions of men and women. Marcuse, who in 1932 saw the MSS as the basis for a revision of Marxism, had to admit in 1962: "Marx's early works ... are in every respect only preliminary steps leading to his mature theory, steps whose importance should not be over-rated" (91; 260).
How then has the bourgeois interpretation of the 1844 MSS changed? In place of the contrast between Marx's early and later works has come the obscuring of any qualitative distinction between them. The earlier claim was that the young Marx's brilliant ideas were not reflected in his later works, while the new claim was that throughout his life Marx had rehearsed the basic propositions of his earlier works, merely varying his terminology. This striking turnabout is well illustrated by H. B. Acton's flat statement: "I would say that Marx spent all his life writing and re-writing the book of which the Paris Manuscripts was the first draft" (46; 271). This is a crude argument ad hominem in an effort to convince the reader that Marx did not produce any new ideas in the four decades of persistent effort after writing his 1844 MSS.
Everyone knows that the analysis and theoretical summingup of the economic development of capitalism and the historical experience of the working-class movement is a prominent element in Marx's studies. Such works of his as The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte, his articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and other periodicals, his Capital (all four volumes of it) show that Marx's theoretical conclusions were based on a thorough scientific analysis of a vast array of facts. But Acton and other opponents of Marxism ignore this and assert that in all his works---from the earliest to the latest---Marx kept saying virtually the same thing, remained in the grip of his early ideas and clearly failed to reckon with new historical experience.
Robert C. Tucker elaborated on the ideas of Acton and 274 other anti-Marxists and declared that "Marx's first system", i. e., the 1844 MSS, shed light on all of his subsequent works. According to Tucker, Marx now appeared "no longer as the analyst of society he had wanted to be but above all as a moralist or something of a religious thinker. The old view according to which 'scientific socialism' is a scientific system is increasingly giving way to the conviction that it is, in effect, an ethical or religious system of views" (116; 2).
One will easily see that the obliteration of the dividing line between Marx's early works and the works of mature Marxism has the same ideological functions to perform as the contrast between the two. In either case, we find in the foreground Marx's earlier works in which he had not yet fully parted company with Hegel, Feuerbach, bourgeois humanism and petty-bourgeois socialism. This is what enables the bourgeois critics of Marxism to claim that the doctrine of Marx and Engels is not connected with the proletariat's class struggle, but with the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach, and that the main propositions of Marxism are a development of the speculative theme which Marx had borrowed from Hegel and Feuerbach as a youth. One will not be surprised to discover that alienation is that theme.
Jean Hyppolite, whose works about Hegel and Marx have been widely circulated, is one of those who started the now fashionable trend in present-day Western philosophy of interpreting scientific communism in the spirit of Hegel's theory of alienation. He wrote: "The fundamental idea and, one could say, the germ of the whole of Marxist thinking is the idea of alienation borrowed from Hegel and Feuerbach. I believe that starting from this idea and defining human liberation as man's active struggle in the course of history against all alienation of his substance, in whatever form it may present itself, one could best of all explain the Marxist philosophy in its entirety and understand the structure of Marx's chief work, Capital (79; 147). While Hyppolite argues that the structure of Marx's Capital, in effect coincides with the structure of Hegel's Phdnomenologie des Geistes, Pierre Bonnel goes further: his aim is to explain, by means of the category of alienation, the basic content of scientific communism. In an article entitled "Hegel and Marx", this theoretician, who claims to be a socialist, declares that Hegelianism is intrinsic to Marxism, that it is Hegel's 275 philosophy of history that constitutes the main element of Marx's doctrine, for he had allegedly inherited from Hegel "a certain fundamental conception of man and history which he never questioned" (52; 318-9). This fundamental conception is, of course, the conception of alienation. Bonnel ignores the fact that Marx's materialist and communist views are the opposite of Hegel's idealistic and bourgeois views, and asserts that, like Hegel, Marx assumed that "man leads a double life, torn apart and alienated up to the point at which history effectively surmounts this alienation and tornapartness; that, in its turn, history, continues to the point when this alienation and torn-apartness are surmounted" (52; 321). However, Marx's view of real socio-economic alienation, the working people's exploitation and the actual ways of their social emancipation has nothing in common with the teleological conception of the culmination of world history, which Bonnel ascribes to him.
I have" already compared Marx's concept of alienated labour (and alienation generally) and Hegel's concept of alienation. Some elements of divination that we find in Hegel's philosophy concerning the antagonistic nature of capitalist progress are, of course, a far cry from Marx's economic doctrine of the laws governing the origination, development and abolition of the capitalist mode of production. The Marxist doctrine of the capitalist formation, like its philosophical foundation---historical materialism---is not a continuation of Hegel's philosophy of history, of which Lenin wrote the following: "In general the philosophy of history yields very, very little---this is comprehensible, for it is precisely here, in this field, in this science, that Marx and Engels made the greatest step forward. Here most of all, Hegel is obsolete and antiquated" (5, 38; 314).
Such are the facts. Still, the critics of Marxism refer to the 1844 MSS and insist that Marxist political economy and scientific communism are based on the theory of alienation, which, as I have shown, merely served as a connecting link in the passage from Hegel's philosophy to a totally new range of ideas. That is why obliteration of the qualitative distinctions between Marx's early works and the works of mature Marxism is a continuation of the ideological line taken by those who contrast the two sets of works. Although the contrast is renounced and declared to be untenable, it is not, in effect, eliminated. Ideas characterising mainly Marx's 276 early works are still placed instead of the basic and most important propositions of Marxism.
Jean-Yves Calvez, who wrote a voluminous monograph, The Thought of Karl Marx, in the objectivist style which is typical of the numerous catholic critics of Marxism, insists that the concept of alienation alone provides the key to the basic propositions of the Marxist doctrine. With Capital in mind, he wrote: "There is a real unity in the whole of Marx's work. Alienation is the essential idea which Marx borrowed from Hegel, and which he retained at the centre of all his work" (59; 319). He adds: "Marx resumes the theme of alienation on the level of economics.... Capital is nothing but a theory of fundamental alienation, which also includes alienation in the sphere of economic ideology" (59; 320). From this standpoint, Marx's doctrine consists of two basic sections: an analysis of religious alienation, on the one hand, and of secular alienation, on the other. Naturally, religious alienation turns out to be the primary phenomenon in human life, whose roots will already be discovered in the Old Testament story of original sin. Secular alienation, with its numerous forms, both material and spiritual (economics, politics, philosophy, etc.), is characterised by Calvez as derivative secularised expressions of the basic, religious alienation, whose substance consists in man's separation from God, while social alienation consists in his separation from the species.
``The Catholic Church and Marxism", the last section of Calvez's book, sums up the interpretation of Marxism as a doctrine which is allegedly religious in basic content, and which is irreligious only in form. "Consequently, central to Marxism is the idea of revolutionary mediation, which is to liberate man from alienation and allow his reconciliation with nature arid with society" (59; 601). Calvez claims that this main idea of Marx's, which is of Christian origin, because the central tenet of the Christian faith is the idea of the God-man's divine mediation. "Christ is the mediator whom Marx assumes. He performs the revolution which the proletariat was to carry out" (59; 598). With this kind of reading of Marxism, its content, which is first reduced to Marx's early works, is subsequently fully replaced with theological reasoning that is presented as the true meaning of Marxism.
Of course, not all bourgeois interpreters of the 1844 MSS 277 ascribe to Marx a religious world view, but virtually all start from this early work, ignore its concrete economic content, and depict Marxism as a speculative system of deductions that have no bearing on the actual content of the sociohistorical process. It is, therefore, a pleasure to emphasise that Marx seems to have anticipated the brand of critic his work would have to face. In a preface to the 1844 MSS he wrote: "It is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been attained by means of wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy" (1, 3; 231).
Let us recall that in the 1844 MSS he considers the questions of wages, profit of capital, accumulation of capitals, and competition among the capitalists, private property and labour, rent of land, money, etc., and accordingly analyses the view of the mercantilists, physiocrats, Adam Smith and David Ricardo and his school, which is, in fact, the basis on which Ma'rx analyses the problem of alienated labour. It is this basis that determines the emphasis on new problems which Hegel and Feuerbach dealt with either in the most cursory terms or did not consider at all. These were the economic structure of capitalist society, the domination of capital over labour, the irreconcilable antithesis of the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie, man's enslavement by the spontaneous forces of social development, and the historical necessity for the abolition of private property.
However, the critics of Marxism ignore the logic of Marx's reasoning and the actual data whose analysis led him to draw new conclusions, and try to insinuate into Marxism the speculative scheme they had discovered in Hegel. But the whole point is that Marx's concept of alienation, as elaborated in the 1844 MSS, is, first, anti-speculative, and second, -materialist. For some reason, the bourgeois interpreters of Marxism tend to lose sight of the fact that these MSS contain a special section with circumstantial criticism of Hegel's idealistic conception of alienation. But this is direct evidence that Marx consciously contrasts his dialectico-materialist, concrete-historical view of alienation with the idealistic theory of alienation. The religious alienation, of which Feuerbach wrote so much, is virtually not considered at all in the MSS, because Marx deals mainly with the material, economic basis of all the forms of alienation, and not only 278 ideological, but also political.
It might seem at first sight that Marx formulated the concept of alienated labour by taking the Hegelian (and Feuerbachian) concept of alienation and providing it with a concrete economic content. But this is oversimplification. The substance of the matter was that Marx's socialist critique of bourgeois political economy enabled him to bring out the fact of the alienation of labour, which bourgeois economists regarded as a natural condition of production. Marx writes: "We took our departure from a fact of political economy--- the estrangement of the worker and his product. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labour. We have analysed this concept---hence analysing merely a fact of political economy" (/, 3; 278). Consequently, Marx stresses that the concept of alienated labour was obtained as a result of his reworking of the initial propositions of bourgeois political economy. Hegel's and Feuerbach's concept of alienation could merely suggest to him the possibility of such a reworking.
Thus, the reduction of the 1844 MSS, to say nothing of the entire content of Marxism, to Hegel's doctrine of alienation, to the theory of alienation in general, is nothing but an attempt to reduce Marxism to the level of the doctrines which he had surpassed. One curious point to note is that those who identify scientific communism and the theory of alienation do not consider it necessary to say why in the mid-1840s Marx himself had already criticised the reduction of the concrete problems of socialism to the question of alienation and its supersession. It was in his struggle against "true socialists" that Marx, as we shall see later, showed that the doctrine of alienation and its supersession was not an adequate form for the comprehension and exposition of scientific socialism. None of those who seek to substitute the theory of alienation for Marxism take the trouble to explain why in Marx's Capital the concept of alienation has a subordinate role and is used mainly to describe capitalist relations of production, which appear as relations of things (consequently, as materialised relations) that dominate men.
While bourgeois critics of Marxism, who interpret his doctrine as a speculative system of views, frequently declare their acceptance of ``authentic'' Marxism, right-socialist critics, who perform the same operation in killing the real 279 content of Marxism, declare the need to substitute for Marxism a theory based on facts, or urge abandonment of any coherent theory so as not to become dogmatists. This paradoxical situation, in which bourgeois ideologists ``side'' with Marxism, while those who claim to be socialists recoil from it, reveals the deep crisis of bourgeois and pettybourgeois ideology.
The adversaries of Marxism have always attacked materialist dialectics, claiming that it is incompatible with materialism, in virtue of which the Marxist method turns out to be Hegel's idealistic method. The 1844 MSS were also used in this struggle against materialist dialectics as allegedly providing fresh confirmation of this old standpoint. The neoThomist Jakob Hommes refers to the 1844 MSS in an effort to prove that Marx's dialectics has not been correctly understood until now because it was regarded alternately as a doctrine of the immanent development of the objective, and as a-theory of scientific thinking. But, Hommes says, dialectics is not a theory of development, but a theory of alienation, which describes the ceaseless dichotomy of the human substance and its urge to overcome this selfalienation.
The subject-object relation, Hommes argues, exists only in consequence of alienation, while the dialectical contradiction boils down to an antithesis between the human substance and its alienated being. The objectivation of labour, its reification, is interpreted as alienation of the human substance. All of this is ascribed to Marx as allegedly following from his conception of labour as activity by means of which man changes the external world and his own nature. Eventually, Hommes reaches the conclusion that the true meaning of dialectics, to which Marx had allegedly come close, consists in the movement of the human being towards its divine creator, because alienation is, of course, rooted in original sin.
Calvez, as I have shown, also seeks to reduce the Marxist view of the ways of overcoming alienation to man's reunification with God and claims that, like Hegel, Marx has dialectics in two forms: the phenomenological and the ontological. Phenomenological dialectics (the subject's relation to its alienation) is declared to be the most important methodological principle of scientific communism. Calvez seeks to discover not only in the 1844 MSS but also in 280 Capital "the competition of the two formulations of dialectics---the logical and the phenomenological---which are highly distinct from each other" (59; 409). In effect, Calvez reduces the whole of historical materialism, insofar as it analyses the productive forces, social relations, political institutions, i.e., all the conditions and forms of human life created by men themselves, to phenomenological dialectics, whose presence in Marxism he explains by claiming that Marx had adopted and expounded in the terms of political economy Hegel's Phanomenologie des Ceistes. Calvez insists that dialectical materialism is based on ontological dialectics borrowed from Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, because it deals with laws inherent in reality irrespective of the existence of man. Calvez says nothing about which of these two forms of dialectics is most characteristic of Marxism, creating the impression that the founders of Marxism had failed to realise that these two types of dialectics were opposites. Calvez converts historical materialism into phenomenological dialectics, and dialectical materialism into ontological dialectics, so distorting the substance of the Marxist world outlook and the actual relation of dialectical and historical materialism. The fact that the dialectics of social life, in contrast to the dialectics of nature, implies the existence of man does not provide any ground for interpreting the socio-historical process in the' spirit of phenomenological correlation of subject and object. The materialist view of history implies not only a nature which is independent of men's consciousness and will, but also objective material production and relations of production, despite the fact that they are created historically by man's own unfolding activity.
Present-day critics of Marxism frequently assert that they had started the review of the Marxist doctrine because of the publication of the MSS, but that is, of course, not so. Ever since the beginning of the conjunction of Marxism and the working-class movement, and the expulsion of pre-Marxist petty-bourgeois socialist theories from it, the theoreticians of opportunism have ceaselessly tried to revise Marxism. The MSS were not the cause, but the pretext for the adversaries of Marxism. Landshut, Mayer, Marcuse, de Man and other social-democratic interpreters of the 1844 MSS tried to revise Marxism even before the publication of the MSS and preached the same ideas of allegedly non-class ethical 281 socialism which they then ascribed to Marx, making use of some formulations in this remarkable work, which is not yet a work of mature Marxism. That was the origin of the legend about the MSS, whose exposure is one of the important tasks of the Marxist-Leninist historicophilosophical science.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 10 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S COMMUNIST VIEWS.In February and March 1844, Engels wrote two articles about England, which were published in Vorwarts from August to October of that year. In December 1844, the Owenist organ, The New Moral World carried another of his articles, "Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany". In these works, Engels elaborated on and gave concrete form to the communist ideas he had expressed in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbucher: the ideas about the socio-economic roots of communism, the attitude of communism to bourgeois democracy, and German "philosophical communism''.
The need for England's restructuring on socialist lines, Engels says, springs from its industrial revolution, a "social revolution" in production which creates the material premises for a new, socialist society. "The only true revolution is a social revolution, to which political and philosophical revolution must lead: and this social revolution has already been in progress in England for seventy or eighty years and is rapidly approaching its crisis at this very time" (1, 3; 469).^^*^^ Of course, "social revolution" is hardly a term that gives adequate expression to the substance of the industrial revolution which does not in any way invalidate the need for the proletariat's social revolution. But Engels does not contrast the industrial revolution and the idea of a revolutionary attack on capitalism. On the contrary, he assumes that this revolution is now "rapidly approaching its crisis", i.e., a _-_-_
^^*^^ Engels adds: "This revolution through which British industry has passed is the foundation of every aspect of modern English life, the driving force behind all social development" (1, 3; 485).
282 revolutionary explosion. The latter is inevitable because, far from reducing, the industrial revolution has, in effect, intensified the antagonistic contradictions of capitalist development. The increase in England's social wealth has not done away with the working people's poverty, but has further deepened the gulf between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. "Man has ceased to be the slave of men and has become the slave of things; the perversion of the human condition is complete; the servitude of the modern commercial world, this highly developed, total universal venality, is more inhuman and more all-embracing than the serfdom of the feudal era" (1, 3; 476).Thus, personal dependence has given way to the individual's enslavement by the haphazard forces of social development. Still, this is progress, although -it is, of course, antagonistic progress, and under the domination of private property no other kind of progress is possible. The progressive importance of bourgeois changes consists in the fact that they create the necessary conditions for the subsequent advance to communism. "The disintegration of mankind into a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms in itself means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular interests, and is the last necessary step towards the free and spontaneous association of men. The supremacy of money as the culmination of the process of alienation is an inevitable stage which has to be passed through, if man is to return to himself, as he is now on the verge of doing" (1, 3; 476).
Bourgeois liberals claimed that the development of democracy would wipe out all the social conflicts and lead to universal welfare. The petty-bourgeois critics of bourgeois democracy, like its feudal critics, in effect denied that bourgeois-democratic gains had any progressive significance in historical terms. While sharply criticising bourgeois democracy, Engels does not brush it aside, and says: "England is undeniably the freest, in other words, the least unfree, country in the world, not excepting North America" (I, 3; 487).
He is very well aware of the class character of bourgeois democracy and says that it is a false, spurious democracy, for the economic domination of private property enables a minority to subordinate the majority. Engels writes: "Who then actually rules in England? Property rules" (1, 3; 497).
283True, or social, democracy, which Engels contrasts with the democracy of private property-owners, can be attained only through a socialist revolution. "Democracy by itself is not capable of curing social ills. Democratic equality is a chimera, the fight of the poor against the rich cannot be fought out on a basis of democracy or indeed of politics as a whole. This stage too is thus only a transition, the last purely political remedy which has still to be tried and from which a new element is bound to develop at once, a principle transcending everything of a political nature.
``This principle is the principle of socialism" (1, 3; 513).
Thus, Engels contrasts socialist and bourgeois democracy, and regards the former as a fundamentally new social form, which develops on a qualitatively new economic basis. It is "the democracy whose antithesis is the middle class and property" (1, 3; 513).
Considering the historical roots of the socialist theory, Engels gives a short sketch of the development of science in the 18th century, which resulted, on the one hand, in the establishment of the natural-science principles of social production, and, on the other, in the formulation of the materialist world outlook. But for these achievements in scientific and philosophical thought, no social transformations could have been possible in Britain and France in the process of capitalist development. But for all its naturalscience and philosophical discoveries, the eighteenth century failec to resolve the basic ideological problems of the new period. It "did not resolve the great antithesis which has been the concern of history from the beginning and whose development constitutes history, the antithesis of substance and subject, nature and mind, necessity and freedom; but it set the two sides against each other, fully developed and in all their sharpness, and thereby made it necessary to overcome the antithesis" (1, 3; 470). Engels thinks that these key philosophical problems were solved by the latest development of German philosophy, especially by .those of its thinkers who abandoned the speculative idealistic constructs and switched to materialism and communism. This is what explains the relatively rapid spread of socialist and communist doctrines in Germany. "In fact, Socialism occupies at this moment already a ten times prouder position in Germany than it does in England" (I, 4; 231). It is true that within a few pages, Engels remarks that "in this country the word 284 Socialism means nothing but the different vague, undefined, and undefinable imaginations of those who see that something must be done, and who yet cannot make up their minds to go to the whole length of the Community system" (1, 4; 241). He draws a distinction between communist and socialist doctrines of the 1840s and says that only the former are truly revolutionary. But in contemporary Germany (and Engels also notes this) many liberal bourgeois declared themselves to be not just socialists but even communists, something that did not prevent them, however, from taking the attitude of their class and interpreting the demands formulated by communist doctrines in the spirit of bourgeois philanthropy. Engels describes the polemic clashes between true German communists and bourgeois fellow-travellers, who put the tag of communism on all kinds of philanthropic schemes. These pseudo-communists were exposed in the course of the polemics.
Among those who claimed to be communists were Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Feuerbach, and the latter, according to Engels, expressed "his full conviction that communism was only a necessary consequence of the principles he had proclaimed, that communism was, in fact, only the practice of what he had proclaimed long before theoretically" (1, 4; 235). Engels does not object to this view, and apparently assumes that it does have some grounds.
Engels also describes---and this should be emphasised--- the struggle of the German communists against the Young Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, who declared that critical self-consciousness, which rises over and above all practical affairs and political tasks, should not adopt communist doctrines and ideals either. The communists, Engels says, declared war on those German philosophers "who refuse to draw from their mere theories practical inferences, and who contend that man has nothing to do but to speculate upon metaphysical questions. Messrs. Marx and Engels have published a detailed refutation of the principles advocated by B. Bauer, and Messrs. Hess and Burgers are engaged in refuting the theory of M. Stirner:---Bauer and Stirner being the representatives of the ultimate consequence of abstract German philosophy, and therefore the only important philosophical opponents of Socialism---or rather communism" (1, 4; 240).
In this article, Engels does not contrast his communist 285 views with those of Hess, Weitling, Piittmann and other German socialists and communists, or his philosophical views with Feuerbach's doctrine. It would be wrong to assume, in this context, that there are no differences between Engels and them, for his works published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher show very well that, like Marx, he has been working on a fundamentally new world outlook, a coherent system of views which is incompatible not only with the Utopian views of petty-bourgeois socialism but also with the Utopian communism of Weitling and with Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology. But one should take into account that the elaboration of this fundamentally new, scientific world outlook has just begun, that only the initial propositions have been formulated, and that this has been done with a terminology that is inadequate to their actual content.^^*^^ It is not surprising, therefore, that the founders of the new world outlook have themselves still to realise the basic distinction between their doctrine and those of their recent associates, for this basic distinction is itself still in the making. On the other hand, the overall tasks in the struggle against the reactionary social relations reigning in Germany require joint action by Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Hess and other opponents of German absolutism.
Political tensions in Germany were growing, and one felt a revolutionary situation coming to a head. What was the concrete socio-economic content of the looming revolution? Engels is not yet able to give an answer. He speaks of a social revolution, assuming that the task of transforming social relations on communist lines has already historically matured. He has not yet realised that a preliminary condition for communist revolution is the development of capitalism and the maturing of the premises for socialism within the entrails of bourgeois society. He says that "the present state of Germany was such as could not but produce in a very short time a social revolution; that this imminent revolution was not to be averted by any possible measures for _-_-_
^^*^^ On some questions Engels continues to take the idealistic view of history. Thus, he writes: "Antiquity, which as yet knew nothing of the rights of the individual, whose whole outlook was essentially abstract, universal and material, could therefore not exist without slavery" (1, 3; 475). This view bears the imprint of . Hegel's conception, according to which " selfconsciousness enters the relation of slavery which prefers life to freedom" (72, 3; 110).
286 promoting commerce and manufacturing industry; and that the only means to prevent such a revolution---a revolution more terrible than any of the mere subversions of past history---was the introduction of, and the preparation for, the community system" (1, 4; 238).We find, therefore, that Engels believes it to be possible to "introduce the communist system" without the prior revolutionary abolition of capitalist relations. He has still to understand the need for a revolution not only to destroy the old social relations but also to create a socialist system. But the main characteristic feature of the young Engels's views and of that stage in the shaping of Marxism generally is awareness of the proletariat's historical role and of the need for a solid alliance between the advanced philosophical theory and the emancipation movement of that class.
[287] ~ [288] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ PART TWO __ALPHA_LVL1__ LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OFBy the beginning of 1844, Marx and Engels, working independently of each other and studying a socio-economic situation and literature that were largely different, advanced from idealism and revolutionary democracy to dialectical materialism and scientific communism. Their articles in the Deutsch-Franziisische Jahrbiicher and Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 mark the completion of this stage in the shaping of the philosophy of Marxism. They testify to the common views held by Marx and Engels, who were henceforth to act together as the founders of the scientific ideology of the working class.
However, the advance from idealism and revolutionary democracy to dialectical and historical materialism does not yet complete the shaping of the two men's philosophical views. The following stage in the process is the elaboration of the fundamental tenets of dialectical and historical materialism, and the materialist back-up of scientific communism.
Lenin called The Poverty of Philosophy and Manifesto of the Communist Party, both written in 1847, the first mature works of Marx and Engels. These completed the formation of Marxism, consistently setting out the dialectico-materialist view of society and elaborating the basic ideas of scientific communism. It would be wrong to regard their earlier works (1844-1846) as works of mature Marxism, despite the fact that they do contain some formulations of Marxist propositions that have become classical.
In Part One, I endeavoured to show that the idea of the proletariat's historical mission is the main element of Marx's 291 and Engels's articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, but these do not yet set forth the idea of the proletarian dictatorship, i. e., recognition of the fact that the proletariat can fulfil its historic role only by setting up a proletarian state. Nor do these articles contain---in a sufficiently explicit form, g,t any rate---the concept of relations of production, the basic concept of historical materialism. Epistemological questions are likewise not a prominent element in these articles. The new stage in the shaping of the Marxist philosophy consists not only in a further development of the propositions set forth in the Jahrbiicher, but also in the formulation of new problems and propositions and the correction of some erroneous assertions.
But it would be wrong to contrast the works of Marx and Engels relating to the new stage and those published in the Jahrbiirher, for they are all of Marxism in the making, marking the stages of the uninterrupted advance in the shaping of Marxism. A study of the process shows how earlier ideas are expressed in more specific and concrete terms, and new problems considered.
At the end of August 1844, Engels spent a short while in Paris, where he met Marx. There, for ten days they discussed the various aspects of the doctrine they were working on, and plans for ideological and political struggle and the organisation of the communists and kindred revolutionaries. Engels told Marx about the main points of the work he was preparing: The Condition of the Working Class in England. They also agreed to act together against Bauer's group of Young Hegelians. In its monthly, Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, this group had started a campaign against socialism and communism in an effort to discredit their allegedly dogmatic abstractions, which were fettering the activity of the infinite self-consciousness, or "critical criticism''.
Bauer and his associates had enough acumen to understand the main elements of the view of Marx and Engels. These theoreticians of German bourgeois radicalism realised that the idea of the proletariat's socialist mission was fundamentally incompatible with the idealistic doctrine of the omnipotent self-consciousness, and hastened to brand it as ``uncritical''. Jung wrote to Marx: "Bauer has been so carried away with this criticism that he recently wrote to me: not only society, privileged property-owners, etc., should be 292 criticised, but---and this has not yet occurred to anyone--- also the proletarians." (40).
The advocates of "critical criticism" who imagined themselves spokesmen of the "absolute self-consciousness", asserted that everything that exists had to be subjected to withering criticism. Actually, the "critical criticism" condemned the proletariat as an "uncritical mass" and was increasingly involved in the struggle against the revolutionary ideas and revolutionary movement. Lenin wrote: "Marx and Engeis vigorously opposed this absurd and harmful tendency. In the name of a real, human person---the .worker, trampled down by the ruling classes and the state---they demanded not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that is capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it" (5, 2; 23).
The Holy Family or Critique of Critical, Criticism Against Bruno Bauer and Company appeared in February 1845. In his summary of it, Lenin stressed: "Marx here advances from Hegelian philosophy to socialism: the transition is clearly observable---it is evident what Marx has already mastered and how he goes over to the new sphere of ideas" (5, 38; 24). The Holy Family projected and elaborated on the ideas formulated by Marx and Engels in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. At the same time, it advances the new range of ideas within the framework of the dialectico-materialist and communist world outlook, which the two men were working on.
They saw Young Hegelianism as a product of the disintegration of Hegel's philosophy and held that Hegel's doctrine, like the whole of German classical idealism, was a revival of 17th-century metaphysics. The rationalistic systems of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, for all their theological assumptions, were related to the positive sciences. Seventeenth-century metaphysics "made discoveries in mathematics, physics and other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope. This semblance was done away with as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The positive sciences broke away from metaphysics and marked out their independent fields. The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings of thought and heavenly things, at the very time when real beings and earthly things began to be the centre of all interest" (I, 4; 126).
293So the connection between the metaphysical (mainly idealistic) systems and the positive sciences did not at all spring from the nature of idealism but from the fact that the positive sciences had yet to separate "from philosophy. But when this process was in the' main complete, it transpired that the metaphysical systems, with their claim to knowledge of some super-physical reality and the establishment of a closed system of perfect knowledge, ran into conflict with the actual development of scientific knowledge, which increasingly concentrated on vital, terrestrial problems. The metaphysical systems were discredited and were vanquished by French 18th-century materialism. Marx and Engels saw. materialism as the truly implacable adversary of metaphysical systems-spinning. They rejected the notion which was prevalent in bourgeois philosophy that materialism is a brand of metaphysical philosophising.
Marx and Engels did not explain why, after the victory of 18th-century materialism over idealist metaphysics, the latter resurfaced in German classical philosophy. They did not yet note the basic flaws of 18th-century materialism, which had been to some extent brought out and criticised in the light of idealism by the classics of German philosophy; Marx and Engels emphasised that the restoration of 17th-century metaphysics was substantial, thereby recognising the outstanding historical importance of German classical idealism. But "after Hegel linked it [17th-century metaphysics--- T.O.] in a masterly fashion with all subsequent metaphysics and with German idealism, and founded a metaphysical universal kingdom, the attack of theology again corresponded, as in the eighteenth century, to an attack on speculative metaphysics, and metaphysics in general. It will be defeated for ever by materialism, which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism" (1, 4; 125). Consequently, Marx and Engels believed that only materialist philosophy, enriched by speculation (i. e., in this case by the dialectical mode of thinking) is capable of showing the right way out of the contradictions of Hegel's doctrine and idealism in general. This is not 18th-century materialism but a new and consummate materialism, which is enriched with the attainments of Hegel's philosophy and which also applies to society. They call this materialism humanism. Hence their high appreciation of Feuerbach as a thinker who has 294 substantiated a humanist world outlook materialistically. But Marx and Engels failed to realise that Feuerbach did not solve the problem of producing a coherent materialism embracing both nature and society. And one should also add that ``humanism'' is here a concept which is inadequate for characterising the philosophical views of Marx and Engels. They take a materialist approach to the historical fortunes of classical German philosophy and criticise Young Hegelianism as a theory which is incapable of transcending Hegel's doctrine, i.e., going beyond the bounds of idealism, and which, for that reason, is engaged in contrasting one element of Hegel's philosophy with another, claiming this to be its final supersession. "In Hegel there are three elements: Spinoza's Substance, Fichte's Self-Consciousness, and Hegel's necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man; the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species" (1, 4; 139). The debate between the two major Young Hegelians---Strauss and Bauer---remains within the bounds of Hegel's idealist system: Strauss takes Spinoza's element of Hegel's philosophy as his starting point, and Bauer proceeds from Fichte's element. Strauss believes that the Evangelical legends resulted from a spontaneous, subconscious ( substantial) mythological creativity on the part of the early Christian communities, a specific form of the expression of the people's spirit. By contrast, Bauer sees the source of the Evangelical legends in self-consciousness, in the activity of the outstanding religious preachers who consciously created these legends that constitute a necessary step of historical development, of the self-expression, self-alienation of the universal human self-consciousness.
Strauss and Bauer criticised Hegel, the former for his inadequate development of the doctrine of substance, and the latter, for his inadequate development of the doctrine of self-consciousness, but both continued to stand on Hegelian ground. Feuerbach alone parted company with Hegel's philosophy and idealism generally because he tore the mystical veil from nature and man and replaced their idealistic mystification with his materialist doctrine of the unity of man and nature. Feuerbach did not regard nature as reality external to man, for man is also nature, and not 295 something that is external or super-natural with respect to it. Although, as Marx and F.ngels show, Feuerbadi look Hegel's conception for his starting point, he arrived at philosophical conclusions which were the'opposite of Hegel's. " Feuerbach, who completed and criticised Hegel from Hegel's point oj view by resolving the metaphysical Absolute Spirit into 'real man on the basis of nature', was the first to complete the criticism of religion by sketching in a grand and masterly manner the basic features of the criticism ol Hegel's sjiei illation and hence of all metaphysics" (7, 4; 139).
Here and elsewhere in 'The Holy Family, Feuei-bach's historical achievements are undoubtedly exaggerated, because Marx and Engeis are still under the influence ol his philosophy, but this does not mean that \vu should simply drop this appreciation of Feuerbach's materialism as being wrong. It is highly meaningful, despite the obvious exaggeration. Of course, Feuerbach did not complete the criticism ol religion because he failed to show the historic-ally transient economic relations which determine man's domination by the spontaneous forces of social development, but he was well aware that religion sanctified social inequality, oppression and exploitation. From the standpoint of religion, he said, "any wilful change of the existing order of things is a sacrilegious revolution" (66a; i!ll). Accordingly, he resolutely sided with the "sacrilegious revolution". "The necessary conclusion to be drawn from the existing injustices and calamities of human life is solely the urge to eliminate them, and not in any sense belief in another world, which makes man fold his arms and leave evil l.o exist unhampered" (660; 358). Marx and Engeis elaborated the ideas which Feuerbach merely sketched out, and frequently regard them as stemming directly from his doctrine. This gratitude to their outstanding predecessor did not prevent the founders of Marxism from working out their new system ol views, which differs fundamentally from Feuerbach's philosophy. Let us recall that Feuerbach was a metaphysical materialist, and an idealist in his view of social life, although his anthropological principle did contain the embryo of historical materialism.
Lenin noted that in The Holy Family "one finds Feuerbach warmly praised" (5, 38; 35). Marx and Engeis stand up for Feuerbach in face of the attacks by the "critical critics" and accuse the latter of trying to restore the old speculative trash which had been exposed by Feuerbach. They do not yet say 296 that Feuerbach was unable to overcome Hegel's philosophy, i.e., to discard his idealism while preserving the dialectical mode of thinking. They regard Feuerbach as a thinker who has revealed the secret of Hegel's philosophy: "But who, then, revealed the mystery of the ``system'' [of Hegel's--- T.O.]? Feuerbach. Who annihilated the dialectics of concepts, the war of the gods that was known to philosophers alone? Feuerbach. Who substituted for the old lumber, for 'infinite self-consciousness', if not, indeed, 'the significance of man'--- as though man had another significance than that of being man---at any rate `Man'? Feuerbach and only Feuerbach. And he did more" (/, 4; 93). This exaggeration of Feuerbach's historical role also contains a definite truth, for he did produce a full-scale critique of philosophical speculation, thereby exposing the mystified aspects of Hegel's dialectics. One cannot agree, therefore, with those who assert that the authors of The Holy Family took a Feuerbachian stand. This view was refuted by Lenin, who proved that The Holy Family was written by proletarian revolutionaries who advocate revolutionary destruction of private property and advance close to the basic concept of historical materialism, the concept of the relations of production.
After having run through The Holy Family in 1867, Marx wrote to Engeis: "I was pleasantly surprised to find that we need not be ashamed of our work, though nowadays the cult of Feuerbach tends to create a humorous effect" (4, 31; 290). So, twenty-two years after the publication of the book, Marx noted that the "cult of Feuerbach" did not constitute the main or definitive element of that work. Its main element is the elaboration of the basic propositions of the Marxist philosophy and scientific communism.^^*^^
Marx and Engeis resolutely opposed the Young Hegelians' attempts to convert Feuerbach's materialism into a speculative construct, for this would permit them to declare that it had been superseded by "critical criticism". Feuerbach, Marx _-_-_
^^*^^ G. Fleischer underestimates the need for a fundamental distinction between the early (primarily idealistic) works of Marx and Engeis and the works of mature Marxism, and says that it would be more correct to draw a distinction between the period of the "cult of Feuerbach" and the subsequent period when the ``cult'' had been ended (28; 17, 18). But he loses sight of the fact that despite the exaggerated appreciation of Feuerbach's doctrine and some use of his propositions, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, to say nothing of The Holy Family, Marx and Engeis elaborate a philosophy which is basically different from anthropological materialism.
297 and Engels explain, does not start from any speculative proposition, but from the facts consisting of sensuously perceived things, individuals, their sensuous life, their contacts with other men' etc. Emphasising the great importance of Feuerbach's materialist sensualism, which shows the diversity of human sensuousness~^^*^^, Marx arid Engels criticise the Young Hegelians for following Hegel in separating thought from man, instead of connecting thoughts and men's sensory activity, their practice. The Young Hegelians used the same speculative method---conversion of the predicate into the subject---in order to separate human sentiments from man, converting them into some kind of demoniac forces which are independent of the subject. It will be easily seen that by means of this speculative method "all the attributes and manifestations of human nature can be critically transformed into their negation and into alienations of human nature" (/, 4; 21). That is what the Young Hegelians have in fact been doing by converting criticism (i.e., a definite human activity) into a special subject, investing it with an independent being of its own. Thus, "critical criticism" is set up as something absolute, a kind of Hegelian Absolute Spirit.Let us recall that the polemics between Bauer and Strauss ended in Bauer's victory, so that his subjective idealist philosophy of self-consciousness became the main theoretical platform of Young Hegelianism. That is why Marx and Engels concentrated their criticism on this conception, which was expressed in extreme forms in Bauer's Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. On August 11, 1844, Marx wrote to Feuerbach about that monthly: "The character of the Literatur-Zeitung can be reduced to the following: `Criticism' is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men. They therefore acknowledge only one real need, the need of criticism.... Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality. Love, for example, is rejected because the loved one is only an 'object'. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active _-_-_
^^*^^ Quite in the spirit of Feuerbach, they declare that love "first really teaches man to believe in the objective world outside himself, which not only makes man into an object, but even the object into man!" (/. 4; 21).
298 element in history. It is confronted with the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion. He must be an ironical, ice-cold croipos" (1, 3; 356). This aphoristic characterisation of "critical criticism" is systematically developed in The Holy Family.Marx and Engels show the most important features of Bauer's subjectivist philosophy and prove that he has carried to a logical end the basic idea of Hegel's "phenomenology of spirit": the substance must rise to self-consciousness. Through this speculative operation, Bauer converted selfconsciousness into substance, and a human property into an absolute subject. "Hegel makes man the man of selfconsciousness instead of making self-consciousness the selfconsciousness of man, of real man, i.e., of man living also in real, objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limitations, which nevertheless remain in existence for had sensuousness, for real man" (/, 4; 192). Bauer absolutised the tendency of identifying selfconsciousness (in its alienated forms) with reality in the broadest sense of the word, a tendency characteristic of Phanomenologie des Geistes, and so identified practice and theory.
Marx and Engels refute the subjective-idealist conception of self-consciousness and explain that the world continues to exist even when the subject mentally abolishes it. Consequently, mental abolition of anything makes no changes in the external world, but leaves intact the real, material foundations of alienation, even if it does declare them to be superseded. The Young Hegelian is "transforming the world outside himself into an appearance, a mere fancy of his brain, and afterwards declaring this fantasy to be what it really is, i.e., a mere fantasy (/, 4; 140).
Whereas the Young Hegelian says that "everything determinate is an opposite of the boundless generality of self-consciousness and is, therefore, of no significance" (1, 4; 193), Marx and Engels argue that the sensuously perceived reality exists irrespective of the consciousness, independently of it, because it is not the alienation of self-consciousness but that which precedes it.
Thus, the authors of The Holy Family not only show the theoretical flimsiness of trying to reduce the external world 299 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1981/MMP495/20091123/399.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2009.11.23) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ and men's practical activity to self-consciousness, but also bring out the conservative social tendency of this speculative operation and the idealistic interpretation of reality in general. Like religion, idealism usually sanctions the existing state of things in society, sometimes even when it opposes it. From this standpoint, Marx and Engels consider the Young Hegelians' struggle against (theology and religion: their struggle is highly inconsistent, because "critical criticism" tends to reduce all the problems of theory and practice to theological problems. "If it were a question of the Code Napoleon, it would prove that it is properly a question of the Pentateuch" (/, 4; 90).
The Young Hegelians declared their idealism to be the "truth of materialism". Marx and Engels reject this groundless claim and counter-pose to idealism the basic propositions of i he coherent materialist view of the world which starts from the materialist solution of the basic philosophical problem and reaches the scientific conclusion that material production has the definitive role to play in social life. They ridicule the Young Hegelians for excluding man's theoretical and practical relation with nature, natural science and industry from the socio-historical process, and prove that no historical epoch can be understood if one starts from its social consciousness (political, literary, theological), for social consciousness must itself be explained from the development of material social life.
Although Hegel did assert that the Absolute Spirit was adequately expressed in his philosophy, he did not consider himself to be the Absolute Spirit. Marx and Engels sarcastically remark that Bauer corrected this ``inconsistency'' of Hegel's, declaring that "critical criticism", i.e., he himself and his handful of associates, was the Absolute Spirit. Without going into the concrete socio-political conclusions which logically follow from this subjective-idealist view (which I analyse below) let me note that the Young Hegelian interpretation of self-consciousness carries to an extreme the antithesis between philosophy and practical activity, which is so characteristic of most idealistic doctrines. Marx attacked this traditional idea of the ``non-partisanship'' of philosophy when writing in the Rheinische Zeitung. The Holy Family exposes the idealistic meaning of the idea of philosophy's ``non-partisanship'' and defines philosophy as a form of social consciousness reflecting social being. In the light of 300 this materialist stand it also assesses the idealistic reflection of social being. Feuerbach already considered idealism a philosophically alienated form of self-consciousness. Marx and Engels elaborate on this profound idea and examine the social content of idealistic philosophising, taking the Young Hegelian "critical criticism" as their example.
In the above-mentioned letter to Feuerbach, Marx quotes Bauer's view that ``criticism'', i. e., philosophy, as the Young Hegelian leader saw it, should not display feeling or passion: "The critic should participate neither in the sufferings nor in the joys of society; he should know neither friendship and love, nor hate and envy; he should be enthroned in a solitude, where only the laughter of the Olympian Gods over the topsy-turviness of the world resounds occasionally from his lips" (7, 3; 356).^^*^^ Marx exposes this interpretation of ``criticism'' (philosophy) as an "aberration of criticism" and says that he intends to attack it on a later occasion. He did this in The Holy Family, which shows that the distortion of the actual role of philosophy expresses a definite social tendency.
Marx arid Engels emphasise that Feuerbach correctly defined philosophy (meaning idealism) as speculative and mystical empeiria. According to this definition, philosophy (idealism) has a fully terrestrial content and origins. That is why Feuerbach described it as an abstract expression of the existing state of things. Feuerbach, they argue, drew the conclusion that philosophy should descend from the skies of speculation to the depths of human need. For this, it must, first, abandon idealism, and second, become a philosophy of the classes whose social being forces them with ah objective necessity to fight against poverty and oppression. Idealism cannot be an ideological banner in this struggle because it attaches a transcendental significance to the existing state of things.
Idealism constitutes the theoretical source of the illusory concept of philosophers concerning the meaning and significance of philosophy itself. Marx and Engels say that philosophy, "precisely because it was only the transcendent, abstract expression of the actual state of things, by reason of _-_-_
^^*^^ In contrast to the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach stressed that "even those who imagine themselves to be the most non-partisan, are, contrary to their will and consciousness, partisans" (28; 1).
301 its transcendentalism and abstraction, by reason of its imaginary difference from the world, must have imagined it had left the actual state of things and real human beings far below itself. On the other hand, it seems that because philosophy was not really different from the world it could not pronounce any real judgment on it, it could not bring anyreal differentiating force to bear on it and could therefore not interfere practically, but had to be satisfied at most with a practice in abstracto" (1, 4; 39-40). Thus, rejecting the idealist notion of the independence of philosophy from social life, Marx and Engels substantiate their negation of philosophy (in the old sense of the word), i.e., negation of reason which is contrasted with reality from outside, and which is allegedly independent of it. This view is formulated as negation of philosophy in general, i.e., recognition of the need to advance to a non-philosophical theory. This is, in effect, the need for a new type of philosophy.From the Young Hegelians' standpoint, philosophy is active because the mass is passive. Marx and Engels say: "Critical criticism, by lumping humanity together in a spiritless mass, gives the most striking proof how infinitely small real human beings seem to speculation" (/, 4; 40). They believe that the starting point for understanding the active role of philosophy is "real men" and not abstract self-consciousness, i.e., a speculative abstraction of real human consciousness separated from its material basis, which determines its form and content. What is more, it is not men in general, but the proletariat and its liberation movement that work a radical change in the whole of social life, including philosophy itself. Against the imaginary greatness of the speculative "critical criticism", Marx and Engels present the true greatness of the working-class struggle against all oppression and man's enslavement of man. From this angle they determine the place of philosophy in society, the prospects for its development and the tasks in the struggle for the social emancipation of the oppressed and exploited. Here, as elsewhere in The Holy Family, their criticism of Young Hegelianism develops into a criticism of its original source, Hegel's philosophy, and is carried on to an exposure of idealism generally (because Hegel's philosophy is the most consummate expression of the idealist world outlook). It is true that Marx and Engels mainly consider rationalist idealism, but that does not minimise the 302 importance of their critical analysis for combatting other brands of idealism, because any idealism implies speculative mystification of the objective reality and its reflection in consciousness.
Marx and Engels expose the epistemological roots of idealism and show that it starts by bringing out the general from the diversity of individual things and then goes on to regard the general as the source and the prime cause of the objects given in sensory perception. This is an exercise which is similar to deducing the concept ``fruit'' from real and definite fruits, and declaring it to be the true substance of pears, apples, etc. From the speculative idealist standpoint, the sensorily perceived distinctions between apples and pears are immaterial. But that is not so in actual life. If, say, a mineralogist confined himself to stating that all minerals are modifications of "mineral in general", instead of studying their real qualitative distinctions, he "would be a mineralogist only in his imagination" (1, 4; 58). Indeed, the reference of the individual to the general, its inclusion in a definite class of objects implies the study of individual things, their relations with each other, etc. Yet idealist philosophy, like theology, regards things as no more than an embodiment of something that is distinct from them. Thus, it sees "in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of 'the Fruit', this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind" (1, 4; 59).
