The great task of Karl Marx’s first period was to engage German philosophical thought in the actualities of contemporary Germany.
The world of German philosophy seems queer to us when we come to it from the French Revolution. The abstractions of the French—whether Liberty, Fraternity and Equality or the Harmonies and Passionate Attractions of Fourier—are social principles which are intended to evoke visions of social and political improvement; but the abstractions of the Germans, by comparison, are like foggy and amorphous myths, which hang in the gray heavens above the flat land of Königsberg and Berlin, only descending into reality in the role of intervening gods. Marx and Engels were to come to the conclusion that the failure of the German philosophers to supply principles for man as a social being had been due to their actual helplessness under an obsolete feudal regime: as, for example, the “self-determination” of Kant had been the intellectual reflection of the effect of the French Revolution on the minds of the German bourgeoisie, which had the impulse but not yet the power to free itself from the old institutions—so that this “will” remained a “will-in-and-for-itself … a purely ideological determination and moral postulate,” with no influence on actual society.
Hegel had held that society, “the State,” was the realization of absolute reason, to which the individual must subordinate himself. He afterwards said that what he had meant was the perfect State; but his politics and position in his later years gave ground for the assumption that he regarded this perfection as already having been achieved by the contemporary Prussian state of Friedrich Wilhelm III. Society had ceased to develop, was consummated and petrified in a mold. Yet at the same time this consummated State was itself merely a mystical entity in the shadowland of German idealism, for it was conceived as merely a product and aspect of a primordial divine “Idea,” which realized itself through reason. The King, who had thus been supplied with a Divine Right and had the permanence of his office guaranteed in terms of the most advanced thinking, patronized and promoted the Hegelians: they had become pillars of the administration.
Yet there was a revolutionary principle in Hegel, who had been swept up in his early years, before he had stiffened into a Prussian professor, by the surge of the French Revolution. He had reviewed the whole of history as he knew it and he had shown the organic processes, recurrent and ineluctable, by which old societies turn into new. Why, then, should these processes be suddenly arrested? The Revolution of 1830 in France had awakened agitation in Germany. This had been put down and had been followed by a reaction, of which one of the features had been an attempt to revive orthodox religion, A new school of Hegelians appeared, who used Hegelianism to liquidate Christianity. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published his Life of Jesus. It had been one of the achievements of Hegel to direct the attention of the Germans to the development of human institutions as special expressions of the genius of various peoples. D. F. Strauss, even in asserting like Hegel that Christianity represented ideal truth, shocked Germany with the contention that the Gospels were not historical documents at all but only myths, that, though they could be traced back to an authentic germ of fact, they had largely been created unconsciously by a communal imagination which had flowed through the minds of the early Christians. Bruno Bauer, in criticisms of the Gospels published in 1840 and 1841, tried to clear away this mythopoeic possession, itself something in the nature of a myth, by examining the New Testament documents as the products of specific human hands and concluding that the whole thing was a forgery, known and intended as a fraud by its first perpetrator: Jesus had never existed. Bauer had thus got rid of Christianity but, Hegelian as he still remained, later elaborated a doctrine of “self-consciousness,” which, denying the existence of matter as a reality distinct from spirit, left humanity still disembodied, still suspended in the philosophic void.
Karl Marx, a young student at Berlin, had been admitted in 1837 to a Doktorklub of which Bauer was a member and in which a “Young Hegelian” movement arose. Marx had succumbed to the Hegelian philosophy, which was still the most powerful system of thought in Germany, but almost immediately commenced to resist it. The deicide principle in Marx rebelled against the Absolute Idea. “Philosophy makes no secret of the fact,” he wrote in a doctor’s thesis which is nevertheless full of Hegelian method: “Her creed is the creed of Prometheus—’In a word, I detest all the gods.’ This is her device against all deities of heaven or earth who do not recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself.” Nor, as we shall see, was this human self-consciousness to remain merely a universal abstraction like the self-consciousness defined by Bruno Bauer.
Bauer himself was by this time a professor at Bonn, and he had promised Marx to get him a post there. Marx had counted on joining him; they had collaborated on a satire against pious Hegelians, talked about publishing an Atheist Review. But in the meanwhile, by the time Marx had graduated, Bruno Bauer was already getting into trouble for his anti-religious and pro-constitutional activities; and he was dismissed from his chair the next spring. The possibility that the ablest philosopher of the new German generation—of whom it had already been predicted by a contemporary that, as soon as he should make his appearance in a lecture room, he would draw upon him the eyes of all Germany—the possibility that the young Dr. Marx might follow the example of his great predecessors, Kant and Fichte and Hegel, and expound his system from an academic pulpit, was thereby destroyed forever.
