Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

CHAPTER 2

Alien politics

In freeing his thought from the direct imprint of Hegel, Marx, during
the period beginning with his essays of 1842-3 and ending with The
German Ideology of 1846, elaborated a theory of what we might call
‘alien politics’. Marx’s theory of alienation as it emerged at this time
had a specifically political aspect that too often has escaped the atten-
tion of scholars, even though some of its main features preceded and
set the tone of Marx’s celebrated formulation of the concept of alien-
ation in the labour process in the Economic and Philosophic Manu-
scripts of 1844. Marx’s theory of alien politics also provides the back-
ground for his recurrent attacks on the anarchists, even though it was
not until The German Ideology that he attacked an anarchist - Max
Stirner - directly. While it varied from the abstract humanism and
vacuous materialism of Feuerbach, through the state-worship and
etatisme of Bruno Bauer, to the ‘speculative idealism’ of Edgar Bauer,
young Hegelian thought - with the conspicuous exception of that of
Stirner - was not at all anarchist; Marx’s target in ‘On the Jewish Ques-
tion’ (1843), Bruno Bauer, for instance, with his obsession with the
secular state, seems as remote from anarchism as Hegel had been.

It may be wondered, then, what is the relevance of Marx’s early
critiques of such figures as Hegel and Bauer to his disputes with the
anarchists; but to pose the question in these terms is to imply its
answer. Over and above the fact that these critiques provide indis-
pensable sources for various ideas Marx entertained and developed
throughout his writings about the relationship of political life to
social forms in bourgeois society, and besides the fact that these very
ideas in turn form part of the continuity and unity of Marx’s thought
taken as a whole, Marx’s essays of the early 1840s reveal yet another
relevant continuity of outlook. Bauer, Proudhon, Bakunin and Stirner
have rather more in common than initially might be supposed. From
Marx’s point of view, the etatist and the anarchist - like blind obedience
and blind destruction - have in common a certain specific form of false
consciousness. What Bauer and the anarchists shared was a type of
idolatry. To all of them, in their different ways, the state bore almost




religious credentials. Bauer, because of what he took to be the state’s
incorporation of the religious, saw all the more reason to idolize it;
Proudhon, thinking that the state absorbed and expressed in a strength-
ened form everything (and there was a great deal) that was noxious to
him, saw all the more reason to short-circuit its authority from below;
Stirner, and the more collectivist Bakunin, saw all the more reason for
the state’s root-and-branch destruction. In this way, anarchism and
etatisme are opposite sides of the same, idolatrous coin; the anarchist,
in overestimating what Proudhon called the puissance of the state,
wildly exaggerated what would be the effects, both immediate and
ultimate, of its abolition. It was this kind of fundamental misapprehen-
sion that Marx attacked in the early writings under consideration; in
particular, Marx’s perception of the state as (in some sense) a religious
entity external to the real life of man in capitalist society - a perception
of Hegelian parentage which Marx outlined most fully in ‘On the Jewish
Question’ - had an effect of pointing his thought in a specifically anti-
anarchist direction.

Marx concluded that because Hegel was committed a priori to the
idea that the empirical order was in the last analysis rational, because
he ‘conceives of the contradiction in appearance as being a unity in
essence, i.e., the Idea’, The Philosophy of Right failed to recognize that
‘the claim that the rational is actual is contradicted precisely by an
irrational actuality’.¹ Even though the Hegelian language and the
occasional (democratic) state-worship of the Critique of Hegel’s Philos-
ophy of Right indicate that Marx’s tortured auto-emancipation from the
the hold of Hegel was in 1842 less than total, Marx did in this work
take the methodologically interesting step of trying to separate The Phil-
osophy of Right’s philosophical form from its empirical content, to strip
away Hegel’s ‘mystical aura’ from contemporary political institutions,
which only then he believed would emerge as substantive realities open
to direct, critical confrontation. Marx’s procedure in the Critique
involved a certain acceptance of Hegel’s claims on behalf of his own
philosophy - as having been the ultimate comprehension of reality and
the highest point to which philosophical speculation - as speculation -
could attain. On the one hand, given a deficient, contradictory structure
of reality, Hegel’s philosophy was indeed what Hegel claimed it was,
the optimal speculative approach; in so far as it reflected and clearly
expressed an ‘irrational actuality’, it was positively to be valued. On the
other hand, Hegelianism on this very reckoning was part of the illusion
of liberty which the modern state creates, upholds and requires. The
‘illusion’ in question, far from being fortuitous or arbitrary, was in a
sense necessary: it signifies something real without itself being real. The
German Ideology was, first and foremost, a frontal attack on the notion
that we can speak of a system of ideas as being predominant within an
historical epoch without reference to the social conditions of production