The general, when separated from the particular and the individual and contrasted with them, is absolutely empty and meaningless, Marx and Engels say. It does not in the least explain the real diversity of things and^^1^^ their qualities, because it is, of course, impossible to deduce from the concept of ``fruit'' the existence of apples and pears, their distinctions from each other, etc. This is indirectly recognised by speculative philosophy, for it rejects the concept of abstract identity (identity excluding difference) and, 303 accordingly, revises the concept of the general in order to detect in it sensuously perceived differences which are, however, presented as differences inherent in the concept. Thus, the speculative philosopher insists that fruit in general "is not dead, undifferentiated, motionless, but a living, selldifferentiating, moving essence. The diversity of the ordinary fruits is significant not only for my sensuous understanding, but also for 'the Fruit' itself and for speculative reason" (1, 4; 59). The suggestion here is that the diversity of real fruits exists only because the concept of fruit (fruit in general) contains that diversity within itself. The speculative philosopher assumes that in this way he overcomes the spirit of abstraction. Actually, he merely substitutes one abstraction for another, more refined, preserving the basic features of the idealistic notion that concepts (the spiritual generally) are not a reflection of real things but their basis.
Like all men, the speculative philosopher ascends from sensuously-perceived facts to concepts, but he presents this real way of cognition as semblance. Inverting the real relation which exists between concepts and the sensuous reflection of things^ he seeks to prove that the content of concept is something independent both of the sensuous reflection of things and of the external world in general. Moreover, the speculative philosopher presents concept, thought and spirit as a creative force predicating as its alienation both the sensuously perceived external world and its sensory perception. Thus, Hegel "with masterly sophistry is able to present as a process of the imagined creation of the mind itself, of the Absolute Subject, the process by which the philosopher through sensory perception and imagination passes from one subject to another" (1, 4; 61). The circumstantial criticism to which Marx and Engels subject speculative philosophy is not only criticism of idealism but also criticism of idealist dialectics, which tends to absolutise the logical process, presenting it as self-movement of reality itself, inverts the relation between the sensuous and the rational and distorts the actual relation of thought and being. This dialectics fails to see the concrete within material reality, for it regards the concrete as merely a product of the logical process, as something secondary. Idealist dialectics rejects sensory experience and any reality that is independent of the spiritual.
When criticising idealist dialectics, Marx and Engels do not 304 yet designate the method they are in the process of elaborating as materialist dialectics, and say nothing as yet about the rational content of Hegel's doctrine of the concrete identity, of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, and of the self-movement of concept. All of this may leave the impression that, together with Hegel's and Young Hegelian idealism, they also reject Hegel's dialectics (not without Feuerbach's influence). But actually they have already brought out the "rational kernel" of Hegel's dialectics, setting idealistic dialectics on its feet and elaborating the basic questions of the dialectico-materialist theory of development, especially the question of contradiction, of unity and the struggle of opposites. It is true that they do not yet consider the most general laws of motion, the development of nature, society and thought, but they do show the dialectical processes and analyse concrete historical and economic facts, so laying the foundation for broader dialectical generalisations in the future. This is exemplified by their polemics with the Young Hegelian interpretation of capitalist development. They examine the "critical history" of English industry, i.e., the Young Hegelian interpretation of a definite historical process, and say that the speculative critics refuse to recognise history such as it is in reality. The Young Hegelian ``critical'' history would have us believe that factory towns existed before the industrial revolution, just as the son engenders his father in Hegel's speculative conception. Careless treatment of the historical facts results not only in absurd but frequently in reactionary assertions, like the one that the development of industry is made impossible by the abolition of mediaeval privileges of the craft guilds and corporations. From this standpoint, the abolition of the landowners' feudal privileges means abolition of landowning in general, whereas in actual fact the abolition of feudal social relations brings about rapid development of capitalist land tenure.
One will easily realise that such views showed that Young Hegelianism was out of touch with the concrete economic and political problems brought to the fore by Germany's capitalist development. Young Hegelian idealism reflected the petty-bourgeois character of contemporary Germany and fear of capitalist development and the proletarianisation of the mass of artisans. The bourgeois radicalism of the Young Hegelians was abstract, and in the political sphere was 305 expressed mainly as insistence on the individual's civil rights. Like all, even revolutionary bourgeois leaders, the Young Hegelians had the illusion that the abolition of feudal oppression signified emancipation of the individual from all oppression generally. Marx had attacked these bourgeoisdemocratic illusions already in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher and, in contrast to political emancipation, insisted on human emancipation. In The Holy Family Marx and Engels elaborate on these ideas and analyse the contradictory nature of the social relations which replace feudalism, and give a dialectico-rnaterialist interpretation of the relation of semblance and substance. They write: "In the modern world each person is at the. same time a member of slave society and of the public commonweal. Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fullydeveloped slavery and inhumanity. Law has here taken the place of privilege" (1, 4; 116).
The Young Hegelians, who prided themselves on their speculative dialectics, by means of which they ran just about everything through the mill of categories, were unable to understand (chiefly because of their bourgeois limitations) that the proletarian, who is personally free, i.e., who is emancipated from feudal dependence, is not actually free, because this "greatest freedom" is, in effect, a new historical form of enslavement and a specific mode of intensifying exploitation. Bourgeois law, which the Young Hegelians imagined to be a restoration of justice, was not more than a juridical form for the new enslavement of the working people.
Marx and Engels gave a profound dialectical analysis of the substance of bourgeois transformations. With their materialist view of history, which is organically connected with the dialectical conception of development arid the scientific principle of defence of the interests of broad masses of working people, they showed the antagonistic contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. Industry, released from feudal, craft-guild limitations, and free trade destroyed the feudal seclusion and particularism, and "produce the 306 universal struggle of man against man, individual against individual" (/, 4; 116). That is why the bourgeois society, however democratic its constitutional form, is "war against one another of all individuals, who are no longer isolated from one another by anything but their individuality, and the universal unrestrained movement of the elementary forces of life freed from the fetters of privilege" (/, 4; 116).
The Young Hegelians turned out to be absolutely incapable of understanding one of the main features of capitalist society, the anarchy of production. They contrasted the concept of anarchy and legal order and were unable to sort out the facts characterising capitalist reality. They deduced the concept of anarchy from the common notion of feudal arbitrariness, with whose destruction they connected the idea of the legal order. Here, Marx and Engels gave a profound and concrete historical analysis to show the objective dialectics of capitalist social relations. "Anarchy is the law of civil society emancipated from divisive privileges, and the anarchy of civil society is the basis of the modern public system, just as the public system in its turn is the guarantee of that anarchy. To the same great extent that the two are opposed to each other they also determine each other" (7, 4; 117). Thus, while the Young Hegelians, with their idealist dialectics, metaphysically contrasted the concepts of anarchy and order, Marx and Engels gave a materialist analysis of social phenomena and consistently applied the principles of dialectics.
They still regard society as a contradictory unity of the civil society and the state and argue, in contrast to Hegel and the Young Hegelians, that in this relation of mutually conditioned opposites, it is the civil society that is the definitive basis. But this on the whole materialist view is still inadequate because the concept of civil society has not yet been broken down into its parts, and the productive forces and the relations of production have not yet been demarcated, so that the definitive element within the civil society itself has yet to be determined. Still, even on this question The Holy Family marks a new step forward, and this becomes most obvious when one considers the polemics of Marx and Engels with the Young Hegelians over the concept of state. The Young Hegelians declared that in the civil society individuals were ranged in hostility against each other as self-seeking beings, and, following Hegel, argued that only 307 the state united the individuals and reconciled their interests, so that society, as a definite entity, existed only because of the state. Marx and Engels started by criticising the metaphysical concept of the civil society, in accordance with which the contradictions between individuals and social groups excluded their interdependence in the same sphere (economic relations) where these contradictions occurred. Contradiction and interdependence were inseparable from each other, because opposites were not absolute but relative, and determined each other.
Marx and Engels also rejected the Young Hegelians' absolutisation of the state, which in pre-revolutionary Germany led to a denial of the need for a revolutionary solution of the issue of power. Unlike the Young Hegelians, they said that it was "natural necessity, the essential, human properties however estranged they may seem to be, and interest that hold the members of civil society together; civil, not political life is their real tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination, in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but egoistic human beings. Onlypolitical superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life" (1, 4; 120-21).
Here, we find the question of the relation between economic basis and political superstructure, and this is organically tied in with the dialectico-materialist analysis of the relations of classes in bourgeois society, which brings out the relations of production, the basic relations that in the aggregate constitute the economic structure of society.
When criticising the subjectivist, Populist sociology, Lenin noted that the substance of dialectics did not lie in triads but in the denial of subjectivism, and the profound meaning of this remark is made visual when we consider Marx's and Engels's polemics against the Young Hegelians' methodology. Idealist dialectics, and not only in the form which the Young Hegelians gave it, inevitably suffers from subjectivism. Nor is Hegel's dialectics free from this defect despite the fact that he objected to the subjectivist interpretation of dialectics and required a study of phenomena in their immanent movement. In this sense, the criticism of Young Hegelian 308 subjectivism also shows up the basic defects of Hegel's objective idealism.
In contrast to the Hegelian reduction of the objective world to alienation of self-consciousness, Marx and "Engels dialectically interpret the starting premise of materialism, showing that it is the change of human nature, the transformation of the material into the ideal in the process of cognition, and of the ideal into the material through practice that testifies to the primacy of matter. "Man has not created the matter itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if the matter does not exist beforehand" (7, 4; 46).
The metaphysical materialists insisted that matter was primary and spirit secondary, but did not see the dialectical uniformity of the subjective being transformed into the objective, and of the ideal into the material, a transformation which daily occurs in human practice. German classical idealism discovered the dialectics of the objective and the subjective, but also mystified it. By their criticism of idealistic speculation, Marx and Engels showed that the facts to which idealism refers refute it and confirm the materialist view of the world.
Speculative idealism, Marx and Engels explain, does not so much attack the real defects of the old materialism as its achievements. Idealism "combats in Substance not the metaphysical illusion but its mundane kernel---nature; nature both as it exists outside man and as man's nature" (1, 4; 141).
The old materialism stood up for sensualism but was unable to show the organic connection between sense perceptions and the diversity of practice. Its limited view of sensuous activity made it impossible to substantiate and develop the fundamentals of materialist sensualism, which were taken for granted. Speculative idealism attacked this limited view of the role of sense perceptions and denied the sensuous character of practice, reducing it to the activity of abstract self-consciousness which was allegedly independent of sensuousness. However, reason, self-consciousness, sense perceptions and practice constitute an indissoluble whole, and an understanding of this shows the truth of sensualism interpreted in dialectico-materialist terms. Not only sight, hearing, touch, etc., but the whole of man's sensuous, emotional life "compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of individuals outside him, and even his profane 309 stomach reminds him every day that the world outside him is not eml>ly, but is what really fills" (I, 4; 120). The scientific theory of knowledge must start from these facts, which constitute the basis of the real and daily occurring process of cognition. This basis consists of practice, i.e., production and the whole diverse sensuous life of individuals, who are connected with each other by their requirements, interests, needs, etc.
The Holy Family contains an outline of the history of West European philosophy in the new period. These propositions, which have become classical, have long since been written into Marxist study aids. Still, they need to be specially considered because they also characterise the shaping of the dialectico-materialist world outlook.
In the development of philosophy of the new period, Marx and Engels accentuate the struggle of materialism against .``metaphysics'', against idealism. They regard the materialism of the new period as a successor to the materialism of antiquity, which is enriched with new ideas. The chief of these is the idea of the self-movement of matter, which was formulated in general terms by Francis Bacon and Descartes.^^*^^ In contrast to the historicophilosophical conceptions of idealism, which regards materialism as the view taken by ordinary, non-philosophical consciousness that remains unchanged throughout the millennia, Marx and Engels show the development of materialist philosophy and demarcate the historical forms of materialism, which for that reason appears as a living, creative world outlook that is organically connected with life. From this angle they consider the struggle of materialism and idealism. The victory of 18th-century materialism over the metaphysical systems was determined by the deep-going socioeconomic changes arid the development of capitalist social relations: "the downfall of seventeenth-century metaphysics can be explained by the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement itself is _-_-_
^^*^^ They characterise Bacon's philosophy as follows: "Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an iinjndse, a vital spirit, a tension---or a 'Quid', to use a term ol Jakob Bohme's---of matter" (/, 4; 128).
About Descartes they say: "Descartes in his [thisics endowed matter with self-creative power and conceived mechanical motion as the manifestation of its life" (1, 4; 125).
310 explained by the practical nature of French life at that time. This life was turned to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests, to the earthly world. Its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic practice demanded corresponding anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories" (1, 4; 126).They point to the organic connection between the materialism of the new period and natural science and emphasise its" influence on the natural sciences. They call Bacon the "real progenitor of ... all modern experimental science''.
The outstanding importance of the new-period materialism also lay in the fact that it elaborated the principles of sensualism from which the sciences of nature start. Materialist sensualism rejected super-natural substances and was also the philosophical substantiation for the atheistic world view, which is especially obvious from the writings of the 18th-century French materialists and Feuerbach.
French materialism elaborated on Locke's theory of the origin of knowledge from sensuous experience, and applied sensualism to the doctrine of man and to the theory of education in the broadest sense of the word. This led to the materialist view of social life. From this standpoint, Marx and Engels assess Helvetius and emphasise the important conclusions which resulted from his essentially first attempt to apply materialist sensualism to an understanding of society: "The natural equality of huinan intelligences, the unity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the natural goodness of man, and the omnipotence of education, are the main features in his system" (1, 4; 130). The views of Helvetius (and to some extent also of all the French materialists) constitute one of the theoretical premises for Utopian socialism and communism.^^*^^ Consequently, _-_-_
^^*^^ Utopian socialism and communism, Marx and Engels say, also rest on the key proposition of the ethics of French materialism concerning the identity of the individual's reasonable interests with those of society as a whole: "If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man's private interest must he made to coincide with the interest of humanity.... If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human" (/, 4; 130-1). According to Marx and Engels, materialism, applied to social life, and to the substantiation of the communist ideal constitutes real humanism and the logical basis of communism. Here they obviously present not only the views of Fourier, Owen and other socialists but to some extent their own views as well.
311 materialism has an outstanding role to play in the history of socialist doctrines as well.Marx and Engels say that the chief defect of classical German idealism, which means mainly the philosophy of Hegel, lies in its recognition of some super-natural, superhuman and super-sensuous reality, and in its effort to have philosophy substantiate theology. Feuerbach's main achievement, therefore, lay in his struggle against philosophical speculation as the last refuge of theology.
Marx and Engels bring out the historical limitations of contemporary materialism, which are most pronounced in Hobbes's doctrine. While Bacon's materialism was capable of all-round development, Hobbes, who continued and systematised Bacon, turned materialism into something that was one-sided, mechanistic and ``misanthropic''. Sensuously perceived nature is reduced to mechanical processes and geometrical forms, while man is regarded as a body of nature. Setting forth Hobbes's views, they say: "Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning and an end.... Man is subject to the same laws as nature" (1, 4; 129). This assessment of Hobbes's mechanistic materialism also sheds light on his sociology, according to which in his "natural state" man is to man a wolf (homo homini lupiis est). This accords with Hobbes's conception of the Leviathan, the absolute state. According to Marx and Engels, the historical importance of Feuerbach's philosophy lies, in particular, in the fact that by means of his anthropological method he managed to some extent to overcome this inevitable one-sidedness of mechanism.^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ G. Wetter distorts Marx's and Engels's actual attitude to materialism when he claims that by designating Hobbes's doctrine as ``misanthropic'' they were expressing their own negative attitude to materialism generally. But being unwilling completely to break with the materialist tradition, says Wetter, Marx "chose a form of materialism which coincided with humanism and placed nature in a dialectical relation with man". This allegedly faced Marx with the need to choose between "dialectics without materialism or materialism without dialectics" (57; 68). The fact, however, is that the description of Hobbes's materialism as ``misanthropic'' does not in any way determine Marx's and Engels's attitude either to materialism generally or to mechanistic materialism as a whole. After all, The Holy F'amily shows that the hostility of Hobbes's materialism to man was already overcome by the French materialists of the 18th century. So Marx and Engels show that the development of materialism helped to eliminate the defects which some of its forms have. They reject the idealistic notions of the opposition of materialism and dialectics, materialism and humanism, and create dialectical and historical materialism.
312Marx's and Engels's historico-philosophical conception, as set forth in The Holy Family, is still fragmentary and incomplete. We do not find in it any description of the materialism of Spinoza, of the agnosticism of Hume and Kant, and so on. Their assessment of classical German idealism as a revival of 17th-century metaphysics does not show its outstanding role in the historical preparation for the scientific dialectical method. Their analysis of Feuerbach's materialism is still one-sided because they do not show the main defects of his philosophy. On the whole, their exposition of the materialist doctrines of the 17th and 18th centuries does not contain adequate criticism of their metaphysical limitations: the idealism of the old materialists in sociology, the contemplative nature of their epistemological views have still to be critically analysed. All these gaps partly spring from the polemic: form of this work, and partly express the insufficient maturity of their materialist views. But these views are already qualitatively different from earlier materialist doctrines. Their critique of the "philosophy of self-consciousness" and of idealism in general, like their analysis of the historical development of materialist philosophy, leads Marx and Engels to the most important materialist conclusions, which the whole content of their work helps to substantiate and develop.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 2 __ALPHA_LVL3__ CRITIQUE OF THE YOUNG HEGELIAN THEORY OF ``HEROES'' ANDIn the struggle against Young Flegelianism, Marx and Engels argue that these philosophical representatives of German bourgeois radicalism, for all their illusions (and of the illusions of their opponents on the right), are not revolutionaries or consistent opponents of religion and theology. "Philosophic self-consciousness", which the Young Hegelians oppose to the religious world outlook, actually renders it a peculiar kind of support, because it "substitutes `self-amsciousness' or the 'spirit' for the real individual man and with the evangelist teaches: 'It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing'" (1, 4; 7).
313While earlier Marx and Engels had shared the Young Hegelian idea that ``rational'' idealism was opposed to religious fantasies, now they expose the error of this view.
Idealism, they show, is ineapable of refuting the religious world outlook, and, for all their distinctions from Hegel, who consciously substantiated religion, the Young Hegelians, in effect, merely modernised the speculative notion of the relation of spirit and body, which is theological in origin. This is not a mere error; it is the philosophical basis of the socio-political conceptions of the "critical critics" with their characteristic neglect of the masses, whom they regard as inanimate matter without spirit. Marx and Engels discover the connection between the philosophical construct and the political platform, which expresses the bourgeoisie's fear of the masses, and say: "That relation discovered by Herr Bruno is, in fact, nothing but a Critically caricatured consummation of Hegel's conception of history, which, in turn, is nothing but the speculative- expression of the Christian-Germanic dogma of the antithesis between Spirit and Matter, between God and the world. This antithesis finds expression in history, in the human world itself in such a way that a few chosen individuals as the active Spirit are counterposed to the rest of mankind, as the spiritless Mass, as Matter" (1, 4; 85). Initially, the Young Hegelian cult of self-consciousness did contain a call on the intelligentsia to give a lead in the cause of progress, but the subsequent development of this speculative version of the notorious ``heroes'' and ``crowd'' theory led to conservative conclusions, which boil down to the following: "On the one side is the Mass as the passive, spiritless, unhistorical, material element of history. On the other is the Spirit, Criticism, Herr Bruno and Co. as the active element from which all historical action proceeds. The act of transforming society is reduced to the cerebral activity of Critical Criticism" (7, 4; 86).
In contrast to Hegel, who brought to the fore the unity of opposites and the identity of thought and being, Bauer and his followers assumed an absolute antithesis between selfconsciousness and mass, and because self-consciousness was also presented as the true substance not only of philosophy but also of the state and of progress generally, the people were depicted as an elemental conservative force shot through with religious and* other superstitions. This attitude to the people cannot, of course, be seen as resulting from an 314 incorrect deduction; it served only as a theoretical justification of the Young Hegelians' bourgeois hostility for the emancipation movement of the masses. And while they did say that they used the word ``mass'' to designate any crowd, including "the educated world", insofar as it lacked selfconsciousness, the real meaning, which was independent of the subjective frame of mind, of this speculative construct was directed against the people. Bauer asserted: "In the mass... not somewhere else, as its former liberal spokesmen believed, is the true enemy of the spirit to be found" (1, 4; 82).^^*^^
Above I dealt with Engels's criticism in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbiicher of Carlyle's reactionary conception of ``spirit'' and ``mass''. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels also point to the so-called doctrinaires (Guizot and RoyerCollard) who proclaimed the sovereignty of reason in contrast to the sovereignty of the people, and this showed that, the Young Hegelians' ``originality'' consisted only perhaps in that they closely connected a definite political conception with speculative idealism.
They strove to prove that it was not the people but ideas that were the motive force of social progress. These were not ideas expressing the people's vital requirements, but ``pure'' speculative ideas which were allegedly independent of material interests, egoism, etc. That was their approach in criticising, for instance, the ideas of the French bourgeois revolution. Thus, Bauer wrote that the ideas engendered by it did not go beyond the limits of the order which it wanted forcibly to overthrow. Marx and Engels disagreed and formulated the materialist view of the role of ideas as follows: "Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force" (7, 4; 119).
_-_-_^^*^^ Elsewhere in this section, Marx and Engels quote Bauer as follows: "All great actions of previous history ... were failures from the start and had no effective success because the mass became interested in and enthusiastic over them---or, they were bound to come to a pitiful end because the idea underlying them was such that it had to be content with a superficial comprehension and therefore to rely on the approval of the mass" (/, 4; 81). And again: "The spirit now knows where to lank for its only adversary---in the self-deception and the pithlessness of the Mass" (/, 4; 83). All these Young Hegelian assertions supplement each other and show that bourgeois radicalism and the anti-popular attitude abide together very well.
315Ideas do not transcend the limits of a given social system because they are a reflection of existing social relations, requirements and interests. But because these social relations contain within themselves the prerequisites for a new social system, ideas are capable of anticipating the future, i.e., of transcending the limits of the dominant ideology. Thus, the revolutionary movement which started in 1789 produced the communist idea, whose elaboration led to the idea of a new social system. Consequently, the active role of ideas is also determined by material social relations, requirements and interests.
The Young Hegelians held forth on the power of ``pure'' idea free from the egoism which was incapable of performing outstanding historical deeds. Marx and Engels resolutely reject the attempt to identify material social requirements and egoism, and say: "The egoism which has a nation as its content is more general or purer than that which has as its content .a particular social class or a particular corporation" (1, 4; 120).^^*^^
The 1789 French Revolution, Marx and Engels explain, did not realise the slogans of freedom, equality and brotherhood, which it proclaimed, not because these ideas did not go beyond the limits of the existing historical conditions. Actually, the 1789 slogans were mere illusions, inevitable because of the limited social content of the bourgeois revolution. But despite the collapse of the illusions concerning the reign of reason and justice that revolution was a success, i. e., it led to the establishment of the bourgeoisie's political power, because despite the aspirations of the masses, it was mainly an expression of the interests of that class. "The interest of the bourgeoisie in the 1789 Revolution, far from having been a `failure', 'won' every thing _-_-_
^^*^^ Unlike the Young Hegelians, Feucrbach contrasted the people's interests and the self-seeking of its oppressors. Lenin cited these words of Feuerbach's, which he saw as the embryo of historical materialism: "Where does a new epoch in history begin? Only wherever an oppressed mass of majority makes its well-justified egoism effective against the exclusive egoism of a nation or caste, wherever classes of men (sic!) or whole nations, by gaining victory over the arrogant self-conceit of a patrician minority emerge into the light of historical glory out of the miserable obscurity of the proletariat. So, too, the egoism of the now oppressed majority of mankind must and will obtain its rights and found a new epoch in history" (5, 38; 77). Here, as in many other instances, we find Feuerbach formulating problems which he was unable to answer.
316 and had 'most effective success'.... That interest was so powerful that it was victorious over the pen of Marat, the guillotine of the Terror and the sword of Napoleon as well as the crucifix and the blue blood of the Bourbons. The Revolution was a `failure' only for the mass which did not have in the political `idea' the idea of its real 'interest', i. e., whose true lifeprinciple did not coincide with the life-principle of the Revolution, the mass whose real conditions for emancipation were essentially different from the conditions within which the bourgeoisie could emancipate itself and society" (7, 4; 81).Consequently, the 1789 bourgeois revolution was limited not because its ideas reflected definite material interests but because these interests were not those of broad masses of working people. "If the Revolution was a failure it was not because the mass was `enthusiastic'over it and `interested'in it, but because the most numerous part of the mass, the part distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not have its real interest in the principle of the Revolution, did not have a revolutionary principle of its own, but only an 'idea,' and hence only an object of momentary enthusiasm and only seeming uplift" (I, 4; 81-82).
In contrast to the Young Hegelians, the founders of Marxism insist that ideas could become a mighty force of social development when they express material social requirements, the interests of progressive classes, especially the interests of masses of people. This conclusion is a more profound and concrete formulation of the idea Marx first expressed in the Deutsch-Franzb'sische Jahrbiicher about the transformation of theory into a material force.
The Young Hegelians complained about the ``failure'' of social movements in earlier history and claimed that the reason lay in the involvement of the masses. Marx and Engels explained that "the activity of real mankind is nothing but the activity of a mass of human individuals" (1, 4; 85). The reason why masses of people had not up to then taken a sufficiently active part in socio-political movements was that these movements expressed---directly, at any rate---social interests and requirements which were alien to them. The development of material production necessarily carries the masses to the forefront of history: they begin to realise that their interests are opposite to those of the ruling minority; and they join in the socio-historical process ever 317 more consciously and resolutely. Marx and Engels formulated this summing-up of historical experience as follows: "Together with the thoroughness of the historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will therefore increase" (7, 4; 82). This means that the people are the chief motive force of social progress, whose acceleration depends on their growing role in the development of society. This theoretical conclusion is a scientific discovery of one of the objective regularities of world history.
Thus, Marx and Engels show that the Young Hegelian conception of ``spirit'' and ``mass'' obviously conflicts with the basic socio-historical trends. The Young Hegelian view of progress is just as untenable, for they insist that it is absolute, so ignoring its definite historical, contradictory content, which is limited in class terms. Here, as elsewhere, speculative idealism shows itself to be incapable of overcoming the metaphysical mode of thinking. Marx and Engels contrast the Young Hegelians with outstanding Utopian socialists and note that the latter were aware of the antagonistic character of progress in the private-property society and realised that "all progress of the Spirit had so far been progress against the mass of mankind, driving it into an ever more dehumanised situation" (1, 4; 84). This discovery is one of the most important premises for Utopian socialism. The Utopian socialists "assumed ... a fundamental flaw in the civilised world; that is why they subjected the real foundations of contemporary society to incisive criticism. This communist criticism had practically at once as its counterpart the movement of the great mass, in opposition to which history had been developing so far" (1, 4; 84).
The Young Hegelians regarded as absolute laws the development of culture at the expense of the mass of the population, the antithesis between mental and manual labour, the ignorance of the masses, and all the other historically transient features of social development. Despite their super-criticism, the Young Hegelians saw antagonistic contradictions as something natural and determined by the people's substantial nature. To this conservative view of the antagonistic character of progress Marx and Engels opposed a communist critique of the capitalist system, and showed the ways of abolishing the antagonistic social relations which are not the only possible ones despite the claims of the "critical critics". The proletariat's emancipation 318 movement necessarily leads to a social system under which antagonism will no longer be a law of social progress. This shows the humanistic character of the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels say: "one 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" (7, 4; 84).
The hostility of "critical criticism" to the masses of people was most pronounced in its evaluation of the condition and role of the working class. While the French socialists asserted that the workers created everything but had no rights, no property, the Young Hegelians assumed that the workers produced nothing, because the act of creation was, by its very nature, a spiritual act. They insisted that the workers produced only the individual, the sensuous, that which was designed to satisfy material requirements. Consequently, the Young Hegelians outdid even the vulgar economists, who did not deny that the workers' labour was productive, but insisted that the proletarians received the price of their labour in the form of wages. The "critical critics" argued that the proletarians received their wages only for helping the capitalists. They also rejected the truth about the antithesis between profit and wages (the antithesis between the interests of the chief classes of capitalist society), a truth established by bourgeois political science, and declared that the proletarians and the bourgeois made up a single ``factory'' party. They attacked the Chartist movement, which, Marx and Engels say, was "the political expression of public opinion among the workers" (7, 4; 15).
The Young Hegelians claimed that the workers and capitalists constituted a single party, and that the proletariat was therefore wrong in fighting its class enemy. They insisted that the contradictions between labour and capital would be resolved by self-consciousness, and could occur only within the bounds of the latter. The founders of Marxism remark ironically that absolute criticism "has learnt from Hegel's Phanomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and thus of converting all external sensuously perceptible struggles into pure struggles of thought" (7, 4; 82-3). For all its extravagance, "critical criticism" eventually turns out to be a brand of 319 the idealistic view of history, which starts from consciousness, from men's emotions and reason and claims that the events taking place in history and all the human establishments result from reason or unreason, knowledge or ignorance, egoism, self-seeking, or other emotions, so failing to notice the objective social relations which take shape independently of men's consciousness, the fundamental economic facts which determine these secondary, spiritual motives. The Young Hegelians merely gave a speculative interpretation to this naturalistic and idealistic view of the socio-historical process. That is why the criticism of Young Hegelianism was simultaneously a criticism of the idealistic view of history in general.
Marx and Engels rejected the idealistic interpretation of the antithesis between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and gave their own, materialist view, which, they emphasise, coincides with the conviction of class-conscious workers, who "do not-believe that by 'pure thinking' they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life" (1, 4; 53). This shows the unity of proletarian partisanship and the materialist view of history: the interests of the proletariat's class struggle require consistent implementation of the principles of historical materialism.
The Young Hegelians did not think that they were ideologists of the bourgeoisie, and some of them even called themselves socialists---``critical'' socialists, it is true, in contrast to the ``vulgar'' and ``practical'' socialists of Britain and France. But the polemics carried on by these ``critical'' socialists with the ``practical'' socialists was, in effect, an attack on the emancipation movement of the working class. Hence, their attacks on Marx and Engels for their ``worship'' of the proletariat, their attempts to present the scientific proposition concerning the proletariat's socialist mission as theological dogma, the fight against which they proclaimed to be a sacred duty of "critical criticism". In response, Marx 320 and Engels write: "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need---the practical expression of necessity---is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself" (1, 4; 36-37). But in contrast to the exploited classes of earlier epochs, which could at best emancipate only themselves, the proletariat destroys capitalist relations, so fulfilling a global human task. This occurs in virtue of the objective imperative which is determined by the level of social development and the condition of the working class in bourgeois society. This class "cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation" (1, 4; 37).
Here, as in many other passages of The Holy Family, the basic ideas of scientific socialism are expressed in terms of anthropological materialism. The proletariat's social condi^ tion is defined as the complete alienation from everything human, and the socialist transformation of society as the re-establishment of genuinely human relations. In 1845, Marx and Engels did not yet have their doctrine of socio-economic formations, according to which the various types of relations of production are law-governed phases in the development of society. That is why they regard capitalist relations of production mainly as distorted and alien to man, and not as corresponding to a definite level in the development of society's productive forces.^^*^^ Yet, despite the still inadequate _-_-_
^^*^^ In The German Ideology in 1846, Marx and Engels abandoned this approach and criticised the petty-bourgeois socialists who asserted that real man was not man because he led an alienated existence. These theoreticians "have declared people to be inhuman, not because they did not correspond to the concept of man, but because their concept of man did not correspond __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 322. 321 elaboration of the overall conception of social development, Marx and Engels show the epoch-making importance of the proletariat's emancipation movement and give a scientific formulation of the idea of the objective necessity of socialism, the idea that the proletariat's social emancipation is inextricably connected with the emancipation of the whole of society, of men from the sway of the spontaneous forces of social development. Besides, in contrast to the Utopian socialists, they argue that the proletariat will emancipate itself.
The proletariat is bourgeois society's intrinsic negation of private property, its economic basis, a negation which is directly expressed in the fact that the proletariat is a class deprived of private property, and this determines its socialist mission. "Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today" (1, 4; 37). This key theoretical conclusion is backed by references to the historical experience of the most developed capitalist countries: "There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity" (1, 4; 37). A comparison of these ideas with what Marx and Engels said in their articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher shows that as Marxism takes shape the scientific concept of the historical role of the working class is also developed and concretised on the basis of historical materialism. In this context, Lenin emphasises that in The Holy Family we see Marx's view "already almost fully developed--- concerning the revolutionary role of the proletariat" (5, 38; _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 321. to the true concept of man, or because they had no true understanding of man" (/, 5; 430). Elsewhere in the same work, they say: "The positive expression `human' corresponds to the definite relations predominant at a certain stage of production and to the way of satisfying needs determined by them, just as the negative expression `inhuman' corresponds to the attempt to negate these predominant relations ...an attempt that this stage of production daily engenders afresh" (I, 5; 432).
322 26). The "critical critics" regarded class contradictions sub specie aeternitatis, declaring the contradiction between labour and capital to be overcome within the speculative selfconsciousness, but Marx and Engels reject the idea of any reconciliation of the opposite classes and theoretically demonstrate the objective necessity of the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie.They write: "Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole" (/, 4; 35). This thesis is directly aimed against Hegel's (and the Young Hegelians') interpretation of the unity of opposites as a purely correlative, ``reflective'' relation, which ultimately turns out to be their identity. Marx and Engels insist that opposites have a different role to play within the concrete system whose structure their relation makes up. Consequently, it is not enough to regard opposites as being merely two sides of a single whole; there is a need for a concrete analysis of the opposites and their relation with each other. Because they consider the problem of opposites in connection with their analysis of the proletariat-bourgeoisie antagonistic relation, they show the specific dialectics of the opposites within the given economic relation. These opposites have different functions, they are not transformed into each other, they do not change places, and the struggle between them necessarily results in the abolition of one side and a fundamental change of the other. Does this mean that Marx and Engels deny the identity of opposites and their transformation into each other? Of course, not. They merely emphasise (chiefly because of the subject-matter of their study: the social cataclysms of the capitalist system) the struggle of opposites, the antagonistic contradiction and the relations between a conservative (positive) and a revolutionary (negative) side of the contradiction: "Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.
``The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its 323 restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property" (1, 4; 36).
The antithesis between the revolutionary and the conservative sides of the antagonistic contradiction does not, of course, mean that they are not mutually conditioned or that there is no element of identity between them. This view marks an important stride forward as compared with that which Marx mostly presented in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Having reworked Hegel's dialectics in materialist terms, Marx and Engels show that identity is a real element of contradiction---the relation between opposites which are mutually exclusive, but which nevertheless determine each other. They present concrete facts to show the connection between identity and difference, and the contradictory character of identity: "The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement: it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
``Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletariat the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it" (1,4; 36).
It is well worth while to emphasise that Marx and Engels drew a fundamental distinction between two types of "human self-estrangement", the alienated being of the bourgeoisie, and the alienated labour of the proletariat. This distinction was adumbrated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and it is especially important for overcoming the abstract-humanistic (notably Feuerbachian) view of the alienation of human substance in general.
The inter-relation of opposites and their different roles in this objective (in this case, social) relation sheds light on the nature of historical necessity, which differs from natural 324 necessity, because it is immanent in human activity. The bourgeoisie seeks lo maintain private property, and the proletariat---to destroy it. The nature of the activity and struggle of each of these classes are determined by the existence and the activity of the other side. Thus, the objective regularity to which the development of bourgeois society is subordinated is not something that is externally opposed to social relations. It is determined by the interaction and inter-relation of these opposites, of these classes, and by the struggle between them, which is not in any sense a matter of free choice, but has an objective economic basis created by men during the life of successive generations. Consequently, the historical necessity inherent in social development is inseparable from its intrinsic basic contradictions. This necessity is also an embodiment of the objective premises for human activity created by earlier generations of men, and of the conscious activity of various social groups and classes at the given stage in the development of society. However, the relation of the opposites is not confined to their operation in opposite directions (an operation which is, however, mutually conditioned). Their inter-relation is necessarily expressed in the operation of each side. Thus, the proletariat, carrying on its struggle against capital for the purpose of destroying it, in virtue of its status in bourgeois society keeps reproducing capitalist relations (usually on an extended scale). The same applies to the bourgeoisie, whose activity engenders the social forces out to destroy it, so eroding the very basis of its economic and political power. The founders of Marxism show this dialectical inter-relation between men's conscious activity and its results, an interrelation without an understanding of which it is, in principle, impossible to understand the specific nature of social regularities, and say that "private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanisation which is conscious of its dehumariisation, and therefore self-abolishing" (/, 4; 36). This means that not only the proletariat's emancipation movement but also the objective consequences of the bourgeoisie's own conscious activity, 325 independently of the will of that class and even despite it, lead to the formation of material prerequisites of socialism in the entrails of the capitalist system. But whereas the objective results of the conscious activity of the working class coincide with the goals which that class sets itself, there must be a profound contradiction between the purposes and the end results of the capitalists' activity. This occurs because the emancipation struggle of the working class accords with the objective regularities of the development of capitalism, whereas the bourgeoisie's urge to perpetuate its power contradicts these regularities. The inevitable result of this whole historical process, of the interaction between the conscious activity of the various classes and the spontaneous course of events, which is also definitely related to this conscious activity, the result of the emancipation movement of the working class is the socialist revolution. "The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite" (1, 4; 36).
These briefly analysed ideas concerning the contradiction between the proletariat and private property, and the development of this contradiction arid ways of its resolution, represent a brilliant formulation of the fundamental tenet of scientific communism concerning the objective regularity and the inevitability of revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. Marx and Engels show the dialectico-materialist content of the concept of historical inevitability, which, despite the assertions of the critics of Marxism, has nothing in common with fatalism. Historical necessity is not externally opposed to men's activity, to its premises and its results: it takes shape from all these elements of social life.
These ideas are also remarkable in that they show the unity of the materialist conception of history and materialist dialectics. The unity of men's conscious activity and objective historical necessity, which is also a product of the historical creativity of the succession of generations, can be understood and explained only in the light of materialist dialectics, which completely overcomes the abstract dualism of the subjective and the objective, of freedom and necessity, with which not 326 only the metaphysical materialists were unable to cope. Hegel, the dialectician, may have declared this dualism overcome and may have correctly formulated the question of the connection between freedom and necessity, but he ultimately falters into the fatalism which is inevitable for absolute idealism. Marx and Engels are equally free of fatalism and of voluntarism: they put a high value on men's conscious activity, while substantiating the key proposition of historical materialism concerning the definitive importance of material conditions in the life of society, which are, however, created by men themselves in the succession of generations.
The latter-day critics of Marxism claim that there is no dialectics in The Holy Family, and that its authors reject dialectics. The fact is, however, that the basic propositions formulated by Marx and Engels in their first joint work are a well-grounded negation of speculative idealism and a scientific elaboration of the principles of materialist dialectics, of the materialist conception of history.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 3 __ALPHA_LVL3__ CRITIQUE OF YOUNG HEGELIAN CRITICISM OF PROUDHONISM.In his summary of The Holy Family, Lenin says that Marx ''defends Proudhon against the critics of the lAlernn Ciazette. counterposing his clearly socialist ideas to speculation.
``Marx's tone in relation to Proudhon is very laudatory (although there are minor reservations, for example reference to Engels's Umrisse zn einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie in the Deutsch-Franzosische Johrbucher)" (5, 38; 24).
Marx's and Engels's attitude to Proudhon, whose pettybourgeois views they were soon to fundamentally criticise, needs to be closely examined.
The Young Hegelians attacked Proudhon as a spokesman for French socialism, whose substance they reduced to all manner of dogmatic abstractions and whose real social content they totally ignored.^^*^^ "Proudhon," wrote Bauer _-_-_
^^*^^ Even where the Young Hegelians do suspect the true social meaning of Proudhon's theory, they tend to over-simplify it. Tims, Bauer declared: __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 328. 327 ``therefore finds something absolute, an eternal foundation in history, a god that guides mankind---justice" (J, 4; 33). Although there is some ground for this charge of absolutisation of the concept of justice, the Young Hegelian criticism of Proudhon's teaching as a whole did not go to the heart of it, the problem of private property. The 'Critical Critics' not only failed to answer the questions he posed but tried to minimise their importance as being imaginary problems. But the fact is that the problems Proudhon tried to solve also faced his German opponents. Marx and Engels showed that the Young Hegelian principle ol sell-consciousness--- whatever its authors may have thought of it---was a speculative formulation of the democratic principle of equality which made up the basic content of Proudhon's concept of justice. "If Herr Edgar compares French equality with German `self-consciousness' for an instant, he will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract thought,- what the former says in French, that is, in the language of politics and of thoughtful observation. Selfconsciousness is man's equality with himself in pure thought. Equality is man's consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., man's consciousness of other men as his equals and man's attitude to other men as his equals" (/, 4; 39). The Young Hegelians' attitude to Proudhon was, in effect, only a partial expression of the general relation between German speculative thinkers, and French, arid English socialists and communists. "The criticism of the French and the English is not an abstract, preternatural personality outside mankind; it is the real human activity of individuals who are active members of society and who suffer, feel, think and act as human beings. That is why their criticism is at the same time practical, their communism a socialism in _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 327. ``Proudhon writes in the interest of those who have nothing; to have and not to have are for him absolute categories" (1, 4; 41). Having dealt with Proudhon in this way, Bauer goes on to explain to him that having and not having do not rule out each other, for not having is a definite having, because there is no absolute not having. But the point is that Proudhon considers very definite not having, in virtue of which the working people are exploited by those who own the land, the factories, etc. By contrast, Marx and Engels say that not having is not only a category but a very definite reality: "Not having is the most despairing spiritualism, a complete unreality of the human being, a complete reality of the dehumanised being, a very positive having, a having of hunger, of cold, of disease, of crime, of debasement, of hebetude, of all inhumanity and abnormity" (/, 4; 42).
328 which they give practical, concrete measures" (/, 4; 153).Marx and Engels state the fact but do not say that the distinction between German speculative conceptions and French and English socialist, teachings also springs from the fact that they are a theoretical expression of the interests of different classes. Marx and Engels characterise the sociopolitical meaning of the philosophy of self-consciousness and its hostility to the interests of the oppressed and the exploited, and explain that these peculiarities of "critical criticism" are mainly dtie to its speculative character and isolation from real life. By contrast, Proudhon's doctrine cannot be reduced to speculative constructs, for it is a theoretical expression of the status and interests of a definite class. "He does not write in the interests of self-sufficient Criticism or out of any abstract, self-made interest, but out of a mass-type, real, historic: interest, an interest that goes beyond criticism, that will go as far as a crisis. Not only does Proudhon write in the interests of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is scientific manifesto of the French proletariat and therefore has quite a different historical significance from that of the literary botch work of any Critical Critic" (/, 1; 11).
The fact that Proudhon is described as an ideologist of the French proletariat, and that his work, Qu'est-ce qne la propriele? (What Is Property?); as a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat, shows that the formation ol scientific socialism is not yet complete, but it would be wrong to assert that Marx and Engels accepted Proudhon's teaching. It would be more correct to say that at that stage in the development of their views they regarded him, like other contemporary socialists and communists, as an ally. I showed above that the very high evaluation of Feucrbach's philosophy in The Holy Family did not mean that Marx and Engels fully shared his views. The same is even truer of Proudhon. The whole content of The Holy Family shows that, as Marx and Engels worked out their dialecticomaterialist and communist world view, they stood head and shoulders above Proudhon, a petty-bourgeois socialist, idealist and metaphysicist. Why then the high evaluation, rather the over-estimation, of Proudhon? The point is that they regarded Proudhon not just as a theoretician of the French proletariat but above all as a French worker elaborating a socialist theory on his own. This is almost the same view as 329 that which they took of Weitling, who was not only a worker but did in fact express the interests of the German workers at a definite historical stage of their development.
Last but not least, Proudhon extols his first and best work which did, indeed, have an important role to play in the history of pre-Marxian socialism. In 1865, Marx wrote to Schweitzer that Prouclhon's book, Qu'est-ce que la propriete? was "by all means his best work. It is epoch-making, if not for the newness of its content, then at least for the new and audacious way in which old things are said. In the works of the French Socialists and Communists whom he knew, `property' had, of course, been not only criticised in various ways but also 'abolished' in the Utopian manner. In this book Proudhon's relation to Saint-Simon and Fourier is about the same as that of Feuerbach to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is exceedingly poor. All the same he was epoch-making after Hegel, because he laid stress on certain points which are disagreeable to the Christian consciousness while important for the progress of criticism, and which Hegel had left in mystic semi-obscurity" (2, 2; 24).
What then were Proudhon's main points? They were the problem of private property, the question of the social evil it engendered, and the need for its abolition.^^*^^ "Provocative defiance, laying hands on the economic 'holy of holies', superb paradox which makes a mock of bourgeois common sense, withering criticism, bitter irony, and betrayed here and there, a deep and genuine feeling of indignation at the infamy of what exists, revolutionary earnestness---because of all this. What Is Property? had an electrifying effect and produced a great impression upon its first appearance (2, 2; 24-5). This evaluation of Proudhon's first book, which Marx gave twenty years after the publication of The Holy Family helps to understand Marx's and Engels's attitude to Proudhon in 1845.
_-_-_^^*^^ Proudhon took a petty-bourgeois approach in his critique of private property and this ultimately invalidated his idea of the need to abolish private property, by which he meant large-scale capitalist property. That is why Marx says: "But in spite of all his sham storming of heaven, one already finds in What Is Property? the contradiction that Proudhon, on the one hand, criticises society from the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later petty bourgeois) and, on the other, applies the measuring rod he had inherited from the Socialists" (2, 2; 25).