The accession in 1840 of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, of whom liberal reforms had been expected, had brought only a new feudal reaction. From that point on, the necessity for political action became continually more urgent for Germans. In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, they had no parliament, no trial by jury, no rights of free speech or assembly; and the new king, with his royal romanticism that idealized the Middle Ages, made it quite plain that he would give them none of these things. In the meantime the doctrines of the utopian socialists had come to trouble German philosophy and politics. They leaked over first from their sources in France into the Rhineland, already partly Gallicized, where they found for other reasons, also, a particularly favorable field. The wine-growing peasants of the Moselle were being impoverished, since Prussia’s customs union with Hessia, by the competition of the wine industry outside; and they had still some remnants from the Middle Ages of the communal ownership of land. Saint-Simonism spread so rapidly along the Moselle that the archbishop had to denounce it as a heresy; and in 1835 a German named Ludwig Gall published in Trier a socialist pamphlet in which he declared that the propertied class and the laboring class had directly conflicting interests. Heinrich Marx had in 1834 taken a leading part in political banquets at which the demand for a real parliament had been pressed and at which the Marseillaise had been sung, but of which the Trier papers had been forbidden to publish any report and which had been rebuked by the Crown Prince himself—with the result that the club in which they had been held had been put under the supervision of the police.
Karl Marx in the first months of 1842 wrote an article on the new Prussian censorship, in which we see him for the first time at his best: here the implacable logic and crushing wit are trained full on Marx’s lifelong enemies: the deniers to human beings of human rights. The censor himself, it is true, blocked the publication of the article in Germany, and it was only printed a year later in Switzerland. But the new note has already been sounded which, though it is long to be muffled or ignored, will yet gradually pierce with its tough metallic timbre through all the tissues of ideas of the West.
Marx now begins to write for the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper published in Cologne, the center of the industrialized Rhineland, and supported by the wealthy manufacturers and merchants who had found their ideas and their railroads obstructed by the old Catholic society. It was written by the young intelligentsia; and Karl Marx became editor-in-chief in October, 1842.
Marx’s work for the Rheinische Zeitung brought him up for the first time against problems for which, as he said, no solution had been provided for him by Hegel. In commenting on the proceedings of the Rhenish Diet which Friedrich Wilhelm IV had convened, he had had to deal with the debate on a bill for punishing the picking-up of wood in forests, and it had been plain to him that the new government was attempting to deprive the peasants of even those communal privileges which had remained with them from the Middle Ages. By a first stroke of that irony of “fetishes” which was afterwards to play so important a part in his work, he pointed out that the trees had been given rights to which the rights of the people were being sacrificed; and through arguments of a semi-scholastic subtlety he proved that an administration that made no distinction between wood-gathering and common theft as offenses against private property were inviting the persons they prosecuted so unfairly to disregard the distinction between the offense against property involved in common theft and the offense against property involved in owning a great deal of property and preventing other people from having any. The subject leads for Marx at twenty-four to a passage of exhilarating eloquence, in which he declares that the code of the feudal world has no relation to general human justice but has perpetuated itself from a time when men were essentially animals, and simply guarantees their right to eat one another up—with the exception that among the bees, at least it was the workers that killed the drones and not the drones that killed the workers. Later, people began writing to the paper about the misery of the wine-growers on the Moselle. Marx investigated, found out that conditions were really extremely bad, and got into a controversy with the governor of the Rhine Province. In the meantime the Rheinische Zeitung had become involved in polemics with a conservative paper rival, which had accused it of communist tendencies. Karl Marx knew very little about communism; but he decided to study the subject forthwith.
The Rheinische Zeitung, under Marx’s direction, lasted five months. It was suppressed, at the instance of the Ambassador to Russia, for criticizing the government of the Tsar.
