[The Letters were written in the course of 1843. In them Marx criticizes the actual world, which he sees as ‘perverted’. In particular he criticizes political society, that is the Prussian state, as a despotism whose principle is the dehumanization of man. The sole political person, he finds, is the monarch, who rules through caprice. Marx counterposes to this the notion of the liberation of a ‘thinking mankind’ and the formation of a ‘community of men that can fulfil their highest needs, a democratic state’. In a passage which accurately predicts the events of the coming years Marx says that the basis for the imminent revolt against the existing order is the ‘system of industry and commerce, the exploitation of man’. Criticism of the sort that Marx has in mind should involve the critic in practical political struggle (‘hitherto the philosophers have left the key to all riddles lying in their desks’).]
Marx to Ruge
From a barge on the way to D., March 1843
I am now travelling in Holland. From both the French papers and the local ones I see that Germany has ridden deeply into the mire and will sink into it even further. I assure you that even if one can feel no national pride one does feel national shame, even in Holland. In comparison with the greatest Germans even the least Dutchman is still a citizen. And the opinions of foreigners about the Prussian government! There is a frightening agreement, no one is deceived any longer about the system and its simple nature. So the new school has been of some use after all. The glorious robes of liberalism have fallen away and the most repulsive despotism stands revealed for all the world to see.
This too is a revelation, albeit a negative one. It is a truth which at the very least teaches us to see the hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state and to hide our faces in shame. I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring. I admit that even this shame is not yet to be found in Germany; on the contrary the wretches are still patriots. But if the ridiculous system of our new knight1 does not disabuse them of their patriotism, then what will? The comedy of despotism in which we are being forced to act is as dangerous for him as tragedy was once for the Stuarts and the Bourbons. And even if the comedy will not be seen in its true light for a long time yet it will still be a revolution.
The state is too serious a business to be subjected to such buffoonery. A Ship of Fools can perhaps be allowed to drift before the wind for a good while; but it will still drift to its doom precisely because the fools refuse to believe it possible. This doom is the approaching revolution.
[In his reply Ruge, in a mood of deep despair, tells Marx that there is no chance of a political revolution. He argues that the Germans are by nature a docile people: ‘our nation has no future, so what is the point in our appealing to it?’]
Marx to Ruge
Cologne, May 1843
Your letter, my friend, is a fine elegy, a breath-taking funeral dirge; but it is utterly unpolitical. No people despairs and if stupidity induces it to live on hopes for many years a sudden burst of cleverness will eventually enable it to fulfil its dearest wishes.
However, you have stimulated me. Your theme is by no means exhausted. I am tempted to add a finale and when all is at an end give me your hand and we can start all over again. Let the dead bury the dead and mourn them. In contrast, it is enviable to be the first to enter upon a new life: this shall be our lot.
It is true that the old world belongs to the philistines. But we must not treat them as bogeymen and shrink from them in terror. On the contrary, we must take a closer look at them. It is rewarding to study these lords of the world.
Of course, they are lords of the world only in the sense that they fill it with their presence, as worms fill a corpse. They require nothing more than a number of slaves to complete their society and slave-owners do not need to be free. If their ownership of land and people entitles them to be called lords and master par excellence this does not make them any less philistine than their servants.
Human beings – that means men of intellect, free men – that means republicans. The philistines wish to be neither. What is left for them to be and to wish?
What they wish is to live and to procreate (and Goethe says that no one achieves more). And this they have in common with animals. The only thing a German politician might wish to add is that man knows this is what he wants and that the Germans are determined to want nothing more.
Man’s self-esteem, his sense of freedom, must be re-awakened in the breast of these people. This sense vanished from the world with the Greeks, and with Christianity it took up residence in the blue mists of heaven, but only with its aid can society ever again become a community of men that can fulfil their highest needs, a democratic state.
By contrast, men who do not feel themselves to be men accumulate for their masters like a breed of slaves or a stud of horses. The hereditary masters are the aim and goal of the entire society. The world belongs to them. They take possession of it as it is and feels itself to be. They accept themselves as they are and place their feet where they naturally belong, viz. on the necks of these political animals who have no other vocation than to be their ‘loyal, attentive subjects’.
