39
to the then prevailing idealistic thought. This was why he so soon arrived at the most
radical deductions from the Hegelian system. This was also why he greeted so
warmly Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. In his criticism of Christianity,
Feuerbach came to the same conclusions to which the eighteenth-century
materialists had come. But where they had seen only deceit and bigotry, he, who had
gone through the Hegelian school, discerned a necessary phase of human culture.
But even to Feuerbach, man was as much of an abstract figure as he was to the
materialists of the eighteenth century.
It was necessary to go only one step further in the analysis of man and his
surroundings to discover that man was quite varied, existing in diverse sires, having
a different status. The Prussian king, the Moselle peasant, as well as the factory
worker, whom Marx had been meeting in the Rhine province, were all men. They all
had the same organs -- heads, feet, hands, etc. Physiologically and anatomically there
was not any great difference between the Moselle peasant and the Prussian landlord.
Yet there was an overwhelming difference in their social position. Futhermore, men
differed from each other not only in space but in time, those of the seventeenth
century differing from those of the twelfth, and from those of the nineteenth. How
did all these differences originate, if man himself was not changing, if he was
exclusively a product of nature?
Marx's thought began to work in this direction. To maintain that man is the
product of his environment, that he is fashioned by his surroundings, is not enough.
To breed such differences, environment itself must be a complex of contradictions.
Environment is not a mere collection of people, it is rather a social milieu in which
men are bound up in definite relations and belong to distinct social groups.
This was why Marx could not be satisfied even with Feuerbach's critique of
religion. Feuerbach explained the essence of religion by the essence of man. But the
essence of man is not at all something abstract and belonging to man as a separate
individual. Man himself represents an aggregate, a totality of definite social relations.
There is no separated and isolated man. Even the natural ties existing among men
recede before the significance of social ties that are established in the process of
historical development. Therefore religious sentiment is not anything natural, but is
itself a social product.
The assertion that man is the source of a new weltanschauung seems
inadequate. One must emphasise the social aspect in the concept of man. One must
40
think of man as the product of a certain social development who is formed and
brought up upon a definite social soil specifically stratified and differentiated. This
stratification and differentiation of the environment into distinct classes is not
anything primordial, but is the result of a long developmental process. An
investigation of the manner in which this historical process was accomplished shows
that it has always resulted from a struggle between opposites, between contradictions
that had appeared at a certain definite stage of social development.
Marx did not confine himself to this, he subjected to his criticism other
propositions of Feuerbach's philosophy. Into the purely theoretical contemplative
philosophy he injected a new revolutionary element which was based on a criticism
of reality -- practical activity.
Like the French materialists, Feuerbach taught that man was the product of
circumstances and education, the product of existence acting upon consciousness.
Thus man as he is, with his head, hands, feet, etc., and set apart from the animal
kingdom, was viewed as a sort of sensitive apparatus subjected to the influences and
the action of nature upon him. All his thoughts, his ideas, are reflections of nature.
According to Feuerbach it seemed, therefore, that man was a purely passive element,
an obedient recipient of impulses supplied by nature.
To this proposition Marx opposed another. Everything, he insisted, that goes
on within man, the changes of man himself, are the effects not only of the influence
of nature upon man, but even more so of the reaction of man upon nature. It is this
that constitutes the evolution of man. The primitive manlike animal in his eternal
struggle for existence did not merely passively subject himself to the stimuli that
came from nature, he reacted upon nature, he changed it. Having changed nature, he
changed the conditions of his existence -- he also changed himself.
Thus Marx introduced a revolutionary, active element into Feuerbach's
passive philosophy. The business of philosophy, maintained Marx in
contradistinction to Feuerbach, is not only to explain this world, but also to change
it. Theory should be supplemented by practice. The critique of facts, of the world
about us, the negation of them, should be supplemented by positive work and by
practical activity. Thus had Marx converted Feuerbach's contemplative philosophy
into an active one. By our whole activity must we prove the correctness of our
thought and our programme. The more efficiently we introduce our ideas into
practice, the sooner we embody them in actuality, the more indubitable is the proof
41
that actuality had in it the elements that were needed for the solution of the problem
we had confronted ourselves with, for the execution of the programme we had
worked out.
The general features of this criticism of Feuerbach were formulated by Marx
at quite an early period. A thoughtful examination of the line of his thought shows
how he arrived at his fundamental idea the elaboration of which led him to scientific
communism.
In his polemics with the German intelligentsia, from whose midst he had
himself emerged, Marx tried to prove the bankruptcy of their old slogans.
We all agree, he told them, that the German reality about us, the Prussia
where life is so difficult, where there is neither freedom of thought nor teaching,
presents in itself something utterly unattractive. There is not the slightest doubt that
this world must be changed, if we do not wish the German people to sink to the
bottom of this horrible morass.
But how can this world be changed? inquired Marx. This change is contingent
upon the presence within German society of some group, a category of people, who
would with every fibre of their being be interested in bringing about the change.
Marx examined successively the various groups existing within German
society -- the nobility, the bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie. He came to the conclusion
that even the last mentioned, unlike the French bourgeoisie which played such an
important revolutionary part, was not capable of taking upon itself the role of the
"liberator class/index.htm" which would completely change the social system.
If not the bourgeoisie, which other class would measure up to the task? And
Marx who was at that time steeped in the study of the histories and the prevailing
condition of France and England, concluded that the proletariat was the only class
that held out any real social promise.
Thus even in 1844, Marx advanced his main thesis: The class that is capable
and that should assume the mission of freeing the German, people and of changing
the social order is the proletariat.... Why? Because it constitutes a class of people
whose very conditions of existence are the embodiment of what is most pernicious in
contemporary bourgeois society. No other class stands as low on the social ladder,
feels as heavily the weight of the rest of society. While the existence of all the other
classes of society is founded upon private property, the proletariat is devoid of this
property and consequently not in the least interested in the preservation of the
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