Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale
and the world’ (MEW 2:89). Not history, however, but man would be
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| and the world’ (MEW 2:89). Not history, however, but man would be the agent of social change which promised to overcome the alienation and misery of industrial society: ‘History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims’ (MEW 2:98). Marx underlined the simple truth that:
Ideas can never lead beyond an old world system but only beyond the ideas of that system. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. T° carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical force (MEW 2:126). Marx found these men in the masses of the oppressed industrial proletariat, which he had come to know personally in the Paris working men’s groups: One must have first discovered how well-instructed the French and English workers are, how strong is their craving for knowledge, their moral energy and their urge for self-development, in order to imagine the human nobleness of this movement (MEW 2:89). Based on his understanding of man’s productive activity, his social needs, Marx developed a ‘materialist’ view of a free society governed by the principle that each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being: If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society ... (MEW 2:138). One chapter of The Holy Family, related thematically to the discussion on alienation, dealt with the article which had ap peared in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on Sue’s Mysteres de Faris. The central figure in this novel was a young prostitute, Fleur de Marie, who possessed, according to Marx, a ‘human nobleness of soul’ that enabled her in spite of her inhuman environment to develop positive traits of character. She lived according to the Epicurean principle of ‘free and strong nature’ and for her goodness was not a function of a Perfect, Godly Being but a measure of the humanness between fellow beings, a sign therefore that: the bourgeois system has only grazed her surface which is simply her bad fortune and that she is neither good nor bad, but human (MEW 2:180). Marie was eventually persuaded to adopt a religious attitude towards life; her human values were destroyed so that she might receive a system of religiously-orientated values. God became the mediator of her relations with other human beings; happiness was no longer part of her human nature but came to her through the grace of God; her appreciation and love of nature became the expressions of religious fascination for the metaphysical essence behind real objects. Marie became, in short, self-conscious and lost her original human virtue, became an object to be manipul ated henceforth by religious dogma. Marx contrasted this religious ‘emancipation’ of the young Marie from the world of vice and with Fourier’s ‘masterly’ thoughts on woman’s emanci pation : The humiliation of the female sex is an essential feature of civilisation as well as of barbarism. The only difference is that the civilised system raises to a compound, equivocal, ambiguous, hypocritical mode of existence every vice that barbarity practises in the simple form .. Nobody is punished more for keeping woman a slave than man himself (MEW 2:208). An appreciation of The Holy Family came from Georg Jung towards the end of the year. Jung added that he and his friends were enthusiastically looking forward to Marx’s next volume on political economy, which was both essential and urgent. The struggle against religion was now finished and a new one could begin with Marx at its fore: What you are now for all your friends you must become for all of Germany. With your exceptionally sharp style of writing and the great clarity of your argumentation you will and must achieve your goal and become a guiding light of the first magnitude (Nov. 24, nSH).
Sometime early in 1845 Marx began working on a critical analysis of Friedrich List’s Das nationals System der politischeu Okotiomie (1841) and drafted four fragmentary chapters which were never developed or incorporated in any finished or published work. This writing contains an important discussion of Marx’s own views on labour, exchange value, productive forces, industry, bourgeois nationalism, etc. He denies List’s theoretical system as a ‘camouflage in idealist phrases of the industrial materialism represented by honest economy’ (BZG, p. 42,5), and reproaches him for criticising only the theoretical expression of this society and not the actual social conditions themselves *. It may never occur to Herr List that the real organisation of society is a spiritless materialism, individual spiritualism, individualism. It can never occur to him that the political economsts have expressed theoretically only this social condition. Otherwise he would have to oppose, not the political economists, but the present organisation of society (BZG, p. 433). 1845 55 Engels's book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England [The Condition of the Working Class in England], published in Leipzig in May, contained a wealth of information on the actual material circumstances of the English factory workers and their families. Moreover, the author analysed the symptoms of crisis observed in the cities with high unemployment, concluding that an upheaval was near, one which could lead to open war between the classes: The war of the poor against the rich will be the most bloodthirsty the world has seen ... Were it possible to turn all the English workers into Communists before the outbreak of the revolution, then the revolution itself would be a peaceable one. But that is not possible. It is too late (p. 334T). During the summer Marx and Engels worked together on topics of an economic nature. Engels moved into a house close to Marx in a Brussels suburb. Sometime in the first half of the year Marx made a private