The philistine world is the animal kingdom of politics and if we must needs acknowledge its existence we have no choice but to accept the status quo. Centuries of barbarism have produced it and given it shape, and now it stands before us as a complete system based on the principle of the dehumanized world. Our Germany, the philistine world at its most perfect, must necessarily lag far behind the French Revolution which restored man to his estate. A German Aristotle who wished to construct his Politics on the basis of our society would begin by writing ‘Man is a social but wholly unpolitical animal’. And as for the state, he would not be able to better the definition provided by Herr Zöpfl, the author of Constitutional Law in Germany. According to him the state is an ‘association of families’ which, we may continue, is the hereditary property of a family higher than all others and called the dynasty. The more fertile the families, the happier the people, the greater the state, the more powerful the dynasty, for which reason a premium of 50 Talers is placed on the seventh-born son in the normal despotism of Prussia.
The Germans are such prudent realists that not one of their wishes and their wildest fancies ever extends beyond the bare actualities of life. And this reality, no more no less, is accepted by those who rule over them. They too are realists, they are utterly removed from all thought and human greatness, they are ordinary officers and provincial Junkers, but they are not mistaken, they are right: just as they are, they are perfectly adequate to the task of exploiting and ruling over this animal kingdom – for here as everywhere rule and exploitation are identical concepts. When they make people pay them homage, when they gaze out over the teeming throng of brainless creatures, what comes into their minds but the thought that occurred to Napoleon on the Berezina. It is said that he pointed to the mass of drowning men and declared to his entourage: Voyezces crapauds!2 The story is probably invented, but it is true nevertheless. Despotism’s only thought is disdain for mankind, dehumanized man; and it is a thought superior to many others in that it is also a fact. In the eyes of the despot men are always debased. They drown before his eyes and on his behalf in the mire of common life from which, like toads, they always rise up again. If even men capable of great vision, like Napoleon before he succumbed to his dynastic madness, are overwhelmed by this insight, how should a quite ordinary king be an idealist in the midst of such a reality?
The principle on which monarchy in general is based is that of man as despised and despicable, of dehumanized man; and when Montesquieu declares that its principle is honour he is quite in error. He attempts to make this plausible by distinguishing between monarchy, despotism and tyranny. But these names refer to a single concept denoting at best different modes of the same principle. Where the monarchical principle is in the majority, human beings are in the minority; where it is not called in question, human beings do not even exist. Now, when a man like the King of Prussia has no proof that he is problematic, why should he not simply follow the dictates of his own fancy? And when he does so, what is the result? Contradictory intentions? Very well, so they all lead to nothing. Impotent policies? They are still the only political reality. Scandals and embarrassments? There is only one scandal, and one source of embarrassment: abdication. As long as caprice remains in its place it is in the right. It may be as fickle, inane and contemptible as it pleases; it is still adequate to the task of governing a people which has never known any law but the arbitrary will of its kings. I do not claim that an inane system and the loss of respect both at home and abroad can remain without consequence; I am certainly not prepared to underwrite the Ship of Fools. But I do maintain that as long as the topsy-turvy world is the real world the King of Prussia will remain a man of his time.
As you know, he is a man I have been much interested in. Even when his only mouthpiece was the Berlin Political Weekly I could see his worth and his vocation clearly. As early as the act of homage in Königsberg he confirmed my suspicion that all issues would now become purely personal. He proclaimed that henceforth his own heart and feelings would constitute the basic law of the Prussian domains, of his state; and in Prussia the King really is the system. He is the only political person. His personality determines the nature of the system. Whatever he does or is made to do, whatever he thinks or is put into his mouth, constitutes the thought and action of the Prussian state. It is therefore a positive good that the present King has admitted this so frankly.
The only mistake was to attribute any significance, as people did for a while, to the wishes and ideas actually produced by the King.3 But these could not affect the situation since the philistine is the material of the monarchy and the monarch is no more than the King of the philistines. As long as both remain themselves he can turn neither himself nor them into real, free human beings.