characterizing that epoch. To abstract ideas from their social context,
to isolate them, to attribute an independent existence to them, to take
them at their own word, is to lend the idees mattresses of an epoch a
semblance of universality, and make them ideologically acceptable; it
is to affix one’s seal of approval on a defective social reality, a reality
that because of such validation might be given a new, and undeserved,
lease of life.

Hegel, however, had recognized something that Marx was to reiterate
in ‘On the Jewish Question’. Civil society (biirgerliche Gesellschaft), the
creation of which he called ‘the achievement of the modern world’,²
was to Hegel very much more than a conceptual category; in The
Philosophy of Right, it emerged as an officially recognized sphere of
activity with its own characteristic institutions. These institutions were,
however, unlike political institutions such as the bureaucracy (which,
to Hegel, was the ‘universal class’ needing no institutional structure
outside itself to reconcile its particular existence with the common
weal, because its aims as a particular group were, he claimed, identical
with the universal aims of the state). The institutions of civil society -
the corporations (Stande) and private property - unlike the bureaucracy,
remained incomplete, in need of anterior institutional expression. The
corporations - guilds, trade associations, professional and municipal
organizations - were supposed to champion the multifarious interests
of civil society against and towards the state, and to channel the egoism
of the individual members of the group in question into co-operative
endeavours, articulating their common aims in a way that would ensure
their consideration in the process of legislative deliberation. Primogeni-
ture, for its part, was supposed to provide an element of stability from
generation to generation, shielding property from market fluctuations
and arbitrary interference and encouraging a political independence for
the property holder that allowed for the development of a disinterested
political spirit. The Assembly of Estates was portrayed as a complex
series of mediations synthesizing the several particularisms of civil
society with the universality of the state, without antagonizing the
Executive (the Crown) to which it remained complementary.

Marx, while he shared Hegel’s perception of the problem of the
separation of civil and political life, found much to criticize in the
institutional mechanisms that Hegel believed had solved it. Hegel’s
institutional solutions represented, in effect, a wholly uncritical accept-
ance - or so Marx believed - of the estrangement of state and society in
the ideological guise of its resolution. Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s
categories was systematic: however unconnected they may seem at
first glance, Marx’s own agencies of emancipation, as they did emerge,
were directly related to the Hegelian categories which they were designed
to supplant. For the bureaucracy as the ‘universal class’ (allgemeine
Stand) Marx (seemingly recognizing that in Hegel’s political thought




the bureaucrat was in a real sense the only true citizen) was to some
extent to substitute the proletariat; for primogeniture and the corpor-
ations, he substituted the abolition of private property relations; for
war, Marx was to substitute class war; and in place of the Assembly
of Estates, Marx initially - and problematically - substituted universal
suffrage, which in the Critique and in his earliest journalism Marx
described as the medium par excellence for the abolition of the duality
between state and civil society, for the interesting reason that ‘in true
democracy the political state disappears’³ (‘der politische Staat un-
tergeht’). Marx despairingly wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843 that Prussia
was a despotism in which the monarch, ruling by caprice in a state
where men were despised and dehumanized, was the only ‘political
person’, properly so-called, and that, to combat this, a clearer critical
understanding of the operation of economic forces in society would
be necessary. Also,

freedom, the feeling of man’s dignity, will have to be reawakened
. . . Only this feeling, which disappeared from the world with the
Greeks and with Christianity vanished into the blue mists of heaven,
can again transform society into a community [Gemeinwesen]
of men to achieve their highest purpose, a democratic state.⁴

Although Marx was quick to drop his belief - which is also expressed
in the Critique - that men’s highest purpose was a democratic state,
his corresponding ideal of Gemeinwesen, as embodying freedom, was
to play an important part throughout his thought.