attempt to summarise his critique of Feuerbach and Hegel in view of his insights into philosophy and speculative thinking in general. He jotted down his thoughts in a series of ‘theses’, which were found in one of his notebooks after his death and published by Engels in an appendix to his own work on Ludwig Feuerbach (1888). These eleven short points, popularly known as the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, leave no doubt about Marx’s critical orientation towards speculative philosophy. The human ‘essence’ which philosophers sought to define was no abstraction to be studied apart from actual human existence, from practical life. To study man, philosophy should turn to the ensemble of social relationships in which man lives and works. The sole value philosophy might have for man would therefore be of an ethical nature, i.e. in aiding man to orientate his activities according to the goal of a human life in a human society: [8.] All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice Marx stressed ‘practical’ human activity combined with critical thought, ‘practical-critical’ activity, which could be realised only in ‘revolutionary practice’: [li.] The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different- ways; the point is to change it In July Marx and Engels travelled together to EnclaniJH connection with their studies, also using the occasion to meet Wilhelm Weitling and other members of the Londotr League of the Just. They spent some time in Manchestaifoir the purpose of reading and making extracts from the most important British economists. His notebooks from this period reveal that Marx had devoted particular attention to the work^by i the socialist William Thompson entitled An Inquiry intm the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824) and read as well works by William Petty, G. Browning and William Cobbett, After their return to Brussels at the end of -\11gust, Marx and Engels came upon the most recent issue of Wigands VierteJ*; jahresschrift (vol. 3,1845) in which they discovered philoso|S|M articles by Bauer and Stirner. Speculative philosophy Was not yet vanquished, they concluded and decided therefore to lhuncha polemical attack against these and other speculative thinkerSfffl [ an article to be entitled ‘The Leipzig Council'. Their writing foi t this project continued into January of 1846. Ii Jenny Marx, who had paid a first visit t© her mother in Trier K during the summer, returned to Brussels in August bringinf with her the 26-year-old Helene Demuth (1820-1890), who!had been the maid-servant of the Westphalen family since 1837. Leni I or Lenchen, as she came to be called, became virtually a membei ; of the Marx family, sharing their fate and their disappointments during all the long years in exile. In September a second daughter 4; .Laura was bom to Karl and Jenny. Shortly thereafter, Marx
. America. The responsible officials in Berlin seemed to have been J only too happy to divest themselves of thic heretiC' Marx who 1 was, in the words of the Prussian functionary Rudolflj von BpAuerswald, ‘guilty of attempted high treason and of insults® the person of His Royal Majesty'. The request was grante® and
the local newspapers (Nov. 23). It is not known why this plan | never materialised. 1846 Although Leske, the publisher with whom Marx had signed for the ‘Economics'* had already advanced 1500 francs on the promised manuscript, Marx now put aside his writing on political economy in order to devote himself temporarily to the ‘last battle' against purely speculative thought and criticism. He and Engels decided to expand the polemic against Bauer and Stimer into a much more comprehensive work containing a critical analysis not only of the left-Hegelians but also of Feuer bach and the ‘true socialists’. With such a work to prepare the German public the foundation would be laid for Marx’s radical analysis of society—for economics rather than metaphysics. Apart from this attack on the chief representatives of German ideology, Marx and Engels launched a practical project to create a chain of international correspondence committees whose pur pose was to give the industrial proletariat through contacts with similar emancipation movements in other countries the means for self-education and to acquaint the working men with socialist efforts and proposals on an international scale. Engels later formulated the committees' goals as ‘(1) to realise the interests of the proletariat as opposed -to those of the bourgeoisie; (2) to , achieve this end by abolishing private property and replacing it with collective property; (3) to recognise no other means for achieving these goals than that of a violent democratic revo lution’ (letter addressed to the Brussels Correspondence Com mittee, Oct. 23). Marx and Engels solicited the support of prominent socialists and labour leaders in establishing these committees and preparing international reports and exchanges of information. Marx addressed a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proud hon, inviting him to join their organisation. Their primary purpose, he wrote, was to air differences in opinion and to exchange criticism of and information on the progress being made by socialist movements in the various countries: This is a step which the social movement must take in its literary form of expression, if it is to rid itself of national limitations. And at the moment of action everyone will certainly benefit from being well-instructed. on the state of affairs abroad as well as at home (May 5). Proudhon replied that he found the organisation’s goal ‘most useful’ and agreed to lend his support. However, what disturbed hhn in Marx’s letter was the talk about revolution. Although he had once espoused such means as well, Proudhon maintained that his more recent studies had brought him to regard revo lutionary action as unnecessary for social reform. What was