330So, the authors of The Holy Family give a high appreciation of Proudhon for his efforts systematically to develop the idea of negation of private property. "All treatises on political economy take private property for granted. This basic premise is for them an incontestable fact to which they devote no further investigation, indeed, a fact which is spoken about `accidentellment', as Say naively admits. But Proudhon makes a critical investigation---the first resolute, ruthless, and at the same time scientific investigation---of the basis of political economy, private property. This is the great scientific advance he made, an advance which revolutionises political economy and for the first time makes a real science of political economy possible. Proudhon's treatise Qu'est-ce que la propriete? is as important for modern political economy as Sieyes' work Qu'est-ce que le tiers-etat? for modern politics" (1, 4; 31-32).^^*^^
It is true, Marx and Engels add, that Proudhon does not analyse forms of private property like wages, trade, value, price and money, a shortcoming which is due to the fact that he criticises political economy (meaning, of course, bourgeois political economy) on the strength of its own theoretical premises. This was inevitable at the beginning, when the opponents of political economy were faced with the task of criticising it. That is why "Proudhon's treatise will ... be scientifically superseded by a criticism of political economy, including Proudhon's conception of political economy. This work became possible only owing to the work of Proudhon himself, just as Proudhon's criticism has as its premise the criticism of the mercantile system by the physiocrats, Adam Smith's criticism of the physiocrats, Ricardo's criticism of Adam Smith, and the works of Fourier and Saint-Simon" (1, 4; 31).
Consequently, Marx and Engels urged the need to supersede Proudhon's view, which does not go beyond the _-_-_
^^*^^ In the above-men(ioned letter to Schweit/er, which on the whole contains a high appreciation of the role which Proudhon's Qu'est-ce ijiie la projiriete? had to play, Marx emphasises that the strictly scientific importance of the book is insignificant: "In a strictly scientific history of political economy the book would hardly be worth mentioning. But sensational works of this kind play their part in the sciences just as much as in polite literature. Take, for instance, Malthus' book On Population. In its first edition it was nothing but a- 'sensational pamphlet' and plagiarism from beginning to end into the bargain. And yet what a stimulus was produced by this libel on the human rare!" (2, 2; 25).
331 framework of the existing political economy despite his criticism of it. The point is that bourgeois economists also frequently attack this or that historical form of property, regarding it as a distortion of genuine private property. It is true that Marx and Engels do not set draw the conclusion that in a sense Proudhoii took the same path, a conclusion Marx is to draw two years later in The Poverty of Philosophy. For the time being, the founders of Marxism emphasise that Prondhon differs from the economists opposing some types of private property in the fact that he "consistently depicts as the falsifier of economic: relations not this or (hat particular kind of private property, as other economists do, but private property as such and in its entirety. He has clone all that criticism ol political economy from the standpoint of politic.al economy can do" (I, 4; 33).What then ate the positive results ol this negation ol bourgeois political economy in the light of its own principles.' Marx and F.ngels say that Proudhon is much more consistent in applying the principle of tire labour theory of value than other bourgeois economists. "Bv making labour time, the immediate existence of human activity as activity, the measure ol wages and the determinant of the' value of the product, Proudhon makes the' human side the decisive factor, hi old political economy, on the other baud, the decisive factor was the material power of capital and of landed property. In other words, Proudhon reinstates man in his rights, but still in an economic and therefore contradictory way" (/, 4; 49). This is expressed in the fact that Proudhon accepted the bourgeois economists' notion that the economic categories of capitalism are everlasting, but sought to clothe these categories in a fair and rational form.
Marx and Engels note all the positive aspects of Proudhon's critique of private property but reach the conclusion that its results are on the whole partial and indefinite. Bourgeois economists are apologists of private property because they argue that national wealth is created by the movement of private property. By contrast, Proudhon asserts that the movement of private property breeds poverty, and for that reason demands the abolition of private property. But he contrasts to private property ``possession'' by which he designates the property of the small producers. While declaring the abolition of private 332 property, he in effect proposes no more than a redistribution of it, namely, equal possession of property. And while he declares possession to be a "social function", this does not change the petty-bourgeois substance of his conception. It is true that in The Holy Family we do not find any direct indication of the class content of Proudhon's conception, but such a conclusion is in effect anticipated by the criticism of Proudhon's notion of the possibility of equal (egalitarian) possession' of private property. "The idea of 'equal possession is the economic and therefore itself still estranged expression for the fact that the object as being for man, as the objective being of man, is at the same time the existence of man for other men, .his human relation to other men, the social behaviour of man to man. Proudhon abolishes economic estrangement within economic estrangement" (7, 4; 43). Although this idea is expressed in an anthropological form, it is one that had not occurred to Feuerbach: it is the idea of the products of labour, of production, as materialised social relations. This, for its part, suggests that production implies definite relations between men, definite social, production relations.
So, in over-rating the importance of Proudhon's theory, and protecting him against criticism from the right, Marx and Engels were already outlining the main direction of the critique of Proudhonism from the left, showing his inability to transcend the limits of bourgeois political economy, and contrasting to Proudhon's immanent critique of political economy the critique of the bourgeois view of economic relations that had a theoretical starting point independent of the latter, namely, recognition of the need for social property as the only basis for resolving the contradictions of society's earlier development.
Summing up the analysis of The Holy Family, one could say that it contains not only an attack on the bourgeois ideology, but the beginnings of the break with petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism. Marx and Engels contrasted to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology the basic propositions of the scientific ideology of the working class they were elaborating: the ideas of the objective need of socialism, the working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie, a socialist revolution, and substitution of social property for private property. This results in an elaboration of the initial principles of dialectical and historical materialism.
333In Germany, a great impression was created by the publication of The Holy Family, which sparked off an animated discussion between the numerous opponents of communism and the handful of those who sided with Marx and Engels at that time. The Kolnische Zeitung, for instance, said that the book was a resolute expression of the stand of the socialist party, "which vigorously condemns the futility and sentimentality of all the half-measures against the social evil of our day" (44; 178). A long review by A. Schmidt in the Jahrbucher fur u'issenschaftliche Kritik accused Marx and Engels of trying to do away with philosophy, "the German substance", private property, etc. (44; 183-88).
Bruno Bauer attacked the book from his idealistic standpoint, and claimed that he had been misunderstood. Marx and Engels replied to Bauer's ``anti-criticism'' in the Gesellschaftsspiegel, a journal edited by Moses Hess. The article was subsequently included in The German Ideology. In it, Marx and Engels emphasised that Bauer's ``anti-criticism'' compounds the errors that were criticised in The Holy Family. Thus, he had written that criticism and critics "have guided and made history, that even their opponent^ and all the movements and agitations of the present time are their creation, that it is they alone who hold power in their hands, because strength is in their consciousness" (quoted in 1, 5; 109). Bauer's ``anti-criticism'' was undoubtedly evidence that the "philosophy of self-consciousness" had run into a dead-end. By the mid-1840s, Young Hegelianism had worked itself out even as a bourgeois-democratic movement. Jung wrote Marx and Engels: "You have routed speculative criticism for good" (44; 176-7).
Young Hegelianism never managed to recover the positions it had lost largely as a result of the critique by Marx and Engels.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 4 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ENGELS'S THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND.The idea of the proletariat's historic role, first expressed by Marx in the Deutsch-Franziisische Jahrbucher, was further elaborated in The Holy Family, and in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels's main work in that period, on which he worked from September 1844 to March 1845.
334Lenin commented on it as follows: "Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself" (5, 4; 22).
Engels's work is a brilliant refutation of the bourgeois invention that the principles of scientific communism are speculative. Our consideration of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and especially of The Holy Family, shows that this is not a new idea, for it merely restates the arguments of the Young Hegelians, the group of speculative philosophers who accused their opponents of producing speculative constructs of world history.
Present-day bourgeois sociologists depict historical materialism as an a priori scheme of the world historical process, and oppose to it their empirical sociology, which rejects the concepts of development, uniformity and progress as allegedly being incompatible with the social facts. Marxism has shown this approach to be untenable. Long before the emergence of "empirical sociology", Marx and Engels engaged in concrete social studies, basing their theoretical conclusions on the analysis and summing-up of the facts which bourgeois sociologists usually ignored, for they preferred to hold forth about society in general, progress in general, and so on. Indeed, rejection of a priori philosophical and historical premises, that fundamental feature of Marxism, was fully in evidence already during the shaping of Marx's and Engels's views.
When working on his book, Engels made a study of a vast array of data brought together by other researchers and visited the homes of English workers to learn at first hand about their living conditions, attended workers' meetings to find out about their working conditions, and took part in the Chartist movement. His book opens with an address to the proletarians of Great Britain: "I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to their knowledge my most serious attention, I have studied the various official and non-official documents as far as I was able to get hold of them---I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract 335 knowledge of my subject. I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champaign of the middleclasses, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working-Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so" (1, 4; 297).
Engels's concrete social study was not, of course, confined to a statement, description and systematisation of the facts. He drew important theoretical conclusions, whose significance went well beyond the historical situation which provided the factual basis for his study. His main conclusion is that the working class is capable not only of destroying the capitalist system, but also of building a classless, communist society.
In the Preface to his book, Engels writes: "The condition of the working class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements of the present because it is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day" (7, 4; 302). Elaborating on this thesis, he describes the main features of the industrial revolution in England and its social consequences. "Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those days" (7, 4; 320).
The industrial revolution was more than a revolution in machinery, and its most important result was the formation of a revolutionary proletariat. Before the industrial revolution, the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, adhering to the patriarchal tradition. They worked their own primitive spinning-wheels and looms, lived mainly in the villages, cultivated a plot of land of their own and in general got on fairly well on what they earned. "But 336 intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind. They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings" (7, 4; 309). The industrial revolution put an end once and for all to this stultifying idyll. The invention of the jenny and then of the powerloom destroyed the old social order and brought together large masses of workers in the factories, separating them from the land and ranging them against the capitalist owners of the enterprises.
Engels gives a staggering picture of the plight of the English workers. Each of his irrefutable conclusions is backed up with facts and shows the progressive impoverishment of the English proletariat, despite the tremendous growth of social production, the national wealth, and the capitalists' profits. He regards this polarisation of bourgeois society as a law-governed result of the domination of private property and capital.
He refutes the naive Utopian socialist notion about the propertied classes, the bourgeoisie being concerned with a socialist transformation of social relations. Socialism is incompatible with the interests of the bourgeoisie: "The bourgeois, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trembles, blesses and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletariat has open eyes for it, and studies it with pleasure and success" (7, 4; 528).
Engels regards the working-class movement as a necessary expression of the antagonistic contradiction between the main classes of capitalist society, and emphasises the proletarian nature of the Chartist movement, but adds that the Chartists are as yet unaware of the need for social revolution. In England, socialism is virtually unconnected with the working-class movement, and those who advocate socialism do not .advocate an implacable class struggle. Engels writes: "English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition 337 of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
``The Socialists are thoroughly tame and peaceable, accept our existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion" (7, 4; 525).
English socialists lack the historical approach to social life, which is why they do not connect the transition to socialism with definite, historically shaped conditions. They complain of the hatred of the working class for the bourgeoisie, and fail to understand that the workers' hatred for the class exploiting them impels them to advance. "They acknowledge only a psychological development, a development of man in the abstract, out of all relation to the Past, whereas the whole world rests upon that Past, the individual man included" (1, 4; 526). How is English socialism to overcome its limitations? To do this it must pass through the crucible of Chartism to be purified of its bourgeois elements, and to merge with the working-class movement. This process has already begun, and this will be seen from the fact that many Chartist leaders have become socialists. Development will produce proletarian socialism, whose historical necessity is determined by antagonistic character of capitalism and the advance of philosophical and sociological thought. Only true proletarian socialism will make the English working class master of its own country.
Criticising the bourgeois-liberal ideology, Engels explains that the proletariat's revolutionary action, like the whole of its emancipation struggle, is law-governed and progressive. Under capitalism, the proletarians' human dignity is expressed only in struggle against the existing conditions.
Initially, the workers object to the introduction of machinery, which worsens their condition, but their struggle subsequently becomes conscious and organised. They begin to set up unions and associations, which are secret at first and then legal, following the repeal by Parliament of all the laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had hitherto been forbidden. The strike movement shows very well the advancing organisation of the workers. "These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; 338 they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement" (1, 4; 512). Engels shows the development of the objective conditions for the proletariat's class organisation and demonstrates how the progress of capitalist production induces the proletarians to unite in a single powerful army which is increasingly conscious of the fact that its interests are incompatible with those of the capitalists. The socialist revolution is drawing nigh, it is inevitable, and "the war of the poor against the rich now carried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. It is too late for a peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion" (1, 4; 582-83).
Such are the basic ideas of Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England. It is not free of imprecise and incorrect propositions, which are mainly due to the fact that Marxist economic theory was still embryonic. Engels assumed that capitalism had already worked out its potentialities, as the cyclical crises of over-production seemed to indicate, while the growing impoverishment of the proletariat was a certain sign that the bourgeoisie was losing its footing.
He notes correctly that socialist theory has nothing to do with the cult of violence, and regards the revolutionary use of force only as a means which the proletariat is forced to use against the ruling bourgeoisie that resorts to violence. But he asserts that the doctrine of communism rises over and above the contradiction between labour and capital, a conclusion which, in effect, contradicts the whole thrust of his book, and is one which he drew from the fact that some members of the bourgeoisie were coming to realise the inevitability of socialism and were siding with the working class. That is why Engels declares: "as Communism stands above the strife between bourgeoisie and proletariat, it will be easier for the better elements of the bourgeoisie (which are, however, deplorably few, and can look for recruits only among the rising generation) to unite with it than with purely proletarian Chartism" (I, 4; 582).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ In another work written in the autumn of 1845, Engels says that "it is the youth of Germany that will bring about such a change [meaning a __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 340. 339
Engels overcame these relicts of Utopian-socialist views in the subsequent works he wrote that same year, 1845. In his "Speeches in Elberfeld", Engels tries to show the economic roots of the struggle between the main classes in bourgeois society. Capitalism destroyed the feudal conditions of production and ushered in free competition in their stead. Engels believes that this concept of free competition is the starting point for studying the specifics of capitalism. "The individual capitalist is involved in struggle with all the other capitalists; the individual worker with all the other workers; all capitalists fight against the workers just as the mass of workers in their turn have, of necessity, to fight against the mass of capitalists. In this war of all against all, in this general confusion and mutual exploitation, the essence of present-day bourgeois society is to be found" (1, 4; 243). However, Engels manages to see the basic antagonistic contradiction of capitalism through this somewhat generalised concept, which is also to be found among the Utopian socialists: "the glaring contradiction between a few rich people, on the one hand, and many poor, on the other, a contradiction which has already risen to a menacing point in England and France and is daily growing sharper in our country too" (1, 4; 243). The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is bound to grow sharper "as long as the present basis of society is retained", i.e., capitalist private property and the free competition it engenders. The power of capital and free competition ruin the pettybourgeoisie, and this further intensifies the class polarisation. A necessary consequence of all this is the crying discrepancy between production and consumption, and consequently also the anarchy of production and periodical crises of overproduction. Such, says Engels, are the basic economic facts which will inevitably lead to a socialist revolution: "With the same certainty with which we can develop from given mathematical principles a new mathematical proposition, with the same certainty we can deduce from the existing economic relations and the principles of political economy the imminence of social revolution" (/, 4; 262). This revolution---"the open war of the poor against the rich"--- _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 339. socialist revolution---T. O.]. This youth is not to be looked for among the middle classes. It is from the very heart of our working people that revolutionary action in Germany will commence" (I, 4; 647).
340 will put an end for good to the divergence of interests, the contradictions between classes and the existence of classes in general. Private appropriation will disappear because there will be no private property, production will be regulated by social requirements, and production will cease to be haphazard. In communist society, there will be no need for a state machine and a standing army. While assuming that for some time communist countries may have to live side by side with other, non-communist countries, Engels says that "in the event of a war, which anyway could only be waged against anti-communist nations, the member of such a [communist--- T.O.] society has a real Fatherland, a real hearth and home, to defend, so that he will fight with an enthusiasm, endurance and bravery before which the mechanically trained soldiers of a modern army must be scattered like chaff" (7, 4; 249-50).All these ideas show that Engels has finally advanced from revolutionary democracy to communism and also that he musters materialist arguments for his communist views. Of course, the economic characterisation of capitalism in the "Speeches in Elberfeld" does not yet give an idea of the objective laws governing its origination, development and fall: the law of value, the law of surplus-value, and the concentration and centralisation of capital. The economic arguments he uses were to some extent already used by the Utopian socialists, but he is well ahead of them with his idea of the law-governed nature of the struggle of classes in bourgeois society, the inevitable aggravation of class contradictions and the objective necessity of socialist revolution.
At the end of 1845, Engels prepared for publication in German "A Fragment of Fourier's on Trade", which appeared in the Deutsches Burgerbuch in 1846. The introduction and conclusion to the fragment, which Engels wrote, are the first public Marxist attack on German petty-bourgeois (so-called ``true'') socialism, with some of whose ideologists (Moses Hess, in the first place) Marx and Engels still continued to co-operate.
Engels contrasts Fourier with the representatives of German "philosophical socialism", who took a supercilious attitude to the ``crude'' and ``uneducated'' English and French socialists. "Fourier," says Engels, "was no philosopher, he had a great hatred of philosophy and savagely ridiculed it in his writings and in this connection 341 said a multitude of things which our.German 'philosophers of socialism' would do well to take to heart" (7, 4; 642). Engels puts an especially high value on Fourier's criticism of capitalism and correctly notes the most rational element in the teachings of French Utopian socialism in the early nineteenth century. "Fourier has criticised existing social relations so sharply, with such wit and humour that one readily forgives him for his cosmological fantasies, which are also based on a brilliant world outlook" (1, 4; 615). Meanwhile, the German "true socialists" discarded this very important aspect of Fourier's teaching, the criticism of the capitalist social system, and presented in its stead general philosophical and high-flown discourses on human nature, from which allegedly springs the need for a socialist restructuring of society. These theoreticians translated the ideas of English and French socialism into the language of Hegel's logic, and now claimed this translation to be something original, something purely German, which allegedly rises over and above "bad practice" and the theoretical flaws of all earlier socialist doctrines. "What the French or the English said as long as ten, twenty and even forty years ago---and said very well, very clearly, in very fine language---the Germans have now at last during the past year become acquainted with in bits and have Hegelianised, or at best belatedly rediscovered it and published it in a much worse, more abstract form as a completely new discovery" (/, 4; 614).^^*^^
Engels objects not only to the "true socialists'" highhanded attitude to the achievements of English and French Utopian socialism but also to the superficial, eclectic and unscientific nature of their literary products. "A little `humanitarianism', as the thing is called nowadays, a little `realisation' of this humanitarianism or, rather, monstrosity, a very little about property from Prouclhon---at third or fourth hand---a little moaning about the proletariat, and a little about 'the organisation of labour and wretched associations for raising the lower classes of the people---together with boundless ignorance of political economy and the real character of society---that is the sum total of all this _-_-_
^^*^^ Here Engels also says this about his own studies in that period: "I make no exception here of my own writings" (/, 4; 614). One should note, however, that his writings in 1844 and 1845 differ fundamentally from Utopian socialist writings despite some similarities.
342 `socialism'.... And with this tedious stuff they want to revolutionise Germany, set the proletariat in motion, and make the masses think and act!" (1, 4; 642-3).Of course, criticism of German "true socialism" does not yet amount to criticism of Utopian socialism as a whole. On the contrary, as I have already stressed, Engels contrasts Fourier and other patriarchs of Utopian socialism to the German petty-bourgeois socialists, and this is well justified because the classics of Utopian socialism did much for the historical preparation of the materialist conception of history and scientific communism. Still, some of Engels's arguments against the "true socialists" are also applicable to the classics of Utopian socialism, who also held their teachings to be non-partisan, derived the need for socialist transformations from the requirements of an extra-historical justice, and so on. In effect, "real socialism" was a caricature of the Utopian socialism propounded by its great predecessors. Like every caricature, it reproduced in a distorted form the organic defects of the whole of Utopian socialism.
One of the main shortcomings of Utopian socialism was negation of the political struggle. The Utopian socialists were aware that bourgeois-democratic transformations went hand in hand with the growing impoverishment of the masses, and so looked for ways of realising the socialist ideal outside the struggle for democracy. But the point is that by the mid-19th century, the liberal bourgeoisie in Western Europe had already begun to grow into a counter-revolutionary force, so that it was increasingly up to the revolutionary proletariat to carry the struggle for bourgeois-democratic transformations to the end. Engels says that while the bourgeoisie fought against feudalism it was democratic, and the working class was under its influence. "The working people, though more advanced than the middle classes, could not yet see the total difference between liberalism and democracy---emancipation of the middle classes and emancipation of the working classes.... But from that very day when the middle classes obtain full political power---from the day on which all feudal and aristocratic interests are annihilated by the power of money---from the day on which the middle classes cease to be progressive and revolutionary, and become stationary themselves, from that very day the working-class movement takes the lead and becomes the national movement" (1, 6; 29).
So, the working class becomes not only the chief but also 343 the leading force in the struggle for democracy, which shows a tendency to grow into a struggle for socialism. Accordingly, Engels says: "Democracy nowadays is communism..... Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses.... The democratic masses can be safely included in any calculation of the strength of the communist forces" (7, 6; 5). The Utopian socialists failed to understand the importance of the proletarian struggle for democracy in tackling the socialist task of abolishing the capitalist system. Engels criticises this fundamental error of pre-Marxian socialism, an error which largely made it sectarian.
Scientific communism draws a fundamental distinction between the struggle for socialism, and the struggle for democracy, but goes on to show the essential connection between the two. Both the distinction and the connection cannot be established without a materialist view of history, without a dialectical analysis of the unity and intertransformation of opposite processes. In his articles "The State of Germany" and "The Festival of Nations in London", Engels reveals this real dialectic of the class struggle and draws the correct conclusions concerning the tasks of the proletariat's emancipation movement.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 5 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX'S "THESES ON FEUERBACH"In January 1845, the French Foreign Ministry ordered Marx's expulsion from France, following a protest lodged by the government of Prussia over an attack on Prussian absolutism by the newspaper Vorwdrts. Let us recall that it had carried Marx's article "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'". A number of articles written by Bernays and others which appeared in the paper had obviously been edited by Marx, who had inspired the paper's most important articles.
Marx moved to Brussels, where Engels joined him in the spring of that year. Engels subsequently said that by the time they met in Brussels Marx "had already fully developed his materialist theory of history in its main features and we now applied ourselves to the detailed elaboration of the newlywon mode of outlook in the most varied directions" (2, 3; 344 178). That was also when Marx wrote his "Theses on Feuerbach", which Engels first published in 1888. Their outstanding importance lies in the fact that they mark the watershed between the old materialist philosophy and the new, Marxist materialism.
The very first thesis shows that in the short period since The Holy Family Marx had taken another stride forward in elaborating dialectical materialism. "The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively" (7 5- 3).
Pre-Marxian materialism regarded sensuousness as a passive state caused by the impact of external things on man. Marx emphasises the inadequacy and one-sidedness of this view and adds that sensuousness is man's own activity, that practice is sensuous activity. Hence, in his sensuous activity man is not only the object of influence of the environment, but also the subject which transforms it. The old materialism ignored the cognitive importance of human influence on things in the outer world, i.e., the active, subjective aspect of the process of cognition. However, it is practice---men's conscious and purposeful activity---that constitutes the basis of cognition, for it can never be reduced to perceptions, emotions, thinking, etc. Practice, whatever its form, is the use of material things, processes and uniformities for the purpose of understanding or changing reality, satisfying the requirements of individuals and society, and organising their activity. Man cognises the world because he changes it, and the sensory perceptions of the surrounding world are the necessary element of his practical activity. Contemplative materialism separates the sensuous relation with the world from practice. "Feuerbach," Marx says, "regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance" (7, 5; 3). This is more or less the flaw of all pre-Marxian materialism. So, Marxist philosophy differs from contemplative materialism in the new view of practice and the high appreciation of its cognitive importance.
Those who seek to find in Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" what is not there imagine that he urges a subjectivist 345 examination of reality, that he identifies reality and practice, sensuous activity, etc. But the only thing he says there is that cognition is the subject's activity and that it is subjective activity, in that sense alone, not passive, mirror-like reflection of things. That is what escapes the critics of Marxism, who ascribe ^ to its founder a pragmatic idealistic-empirical approach.^^*^^
Their unanimity does not make their interpretation of Marx's first thesis any more convincing, for their whole argument rests on the separation of the mode of expression from the content of this and other theses of Marx's. Of course, if this thesis is contrasted with what Marx says in the following theses, if it is considered outside the context of the ideas set forth in, say, The Holy Family, and if one forgets that this is only a thesis and not a full-scale explication of his views (and this is what the critics of Marxism do), then its content may appear to be non-materialist.
When .attacking speculative idealism, Feuerhach emphasised the cognitive importance of sensuousness, the cognition of sensuously perceived objects. He regarded sensual activity as a totality of psychic acts: sensations, perceptions, emotions, etc. But practice is not a psychic process, although it does, of course, include psychic acts. Practice is the joint activity of individuals working to change the objective world. This is a point which Feuerbach missed: "Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity" (/, 5; 7).
The analysis of earlier materialism shows that it failed to understand the epistemological importance of practice, and to include the concept of practice in the theory of knowledge. Here, Marx does not deal with the contemplative attitude to reality in general (that is a shortcoming which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists, for instance, did not have) but with the epistemological limitations of the old materialism, which ignored the dialectical character of reflection, the dialectics of the subjective and the objective, _-_-_
^^*^^ Alfred Stern insists that Marx is the founder of pragmatism: "Pragmatism is not an invention of the American philosophers Charles Pierre and William James. It was established by Marx a half-century before them. In his "Theses on Feuerbach", Marx set forth the principles of pragmatism" (.'>/>, 315).
346 the theoretical and the practical. This makes it clear why Marx says that the idealists, who worked out the question of the active, subjective aspect of cognition, did not take the contemplative approach. He has in mind above all the dialectical idealists, who attached crucial importance in cognition to practice interpreted in idealistic terms. Noting this positive aspect of the epistemological views of the outstanding idealists, Marx explains that idealism takes an extremely abstract view of the subject's cognitive activity, since, of course, "idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such" (/, 5; 6).Social practice is the active material basis of cognition, the substantive subject-object relation in which the ideal and the material are transformed into each other. Such are the main conclusions suggested by Marx's criticism of the contemplative character of the old materialism, on the one hand, and the speculative view of practice taken by the dialectical idealists, on the other. Marx regards theory and practice as relative opposites, which, one could say, fill out each other; theory becomes a part of practice (at a definite stage of its development, of course) just as practice becomes the content of theory. This dialectical view of the process of reflection, of the cognition of the world, is the starting point for the revolution in epistemology which was carried out by dialectical materialism.
Marx says that practice is crucial in deciding the question of the existence of the external world, of objective reality, which is independent of human consciousness. While Hegel asserted that only "pure being" could be assumed immediately, i.e., without any theoretical premises, and Feuerbach insisted on an unconditional recognition of the truth of the whole content of sensual data, Marx declares that only practice proves that our thinking is objective, i.e., that our concepts (like our ideas) have objective content, which precedes cognition and is independent of it. To try to deduce the existence of nature logically is to assume the existence of something before nature, i.e., to take the idealist standpoint. The attempts to prove the objective truth of thinking in purely logical terms are futile and scholastic: "Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question" (I, 5: 6). Does 347 this mean that theoretical thinking has no part in deciding the question of the existence of objective reality, of its cognisability, of the cognitive role of ideas and concepts? Of course, not. Marx does not contrast practice and theoretical thinking, but practice and irrelevant idealistic speculations. He criticises the contrasting of theoretical thinking and practice, so substantiating the unity of thinking (cognition, theory) and practical activity, and the dialectics of these opposites does not do away with their relative independence or with their essential distinctions.
Mankind comprehends its capability of cognising the world not because it has analysed its own cognitive capabilities in advance, but because it is engaged in practical activity and owing to this cognises, coming to realise that the world is cognisable. Long before philosophy came on the scene, practice, life itself, solved the problem of the relation between man's thinking and being, the external reality, and it is up. to philosophy to comprehend this practical solution theoretically: "All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice" (I, 5; 8).
Consequently, Marx does not at all say that the solution of fundamental philosophical problems can be attained by practice alone: practice itself, he says, has to be comprehended, i.e., theoretically analysed.
Dialectical materialism has nothing in common with intuistic interpretation of the data of practice as being given to consciousness immediately and absolutely. Marx objects to the efforts to separate theoretical thinking and practice and also rejects the separation of practice from theoretical thinking.
Practice, Marx says, is not just the basis of cognition, for it is such only because it constitutes the most important content of human life. "Social life is essentially practical" (1, 5; 8). This does not require any special explanation, considering that the scientific view of material practice, whose basic form is production, labour, was set out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and in The Holy Family. Since production is the basis of social life, practice is the basis of cognition, whatever its form. This does not mean, of course, that the concept of practice boils down to the concept of production: practice is as diverse as cognition.
In his "Theses on Feuerbach", Marx lays logical emphasis 348 on the concept of revolutionary practice, i.e., the class struggle that transforms social relations. This concept is obviously of tremendous importance not only for epistemology but also for the materialist conception of history and scientific communism. As he elaborated it, he criticised the theory of education produced by earlier materialists, a theory which the Utopian socialists adopted as the basis of their theory for a socialist restructuring of society. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels refer to this theory and note the historically progressive ideas and the rudiments of the materialist view of history which it contains. In his "Theses on Feuerbach", Marx goes on to expose the utopianism of the idea of remaking the human race through education: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence, this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example).
``The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice" (1, 5; 7).
So the basic defect of the sociological conception of education worked out by the French materialists and Utopian socialists lay above all in the fact that it excluded the class struggle, revolutionary practice, i.e., the key forces of social transformation. Consequently, it took a limited view of education itself. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who advocated this view had naive Utopian notions about the possibility of educating man for a future socialist society under capitalism. The point is that men themselves change as they change social relations in the process of the class struggle and revolutionary practice. The transformation of the conditions of human life and the change of the human substance constitute a single whole, and it would be Utopian to assume that one could first transform men and then the circumstances of their life. But it would be equally wrong to assume that men do not change as they transform the conditions of their life.
Practice, which Marx initially regarded in epistemological terms, is now defined as a sociological category. It is this definition of practice as the unity of freedom and necessity, 349 of men's subjective activity and the objective consequences of their activity ("change of circumstances").that should be seen as its main philosophical definition because it is directly based on the materialist view of history. From this standpoint, Marx analyses Feuerbach's doctrine of religious alienation and shows that it lacks understanding of the role of social practice, and especially of the importance of ``revolutionary'', ``practical-critical'', activity.
Feuerbach brought out the diverse secular content in the various religious notions. But how are we to explain that this very real content of religion assumes a special fantastic form of expression? Feuerbach fails to give any clear-cut answer to this question, because he takes a basically anthropological view of the reasons for which religion exists, referring to the fear of death, the urge for happiness, etc. But this does not explain why religion is historically transient. What then needs to be done to eliminate the religious duplication of the world, man's religious alienation? That is another question Feuerbach fails to answer, chiefly because he had, in effect, no idea of revolutionary practice, of revolutionary transformation of social being and the social consciousness it produces. "Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and transformed in practice" (7, 5; 7).
Marx says that the secular, material basis of religion is fragmented and self-contradictory, and urges the need for a practical, revolutionary abolition of the social antagonisms which produce the religious duplication of the world. This differs fundamentally from Feuerbach's assertion that the substance of religion is the human substance. But what is the human substance? According to Feuerbach, it is the species 350 community of individuals held together by natural bonds. Since each individual has definite features of the species, he is an embodiment of the human substance. But social consciousness and religion, as one of its forms, cannot be explained in anthropological terms.
Feuerbach, Marx says, fails to see that the religious consciousness is a social product. Feuerbach's anthropologically characterised individual is an abstract man, despite all the emphasis on his being a living, sensuous and emotional individual. The substance of man cannot be reduced to his individual features, i.e., to that which distinguishes him from other human beings, because man is, above all, a social being. The individual is a specific mode of being of the social. But Feuerbach starts from the individual, from the nature of the individual, which he regards as something primordial, like nature. Marx says: "But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" (/, 5; 7). Consequently, criticism of religion can only get down to the true roots of the religious consciousness when it analyses the social relations that produce religion. But Feuerbach hardly, if at all, criticises the social relations and directs the thrust of his criticism against their fantastic, ideal expression (religion, idealism), failing to see what they reflect and present in a mystical form.
It would be naive to suppose that Feuerbach alone had these shortcomings. They will be found in the whole of earlier materialism, and Marx concentrates on criticising Feuerbach's doctrine only because it brings out these defects more clearly, for Feuerbach went beyond other pre-Marxian materialists in his criticism of religion and idealism.
The definition of the substance of man as the totality of the social relations marks a radical break with Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology, which assumes man to be something primordial and basically prehistoric, something that unfolds only in the course of history. By contrast, historical materialism regards social relations in the process of change (which means that they are qualitatively distinct in various epochs), as determined by the development level of the productive forces, and hence derivative, secondary. From this standpoint, the substance of man, i.e., the totality of the social relations, is created by mankind itself in the course of world history. This is a fundamentally new view of man and 351 mankind, which we do not yet find in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where the concept of man's social substance is linked mainly with a characterisation of the human individual, his relation with other men and with himself. But while this view of the human substance as something inherent in the individual may establish the essential distinctions between one human individual and another, it does not explain the historically changing and developing social substance of man. In this connection Engels wrote: "But from the abstract man of Feuerbach one arrives at real living men only when one considers them as participants in history.... The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach's new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development" (2, 3; 360). Explaining the principles of the materialist conception of history, Lenin remarked that Marx reduced the individual to the social, and the latter, i.e., men's social relations, to the primary and definitive relations of production. Marx's ``Theses'' is a landmark in the scientific understanding of the substance of the socio-historical process.
In the concluding theses on Feuerbach, Marx contrasts his "new materialism" to the whole of earlier materialist philosophy, which confined itself to contemplating individuals in civil society, i.e., to accepting the fact of the existence of a class-divided (in particular bourgeois) society as something quite natural and everlasting. "The standpoint of the old materialism is `civil' society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or associated humanity" (/, 5; 8). This should not be taken to mean that the materialists alone took the standpoint of the ``civil'' society, while the idealists rejected it. Marx sums up the critical analysis of earlier materialist doctrines, shows their historical limitations and opposes to them the new, dialectico-materialist philosophy, which is the theoretical basis of scientific communism. Marx and Fngels parted company with idealism back in 1844, while the fact that idealism was firmly rooted in the "civil society" \\.is established by Marx even before that---in the MS, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Incidentally, in his ``Theses'', Marx does not deal with the materialists alone. His final, llth thesis, which follows directly upon the one quoted above, and which elaborates on its content, applies equally to all philosophical teachings, which 352 had been the ideology of economically or politically dominant exploiting classes: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (7, 5; 8).
Present-day critics of Marxism distort the true meaning of this final thesis, when they insist that it denies the need for a scientific explanation of the world and means a limited, pragmatic approach which Marxism has always eschewed. From the standpoint of dialectical and historical materialism, there is riothing in cognition that does not have either a direct or indirect relation to practice. Marx's final thesis does not in the least deny the need for a scientific explanation of the world and does not at all contrast the need to change and to explain the world. What he does contrast is the philosophy which theoretically substantiates the need to change the world (and this philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism), and the philosophy which is satisfied with interpreting it, so inclining to an acceptance and justification of that which exists, because it has its own basis, a long history, and so on. Consequently, Marx criticises the philosophers who are content merely to understand what is, and go no farther. In contrast to this impassive attitude to social reality which enslaves and distorts man, in contrast to this philosophical ``non-partisanship'' which actually meets the interests of the exploiting classes, Marx presents a scientific explanation of reality which serves its revolutionary change. What Marx's thesis urges is not a denial of the role of theory, but a raising of its scientific level to a point where it can discover the laws fon jchainging reality.
The truly scientific explanation of the world is the theoretical substantiation of ways to transform it, and it is organically connected with revolutionary practice. Thus, we have here the unity of theory and practice, which raises both to a new and higher level. To say that this is a neglect of theory is to insist that the speculative (and generally idealistic) interpretation of the theory-practice relation is the only possible one. This is altogether unwarranted.
Even when pre-Marxian philosophers did not contrast theory and practice (say in mastering nature's elemental forces), they were unable to turn philosophy into a study of the most general laws for changing reality, especially social life. The eighteenth century French materialists were revolutionary fighters against feudalism, but they did not rise __PRINTERS_P_353_COMMENT__ 12---185 353 to an explanation of reality which would provide a theoretical back-up for its practical change.
Thus, Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, taken in the context of the other theses and of the earlier writings of the founders of Marxism, is an aphoristic definition of the substance of dialectical and historical materialism, the substance of the revolution which Marxism has carried out in philosophy.
Feuerbach, whose aphorisms frequently contained fundamentally new ideas in embryo, once wrote: "True philosophy does not consist in creating books, but in creating men" (24; 323), This may appear to be almost identical with Marx's llth thesis Indeed, it may have had some influence on Marx, but Feuerbach's suggestion is that philosophy should educate men, which means that he does not go beyond the bounds of the theory of education itself, which Marx criticised. This comparison of two, apparently similar theses, shows very well the fundamental distinction between the thinking of the two men.
Lenin repeatedly stressed the profound social meaning of Marx's 11th thesis, which he regarded as the philosophical substantiation of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. Criticising the opportunist interpretation of the proletariat's tasks in the 1905 revolution in Russia, Lenin wrote: "The new-/.sfera manner of expressing its \iews reminds one of Marx's opinion (stated in his famous " Theses on Feuerbach") of the old materialism, which was alien to the ideas of dialectics. The philosophers have onK interpreted the world in various ways, said Marx; the point, however, is to change it. Similarly, the new-Iskra group can give a tolerable description and explanation of the process of struggle taking place before their eyes, but they are altogether incapable of giving a correct slogan for this struggle. Good marchers, but poor leaders, they disparage the materialist conception of history by ignoring the active, leading, and guiding part which can and must be played in history by parties that have realised the material prerequisites of a revolution and have placed themselves at the head of the progressive classes" (5, 9; 43-44). Lenin shows that Marx's final thesis on Feuerbach is a seminal one for the materialist view of history, and especially for the Marxist doctrine of the role of the subjective factor in the socio-historical process.
Consequently, Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" are a 354 further development and summing-up of the ideas he expressed in the earlier period, and also formulate new problems and ideas of dialectical and historical materialism. That is why they can be correctly understood and interpreted only in the context of the earlier and later writings of the founders of Marxism.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 6 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX'S AND ENGELS'S THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY.The German Ideology, which Marx and Engels wrote in 1845 and 1846, was another great stride forward* in elaborating the principles of the Marxist philosophy and scientific communism. It presents the scientific theory of the proletariat's emancipation struggle and the Marxist scientific philosophical world view in contrast to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology along all the main lines. Here, Marx and Engels no longer call their doctrine "real humanism" but communism, communist and also practical materialism. It is quite obviously antithetical not only to idealism, but also to Feuerbach's metaphysical materialism, and, what is equally important, to petty-bourgeois socialism. The critique of bourgeois ideology (in its refined, philosophical form of "German ideology") goes hand in hand with an exposure of petty-bourgeois socialism.
Lenin said that in The Holy Family, the founders of Marxism only approached the idea of relations of production, but in The German Ideology they analyse, even if in general terms, the historical succession of forms of property as forms of social intercourse corresponding to definite levels in the development of the productive forces, indeed, the relations of production. Here they elaborate the doctrine of the class struggle, of social revolutions generally and of the proletarian revolution in particular.
The German Ideology is the major work of the period of the shaping of Marxism. It sets forth the basic propositions of the Marxist philosophy, and especially of historical materialism. Here, use is first made of the term "materialistic conception of history". Marx and Engels were able to produce this outstanding work because of their active 355 participation in the working-class movement, their study and summing-up of the experience of the proletariat's class struggle, and their revolutionary critical digest of earlier philosophical, economic and socialist doctrines.
In the spring of 1845, when Marx and Engels once again met in Brussels, a revolutionary situation was once again in the offing in Europe. They worked /hard to unite the scattered communist groups in the various countries of Europe. In early 1846, on Marx's initiative, an international Communist Correspondence Committee was set up in Brussels.^^*^^ The numerous letters received by Marx and Engels in that period, especially those from their German supporters, showed the growing influence of communist ideas. Thus, Daniels (subsequently a member of the Communist League) informed Marx about the strengthening of the communist group in Cologne (18; 179, 1). The same is reported in letters from Bernays, Schapper, Harney, Moll, Rosenthal and other correspondents. Years later, Engels wrote about this period as follows: "We were both of us already deeply involved in the political movement, and possessed a certain following in the educated world, especially of Western Germany, and abundant contact with the organised proletariat" (2, 3; 179).
Marx and Engels established ties with the revolutionary section of the Chartists, the French Socialist-Democratic Party, led by Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, with the alliance of Fraternal Democrats (bringing together English, French, _-_-_
^^*^^ In this context Marx wrote to Proudhon on May 5, 1846: "Together with two friends of mine, Frederick Engels and Philippe Gigot (both in Brussels), I have organised a continuous correspondence with the German Communists and Socialists, which is to take up both the discussion of scientific questions and a critical review of popular publications as well as socialist propaganda, which can be carried on in Germany by this means. It will be the chief aim of our correspondence, however, to put the German Socialists in contact with the French and English Socialists; to keep the foreigners posted on the socialist movements that will take place in Germany, and to inform the Germans in Germany of the progress of socialism in France and England.... Besides the Communists in Germany our correspondence will also embrace the German Socialists in Paris and London. Our connections with England have already been established; as for France, we are all of the opinion that we could not find a better correspondent there than you" (3; 24). But Proudhon refused to co-operate with the Committee, for by then he had joined with the leader of the "True Socialists" Grun, so that the tasks formulated in Marx's letter were alien to him.
356 Russian and Polish revolutionaries) and especially with the League of the Just, whose leaders, Bauer, Schapper and Moll, Engels had met in London in 1843. At that time it was a secret association mainly of German artisans and workers in which Blanqui's and Weitling's ideas predominated.There is no doubt that by the time they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee, Marx and Engels believed that it was their task to convert the petty-bourgeois League of the Just into a truly revolutionary, communist organisation. Marx subsequently recalled: "We published a number of pamphlets, partly in the printed form, partly lithographic, in which we mercilessly criticised that mixture of French-English Socialism or communism and German philosophy which made up the secret teaching of the Union; instead of this we proposed a scientific research into the economic structure of bourgeois society as the only stable theoretical basis, and, finally, explained in a popular form that this involved not only the implementation of some Utopian scheme, but also conscious participation in the revolutionary transformation of society occurring before our eyes." (,4a, 14; 43).
Engels's letter to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee dated October 23, 1846, gives a good idea of the work the two men were carrying on with the members of the League of the Just. It describes Engels's participation in discussions at meetings of the Paris Section of the League. Most of its members were under the influence of "true socialist" Griin and Proudhon, whose ideas Engels criticised. "The chief point was to prove the necessity for revolution by force and in general to refute Griin's true socialism, which derived new life from the Proudhon panacea, and was an anti-proletarian, petty-bourgeois, Straubingerian theory" (3; 27)^^*^^ When the members of the section demanded a definition of communism, Engels said that he "gave them an extremely simple definition. It covered no more than the particular points at issue and, by positing community of
_-_-_^^*^^ In another letter to Marx Engels describes Griin's activity in the League of the Just: "Griin has done a fearful lot of harm. He has turned everything definite in the minds of these fellows into mere daydreams, humanitarian aspirations, etc. Under the pretence of attacking Weitlingian and other doctrinaire communism he stuffed their heads full of vague literary and petty-bourgeois phrases and claimed everything else was __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 358. 357 goods, ruled out peaceableness, tenderness and consideration for the bourgeoisie or the Straubingers, and, finally, the Proudhonian joint-stock company with its retention of individual property and all that this involves.... I therefore defined the objects of the Communists in this way: 1) to safeguard the interests of the proletariat as against those of the bourgeoisie; 2) to do this through the abolition of private property and its replacement by community of goods; 3) to , recognise no means of carrying out these objects other than a democratic revolution by force" (3, 27).
Let us note that although Engels believed the definition to be no more than a preliminary one, it marks a new stride forward in clarifying the essence of the communist transformation of society and of the communist doctrine itself: communism is directly opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie as a scientific expression of the interests of the proletariat, from which it directly follows that it is quite impossible to realise communism in a bourgeois society, i.e., in a non-revolutionary way. The concept of "democratic revolution by force" is apparently contrasted with the tactics of conspirators, who sought to overthrow the capitalist system in an uprising prepared by a secret revolutionary organisation and carried out by a handful of revolutionaries, out of touch with the mass movement, the class struggle, and the struggle for democracy. But this conception is not quite clear or definite in the sense that it does not yet show the proletarian nature of the revolution, whose tasks and content cannot be reduced to the concept of ``democracy'', whatever its interpretation. There is even less clarity in the concept of "common property", which we find again in the writings of the Utopian communists. Subsequently, Marx and Engels came to use the concept of social ownership of the means of production, which draws a distinction between personal and private property.
In their efforts to unite the revolutionary forces, Marx and _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 357. system-mongering. Even the joiners, who were never Weitlingians---or at most only a very few of them were---have got a superstitious fear of the spectre of bread-and-butter communism and---at least before the decision [the Paris commune's decision, taken under Engels's influence, to consider itself communist---T.O.] was taken---would rather support the greatest nonsense, peaceful plans for bestowing happiness on mankind, etc., than this 'bread-and-butter communism'. Boundless confusion reigns here supreme" (3; 29).
358 Engels fought petty-bourgeois socialists---notably Weitling--- whose sectarian policies were slowing down the organisation of a communist party. Weitling's early works and speeches had undoubtedly played a revolutionary role, but he soon became an obstacle to the advance of the socialist movement and its scientific theory. He failed to understand the importance of the class struggle, denied the need for a proletarian party organisation, tried to convert the League of the Just into a sect of fawning followers, rejected even the idea of the scientific elaboration of the problems of communism, and imagined himself to be the founder of the true religion and the saviour of the human race. That is why at a meeting of the Communist Correspondence Committee in March 1846, Marx and Engels sharply criticised Weitling and his followers. The meeting was held in Marx's home, and is described by P. V. Annenkov, who was there.Annenkov says that Marx criticised Weitling's Utopian views and asserted that "to address the working man without a strictly scientific idea and a positive doctrine is tantamount to carrying on an empty and dishonest game of preaching, in which on the one hand there has to be an inspired prophet, and on the other only asses who listen to him with gaping mouths". In reply to Weitling's objections to scientific socialism, or "armchair socialism", as he called it, Marx gave such a thump with his fist on the table that the lamp swayed; he leapt to his feet and exclaimed: "No one has ever yet benefitted from ignorance!" (4a; 483).