Hegel had believed the Assembly of Estates could signify the abolition
of the duality of political state and civil society, yet Marx noted that
Hegel’s own texts betrayed the Assembly’s real character as the formal
illusion of popular participation in political affairs, affairs which in
fact were monopolized by bureaucratic officialdom. Hegel’s machinery
of government served to indicate the real character of that government.
The ‘political sentiment’ of the legislative part of the Assembly, to give
one prominent example, was to be guaranteed, Marx noted with some
malicious glee, by independent, inherited land property. But, Marx
asked, how could entailed landed property form a principle of unity
synthesizing political and social life when it is itself nothing more than
‘property whose social nerves have been severed, the epitome of private
rights freed from all political, ethical and social bonds’?⁵

The relationship of private property to the state, which as we have
seen had been a central concern of The Philosophy of Right, was
likewise a central concern of Marx. Discussing primogeniture, Marx
said (somewhat obscurely) that

it appears [in Hegel’s system] that private property is the




relationship to the function of the state which is such that
the existence of the state is something inhering in, or is an
accident of direct private property.. . Instead of making private
property a civil quality, Hegel makes political existence and
sentiment a quality of private property.⁶

Worse still was the way he had done so. Hegel, paradoxically, had
defended primogeniture on the grounds of the political disinterested-
ness it afforded the fortunate few, and had portrayed property as
something subservient to and expressive of the will of its owner. This
was the kind of contradiction on which Marx loved to pounce. And
pounce he did. The essence of property, as Hegel had discussed it, was
its alienability by the will of its owner; but, asked Marx, what was
primogeniture if not property’s becoming inalienable (i.e. non-property,
on Hegel’s definition) and subject, with the will of its so-called owner
as predicate? The rule of property, as Marx repeatedly was to emphasize,
means the predication of man. As primogenital property passes un-
divided from first-born to first-born, it becomes ‘substance’, its owner
‘accident’, and what is owned is the will of the supposed owner. Man
does not inherit property, but property man. The original Hegelian
relationship between the creative subject possessed of will and the
objectification of his will is reversed. On the political level, this means
that instead of the ownership of property’s giving man the freedom to
practice politics disinterestedly (which had been Hegel’s starting-point),
it is inanimate property that is in principle given the freedom to do
with man what it will, without any political ‘interference’.

The ultimate importance of Marx’s far-reaching attack on Hegel’s
political defence of private property is, of course, that it was the
prototype of his theory of alienation in the labour-process, and of the
fetishism of commodities; when property is given the freedom to act,
men are reduced to the status of mere objects. Men become the attri-
butes of property - even though property is by definition the socially
crystallized outcome of their own purposive creative activity. Reifi-
cation, a concept which tolls like a minute bell through Marx’s writings,
was sounded in advance, as it were, in the Critique, where Marx first
came to recognize that far from being the realization or objectification
of human personality - which had been Hegel’s original justification -
private property actually negated human personality. Small wonder,
then, that in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Marx was
to sum up the communists’ programme in the single phrase: abolition
of private property; small wonder that in ‘On the Jewish Question’
(1843) and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) Marx
specifically linked the possibility of human emancipation with the
abolition of private property; and small wonder that Marx’s initial,
guarded praise of Proudhon in The Holy Family (1845) gave way to


the hostility, with all stops out, expressed in The Poverty of Philosophy
(1847). '