needed, instead, was a suitable economic ‘combination’, ‘what you other German socialists term “commune” Professing him self a ‘nearly absolute economic anti-dogmatist’, Proudhon seconded Marx’s efforts to discover the laws of society and analyse the modes of social progress, but warned that ‘for God’s sake, after demolishing all dogmatisms a priori, let us not in turn entertain the notion of indoctrinating the people’. More than that, he continued: Let us offer the world an example of wise and prudent tolerance; let us not, because we are at the head of a movement, be the masters of a new intolerance; let us not pretend to be the apostles of a new religion, be it the religion of logic or of reason (May 17). The proletariat, with its profound thirst for knowledge and understanding, desired more to quench that thirst than blood. Proudhon added that he was presently engaged in writing a book which would explain his reform plans in detail and would, while awaiting his turn to reply, graciously submit to Marx’s ‘ferule’. At a meeting of the Correspondence Committee organised by Marx and Engels in Brussels, the question of political propa ganda in Germany was put to the members for discussion (March 30). Marx used the opportunity to make a vehement attack against the ‘sectarianism’ of Weitling’s ‘artisan commun ism’ which tended to negate the political struggle and against the ‘true socialists’ with their ‘philanthropic communism. According to a letter from Weitling to Hess (March 31) Marx demanded that the group be purged of certain elements, that contact be sought with financially solid parties and that they begin secret propaganda-making. Weitling quoted Marx as having said: ‘As yet there can be no talk of realising commun ism; the bourgeoisie must first assume the helm' (Quoted in: Moses Hess, Briefwechscl. ed. E. Silberner. The Hague, 195-5’ p. 151). Paul Annenkov, however, recounted that Marx had branded as deceit all attempts to rouse the popular masses to action without first giving them a constructive basis for their protest. To do otherwise ‘was equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one hand 1846 59 and only gaping asses on the other’ (Reminiscences ..p. 271). On May 11 the Brussels Committee passed a resolution on Hermann Kriege, German emigrant in America and editor of the New York newspaper Volfestribim. The resolution protested against the paper’s orientation as incompatible with its professed communism. In the name of the committee Marx and Engels composed a circular attacking the ‘prophet’ Kriege’s ‘sentimental communism’ which was distributed to the correspondence com mittees in Germany. Leske, meanwhile, fearing that Marx’s economics would prove to be revolutionary rather than scientific, decided to annul the contract on the grounds that the book would probably be censored in Germany (March 31). Four months later Leske wrote again, demanding that Marx return the money advanced or deliver the completed manuscript at once. On August 1 Marx replied, promising to have the first of the two volumes promised ready by the end of November. It was about this time that Marx and Engels decided to abandon the manuscript of their work on The German Ideology to the ‘gnawing critique of the mice' (MEW 13:10), after their efforts to find a publisher failed. Marx explained to Leske why he had felt it important to write this book I thought it important to precede my positive development with a polemic writing against German philosophy and recent German socialism. This is needed in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint of my economics which is diametrically opposed to German science hitherto (August 1). The German Ideology, abandoned with several of its chapters in an unfinished state, is divided into two volumes each containing several sections; there are numerous digressions inspired by but not pertinent to the stated themes. The first chapter entitled ‘Feuerbach’ is known to be the last written and is the most theoretical, containing the premises which are essential to an understanding of the relationship between Marx’s early philo sophical investigations and the forthcoming work on economics. This part as well as all other theoretical passages may be ascribed with near certainty to Marx. Engels, by his own later admission, was at this time a listener to and disciple of Marx and hardly capable of formulating and applying the theoretical views which Marx had just recently shared with him. The theoretical material falls into three categories: first, a presentation of the methodo logical procedure which distinguishes the Marxian analysis from other methods of historiography; the application of this method in analysing bourgeois society and its development; finally, the postulates based on a valuation of the results of this analysis and intended as incentives to a certain future course of social action and development. [I.] History had always been written by scholars and philo sophers who each sought to explain the course of human existence by recourse to particular intellectual categories or constructions. Marx sought, however, to use as his reference point not an abstract category but practical human life. To this end he established five premises for the analysis of human development:
, This then was Marx’s formulation of the views which he used to orientate himself in studying ‘real, active men’ along wit their ‘ideological reflexes and echoes’ which are the ‘necessary sub-limitations’ of the life process (MEW 3:26). [II.] As Marx saw it, the mode of production was a deter ming factor not only for the material existence of the individual but also for the manner in which he expressed his life: ‘As individuals express their life, so are they. What they are thus coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce as well’ (MEW 3:21). As a result: ‘It is not consciousness which determines life, but life which deter mines consciousness’ (MEW 3:27). Marx perceived that in contemporary society the productive forces and their products did not necessarily belong to those whose task it was to work the productive forces. He examined therefore the relation between these productive forces and their ownership, i.e. property relations. Marx found that private ownership of the means of production was necessary at certain industrial levels. Not until industry is very highly developed on a broad scale does a conflict arise between the property relations and the instruments of production (cf. MEW 3 :66). For the optimal functioning of the highly developed system of industrial production, ‘division of labour' is essential. The labour force necessarily becomes specialised and one-sided. The individual can maintain his life, i.e. enter into the production system, only by performing a specialised activity and thus deforming his nature which is manifold: For such an individual the few remaining desires, rooted in the constitution of the human body rather than in his mundane inter action, are expressed only by reaction, i.e. they take on in their restricted development the same one-sided and brutal nature as his thinking ... and express themselves violently, passionately, and with the most brutal repression of ordinary and natural desires, leading thus to further domination of the thought processes (MEW §j: 246f.). This division of labour leads, moreover, to the separation of mental or intellectual activity from material or physical. Thus, an attempt is made to separate ‘thought’ and ‘action’ into two different and independent spheres, whereas in reality ‘the pro duction of ideas, of mental images and of the consciousness is directly interwoven in the material activity and material ex change of men, the language of real life’ (MEW 3:26). Basing themselves on this pretended separation, the left- Hegelians and other philosophical schools had attributed an independent existence to ideas, concepts and other products of the mind and maintained that ideas were the chains hindering man from progress and development. Marx attacked with parti cular sharpness the Hegelian philosophy, last of the scholarly tradition in Germany ‘whose centre of interest is not real, not even political, but pure thought’ (MEW 3:39). All ideological and religious systems, Marx continued, had their roots in the material world; the ruling thoughts were the thoughts of the ruling class: ‘i.e. the class which represents the ruling material power in society is at the same time its dominating intellectual power' (MEW 3:46). The state as well represents ‘the will of the class in control of the means of production. If it loses its sovereignty, it is not just the will which has changed but the material existence and life of the individuals and their will is simply a result of the foregoing elements’ (MEW 3:312). [III.] Marx held that social theory as developed up to this point was meaningful and worthwhile only if it provided the motivation for the revolutionary practice which would change the inhuman conditions exposed by the social analysis. His transformation of scientific theory into a weapon in the struggle for social, human emancipation may be summarised as follows
and led merely to the construction of new political institutions, the communist revolution can be brought about only by opposing the entire system of production based on private property and culminating in the apparatus of the state.
The Communist society is the only society in which the creative and free development of the individual is no empty phrase. It is rendered possible by the solidarity of the individuals, a solidarity which is produced in part by the economic preconditions, partly by the necessary solidarity for the free development of all, and finally in the universal mode of activity of the individual on the basis of the existing productive forces (MEW 3 :425). Society will be an association of individuals who realise that their personal freedom and development can be attained only in a community where division of labour has been abolished, where property relations no longer prohibit their universal expression of self: The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals and its repression in the broad masses is a result of the division of labour ... In a communist society there are no artists, but, rather, men who among other things paint as well (MEW 3:379). In September Marx again resumed his reading in economics, excerpting from works by Owen, Quesnay and Bray. Through Engels he learned of Proudhon’s forthcoming book Systeme des contradictions cconomiques ou Philosophic de la misere which was still in the press. Engels sent him a detailed outline of the Proudhonian economic solution to the misere of the working class, a plan ‘to make money out of nothing and bring heaven closer to the workers', and he remarked: Just imagine: proletarians are to serve up to buy small shares of stock! ... What these people have in mind is nothing less than to buy tip all of France ... and later perhaps the whole world by dint of proletarian savings ... Blokes who cannot manage to keep six sous in their pockets for drinks want to buy up toute la belle France out of their savings (Sept. 18). Marx’s first opportunity to acquaint himself with Proudhon’s book came in December. Immediately thereafter he wrote a lengthy critique of it in a letter to Annenkov, which may be considered as a sort of preamble to his rejoinder of 1847 in Miscre dc la Philosophic. Since the manuscript of The German Ideology had been abandoned ‘to the mice’, the Russian Annenkov was the first person apart from Engels whom Marx instructed on his materialist theory of history and social change. While criticising Proudhon’s book, which he found ‘very bad indeed’, Marx summarised certain essential points developed at length in The German Ideology. The history of human society, Marx pointed