In early May 1846, Marx, Engels and several other members of the Committee issued a "Circular Against Kriege" which condemned the pseudo-communist propaganda of Kriege, a German "true socialist" who emigrated to the United States in 1845 and there published a paper, Der Volks-Tribun. In his newspaper articles, he described communism as a religion of love which was to lead the whole of mankind to brotherhood and prosperity. Addressing American women, Kriege tried to convince them that as "true votaries of love" they were designated by nature itself to establish a "kingdom of love" on the earth. It was this feminine "heart brimming with love that was to engender the holy spirit of community". Kriege did not say that communism required the revolutionary abolition of privateproperty relations, and exclaimed: "We do not want to 359 encroach on anyone's private property: let the usurer keep what belongs to him; we merely want to prevent the further plunder of the people's wealth and to prevent capital from continuing its plunder of labour of its legitimate property." This self-styled apostle of ``communism'' declared everywhere that he represented the German Communist Party in the United States. All of this made it necessary for the Committee to attack Kriege.
In their circular, the Committee declared that Kriege "presents communism as the love-imbued opposite of selfishness and reduces a revolutionary movement of worldhistorical importance to the few words: love---hate, communism---selfishness" (1, 6; 41). It rejected the sentimental pseudo-communism, which was based on faith in "the holy spirit of community" and also commented on the movement of the American National Reformists, which Kriege had joined and which he had immediately declared to be communistic. The American National Reformists demanded the abolition of rent for the wastelands that the US government was allotting to settlers. They hoped to prevent the further development of capitalism, with its inevitable consequences---unemployment, poverty, etc.---by giving land to the unemployed and also by nationalising it. Kriege spread the Utopian views of the National Reformists and asserted that every poor man would .have a decent life if society gave him a tract of land to enable him to feed himself and his family.
Marx and Engels always made a careful study of every mass democratic movement and believed it necessary to stress the historically progressive character of the National Reformist Movement, but they rejected Kriege's attempts to present it as the establishment of communism, which Kriege imagined to be a kingdom of small autonomous producers. "We fully recognise that the American national Reformers' movement is historically justified. We know that this movement has set its sights on a goal which, although for the moment it would further the industrialism of modern bourgeois society, nevertheless, as the product of a proletarian movement, as an attack on landed property in general and more particularly in the circumstances obtaining in America, will by its own inner logic inevitably press on to communism" (1, 6; 41-42). Marx and Engels, therefore, suggested the possibility of a democratic movement, in which 360 the proletariat was the leading force, growing into a socialist movement. But Kriege, failing to understand the nature of the movement, distorted its true meaning, just as he did the real content of the theory and practice of communism. If Kriege had supported National Reformism as the first form of an emergent American workers' movement, without idealising it, there would have been no objections, Marx and Engels say: "As things are, however, he declares what is after all a still subordinate form of movement of real specific people to be a matter for mankind in general presents it, against his better knowledge, as the ultimate, supreme goal of all movement in general, and thereby transforms the specific aims of the movement into sheer, extravagant nonsense" (1, 6; 43).
Lenin put a high value on this profound criticism of Kriege's petty-bourgeois pseudo-communism, which is organically hostile to any sectarianism and dogmatism, and wrote: "In 1846, Marx ruthlessly exposed the petty-bourgeois character of the American Socialist-Revolutionary Hermann Kriege, who proposed a veritable General Redistribution for America and called it ``communism''. Marx's dialectical and revolutionary criticism swept away the husks of petty* bourgeois doctrine and picked out the sound kernel of trie 'attacks on landed property' and of the 'Anti-Rent movement'" (5, 13; 282). Lenin's remark on Marx's dialectical and revolutionary criticism brings out a key feature of the Marxist philosophy, its revolutionary-critical character. We find that this basic feature of the dialectico-materialist world view was pronounced as early as 1846.
The ``Circular'' was signed by Marx, Engels, Gigot, Heilberg, Seiler, von Westphalen and Wolff. Weitling refused to sign it, and tried to prevent the Committee from attacking Kriege. At a meeting of the Committee, he declared that in American conditions Der Volks-Tribun was a communist organ. His letters to Kriege show that he failed to understand the meaning and importance of the ``Circular'': he claimed that it was a pack of ``intrigues'' and "fratricidal war" aimed to discredit his own teachings.
When considering the growing influence of Marx and Engels among the communists and democrats of Brussels, in the League of the Just, and so on, one must constantly bear in mind that in that period Marx's doctrine, according to Lenin, was "only one of the very numerous groups or trends 361 of socialism" (5, 18; 582). The task facing the founders of Marxism and their handful of followers was above all to give a scientific substantiation of the socialist ideology and to contrast it, on the one hand, with the ideology of the liberal bourgeoisie, and on the other, with petty-bourgeois socialism. It was necessary to convince the forward-looking proletarians that scientific communism alone indicated the real way for the social emancipation of the working class, a way the proletarians were spontaneously impelled to take by the development of the antagonistic contradictions of capitalism. The task was, furthermore, to show the forward-looking workers the reactionary essence of the petty-bourgeois socialist Utopias and their connection with the bourgeois ideology. Engels subsequently wrote: "It was our duty to provide a scientific foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction" (2, 3; 179).''
That was why Marx and Engels got down to writing The German Ideology.
Let us bear in mind that The German Ideology was not published in their lifetime. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois publishers refused to print a work which criticised bourgeoisdemocratic and petty-bourgeois socialist illusions. The followers of Marx and Engels did not have the money to undertake the publication of such a voluminous work.^^*^^ The MS of the book lay in the archives of Marx and Engels, and Marx subsequently wrote: "We abandoned the manuscript to the growing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose---self-clarification" (2, 1; 505).
German Social-Democrats, in whose archives this brilliant work lay, made no haste to publish it. Its opportunist leaders could not be pleased with the militant party spirit of this work, the relentless criticism of petty-bourgeois socialism, whose ideas were being revived in new forms by socialdemocratic reformists and revisionists. Only through the persistent efforts of F. Mehring did some sections of the book see the light of day. It was first published in full in the language of the original in the USSR in 1932.
_-_-_ ^^*^^ In a letter to Annenkov on December 28, 1846, Marx wrote: "You
would never believe the difficulties which a publication of this kind comes
__NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 363.
362
__NUMERIC_LVL3__
7
__ALPHA_LVL3__
FINAL CRITICISM OF YOUNG HEGELIAN IDEALISM.
CRITIQUE OF STIRNER'S ANARCHISM AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL
PRINCIPLES
The German Ideology completes the ideological rout of Young Hegelian philosophy. The new essential element in the struggle against Young Hegelianism and idealism generally is an analysis of the class roots of these teachings, and also a critique of the philosophical principles of Stirner's anarchism, whose notorious book, The Unique and His Property, was the last product of Young Hegelian idealism to attract attention.
As in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels show that no Young Hegelian tried to give an all-round critique of Hegel's system, although all of them claimed that they had gone beyond it. These left-wing followers of Hegel declared that politics, law and morality were transmuted forms of religious consciousness. Political oppression was interpreted as man's enslavement by religion. Marx and Engels write: "The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Except that the one party attacks this rule as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate" (1, 5; 30).
In contrast to the Young Hegelians, who cultivated illusory notions about ways of abolishing social and political oppression, the founders of Marxism explain that "...all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into `self-consciousness' or transformation into `apparitions', `spectres', `whimsies', etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory" (1, 5; 54).
_-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 362. up against in Germany, from the police on the one hand, and from the publishers, who are themselves the interested representatives of all the tendencies I am attacking, on the other. And as for our own Party, it is not merely that it is poor, but a large section of the German Communist Party is also angry with me for opposing their Utopias and declamations" (3- 39). 363The Young Hegelians confined their attitude to the reactionary status quo merely to theoretical criticism and, in effect, discredited the practical revolutionary struggle by demanding a change in consciousness instead of reality. "This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognise it by means of a different interpretation. The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly 'world shattering' phrases, are the staunchest conservatives" (1, 5; 30). What then is the explanation of the characteristic Young Hegelian combination of revolutionary catch-words and theoretical radicalism, with practical conservatism? The work, "has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; that the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany" (1, 5; 23).
In The Holy Family Marx and Engels explained the characteristic Young Hegelian combination of radical and conservative ideas mainly by pointing to the nature of speculative idealism, but now they deduce their idealistic speculations from definite material conditions, so consistently applying the principle of the materialist view of history, which they discovered. The idealism which had earlier been chiefly the cause of the Young Hegelians' political illusions is now characterised as a specific illusion rooted in definite social reality. They write:
``We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and" philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-bourgeois conditions" (1, 5; 446-47).
This is interesting not only as one of the earliest descriptions of the social roots of definite idealistic teachings. What is also important is that in elaborating their materialist view of history, the founders of Marxism also worked out one of the principles of the Marxist methodology, the principle of the party approach, according to which it is 364 impossible to make a scientific analysis of a social doctrine without studying its class origins and content. Marx and Engels apply this principle not only to the Young Hegelian conceptions, which are patently speculative, but also to French materialism, to Kant's ethics, and so on. The theory of rational egoism and the consequent view of the intercourse of individuals as their mutual use was a reflection, according to Marx and Engels, of the practices of the bourgeois society which was taking shape in France. "The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation" (1, 5; 409).
Such an assessment of the socio-economic principles of the theory of rational egoism and utilitarian concepts of a given epoch, together with an indication of their historically limited content, did not at all mean a denial of their outstanding importance in the development of social thought. Emphasising that "Holbach's theory is the historically justified philosophical illusion about the bourgeoisie just then developing in France, whose thirst for exploitation could still be regarded as a thirst for the full development of individuals in conditions of intercourse freed from the old feudal fetters", Marx and Engels remark not only on its historically progressive character but also on the elements of profound truth which it contains: "Liberation from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, i.e., competition, was, of course, for the eighteenth century the only possible way of offering the individuals a new career for freer development. The theoretical proclamation of the consciousness corresponding to this bourgeois practice, of the consciousness of mutual exploitation as the universal mutual relation of all individuals, was also a bold and open step forward. It was a kind of enlightenment which interpreted the political, patriarchal, religious and sentimental embellishment of exploitation under feudalism in a secular way; the embellishment corresponded to the form of exploitation existing at that time and it had been systematised especially by the theoretical writers of the absolute monarchy" (/, 5; 410). Analysing the subsequent evolution of the utilitarian conception, Marx and Engels draw the conclusion that this initially 365 progressive theory was subsequently converted into an apology of capitalist reality.^^*^^
The German Ideology contains an in-depth analysis of the social meaning of Kant's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Kant's philosophy is characterised as a German theory of the French bourgeois revolution. The conversion of the demands of bourgeois democracy into a priori postulates of practical reason is a reflection of the embryonic state of capitalist relations in Germany and the actual impotence of the German bourgeoisie. Neither Kant nor the German bourgeoisie, whose status and interests were reflected in his philosophy, noticed that the a priori postulates of "good will" were based on "material interests and a will that was conditioned and determined by the material relations of production. Kant, therefore, separated this theoretical expression from the interests which it expressed; he made the materially motivated determinations of the will of the French bourgeois into pure self-determinations of single 'free will', of the will in and for itself, of the human will, and so converted it into purely ideological conceptual determinations and moral postulates" (I, 5; 195). Of course, this is not an exhaustive characterisation of Kant's ethics, and its methodological importance lies in the fact that it indicates the scientific way of analysing the - ideological function of philosophy.
Consequently, in The German Ideology outstanding philosophical teachings of the past are taken as examples to show the tremendous methodological importance of the materialist view of social consciousness and reflection (which is not at all immediate) of social being. Historical materialism is presented not only as a scientific-philosophical theory of social development, but also as a specific method of analysis, which is used for thorough criticism of the teaching of "Saint Max" (M. Stirner), who declared `` selfconsciousness''---the chief category of Young Hegelianism--- to be his own, only and unique self-consciousness. His _-_-_
^^*^^ The economic content gradually turned the utility theory into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today are the most advantageous and generally useful. It has this character among all modern economists" (I, 5; 413-14).
366 doctrine reduces self-consciousness to the unique and, for that reason, to the only human Ego, so acquiring a new idealistic-anthropological tenor.Stirner's philosophy of "pure egoism", in effect, extolled bourgeois individualism, although it appeared to attack bourgeois ideology and to establish anarchism in its stead. The latter's philosophical substantiation boils down to the assertion that the individual was something absolute, in virtue of which the Ego alone, only my own unique subjectiveness, constituted the sole measure of all that existed in society. The transition from the universal selfconsciousness, which according to the Young Hegelians was identical with humanity, with the unique Ego, which rejected all things objective as being incompatible with the boundless objectiveness of the Ego, meant that the "philosophy of self-consciousness" had been carried to its logical end. All social institutions were made dependent on the unique self-consciousness (at any rate, for oneself). Thus, Stirner insisted that the state owed its existence only to the disrespect which the Ego had for itself, so that once this disrespect for one's own personality disappeared, the state would also disappear. Stirner made similar short shrift of the concepts Fatherland, nation, and mankind, regarding these as fetters created by the Ego itself, because it did not dare to be consistent in standing up for its individuality, because it was ashamed of its egoism, which constituted the inner substance, the sacred patrimony and the indefeasible right of the ``unique''.
In substantiating his conception, Stirner tried to comprehend mankind's development in the spirit of Hegel's phenomenology, philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. He claimed that the most important and virtually only result of world history was egoism as the individual's comprehension of his true substance free from the superstitions and spectres created by human weakness. This pure egoistic consciousness could no longer be an object of criticism or moral evaluation.
Marx and Engels exposed the pretentious emptiness of Stirner's philosophical anthropology, in which the child, the youth and the man constitute stages in the development of the individual on the way to true egoistic self-consciousness. The child is fettered with surrounding things, the youth is captive to ideas, and the man, alone free of the power of 367 things and ideas, accepts the world as it is.^^*^^
Stirner makes an equally futile attempt to discover the same triad---child, youth, man---in mankind's world history. He regards antiquity as childhood, the Christian Middle Ages as the period of youth, and recent history, as transition to the man's self-consciousness. He constructs world history in this way mainly on the basis of the history of philosophy, treated in Hegel's spirit. The ancients turn out to be realists (or realistic egoists), men of the Middle Ages, idealists (or idealistic egoists), while men of the new period are a unity of realism and idealism, or true egoists. These three stages in mankind's spiritual development, Stirner claims, will be discovered in the relations among races as well. The Negroes are an embodiment of mankind's childhood, the Mongols, of its youth, and the Caucasians, the superior representatives of the European race, of the true egoism of the man. Marx and Engels say: "Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality" (I, 5; 130). That is why Stirner's speculative construction of history did not explain anything and merely served to illustrate preconceptions by means of historical facts. What then is the real social meaning of his idealistic philosophy?
Above I remarked on his imaginary negation of absolutism, because the true egoist, or the man, rejects only the "wild fantasies" and accepts reality as it is. Thus, the all-destroying unique Ego turns out to be a fairly wellbehaved subject. Stirner displays the same conservative trend of petty-bourgeois anarchism with respect to property. First he identifies private property with ``possession'', and then deduces the concept of property (Eigentum) from the word _-_-_
^^*^^ Here Stirner on the whole followed Hegel who said: "Being consummated in himself, the man also regards the ethical world order not as one which he still has to create, but as one which is already complete in its essential features. That is why he works for the benefit of the cause and not to the detriment of it, is concerned with maintaining the existing order, and not destroying it, thereby rising over the one-sided subjectiveness of the youth, taking the standpoint of objective spirituality" (S3, 10; 97-98). Consequently, like Hegel, Stirner characterised the adult's world view as reconciliation with the existing world.
368 eigen, which means own, proper, specific, so perpetuating private property as something primordial to mankind, by means of an etymological trick. Thus, Stirner rejects only that which is of secondary importance for the bourgeois: Fatherland, nation and mankind. But he sanctifies the economic basis of the bourgeois society as an inalienable patrimony of the human, the unique, etc. Ego.Stirner formulates in a speculative form the ideas which the bourgeois inexperienced in philosophy expresses in prosaic form: "When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the communists: by abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed proprietor, as a factory-owner, and your existence as workers, you abolish my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent, you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual.---When, therefore, the bourgeois tells the communists: by abolishing my existence as a bourgeois, you abolish my existence as an individual; when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an individual, one must, at least, recognise his frankness and shamelessness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be an individual only insofar as he is a bourgeois" (7, 5; 229). Then a philosopher appears on the scene and gives these assertions a speculative expression, i.e., one which is allegedly independent of the bourgeois' interests, so converting into an everlasting truth the bourgeois attitude to the means of production. Is it surprising, therefore, that Stirner attacked communism?
Like all petty bourgeois, Stirner regarded the proletariat not as a productive class but as a mob of paupers. Confusing his concepts, he calls communism social liberalism, as distinct from conventional, political liberalism, and characterised these two brands of ``liberalism'' as imperfect modes of existence of the truly egoistical subject. Stirner tried to rise above these extremes and to overcome them by means of his speculative anarchism, which he called "humane liberalism". This is allegedly the most perfect egoism and, consequently, a negation of ordinary egoism, a negation of God for the sake of man, a negation of man "in general" for the sake of the given and unique human subject who---for himself, at any rate---is the primary, supreme and unique reality. Stirner wrote: "God is concerned only with himself, he also thinks and takes care only of himself, and has himself 369 exclusively in mind; woe to him who is not acceptable to him. Consequently, God does not serve anything supreme and wishes only to satisfy himself. So, his aims are purely egoistical" (56; 13). However, it is not only God but also mankind, trie people, the nation, that are, Stirner said, great egoists. That is why "instead of serving great egoists, / prefer to be an egoist myself" (56; 14).
It was only natural that Stirner was incapable of giving a scientific explanation to the contradiction between personal and social interests, between egoism and selflessness, between the individual and society in general. He did not see the real roots of individualism and egoism, which he took to be natural qualities of the individual. His critical remarks about communism showed that he failed to see the connection between the domination of social relations over men and economic conditions which were definite, and historically inevitable, but also transient. "Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists; etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals" (1, 5; 247).
We can say, therefore, that the critique of Young Hegelianism, and especially of Stirner's philosophy, in The German Ideology, is an analysis of the real class content of the philosophical conceptions of German bourgeois radicalism. This analysis of a specific form of social consciousness, based on the materialist view of history, shows the rapid advance in the elaboration of the principles of Marxist philosophy.
The exposure of Young Hegelianism and idealism generally, which is such a prominent element of The German Ideology, is directly connected with the substantiation of the key propositions of dialectical and historical materialism. The results of this analysis need naturally to be considered separately, but before we do this let us look at the critique by Marx and Engels of Feuerbach's doctrine, because their critique is aimed above all against the idealistic view of history.
370 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 8 __ALPHA_LVL3__ NEW ASPECTS OF THE MATERIALIST CRITIQUEChapter I of The German Ideology entitled ``Feuerbach'' has the following subtitle: "Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks". The critique of Feuerbach's doctrine is only part of its content and is subordinate to the exposition of the principles of the materialist view of history.^^*^^ In his "Theses on Feuerbach", Marx criticised the contemplative character of Feuerbach's materialism, but here the criticism is directed at the idealistic view of history, which Feuerbach shared with all pre-Marxian materialists. This marks a new stride forward in substantiating the dialectico-materialist world view. It is one thing to criticise the speculative idealistic philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and quite another to bring out and critically analyse the idealistic view of history in a materialist philosophy. Let us bear in mind that before Marx and Engels no philosopher was aware of this contradiction that is inherent in metaphysical materialism.
Marx and Engels write: "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely..." (1, 5; 41). How is Feuerbach's idealism expressed? He says that human emotions, passions and urges are the mainspring of history, which means that he regards the secondary motives for human activity as the primary and definitive ones. That is why Feuerbach does not consider the question of the objective determination of ideal motives or of the historical change in their content.
In contrast to the theological and speculative view of history, Feuerbach presents a naturalistic conception _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1965, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CC CPSU published the enlarged and corrected text of Chapter I of the book, which included the two new sheets of the MS that had been found at the Amsterdam Institute of Social History and that were published in 1962. The introduction by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the publication says: "Unlike the other chapters, which are mainly polemical, it was conceived as a general introduction expounding the materialist conception of history.... Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology occupies a special place in the work as a whole" (1, 5; XVII).
371 according to which men themselves make their own history. But he loses his way when dealing with the abstraction of man, the true, individual, corporeal man. It is true that the view of man as a "sensuous object" whose behaviour is determined by his specific substance constitutes, according to Marx and Engels, the great advantage that Feuerbach has over the materialists who regarded man merely as a body of nature subordinate to its laws. But there again Feuerbach stops half way because he considers men outside the context of the social conditions which shape and change this specific substance of man. Social conditions are created and changed by men themselves throughout the whole history of mankind. That is what makes social conditions relatively independent of the consciousness and will of every given generation of men, who also change themselves while changing these conditions.Another point Feuerbach failed to see was that social conditions are qualitatively different from the natural conditions in which animals exist. Material production transforms nature, thereby changing the living conditions of men. But Feuerbach "does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed [a product] in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, and modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest 'sensuous certainty' are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse" (1, 5; 39).
This is a formulation not only of the principles of historical materialism but also of the dialectico-materialist view of the nature of the sensuously certain not merely as being immediately given but also as becoming such in the process of the practical assimilation of the world. Our knowledge, even in its initial sensuous form, is never merely immediate: every reflection of the external world is more or less a unity of the immediate and the mediated.^^*^^ While _-_-_
^^*^^ But Feuerbach regards even natural science as the immediate perception of nature, in this way seeking to contrast its achievements with the futile idealistic speculations. Marx and Engels point to the limited nature of this view: "Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 373. 372 changing the world, man also transforms the sensuously certain and creates new objects of sensuous perception which are possible only in society. Thanks to his theoretical knowledge, which shows the inner connections of phenomena, man discovers new aspects of reality, which are, it is true, only indirectly accessible to human perception.
Polemicising with Hegel, Feuerbach discarded the former's idea of the unity of the immediate and the mediated in cognition and put instead of the doctrine of speculative reflection his thesis concerning the inexhaustible world of sensuous knowledge. Without in any way minimising the cognitive role of the senses, Marx and Engels re-establish Hegel's dialectical idea and develop it in materialist terms.
Consequently, the critical analysis of Feuerbach's philosophy in The German Ideology showed the organic connection between the contemplative character of Feuerbach's materialism, the anthropological interpretation of human nature, and the idealistic view of history. The anthropological interpretation of social life starts from the metaphysical notion of the individual, which is inherent in contemplative materialism, and keeps returning to this isolated subject, ignoring the role of material production in the development of all social relations, which for its part leads to the idealistic view of history, on the one hand, and idealisation of the bourgeois-democratic order, on the other. Feuerbach takes a totally unhistorical view of the latter and regards it merely as human order determined by nature outside of us and of human nature itself. "He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; therefore when, for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the 'higher perception' and in the ideal 'compensation in the species', and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 372. science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this `pure' natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men" (/, 5; 40).
373 condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure (1, 5; 41).It will be easily seen that this "higher perception" and ideal "compensation in the species" are a form of idealistic surrender to the fact of man's exploitation by man, of whose objective historical inevitability Feuerbach is not aware. As a humanist he cannot ignore the fact, but as a bourgeois democrat he fails to see either the real causes of the situation or the law-governed emergence from it.
Marx and Engels show that Feuerbach's anthropological principle, historically progressive in the struggle for bourgeois democracy under established capitalism, begins to play a conservative role because it starts from a recognition of ``natural'' social conditions of human life, which Feuerbach seeks to discover in the existing, i.e., bourgeois, society.^^*^^ Feuerbach fails to see that the unity of man and the conditions of his existence is not something that is immediately given and immutable: it is contradictory and tends to change throughout the history of mankind. Subjectively, he was, of course, no apologist of capitalism.
Feuerbach, Marx and Engels say, calls himself a communist, but he is not one. They reject his claim to regard anthropological materialism and the conclusions it suggests about the natural equality of men and the necessity of intercourse among them as the philosophical basis of communism. Feuerbach converts communism, the doctrine of a definite revolutionary party, into an abstract category deduced from a concept of "social man", which for its part is defined as the predicate of true man, etc. "Feuerbach's whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always _-_-_
^^*^^ Thus, he asserts that "with the exception of unnatural cases, all living beings willingly remain where they exist, such as they are, willingly constituting that which they are in reality, in other words, their substance is not separated from their being, and their being is not separated from their substance" (27; 135). Referring to this passage, Marx and Engels remark: "Thus millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions if their `being' does not in the least correspond to their `essence', then, according to the passage quoted, this is unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. These millions of proletarians or communists, however, think quite differently and will prove this in time, when they bring their `being' into harmony with their `essence' in a practical way, by means of a revolution" (I, 5; 58). The above is an extract from the new publication of Chapter I, of The German Ideology,
374 have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, he merely wants to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real Communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things" (1, 5; 57-58).^^*^^Marx and Engels show that the naturalistic interpretation of communist ideas is closely linked with the unhistorical approach. Feuerbach derives the necessity of communism not from a negation of the capitalist system, but from a comprehension of the existing, i.e., capitalist social relations. Consequently, his ``communism'' does not include anything communistic, but is merely a society in which men are diversely dependent on each other. Feuerbach says that the comprehension of this fact is realisation of the human substance, communism, etc. But the point is that capitalism merely creates the prerequisites for communism which can develop into a real economic basis for a classless society only through a revolutionary negation of the capitalist system. Marx and Engels remark that "for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything but embryos capable of development" (/, 5; 38-39).
We find, therefore, that while criticising Feuerbach's idealism in the field of sociology and exposing its theoretical and class roots, the founders of Marxism note the embryos of a higher and more profound view, which are capable of development, in his doctrine. They abandon the exaggerated evaluation of his philosophy, as set forth in The Holy Family, but still point to the outstanding importance of the problems he raised because their solution led to the materialist view of social life. "Owing to the fact that Feuerbach showed the religious world as an illusion of the earthly world---a world _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx and Engels add: "We fully appreciate, however, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher" (J, 5; 58). By this is probably meant a theoretician out of touch with practice, a philosopher who confines himself to interpreting what exists, as formulated in the llth Thesis on Feuerbach.
375 which in his writings appears merely as a phrase---German theory too was confronted with the question which he left unanswered: how did it come about that people `got' these illusions 'into their heads' ? Even for the German theoreticians this question paved the way to the materialistic view of the world, a view which is not without premises, but which empirically observes the actual material premises as such, and for that reason is, for the first time, actually a critical view of the world" (1, 5; 236).Consequently, the materialist view of history is not a mere reduction of society's spiritual life to its material life: there is a need above all to define the concept of material life in concrete terms, to study its development and its intrinsic contradictions. But even that is not enough, because the task also consists in deducing the various forms of social consciousness from the material basis of social life. Elaborate consideration of these questions keynotes the content of The German Ideology.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 9 __ALPHA_LVL3__ BASIC PREMISES OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.The premises for the materialist view of history are not speculative but empirical. Marx and Engels explain that these are real individuals and the material conditions of their existence. Individuals are corporeal living beings organised in a definite way, and this, in turn, entails definite 'relations between them and nature. The scientific view of history must above all take into account these natural prerequisites of social life.
So these prerequisites are men, population, and natural and geographical conditions. Because men change nature in the process of material production, the latter constitutes an equally obvious empirical premise for a science of society. What is the relation between the production of material goods and the reproduction of human life? In order to live and, consequently, to reproduce their kind, men must eat, drink, have housing, clothing and various other things. Of course, thinkers before Marx were aware of this fact, but the whole point is the statement of the well-known facts, 376 especially when these are duly appreciated. "The hrst historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself" (1, 5; 42). This first historical act needs to be comprehended in the full scope of its content, with all the consequences that follow from it for the various spheres of social life.
``The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, leads to new needs" (1, 5; 42). Needs, created by production, themselves become the motive force for the development of production.
The third basic fact of social life which has a constant impact on the development of society is the propagation of men, the relations between husband and wife, parents and children, the family, which "...to begin with is the only social relation..." (1, 5; 43). Subsequently, with the development of new needs and diverse social ties, the family and the propagation of men become "a subordinate relation" ultimately determined by the development of social production.
``The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, and on the other as a social relation---social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end" (7, 5; 43). In this twofold relation, the crucial role belongs to the "mode of co-operation", to society's "productive force", because "the aggregate of productive forces accessible to men determines the condition of society" (1, 5; 43).
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The Holy Family proved that man's nature is determined by the development of material production, i.e., by the conditions which are not given to man primordially and externally. The German Ideology elaborates this idea and regards man's diverse distinctions from other animals as taking shape historically. That which determines man's chief distinction from other living beings ultimately determines all the other distinctions between them. "Men can be distinguished from animals by conscience, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical 377 __FIX__ White streaks down page, ink missing. organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life" (/, 5; 31). Consequently, man's distinction from the animal is genetic and historical. That is why the historically rooted distinction between the human individual and the individual animal subsequently remains regardless of whether that individual is engaged i labour.-But what is possible fo individuals, for a minority, ;• impo ible for the mass, for the majority of individual whose vital activity coincides with p' luction to a greater or lesser extent. "As individuals expre their life, so they a; . Wha: they are, therefore, coincide:, with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Fence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production" (1, 5; 31-32).
``re-Mai an soc, <logy regarded production as being, at btst, a vi but extra-historical necessity, because animals also variously obtain their food, build nests, holes, etc. "In the whofe onception of history up to the present this real basis of h: =ory has either been totally disregarded or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history" (1, 5; 55).^^*^^ The scientific view of society cannot be confined to a ; ecognition of material production as a nf-ressary condition of the life of men. Even recognition of tl,;j uninterrupted progress of production is fully compatible vhh the idealistic view of history. Historical materialism b r'ins with the concept of social form of production, i.e., re, tions of production which are determined by production ( d which change in the course of history iri consequence of tl changing nature of production). The well-known student of The German Ideology, G. A. Bagaturia, is quite right when he says that "the concept of productive forces existed in _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx and Engels ,;,*d: "History must, therefore, always be written ac rding to <m extraneous standard; the real production of life appears as non-historical, while the historical appears as something separated from ordinary life, something tra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to ature is "xcluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is c ated. The exponents of this conception of history have co. .equently only been at Se to see in history the spectacular political events ami religious ';nd other :;eoretical struggles, and in particular with regard to :ach histcr-cal epoch ihey were compelled to share the illusion of that epoch" (1, 5; .i5). Elsewhere, they note, however, that the French and the English "...he neverthe "ss made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic b :is by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce, and industry" (1, 5; 42).
378 pre-Marxian political economy as well" (8; 143). Although the Marxist view of productive forces differs substantially from the pre-Marxian view, the key concept of historical materialism is the concept of relations of production which are determined by the level (and character) of the productive forces, and which, for their part, operate as the economic basis in determining the political and ideological superstructure.Historical materialism analyses the diverse conneclions of all the aspects of life in society with the material basis which determines them. Consequently, the materialist view of history consists in "starting from the material production of life itself---and comprehending the form .of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production, i.e., civil society in its various stages, as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc., etc., arise from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that basis; thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)" (7, 5; 53).
So, The German Ideology formulates such basic concepts of historical materialism as mode of production, relations of production (which are usually called "forms of intercourse"), basis and superstructure, social consciousness, ideology, state system, etc. It is true that these basic concepts do not always meet the requirements of mature Marxism. Thus, a somewhat extended view is taken of the concept of mode of production: "The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they actually find in existence and have to reproduce.
This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their lives, a definite mode of life on their part" (1, 5; 31). However, when analysing the relation between the various aspects of social life and the development of material production, the founders of Marxism also specify and concretise this concept, showing the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between them, the role of 379 this contradiction in the development of society, and so on.
Marx and Engels regard relations of production, or forms of intercourse, as historically rooted relations between men in the process of production: these are determined by the existing productive forces and constitute the basis which determines the state system and the ideological superstructure. "The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society" (1, 5; 50). Consequently, the civil society is defined as the totality of relations of production, i.e., the economic structure of society, because it "embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage..." (1, 5; 89). Considering that in German civil society (biirgerliche Gesellschaft) also means bourgeois society, Marx and Engels believe it to be necessary to draw a distinction between the two concepts. "Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and intercourse, which in all ages forms the basis of the state and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name" (1, 5; 89). Despite the imprecise terminology ("idealistic superstructure") and the idea concerning the immediate connection between the civil society and material production, which needs to be specified, this distinction is highly important methodologically because it helps to draw a distinction between one of the socioeconomic formations (capitalism) and the definitive feature which is common to all formations, namely, the existence of an economic basis which is here imprecisely called civil society. Marx and Engels subsequently abandoned the term "civil society" because etymologically it implies not only relations of production.
I agree with G. A. Bagaturia, who writes: "In effect, the concept of relations of production, like the term itself, is already to be found in The German Ideology. But here the form lags behind the content. This concept is here crystallised in the content of terms like 'civil society', 'mode of intercourse', 'form of intercourse', 'relations of intercourse', 'relations of property' and finally, 'relations of production', This concept is not yet precisely defined but it is already taking shape in general terms (one should also take into 380 account that the various parts of the MS differ in the state of maturity)" (8; 141).
When considering the immediate, empirically obvious prerequisites for the materialist view of history, Marx and Engels point to population, and their subsequent analysis leads them to the conclusion that in the course of mankind's historical development this immediate prerequisite tends to become ever more dependent on material production and the structure of society which it determines. In their articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, they exposed Malthusianism as an unscientific and reactionary theory which distorted the real causes for the poverty of the masses. The German Ideology marks a stride forward in solving the problem of population, whose growth is seen to be dependent on the development of the productive forces and the relations of production. This approach shows the unity of the natural and the social in man and indicates the ways of overcoming the naturalistic approach to the problem of population. From the naturalistic standpoint, which anthropological materialism" mainly accepts, the natural and the social are antithetical: the natural is regarded as substantial and lasting, and the social, as changing and transient. By contrast, Marx and .Engels argue that the natural develops into the social and is transformed by the social, because in human life it depends on the social.
They succeed completely in overcoming the dualism of the natural and the social which ultimately leads to idealism. They explain that man's relation with nature exists only within a definite social form. Thus, man's deification of nature depends on historically definite social relations. "Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man also appears in such a way that the restricted attitude of men to nature determines their restricted relation to 'one another, and their restricted attitude to one another determines men's restricted relation to nature." (1, 5; 44).
Sociological naturalism makes it impossible to take a scientific approach to the problem of the specific uniformities of social life, for it recognises only the operation of natural, especially biological, uniformities. This gives a fatalistic notion that the contradiction between men's conscious activity and the laws of nature which are independent of it is insoluble. The sociological naturalist assumes that if the latter do determine the face of society, men's conscious 381 activity can change nothing. If one should assume that men's conscious activity tends to change the course of the socio-historical process, the existence of any objective uniformities is ruled out. Either circumstances determine the lives of men, or men determine the circumstances of their lives: such is the alternative that the naturalistic conception of history suggests. Those who advocate it fail to see the specifically material basis of social life and the qualitative peculiarity of the social uniformities which, while being objective, do not exist irrelatively of men's activity.
Marx and Engels explain that men create circumstances to the same extent to which the circumstances create men, the two constituting an integral dialectical process. The objective as a social fact is the result of the activity on the part of many generations of men. "History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity" (1, 5; 50).^^*^^
Hegel used to say that the consequences of men's conscious and purposeful activity do not depend on that activity, i.e., that they constitute something that is objective. This idea of Hegel's, which he backed up with speculative, theological reasoning about the "cunningness of the world's reason", becomes rational only in the light of historical materialism. A scientific analysis of material production shows that, while being men's conscious and purposeful _-_-_
^^*^^ In a letter to P. V. Annenkov in iate 1846, Marx gives a classical formulation of this sociological uniformity: "The productive forces are ... the result of practically applied human energy; but this energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men find themselves, by the productive forces already acquired, by the social form which exists before they exist, which they do not create, which is the product of the preceding generation. Because of the simple fact that every succeeding generation finds itself in possession of the productive forces acquired by the previous generation ancf that they serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises in human history, a history of humanity takes shape which becomes all the more a history of humanity the more the productive forces of men and therefore their social relations develop" (3; 30-31). It is highly important to note that Marx characterises the dialectical nature of the social determinateness as historical continuity in the productive activity of generations of men.
382 activity, it constitutes, in its historically developing coherence, the objective and definitive basis of the whole of social life. To view the objective in the socio-historical process as something that is merely natural amounts to taking the approach of naturalism, i.e., a brand of the idealistic view of history. The social is t-i« natural transformed by human activity. This means that mankind itself, creates the material conditions that determine 'is development, a fact which does not, incidentally, provid? any grounds for voluntaristic conclusions, because each veneration of men has to deal with the productive forces created by preceding generations, and so has to reckon with thr basic fact.The dialectics of the so io-historical process, as shown in The German Ideology, refutes the assertions of those who claimed that Marx and Engels abandoned dialectics when moving from idealism to materialism. This notion is based on an interpretation of Dialectics as a method which is in principle inapplicable to material reality. But the point is that Marx and Engels did not merely move from idealism to materialism, but developed a philosophy which differs qualitatively from earlier materialist doctrines. An analysis of the key propositions of historical materialism brings out the tremendous importance of materialist dialectics in developing this scientific view of history.
Marx and Engels draw a distinction between the concepts of the natural-historical social process and spontaneous social development, and regard the latter as a historically transient form of the existence of society produced by antagonistic relations of production, notably by the forms of the social division of labour which oppress the working people, in virtue of which "intellectual and material activity, that enjoyment and labour, production and consumption, devolve on different individuals" (1, 5; 45). That is why social inequality is attendant upon the division of labour in its elaborate form, which, according to Marx, entails not only a contradiction between manual and mental labour, but also an equal distribution of labour and its products (/, 5; 45). What is more, "division of labour and private property are, after all, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed witii reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity" (1, 5; 46).
Of course, the identification of division of labour and private property shows that the economic doctrine of Marx 383 and Engels in that period was still inadequately elaborated.^^*^^ In one form or another, social division of labour is necessary even in the society which is based on social property in the means of production, but in The German Ideology the division-of-labour concept is still inadequately demarcated from other social relations and largely coincides with the concept of antagonistic form of development of the productive forces. Marx and Engels write: "The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself" (1, 5; 86). This extensive view of division of labour was overcome only in the writings of mature Marxism.
In antagonistic formations, the social division of labour sets man against man, man against the product of his labour, one Social group (or class) against another, and the personal against the social. It is this opposition that determines the haphazard nature of the socio-historical process. "...As long as man remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him" (7, 5; 47).
Earlier on, Marx and Engels had reworked Hegel's and Feuerbach's conceptions of alienation in materialist terms and enriched it with a new content, so posing the question of man's oppression through the division of labour, the domination of the product of labour over the producer, etc., and these ideas were further elaborated in The German Ideology. The domination of materialised, dead labour over living labour, and of social relations generally over men is characterised as a uniformity underlying the development of the society divided into antagonistic classes. The fact that the aggregated power of individuals becomes an alien force rising over and above them, independent of their will and, in _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1888, after paging through the MS of The German Ideology, Engels says that their knowledge in economic history was then still incomplete (2, 3; 336),
384 effect, dominating it, has private property as its empirically established basis.In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx dealt with the alienation of labour producing private property as the basis for the subsequent development of alienation. In The German Ideology the concept of alienation is enriched with a new historical and economic content, is expressed in more precise and concrete terms. Alienation is now characterised above all as the domination over men of materialised and spontaneously shaped social relations, as men's enslavement by antagonistic forms of the social division of labour, Marx and Engels make relatively rare use of the term ``alienation'' and even emphasise that it belongs to speculative philosophy. They write: "This `estrangement' [`Entfremdung'] (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises." The first premise is a deepening and exacerbation of the antagonistic contradictions of bourgeois society: "...it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity `propertyless', and moreover in contradiction to an existing world of wealth and culture" (1, 5; 48). They believe that the second premise for eliminating alienation is "a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development". They stress that a tremendous growth of the productive forces "is an absolutely necessary practical premise ... because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established" (1, 5; 49).
Comparing this proposition with corresponding statements about estrangement in the 1844 MSS we find that their attitude has clearly changed. In The German Ideology, the concept of alienation is no longer a central one, as will be seen from the above-quoted reservation concerning the use of the term estrangement "to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers" (/, 5; 48). This means, in effect, that private property and social division of labour (in the form in which it had taken shape in the class-divided society) are appropriate expressions of inadequate development of society's productive forces, a basic fact which is crucial in characterising the development of the class-divided society, the antagonistic form of social progress.
However, there should be no haste in drawing the final conclusion concerning the historical fortunes of the concept __PRINTERS_P_385_COMMENT__ 13 - 185 385 of alienation (and of the term itself). We find both concept and term in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1859, in Capital and others of Marx's writings. Thus, in his Theories of Surplus-Value, he says that the substance of capitalist production is the substance of "labour alienated from itself, which stands confronted by the wealth it has created as alien wealth, by its own productive power as the productive power of its product, by its enrichment as its own impoverishment and by its social power as the power of society (4, 3; 259). It is no part of my task here to study the whole history of the problem of alienation in the doctrine of Marxism, but merely to establish why Marx and Engels used the term in their subsequent writings, after treating it ironically in The German Ideology. The reason is mainly that in mature Marxist writings the concept of alienation is completely stripped of its anthropological content, i.e., the concept of alienation of man's natural substance, producing a concrete historical category confined to a historically definite content. Another reason indicated by Marx and Engels springs from the specific features of the formation of the Marxist philosophy. In The German Ideology they emphasise that the beginnings of the materialist view of history were outlined in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbilcher. "But since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as 'human essence', `species', etc., gave the German theoreticians the desired reason for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garment" (1, 5; 236). Consequently, the whole point was to draw a line of demarcation from the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach's anthropology and, in particular, the petty-bourgeois "true socialism" not only in content but also in form, in the mode of expression and terminology.^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ Marx and Engels returned to this question in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, where they say that German "true socialists" have written their own philosophical nonsense beneath the French original, i. e., French Utopian socialism. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity", and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote " Dethronement of the Category of the General", and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action", "True __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 387. 386
So, domination of the spontaneous forces of social development over men is the key aspect of the problem of alienation, as considered in The German Ideology. Men are not aware of the social consequences of their own activity, fail to realise the objective historical necessity of the social processes in which they are involved, and have no knowledge of the law governing these spontaneous processes. But it is not this subjective aspect of the socio-historical process that makes it spontaneous. To assume that it is the lack of knowledge of the objective uniformities of social development that makes it spontaneous is to take the idealistic approach, which Marx and Engels countered with their proposition that the character of social life was determined by objective factors. Accordingly, the spontaneous development of society can be overcome only through an objectively determined and law-governed process of elimination of private property and the corresponding division of society into classes, the contradiction between personal and social interests, etc. What then is the role of social consciousness in this communist restructuring of social life? Marx and Engels reject the idealistic deification of consciousness and self-consciousness, but do not in the least deny their role in history, especially in the revolutionary transition to communism, which substitutes conscious social creativity for the spontaneous social process which defies control. But consciousness and selfconsciousness are not something that is independent of material reality, which is why it becomes a mighty social force only to the extent to which it accords with the objective uniformities by comprehending them. Only then does social practice enable organised individuals to dominate social relations.
While the idealists, notably German idealists, defined freedom as self-determination of the spirit, the founders of Marxism connect the concept of freedom with the material conditions of human life. Freedom is conscious and purposeful practical activity by men, who have understood objective necessity, activity in which the results achieved in the main coincide with projected goals. The extent to which man controls nature and himself at a definite stage of historical _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 386. Socialism", "German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism", and so on (1, 6; 511). The creation of historical materialism signified a radical break with this speculative ``substantiation'' of socialism.
387 development is ultimately determined by the development of the productive forces and the corresponding relations of production, with which the advance of knowledge is essentially connected. The development of production is man's steady emancipation from the elemental forces of nature and the creation of prerequisites for mastering the laws of social development. The growth of the productive forces is also the development of man himself, of his requirements and capabilities, including his capability to control himself.The idealists, Marx and Engels say, assumed that the degree of freedom attained by men is determined by their concepts of the ideal man, of freedom, etc. "In reality, of course, what happened was that people won freedom for themselves each time to the extent that was dictated and permitted not by their ideal of man, but by the existing productive forces. All emancipation carried through hitherto has been based, however, on restricted productive forces. The production which these productive forces could provide was insufficient for the whole of society and made development possible only if some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others" (7, 5; 431-32).
The idea of the historical advance of freedom was elaborated by the classics of German idealism, and it keynotes the whole of Hegel's philosophy of history. But Hegel's approach, despite his brilliant idea of freedom as historically developing cognition of necessity, ultimately turned out to be untenable because he claimed that freedom was the substance of spirit, i.e., something that was primary and that was brought out and realised only in the course of world history. Marx and Engels solve the problem of freedom in the light of the materialist view of history, showing the real connection between the advance of freedom, the progress of the productive forces and the transformation of social relations.
Consideration of the problem of freedom and necessity in the context of the real socio-historical process helps to show the antagonistically contradictory development of freedom in the class-divided society, and so to show the necessity for restructuring society along communist lines. The whole point, the founders of Marxism say, is that the progress of human power over nature is closely bound up with man's progressive enslavement by the spontaneous forces of social development; escape from the power of nature's 388 spontaneous forces and man's domination of man are merely two sides of the same antagonistic process. The elimination of personal dependence (slavery, serfdom), i.e., the advance of the individual's personal freedom, turns out to be the simultaneous and progressive enslavement of the individual by the spontaneous forces of social development. This antagonistic character of the historically developing contradiction between necessity and freedom, and social progress in general, is overcome only by a communist revolution. "In the present epoch, the domination of material relations over individuals, and the suppression of individuality by fortuitous circumstances, has assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite task. It has set them the task of replacing the domination of circumstances and of chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances" (1, 5; 438).' The solution of this problem does not boil down to a mere abolition of private property and its immediate social consequences: "...private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives" (1, 5; 439). Communism is all-round transformation of social relations, both material and spiritual. It overcomes the antithesis between manual and mental labour, between town and country, assures every member of society of free development, and so eliminates the contradiction between the individual and the social. The abolition of classes and of social inequality means, in general, a development of true collectivity, because only in intercourse with other men does the individual find the conditions and the means for developing his capabilities in every way. Personal freedom is possible only in the collective. "In the previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed under the conditions of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community in which individuals have up till now combined always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and since it was the combination of one class over against another, it was at the same time for the 389 oppressed class not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association" (1, 5; 78).