The King of Prussia tried to change the system with the help of a theory such as his father did not possess. The fate of this attempt is well known: it failed utterly, naturally enough. For once you have arrived at the animal kingdom of politics there is no reaction that can go further back and no way of progressing beyond it without abandoning its basis and effecting the transition to the human world of democracy.
The old King had no extravagant aims, he was a philistine and made no claims to intelligence. He knew that the servile state and his own possession of it stood in need of nothing more than a tranquil, prosaic existence. The young King was more lively and quick-witted; he had a much more grandiose idea of the omnipotent monarch limited only by his own heart and understanding. He felt only repugnance for the old, ossified state of slaves and servants. He desired to infuse new life into it and imbue it with his own wishes, thoughts and feelings; and this, if anything, he could demand in his own state. Hence his liberal speeches and effusions. Not the dead letter of the law, but the living heart of the King would govern all his subjects. He wished to set all hearts and minds in motion to fulfil his heart’s desires and his long-meditated plans. And people were set in motion, but their hearts did not beat at one with his and the governed could not open their mouths without demanding the abolition of the old form of authority. The idealists who are impertinent enough to want human beings to be human spoke up and while the King gave vent to his Old German fantasies, they imagined that they could begin to philosophize in New German. This had never happened before in Prussia. For a moment it looked as if the old order had been turned upside down; things began to be transformed into people and some of these people even had names, although the naming of names is not permitted in the Provincial Diets. But the servants of the old despotism soon put a stop to these un-German activities. It was not difficult to bring about a palpable conflict between the wishes of the King who dreamed of a great past epoch full of priests, knights and bondsmen, and the intentions of the idealists who simply aspired to realize the aims of the French Revolution, i.e. who in the last analysis wanted a republic and an order of free men instead of an order of dead things. When this conflict had become sufficiently acute and uncomfortable, and the irascible King was in a state of great excitement, his servants, who had formerly managed affairs with such ease, now came to him and announced that the King would be unwise to encourage his subjects in their idle talk, they would not be able to control a race of people who talked. Moreover, the lord of all posterior Russians [Hinterrussen] was disturbed by all the activity going on in the heads of the anterior Russians [Vorderrussen]4 and demanded the restoration of the old peaceful state of affairs. This led to a new edition of the old proscription of all the wishes and ideas men have cherished concerning human rights and duties, that is, it meant a return to the old ossified, servile state in which the slave serves in silence and the owner of land and people rules as silently as possible over well-trained, docile servants. Neither can say what he wishes, the one that he wishes to be human, the other that he has no use for human beings on his territory. Silence is therefore the only means of communication. Muta pecora, prona et ventri oboedientia.5
This then is the abortive attempt to transform the philistine state on the basis of itself; its only result was that it revealed for all the world to see that for a despotism brutality is necessary and humanity impossible. A brutal state of affairs can only be maintained by means of brutality. And this brings me to the end of our common task of analysing the philistine and the philistine state. You will hardly suggest that my opinion of the present is too exalted and if I do not despair about it this is only because its desperate position fills me with hope. I will say nothing of the incapacity of the masters and the indolence of their servants and subjects who allow everything to proceed as God would have it; and yet taken together both would certainly suffice to bring about a catastrophe. I would only point out that the enemies of philistinism, i.e. all thinking and suffering people, have arrived at an understanding for which formerly they lacked the means and that even the passive system of procreation characteristic of the old subjects now daily wins new recruits to serve the new race of men. However, the system of industry and commerce, of property and the exploitation of man, will lead much faster than the increase in the population to a rupture within existing society which the old system cannot heal because, far from healing and creating, it knows only how to exist and enjoy. The existence of a suffering mankind which thinks and of a thinking mankind which is suppressed must inevitably become unpalatable and indigestible for the animal kingdom of the philistines wallowing in their passive and thoughtless existence.
For our part it is our task to drag the old world into the full light of day and to give positive shape to the new one. The more time history allows thinking mankind to reflect and suffering mankind to collect its strength the more perfect will be the fruit which the present now bears within its womb.