Marx’s Critique, having raised the question of the relationship of
private property, civil society and the state, also attacked Hegel’s theory
of bureaucracy and discussed the central problem of the hiatus of civil
and political life. The Critique also perceived all these issues in their
connectedness. They all involve, at a fundamentally important level,
the Rousseauian perception of the dualism of homme prive and citoyen
together with the Rousseauian predicament: how can man be restored
to a unified condition? One of the first works Marx examined and ex-
cerpted at Kreuznach, as he was writing the Critique, was Rousseau’s
The Social Contract, but in ‘On the Jewish Question’, the following
year (1843), Marx was to become severely critical of the solution
Rousseau had offered to this predicament. In ‘On the Jewish Question’
Marx insisted that man was no longer a generic social being; that men’s
powers were no longer apprehended as social powers; that the political
existence of man, the realm of his social, collective and moral being,
was alienated in relation to the demands of his concrete, immediate
existence; and that there was, inhuman terms, an immense loss involved
in the historical process that had brought about all these changes. Such
sentiments have an obvious Rousseauian ring to them; but Rousseau,
unlike Marx, had considered the isolated, autarchic existence of men to
be ‘natural’, and as inhering in spontaneous qualities of human nature.
To Marx such isolation was, by contrast, eminently social; and in
indicating, by means of a (doctored) quotation from The Social Con-
tract, that the isolation of individual members of civil society was an
historical phenomenon, one which characterized a specific, transitory
and oppressive phase of human history, Marx in effect turned Rousseau’s
own telling criticism of Hobbes against Rousseau himself. Rousseau had
observed that Hobbes had ascribed to man in the state of nature qualities
that could have been acquired only in society. Marx, in ‘On the Jewish
Question’, says the same of Rousseau himself. Man’s isolation from man
takes place, said Marx, in a particular, contemporary setting, bourgeois
society, yet Rousseau read it back into man’s natural, primordial state.
Worse yet, Rousseau’s remedy had been purely political; Marx claimed
that Rousseau had perceived only ‘the abstraction of the political man’⁷
instead of the real, individual man.

‘In the real community’, Marx was to write in The German Ideology
(1846), ‘individuals obtain their freedom in and through their associ-
ation’;⁸ and while both Rousseau and Hegel in their very different ways
would scarcely have dissented from such a statement, Marx, for his
part, came to regard their views of freedom and association as anach-
ronistic and retrospective. Hegel gave his backward glance a specific
focus, as Marx recognized.




The peak of Hegelian identity, as he himself admits, was the Middle
Ages. There, the classes of civil society in general and the Estates, or
classes given political significance, were identical. The spirit of the
Middle Ages can be expressed thus: the classes of civil society and
the political classes were identical because the organic principle of
civil society was the principle of the state. . . The political state in
distinction from civil society was nothing but the representation
of nationality.⁹

The Critique went on to indicate the inappropriateness of medieval
‘solutions’ (such as the corporations and the Assembly of Estates in
The Philosophy of Right) to what Hegel knew was a supremely modern
problem, ‘the separation of civil society and the political state as two
actually different spheres, firmly opposed to each other’.¹⁰ Marx was
concerned to separate himself from those who advocated some kind of
return to the Middle Ages, which he called ‘the animal history of
mankind’,¹¹ and those who, like some French Revolutionary leaders,
would appeal to classical models. These latter, said Marx, succeeded in
being doubly misleading because ‘with the Greeks, civil society was a
slave to political society’¹² whereas in modern, bourgeois society the
opposite is the case. Following Hegel, who had seen the classical Greek
era as an ‘undifferentiated substantiality’, Marx characterized the polis
as having been a political form where society is subsumed beneath the
state. As Hegel himself had indicated, no specifically and exclusively
political sphere existed apart from the daily conduct of life in the
polis. Public life in this way was the ‘real content’ of individual life,
and the person who had no political status was simply a slave, an
Unmensch. ‘In Greece’, wrote Marx, ‘the res publica was the real
private concern, the real content of the citizen. . .and the private man
was slave, i.e., the political state as political was the true and sole
content of the citizen’s life and will.’¹³

The Middle Ages offered a quite different spectacle. Here the ‘private
sphere’ came to acquire political status. ‘Property, commerce, society,
man (i.e., private man, the serf) were all political, the material content
of the state was fixed by reason of its own form; every private sphere
had a political character or was a political sphere.’¹⁴ Property was
paramount in feudal society (and often primogeniture was its mode of
transmission), to be sure, but it was so solely because its distribution
was above all a political arrangement. Although the medieval period
thus produced an integrated way of life in which ‘the life of the people’
was congruent with ‘the life of the state’, this was the case only because
feudal man was unfree.