Consequently, the basic propositions of historical materialism, as elaborated in The German Ideology, show that the philosophical science of society created by Marx and Engels provided a true solution for the most intractable problems in the philosophy of history and of historical science.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 10 __ALPHA_LVL3__ HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF FORMS OF PROPERTY.In the wide range of social relations, the authors of The German Ideology underline men's relations in the process of production as the basic and primary relations which determine all the other social relations: political and ideological. "Land has nothing to do with rent of land, the machine has nothing to do with profit" (1, 5; 230). Land brings rent to its owner in consequence of historically rooted social relations, which take shape independently of the will of the landowner and the tenant. Marx and Engels say that relations of production are above all property relations, which need to be distinguished from their material form. Thus, my frock-coat cannot be regarded "as my private property, since it does not enable me to command any, even the smallest, amount of other people's labour" (1, 5; 230). This example illustrates the Marxist view of private property as a means of appropriating the labour of others. Marx and Engels were able to produce a scientific formulation of the task of socialist socialisation because they had drawn a clear distinction between private and personal property.
They sketch out a picture of the historical development of the basic forms of property. The first of these, tribal property, corresponds to the embryonic state of production, when men engaged mainly in hunting, fishing and some farming. This was collective property, and with it is connected the existence of the patriarchal family, within whose entrails slavery emerges and exists in a latent form. The subsequent progress of the productive forces, the 390 growth of population and its requirements, the extension of external intercourse (barter trade, war) engender slaveholding relations of production. "The second form is the ancient communal and state property, which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal property we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal property. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and even on this account alone they are bound to the form of communal property" (1, 5; 33).
The third form is feudal or estate property. The peculiar origination of feudal relations in Europe (the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire, the partial destruction of the productive forces, the decline of the cities, of trade, etc.) cannot conceal the basic fact that the new relations of production allow of much greater development of the productive forces than they did in the slave-holding society. Feudal property, like slave-holding property, implies a division of society into opposite classes, one of which enslaves and exploits the other. "The hierarchical structure of landownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal property, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production" (1, 5; 34).
The guild organisation of the handicrafts in the cities corresponded to the feudal structure of landed property. The antithesis between serfs and feudal lords in the countryside and apprentices and masters in the cities, such were the relations between the basic social groups in feudal society. Without considering in greater detail the question of relations of production in pre-capitalist formations, as set forth in The German Ideology, let us note that despite the inadequacy of historical and, especially, economic data then at their disposal, Marx and Engels show the principal features of the primitive, slave-holding and feudal social systems. They had always eschewed efforts to schematise the socio-historical process, and identify the main features of each type of relations of production and the class structure 391 of society they determine. Their analysis of the concrete historical facts helps them to understand both the coherence and the diversity of world history.
Progress of production in the feudal society inevitably erodes the corporate and communal forms of property, so reducing the producers' personal dependence on the class exploiting them. Capitalist relations of production emerge, and private property gradually comes to dominate economic relations completely. Thus, the various forms of property, which existed throughout mankind's history, evolve to "modern capital, determined by large-scale industry and universal competition, i.e., pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution" (1, 5; 89-90). Wage-labour, free from feudal fetters, i.e., the new form of enslavement of producers, has its political expression in the bourgeois-democratic state, which, for that reason, is the political superstructure of the corresponding economic structure of capitalism. This explains the following remarks by Marx and Engels: "The modern state, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is based on freedom, of labour. ... Freedom of labour is free competition of the workers among themselves. ... Labour is free in all civilised countries; it is not a matter of freeing labour but of abolishing it" (7, 5; 205).
The bourgeois ideologist regards labour free from feudal fetters as free labour in general, ignoring the fact that the proletarian is deprived of the means of production. This kind of labour, which is free from the means of production, i.e., which is dependent on the owners of the means of production, has to be abolished. Marx, and Engels write: "The proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, have to abolish the hitherto prevailing condition of their existence (which has, moreover, been that of "all society up to then), namely, labour" (1, 5; 80). Quite obviously, this is alienated labour, which is a "negative form of self-activity" (1, 5; 87), i.e., a negation of the latter. That is what Marx and Engels have in mind when they keep emphasising that labour "is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as this power exists, private property must exist" (7, 5; 64). This is what gives ground for a form of expression which is not very apt terminologically~^^*^^, but for which there are good reasons. _-_-_
^^*^^ G. A. Bagaturia is right in giving a reminder that the translators of The German Ideology xise "abolition of labour" to convey the German "Auf- __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 393. 392 Marx and Engels raise the question of a radical, communist transformation of the entire creative activity of men, which presupposes the "transformation of labour into self-activity" (7, 5; 88). "The communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves" (7, 5; 52). The objective necessity for this greatest revolution is determined by the development of the productive forces in bourgeois society, which spill over the narrow privateproperty relations of production alienating labour and its product.
The proposition concerning the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production in an antagonistic society, as the objective basis for social revolution, is the great discovery which crowns the elaboration of the principles of historical materialism by Marx and Engels. The relations of production---the key starting concept of historical materialism---are characterised as a historically definite social form of progress of the productive forces, which corresponds to their given level (and character). The conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production also springs from the fact that the ruling exploiting classes resist changes in the social relations of production. That is why this conflict is resolved only through social revolution, as a result of which "an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals---a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another" (7, 5; 82).
In the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, Marx, in effect, reached the conclusion that the economic basis (civil society) determines the political and ideological superstructure. However, he had yet to formulate the concept of relations of production, and dealt mainly with property relations, which, as he subsequently said, are a legal expression of the relations of production. But in his articles in the Jahrbiicher _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 392. hebung der Arbeit", which cannot be literally translated. ``Aulhebung'', a term which Marx and Engels used after Hegel as a philosophical category, means ``subiation'' or dialectical negation, i. e., overcoming and preservation, elimination of form with preservation and development of the substantial content. Consequently, strictly speaking, "Aufliebung der Arbeit" is not abolition but a fundamental transformation of labour activity (9; 369).
393 he does not yet speak of the key role of material production in the development of society. This is a discovery he made in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which, however, we do not yet find the relations-of-production concept. Only in The Holy Family, does Marx come close to the concept, which is systematically elaborated in The German Ideology. Developing the relations-of-production concept and tracing the historical succession of types of relations of production, Marx and Engels discover the basic uniformity of the revolutionary transition from one formation to another: "...all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse" (1, 5; 74). Theoretically summing up historical experience in the light of the materialist view of history, Marx and Engels formulate the following conclusions: 1) the progress of material production within the framework of relations of production which have historically outlived themselves turns the productive forces into a destructive element. This negative social process naturally completes the development of the capitalist mode of production; 2) historically definite antagonistic relations of production determine the domination of one class over another. The state constitutes the political form of this domination. All revolutionary struggle is aimed against the dominant exploiting class; 3) the communist revolution differs radically from earlier social revolutions: it does not eliminate this or that distribution of private property in the means of production among the members of society, but private property as such, and puts an end to the domination by exploiting classes; 4) the communist revolution means not only abolition of the old economic and political relations, but also a massive change in men, massive generation of communist consciousness. The problems of the communist transformation of society can be solved only in a revolutionary way: "...the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew" (Jf, 5; 53).It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this idea. In contrast to the bourgeois ideologists who reject the necessity of revolution and to the petty-bourgeois theoreticians who 394 are prepared to reconcile themselves with the revolution only because there is no alternative, Marx and Engels argue that the communist revolution cannot be replaced by any other, non-revolutionary way of eliminating capitalist relations. The communist revolution is of the greatest transformative significance!
All these propositions, which in the main formulate the already shaped scientific view of history, show that materialism in sociology necessarily leads to communist conclusions. Not only an analysis of the capitalist mode of production, which is a relatively minor feature of The German Ideology, but also of the diverse contradictions of the whole history of the class society, shows that the antagonistic social relations can be overcome only through a communist restructuring of society.
Marx and Engels say that communism is the highest form of social intercourse among men, which is not limited to the boundaries of a single country, a classless society without a state, and assert that communism cannot win in one single country. "Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them" (/, 5; 49). In the mid-19th century, this approach was undoubtedly of outstanding progressive importance, because it signified a rejection of Utopian theories according to which communism could be established in any country (and even in a part of it) without a fundamental transformation of the state system and regardless of the level of its economic development. Considering that Marx and Engels had in mind the higher stage of communism, when neither classes nor the state will exist, their conclusion remains meaningful for the subsequent period as well. In.the new historical epoch---the epoch of monopoly capitalism---Lenin proved that "socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or prebourgeois" (5, 23; 79). The subsequent development of Marxist-Leninist theory led to the conclusion that the higher phase of communism can be built within the framework of a world socialist system even in the presence of a hostile world capitalist system.
Thus, in The German Ideology, historical materialism 395 already appears as a scientific-philosophical theory which makes it possible to anticipate the future development of society by analysing its present and the trends in its development. Communism, Marx and Erigels say, is not only the future which is naturally to replace the capitalist system; it is also the present, namely, the communist movement, the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise" (1, 5; 49). This approach makes scientific communism fundamentally distinct from Utopian socialist doctrines which condemned capitalism as an immoral social order, but also condemned the class struggle. In place of the capitalist system, these Utopians wanted an abstract classless society, whose detailed description, they thought^ would compensate for the absence in their doctrines of any evidence of its objective necessity. Marx and Engeis were least of all concerned with a detailed description of the communist future: they confined themselves to sketching out some of its basic features, the material prerequisites for which take shape under capitalism. They concentrated on theoretically substantiating the proletariat's emancipation movement. They examined the class structure of capitalism, the role of the bourgeois state as an instrument for putting down the oppressed and the exploited, and the economic and political prerequisites for the proletariat's social revolution. This carried them to the idea of the proletarian dictatorship, i.e., to the basic content of the socialist revolution.
According to Marx arid Erigels "...society has hitherto always developed within the framework of a contradiction--- in antiquity the contradiction between free men and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie arid the proletariat" (1, 5; 432). The real basis of the state consists of opposite classes, an antithesis which springs from the character of the relations of production. Contrary to the illusions of bourgeois democrats, the state does not resolve the contradiction between group interests and trie interests of the social whole, because it represents the political domination of one class over another. Meanwhile, the 396 contradiction between private and common interests remains within the ruling class as well. Every member of the ruling class seeks to circumvent the laws laid down by the state, although as a whole the ruling class has a stake in their fulfilment. "Out of this very contradiction between the particular and the common interests, the common interest assumes an independent form as the state, which is divorced from the real individual and collective interests, and at the same time as an illusory community" (1, 5; 46).
What is the relation between the will of the individual and the interests of a social group or class? Marx and Engeis consider the question of how the objectively determined interests of the individual are transformed into the common interests of the class. "How is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of individuals, into class interests, into common interests which acquire independent existence in relation to the individual persons, and in their independence assume the form of general interests? How is it that as such they come into contradiction with the actual individuals and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as religious, holy interests?" (1, 5; 245). Individual interests are transformed into class interests because they are shaped by economic conditions which are common to the whole class (or at any rate, to a sizable part of it), but because there are essential distinctions within these conditions which are common to the whole class, the transformation of individual interests into the interests of the whole class does not eliminate the contradictions between them.
The ruling class is the dominant will in the state. However, "... the state does not exist owing to the dominant will, but the state, which arises from the material mode of life of individuals, has also the form of a dominant will" (1, 5; 330)~^^*^^. This means that it is not the use of force, the _-_-_
^^*^^ This conclusion is based on the following theoretical proposition: "The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their `will', their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually determine each other---this is the real basis of the state and remains so at all the stages at which division of labour and private property are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals.... The individuals who rule in these conditions---leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state---have to give their will, which is determined by __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 398. 397 take-over or usurpation of power that constitutes the substance of the state, but the domination of a definite, given class, and not some other, which is determined by the economic structure of society. The state is "... the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised" (1, 5; 90).
Marx and Engels note that Machiavelli and Hobbes, among others, were already aware that law and real force, which constituted its substance, were inseparable, but they saw the state and law as the use of force for the sake of the common good, despite the fact that in antagonistic society the state only appears to serve the interests of society as a whole. Thus, the bourgeois state "... is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests" (7, 5; 90).
Unlike bourgeois democrats, Marx and Engels attach secondary importance to the forms of government ( monarchy, republic, etc.) and believe that the important thing is which class rules, which class wields the power.^^*^^ Accordingly, they draw a distinction between the basic types of state; slave-holding, feudal and bourgeois.
Bourgeois democrats frequently absolutise the distinction between republic and monarchy, so confusing the question of the class nature of the state, especially of the bourgeoisdemocratic state, Marx and Engels stress that under capitalism the democratic state is itself a form of organisation for the political rule of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean, of course, that they fail to realise the difference between a _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 397. these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way.... Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule.... The expression of this will, which is determined by their common interests, is the law" (1, 5; 329).
^^*^^ They allow for the existence of transitional forms of state, when no class is in complete political ascendancy: "The independence of the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still play a part and there exists a mixture, where consequently no section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany" (I, 5; 90). What they mean here is apparently absolutism.
398 bourgeois monarchy and a bourgeois democracy. Like all proletarian fighters for democracy, they stress the importance of bourgeois-democratic transformations which help to create favourable conditions for the proletariat's struggle for socialism, and they believe it to be their duty to blast the bourgeois-democratic illusions which hamper the working class in developing a socialist consciousness.They argue that every exploiting class seeking to win political power first acts as a representative of society as a whole, for in the period of struggle against the dominant reactionary class its interests largely coincide with those of the non-ruling classes. Its hostility to the interests of the other classes of society is fully brought out only after it takes over political power. Summing up the historical experience of bourgeois revolutions, Marx and Engels formulate the following uniformity: "Every new class ... achieves domination only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on the other hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class then develops all the more sharply and profoundly" (1, 5; 61). The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has a broader social base than the dictatorship of the feudal lords, but the antagonistic contradictions in bourgeois society are more acute than ever before in history. It is this pattern of social revolutions that makes for the growing role of the masses in history.
Back in 1844, Marx and Engels formulated their proposition concerning the proletarian revolution, which overthrows the political power of the bourgeoisie, but they did not then consider the establishment of a dictatorship of the working class. The German Ideology carries them close to the formulation of this key problem, because it argues that "... every class which is aiming at domination, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination in general, must first conquer political power" (1, 5; 47). From this it follows that the political power of the working class can also be exercised in a qualitatively new form constituting a transitional stage towards the elimination of classes. Consequently, the proletarian revolution cannot confine itself to overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The working class must win political power. This conclusion is closely linked with the entire content of The German Ideology, especially with the analysis of bourgeois
399 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1981/MMP495/20091123/495.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2009.11.23) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ revolutions and the substance and development of the state and the class struggle. __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 11 __ALPHA_LVL3__ SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIAL BEINGThe analysis of the role of material production in the development of society and of its social form, i.e., the economic structure of society constituting the basis of the political and juridical superstructure, helps to develop and concretise the material solution of the problem of social consciousness arid social being. What has been said above shows that social being is the totality of objective social relations together with material production, their basis. What is the view of social consciousness taken by Marx and Erigels?
Feuerbach regarded human consciousness mainly as reflection of nature, while also stressing that man carne to comprehend his own nature arid his relations with other men. He wrote: "Consciousness implies being, it itself is only comprehended being" (quoted in 32, 306). But Feuerbach regards the social content of consciousness as something secondary because he does riot have the concept of social being as a specific objective reality, which is why he does not consider the reflection of social being.
While being fully aware that human consciousness reflects nature, Marx and Engels go beyond Feuerbach's anthropologism arid naturalism and establish that men's relations with nature occur only within the framework of definite social relations. That is wily, in fact, social consciousness is such because it reflects social being. Every individual's consciousness is social consciousness although immediately, i.e., as an individual's consciousness, it is individual. Social and individual consciousness constitute an indissoluble unity: social consciousness never exists outside the consciousness of the members of society. Still, individual consciousness differs substantially from social consciousness, which assumes the diverse forms of morality, philosophy, science, religion, etc. The individual consciousness simply cannot encompass ail social consciousness, and this distinction between individual and social consciousness is also social, if only because man is shaped as an individual only in society: "Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all" (1, 5; 44).
400The German Ideology also contains a concise characterisation of the shaping of social consciousness. The primitive consciousness "is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first confronts men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion)" (1, 5; 44).^^*^^
Even in primitive consciousness, the founders of Marxism identify consciousness of the immediate natural and social environment, and on the other hand, the fantastic reflection of the domination of the elemental forces of nature over man. That is why they do not think that even primitive consciousness was solely religious or mystical. This primitive consciousness, which Marx and Engels say is both human and animal, is proper only to man, as will be seen from language, its social form. "Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language! like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men" (1, 5; 44).
In contrast to man, the relation of the animal and its environment does riot exist as a relation. In other words, the animal has no consciousness, which means that it has no self-consciousness. That is why the animal has not language. Consciousness, self-consciousness arid language are social phenomena taking shape in the process of man's anthropological and sociological development. That is why it is necessary to draw a distinction between the developed social consciousness, which is diverse in form, and the primitive consciousness, which "is directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men" (1, 5; 36). Only later, with the emergence of the antithesis between mental and manual labour does social consciousness become relatively independent. "From this moment onwards consciousness^ can really flatter itself that it is something other _-_-_
^^*^^ One should bear in mind that the founders of Marxism later gave a more precise description of the primitive consciousness, as will be seen, for instance, from Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
401 than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of `pure' theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc." (1, 5; 45).The Holy Family exposed the epistemological roots of the idealistic antithesis of consciousness and reality. The German Ideology shows the social roots of this antithesis, the starting point of idealist philosophy. Marx and Engels draw the following conclusion: opposition of consciousness and being, of the spiritual and the material is a reflection of definite material conditions of life in a society in which men are dominated by social relations. The specific forms of this opposition are established by means of special analysis of their concrete historical social basis. Wherever social consciousness is in conflict with social reality, the conflict springs from social relations which "have come into contradiction with existing productive forces" (I, 5; 45). This, for its part, constitutes the necessary prerequisite for social revolution. So, the fact that German speculative philosophers attacked the religious and philosophical notions prevailing in Germany was also a reflection of the objective process of maturing revolution.
Reactionaries assert that revolutionary ideas are spread about by all kinds of trouble-makers, people who are at odds with the law, and so on. Marx and Engels reject this trite notion: "The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class" (1, 5; 60).
So, social consciousness, including the consciousness of individuals making up society, reflects social being. " Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process" (1, 5; 36).
The theory of cognition propounded by materialists before Marx correctly insisted that only notions and ideas which reflected objective reality could be regarded as true. But they did not ask themselves whether delusions (including fantastic notions) were also a reflection of reality. Rather, they assumed that fantastic, say religious, notions were false because they did not reflect reality. That is why, in particular, they failed to see the dialectics of truth and delusion.
402The pre-Marxian materialists were unable to apply the materialist principle of reflection to an analysis of the whole content of consciousness, because they took a metaphysical view of the process of cognition. They made only limited epistemological use of the principle, but in sociology it was not accepted as a principle at all. Feuerbach alone realised that illusory (religious) consciousness was a reflection of man's actual life, but he did not give a materialist answer to the question of what religion or any other human delusion reflected. It was Marx and Engels who discovered the specific social reality which religion and every other consciousness generally reflect. "The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness" (7, 5; 36-37).
The distorted reflection of reality is not something purely subjective, and has both objective content and objective basis. That does not mean, of course, that any delusion can be explained by means of a reference to the objective basis. What is important is not the incorrect deduction, or hasty or inadequately based conclusions, the responsibility for which is entirely the individual's, but the forms of social consciousness which reflect reality in a distorted form and which have existed over the millennia. These are religion, idealistic philosophy, etc. Such reflection is objectively determined, for it is a necessary form of men's consciousness in historically definite conditions.
Marx and Engels used the term ideology to designate the distorted reflection of social being in the consciousness of historically definite (propertied economically or politically dominant) classes, a term they use in the negative sense in which it was usually applied in their day. They do not use it to designate the social consciousness of exploited classes. Wherever they consider the development of the proletariat's class consciousness they emphasise that its consciousness is 403 not in any sense illusory. They regard scientific communism as a reflection of the proletariat's condition and interests, although they do not call it ideology. It is true that neither in The German Ideology nor in their other writings do we find the term "scientific ideology" despite the fact that they were elaborating the scientific theory of the proletariat's emancipation struggle. It was Lenin who worked out the concept of scientific ideology as he advanced the doctrine of Marx and Engels concerning ideology.
Bourgeois critics of Marxism seek to contrast the doctrine of Marx and Engels concerning ideology and Lenin's concept of scientific ideology in an effort to prove that the founders of Marxism held ideology to be only illusory, idealistic and alienated social consciousness. The point is, however, that while exposing the illusions and idealistic propositions of bourgeois arid petty-bourgeois ideology, Marx and Engels constantly showed that these illusions and idealistic delusions had real, social content, and this is what makes their view fundamentally distinct from those of their contemporaries who saw ideological conceptions as being essentially without content. The founders of Marxism held that the distortion of social reality which would be found in this or that ideology was a reflection of the historically definite features of this reality, the objectively established condition of the given class, its role in social production, its interests, etc.
Marx and Engels showed the real social content of the theory of rational egoism, Kant's conception of practical reason, and the Young Hegelian philosophy of selfconsciousness, and they did the same thing---but much more thoroughly, of course,---with the writings of Hegel, Feuerbach, and the classics of English political economy, whose teachings they regarded as ideology, while also adopting them as theoretical sources for the scientific view of history which they were developing.
Marx and Engels used the term ideologist for the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie. Some of these ideologists advocated the capitalist system, others rejected capitalism and favoured feudal society, and still others propounded Utopian notions concerning a society of petty proprietors. Before Marxism came on the scene, there was, no scientific ideology. Is it surprising that Marx and Engels did not designate their scientific ideology as ideology (apparently in order to avoid a 404 confusion of concepts)? This approach may appear to be a denial of all ideology or a demand to de-ideologise social knowledge only with a superficial or biassed approach, for it merely meant a negation of the alienated form of social consciousness, of which speculative idealist philosophy was one of the basic expressions. From this standpoint, the historical shaping of Marxism is, in objective content, a struggle against the bourgeois (arid petty-bourgeois) ideology for the purpose of formulating the scientific socialist consciousness, i.e., the scientific ideology of the working class. It would be highly naive to assume that in the period in which the proletariat's scientific ideology was in the making, its objective content and subjective form of expression were totally identical.
One must emphasise that here arid there ideology is used in The German Ideology in a broader sense as well. This is connected with a concrete analysis of the bourgeoisie's social consciousness in various countries and an different siages of its development as a class, especially with the study of the ideological and political struggle between progressive and reactionary social forces. Concrete analysis helps to draw a distinction between the ideology of the ruling and nonruling, progressive and reactionary classes. "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. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it" (1, 5; 59). Of course, the ideologists of the ruling exploiting class believed that their ideas, convictions and ideals came to be.dominant in society because they were more rational, useful, lofty, etc. Marx and Engels explode these illusions and show that they have socio-economic roots. They explain that the illusion that the domination of a definite class is only the domination of certain ideas (or results from this fact) finally disappears only with the abolition of antagonistic social relations, which does away with the need to represent the special interests as universal interests, and the latter, as the dominant ones.
Marx and Engels say that ideology is consciousness of social being arid social orientation based on it, as an 405 expression of the condition and interests of a definite class, but once again draw a clear-cut distinction between social consciousness and social being, so emphasising that their unity does not at all imply an identity of content. That is why in assessing social consciousness, one must start from social being, and not the other way round, as the idealists think. "Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historiography has not yet won this trivial insight. It takes every epoch at its word and believes that everything it says and imagines about itself is true" (1, 5; 62). The founders of Marxism present the materialist view of history as against the idealistic view of it: it is a matter "not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process" (1, 5; 36).
Historical materialism shows the unity of consciousness and being but draws a distinction between the two, analyses the interaction between them, the various forms of reflection of social being and the reciprocal action of social consciousness on its basis. All these aspects of the dialectico-materialist view of society's spiritual life will be found in The German Ideology.
Before Marx, sociologists altogether failed to see the reflection of men's social being in consciousness, and did not understand the concept of social being and social consciousness. These key philosophical and sociological categories were elaborated by Marx and Engels as they formulated the science of society. The German Ideology shows the dialectics of social consciousness and social being, which is why it is an outstanding contribution to the development of materialist dialectics.
The whole content of The German Ideology shows that the shaping of the materialist view of history, on the one hand, and of materialist dialectics, on the other, is a coherent process, and that Marxist dialectics was worked out above all through an analysis of the socio-historical process.
406 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 12 __ALPHA_LVL3__ CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL THEORY OF GERMANIn their writings of the revolutionary-democratic period, Marx and Engels already expressed the idea that Germany was on the eve of a revolution. But at the time, they could not yet have an understanding of the socio-economic content of the looming revolution. Now, in 1846 and 1847, they say that the bourgeois revolution is inevitable, an approach which shows very well the new stage in the shaping of Marxism, implying a scientific view of society's class structure, the uniformities governing transition from one socio-economic formation to another, and the fundamental antithesis between socialist and bourgeois^ revolutions.
``The German bourgeoisie feels a real need for political power, a need produced by economic relations, and is striving to satisfy it" (1, 5; 112). What then should the proletariat's attitude to the bourgeois revolution, to the struggle for democracy, be? These questions were first posed in the Deutsch-Franzb'sische Jahrbucher, when Marx asserted that in Germany no political emancipation was possible without human emancipation. Now, the founders of Marxism formulate in concrete terms the question of the proletariat's participation in a bourgeois revolution. They insist on the proletariat's political independence and criticise the political theory of German bourgeois radicalism. It is in this light that one should consider their statements against K. Heinzen.
In 1842, Heinzen worked on the Rheinische Zeitung, held liberal views and had visions of progress within the framework of the existing legal system. Following the Prussian government's ban on his book, he was forced to emigrate. In February 1844, he wrote to Marx, then the editor of the Deutsch-Franwsische Jahrbucher, seeking to convince him that communist views were ``impractical'' and that it was better to be a political moderate. Quite naturally, Marx did not take his advice.
While Heinzen carried on his struggle on the basis of legality, he attacked those who called for revolution, but when legal struggle no longer became possible, he began to urge an instant uprising against the monarchies existing in 407 Germany.^^*^^ He reduced all social problems to the demand for a republic in place of the monarchy, declaring the monarch to be the chief and virtually the sole cause of all the poverty and privation, so ascribing to him, as Engels wrote, a supernatural power. In this way, Heinzen excessively narrowed down the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, reducing them to a struggle against royal despotism alone, and not against the economic and political foundations of the feudal system. Polemicising with the communists, he wrote: "You are trying to make social questions the central concern of our age, arid you fail to see that there is no more important social question than that of monarchy or republic" (1, 6; 321).
This narrowing down of the revolutionary programme of bourgeois democracy contained an anti-democratic trend, which it was necessary to expose in order to carry bourgeois-democratic transformations to the end. That is why Engels wrote: "Herr Heinzen will never transfer to the princes the hatred which the serf feels tor the feudal lord and the worker for his employer. But of course Herr Heinzen is working in the interests of the landowners and capitalists when he puts the blame for the exploitation of the people by these two classes not on them but on the princes" (/, 6; 293-94).
Heinzen sought to prove that the communists were splitting the united front of democracy so as to present themselves as fighters against the opposition, ``destroying'' such ``leading'' men as the Bauer Brothers, Ruge and Heinzen.^^**^^
He called his conflict with the communists "the absurd split which the communists have provoked in the camp of _-_-_
^^*^^ "Do we have to wait until our patience converts the gaoler into a demagogue who will fling open the doors for us in a burst of love for freedom?" (34; 200).
^^**^^ Heinzen claimed that the communists (among whom he equally included Marx and Engels and the "true socialists") were intent on introducing socialism right away. In a book he published in 1848 in reply to the articles by Marx and Engels, Heinzen claimed that they intended to establish a "communist dictatorship" with the help of "some German Blanqui", arid urged the workers to abandon the communists arid join the republicans. He claimed to be the best friend of the working class and looked down on the communists as its "worst enemies". In something like an anticipation ot present-day semantic philosophy, Heinzen uses in quotes words like ``classes'', ``oppression'', ``domination'', etc. (35; 98, 104).
408 the German radicals" and accused Marx and Engels of treating people in terms of ``classes'' and inciting them against one another according to their ``craft'' (1, 6; 329). In his efforts to discredit the communists, Heinzen asserted that the class standpoint adopted by Marx and his followers led to moral licence and justified any use of force. Heinzen's statements will be easily seen as some of the earliest expressions of the social demagogy of anti-communism.Like other bourgeois radicals, Heinzen declared the communists to be opponents of democracy. Rejecting these slanderous assertions, Engels explains: "...The Communists must co-operate with the German radicals and desire to do so. But they reserve the right to attack any writer who discredits the entire party" (1, 6; 306). Marx and Engels criticised Heinzen not so much for his hostile views as for his extremely limited bourgeois-democratic programme. Engels wrote: "The Communists ... are attacking Heinzen not because he is no Communist, but because he is a bad democratic party writer. They are attacking him not in their capacity as Communists but in their capacity as democrats.... Even if there were no Communists at all in the world, the democrats would still have to take the field against Heinzen.... Far from starting futile quarrels with the democrats, in the present circumstances, the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters.... As long as democracy has not been achieved, thus long do Communists and democrats fight side by side, thus long are the interests of the democrats at the same time those of the Communists" (1, 6; 298-99).
Marx and Engels emphasise that communists are vanguard fighters for democracy. To criticise bourgeois-democratic illusions is not to minimise the importance of bourgeoisdemocratic transformations; on the contrary, the immediate purpose of this criticism is to carry these transformations to the end. Like the proletarian struggle for democracy, it is organically hostile to sectarianism and the doctrinaire approach, of which Heinzen turns out to be a typical spokesman in his own bourgeois way.
In an article entitled "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality", Marx analyses the thesis with which Heinzen backs up his demand for an immediate overthrow of the monarchy. The whole point, Heinzen says, is that in Germany power dominates property, a not very clear idea 409 (regardless of what Heinzen himself had in mind) which reflected the contradiction between the bourgeoisie's dominant position in the economy arid the political domination of the landowners. Heinzen's statement merely meant that the capitalists did not yet have the political power, which is why the demand to abolish the domination of power over property reflected the bourgeoisie's urge to transform the political superstructure in accordance with the emergent capitalist basis. Of course, Heinzen said nothing about the bourgeoisie's interests or its struggle for power, but in his vague statements "he has only expressed the fact that the German bourgeoisie must win political power" (1, 6; 318), and that the state did not yet become its property.
Marx and Engels naturally believe that the monarchy should be overthrown in a revolution and a democratic order established in Germany, but in contrast to Heinzen, they regard the monarchy not as the basis of the social system then prevailing in Germany but merely as the political superstructure characteristic of it. That is why they do not reduce the tasks of the bourgeois revolution to destroying the feudal superstructure, and insist on the abolition of feudal relations of production as well. Thus, they give a materialist explanation of their revolutionary line.
Marx held that the bourgeoisie's urge for political domination in contemporary Germany was progressive, and anticipated the main features of the German 1848, including the political behaviour of the liberal bourgeoisie. He says that Germany was late in entering upon the capitalist way, so that the German bourgeoisie began its struggle against absolutism at a time when the bourgeoisie in the more developed countries was already fighting against the proletariat. In Germany, on the one hand, semi-feudal relations remained side by side with the political wretchedness of the absolute monarchy, and on the other, contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the working class were already developing, as, for instance, exemplified by the Silesian uprising. "The German bourgeoisie therefore already finds itself in conflict with the proletariat even before being politically constituted as a class" (7, 6; 332).
Whereas in Britain and France, the conversion of the liberal bourgeoisie into a counter-revolutionary force resulted from the victorious bourgeois revolutions, in Germany the process began on the eve of the bourgeois revolution, 410 and the German bourgeois sought "as far as possible to make the change from absolute to bourgeois monarchy without a revolution, in an amicable fashion" (1, 6; 333).
The revolutionary proletariat had to prevent a compromise between the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. Because the communists were faced with the task of winning as much democracy as possible, they had to unite all the truly democratic forces. They were fully aware that the struggle for civil rights and other democratic freedoms merely created the prerequisites for the subsequent struggle for socialism. Marx writes: "The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by preserving those of feudalism. They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement. They know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious.... They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers' revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal" (1, 6; 332-33).
The founders of Marxism expose Heinzen's idealistic claims that the communist movement sprang from communist theory, an assertion which expressed the bourgeoisie's urge to slow down the development of the independent working-class movement. That is why Heinzen depicted scientific communism as an armchair theory out of touch with life. Engels points to the reactionary nature of this view of communism (which, incidentally, is being revived by present-day bourgeois ideologists) and says: "Herr Heinzen imagines communism is a certain doctrine which proceeds from a definite theoretical principle as its core and draws further conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen is very much mistaken. Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts. The Communists do not base themselves on this or that philosophy as their point of departure but on the whole course of previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries at the present time.... Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat" (7, 6; 303-04). This proposition concretises the Marxist negation of 411 philosophy in the old sense of the word and the new concept of social theory and the scientific form of social consciousness which the founders of Marxism have been working out.^^*^^
Bourgeois radicals feared the proletariat's participation in a revolution, for it never occurred tp them that the task of the conscious proletariat in a bourgeois revolution did not at all amount to establishing its power. Having failed to understand scientific communism and the fact that the communists could fulfil their tasks only at. a definite and much higher level of social development than that of contemporary Germany, Heinzen held that the communist idea about the need to substitute social property for private property was some sort of invention which its authors were seeking to realise as soon as possible. He could not understand that the bourgeois revolution also solved the problem of property in the interests of the bourgeoisie, even if it did -so in its own peculiar way. Marx explains: "The question of property, depending on the different levels of development of industry, has always been the vital question for a particular class. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when the point at issue was the abolition of feudal property relations, the question of property was the vital question for the bourgeois class. In the 19th century, when it is a matter of abolishing bourgeois property relations, the question of property is a vital question for the working class" (1, 6; 322-23). Consequently, even before the proletariat proclaimed---through its ideologists---the task of abolishing capitalist property, bourgeois revolutions were eliminating feudal property. This means that they were not eliminating property as such (as Heinzen and other bourgeois radicals insisted) but merely abolished a definite form of property, and did so only when it became an obstacle for the further development of the productive forces. At present, Marx says, Germany faces a bourgeois revolution, which, far from abolishing private property, in effect establishes private property which is released from feudal fetters. The communists are fully aware of this objective uniformity in the historical succession of forms of property, realising that the _-_-_
^^*^^ In his pamphlet, Heinzen refers to this statement by Engels and jubilantly exclaims: "If communism is not a doctrine, this means that you have no theory at all!" (35; 53).
412 abolition of private property is no arbitrary matter but implies objective conditions which take shape as a result of the development of private property.The question of private property is the question of definite, historically shaped production relations and the corresponding class structure of society, which is also a result of social development. The abolition of private property becomes a necessity only when the developing productive forces of capitalist society grow beyond the limited framework of private-property relations. Engels writes: "Because large-scale industry, the development of machinery, communications and world trade are assuming such gigantic proportions that their exploitation by individual capitalists is becoming daily more impossible; because the mounting crises of the world market are the most striking proof of this; because the productive forces and the means of exchange which characterise the present mode of production and exchange are daily becoming increasingly more than individual exchange and private property can manage; because, in a word, the moment is approaching when communal management of industry, of agriculture and of exchange will become a material necessity for industry, agriculture and exchange themselves---for this reason private property will be abolished" (1, 6; 304).
Consequently, in the period of bourgeois revolution the proletariat and its party do not set themselves the task of abolishing private property, just as they do not seek to avert the historically inevitable assumption of political power by the bourgeoisie, which is progressive in some conditions. Engels ridicules Heinzen's economic schemes, for he is unaware of the nature of capitalist production and its laws and demands utmost curbs on competition because the latter inevitably ruins a large part of the property-owners. Engels explains that free competition is not something that is independent of private property: it is a necessary outcome of its development. And so long as it is impossible to abolish private property, the demand to eliminate competition, anarchy of production, etc., is bound to be reactionary, because it is aimed against the development of large-scale capitalist production, i.e., social progress within the framework of bourgeois society.
Engels gives an evaluation of the reforms proposed by Heinzen and remarks that he borrowed them from the 413 communists. But the communists regard these reforms as preparatory measures for the elimination of private property through a proletarian revolution: "All measures to restrict competition and the accumulation of capital in the hands of individuals, all restriction or suppression of the law of inheritance, all organisation of labour by the state, etc., all these measures are not only possible, as revolutionary measures, but actually necessary" (1, 6; 295). But Heinzen believed these reforms to be the ultimate goal of bourgeois society's development, so converting them into mere phrases, which the bourgeoisie needs to distract the proletariat from its task in the bourgeois revolution, which is to win the maximum of democracy for the subsequent struggle against capital.
Heinzen believed that the peasant masses were the main force of the democratic movement. Engels countered this by pointing to the crucial importance of the working class: "The industrial proletariat of the towns has become the vanguard of all modern democracy; the urban petty bourgeoisie and still more the peasants depend on its initiative completely" (1, 6; 295). Here he is, in effect, considering the hegemony of the working class in the general democratic struggle.
Thus, in their polemics with Heinzen, Marx and Engels developed historical materialism and applied it to the solution of concrete political questions. They explain that the communists do not at all propose the abolition of private property in the course of a bourgeois revolution, because its abolition is not yet a historical necessity. Marx writes: "If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its `movement', the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie" (1, 6; 319).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ Concerning the proletariat's participation in the early bourgeois revolutions, Marx writes: "The first manifestation of a truly active communist party is contained within the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is eliminated. The most consistent republicans, in England the Levellers, in France Babeuf, Buonarotti, __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 415. 414
There is no need to argue the outstanding importance of this thesis of Marx's which follows from the materialist view of the objective determinateness of the epochal stages in social development. In pre-revolutionary Germany it signified a rejection of the political adventurism of the revolutionary leaders who hoped to set up a "Red Republic" with the help of a handful of conspirators and then instantly to implement the principles of socialism and communism. Such ideas and plans were nurtured not only by the members of secret revolutionary groups in France. During the 1848 revolution in Germany these ideas, together with the corresponding political tactics, were advocated by A. Gottschalk.^^*^^
Rejecting the adventurist attempts to run ahead of events, the founders of Marxism theoretically summed up historical experience and taught the proletariat active participation in bourgeois revolutions, explaining that only after the victory of the bourgeoisie could the proletariat issue its battle-cry that was "not at all rule of the princes or the republic, but rule of the working class or the rule of the bourgeois class" (1,6; 324). This is a definite statement of the question concerning the proletarian dictatorship.
Consequently, Marx and Engels not only exposed the political theory of German bourgeois radicalism, which also had some influence on the workers, but in the struggle against bourgeois ideology elaborated the basic questions of scientific communism, especially the question of the relation between the struggle for socialism and the struggle for democracy.
_-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 414. etc., were the first to proclaim these 'social questions'" (1, 6; 321). Quoting this extract, E. P. Kandel is quite right when he says: "Here Marx makes use of the definition 'communist party' in a broader sense, having in mind the action by the most advanced and revolutionary representatives of the contemporary proletariat" (10; 87).^^*^^ See, T. I. Oizerman, The Development of Marxist Theory From the Experience of the 1848 Revolutions, Chapter I, Moscow, 1955.
415 __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter Two __ALPHA_LVL2__ MATERIALIST SUBSTANTIATION OF SCIENTIFICOne of the key features of the formation of Marxism is its constant separation from all kinds of fellow-travellers: first, bourgeois liberalism, and then petty-bourgeois democracy, including petty-bourgeois socialism. Criticism of the latter is a necessary continuation of the struggle against the bourgeois ideology carried on by Marx and Engels. This feature of emergent Marxism reflects the historical process in which the proletariat emerges from the midst of the other exploited classes.
In order to substantiate the proletariat's historical role there is a need to study the qualitative distinctions between its social consciousness as a class and the ideology of the non-proletarian working masses. Hence, the need to criticise the petty bourgeoisie's vacillations. Marx and Engels put a high, value on the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the non-proletarian working masses, but believed it to be their duty to criticise the ideologists who voiced the conservative aspect of the small producer and opposed the emancipation movement of the working class. Among these ideologists in Germany in the mid-1840s were the "true socialists" Grim, Liming, Weydemeyer and Piitmann, who styled themselves "true socialists" in opposition to those who expounded the ``crude'' and ``uneducated'' French and English Utopian socialism. "True socialism" had taken shape by 1844. The Silesian weavers' uprising had the decisive role to play in shaping the trend, whose main feature was a denial of the need for capitalist development and also a denial of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. That is why a distinction
416 should be drawn between "true socialism" and the earlier "philosophy of communism", despite the fact that a sizable number of its spokesmen switched to the positions of "true socialism". The need for this demarcation has been well established by M. V. Serebryakov (75) and E. P. Kandel (//). The "true socialists" insisted that Germany should not travel the English and French, i.e., capitalist, way and criticised the German bourgeoisie for implanting capitalist relations and appealed to the feudal governments to prevent the growth of the proletariat and pauperism. In their writings, the "true socialists" gave pictures of the working people's terrible poverty, as E. Dronke did in his 1846 Polizei-Ge.schichten ("Police Stories"). This protest against pauperism reflected the revolutionary ferment within the German people.From 1845 to 1847, "true socialism" became fairly influential in Germany. Its journals, Prometheus, Das Westphiilische Damp/boot, Veilchen, Gesellschaftsspiegel, and Rheinische Jahrbucher, spread the doctrine in prose and verse. Subsequently, some "true socialists" joined the revolutionary camp,^^*^^ but as an ideological trend, "true socialism" was undoubtedly reactionary.^^**^^
Contrary to the assertions of Heinzen and other opponents of emergent Marxism, who lumped contemporary socialists in one camp, Marx and Engels were never "true socialists". In 1844 and 1845, they did work with some "true socialists", chiefly with M. Hess, who was the first among the Young Hegelians to spread the ideas of Utopian socialism. They supported Hess to the extent to which they strove to tie in French socialist ideas with those of German classical philosophy and English political economy, but while Hess _-_-_
^^*^^ In October 1847, Engels wrote: "All members of this now completely dissolved movement who are capable of learning anything have come over to the Communists and are now themselves attacking true socialism wherever it still shows itself" (/, 6; 300-01).
^^**^^ In a preface to the selected works of M. Hess, Cornu and Monke quite rightly noted: "On the whole, the writings of the 'true socialists' arcmarked by very definite reactionary features, and this in two respects: first, the idealistic phrases of `true' socialism inevitably confused the workers, distracting them from the class struggle and slowing down the development of their class consciousness; second, `true' socialists, with their pettybourgeois propositions, had no idea at all of real history, and so opposed the liberal bourgeoisie, doing this in such a way as to help feudal reaction, which was fighting it" (36; X).
417 continued to take the idealist view, Marx and Engels went on to work out dialectical materialism and scientific communism. Their differences, which first came to light in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, gained in depth in the subsequent period.In the preceding chapter, I examined Engels's preface to an extract from the writings of Fourier, in which he makes a number of sharp critical remarks about the "true socialists". The "Circular Against Kriege" also exposes some "true socialism" ideas. It is true that because Kriege was not actually a member of any of the rival "true socialism" groups in Germany, far from all "true socialists" regarded Kriege's exposure as having any direct bearing on them. O. Liining even published the ``Circular'' (but with all kinds of reservations toning down its content) in his journal Das Westphdlische Damp/boot, and said that in the main he accepted the views it contained. This was a characteristic expression of "true socialism`s'' theoretical confusion, ideological impotence and tendency to compromise.
M. Hess backed Marx's statement against Weitling and wrote to Marx: "Whereas at first communist aspirations were necessarily connected with German ideology, it is now necessary to substantiate them with historical and economic premises" (23; 389-90). However, this correct approach did not prevent Hess from remaining an idealist and a Utopian. The "true socialists" strove in every way to get Marx and Engels to write regularly for their publications, as is instanced by Hess's letter to Marx soon after the publication of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. Hess reported on the ``triumphant'' advance of socialism in Germany: "All the former philosophical radicals have now become socialist radicals.... Soon the whole of educated Germany will become socialist, and radical socialist, and I believe, communist at that.... Karl Grim, who is steadily improving, has much credit for spreading our line in the German press. He is tireless. We have now settled together and daily make new breaches in the rotten edifice of the present order" (76; 1-2).
When preparing the publication of the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel, whose declared purpose was to unite "writers of our orientation", Hess sought to get Marx and Engels to send in regular contributions to it. (see 37; 105-07). But they did not take an active part in the journal, 418 despite the fact that they undoubtedly believed that Hess stood out among the "true socialists", even as they were writing The German Ideology, whose second volume contained a critique of "true socialism''.
As early as 1845, Marx and Engels saw the need for a clear-cut separation from the "true socialists". The letters from Germany which Marx received in Brussels testified that these petty-bourgeois ideologists were doing much harm to the spread of communist ideas. Having published The Holy Family, they were looking forward to a joint book--- The German Ideology---and decided to devote its second volume to a critique of "true socialism". It is true that the latter was not published at the time, but its content must have been publicised, if only by the publishers who refused to print it, largely because it contained a critique of "true socialism". Engels's article, "True Socialists", which he wrote in early 1847, outlined the content of the second volume of the book. The article was not published at the time either. In 1847, Marx and Engels were able to attack "true socialism" on the pages of the Deutsche Briisseler Zeitung, which carried Marx's "Declaration Against Karl Griin", and Engels's "German Socialism in Verse and Prose''.