out, ‘is nothing other than the history of the development of individuals’ and not the history of ideas, as the German thinkers would have us believe. Proudhon failed to understand that ideas and abstract categories rest on the material basis of human productive activity as well and are as historical and transitory as the social relations they reflect. Since Proudhon therefore took abstractions to be ‘the primordial cause', he was unable to recognise that economic categories represent the laws of a particular epoch of social development and are not eternal. His own bourgeois mentality hindered him from imagining a social order in which the laws of bourgeois production had been surpassed. He ‘must justify in theory what he is in practice, and Marx characterised him therefore as ‘the scientific inter preter of the French petit-bourgeoisie’ (Dec. 28). By the end of the year the Correspondence Committee in Brussels had succeeded in establishing numerous contacts with groups in England and on the Continent. George Harney and the German immigrant group under Karl Schapper in London declared their solidarity with the Brussels organisation. Contacts were established, moreover, in Wuppertal, Kiel and in Silesia in Germany. In France rivalry existed within the three sections of the League of the Just, whose members were divided into supporters of Proudhon and his German translator Karl Griin and the followers of Wilhelm Weitling. In August Engels had been sent to Paris to win support for the revolutionary Marxian concept of working men's organisations and to aid these artisans’ and workmen’s groups in establishing themselves as an associ ation. By October it was clear that Engels’s efforts had not been in vain: he met regularly with groups of tanners, joiners and tailors to discuss historical problems and explain current economic questions. ‘What they come to learn at these weekly meetings is drummed into the heads of their listeners at the Sunday meetings,’ Engels wrote to the Brussels Committee (Sept. 16). In December Edgar Marx, first son of Jenny and Karl, was born. He was named after Jenny’s brother who was at the time one of their most intimate friends and a member of the Brussels Committee. 1847 The publisher Leske formally annulled the contract for Marx’s ‘Economics’ in February, threatening to take drastic measures should he fail to repay the advance immediately. Marx, however, was preoccupied with writing a critical reply to Proudhon’s recent book and with the affairs of the Brussels Correspondence Committee. Without consulting the Brussels Correspondence Committee —with whom they enjoyed close but unofficial relations—the London Committee of the League of the Just decided to call an international communist congress for May of 1847, a step which of course caused the Brussels group to feel it had been slighted. Thus, in an effort to re-establish an atmosphere of harmonious co-operation, the League sent Joseph Moll as its ambassador to Brussels in February. Moll was charged with inviting Marx, Engels and other Committee members to join the League and to assist them in reorganising their association and in redefining its goals. The offer was accepted in view of the considerable influence which the League enjoyed in London, where it directed two large workers’ educational societies with 500 other members of different nationalities. The First International Congress was held from June 2 to 9 in London. The Brussels Committee was represented by Wilhelm Wolff and the Paris Committee by Engels, while Marx was prevented from attending by financial difficulties. Although this congress did not resolve! all the members’ differences, they agreed to the founding of a new organisation to be called the Communist League [Kommimisfceii. bund] and drafted a credo, which was distribute! to all the committees for discussion. This paper, written in Engelsls hind was prefaced with the slogan ‘Working Men of All Countries Unite!’ which replaced the League’s old motto of universal brotherhood. In July Marx’s critique of Proudhon* entitled The Puvi t.[, u'j Philosophy. An Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty& ffl M. Proudhon, was issued in French by the Brussels publisherm G. Vogler. The first of Marx’s writings on economics j|p appear in print, this work not only treated the ‘poverty’ of philoso$l|Has a means for comprehending and solving the problems posed by modern industrial society, it also analysed the!? immediate situation of the European working classes, its causes and* m Marx’s view, its inevitable outcome, All progress had resulted from dass antagonisms find society had been industrialised thanks to a systefflil off individual exchange, free production and wage-labour; Social rilations, founded on the needs of the production process! had required the exploitation of one dass by another and the misery-and suffering of the greatest part of mankind. The wages paid to the working man correspond to their needs as part of the product!® force and not to their needs as human beings: what they receive! sufficed to reproduce and maintain their kind. Commercial' exchange coloured every aspect of sodal existence,^whether moral or material; everything is valued in terms of money, Is alienated, becomes part of the market trade: ... all the things which men had previously regarded p inalienable became the objects of exchange ... virtue, love, conviction, knof* ledge, conscience, etc.... in a word, everything became part of trade (Oeuvres 'isjuE Marx, who saw in the proletariat the complete negation of bourgeois society and the debasement of human nature,* applied to this situation the Hegelian dialectic and concluded ) that fa this negation was the force to overcome the two andjgonfflj elements and establish mankind at a higher level of social devel- Yüklə 0,64 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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