The old civil society [in the Middle Ages] had a directly
political character; that is, the elements of civil life such as




property, the family and types of occupation had been raised, in
the form of lordship, caste, and guilds, to being elements of
political life.

If, however, in the Middle Ages ‘man was the actual principle of the
state, he was an unfree man’; the medieval world to whose institutions
The Philosophy of Right had harked back was the ‘democracy of
unfreedom, accomplished alienation’,¹⁵ and the feudal past had no
model to offer the future. What ‘On the Jewish Question’ called ‘political
emancipation’ (meaning, roughly, ‘bourgeois revolution’)

released the political spirit, which had been broken, fragmented and
lost, as it were, in the various culs-de-sac of feudal society. It
gathered up this scattered spirit, liberated it from its entanglement
with civil life, and turned it into the sphere of the community, the
general concern of the people independent of these particular
elements of civil life. A particular activity and situation in life
sank into a merely individual significance, no longer forming the
general relation to the individual as a whole.¹⁶

Whatever the loss might be in the process, the sequence is irreversible;

all emancipation is restoration of the human world and the relation-
ships of men themselves [and] political emancipation is a reduction
of man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic independent
individual on the one hand and to a citizen on the other.¹⁷

Marx insisted against those who would turn the clock back that ‘the
abstraction of the state as such belongs to modern times because the
abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times’. Not only is
it true that, consequently, ‘the abstract, reflected opposition [between
civil and political life] belongs only to modern times’; it also follows that

[what] distinguishes the modern state from these states in which
a substantial unity between people and state obtained [i.e. medieval
and classical models] is not that the various moments of the
constitution are formed into particular actuality, as Hegel would
have it, but rather that the constitution itself has been formed into
an actuality alongside the real life of the people [in civil society].¹⁸

Marx went on to claim that Hegel’s defence of the modern state, on
the grounds that it had transcended the social and historical forces that
had brought it into being, was unwarranted and specious. Hegel presented
the state as the reconciliation of the very division in society - and of
every individual in society - of which the modern state was but a term.




The very emergence of the modern state, Marx insisted, presupposed
the radical separation of politics from society for the first time in
history. Not only do particular, oppressive and original interests parading
under the banner of ‘the general good’ and the achieved universal (such
as bureaucracy as celebrated by Hegel) reinforce the actual rule of
private property and material process over human subjects and relation-
ships, but the very institutional arrangements Hegel had insisted had
abolished the new-found separation of the state from society were in
fact themselves responsible for the maintenance of this unprecedented
separation. The modern state, as Hegel had seen it, did not and could
not liberate men from the disastrous effects of predatory social agencies
(bureaucracy, private property, the division of labour, religion, money);
the state’s own inaction actually permitted them to flourish freely.

The state, far from subsuming the force of private property and
exchange within itself, as Hegel had claimed, was in Marx’s view not
even insulated against the claims and encroachments of property and
exchange - not to mention those of the bureaucracy (which Marx
discussed in the Critique), those of religion (which Marx discussed in
‘On the Jewish Question’), those of money (which Marx discussed in
the 1844 Manuscripts) and those of the division of labour (which he
discussed in the first part of The German Ideology). Moreover, even
before he wrote The German Ideology and The Manifesto of the
Communist Party, Marx had come to believe that the modern state,
whatever its constitutional form, will in some way inevitably reflect
the prevailing pattern of social determinations and relations; this is
the least that is implied by his celebrated formulation of the state as
the handmaiden, or surrogate, of the bourgeoisie. But in order to
understand what this designation, and others like it, mean and do not
mean, we need to turn for background from Marx’s Critique to an
even more important source for the emergence of his theory of alien
politics, the essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, written in 1843 against
Bruno Bauer.