When the founders of Marxism criticised the "true socialists" in 1846, the latter tried to find a way of reconciliation. Hess, who clearly failed to understand the substance of the differences between Marx and Engels, on the one hand, and petty-bourgeois Utopians, on the other, believed that personal relations were to blame. In his letters to Marx, he spoke of "our party", in which he included himself and Marx (23; 344).^^*^^ But Marx and Engels believed that the primary task was ideological separation from "true socialism" and petty-bourgeois ideology generally. That is why they attached much importance to a public statement against "true socialism", and this took the form of articles in the Deutsche Briisseler Zeitung.
The writings of Marx and Engels in 1845 show that they are clearly aware of the basic defects of French and English Utopian socialism, but that they find totally unacceptable the criticism of these doctrines by the German "true socialists", _-_-_
^^*^^ However, in the same letter, while declaring that he shares Marx's ideas, he adds: "I want to have nothing more to do with your party" (23; 345).
419 because the latter killed the real content of these doctrines, instead of enriching them with a scientific analysis of economic relations and the struggle between classes. In The German Ideology they say: "These `socialists' or 'true socialists', as they call themselves, regard foreign communist literature not as the expression and the product of a real movement but as purely theoretical writings which have been evolved---in the same way as they imagine the German philosophical systems to have been evolved---by a process of 'pure thought'. It never occurs to them that, even when these writings do preach a system, they spring from the practical needs, the conditions of life in their entirety of a particular class in a particular country" (1, 5; 455). They explained that in Germany class antagonisms were as yet not as developed as they were in Britain and France, which is why the German petty-bourgeois ideologists had to rehash foreign communist and socialist ideas in the spirit of a world view which was spontaneously taking shape on the basis of small-scale artisan production. "They detach the communist systems, critical and polemical writings from the real movement, of which they are but the expression, and force them into an arbitrary connection with German philosophy" (I, 5; 456). Communist ideas, reflecting the condition and interests of the proletariat, were presented as supra-class principles that were common to the whole of mankind. The transformation of proletarian communism "within the heaven of the German mind" meant a loss of all revolutionary elan. Petty-bourgeois socialism proclaimed universal love of men, addressing itself not to the proletarians but to man in general, to the everyday and philosophical consciousness prevailing in Germany. Thus, "even the social movement was at first a m,erely literary one because of the lack of real, passionate, practical party struggles in Germany" (7, 5; 457).^^*^^ _-_-_^^*^^ In Germany, they say, socialist phraseology deprived of real socialist content is especially dangerous: "Of course, we realise that the communist movement cannot be impaired by a few German phrase-mongers. But in a country like Germany---where philosophic phrases have for centuries exerted a certain power, and where, moreover, communist consciousness is anyhow less keen and determined because class contradictions do not exist in as acute a form as in other nations---it is, nevertheless, necessary to resist all phrases which obscure and dilute still further the realisation that communism is totally opposed to the existing world order" (/, 5; 469).
420A visual example of the way in which the "true socialists" digested the theories of the French and English socialists and communists was their assertion that their doctrine was a unity of opposite principles which had allegedly been artificially separated from each other by the French and the English, the unity of socialism and communism. Meanwhile, they had a very vague idea of the difference between socialist and communist ideas, and simply started from Hegel's triad, designating socialism and communism as the thesis and antithesis, and declaring their doctrine to be the negation of the negation, which superseded the ``extremes''. The essence of this ``synthesis'' was a rehash of Hegel's and Feuerbach's doctrines of alienation. In his analysis of Griin's book, The Social Movement in France and Belgium, Marx shows that this leader of petty-bourgeois socialism was convinced that Feuerbach was infallible and devoutly believed that ``Man'' or "pure, true Man" was the ultimate goal of world history, that religion, money, wagelabour, were all alienations of the human substance, the measure of all things, and so on, and so forth. Socialism, regarded as the overcoming of alienation which had originated from nowhere, was declared to be a supra-class truth, and an expression of man's substantial nature, which German ideology had allegedly comprehended. Man, he said, was something individual, based on the general, the gens, humanity. From this standpoint, socialism was a re-establishment of the disrupted unity between the categories of the general and the individual. Ridiculing these idealistic phrases, Marx and Engels explained that such criticism of capitalism was quite good-natured, while the futile juggling of categories of the individual and the general, presented as the true form for resolving social issues, was only a reflection of Germany's backwardness.
The "true socialists" declared every man to be socialist in substance, preaching a universal brotherhood, condemning the class struggle as the worst form of man's alienation, and scorning the struggle for democracy as self-delusion. They sought to prevail on the workers that they should "not at any time take part in political revolutions (1, 5; 557).^^*^^
_-_-_^^*^^ Hess and Kottgen wrote on this question as follows: "We did not recommend a revolution which we ourselves hate, and which is repugnant to us, but a doctrine according to which revolution should be avoided" (47; 96).
421The heralds of "true socialism" also addressed their sermons to the propertied classes: they sought to convince the rich that wealth did not bring happiness, which consisted in becoming a true man. Weydemeyer, who subsequently broke with "true socialism" and became an associate of Marx and Engels's, said, for instance, that "a very large section of the rich ... are anything but happy" (I, 5; 544). The attribute of the true man, i.e., the socialist, they claimed, was ``natural'' or ``true'' property, i.e., the property of the small producers, as opposed to large-scale capitalist property, which was a source of misfortune for the capitalists themselves and for mankind as a whole.
The founders of Marxism show the theoretical roots of the Utopian notions: "If one takes the antithesis of communism to the world of private property in its crudest form, i.e., in the most abstract form in which the real conditions of that antithesis are ignored, then one is faced with the antithesis of property and lack of property. T'he abolition of this antithesis can be viewed as the abolition of either the one side or the other; either property is abolished, in which case universal lack of property or destitution results, or else the lack of property is abolished, which means the establishment of true property. In reality, the actual property-owners stand on one side and the propertyless communist proletarians on the other. This opposition becomes keener day by day and is rapidly driving to a crisis" (1, 5; 469). But the "true socialists" proved to be incapable of going beyond the abstract antithesis of property and absence of property. The antithesis of the chief classes of bourgeois society remained beyond the field of vision of the Utopians, who, like all petty bourgeois, feared capitalist competition, which threatened to convert them into proletarians. As a result, "true socialism" substituted for the true picture of capitalist relations a lacrimose sermon of universal brotherhood and sentimental complaints about suffering mankind. "It preached the gospel of man---of the true man, of the true real man, of the true, real corporeal man---with all its strength, but this, of course, was not particularly great" (1, 5; 541), Engels remarked sarcastically.
The "true socialists" were terrified at the growth of the proletarian movement in France and Britain, and even argued that socialism had no connection at all with the proletariat. They claimed that proletarians were men who 422 had nothing, while the "true socialists" were spiritual aristocrats and intellectuals. In contrast to the start-of-- thecentury Utopians, who failed to see the links between the socialist and communist teachings, and the working-class movement, the "true socialists" denied an obvious historical fact, which even some spokesmen for feudal-romantic reaction admitted, as L. Stein did in his well-known book, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs (Socialism and Communism in Modern France) (1842). In an epoch when the antagonistic contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie increasingly rose to the surface, the "true socialists" tried to damp down the mounting struggle of classes and urged the capitalist magnates to become socialist benefactors. This exaggerated notion of the power of money and of the financiers fully accorded with the nature of the petty bourgeois, as compared with what Engels called "the proud, threatening, and revolutionary proletarian" (1, 6; 235).^^*^^
Although the "true socialists" addressed themselves to the big capitalists, they also accused the liberal bourgeoisie that it tended to generate the proletariat (or pauperism, which was the same thing in their view), so ruining the ``independent'' small businessman. The "true socialists" rejected the political struggle^ and declared that the liberal programme for securing a constitution was alien to the people. Griin, for instance, wrote that only the Prussian liberals demanded a Constitution, while the people did not even think about it. Marx shows that the "true socialists'" demands to restructure society in accordance with human nature were borrowed from Feuerbach, who asserted that in man nature contemplated itself, loved itself, etc. They saw socialism as the overcoming of the dichotomy between man and nature, man's alienation from nature, etc. In this context, Marx and Engels write: "The first fact asserted is that man possesses self-consciousness. The instincts and energies of individual natural beings are transformed into the instincts and forces of `nature', which then, as a matter of course, `are _-_-_
^^*^^ Elsewhere, characterising the class roots of Grtin's petty-bourgeois socialism, Engels says: "His whole polemic against the Revolution is that of a philistine. His hatred of the liberals, the July Revolution and protective tariffs is. the absolutely unmistakable expression of the hatred an oppressed, inflexible petty bourgeois feels for the independent, progressive bourgeois" (/, 6; 267).
423 manifested' in isolation in these individual beings. This mystification was needed in order later to effect a unification of these instincts and forces of `Nature' in the human self-consciousness. Thereby the self-consciousness of man is, of course, transformed into the self-consciousness of nature within him. This mystification is apparently resolved in the following way: in order to pay nature back for finding its self-consciousness in man, man seeks his, in turn, in nature---a procedure which enables him, of course, to find nothing in nature except what he has imputed to it by means of the mystification described above" (1, 5; 473). This important critical remark shows very well that Feuerbach's anthropologism is groundless and that it has definitely been overcome for good.Thus, whereas in 1844 and 1845, Marx and Engels tended to overestimate the importance of Feuerbach's philosophy for the development of the socialist doctrine, their critique of the "true socialists", which was in a sense self-criticism as well, shows that they no longer tended to do so.
In elaborating the basic propositions of scientific socialist ideology, Marx and Engels emphasise its internationalist character. Impassioned and steadfast revolutionaries, they reject the "true socialists'" nationalistic assertions that the Germans were head and shoulders above the other nations. Their analysis of these claims shows the "narrowly national outlook which underlies the alleged universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Germans" (1, 5; 470). The "true socialists" idealised Germany's socio-economic backwardness. The fact that, in contrast to other European nations, the Germans did not so much make history in practice as tried to comprehend it, provided the "true socialists" with the pretext for believing that they had a mission to pass judgement on other nations. "National narrow-mindedness is everywhere repellent. In Germany it is positively odious, since, together with the illusion that the Germans are superior to nationality and to all real interests, it is held in the face of those nations which openly confess their national limitations and their dependence upon real interests" (1, 5; 470).
In the foregoing chapters, I showed that in 1846, Marx came out against Weitling's pseudo-scientific claim that communism had been given him in revelation. The founders of Marxism believed that their primary task in working out 424 scientific socialism and theoretically summing up the experience of the working-class movement was to disprove such notions of relations between the leaders of the socialist movement and the masses, notions which inevitably led to sectarianism and a distortion of the true role not only of the leaders but also of the masses. Accordingly, they exposed the "true socialists'", messianic claims. Feuerbach had argued that speculative philosophy was ultimately rational theology, but its exponents likened themselves to religious preachers announcing the advent of the Kingdom of Christ, and also pretended to be divinely elected for the meek fold to follow. For these idealists every social movement began with the appearance on the historical scene of a messiah who pronounced the ultimate truth. Like the Young Hegelians, the "true socialists" believed themselves to be the makers of world history, while the masses were more of an object than a subject.
The present-day critics of Marxism say nothing about Marx's and Engels's struggle against these messianic claims on the part of the Young Hegelians, Weitling and the "true socialists", and frequently liken them to the prophets of petty-bourgeois socialism whom the two men had relentlessly ridiculed. In elaborating the materialist view of history, they kept explaining that, in contrast to Utopian socialism, scientific socialism is fundamentally incompatible with any absolutisation of the role of the individual in history. The fundamental tenet of Marxism concerning the historical role of the working class is a rejection in principle of any pseudo-scientific and reactionary opposition of outstanding historical figures arid the masses.
In an article, "The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter", Marx criticised the feudal romantic ideology and said that the "true socialists" helped the reactionaries by attacking the bourgeoisie and at the same time rejecting the struggle for democratic transformations: "If a certain section of German socialists has continually blustered against the liberal bourgeoisie, and has done so, in a manner which has benefited nobody but the German governments, and if at present government newspapers like the Rh[einischer] Beobachter, basing themselves on the empty phrases of these people, claim that it is not the liberal bourgeoisie but the government which represents the interests of the proletariat, then the Communists have nothing in common with either 425 the former or the latter" (1, 6; 220).
This fully explains why Marx and Engels believed their primary political task to be an attack against "true socialism", which not only distorted socialist ideas but also discredited the struggle for democracy. The point is that criticism of the bourgeoisie (and capitalism) without insistence on the need for a revolutionary abolition of feudal social relations, coalesces with the ideology of feudal romanticism, which declares absolutism to be a force over and above classes that allegedly displays concern for the interests of the masses and which demagogically attacks the bourgeoisie for its selfseeking, while saying nothing about the self-seeking of the landowners.
In their Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels summed up their critical analysis of "true socialism", and declared that "To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it ['true socialism'---T. O.] served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
``It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.
``While this `true' socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German Philistine" (1, 6; 512).
Of course, subjectively the leaders of German pettybourgeois socialism did not advocate absolutism, and their speeches against the German bourgeoisie did not aim to support the feudal reactionaries. They found themselves in the wake of the reactionaries because they were unable and unwilling to tie in socialism with the proletariat's emancipation movement and the struggle for democracy.
In their fight against "true socialism", Marx and Engels showed the significance of bourgeois-democratic transformations for the proletarian struggle for socialism, arguing that the bourgeois revolution and the establishment of the bourgeoisie's political power create the necessary conditions for the revolutionary movement of the working class, which culminates in the overthrow of the power of capital. Thus, they did not confine themselves to a critique of pettybourgeois socialism but worked out the materialist view of history, the doctrine of the material prerequisites of 426 socialism, of the proletariat's socialist nature, of the struggle between classes and of the socialist revolution. They showed that Germany would not reach socialism in some special way that ruled out capitalist development, but through the emancipation movement of the working class.
In our day, when pseudo-criticism of capitalism, romantic anti-capitalism and quasi-socialist catchwords have become the hallmark of many bourgeois, including anti-communist, doctrines, the works of Marx and Engels exposing German petty-bourgeois socialism are of the utmost importance.
The "true socialists" denied the need for the proletarian struggle for democracy, while present-day right-wing socialists declare state-monopoly capitalism a "welfare state". Like the petty-bourgeois socialists of the mid-19th century, present-day right-wing socialists claim that a classless society can be built only through a reconciliation of the opposite classes, that the motive force of the socialist movement is provided by the sense of justice, the urge to attain a universal human ideal, etc., which are supposedly independent of class struggle and economic conditions. They also allege that, in contrast to .obsolete Marxism, their teaching is based on the historical experience of the twentieth century.
In his article, "The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter", Marx exposes the reactionaries' attempts to present religion and the church as forces rising over and above the opposite social interests and showing all men the way of redemption and solidarity. Communism, Marx says, is a revolutionary negation of the capitalist system, while Christianity, in effect, sanctifies oppression and man's exploitation of man. In the past, Christianity used to justify ancient slavery and the serf system. Today, it justifies the proletariat's exploitation, even if it does so with some • reservations. Christianity says that the division of society into opposite classes is a divine necessity, and its calls on the ruling class to do good to the oppressed and the exploited are a package of hypocritical and pious hopes. It promises the working people recompense in a life to come for the injustices they have to suffer in this life.
Marx writes: "The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.
427``The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.
``The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.
``So much for the social principles of Christianity" (1, 6; 231).
One will easily see that this exposure of Christianity differs essentially from Feuerbach's, who said that it tended to impoverish, debase and demoralise man in general, every man, which is, of course, quite true, but the whole point is that, like every religion, Christianity is an apology for the exploitative order, and it is this point that Feuerbach mostly missed. He attacked religion from the standpoint of bourgeois humanism, while Marx exposed Christianity as a proletarian revolutionary. Consequently, not only at the initial, revolutionary-democratic stage in the shaping of Marxism, but also later, when Marx and Engels established themselves as the founders of dialectical materialism and scientific communism, the struggle against religion constituted one of the most important aspects in the development of the Marxist world view. Whatever the problems they tackled---philosophical, sociological, historical, economic--- they always substantiated scientific, proletarian atheism.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 2 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MARX'S CRITIQUE OF PROUDHON'S ECONOMIC UTOPIAMarx's attack on Proudhon's doctrine was another advance in the substantiation of scientific communism. Whereas the critique of "true socialism" was aimed above all against the speculative idealist interpretation of socialism, his critique of Proudhonism not only refuted idealism but also the false economic conception of petty-bourgeois socialism.
Even before Proudhon, some English socialists (Hodgskin, Bray, and others) drew socialist conclusions from the theory of value, and while Proudhon did not name these 428 predecessors of his, he must have relied on their ideas and actually repeated Bray's ideas in his project for an ``exchange''. But in contrast to the English socialists, Proudhon tried to combine the theory of value, which he saw in the light of Utopian socialism, and a philosophical conception of world history.
On the whole Marx gave a positive appraisal of Proudhon's early work, What Is Property? During his stay in Paris in 1844 and 1845, Marx met Proudhon and tried to make him take the path of revolutionary struggle against capitalism. However, Proudhon evolved to the right and drew closer to the "true socialists", through whom he got a knowledge of Hegel's philosophy. Marx's efforts to get Proudhon to join the Communist Correspondence Committee were not successful either.
In 1846, Proudhon issued another book, Philosophy of Poverty, in which he attacked communism, the working-class movement and political struggle generally. He preached a peaceful transformation of capitalism into a society of small producers, who were independent of each other and who exchanged their products in accordance with the quantity of labour they expended. He claimed that such a society would make state power superfluous. He said that the state did not exist because of the struggle between opposite classes, but because of the nation-wide organisation of production, the need for which he resolutely denied. In his book, he carried to the limit his metaphysical antithesis between the small producers' private property and capitalist private property. He held the former to be an attribute, and the latter a distortion of human nature.
Proudhon saw the proletarians as inferior men, because they had become alien to ``independent'' artisan production. He regarded proletarian strikes as rioting by a blind mob. He pinned all his hopes for radical social transformation on the artisans, who had only to organise ``exchange'' where everyone would be able to exchange his product for another's without money. Once the small producers were supplied with credit, all the evil on earth would be eliminated. He assumed that all the, social evils were rooted in trade, money and usury. He saw the law of value as the law of fair exchange, which, it is true, was distorted by the circulation of money.
Proudhon's petty-bourgeois criticism of capitalism 429 presented a serious danger to the contemporary working-class movement, with its strong petty-bourgeois illusions and hopes for all manner of panaceas, and projects which the doctrinaire Utopians spun out in great abundance. Immediately upon the publication of his book, Marx realised the need to combat this pseudo-socialist ideology. In a letter to P. V. Annenkov on December 28, 1846, Marx described Proudhon as an ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie, who finds himself in a twofold condition: "He is dazed by the magnificence of the upper middle class and has sympathy for the sufferings of the people. He is at once both bourgeois and man of the people. Deep down in his heart he flatters himself that he is impartial and has found the right equilibrium, which claims to be something different from the juste-milieu. Such a petty bourgeois glorifies contradiction because contradiction is the essence of his existence" (3; 39). Proudhon, Marx shows, did not reject either private property, competition or any of the other pillars of capitalism, and in everything sought to discover the good and the bad to overcome the contradiction between the two and to present a recipe for improving capitalism. He regards all the economic pillars of the bourgeois society as establishments based on good ideas but badly implemented. "Indeed he does what all good bourgeois do.... They all want competition without the pernicious effects of competition. They all want the impossible, namely, the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions. None of them understands that the bourgeois form of production is historical and transitory, just as the feudal form was" (3; 37).
Marx exposes the Hegelian-type idealism, which is the philosophical basis of Proudhon's petty-bourgeois views. Proudhon does not regard the categories of bourgeois political economy as abstract expressions of historically transient economic relations, but believes that these economic relations are an embodiment of the categories, which had existed in mankind's impersonal reason from time immemorial. On the one hand, Proudhon has eternal ideas and categories of pure reason, and on the other, the practical activity of men, which realises these categories. His sole charge against the bourgeoisie was that it had distorted the ``eternal'' principles of property, competition, etc. He asserted that there was a contradiction between ideas and 430 men's practical activity, and proposed a project for overcoming it. Without actually declaring bourgeois society to be an embodiment of the eternal principles of reason, Proudhon said this indirectly, so'establishing the categories of bourgeois political economy as everlasting and immutable. " Accordingly he does not rise above the bourgeois horizon" (3; 36).
According to Proudhon, social relations are independent of the productive forces and are determined only by the level of human comprehension, the extent to which men had come to understand the eternal economic categories. He failed to understand that production is not only production of things, but of social relations, together with the corresponding economic categories. This made him assume that resolving social contradictions was a matter for thought, for science, although these contradictions spring from real life and can be actively resolved only in life itself. Marx remarks ironically: "It is therefore the men of learning that make history, the men who know how to purloin God's secret thoughts. The common people have only to apply their revelations" (3; 37). It is not surprising, therefore, that Proudhon was opposed to political struggle, for which the implementation of his reform could do very well.
Marx's letter\to Annenkov is a remarkable sketch of the first work of mature Marxism, The Poverty of Philosophy, in which Marx exposes Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty, as a petty-bourgeois Utopia which diverts trie working people from the class struggle. In place of Proudhon's idealistic politico-economic constructs, Marx presents the dialecticomaterialist view as the basis for a theoretical analysis of economic relations. Marx's book was published in early July 1847 in French, and was highly important in the struggle against Proudhonism and petty-bourgeois ideology generally. First of all, Marx criticises Proudhon's view of commodity exchange: the products of labour become commodities by mutual agreement among men, who due to their nature have diverse requirements and produce various things to satisfy them. Proudhon regarded the diversity of the individual's requirements as something that had been there all along, i.e., not as the effect, but as the cause of the production of various things. Proudhon regarded man in the developed bourgeois society as natural man, from whose nature springs the need for commodity exchange. From this it followed that the exchange of commodities (and so value) 431 was not a historically transient form of social production but realisation of the eternal principles of human reason.
As opposed to Proudhon Marx shows that the exchange of commodities, like the diversity of the social individual's requirements can be correctly understood only in the light of history. There was a time when producers exchanged only the surplus of their production. Under capitalism, everything, even what once had been regarded as inalienable, can be bought and sold. "This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought---virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc.---when everything finally passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value" (7, 6; 113). Human labour (Marx has yet to develop the concept of labour-power) also becomes a commodity. Proudhon did not believe this to be important and so also neglected the fact that the formation of the proletariat is a full-scale expression of the antagonistic contradictions which are organic to the commodity economy and which develop along with it. After all, according to Proudhon, division of labour and the exchange of commodities exist for the convenience of the producer: he is, after all, unable to make all the things he needs. That is why producers, according to Proudhon, had agreed on a division of labour and the mutual exchange of their products.
Marx sarcastically exposes the groundlessness of Proudhon's social-contract concept, which had allegedly initiated the economic interdependence among producers. Men, Marx writes, cannot, of course, agree to make commodities of love, conviction, and conscience. Equally, human labour does not become a commodity because of man's expression of free will. The universality of commoditymoney relations under capitalism is determined by the law of value.
From Proudhon's standpoint, men began to produce luxuries and the most expensive consumer goods in general after they had satisfied their elementary requirements. There, Proudhon ignored the objective basis of men's production activity and the contradictions inherent in 432 __FIX__ Remove bold on this page. commodity production. The point is, Marx says, that since the emergence of private property there has been a contradictionx between living and accumulated labour, and between various social groups. "No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms. To say now that, because all the needs of all the workers were satisfied, men could devote themselves to the creation of products of a higher order---to more complicated industries----would be to leave class antagonism out of account and turn all historical development upside down" (1, 6; 132-33).
Proudhon ignored the class opposites because he regarded the production of commodities as something which was quite natural and without which human life was altogether impossible. He identified the production of commodities with the production of material goods in general, and reduced value to the expenditure of a definite quantity of labour for the making of a thing, which is inevitable in any conditions. His conviction that commodity production was eternal led him to the absurd conclusion that the cheapest things had the broadest distribution because they were the most useful. It turns out, Marx says, that potatoes, cotton and hard liquor are more useful than meat, wool, flax, beer and wine. Proudhon failed to see that the minimum price which is determined by the lowest expenditure of labour determines the maximum of consumption. The production of cotton, potatoes and hard liquor requires less labour than the production of other, more useful products, which is why they had become the cornerstone of bourgeois society. In a society based on the exploitation and poverty of the masses, the most beggarly products inevitably come to be the people's consumer goods. "In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of its social utility" (I, 6; 134).
Proudhon equally displayed his inability to see the organic contradictions of commodity production when he said that the sum-total of the values produced by labour was equal to the sum-total of the incomes of the producers, so that the producers were able to purchase all of the goods they made. __PRINTERS_P_433_COMMENT__ 15---185 433 This meant a failure to understand that workers' wages are the value of the means necessary for reproducing manpower and not the value of all the goods produced by the workers. The fact that the worker receives less than he produces springs from the nature of capitalist commodity production, which is necessarily based on the existence of workers deprived of the means of production. This does not depend either on the will of the workers or of the capitalists.
Of course, Proudhon must have realised that in a society in which the exchange of commodities prevails the producers had to live in poverty, but he claimed that their poverty had nothing to do with the law of value. It sprang from the unreasonable use of the law of value, from a distortion of this principle of reason. What then had to be done to re-establish the true law of value, which, according to Proudhon, ensured a fair distribution of consumer goods in accordance with the quantity of labour time expended by the producer on their production? There was a need to establish a correct relation between the exchange value of a product and its utility.
Proudhon asserted that he had discovered the antithesis between exchange and use value, but Marx shows that this contradiction had been noted long before Proudhon, by Sismondi, Lauderdale and other economists. Proudhon had distorted the real relation between these opposites because he identified exchange value with scarcity, and use value with abundance, ultimately equating use value and demand. Stating his task to be a reconciliation of supply and demand, Proudhon declares that this depends on human will because "...it is man's free will that gives rise to the opposition between use value and exchange value" (1, 6; 117). It is free will that was to resolve the contradiction by means of the true, fair, or ``constituted'' value, which was the quantity of labour time expended on the production of a given thing. If every artisan was able to receive in exchange for the product of, say, his ten-hour labour any other products containing the same quantity of labour, the contradiction between exchange and use value would be resolved. "Constituted value", according to Proudhon, was the relation of proportionality of products which constitute wealth. There was no such relation in capitalist society where the price of a commodity changes in consequences of the fluctuation of supply and demand. This injustice is eliminated by " 434 constituted value", which reduces price to the quantity of labour time. In this way, Proudhon held, human reason and social genius solve their problems in a single formula.
Proudhon did not examine the essential distinction between complex and simple, skilled and unskilled labour. He also ignored the fact that the value of a commodity is determined not merely by the quantity of labour expended on its production, but by the quantity of socially necessary labour. He simply asserted that commodity exchange under capitalism was not equivalent, so that the law of value was constantly violated. According to Proudhon "constituted value" could rehabilitate the law of value. Proudhon's attempt to ``correct'' the operation of the law of value showed that he took an oversimplified, artisan view of its operation. The "constituted value", which he invented was merely a Utopian interpretation of Ricardo's theory of value. Marx says: "Rieardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production, which constitutes value. M. Proudhon, leaving this real movement out of account, 'fumes and frets' in order to invent new processes and to achieve the reorganisation of the world on a would-be new formula, which formula is no more than the theoretical expression of the real movement which exists and which is so well described by Rieardo" (I, 6; 123). Consequently, Proudhon did not express any new idea but merely tried to re-interpret Ricardo's idea, giving as a revolutionary theory of the future "what Rieardo expounded scientifically as the theory of present-day society, of bourgeois society" (1, 6; 121).
The law of value is distorted also because the exchange is effected by means of money. Although money, Proudhon said, was also a product of agreement, it made equivalent exchange impossible because the state used it in its own interest. He declared: "Money is born of sovereign consecration: the sovereigns took possession of gold and silver and affixed their seal to them" (7, 6; 147).^^*^^ Marx shows that Proudhon was Utopian when he recommended that artisans _-_-_
^^*^^ Marx says: "Thus the whim of sovereigns is for M. Proudhon the highest reason in political economy.
``Truly, one must be destitute of all historical knowledge not to know that it is the sovereigns who in all ages have been subject to economic conditions, but they have never dictated laws to them. Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations" (1, 6; 147).
435 should directly exchange their products with each other, without the use of money, and he explains that money is not a thing that can be by the mode of their production. The commodity form of exchange effected through the medium of m6ney implies the division of labour, existence of private property, classes and of antagonism between them.Thus, Proudhon abstracted himself from the fact that in bourgeois society it is not the individual producers that exchange the products of their labour but masses of wage-workers toiling for the owners of the means of production. While ignoring the specific antagonisms inherent in the capitalist system, Proudhon tried hard to retain its commodity basis.
Lenin gave a high appreciation of Marx's critique of Proudhon's economic Utopia and stressed the opportunistic meaning of the latter's "constituted value": "Not abolishing capitalism and its basis---commodity production---but purging that basis of abuses, of excrescences, and so forth; not abolishing exchange and exchange value, but on the contrary, making it `constitutional', universal, absolute, 'fair', and free of fluctuations, crises and abuses---such was Proudhon's idea" (5, 20; 34).
Thus, the "constituted value" theory was a pseudo-- scientific economic back-up of petty-bourgeois socialism. Comparing Proudhon's doctrine with classical political economy, Marx notes that Smith and Ricardo could be called fatalists, because they saw the poverty engendered by capitalism as being inevitable. This conception corresponded to the period in which capitalism established itself. But when in the course of capitalist progress, the antagonism between labour and capital came to the fore, there appeared economic romanticists, followed by economic humanists, who bewailed the plight of the proletarians, advised them to be moderate, to breed fewer children, etc. Finally, there came the economic philanthropists, who improved on the arguments of their predecessors and denied the inevitability of antagonism within the capitalist mode of production. They sought to maintain capitalist relations while doing away with their organic antagonistic contradictions. For all the differences between these economic schools, they were ideologists of the bourgeoisie and were convinced that the capitalist mode of production was everlasting.
In contrast to the bourgeois economists, the socialists and 436 communists expressed the interests of the proletariat at various stages of its historical development. "So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely Utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science" (1, 6; 177).
To which of these two groups did Proudhon belong? Neither to the one, nor to the other, because he criticised both the bourgeois economists and the Utopian socialists. The former, he held, saw only the good side of capitalism, and the latter, only the bad. He claimed to have produced a synthesis of the opposite theories, but in fact repeated the mistakes of both. "He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians; he is merely thrf petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism" (1, 6; 178). This makes him an opponent of revolutionary struggle, a reformist and a doctrinaire. Socialist theory can be actively developed only through a scientific comprehension of the real socio-historical process. Once the proletariat has started to take organised action against its class enemy, its theoretical spokesmen no longer need to look for scientific truths in their own minds: all they have to do is to study the ongoing historical process and consciously to express it. "So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From the moment they see this side, science, which is produced by the historical movement and associating itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary" (1, 6; 177-78).
This key proposition shows the genesis of scientific socialism and also substantiates the unity of socialist theory and revolutionary practice.
437 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 3 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MATERIALIST DIALECTICS AND PROUDHON'S PHILOSOPHY OFProudhon, Marx says, acted as an economist among philosophers, and as a philosopher among economists, which is why there is a need to move on from the critique of his economic Utopia to an analysis of his philosophical views. Every philosophical system is summed up in its method, and Proudhon's method was vulgarised Hegelian dialectics.
Proudhon followed Hegel in regarding categories as the basis of empirically observed phenomena. What is the relation between economic categories and economic phenomena? Proudhon gives the idealistic answer to the essentially basic philosophical question, regarding economic relations as an embodiment of economic categories, which men come to cognise insofar as they realise their requirements and seek reasonably to satisfy them.
Proudhon tried to deduce one category from another, and constructed a system of economic categories,- assuming that he was showing the true structure of society's economic life. Having arranged his categories in a definite sequence, he characterised this as the sequence of ideas in reason, in accordance with which economic relations needed to be reorganised. He failed to understand that these categories were the categories of the capitalist economy, which is why they could not be directly applied to other types of economic relations. Historical development is converted into a process of discovery and realisation of eternal and immutable ideas, while historical conflicts are said to spring from the discrepancy between the predetermined ideal and its practical realisation. This gives world history a ideological character. Its prime fundamental is said to be social genius, which is totally analogous with Hegel's absolute spirit. History is interpreted as the quest by social genius for absolute truth (or absolute justice) and ways of realising it. Proudhon did not recognise development in the proper sense of the word: "...in civilisation as in the universe, everything has existed, has acted, from eternity.... This applies to the whole of social economy" (7, 6; 171).
Consequently, he completely accepted the idealistic premises of Hegel's dialectics, above all the notion of absolute reason, from which the empirical reality had to be logically 438 deduced. Marx asks: "Why does Mr. Proudhon talk about God, about universal reason, about the impersonal reason of humanity which never errs, which has always been equal to itself and which one need only understand properly in order to arrive at the truth? Why do'es he resort to feeble Hegelianism to give himself the appearance of a bold thinker?
He himself provides the answer to this riddle. Mr. Proudhon sees in history a series of social developments; he finds progress realised in history; finally he finds that men, as individuals, did not know what they were doing and were mistaken about their own movement, that is to say, their social development seems at the first glance to be distinct, separate and independent of their individual development. He cannot explain these facts, arid the hypothesis of universal reason manifesting itself is pure invention. Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, that is to say, phrases which have no sense at all" (3; 30).
Marx criticised Hegel's idealistic dialectics back in 1843 and then again, more thoroughly, in 1845. That is why in The Poverty of Philosophy he confines himself to a critical summary of his remarks on this question. He explains that because Hegel started out from the notion of pure thought, reason, which allegedly contains within itself the whole of reality, Hegel had no other recourse than to oppose reason ,to himself.
Hegel's absolute method was abstract motion, or motion in an abstract form, i.e., a purely logical motion, or the motion of pure reason, which was separated from objects. "Wherein does the movement of pure reason consist? In posing itself, opposing itself, composing itself; in formulation itself as thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or, yet again, in affirming itself, negating itself and negating its negation" (1, 6; 164).
Marx's critique of Hegel's idealistic method has been frequently interpreted by bourgeois writers as a critique of dialectics generally. But in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx contrasts materialist and idealist dialectics. G. V. Plekhanov was quite right when he said that "Marx's victory in this controversy was won by a man able to think dialectically, over one who had never been able to understand the nature of dialectic, but was trying to apply its method to an analysis of capitalist society" (46, 3; 138). Marx's critique of Hegel's triad does nothing at all to cast doubt on the dialectical 439 conception of development, including the law of negation of the negation.^^*^^
Idealistic dialectics implies the utmost abstraction from the real features of things, and this results in a mystical notion that pure quality, pure quantity and other ``pure'' categories constitute the basis of that from which they had been abstracted. "If all that exists, all that lives on land and under water can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category---if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories---who need be astonished at it?" (/, 6; 163).
It goes without saying that Marx does not at all contest the undeniable need of categories for theoretical thinking. He merely demands that categories should be regarded as reflections of actually existing relations. He merely polemicises with the idealistic notion of the self-motion of thought, of concepts, and insists that contradiction is the inner content of processes reproduced by thought, and not an immanent self-division of thought which opposing itself (i.e., irrespective of the object) "...splits up into two contradictory thoughts---the positive and the negative, the yes and the no" (1, 6; 164). The speculative philosopher imagines that it is not the struggle of actually existing opposites that constitutes the dialectical process, but merely the struggle of thoughts. "The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralise, paralyse each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them. This thought splits up once again into two contradictory thoughts, which in turn fuse into a new synthesis" (1, 6; 164). Marx could not, of course, accept such a view of the process of development, as a self-generation of thoughts, whose motive force was said to be their permanent dichotomy, inter penetration, etc. He insists on the materialist principle of reflection of objective reality in the minds of men. It is in reality, which is independent of _-_-_
^^*^^ In 1847, Marx wrote: "Any development, whatever its substance may be, can be represented as a series of different stages of development that are connected in such a way that one forms the negation of the other. If, for example, a people develops from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, it negates its former political being. In no sphere can one undergo a development without negating one's previous mode of existence." (1, 6; 317).
440 consciousness, that contradictions---in no sense engendered by thought---need to be discovered.While Proudhon introduced elements of subjectivism into the interpretation of dialectics, Marx shows the objective nature of dialectics as a method, whose substance consists not merely in reasoning or combination of concepts, but in analysis of the actual contradictions of actual processes. Rejecting the idealistic absolutisation of the logical process, which culminates in the reduction of all phenomena to logical categories, to "absolute ideas", Marx gives brilliant specimens of his dialectical analysis of politico-economic categories.
Economic categories are neither everlasting nor immutable; they do not precede social relations and, being their theoretical expression, are just as transient as these relations themselves. That is, above all, the real dialectics of concepts and thoughts,, which is determined by the objective dialectics of material reality'. Proudhon failed to understand the objective nature of contradictions and their role as the inner source of development which is independent of the subject. He saw contradictions as existing merely between ideas and their realisation in practice, which was, alas, imperfect. "He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop--- all economic relations---were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement" (1, 6; 172).
But due to his erroneous conception Proudhon did not only reduce the real process of development to the logical, motion of thought, so on the whole following in Hegel's wake. The chief feature of his method was vulgarisation of Hegel's dialectics, and this was clearly expressed in his interpretation of the key dialectical problem, the problem of contradiction. According to Proudhon, every 'category has two sides---the good and the bad---and this is allegedly the source of contradiction. To resolve it, one needs merely eliminate the bad side, and this is made possible not through the development of contradiction but through the attachment of one category to another, which provides the counterweight to the bad side. Proudhon had no idea about the real mutual determination of mutually exclusive opposites, 441 of the struggle of opposites, and of the actual role of the various sides of the contradiction in the process of development. That is why Marx says that he borrowed from Hegel's dialectics no more than its language. By reducing the dialectical motion to the dogmatic distinction between good and bad, Proudhon deprived it of its objective content and orientation, which left him far behind Hegel, whose dialectics, despite its speculative nature, had nothing in common , with subjectivist moralising that Hegel scorned. But Proudhon's pseudo-dialectics "has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality" (1, 6; 169).^^*^^
Proudhon did not understand that it was impossible to destroy the ``bad'' and retain the ``good'' side of the real contradictions of capitalist society. Under capitalism wealth breeds poverty, and vice versa. Consequently, it is impossible to destroy poverty without destroying the capitalist system. It is Utopian to demand the elimination of the ``bad'' side alone.
Although Proudhon claimed to be a dialectician, he failed to see not only the mutual determination of the ``good'' and the ``bad'' sides of capitalism, but also the fact that it is the ``bad'' side, as The Holy Family explains, that turns out to be the revolutionary social force. Elaborating on this idea in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx emphasises: "What constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category. The very setting of the problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectical movement" (1, 6; 168).
Proudhon considered the ultimate goal of world history--- absolute justice, or equality---a goal towards which the efforts of men in every age had been consciously or unconsciously directed. The concept of equality becomes an extra-historical standard. "Henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality; the bad side, that which negates it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. In short, _-_-_
^^*^^ It is highly symptomatic that some present-day anti-Marxists seek to contrast Marx's method with a "new dialectics", which, they declare "adopts Proudhon's concept, according to which the struggle of opposites produces a new equilibrium" (43; 299).
442 equality is the primordial intention, the mystical tendency, the' providential aim that the social genius has constantly before its eyes as it whirls in the circle of economic contradictions" (1, 6; 172-73).^^*^^ Of course, the abolition of social inequality is the task of the emancipation movement of the working class, which should not be ascribed to other classes. But what Proudhon had in mind was the equality of small producers, and it is with this extremely narrow view that he evaluated the division of labour, the factory system, competition, taxes, etc.Proudhon starts his analysis of "economic evolutions" with a consideration of the division of labour, but not in the concrete historical forms of its development; he merely proclaims that the division of labour has a good and a bad side. It is good in that it helps to establish equality of working conditions; it is bad in that it intensifies poverty and turns labour into a one-sided unattractive activity. The. task is to find an economic relation that would eliminate the harmful aspects of the division of labour, while retaining its beneficial effects. And he claims to have discovered such an economic relation: it is the machine, the factory.
First of all, Marx explains that the machine, in contrast to the capitalist factory system, is not an economic relation. The machine is one thing, and its social use is another. A distinction should also be made between machine production, as a definite technological process, and the capitalist factory system. Proudhon makes no such distinction. By converting machines (and the factory) into something abstract, he confines himself to a general conclusion: the machine unites the operations fragmented by the division of labour, thereby re-establishing the unity of human labour which the latter has disrupted.
The machine performs a succession of operations, which under manual, manufactory production, were carried out by different workers. This gave Proudhon ground to regard the _-_-_
^^*^^ Later on Marx explains this proposition and remarks: "6f course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century. To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means of production, etc., worked providentially for the realisation of equality is, first of all, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them" (1, 6; 173).
443 machine as the logical antithesis of the division of labour. But he failed to see that new forms of division of labour had been developing on the basis of the capitalist factory system. Nothing is more absurd, Marx says, than to regard machines, which, in effect, emerged only in the late 18th century, as a synthesis that re-establishes the unity of once fragmented labour. Actually, every new invention in the field of mechanics intensifies the division of labour, and the latter, for its part, leads to new inventions, and so to a further intensification of the division of labour.The invention of machines finally separated manufactory production from agricultural production. Marx writes: "Thanks to the application of machinery and of steam, the division of labour was able to assume such dimensions that large-scale industry, detached from the national soil, depends entirely on the world market, on international exchange, on an international division of labour. Finally--- the machine has so great an influence on the division of labour, that when, in the manufacture of some object, a means has been found to produce parts of it mechanically, the manufacture splits up immediately into two branches independent of each other" (/, 6; 187).
The factory system edges out the manufactory division of labour, breaks down the production process into its component parts, so producing two forms of division of labour. At capitalist factories, the machines simplify the workers' functions and so also their labour. Proudhon failed to see the actual relation between machine production, the capitalist factory system and the division of labour, and was quite naturally even less capable of understanding that development'of large-scale industry creates the material premises for eliminating the forms of division of labour which exist in antagonistic society and which oppress man. He merely saw that the machine turned out a whole pin at once, whereas in the manufactory it took twelve workers to make it. Proudhon's ideal is the production of the whole pin by one worker with the aid of a machine. But in this way, Marx says ironically, the worker merely attains full and all-round knowledge of the pin.
Actually, the prerequisites for eliminating the oppressive forms of division of labour consist in the elimination of separate trades and the wiping out of the attendant craft idiocy, in the development of the requirement for 444 universality, and the individual's urge for all-round development. This idea of the progressive role of the factory system in creating the material prerequisites for the individual's all-round development was systematically elaborated by Marx in his Capital.
When considering competition, Proudhon, also discovered a good and a bad side to it. Competition was just as necessary as division of labour: it was necessary for the advent of equality. But it ruined those who took part in the competitive struggle, so that it was necessary to seek the principle of accommodation.
Proudhon attacked the Fourierists, who preached the substitution of emulation for competition. He insisted that competition was emulation, and that it was absolutely necessary because it constituted an inalienable element of human freedom. Marx explains: competition is a contest for profit, a drive for profit. In communist society, there will be no competition, but only emulation.
Competition, Proudhon said, sprang from human nature. But, says Marx, the history of mankind is the change of human nature. Man's nature, or substance, is the product of society's development in each historical epoch. This means that there are no immutable economic principles, which are given once and for all.
Proudhon asserted that competition did not contradict combination, that it helped to attain common goals and that its substance could not be reduced to egoism. Marx says that this does not prove anything, for egoism also implies common goals among different men. "Every egoism operates in society and by the fact of society. Hence it presupposes society, that is to say, common aims, common needs, common means of production, etc., etc." (1, 6; 193).
In order to establish his idea that competition was everlasting, Proudhon declared that all the branches of production where competition had not been adequately developed were economically backward. That is certainly true when it comes to capitalist production, but Proudhon deak with production in general, which is why he reached the conclusion that competition was "the constitution of value", the condition for the attainment of equality, the principle of social justice, the decree of fate, etc. But despite all these praises for competition Proudhon, a true ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie, could not ignore its ``bad'' side, 445 which distorted the concept of justice, destroyed honest and free trade, corrupted the public conscience and stirred up civil wars. Consequently, there was a need to overcome the ``bad'' side of competition, which threatened the existence of society. For this purpose, monopoly should be opposed to competition.
This time, Marx says, Proudhon has been lucky enough to discover an actually existing relation of opposites. Competition sprang from feudal monopoly, and emerged as its negation. For its part, competition breeds monopoly, which is now bourgeois monopoly, and this is negation of the negation, the unity of opposites. "In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists compete among themselves; competitors become monopolists" (1, 6; 195). But Proudhon failed to understand this existing unity of ,opposites. For him, monopoly was another discovery by the human genius which had to be applied as an antidote to competition. Indeed, monopoly does not eliminate the "bad side" of competition: the two opposites intensify each other. Because monopoly also has a "bad side", it had to be overcome, according to Proudhon, by means of taxes, which allegedly curb the appetites of the capitalists. Proudhon did not understand that the capitalists are the politically dominant class making use of taxes as a means of retaining power. The Poverty of Philosophy contains not only a profound critique of the philosophical and economic principles of Proudhonism and petty-bourgeois socialism in general, but also a classical exposition and an economic and philosophical substantiation of scientific communism. Bourgeois economists, Marx says, divide social relations into artificial and natural ones, the latter, of course, being only capitalist relations. This notion is a reflection of the bourgeoisie's struggle against feudalism, which in its day was an equally natural, or necessary, form of development of the productive forces, like the capitalist system which came after it. The productive forces which took shape within the framework of feudal society led to the erosion of feudal social relations. When bourgeois ideologists claim that only the laws which govern the capitalist system are -natural, and for that reason everlasting, they merely display their limited class approach. 446 Actually, the whole development of society is a naturalhistorical process, i.e., no social formation is unnatural, a fact that does not, however, give any grounds for a relativist assessment of the socio-historical process, because every form of society is objectively necessary in certain material conditions, and all of them constitute law-governed stages in humanity's advance.
In his letter to Annenkov, Marx describes the unity of the various elements of the social organism as follows: "What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of'men's reciprocal action. Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. Assume a particular level of. development in men's productive forces and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social system, a corresponding organisation of the family, of social estates or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume such a civil society and you will get a political system appropriate to it, a system which is only the official expression of civil society" (3; 30).