It seems always to have been with something of relief that Karl Marx turned away from politics and devoted himself to research and the following-out of large unifying ideas. The atmosphere, he said, had got too stifling. “It is bad to work for freedom in servitude and to fight with pins instead of clubs. I am sick of the hypocrisy, the stupidity, the brutal authority, and of our cringing and complying and quibbling and tergiversation. And now the government has given me back my freedom.” In the same letter to a friend, he goes on to say that he has now fallen out with his family: he has no claims on his father’s estate while his mother is still alive; but he is engaged to Jenny von Westphalen and neither can nor will go without her. “There is in Germany no possible further career for me. One debases one’s value here.”
Before he leaves the Fatherland, however, he sets himself to grapple with Hegel, whose idealism has dominated his mind hitherto. It will be better to leave the discussion of Marx’s political thought as it splits off from Hegel’s philosophy of Law, till after the beginning of his collaboration with Engels; but we may anticipate a few years in order to indicate how he eventually threw out a bridge—reversing the procedure in The Rhinegold, where the gods cross the rainbow to Valhalla, leaving behind them the harsh scene of human greed—from the self of German idealistic philosophy, which could never really know the outside world, to the landowners of the Rhenish Diet tightening their halters around the necks of the peasants, and Marx himself excluded from the lecture-room, forbidden to express himself in print.
There had been, besides Strauss and Bauer, a third critic of religion named Ludwig Feuerbach, who had made a great impression on Marx’s generation in 1841 by a book called The Essence of Christianity. Hegel’s Absolute Idea, said Feuerbach, which was supposed to have incorporated itself in matter for the purpose of realizing reason, had been a gratuitous presupposition which Hegel was unable to prove. What the Absolute Idea really was, was a substitute for the Word become Flesh; and Hegel was actually merely the last of the great apologists for Christianity. Let us forget about the Absolute Idea; let us start an investigation with man and the world as we find them. When we do so, it becomes perfectly obvious that the legends and the rituals of religion are merely the expressions of human minds.
Feuerbach succeeded in dragging religion down out of the communal imagination of Strauss, in rescuing the ethical instinct from the pure self-consciousness into which it had rebounded with Bruno Bauer after he had rejected its Scriptural sanctions, and in tying both religion and morality inescapably to the habits of men. But he still believes in the permanent necessity for religion. He tries himself to produce a substitute religion, a cult of love based on sex and friendship. And he imagines an abstract humanity endowed with a common reason.
It now presented itself to Marx as his further task to get rid of religion altogether and to put the emotions, the moralities, of man into relation with the vicissitudes of society. It was also his task to convert the “Will” of German philosophy, which had been “a purely ideological postulate” and which even Fichte, though he had contemplated it in action, had not assumed to be necessarily successful but had regarded as an end in itself—Marx’s problem was to convert this abstraction into a force in the practical world.
In a remarkable set of notes on Feuerbach which he wrote down in 1845, he asserted that the defect of all previous materialisms had been their representing external objects only as acting upon the mind, which remained passive, while the defect of idealism had been that what it perceived could not act upon the world. The truth was that the reality or unreality of thought except as thought enters into action was a purely academic question: all that we can know we know is our own action in relation to the external world. On this external world we seek to act: when we find that we succeed in transforming it, we know that our conceptions are correct.
Utopians like Robert Owen had believed that a different education would produce a different kind of human beings. But this utopian was in reality a materialist; and, as a materialist, he was unable to explain how he himself, who was presumably the product of antecedent conditions, had come to be differentiated in such a way as to be in a position to educate others. Were there, then, two kinds of human beings? No: there was a dynamic principle at work in the whole of human activity. How else could one explain the coincidence between the changes in things which we perceive and our purposive human effort?
Feuerbach had imagined an abstract man with abstract religious feelings; but in reality man was always social, and his religious feelings, like all his other feelings, were related to his environment and time. The problems which had given rise to the supernatural conceptions of religion were actually practical problems, which could only be solved by man’s action in transforming the practical world.
As for traditional materialism, its conceptions were equally non-social: it contemplated human beings only as separate individuals who went to make up a “civic” association. The new materialism proposed by Marx was to look at mankind from the more organic point of view of “human society or of socialized humanity.”
I have here given my own paraphrase of this document, which has inspired so much controversy and commentary; I have not analyzed it or criticized its assumptions. Marx never really developed this philosophy. It was the eve of 1848, and he was impatient to put behind him the old kind of philosophical discussion and to be about his revolutionary business: he gave the matter only just enough thought to sketch a position that would bring him into action. He compresses the whole situation into the two lines of the last of his notes: “The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways: the thing is, however, to change it.”