[Bakunin and Feuerbach contribute letters to the correspondence in which they both reject Ruge’s pessimism. Feuerbach, agreeing that the situation in Germany is intolerable, calls for ‘united forces’to rebuild everything by means of united ‘praxis’. He considers a new journal to be a vital element in that praxis. Ruge, in a final letter to Marx, announces his conversion to atheism and his support for the ‘new philosophers’. He now sees the Yearbooks as a means by which to ‘criticize ourselves and all Germany’. It is in this context that Marx stresses the idea that criticism must involve itself in actual political struggle.]
Marx to Ruge
Kreuznach, September 1843
I am very pleased to find you so resolute and to see your thoughts turning away from the past and towards a new enterprise. In Paris, then, the ancient bastion of philosophy–absit omen!6 –and the modern capital of the modern world. Whatever is necessary adapts itself. Although I do not underestimate the obstacles, therefore, I have no doubt that they can be overcome.
Our enterprise may or may not come about, but in any event I shall be in Paris by the end of the month as the very air here turns one into a serf and I can see no opening for free activity in Germany.
In Germany everything is suppressed by force, a veritable anarchy of the spirit, a reign of stupidity itself has come upon us and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin. It is becoming clearer every day that independent, thinking people must seek out a new centre. I am convinced that our plan would satisfy a real need and real needs must be satisfied in reality. I shall have no doubts once we begin in earnest.
In fact the internal obstacles seem almost greater than the external difficulties. For even though the question ‘where from?’ presents no problems, the question ‘where to?’ is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old. Hitherto philosophers have left the keys to all riddles lying in their desks, and the stupid, uninitiated world had only to wait around for the roasted pigeons of absolute science to fly into its open mouth. Philosophy has now become secularized and the most striking proof of this can be seen in the way that philosophical consciousness has joined battle not only outwardly, but inwardly too. If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with the powers that be.
I am therefore not in favour of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. In particular, communism is a dogmatic abstraction and by communism I do not refer to some imagined, possible communism, but to communism as it actually exists in the teachings of Cabet, Dézamy and Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of Fourier and Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism.
And by the same token the whole principle of socialism is concerned only with one side, namely the reality of the true existence of man. We have also to concern ourselves with the other side, i.e. with man’s theoretical existence, and make his religion and science, etc., into the object of our criticism. Furthermore, we wish to influence our contemporaries, our German contemporaries above all. The problem is how best to achieve this. In this context there are two incontestable facts. Both religion and politics are matters of the very first importance in contemporary Germany. Our task must be to latch onto these as they are and not to oppose them with any ready-made system such as the Voyage en Icarie.7
Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality. Now as far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state which contains the postulates of reason in all its modern forms, even where it has not been the conscious repository of socialist requirements. But it does not stop there. It consistently assumes that reason has been realized and just as consistently it becomes embroiled at every point in a conflict between its ideal vocation and its actually existing premises.
This internecine conflict within the political state enables us to infer the social truth. Just as religion is the table of contents of the theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state enumerates its practical struggles. Thus the particular form and nature of the political state contains all social struggles, needs and truths within itself. It is therefore anything but beneath its dignity to make even the most specialized political problem – such as the distinction between the representative system and the Estates system – into an object of its criticism. For this problem only expresses at the political level the distinction between the rule of man and the rule of private property. Hence the critic not only can but must concern himself with these political questions (which the crude socialists find entirely beneath their dignity). By demonstrating the superiority of the representative system over the Estates system he will interest a great party in practice. By raising the representative system from its political form to a general one and by demonstrating the true significance underlying it he will force this party to transcend itself – for its victory is also its defeat.
Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e. from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.
The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it. Like Feuerbach’s critique of religion, our whole aim can only be to translate religious and political problems into their self-conscious human form.
Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analysing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future but to complete the thought of the past. Lastly, it will become plain that mankind will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of its old work.
We are therefore in a position to sum up the credo of our journal in a single word: the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age. This is a task for the world and for us. It can succeed only as the product of united efforts. What is needed above all is a confession, and nothing more than that. To obtain forgiveness for its sins mankind needs only to declare them for what they are.