Marx elaborates this idea in The Poverty of Philosophy and shows that the interaction of men is objectively determined by the whole of the labour activity of earlier generations which is embodied in the attained level of the productive forces. The latter determines the form of commerce in the broadest sense of the word, including the relations of production. The character of consumption is also determined by the level achieved in social production. Production, commerce, and consumption engender a definite economic structure of society, which for its part determines the state system. Every aspect of society's life is organically connected with the others, but in this interconnection there is an essential distinction between the definitive basis (productive forces, relations of production, mode of production) and all the other aspects of the social organism.
Historical materialism, Marx shows, establishes the organic connection between the development of the productive forces and the development not only of the relations of production but of all the other relations among men. Even the production of ideas depends on the development of the productive forces, of which technical progress is the chief indicator. "Social relations are closely bound up with 447 productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you .society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
``The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations.
``Thus these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as .the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products" (1, 6; 166).
Bourgeois society cannot stop the development of the productive forces just as it cannot end progress generally. But the development of the productive forces ultimately changes the relations of production. The bourgeoisie becomes a conservative class; the progress of the productive forces is promoted by the proletariat.
In place of the petty-bourgeois idea of the equality of small producers, Marx establishes the proletarian idea of the abolition Nof classes, but, in contrast to the Utopians, he says that the main condition for overcoming class distinctions is the struggle of classes, the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie.
Proudhon opposed the strike movement and the establishment of workers' unions and political organisations, asserting that once wages were raised as the result of a strike, a general rise in prices was bound to follow. Workers' political organisations were absolutely superfluous because no state could defend the working people's interests. A champion of petty-commodity production, he was unable to understand the need for a centralised state power for the socialist restructuring of society, which he thought could be done by the producers banded in associations, federations of associations, etc.
Marx explains that workers' strikes and unions are necessarily and objectively engendered by the development of capitalism. "Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance---combination. Thus 448 combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist" (1, 6; 210). Consequently, the same economic conditions that have converted the mass of the population into proletarians also determine their common interests in virtue of which they constitute a class opposed to the capitalists. Like other petty-bourgeois ideologists, Proudhon regarded the proletariat only as a product of the erosion of the feudal society. By contrast, Marx shows that the proletariat springs from the progress of the productive forces, and that its existence and struggle constitute a mighty motive force in society's advance. The proletariat's revolutionary spirit reflects the material requirements of society's life, and it is as a revolutionary class that the proletariat constitutes the greatest productive force of society.
Proudhon, the petty-bourgeois ideologist, was horrified at the antagonistic contradictions of social development, which he regarded as abnormal. Marx explains that in a society based on private property in the means of production, antagonistic contradictions constitute the main motive force of social progress in all its forms: economic, political and spiritual.
Abolition of antagonistic contradictions, which is made necessary by the development of the productive forces within the entrails of capitalism, does not imply any reconciliation but a struggle of classes, not a redistribution of power among the various social groups, but the conversion of the proletariat---the chief and decisive productive force of society---:into the politically dominant class.
The Poverty of Philosophy ends with an explanation of the epochal significance and importance of the socialist restructuring of society. Brilliantly anticipating the future, Marx says that only the victory of socialism will put an end to the antagonistic character of social development and pave the way for mankind's all-round progress, so that "social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions" (1, 6; 212). Meanwhile, until and for the establishment of socialism there is a need of relentless, life-and-death war against capital. That,'Marx emphasises, is the last word of social science.
449 __NUMERIC_LVL3__ 4 __ALPHA_LVL3__ THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE. ENGELS'S PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNISMThe brilliant work by Marx and Engels, entitled Manifesto of the Communist Party, put the final touches to the shaping of Marxism in a classical exposition of its basic principles. The Manifesto was issued in connection with the establishment of the Communist League, which marked a new stage in the political activity of the founders of Marxism when they assumed the leadership of the proletarian party they organised.
In his writings on the history of Marxism, D. Ryazanov cast doubt on Engels's reminiscences about the establishment of the Communist League. Ryazanov said that following the defeat in May 1839, the League of the Just ceased to exist as a central organisation. At any rate, from 1840 on it was impossible to find any traces of its activity as an organised centre. There remained only a few circles set up by former members of the League of the Just (14; 80). He did not give any convincing evidence to confirm his view, and merely referred to the fact that Engels's article "On the History of the Communist League" was "written nearly 40 years after the events he describes. In such a long time, it is not hard to forget something, especially when one writes in totally different conditions and in a totally different frame of mind" (14; 79). It turns out, therefore, that Marx and Engels had to deal not with a secret society numbering several hundred members but with its remnants, which in 1847 set up the Communist League. The latest Marxist studies and the extensive publication of documents on the history of the Communist League completely refute this view.^^*^^ Published archive material also helps to refute the notion concerning the origination of the Communist League, which will be frequently found in the writings of West European Social-Democrats. This boils down to the statement of a single well-known fact: in the spring of 1847, Moll, an organiser of the League of the Just, visited Marx in _-_-_
^^*^^ See, for instance, E. P. Kandel, Marx and Engels, The Organisers of the Communist League, Moscow, 1953; M. I. Mikhailov, A History of the Communist League, Moscow, 1968; K. Oberman, Die deutschen Arbeiter in der ersten burgerlichen Revolution, Berlin, 1950; Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumenten und Materialen, Vol. I, 1839-1849, Berlin, 1970.
450 Brussels and Engels in Paris, and proposed the reorganisation of the League on a communist basis. This view differs little from Ryazanov's. Despite the recognition of the existence of the League of the Just, it says nothing at all about the tremendous effort put in by the founders of Marxism to convert the League into a communist organisation. It turns out that Marx and Engels either knew nothing of the existence of this League up until 1847, or, while being aware of its existence, did nothing, and waited until the members of the League came round to the scientific communist view. The facts show, however, that first, following^^1^^ the rout of the Blanquist organisations in 1839, the League of the Just was set up in London; then its branches were also re-established in Paris, Switzerland and Germany. Second, even in 1843 and 1844, Marx and Engels were aware of the existence of the League, and I quoted Engels's report that in 1843 in London he met Bauer, Schapper and Moll, leaders of the League of the Just. Subsequently, Engels wrote: "...in 1843 Schapper had suggested that I join it, which I at that time naturally refused to do. But we not only kept up our continuous correspondence with the Londoners but remained on still closer terms with Dr. Everbeck, then the leader of the Paris Communities" (2, 3; 179-80).There are also the hostile reminiscences of Professor Hildebrand, who in the spring of 1846 attended a meeting of the League of the Just. He, incidentally, mentions Marx and Engels among its ideological leaders.
Hildebrand heard Schapper's report on current politics and admitted that it had a clear communist tenor, with the problem of the proletariat keynoting the whole of it. Thus, Hildebrand attended a meeting of the League, when it was already taking the path of communism, undoubtedly under the influence of Marx and Engels. The founders of Marxism also note that they regularly helped the members of the League in overcoming the petty-bourgeois Utopian views prevailing in it, and in working to organise a communist party of the working class (4a, 14; 439).
Hildebrand's testimony on the influence of Marx and Engels among the members of the League dates from April 1846. When then did the two men begin their work to convert the League into a revolutionary proletarian party? According to their reminiscences this occurred just after they put forward in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher the idea of 451 the proletariat's historical role. Marx wrote that when in Paris in 1843 and 1844, he had maintained personal contacts with the local leaders of the League (4a, 14; 439). In 1845, Engels took part in the work of the Paris branch of the League, and reported this, as I said in the preceding Chapter, to the Communist Correspondence Committee. A striking instance of the influence which Marx and Engels already had at the time on the members of the League is the "Circular Against Kriege", which sparked off hot discussion among the members of the League, with some of them siding with Marx and Engels (23; 347-50).
K. Obermann has brought together much factual, mainly archive, data to show that at the end of 1846 the leadership of the League was becoming aware, under the influence of Marx and Engels, of the need to combat the doctrinaire and sectarian approach. On the proposal of the League leadership, local branches began to discuss the question of the proletariat's attitude to the big and small bourgeoisie, to various religious teachings, and especially to socialist and communist theories (45; 42). The discussion increasingly brought out the influence of the ideas expounded by Marx and Engels on the members of the League. Engels subsequently wrote: "As against the untenability of the previous theoretical views, and as against the practical aberrations resulting therefrom, it was realised more and more in London that Marx and I were right in our new theory" (2, 3; 181). This will also be seen from the letters which League leaders wrote to the founders of Marxism. One of them voices solidarity with their criticism of Weitling. The League leaders condemned Weitling, in particular, for his demand of "blind obedience to his orders" (23; 348). The letter further reported on the work in the League, which had a membership of 250 and met three times a week to discuss reports on current events, to read Feuerbach's "religion of the future" paragraph by paragraph, and to consider the questions raised by League members. "The latest question to be discussed was that of relations between workers and their masters in modern society". The letter also condemned the Blanquists' conspiratorial tactics. The revolution requires long ideological preparation: first there is a need for "a spiritual revolution, which has already begun", and only then is a "physical revolution" possible. From this follows the task of organising revolutionary communist propaganda. 452 The authors of the letter (Schapper, Rosenthal, Doepel, Gobel, . Bauer, Steen, Lehmann, Kelterborn and Moll) proposed to Marx and Engels and their followers that they should join with the League of the Just for the "propaganda of community property" and work "for the sake of a better future" (23; 348).^^*^^ Let us emphasise, however, that while joining Marx and Engels in their critique of Weitling, the League leadership did not accept their assessment of Kriege's sermon as given in the ``Circular''. There was a good reason for this: the teaching of "true socialism" was fairly influential among the League members. In a letter to the Communist Correspondence Committee, Schapper asserted that one could not be satisfied with the materialist substantiation of communism because this was allegedly confined to a desire "to deduce the possibility of communism only from the growing need of the w.orkers and the growth of machine production". He added that it was wrong to "brand sentimentality, when it springs from universal fraternal love" (52; 22).
There was a need for much explanatory work and ideological struggle against "true socialism" and Proudhonism, if the League of the Just was to be converted into a communist party. Marx's and Engels's critique of German petty-bourgeois socialism and Proudhon's doctrine was especially important in preparing the establishment of the Communist League. One of the results of this struggle was a decision of the League of the Just members to reorganise their secret society into a communist party which would stand up for the interests of the working class as openly as possible, making use of legal conditions wherever they exist. Engels subsequently wrote: "What we previously objected to in this League was now relinquished as erroneous by the representatives of the League themselves; we were even _-_-_
^^*^^ In January 1847, the League leadership sent Moll to negotiate with Marx and Engels on their entry into the League and its reorganisation. Moll's mandate said: "To the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels. The undersigned members of the London Communist Correspondence Committee authorise Citizen Josef Moll to enter into negotiation on their behalf with the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels and to give a verbal report on the state of our affairs. Simultaneously, we request the Brussels Committee to entrust Citizen Moll, who is a member of the local committee, with negotiations on questions of any importance and to inform him of anything that relates to the London Committee" (23; 451). This document was first published by F. Mehring in 1914.
453 invited to cooperate in the work of reorganisation. Could we say no? Certainly not. Therefore, we entered the League" (2, 3; 181).The main result of Marx's and Engels's struggle to set up the communist party was the acceptance of their views by members of the League of the Just. Let me stress that all of their writings in the period in which their doctrine took shape were also a substantiation of the need for a revolutionary proletarian party which differed qualitatively from a secret society that could not represent the working class in its day-to-day struggle against capital. The "Circular Against Kriege" already speaks of a party whose members are united in a community of purpose and conviction, and of the need to strengthen the party by fighting views hostile to the proletariat. Those were the ideas by which Marx and Engels were guided in their struggle against the "true socialists", Heinzen and other spokesmen for petty-bourgeois and bourgeois -ideology.
The London Congress of the League of the Just (summer of 1847) decided to reorganise the League: henceforth it was to be known as the Communist League, whose revolutionary slogan was the militant internationalist call "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!", instead of the petty-bourgeois motto "All Men Are Brothers!''
Engels was delegated to the Congress by the Paris branches of the League and took an active part in its work. The Congress adopted a new set of Rules, which determined the basic task of the working class and its party in the light of Marxism: "The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property" (7, 6; 633). In a special decision, the Congress adopted as the basis for discussion Engels's draft " Communist Confession of Faith''.
Written in the form of a catechism, the document clearly formulated the ultimate goal of the communists and the ways of attaining it. It stressed that the communist transformation of society became possible only through the development of large-scale machine industry. "Communism is the theory of liberation which was not possible for the slaves, the serfs, or the handicraftsmen, but only for the proletarians and hence it belongs of necessity to the 19th century and was 454 not possible in any earlier period" (1, 6; 101).
The new League decided to publish a Communist Journal whose first (and last) trial issue appeared in September 1847. The articles criticised the sentimental petty-bourgeois notions of peaceful implementation of socialism, which had until recently prevailed in the League. It is true that the journal "also contained erroneous assertions. Thus, proletarians were said to be "all those who cannot live on their own capital, including intellectuals and petty bourgeois" (42; 1-2).
The Second Congress of the Communist League was held in late November and early December 1847. This time it was attended' by Marx. "On the initiative of Marx and Engels, the Congress decided that the League would publicly declare itself a communist party and proclaim its theoretical principles. This extremely important move was a final rupture with the conspiratorial past, when the League's existence and aims had been clandestine" (29; 106), say the authors of the biographical work, Frederick Engels. A Biography. The Congress decided to draw up the Communist League's programme, a task entrusted to Marx and Engels.
The new draft programme took the form of the Principles of Communism written by Engels in October and November 1847. Although the founders of Marxism were not satisfied either, with its form or its content,^^*^^ in historical terms it was a highly important document, which alongside the exposition of the basic principles of scientific communism that. Marx and Engels had formulated earlier, also raised some new .questions.
Engels defines scientific communism as a doctrine about the conditions for the proletariat's emancipation, a clear-cut scientific formulation which contrasts scientific communism .with Utopian teachings, whose authors were never concerned with the objective prerequisites for society's communist transformation and did not regard their teachings as theories for the emancipation movement of the working class. Engels _-_-_
^^*^^ Engels wrote to Marx: "I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I shall bring along what I have done here; it is in simple narrative form, but badly formulated, in fearful haste, I begin: What is communism? And then straight to the proletariat---history of its origin, difference from workers in earlier periods, development of the antitheses between proletariat and bourgeoisie, crises, conclusions" (3; 40).
455 then gives a concise history of the proletariat, explaining that this is a class that did not exist from time immemorial, and that its origination and development are connected with the industrial revolution, the separation of the means of production from the actual producers and the growing polarisation of society.The proletariat differs essentially from the labouring classes of past historical epochs. "The slave may have a better subsistence than the proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of development of society and himself stands at a higher stage than the slave. The slave frees himself by abolishing, among all the private property relationships, only the relationship of slavery...; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general" (1, 6; 344).
Nor has capitalism been there all the time; it was established in place of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie abolished the political power of the aristocracy and the nobility, and feudal landed estates, their economic basis. It eliminated the craft-guild system, i.e., the feudal organisation of production in the cities. It abolished all privileges and replaced them with free competition, which enables everyone freely to operate in any industry, although this right can be enjoyed only by those who have the necessary resources-. ,
The development of capitalism has shown that capitalist relations begin to act as a drag on the progress of production. The conclusion is "therefore that either largescale industry itself must be given up, which is utterly impossible, or that it absolutely necessitates a completely new organisation of society, in which industrial production is no longer directed by individual factory owners, competing one against the other, but by the whole of society according to a fixed plan and according to the needs of all" (7, 6; 347).
Large-scale industry makes it possible for production to expand without limit, and this, for its part, helps to satisfy all the real requirements of men, and so to enable each to develop and exercise all his powers and abilities. But this cannot be realised under capitalism, which is based on private ownership and for that reason produces crises and poverty. "Hence, private ownership will also have to be abolished, and in its stead there will be common use of all the instruments of production and the distribution of all 456 products by common agreement, or the so-called community of property" (I, 6; 378).^^*^^
Engels suggests the need for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production but condemns conspiratorial tactics, emphasising that it is not merely futile but downright harmful. "The Communists know only too well that ... revolutions ... everywhere and at all times ... have been the necessary outcome of circumstances entirely independent of the will and the leadership of particular parties and entire classes" (1, 6; 349). This thesis contains the embryo of the Marxist doctrine of the revolutionary situation.
Considering the question of the proletarian dictatorship,' Engels says that it will be established through a consistent and revolutionary realisation of democracy, and that this needs a communist revolution, which will "inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat" (1, 6; 350). Of course, this "democratic constitution" differs fundamentally from bourgeois democracy, because its main task is to put through extensive measures directly attacking private property and consolidating the positions of the proletariat: gradual expropriation of landed proprietors, factory-owners, railway and shipping magnates; equal liability to work for all members of society; centralisation of the credit system, etc. But this democracy is nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Consideration of the measures, which the working class will put through once it has established its political power, in effect contains the idea of a period of transition from capitalism to socialism. This is connected with the following highly important idea: private property cannot be abolished all at once; this requires a high level of the development of _-_-_
^^*^^ Private property, Engels says, is essentially capitalist property. "For private property has not always existed, but when towards the end of the Middle Ages a new mode of production appeared in the form of manufacture which could not be subordinated to the then existing feudal and guild property, manufacture, having outgrown the old property relations, created a new form of ownership---private ownership". (1, 6; 348). This should apparently be taken in the sense that only under capitalism does private property, released from all feudal, guild, community and other restrictions, come to be the predominant and universal economic relation everywhere.
457 the productive forces that would economically ensure transition to a socialist economic system. Socialism is not merely a radical change in the system of distribution of material <roods, but a deep-going transformation of the social relations of production on the basis of rapid growth of the productive forces: "Once liberated from the pressure of private property, large-scale industry will develop on a scale that will make its present level of development seem as paltry as seems the manufacturing system compared with the large-scale industry of our time" (1, 6; 352). Consequently, Engels understands that the level of production attained by the most advanced capitalist countries is still inadequate for a transition to socialism.His Principles of Communism is a fruitful effort to analyse the class content of various forms of Utopian socialism. Even at the time, attempts were made to use the banner of socialism to spread teachings that reflected the interests of the exploiting classes. Engels exposes the spokesmen for feudal and bourgeois pseudo-socialism. In contrast to them, the "democratic socialists" are allies of the Communists. They are "either proletarians who are not yet Sufficiently enlightened regarding the conditions of the emancipation of their class, or they are members of the petty-bourgeoisie, a class which, until the winning of democracy and the realisation of the socialist measures following upon it, has in many respects the same interest as the proletariat" (7, 6; 355-56).
Elaborating on the attitude of the communists to other parties Engels formulated the policies of the proletariat and its party towards the bourgeois revolution. "It is in the interests of the Communists to help bring the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order as soon as possible to overthrow them again" (1, 6; 356).
The Principles of Communism is the immediate precursor of Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marxism's great programme document.
__NUMERIC_LVL3__ 5 __ALPHA_LVL3__ MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTYMarx and Engels's brilliant work, Manifesto of the Communist Party, has a special niche in the history of Marxism. This relatively small work is a classically translucent, aphoristic 458 exposition of the principles of Marxism, which brims with revolutionary fervour but is strictly scientific. The Manifesto breathes of the militant party spirit, which springs from the deepest dialectico-materialist analysis of the socio-historical process, and is itself a materialist analysis of the most intractable social problems, organically combining theory and revolutionary practice and the experience of the proletariat's emancipation struggle. All these features of the Manifesto show the substance of the revolution in philosophy, sociology and political economy carried out by Marx and Engels. Lenin writes: "With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new world-conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat---the creator of a new, communist society" (5, 21; 48).
Marxism, Lenin says, has provided the guidelines for discovering uniformity in the apparent chaos and labyrinth of social life: the theory of the class struggle. Its principles were elaborated in The Holy Family, The German Ideology and other works of earlier periods, and are presented in classical exposition in the Manifesto. Marx and Engels show that the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is not an exceptional phenomenon which is unprecedented in world history: since the origination of private property in the means of production and the formation of opposite classes, the struggle between them has been the motive force of social development.
Some contemporaries of Marx and Engels's recognised the existence of the class struggle in ancient and feudal society, but asserted that under capitalism there was no ground for any class struggle because there was no estates division, privileges, etc. The Manifesto refutes this bourgeois dogma and shows that capitalism causes an even more intense polarisation of society into classes than earlier social formations. The aggravation of the contradictions between the chief classes of capitalist society springs from the mechanism of capitalist production itself.
Marx and Engels develop and concretise their earlier concepts of social class and class structure of society. Each historically definite form of society entails a specific division 459 into main classes and other social sections which is proper to it alone. For its part, every class consists of various social groups, which are divided by contradictions. The antagonism of classes also has diverse forms of expression: it is alternately overt and covert, its development and aggravation lead to social revolutions, which may result in the defeat of one of the classes or the destruction of both.
Present-day bourgeois sociologists assert that the theory of the class struggle, as set forth in the Manifesto, is obsolete. They say that society does not consist of classes but of numerous strata into which individuals are grouped according to the most diverse factors: age, sex, income level, education, personal inclinations, etc. One and the same individual simultaneously belongs to several strata, and keeps moving from one stratum to another. The theory of stratification and social mobility, which bourgeois sociologists use to counter the Marxist theory of the class struggle, nullifies the most important definition of the working people's social status: their relation to the means of production. Thus, while the bourgeois ideologists of the Manifesto period recognised the existence of opposite classes but argued that this contradiction was being gradually reduced, the bourgeois ideologists of today allege that the contradictions between classes have all but disappeared. But the outstanding achievement of the Manifesto, Lenin stressed, consists not only in its scientific analysis of society's class structure and the role of the class struggle in world history and specially in the development of the capitalist formation. Marx and Engels traced the development of the struggle between the main classes of bourgeois society to reach their brilliant conclusion that this irreconcilable struggle naturally leads to the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, a key Marxist tenet which is theoretically substantiated by the whole content of the Manifesto.
The relations of production in each social formation are also relations between classes. Society's class structure expresses its economic structure, economic basis, which determines the political, juridical and ideological superstructure of society. Conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production is also a conflict between the exploiting (ruling) and exploited (oppressed) classes of the given formation. This antagonistic contradiction is resolved through social revolution. The bourgeoisie's social revolution 460 culminates in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; the proletariat's social revolution, in the dictatorship of the .working class.
Marx and Engels show the content of social revolutions and various types of states and reach this conclusion: exploiting classes can be eliminated only through a dictatorship of an oppressed and exploited class. Their scientific analysis of the development of capitalism shows that the proletariat alone can be such a revolutionary class. The bourgeoisie played a revolutionary part in history. It put an end' to patriarchal relations, drowned the most heavenly .ecstasies of religious fervour, chivalrous enthusiasm, philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. All of this destructive work, which feudal ``socialists'' regarded as monstrous vandalism and which horrified the petty bourgeois, was historically necessary and progressive because it helped capitalism to put an end to the conservatism of earlier modes of production.
The bourgeoisie created more colossal productive forces than had all the preceding generations together. "It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about" (1, 6; 487). But having destroyed the feudal relations of production and created a new and more progressive mode of production, so ensuring the development of powerful productive forces, the bourgeoisie looked like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells. The constant revolutionising of production, which springs from the very nature of large-scale industry, inevitably runs into conflict with the bourgeoisie's urge to maintain capitalist relations and its political power. The development of society's productive forces condemns capitalism just as it earlier condemned the feudal system to extinction.
Capitalism does away with local and national isolation, develops all-round ties among nations and accelerates the pace of social progress. The concentration and centralisation of production and property mould the population of capitalist countries into one nation with one government. This process is paralleled by the consolidation of classes on a national scale and an intensification of the class struggle. Capitalist accumulation multiplies the ranks of the proletariat and creates the material prerequisites for its class organisation. "The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts 461 from under its feet the" very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (1, 6; 496).
The proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with the origination of that class, and the clashes between individual workers and their employers gradually develop into the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. "But every class struggle is a political struggle" (I, 6; 493), which means that the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie is ultimately a struggle for power, for a socialist restructuring, of social relations.
Under the impact of the sharpening class struggle, which goes forward not only in'the economic and political sphere, but also in ideology, the ruling class is eroded, so that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands" (1, 6; 493). But socialism can be attained only through a long struggle by the proletariat against the capitalist class, a struggle which eventually "breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat" (1, 6; 495).
Neither here nor elsewhere in the Manifesto do Marx and Engels use the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", a term Marx first used in 1850 in his work, The Class Struggle in France from 1848 to 1850. But the main content of this concept has already been formulated in the Manifesto. , Defining the main tasks of the socialist revolution, Marx and Engels say that "... the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy:
``The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible" (1, 6; 504). Explaining this, Lenin writes: "Here we have a formulation of one of the most remarkable and most important ideas of Marxism on the subject of the state, namely, the idea of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'" (5, 25; 407).
462In previous chapters, it was shown how Marx and Engels arrived at the idea of the proletariat's historical role. But in the 1844-1846 period, they did not yet believe that the proletariat could fulfil its mission only by establishing the proletarian dictatorship: they believed then that its task lay mainly in destroying the capitalist system. Marx's and Engels's subsequent involvement in the struggle of the French, English and German workers against the bourgeoisie and their study of the historical experience of the proletariat's emancipation movement led them to the conclusion that the proletarian dictatorship was a necessity and the key preliminary condition for attaining the ultimate goal: the establishment of a classless communist society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (1, 6; 506).
They showed that of all the classes of bourgeois society the proletariat alone was a socialist class, and this idea helped to overcome the abstract contrast between the poor and the rich, which was characteristic of petty-bourgeois democrats, and which produced an inadequately formulated claim of popular rule. Marx and Engels recognised the possibility and necessity for an alliance between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, but showed the objective uniformity underlying the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, demonstrating that of all the classes of bourgeois society the proletariat is alone consistently revolutionary. Lenin writes: "The recognition of the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat is most closely and inseparably bound up with the theses of the Communist Manifesto that the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class" (5, 6; 49).
The Manifesto lays the foundations of the Marxist doctrine of the revolutionary proletarian party as the vanguard and political leader of the working class. Even in the revolutionary-democratic period of their ideological development, Marx and Engels put forward the idea of the party approach and connected it with the idea of revolutionary action for the benefit of the exploited masses. In the Manifesto, they establish the principle of proletarian-party spirit, which is closely bound up with the scientific view of the special historical role of the working class.
In the 1844-1846 period, they described their communist views as a definite party platform, designating as their party 463 the ideological trend which expressed the interests of the working class. The new element in the Manifesto is that, first, it regards the party an organisation of progressive-minded representatives of the working class, on whose behalf Marx and Engels issued their Manifesto. The immediate tasks and ultimate goals of this organisation, its structure and the duties and rights of members are determined, on the one hand, by the programme---the Manifesto---and on the other, by the Rules, which were adopted by the Congress of the Communist League. Second, Marx and Engels formulate a number of key propositions concerning the party's attitude to the working class. The Communist Party identifies and stands up for the common, international interests of the whole proletariat; at every stage of its emancipation movement, it represents the movement as a whole. Its revolutionary theory is a scientific reflection of the objective historical process and the actual struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. That is why the communists have no interests that are not identical with the vital interests of the proletariat of all countries. "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement" (], 6; 518). The Communist Party's advantage over all the other working-class organisations is that it is the most active and resolute proletarian organisation, which induces advance and which has a scientific view of the conditions, course and overall results of the proletarian movement.
This characterisation of the Communist Party's basic features is aimed directly against sectarianism, which tends to separate the proletariat's vital tasks from the concrete historical conditions of its activity, and also against the opportunistic tendency to reduce the ultimate goals of the proletarian struggle to partial, current and limited tasks.
The Manifesto attacks sectarianism, which is especially dangerous in the run-up to a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and explains that "...the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
``...They labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries" (1, 6; 519).
The Manifesto subjects to withering criticism the 464 theoretical notions of the bourgeois ideology, whose spokesmen do not allow for the possibility of any other property, except capitalist property and accuse the Communists of wanting to destroy property generally. But communism does not abolish property generally and merely does away with capitalist property.
Bourgeois ideologists sa^ that the Communists want to abolish personal property, which is acquired by the producers' own labour. Petty-bourgeois property is destroyed by capitalism itself. But capital is not personal property, that is why its socialist socialisation does not amount to the abolition of property but merely to the conversion of private property in the means of production into socialist property.
The capitalists claim that the elimination of private property amounts to the abolition of freedom and the individual,^^*^^ which means that they identify freedom with freedom of capitalist enterprise, and the individual, with the personality of the bourgeois. "You must, therefore, confess that by `individual' you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of, the way" (1, 6; 500).
The Manifesto exposes the hypocrisy of the bourgeois talk about family, marriage and homeland, and points to the fact that the bourgeois family and marriage have as their complement public prostitution, that the bourgeois state is a prison-house for the working people. Only in struggle against the bourgeoisie to overthrow its political power and establish its own power does the proletariat acquire a homeland. Of course, the proletariat is national, but in contrast to the bourgeoisie it rejects nationalism. The proletariat must organise itself on a national scale as the ruling class, to abolish exploitation and national oppression together with it.The workers of all countries and nationalities have common interests. This unity is determined by the development of social production, and from it arise the common tasks for the workers of all countries and the _-_-_
^^*^^ This identification of freedom and private property is characteristic of present-day bourgeois ideology. Thus, the authors of The Capitalist Manifesto, L. Kelso and M. Adler, flatly declare that the private ownership "gives the people generally the economic independence they need to bulwark their political liberty" (40; 94). But if that is so, they must admit that the bulk of the population in the capitalist countries has no personal liberty.
465 basically common ways of their social emancipation.Bourgeois ideologists accuse the Communists of abolishing the traditional spiritual values.^^*^^ To this blanket charge Marx and Engels oppose the materialist proposition that the ideas of each historical epoch depend on the dominant relations of production. Bourgeois ideologists do say that there are supra-historical ideas and ideals. Marx and Engels reply that in all antagonistic societies, some ideas and ideals, common to all these formations, will actually be found, because "...one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
``The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas" (1, 6; 504). This helps to gain a deeper insight into the Marxist revolution in social thought: it rejects the bourgeois allegations of communist nihilism and clearly shows the kind of ideas that Marxism, scientific communism, rejects.
The Manifesto expounds scientific communism in contrast to the unscientific and Utopian socialist and communist theories. First of all, Marx and Engels criticise reactionary socialism, which includes feudal and Christian socialism that is allied with it, and also petty-bourgeois socialism, including its German brand. All these teachings idealised the historical past, sought to prevent the development of capitalism and to revive or maintain obsolete social relations. Their criticism of capitalism has frequently brought out its actual defects.^^**^^ But _-_-_
^^*^^ The experience of historical development,, and of the present historical epoch in particular, shows that socialism is natural heir to the whole of progressive culture, whereas imperialism nihilistically rejects it.
^^**^^ Thus, petty-bourgeois socialism "dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; over-production and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities" (1, 6; 509).
466 their positive aims aspired to restore corporate guilds for manufacture and patriarchal relations in agriculture.Conservative, or bourgeois, socialism is, in effect, no more than an apology for the capitalist system behind a cover of socialistic catch-words. "Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism" (1, 6; 514).
Marx and Engels then go on to an examination of critical-Utopian socialism and communism. The proletariat's first attempts to attain social emancipation date from the epoch of the 17th-18th century bourgeois revolutions, ideologically expressed in the Utopian communism of Babeuf and other revolutionary writers, of whom Marx and Engels say: "The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form" (7, 6; 514). This indication that initial Utopian socialism had mutually exclusive tendencies--- revolutionary and reactionary---is of great methodological importance for it helps to make a concrete historical appreciation of Babouvism and subsequent Utopian systems.
While the epoch of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen differed essentially from Babeuf's, it did not yet present the material prerequisites for socialism and the proletariat had yet to become a politically independent class. Hence, the characteristic features of critical-Utopian socialism: socialism is regarded as an ideal produced by genius, with implementation of his system resulting in a socialist restructuring of society.
The critical-Utopian socialists believed that they stood over and above classes, did not see any ability on the part of the proletariat in taking the historical initiative, rejected political struggle and revolutionary use of force, and addressed themselves to the whole of society, especially to those who were in power, in an effort to attract them by tantalising descriptions of the beautiful socialist future. "Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general 467 reconstruction of society" (/, 6; 515-16).
For all its historically rooted limitations, critical-Utopian socialism produced a remarkable critique of the capitalist system and an anticipation of such basic features of the future society as abolition of the contradiction between town and country, between mental and manual labour, the withering away of the state, etc. But the importance of critical-Utopian socialism and communism is in inverse proportion to socio-historical development, which converts the proletariat into a class for itself, sharpens the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie and leads up to the proletarian revolution, i.e., to everything that the critical-Utopian socialists rejected. "Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat" (1, 6; 516).
In consequence, even these socialist theories, in virtue of their isolation from the working-class emancipation movement, tend in the course of historical development to draw closer to reactionary and conservative pseudo-socialism, and this fact not only helps to understand the history of socialist teachings in the distant past, but also sheds light on the evolution of petty-bourgeois socialism, reformism and revisionism in the twentieth century.
The Manifesto ends with these prophetic words: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" (1, 6; 519).
The Communist Party's militant call for struggle against capitalism expresses the most important revolutionary internationalist principle of the scientific ideology of the working class, whose classical formulation crowns the formation of Marxism.
In the Manifesto, we do not find terms like "materialist dialectics", "dialectical materialism" and so on, but the whole of this epoch-making work is a brilliant specimen of the dialectico-materialist view of social life. The founders of Marxism give a brilliant presentation of the dialectics of capitalist development, which creates the prerequisites for its 468 own inevitable destruction. The analysis of social phenomena in their interdependence, motion, change and contradictory development, the materialist view of bourgeois ideology as a reflection of social being, all of this is, of course, a creative development of dialectical and historical materialism. The Manifesto, which appeared 130 years ago, has been read by hundreds of millions of men and women in the languages of all the peoples of the world. The bourgeoisie has nothing with which to counter the Manifesto.
It is the great result of the shaping of the Marxist world view. It theoretically sums up the experience of historical development, scientifically anticipates the future, and sets new problems and tasks before the science of society and the working class.
A genuine work of creative Marxism, the Manifesto does not at all claim to have solved all the theoretical, let alone practical, problems of the proletariat's emancipation movement, and this is another radical distinction between the Marxist world view and all the earlier, including progressive, social theories.
The Manifesto opens with these famous words: "A spectre is haunting Europe---the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies" (/, 6; 481). Today, communism has become a great historical reality which determines the highroad of social progress. Today, even bourgeois ideologists do not dare to assert that the future belongs to capitalism, that the division of society into classes is natural, and that the bulk of mankind cannot be released from its misery and privation. This is an indication of the deep-going spiritual crisis of capitalism, and also of the tremendous attractive power of the scientific socialist ideology. The working people's emancipation movement and the construction of a classless communist society provide epoch-making confirmation of the great vital truth of Marxism-Leninism.
[469] __ALPHA_LVL1__ CONCLUSIONIn closing this study, I want to make a summing-up which does not claim to be a systematic exposition of all the conclusions, but merely some considerations concerning the objective logic of the historical process in which the philosophy of Marxism was shaped.
The teachings which became the theoretical sources of Marxism constitute the last and highest stage in the progressive development of bourgeois social thought in Europe. By the time Marx and Engels came on the socio-political scene, the ideology of the West European bourgeoisie, once a historically necessary form of development . of social cognition, was coming to fetter it. In the 1840s, not only Hegel's philosophy, but also English classical political economy and critical-Utopian socialism were in deep crisis. The problems they posed remained unanswered because those who carried on these teachings remained bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) theoreticians. What is more, they were no longer able even to maintain the old theoretical level. This is a far from obvious fact (because on some points the continuators went beyond their teachers) and it was largely realised by Marx and Engels in their early writings and this had a tremendous role to play in the subsequent development of their views.
The first thing they had to do was to determine their attitude to the Young Hegelians, the petty-bourgeois socialists and the vulgar economists. Having taken part in the Young Hegelian movement, they drew atheistic and revolutionary-democratic conclusions from Hegel's philosophy and, overcoming its subjectivist opposition of selfconsciousness and being, parted company with Young Hegelianism and Hegel's philosophy. At first, they regarded Feuerbach's anthropological materialism not as a negation of Hegel's philosophy, but as its continuation. This was a view characteristic of Young Hegelians and following the break with them, Marx and Engels gave a materialist appreciation of Feuerbach's philosophy, giving him credit not only for his critique of philosophical speculation and his atheistic analysis 470 of the origins of religion, but also for his materialist approach to the question of man and nature, of man and thought.
Thanks to this new approach to Feuerbach's philosophy, they were able not only to assimilate its rational ideas but also to overcome its limitations. Thus, their attitude to Hegel and Feuerbach changed in the process of their separation from Young Hegelianism. One could say that Marx and Engels discovered the true Hegel, the true Feuerbach, and that this was a necessary premise for bringing out and assimilating the whole of the rational element of their teachings.
Marx and Engels took a different attitude to pettybourgeois socialism: they had never been Utopian socialists, although they did work with some of them. This does not mean, of course, that they produced scientific communism overnight, or that their views of the mid-1840s did not contain any elements of Utopian socialism. The point here is that they moved to scientific communism from revolutionary democracy, and not from Utopian socialism, so that the shaping of their communist views in the main coincided with the shaping of their materialist view of history.
Needless to say, Marx and Engels never saw classical bourgeois political economy as its imitative followers did. But at first they did not contrast the classics of bourgeois political economy with the vulgar economists, because they saw both groups as theoreticians of the "science of enrichment". Only later, notably in The Poverty of Philosophy, will one find an incipient demarcation between Ricardo's scientific standpoint and the unscientific notions of his followers. Of crucial importance in this advance was the Marxist interpretation of the law of value and of the economic basis of capital's exploitation of labour.
Thus, Marx and Engels were able to rework German classical philosophy, French Utopian socialism and English classical political economy on revolutionary, critical lines chiefly because they contrasted these outstanding teachings with their lesser continuers. The theoretical grounds for this contrast were formulated in the process of the making of Marxism. But as early as 1841 and 1842, Marx's and Engels's attitude to the theoretical concepts of bourgeois liberalism was determined by their revolutionary-democratic idea that the most important task of social theory is defence of the 471 interests of the "politically and socially propertyless many" (1, 1; 230).
However, one should not contrast the development of Marx's and Engels's theoretical views and their socio-political orientation, something that the critics of Marxism are wont to do. They claim that Marx's and Engels's advance to communism was substantiated theoretically only post factum. M. Rodinson, for instance, writes: "There is, consequently, a Marxian philosophy which is in maximum dependence on his ideology.... Marx expressed his philosophical opinions in the period before he had got down to producing his mature works" (49; 69). The way in which Rodinson describes Marx's philosophical views obscures the fact that these views were substantially modified in the process of the formation of Marxism. But in his mature works, Marx developed his philosophical doctrine. It is absurd, therefore, to claim that Marx expressed his philosophical views at a certain period, never to return to them later on. The absurdity of this claim consists, however, not only in that it presents Marx's philosophical views as ossified, with a built-in ideological proposition, which, incidentally, also changed in the period of the shaping of Marxism. It is absurd to contrast philosophy and ideology because this ignores the ideological function of philosophy and so the fact that there is no philosophy that is independent of ideology.
Philosophy cannot but express definite social interests and requirements, which does not, it is true, account for the whole of its content, but does give an essential characteristic of it. Proof of this tremendously important idea is one of the elements of the revolution in philosophy carried out by Marx and Engels. Consequently, the question needs to be formulated in a different way: with which ideological orientation are Marx's arid Engels's philosophical views historically connected? Incidentally Rodinson tries to answer this question: "Marx... starts from a preliminary ideological choice rooted in a definite tradition, the tradition of the 18th century. The values he has chosen are freedom, equality and brotherhood for all men" (49; 74). What then does Rodinson resent in these ideals of the French bourgeois revolution, ideals which the Utopian socialists had long since proved to be unworkable within the framework of the capitalist society? Rodinson does not accept Marx's conviction concerning "the possibility of a radical improvement of society" (49; 74). He rejects the 472 socialist alternative to his bourgeois ideological concept of "man's slow improvement by means of education, moral enlightenment, technical progress, etc." (49; 74). Consequently, the thrust of Rodinson's charge against Marx is not merely that the latter pursues a definite ideological orientation in his philosophy but that he fails to take a liberalbourgeois orientation. It is highly indicative that here the revolutionary socialist reconstruction of society is presented as ruling out "man's improvement" by means of education, moral enlightenment, technical progress, etc. Thus, Rodinson contrasts the bourgeois ideology and the socialist ideology and presents this as a purely scientific and non-ideological examination of Marxism.
According to M. Rubel, Marx came to the proletarian movement via his ethical vocation. Rubel denies the scientific character of Marxism on the grounds that Marx and Engels had attacked the capitalist system even before they provided the economic proof for the inevitability of socialism. But it was not as simple as Rubel and his associates think.
The works of mature Marxism are not in any sense a substantiation of the somewhat moralising critique of capitalism which we find in some of Marx's and Engels's early writings, something that they finally overcame in The German Ideology. The subsequent development of Marxism, organically connected with an analysis of the economic foundations for the development of the capitalist mode of production, signified a further deepening of the scientific substantiation of the inevitable socialist reconstruction of society. In contrast to the Utopian socialists, Lenin says, Marx believed that it was altogether not enough to confine oneself to a critique and condemnation of capitalism. He "gave a scientific explanation to it, reducing that existing system, which differs in the different European and non-European countries, to a common basis---the capitalist social formation, the laws of the functioning and development of which he subjected to an objective analysis (he showed the necessity of exploitation under that system)" (5, 1; 157-58). One will easily realise that some of the shortcomings of Utopian socialism also apply to some extent to Marx's and Engels's early writings, in which the socialist rejection of capitalism is still substantiated not so much with economic as with anthropological and ethical arguments, including references to a contradiction between man's nature and the capitalist 473 system. So the writings of mature Marxism should be seen not only as a continuation of the earlier writings of Marx and Engels, but also as abandonment of some of their ideas.
Rubel, like some other critics of Marxism, who ascribe to its founders biased beginnings, which allegedly predetermined the line of their research and eventual outcome, clearly ignore the fact that the starting point in the historical process of the shaping of Marxism---the humanistic protest against the oppression and enslavement of the human being---is the most important result of the development of progressive thought in the pre-Marxian epoch.^^*^^ In his gymnasium essay, i.e., in the period before the shaping of the dialecticp-materialist world view began, Marx says that man's vocation is to ennoble mankind and himself. But in 1841, his revolutionary-democratic stand enables him to formulate the humanistic credo of progressive philosophy in a different way: war not only against the celestial but also against the- terrestrial gods, and abolition of all the anti-- democratic social orders engendering material and spiritual misery.
When in the late 1830s, Marx and Engels joined the Young Hegelian movement, they regarded philosophy as a theory for the rational reconstruction of society. They assumed that philosophy was incompatible with religion because reason, of which philosophy had to be an authentic expression, was a denial of unreason. But at that time they believed idealism to be a real antithesis of fantastic religious notions.
Marx and Engels regarded the predominant social forms as unreasonable because they sanctioned material and spiritual poverty, and for that reason considered the sources of this unreason, which they believed to be in conflict with _-_-_
^^*^^ This fact is emphasised by E. Fromm, who says that Marx's philosophy is "rooted in the humanistic philosophy of the Western tradition, which starts from Spinoza, runs through the French and German Enlightenment of the 18th century, on to Goethe and Hegel, and whose inner substance consists of concern for man and the realisation of his potentialities" (30; 5). But Fromm's interpretation of the humanistic tradition and its scientific development in the doctrine of Marxism in the light of philosophical anthropology is denial of the fundamental distinction between the Marxist philosophy and the earlier philosophical humanism. He says: "When one wants to avoid the ambiguity of `materialist' and `economic', Marx's view of history should be designated as its anthropological interpretation" (30; 23). But the point is that one of the key elements of the Marxist revolution in philosophy is the positive, dialectical negation of philosophical anthropology.
474 man's rational nature. The Young Hegelians believed that the social ills were rooted in religion, but Marx and Engels reached the conclusion that the reduction of all social ills to the dominance of a distorted consciousness did not explain anything. Was not religion, like any distoi ced consciousness generally, a product of distorted social reality? Accordingly, the point was to discover the reasons for which there was a distorted reality that lay outside consciousness and was independent of it. Hegel's philosophy did not consider this matter. Feuerbach's materialist doctrine substantiated the need to overcome the religious alienation of the individual, which was described as the main form of human slavery. Having discovered the basis of alienation in economic relations (alienated labour) Marx and Engels argued the need to bring these relations into conformity with man's rational nature, which they initially interpreted anthropologically, but later defined as the totality of historically changing relations. This new approach to man's nature, substance, marks a resolute break with philosophical anthropology. It is no longer a matter of getting economic relations to conform with human nature: the task of "human emancipation", which Marx formulated, spells out as the abolition of the private-property society and the transformation of social relations on the basis of social property.Philosophy had long proclaimed the task of humanising the individual and society, mostly reducing it to man's moral improvement. Philosophy imagined that it stood above the life of society, which it regarded as a reality alien to philosophy (and so to human reason). Marx opposed this illusion, which showed that philosophy, like religion, was alienated consciousness. Consequently, philosophy was rational not when the philosopher imagined himself as rising over and above the sufferings of men and their struggles. It became real reason through its involvement in actual struggle for a rational reconstruction of society. But what did the reconstruction of society on rational principles mean? What was the social force to which philosophy should turn, considering that it itself, like consciousness generally, was incapable of transforming the material conditions of men's life and embodying in it the humanistic ideals it had worked out? Marx and Engels found the answers to these questions through a critical analysis of English political economy and French Utopian socialism. The critique of political economy 475 developed into a positive analysis of capitalist reality, so anticipating the answer to this question: what is the basis of the prevailing social evil, and what is to be destroyed through revolutionary action?
Utopian socialism first considered the question of a new social system which overcame all the fundamental defects of capitalism, and this is of obvious importance for a basically new approach to the question concerning the meaning and mission of philosophy.
When Marx and Engels, relying on Hegel's doctrine, regarded in the spirit of his left-wing followers, began to argue the need to convert philosophy into a theory of the emancipation struggle, they still had a long way to go before they could answer the questions posed by English classical political economy and Utopian socialism. They turned to these theories because this was required to defend the economic interests of the politically and socially deprived mass. Arid here, consequently, their party stand directed (but did not, of course, predetermine) their theoretical interests, so helping them to move from abstract philosophical to concrete social consideration of the great humanistic task. But this meant a negation of philosophy in the traditional sense of the word and its conversion into the ideological basis of the working people's emancipation movement.
So it is Marx's and Engels's socio-political stand that had the crucial role to play in the historical choice which determined the basic features of the shaping of Marxism. Thanks to their revolutionary-democratic and then proletarian social orientation, Marx and Engels showed the bourgeois content not only of English classical political economy, but also of German classical philosophy which proclaimed social progress to be realisation of reason, freedom and humanism. Let us note that Marx's and Engels's social orientation was not only practical-political, but also theoretical, i.e., in virtue of the objective logic of the development of their theoretical views, they arrived at the discovery of the epoch-making mission of the working class.
Analysis of the formation of the Marxist philosophy includes a consideration (from a definite angle, of course) of the shaping of the Marxist political economy and scientific communism. It would be an obvious over-simplification to assume that the theoretical source of the Marxist philosophy consists only of German classical philosophy (only the 476 preceding philosophical teachings generally), that the theoretical source of scientific communism consists of French Utopian socialism, and so on. Marxism is a coherent and integral doctrine, whose component parts are concerted with each other, substantiate each other and, in a sense, develop into each other.
The facts show that the Marxist philosophy was created not only through a critical assimilation of classical German philosophy and the elaboration of new philosophical propositions. It would have been impossible to work out historical materialism with its fundamental concepts--- productive forces, relations of production, mode of production, socio-economic formation---without economic studies directly involving a critique of bourgeois economic thought. For its part, the critique of bourgeois political economy entailed consideration of the historically transient character of the capitalist mode of production and the inevitability of socialism. The critical analysis of Utopian socialism and the establishment of the rational propositions it contained were also a necessary element in the shaping of the Marxist philosophy, which is not only a dialectico-materialist but also a communist world view. All of this shows that the philosophies of the past were not the only antecedents of dialectical and historical materialism.
The transformation of Utopian socialism into a science became possible because of two great discoveries: the materialist view of history, and the theory of surplus-value, i.e., because of Marx's and Engels's philosophical and economic studies. They began their economic substantiation of socialism in the 1840s, although most of the work in this field was done by Marx later, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital. The historicomaterialist substantiation of socialism was in the main effected in the 1844-1847 period, when Marx and Engels developed their doctrine of the relation of social consciousness and social being, of socio-economic formations, mode of production, productive forces and relations of production, economic basis and superstructure. The creation of historical materialism was, of course, one of the main premises for the development of the Marxist political economy, for this required above all the identification of the definitive and fundamental relations---the relations of production---in the totality of social relations.
477It would be wrong to contrast the philosophical, historicomaterialist and economic substantiation of scientific communism, because all of these are indissolubly connected with each other. Nor is there any need to argue that Marx and Engels combined the elaboration of historical materialism with their formulation of materialist dialectics, because historical materialism gives a dialectico-materialist explanation of social development. In their early works, Marx and Engels considered the question of the relation between the spiritual and the material, between what is and what ought to be, between the ideal and the real, theory and practice, the sensuous and the rational, freedom and necessity, the individual and the general, the abstract and the concrete, the state and the civil society, the individual and society, and so on. The analysis of these dialectical opposites on the basis of a theoretical summing up of historical and economic facts leads to the emergence of dialectical and historical materialism as a coherent and integral philosophical doctrine. In that period, materialist dialectics was elaborated mainly through a summing-up of experience in social development. But this does not warrant the assertion that historical materialism emerged before dialectical materialism: the dialecticomaterialist view of nature and the dialectico-materialist view of social life are inseparable from each other.
Summing up this analysis of the historical making of the Marxist philosophy, one must, of course, bear in mind that its main propositions were systematically developed in every way in Marx's and Engels's subsequent works, notably Capital, Anti-Diihring and The Dialectics of Nature. That is why it would be wrong to seek in their early works any systematic exposition of dialectical and historical materialism.
By the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels already regarded their theory not as a dogma but as a guide to action. This idea is best expressed in Marx's well-known letter to Ruge, which appeared in the Deutsch-Franzb'sische Jahrbiicher. Consequently, even in the period in which Marxism took shape, Marx's and Engels's philosophical doctrine was a vibrant and creative doctrine that was constantly being enriched with fresh propositions. This is the basic feature of dialectical and historical materialism which makes it fundamentally different from all the other philosophical doctrines and which is an adequate expression of the revolution in philosophy carried out by Marx and Engels.
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49. Roclinson M. "Sociologie marxiste et ideologic marxiste". In: Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.
50. Rubel M. Karl Marx, essai de biographie intellectuelle. Paris, 1957.
51. Russel B. Freedom versus Organisation. 1814-1914. New York, 1934.
52. Schapper K. "Brief an das 'Kommunistische Korrespondenz-Komitee' vom 17, Juli 1846". In: Fragen der Geschichten, Moskau, 1948, Nr. 2.
53. Schlamm W. Die Grenzen des Wunders. Ein Bericht iiber Deutschland. Zurich, 1959.
54. Spargo I. Karl Marx. Leben und Werk. Leipzig, 1912.
55. Stern A. "Marxisme et relativisme historique". Revue Internationale de phihsophie, t. XII, N. 45-46, 1958.
56. Stirner M. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Leipzig, o.j.
57. Wetter G. A. "Mensch und Natur beim jungen Marx und im Diamat. In: Universitiitstage, 1961. Marxismus-Leninismus. Geschichte und Gestalt, Berlin, 1961.
__ALPHA_LVL1__ NAME INDEXActon H. 274
Adler M. 154, 465
Adoratsky V.V. 22
Adorno Th. 26
Aeschylus 100
Althusser L. 32, 39, 239
Annenkov P. V. 359, 382, 430, 431,
447Anselm of Canterbury 58 Aristotle 25, 49, 50, 53, 103, 117,
118, 119,
Baader F. 63
Babeuf G. 414, 467
Bacon F. 117, 310-312
Bagaturia, G. A. 378, 380, 392
Bakunin M. 195
Bauer B. 23, 24, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 48, 65, 71, 93, 98, 100, 101, 103, 109-110, 153, 189, 193, 199, 201- 202, 222, 247, 285, 292, 298, 334, 408
Bauer F.. 105, 106, 150, 327-328, 408
Bauer G. 357, 451, 453
Bekker K. 38, 121
Bernays L. 24, 314, 356
Besse G. 266
Blanc L. 356
Bloch E. 18
Bohme J. 75, 119
Boisquillebert P. 225
Bonnel P. 275
Borne L. 77, 79, 84, 86, 147, 148
Bottigelli E. 32
Bray J. 428
Breuer K. 48
Brezhnev L. I. 21
Biickner G. 38
Buonarotti F. 414
Buhl L. 105
Buhr M. 266-267
Burgers H. 24, 285
Byron G. 156
Cabet E. 188, 198
Calvez J. 277, 280-281
Campanella T. 117
Carlyle Th. 220
Chateaubriand F. 183
Cicero 119
Clarke 119
Considerant V. 106, 108
Cornu O. 23-24, 31-32, 37, 65, 151,
417 Cousin V. 194
485Daniels R. 195, 356 Democritus 50-53, 55-56 Descartes R. 293, 310 Deramy T. 198 Doepel I. 453 Dronke E. 417
Epicurus 41, 49-57 Everbeck A. 451
Fedoseyev P. N. 10, 22
Feuerbach L. 21, 36, 37, 39, 60, 70, 92-96, 99, 115, 118, 120-126, 142, 146-147, 150, 164, 169-170, 172, 185, 188, 190, 193-195, 203, 206, 207, 212, 222, 227-228, 231, 242, 244, 247-250, 253, 254, 256-257, -262, 265-266, 269, 271, 275, 278, 285-286, 294-298, 301, 305, 311- 312, 329, 333, 345-346, 348-352, 345-355, 371-375, 400, 404, 423, 424, 425, 428, 471
Fichte J. 38-39, 45, 47, 49, 53, 117
Fleischer G. 297
Fourier 106, 187, 198, 218, 311, 330, 331, 341-343, 467
Freiligrath G. 113
Fromm E. 474
Cans E. 23, 32, 37, 48, 84
Gassendi P. 57
Gigot Ph. 356, 361
Gobel 453
Goethe J. 474
Gottschalk A. 415
Graeber F. 24-25, 75-78, 79-80, 84,
97 Graeber W. 24-25, 74-75, 77-78,
81, 84
Griin K. 356-357, 416, 418-419, 423 Gruppe O. 110 Gutzkow K. 77 Gvishiani D. M. 230
Haller K. 126
Harney G. 356
Hegel G. 19, 21, 24, 32-35, 36, 38-40, 45-50, 54-58, 63-66, 67-68, 71, 81-84, 88-90, 92-96, 98-101, 117, 128, 136-138, 143, 149, 163- 173, 174-179, 180-181, 184, 188, 191, 205-207, 211, 227, 231-232, 247-250, 253, 257-265, 275-276, 278, 281, 293-296, 297-299, 300, 302, 304-309, 313, 330, 347, 363,
368, 371-373, 382, 388, 404, 438,
441-442, 470-471, 475-476 Heine H. 77, 79, 101, 285 Heineccius I. 45 Heinrich D. 18 Heinrich C. 183
Heinzen K. 24, 408-414, 417, 454 Helvetius C. 311 Hengsteuberg 82 Heraclitus 117 Herwegh G. 113, 189 Hess M. 24-25, 36, 101, 106, 154,
189-190, 222, 241, 285-286, 334,
341, 417, 419, 421 Hobbes Th. 117, 312, 398 Hodgskin T. 428 Holbach P. 101, 156, 365 Hommes J. 280 Hook S. 346 Hugo G. 117, 126 Hume D. 103 Hyppolite J. 20, 232, 255, 275
Ilyichev L. F. 10
Jacoby J. 152
James W. 346
Jung A. 84, 93, 148-150
Jung G. 24, 293
Kandel Ye. P. 23, 41, 415, 417, 450 Kant I. 38-39, 45, 127, 188, 191,
205, 313, 366 Kautsky K. 20 Kelso L. 465 Kelterborn G. 453 Kierkegaard S. 18, 87 Konstantinov F. V. 272 Koppen K. 49, 100 Kotgen K. 24, 421 Kriege H. 24, 355, 359-361, 418,
453Lancizolle K. 183
Landshut S. 48, 268-269, 281
Lange M. 128, 197
Lapin N. I. 22, 125, 166-167, 179
Laube H. 147
Lauderdale D. 434
Ledru-Rollin A. 356
Leibnitz G. 51, 11'9, 293
Lehmann A. 453
Lenin V. I. 10, 12, 13, 17, 21, 27, 31, 56, 104, 105, 155, 185, 194, 199, 225, 237-238, 264, 276, 291, 486 293, 296-297, 308, 316, 322, 327, 335, 352, 354-355, 361, 395, 404, 436, 459-460, 462, 473
Leo H. 82, 93, 126
Leroux P. 108, 194
Leske K. 166
Lessing G. 101
Lifshits M. 50
List F. 104
Locke J. 311
Lucretius C. 52
Ludwig K. 183
Luning O. 24, 416, 418
Luther M. 124-126, 188
Machiavelli N. 117, 183, 398
Malebranche N. 119
Malthus T. 218, 331
Malysh A. I. 23, 239
Man H. 270-273, 281
Marat J. 205
Marcuse H. 269-270, 281
Marhinecke Ph. 102
Marx H. 38
Mayer G. 21, 30, 48
Mayer J. 268-269, 281
McCulloch J. 225
Mende G. 43
Mehring F. 21, 31, 37, 44, 106, 124,
154, 454
Metternich K. 87, 469 Meyen E. 105, 109 Michelet C. 102 Mikhailov M. I. 23, 450 Mill J. 225 Mirabeau J. 117 Mitin M. B. 22 Moll I. 356-357, 451, 453 Monke 417
Montesquieu C. 117, 183, 195 Mosolov V. G. 184 Mundt T. 78 Miintzer Th. 188
Oppenheim D. 113, 164-166 Orudzhev G. M. 160 Owen R. 161-162, 311, 337, 349, 467
Pericles 119
Pierce Ch. 346
Pira G. 19
Plato 40, 49
Plekhanov G. 21, 192, 439
Pelnge J. 19
Plutarch 60
Pozner V. 27
Proudhon P. 108, 186, 198, 216, 225, 327-329, 331-333, 342, 356, 428-439, 441-446, 448-449, 453
Putmann H. 286, 416
Reding M. 203
Ricardo D. 218, 219, 225, 228, 278, 331, 435, 436, 471
Rodinson M. 472
Rokhkin N. G. 22
Rosenberg D. 23, 218
Rosenkrantz K. 103
Rosental M. 356, 453
Rousseau J.-J. 101, 117, 136, 156, 183-184
Rubel M. 56, 154
Ruge A. 24, 36-37, 69, 71, 84, 104, 105, 109-111, 114, 120-122, 124- 125, 146, 163-166, 189-190, 192- 193, 195, 200, 216, 219, 408
Russel B. 346
Ruthenberg A. 105
Ryazanov D. 124, 450-451
Saint-Simon C.-H. 186, 330, 331,
467Sannwald R. 50, 60 Sass H. M. 125 Savigny F. 126 Say J.-B. 225, 331 Schapper K. 356, 451, 453 Schelling F. 77, 88-91, 94-96, 102,
123-124, 150, 193-194 Schleiermacher F. 25, 80 Schmidt A. 334 Schufrenhauer W. 125-126 Schweitzer ]. 331 Seller 361 Serebryakov M. V. 23, 31, 108, 192,
417Shelly B. 156 Sismondi J. 434 Sitkovsky Ye. P. 22 Smith A. 217-218, 219, 225, 229,
278, 331, 436 Socrates 118-119 Spinoza B. 103, 117, 251, 293, 313,
474Stahl F. 126 Steen 453 Steigerwald R. 267
487Stein I.. 423
Steklov Yu. 22
Stepanova Ye. A. 24, 97
Stern A. 346
Stirner M. 24, 100-105, 285-286,
363, 366-367 Strauss D. 24, 33-34, 37, 80-82, 84,
93, 101, 118, 124, 295 Svetlov V. I. 22
Thibaut 45 Tucker R. 275
Voltaire F. 101, 117, 135, 156
Wachsmuth W. 183
Weiss C. 63
Weitling W. 188, 198, 216, 227,
286, 330, 355, 358-359, 361, 418,
425, 452
Westphalen E. 361 Wetter G. 312 Weydemeyer J. 416, 422 Wolff W. 361'
__ALPHA_LVL1__ SUBJECT INDEXAbstraction 179-181, 197-198, 212- 213, 249, 252, 257-259, 264-265, 304, 440-
Activity 61, 90, 98, 117, 187, 226, 231, 242, 251, 254, 260, 261, 309, 324-326, 328, 345, 382, 384
---intellectual, spiritual 61, 69, 259, 474
---political 450
---practical 58, 103, 129, 346, 348, 387, 431
---public 103, 242, 259
---revolutionary 23, 37, 346
---sensual 298, 309, 345-347, 373
---theoretical 345
Alienation 15, 27, 121-123, 142-143, 167-168, 174-175, 205-208, 212- 213, 224-226, 232-233, 234-235, 236, 241, 244-245, 246-247, 257- 259, 260-263, 265-267, 268-270, 273, 274-278, 279-280, 298-299, 318-319, 321, 323-325, 333, 384- 387, 474-475
---of nature 233, 256-258
---of the human substance 122, 232, 247-248, 251-252, 258- 259, 267, 298, 307-308
---reliquous 121-123, 276-278, 349-350
---of self-consciousness 258-260, .262-263, 295-296, 318-319
Anthropologism 94, 125, 147, 202, , 207, 228, 245, 254, 256, 296, 374, 386, 400, 424
Atheism 60, 76, 78, 81, 97, 98, 103,
105, 108, 121, 123, 221, 263 Atomistics (Ancient Greek) 51-57
Basic (economic) and political
superstructure 171, 214, 308,
340, 379-380, 393-394, 398, 400,
410, 460, 478 Basic philosophical question 54, 60-
61, 88-89, 200-201, 259-260, 299-
300, 437-438 Beginning (in philosophy) 52-55,
147-148 Bureaucratism 69, 143, 170, 175,
176Capitalism 155, 159-160, 213-214, 217-219, 220-222, 236, 238, 240, 246, 267, 269-270, 273-274, 276, 307-308, 319, 325-326, 338-340, 342, 374-375, 380, 396-397, 430, 436-437, 448, 456-457, 459, 460- 462, 466
Categories
---economic 217, 332-333, 437- 439, 440-441, 448
Chartism 154-155, 158-159, 161- 162. 223-224, 319-320, 335-336, 337-339, 356-357
Christianity 71-77, 80-82, 93-94, 118-119, 123-124, 125, 128-129, 150-152. 187, 201-202, 427-428
Classes 78-79, 84, 107-108. 137-138, 155-156, 158-161, 171-172. 202, 207-208, 210, 213-214, 218, 221.
488223, 286-287, 308, 316-317, 321, 323-324, 337, 339. 341, 389, 393- 394, 395-396, 403-404, 405, 416, 433, 448-450, 457, 460, 461
Class struggle 146-147, 158-160, 197-198/216, 228-229, 246-247, 269, 274-275, 320, 334, 337-338, 340-341, 343-344, 348-350, 355- 356, 359, 395-396, 399., 417, 421, 423, 431, 448-449, 459-460, 462
---working class 36, 156-157, 188-189, 213-214, 223-224, 238-239, 302, 318-321, 323, 325-326, 335-338, 343-344, 399, 413-414, 425, 426-427, 442-443, 457, 461-462, 463- 464, 467
Cognition 57-58, 66-67, 90, 91, 130- 131, !69, 258, 259-260, 261-263, 264-265, 293-294, 304, 309-310, 345-347, 348-349, 373, 387-388, 402-403
Communism 15, 97, 103, 105-107, 108, 154. 159-160, 184-186, 187- 193, 197-198, 240, 245-246, 263- 264, 282-283, 285, 339, 357-360, 368-370, 374-375, 389, 394-396, 412, 420-421, 424-425, 427-429, 437-438, 453-456, 469
---levelling 240-242. 245-246
---philosophical 118-119, 282, 416-417
---scientific 19-21, 27. 165-166, 191-192, 212-213, 216-217. 226-227, 240, 245, 275-277, 279, 280-281, 291, 297, 326, 335, '342-344, 348, 354-355, 361-362, 395-396, 403-404, 411. 415-416, 417-418, 446- 447, 450, 455-456, 466, 471, 476-479
---Utopian 36, 106-108, 188-190, 198, 226-227, 240, 245, 286, 310-31 1. 467
the Communist League 195, 450,
454-456, 463-464 Communist party 190, 191-192,
333-334, 358, 363, 414-415, 450.
452-453, 454-455, 463-465, 468 Competition 218-219, 225, 229-230,
340, 365-366, 392, 413-414, 430-
431, 444-447, 448-449, 456-457
Concrete social studies 334-337 Consciousness 58-59, 62-63, 65-67, 68, 94-95, 113-114, 116-117, 121, 150, 196-197, 200, 206, 210-211, 249-250, 252, 259, 319, 321-322, 363-364. 365-366, 387-388, 400- 401, 402-403
---and being 47-48, 62-63, 65-66, 89-90, 135-136, 203-204, 209, 402, 405-406
---individual 400-401
---primitive 401
---religious 120-121, 170, 201- 203, 227-228, 256, 350-352, 363-364, 402-403
Content (and form) 14-15, 66-68, 69-71, 72-73, 76, 111-112, 118- 119, 142-143, 153-154, 180, 212- 213, 254-256, 277-278, 375-376, 380, 386-387, 392-393, 404-405, 455-456
Continuity 14, 191-192, 249, 263- 264, 382-383
Contradictions 48, 64, 66-67, 68, 70-71, 79-80, 85, 90-92, 98-99, 134-135, 144, 152, 159-160, 163, 171-172, 176-178, 180-181, 195- 196, 205-207, 214-215, 219-220, 249-250, 262-263, 294-295, 304- 305, 307-308, 322-323, 330-331, 333, 379, 430-431, 433
---antagonistic 106-107, 154-155, 191, 202-203, 224-225, 228- 229, 239-240, 267-268, 280- 281, 283, 307-308, 318-319, 323-324, 337-338, 340, 361- 362, 384-385, 432-433, 436- 437, 449, 460, 461
Cosmopolitanism 86
Deism 1 18
Democracy 110, 114, 147, 149, 151, 158, 163, 173, 181, 186, 198, 223-224. 283-284. 343,. 358, 409, 415, 421, 457, 462
---bourgeois 32, 158, .186, 223, 257, 282-283, 366, 374, 398- 399, 408, 416-, 457
---socialist 284
---revolutionary 15, 22, 27, 37-38, 40, 69, 71-73. 79, 86, 97-98, 103, 105, 111-113, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146. 152, 181, 195,
489213, 416, 470, 471 Development (dialectical) 47-48, 162, 180-181, 249, 254-255, 263- 264, 279-280, 304, 306-307, 438-
440, 459
Dialectics 19, 66, 68, 95-96, 100, 138, 166, 178, 249, 254, 280-281, 308, 312, 313, 327, 383, 406, 439,
441, 468
---idealist 19, 66, 68, 95, 166- 167, 180, 248-250, 259, 263, 297, 304, 307-308, 324, 438-442
---materialist (marxist) 24, 252- 253, 263-264, 280, 303, 304- 305, 307, 324-327, 345, 406, 439-441, 447, 459
---of the abstract and the concrete 34, 178-179, 252, 256, 303, 319, 363-364, 366-367, 421, 478
Dogmatism 76, 197
Emancipation
---political 201-205, 207-208, 210, 216, 305-306, 407
---human 173-174, 200-204, 206- 208, 209-214, 224, 243-244, 245-246, 305-306, 407, 474- 475
Experience
---historical 19, 21, 25, 274, 286- 287, 318, 322, 414-415
Family 171-172, 174, 376-378, 465-466
Feudalism 71-72, 81-82, 87, 97-98, 111-112, 127-128, 139-140, 157- 158, 190, 305-306, 446-447
Fourierism 186-188, 191-192, 444-445
Freedom 41-42, 51-54, 82-84, 85, 88, 95-97, 113-114, 131-133, 134- 135, 154-155, 157-158, 185-186, 204-205, 206, 221-222, 256-257, 305-307, 415, 444-445, 464-466
---of press 34-35, 69, 71-72, 85, 110-111, 131-136, 193
---of will 52-53, 54-55, 69, 76, 132-133
---political 185-186, 465-466
Historism 19, 67, 82, 90, 128, 192 History 19, 21, 34, 35, 67, 82-83,
149-150, 154, 184, 197, 206, 224, 245-246, 250-251, 253-255, 258, 268, 273, 316, 317-318, 335, 351, 367-368, 370-371, 373, 376, 378- 379, 382-383, 405, 425, 428, 438, 442
---and the idealist conception of history 119-120, 319-320, 370- 371, 373, 378, 383
---and the materialist conception of history 20, 104, 112, 146, 165, 170-171, 172, 184, 255, 256, 258, 268, 272-273, 281, 306, 320, 326-327, 343-345, 349, 352, 354, 356, 364, 371, 375-376, 379, 381, 382, 386, 388, 406, 471, 478
The history of philosophy 21, 55- 57, 66-68, 76, 103, 117-118, 124, 126, 182-183, 293-294, 368
---ancient philosophy 49-51, 52-56
---Epicureanism 41, 51-56, 57
---scepticism 49-50
---stoicism 41, 49-50
---classical German 39, 64, 68, 191, 205, 293-295
---enlightenment 43-44, 49-50
---Marxist 11, 66-67, 335-336
---neomarxism (Frankfurt School of Social Research) 26, 251
---new period 117, 310-311
---personalism 43-44, 255-256
---philosophical anthropology 18, 94-95, 209, 256-257, 269-270, 285-286, 351, 367-368, 474-475
---"philosophy of life" 251-252, 272
---positivism 148-149
---pragmatism 345-346
---romantism 37-39, 72-73, 122- 124, 126, 127-128
Humanism 17, 18, 39, 43-44, 198, 211, 212, 244, 255, 269, 271-273, 294, 312, 476
---bourgeois 268, 275, 428
---philosophical 439-467
---practical 246
---proletarian 265
---real 17, 245, 355
---theoretical 263
490Idea 33, 35, 45, 47, 77, 82-85, 89, 95, 106-107, 115-116, 138, 162, 167-169, 170, 215, 246, 254-255, 274-275, 276-278, 282, 292-293, 296, 310, 315-317, 348-349, 359, 367, 388, 402, 405, 412, 415, 417-418, 420, 428, 430, 438, 448, 452, 457
---and Absolute Idea 54, 66, 80, 95-96, 130, 167, 170, 171, 258, 264, 441
Ideal 133, 150, 155, 190, 191, 347, 348
The ideal and the real 39, 45-48, 61, 478
Idealism 37-38, 45-46, 54, 58, 60- 61, 66, 89, 93-96, 99, 104, 109, 118, 123, 130, 131, 170, 194, 202, 248, 250, 255, 293-294, 299, 300, 301-302, 309, 314, 318, 327, 347, 352, 355, 363-364, 370, 375, 417, 441, 475
Ideology 16, 17, 27, 36-38, 40, 104,
280, 317, 333, 379, 403-406, 462, 468
---bourgeois 16, 265, 275, 286, 333, 338, 354-355, 362, 366- 367, 404-405, 416, 419, 431, 453, 454, 465, 469, 472-473
---socialist 53, 237, 238, 265, 271-272, 275, 292, 362, 403- 405, 423-424, 469, 472-473
Industrial revolution 154, 282-283, 304, 336-337, 455-456
Interests 48, 138, 139, 141-142, 155-172, 175, 176-177, 181, 190, 209-210, 211, -214-215, 218-219, 273, 278, 306-308, 310, 312, 315, 316-317, 319, 328, 337-338, 339, 358, 365-366, 369-370, 397, 399, 424, 448-449, 453-454, 458, 463-464
Irrationalism 88-89, 91-92, 101, 123-124, 150
Justice 328, 342-443, 426-427, 442-443
Labour 187, 206-207, 221-222, 225- 227, 230-233, 237, 239, 259, 280-
281, 319-320, 322, 348-349, 360, 392, 432, 434-435
---and capital 224-226, 228-229,
238-241, 268-269, 319-320 339, 358
---estranged 207, 226-227, 230- 238, 256, 257-258, 266-269, 274-275, 275-276, 278-279, 384, 392
---manual and mental 383
---social division of 1. 384, 397- 398, 436-437, 440-441, 442-445
Law 71, 111, 112, 117, 129, 131, 134, 136, 139, 141-143, 156-157, 217, 219, 229, 276, 306, 312, 319, 387, 398-397, 4.33, 446, 473
The League of the Just 450-455
Liberalism 63-65, 71-72, 79-80, 111, 151-152, 343-344, 368-370
Logic 89, 96-97, 168, 263-264
Man (the problem of man) 40, 42-44, 51-53, 60-61, 69-70, 82-83, 121, 126-127, 131-132, 171-172, 173-175, 195-196, 203-205, 208, 209, 212-213, 217, 225-226, 227-228, 230-234, 242-243, 244- 245, 250-251, 252-253, 256-258, 267-268, 269-270, 275-276, 279- 280, 296-299, 313-314, 321-322, 328, 333, 350-352, 371-373, 421- 422, 431
---abstract 203-204, 244-245, 338, 350-351, 352-353, 371
---and nature 43-44, 51-53, 54- 55, 121, 129-132, 220-221, 222, 224-225, 233-234, 242, 245, 249-256, 257-258, 260- 261, 265-266, 295-296, 300- 301, 309, 324-325, 381, 4£3- 424, 471
---substantive forces of 243-245, 253-256, 260-261
---the substance of 18, 179, 203- 204, 213-214, 242, 244-245, 252-253, 256, 257-258, 259, 263-264, 268-270, 279-281, 324-325, 350-352, 372, 421- 422, 474-475
Masses (people's) 35, 112, 128, 142- 143, 158-159, 196-197, 199, 202, 209, 214-215, 237, 302, 306-307, 313-314, 315-316, 316-319, 343- 344, 399, 414, 416, 425, 464
Material (and spiritual) 65-66, 150,
491157-158, 197-198, 203-204, 205, 273, 347, 402, 478 Materialism 15-16, 94-95, 97-98, 99- 100, 103, 131-132, 145-146, 150, 162, 180, 220, 247-249, 251-252, 254-255, 293-295, 309, 310-313, 344-345, 352, 371, 459
---abstract 179-180, 220-221
---anthropological 15, 17-18, 21, 37-38, 60-61, 94-95, 118-119,
120, 146-147, 173-174, 212- 213, 246-247, 251-252, 257, 265-266, 271-272, 295, 297, 321, 374-375, 381, 471
---dialectical 21, 30, 90, 110, 147-148, 251-252, 257, 281, 291, 334, 344-348, 353, 417- 418, 468
---historical 20-21, 27, 31, 110,
121, 146, 147-148, 203-204, 209, 257, 268-269, 275-276, 280-282/291, 316, 320, 334, 353-354, 365-366, 378-379, 383, 393, 406, 413-414, 469, 476-477
---pre-Marxian 344-345, 346-347
---mechanistic 131-132, 311-313
---metaphysical 89, 255-256, 326- 327, 354-355, 371
Matter (and form) 137-138, 150, 170-171, 177-178, 231, 251, 272, 295-296, 309-310, 313-314
Metaphysics 293-296, 310, 312-313, 318, 353-354, 403-405
Method 46-47, 52-54, 68-69, 84, 93, 96-97, 126, 168-170, 177-178, 248-249, 257-258, 264-265, 280, 304-305, 366-367, 383-384, 437- 438, 439, 441-442
---anthropological 311-313
---dialectical 46-47, 68, 93, 96-97, 99, 257, 280, 312-313, 439-440
Methodological approach 39, 167, 170-171, 178-179, 265-266, 280- 281, 308-309, 364-365
---speculative 168-173, 180-181 Monarchy 34-35, 67-68, 88, 97,
122-123, 152-153, 170, 172-174, 181, 195-196, 407-408, 410, 414- 415, 440
Mysticism 75-76, 79, 81-82, 90-91, 126, 167-168, 186-187, 194, 348
Nationalism 86
Natural philosophy 48-53, 194 Necessity 15, 51-96, 114-115, 128- 129, 132-133, 135-136, 149, 236, 267-268, 308, 321-322, 324-325, 378-379, 386-388, 393, 395-396, 449
---and chance 52, 58, 389-390
---and freedom 95-97, 135-136, 149-150, 245, 316-327, 477-479
---historical 64, 170, 192-193, 210-211, 237, 278, 324-326, 338, 414-415
Negation (dialectical) 14, 53-54, 148-149, 210-211, 245-246, 247- 250, 258, 261-265, 393, 420-421, 439
---transcendence of 246, 248-249, 259, 261-262, 263-265, 393
Objective (and subjective) 129-132, 146, 149-150, 243-244, 252, 260- 261, 280-281, 309, 326, 345, 346- 347, 381-382
Opposites 57-58, 65-67, 84, 91, 153, 160, 171-172, 176-180, 214-215, 218-219, 238-240, 243-244, 249- 250, 258, 260-261, 307-308, 314- 315, 322-326, 396-397, 433-434, 440-442, 467-468
Panteism 81-82, 104, 221-222 Party spirit 113, 194, 199, 210-211,
300-302, 320, 342-343, 353, 363,
364-365, 459, 464 Philistinism 73, 78, 85, 195-196, 296 Philosophy 61-63, 65-66, 88, 114-
119, 121, 129-130, 146-147, 197-
198, 208-209, 210-211, 247-248.
301-302, 353
---and practice 32-33, 61-63, 64- 65, 83-84, 91, 104-105, 117- 118, 197-198, 208-209
---and religion 32-35, 52-53, 59- 60, 63/81-83, 88-92, 93-94, 98-100, 108-109, 115-121, 128-129, 169, 180, 200, 300- 301, 474-476
---Hegelian 46-47, 80-84, 87-88, 91-93, 148-149, 264-265, 276- 279, 292-297, 300-302
---idealist 39, 118-119, 121-122,
492247-248, 264-265, 303 ---.Marxist 11, 15-16, 21, 88-89, 99-100, 297, 345-346, 352-356
---materialist 94-95, 294-295, 344-346
---of history 275-277
---"of revelation" 88-89, 96-97, 345-346
---``positive'' 90-91
Pietism 73-75, 91, 148-149, 150-151
Political economy 35-36, 103-104,
156-157, 217-219, 224-226, 229-
230, 276-278, 330-331, 340, 378,
417-418, 437-438, 475-477
---bourgeois 218, 226-230, 232, 214-245, 279, 331-332, 333, 130,470-471
---and Marxist political economy 238-240, 276-277, 477-479
Political struggle 198-199, 206, 216,
342-343 Political superstructure 213-214,
308, 379, 380, 393-394, 399-400,
410, 461, 477-479 Political system 172-173, 174 Practice 21, 22-23, 56-57, 62, 89-90,
98-99, 255-256, 297-299, 309-310,
328-329, 344-350, 353-354
---social 62-63, 89-90, 346-350
---political 83-85, 136
---revolutionary 60-62, 208-209, 348-351, 353
Production 30, 159-160, 198, 218- 220, 227-229, 231, 241-242, 253- 254/255-256, 257-258, 273, 310, 317, 322, 333, 337-338, 340-341, 348-372, .376-380, 382-383, 387- 388, 399-400, 405-406, 431, 443- 444, 445-446, 462, 473
---machine 336-337, 338, 443- 445
---of the means of production 210, 358, 376-377, 384, 392, 434, 445-446
Productive forces 161, 198, 218- 219, 307-308, 321, 355-356, 377- 383, 387-388, 393, 402, 412-413, 433, 446-449, 458, 462-463
Process (social historical) 83-84, 96, 169, 171-172, 199, 206, 231, 236, 259, 267, 273, 277-278, 281, 304- 305, 318-320, 321, 326, 334-335,
352, 354, 381-382, 383, 388-389, 406, 437-438, 440-441, 446-447, 459, 463-464
Progress 34-35, 78, 82-83, 88, 113, 148-149, 155-156-, 160-161, 191- 192, 204-205, 210, 224, 231, 237, 267, 275-276, 283, 314-315, 318, 330-331, 335-336, 337-338, 385, 413-414, 433, 438-439, 448-449, 462, 469
Proletariat 17-18, 31-32, 79, 154- 155, 189, 200-201, 207-208, 210- 211, 212-213, 216-217, 222, 224, 236, 237-238, 267-268, 291-293, 302-303, 306-307, 316, 318-319, 320-324, 326-327, 328-329, 334- 339, 353-355, 356-357, 368-369, 392, 403-404, 407, 412-413, 416, 427-428, 429-430, 436-437, 449, 450-452, 454-456, 459, 461-464, 465-466, 467-468
---the dictatorship of 213-214, 291-293, 396-397, 399-400, 414-415, 446-447, 457, 460- 461, 462-463
Proletariat (and bourgeoisie) 319- 320, 322-323, 324-326, 337-340, 358, 396-397, 410, 413-414, 451- 452, 455-456, 458-459, 463-464, 468
Property 140-141, 203-204, 205, 218, 239, 284, 329-330, 331-332, 368-369, 389-392, 393-394, 411- 412,. 461-462, 463-465
---collective 184-186, 188-189, 390-391
---social 189-190, 219-220, 226- 227, 236, 237-238, 242-243, 333-334, 358-359, 384-385, 464-465
---private 15, 106-107, 111-112, 122-123, 135-136, 137-138, 140-142, 163-164, 172, 174, 175-178, 180-183, 187-188, 189-191, 204-205, 217-218, 223-225, 229-231, 234-238, 239-241, 245-246, 263-264, 269-270, 273, 278, 322, 323- 324, 325-326, 328, 330-333, 340, 358-359, 368-369, 384- 386, 389-390, 393, 397-398, 412-413, 456
493Radicalism 407, 409, 415 Rationalism 69-70, 75-76, 79-80, 88- 89, 95-96, 117-119, 130-131
Reality (empirical) 57-58, 61-62, 64- 66, 68, 115, 116-118, 120, 129, 133, 150, 164, 204, 208, 211, 248, 255, 260, 265, 299, 303, 304, 353, 364, 440, 441, 475
Reason 47, 57-62, 63, 69-70, 75-76, 79-81, 82-83, 88-89, 90-92, 94-95, 112-113, 117-119, 123-124, 126- 127, 130-131, 135-136, 149, 163, 192, 200, 205, 261-262, 304, 309, 430-431, 438-439, 474-475
---and faith 58, 70-71, 74-75, 80-81, 89-90, 91, 119-120, 153
Reformism 363, 467-468
Regularity 335, 382, 388, 399, 463
Relations of production 145-166, •199, 234-235, 267-268, 281, 291- 292, 296, 307-308, 321, 352, 355- 356, 365-366, 378-381, 387-388, 390, 392-394, 410, 412-413, 447- 448, 460-461, 465-466, 477-478
Religion 32-38, 39-42, 57-59, 60-61, 69-71, 74-77, 80-81, 84-85, 93-95, 101-102, 108-109, 115-116, 117- 124, 130-131, 146-147, 163-164, 200-204, 206, 221-223, 295-296, 299-300, 313-314, 349-352, 363- 364, 427-429
Requirements 241, 267, 269-270, 273, 315-316, 319, 322, 341, 376- 378, 407, 419-420, 431-433, 438- 439, 445-446, 449, 456
Revisionism 18-20, 22-23, 25-26, 48, 267-272, 274, 281, 363, 468
Revolution 64-65, 79-80, 83, 110, 140, 148-149, 152-153, 156-157, 186, 188, 194-195, 196-197, 200- 201, 205, 210-212, 213-215, 218- 219, 340, 363-364, 394-395, 452- 454, 457, 462
---bourgeois 37-38, 158-159, 188, 205, 211-213, 316, 399-400, 407-408, 410-413, 414-415, 426-427, 458-459, 464-465
---political 158-159, 188-189, 212-213, 282, 358-359, 421- 422, 449
---social 158-159, 188-189, 205, 211-212, 213-214, 235, 269-
270, 282, 285-286, 337-338, 355-356, 392-393, 399-400, 402, 460-461
---socialist 199, 208-209, 212- 214, 215-216, 269-270, 282, 326-327, 333-334, 339-341, 355-356, 388-389, 392-395, 396-397, 398-400, 399-400, 410-411, 462-463, 466, 467- 468, 473-474
---French of 1789 64-65, 86, 91, 117-118, 183-184, 206, 315- 317, 472-473
Right 45-47, 71-73, 110, 112, 118- 119, 133-134, 140-142, 146-147, 154, 155-156, 157-158, 163, 164- 165, 170, 180-182, 204-205, 206- 207, 211-212, 261-262, 305-307, 316, 363, 397-398
---Hegel's philosophy of right 164-168, 170-172, 177-178, 206-207
---philosophy of right 45, 92, 168, 170, 211-212
Saint-Simonism 36, 147-148, 186- 188, 191-192
Self-alienation 117-118, 206-207, 232-233, 234-235, 237, 244-245, 258, 280, 318-319, 323-324, 421-422
Self-consciousness 33-36, 46-49, 50, 51-53, 55-56, 57-59, 60-61, 62-66, 95-98, 116-117, 128-129, 131-132, 133-134, 150, 152-153, 259-260, 262-263, 285-286, 292-293, 295- 296, 298-300, 309, 313-315, 322- 323, 328, 366-367, 387-388, 401, 419
---abstract 51-52, 55-56, 302, 309
---and being 48, 58, 60-67, 69, 99-100, 471
Sensuous (and rational) 129-131, 170-171, 252-254, 273, 319-320, 345, 346-347, 372-373, 477-479
Social being and social consciousness 59, 170-171, 221, 241, 300- 301, 350-351, 366-367, 375-376, 379, 399-400, 402, 405-406, 466, 477-479
Social development 139, 160-161, 184-185, 196-197, 278, 283, 296, 318, 321-322, 324-326, 333, 334- 494 335, 366-367, 379, 387-389, 412- 413, 439, 459, 477-479 Socialism 31-32, 153-154, 184-186, 211-215, 238, 240-241, 284-285, 292-293, 321-322, 325-326, 328- 329, 333-334, 343-344, 361-362, 410-411, 415-416, 420-422, 423- 424, 449, 457,458, 465-486, 473
---bourgeois and petty-bourgeois 26, 274, 327, 329-330, 341-
343, 355-356, 358, 361-363, 420-421, 423, 424-427, 446- 447, 466-468, 470-471
---critical-Utopian 467-468
---English 328-329, 337-339, 341-342
---ethical 267-268, 281-282
---French 328-329, 341-342
---proletarian 338-339
---scientific . 112-113, 191-192, 268-269, 278-279, 321, 328- 329, 424-425
---``true'' 341, 356-357, 386-387, 416-427, 453, 454
---Utopian 17-18, 36, 106-107, 158-159, 161-162, 186-187, 189, 191-193, 198-199, 218, 240-241, 246-247, 285-286, 321-322, 327, 333-334, 341-
344, 386-387, 395-396, 416, 418, 419-420, 458, 466, 473, 475-476
Social relations 15, 72-73, 77, 121, 133-134, 145-146, 172, 203-204, 218, 245, 256, 257-263, 305-306, 315-316, 324-325, 333, 351-352, 363-364; 402, 431, 446-448, 456, 458
---antagonistic 202-203, 214, 225-227, 232, 322-323, 324-325
Society 203-204, 210, 212-213, 225- 226, 227-228, 268-269, 293, 322, 335-336, 376-377, 445-447
---antagonistic 15, 137-138, 397, 444-445
---bourgeois 139-140, 266, 278, 306-307, 321-322, 324-325, 340, 356-357, 413-414, 435-436
---civil 171-172, 174, 176-178, 181-183, 204-208, 210, 214- 215, 261-262, 305-306, 307-
308, 352, 379-380, 393-394, 447-448, 477-479
---and nature 205, 277-278, 294-295
Sociology 334-335
Spirit 53, 56-58, 61, 66, 70, 83-84, 90, 106, 110-111, 115, 119, 130, 135, 172, 180, 183, 313, 315
---absolute 33, 46, 64, 94, 153- 155, 172, 257, 295, 298, 438
---and masses 313, 318
---and matter 272, 314
---and nature 94-96, 294
---the people's s. 132-133, 138, 295-296
State 35, 42, 46, 69, 70-72, 108, 112, 114, 115, 117, 122-123, 129, 133-134, 136-139, 140, 142-144, 152-154, 157, 160, 163-164, 167- 174, 175-177, 181-182, 200, 202, 203, 204-206, 214, 307-308, 312, 367, 392, 396-399, 429, 448, 462, 465, 478
Substance (and appearance) 72, 116, 117, 130-131, 133-135, 153, 178-180, 242, 245, 262-263, 264- 265, 304, 305-306
Theory 21-22, 62-63, 98-99, 106- 107, 110-111, 116-117, 135-136, 150, 156-157, 169, 186, 188-189, 197-198, 199, 209, 212-213, 219- 220, 237-238, 245-348, 251-252, 268-269, 279-280, 285-287, 294- 295, 298-299, 310-312, 316-317, 327, 329-330, 333, 335-336, 339, 345-346, 347-348, 353-355, 359, 366-367, 380-381, 410-412, 437- 438, 451-452, 459-460
---of `heroes' and the `mob' 223, 314-316
---and practice 62, 69, 83-84, 98-99, 106-108, 199, 237-238, 245-247, 284-285, 298-299, 346-347, 348-349, 353-354, 360-361, 437-438, 459, 477-479
---revolutionary 199, 209
---socialist 329-330, 437-438 Theology 58, 76-77, 80-82, 91, 93-
95, 102-103, 105-106, 108-109, 116-118, 123-124, 152-153, 201- 202, 206, 209, 227-228, 248-250,
495294-295, 299-300, 303, 313-314, 424-425
Thinking 21, 56-57, 69-70, 89, 168, 208-209, 249-250, 252, 258-259. 280, 297-298, 304-305, 347, 403, 439-441
---abstract 90, 130-131, 250-251, 264-265, 328, 346-347
---and being 47-48, 56-57, 88-90, 252, 304-305, 314-315, 320, 348
---dialectico-materialist 21, 294, • 297
---speculative 56-57, 285-286, 294, 302. :!27
---theoretical fiO-61, 99, 130-131, 348-349. 440
Truth 33, 58. 70. 76, 80-81, 83, 85, 88, 106-107, 127, 129-130, 134, 169, 170, 179, 181, 196-197, 254, 345-346, 365. 378, 439
---and error 180, 247, 402
Value 20, 140-141, 206-207, 218, 219-220, 224-226, 332, 429-430, 432, 434, 435-436, 471-472, 477-479
---abstract 219-220
---``constituted'' 434-437, 445- 446
Wages 319, 448
Working-class movement 20, 44-45, 74-75, 154-155, 190-191, 194-195, 223-224, 245, 274, 281, 337-338, 343-344, 355-356, 360-361, 425, 426-427, 429-430, 455-456, 462- 463, 464-465, 469
World outlook 12-14, 16, 20-21, 27, 44, 53-54. 98, 105-106, 195, 203- 204, 210-211, 237-238. 246-247, 248, 255-256, 281-282, 284, 286, 293-294, 299-300, 310, 313-314, 330, 354-355, 360-361, 371, 375, 384, 427-428, 431, 469, 478
``Young Germany" 74, 77-79, 84, 93, 147-150, 161
Young Hegelianism 32, 35-37, 46, 49-51, 59, 69, 71, 74-75, 80-85, 87, 92-94, 97-100, 101-102. 104- 106, 108-111, 115-116, 121-122, 124, 148-149, 151, 153, .163, 188- 190, 202, 203-204, 206-207, 208- 209, 222, 292-296, 297-301, 302, 305-307, 313-320, 327-328, 334, 363-364, 370-371, 471, 475
[496] __ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END] ~ [497]