In the meantime, Marx had gotten married and had taken Jenny to Paris in October, 1843. He had been reading up with his usual thoroughness on French communism and studying the French Revolution, about which he was planning to write a book.
But early in 1844 there came under his eye an essay which Engels had written from England for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, to which Karl Marx was also contributing. It was an original and brilliant discussion of the “political economy” of the British, which Engels on his side had been reading up. Engels held that the theories of Adam Smith and Ricardo, of MacCulloch and James Mill, were fundamentally hypocritical rationalizations of the greedy motives behind the system of private property which was destroying the British peoples: the Wealth of Nations made most people poor; Free Trade and Competition left the people still enslaved, and consolidated the monopoly of the bourgeoisie on everything that was worth having—all the philosophies of trade themselves only sanctified the huckster’s fraud; the discussions of abstract value were kept abstract on purpose to avoid taking cognizance of the actual conditions under which all commercial transactions took place: the exploitation and destruction of the working class, the alternation of prosperity with crisis. Marx at once began to correspond with Engels, and he set himself to master as much of the British economists as he could find translated into French.
Engels arrived back from Lancashire about the end of August and stopped in Paris on his way home to Barmen. He immediately looked up Marx, and they found that they had so much to say to one another that they spent ten days together. Their literary as well as their intellectual collaboration began from that first moment of their meeting. They had been working toward similar conclusions, and now they were able to supplement one another. Like the copper and zinc electrodes of the voltaic cell of which they used to debate the mystery—the conductor liquid would be Hegel diluted in the political atmosphere of the eve of 1848—the two young Germans between them were able to generate a current that was to give energy to new social motors. The setting-up of this Marxist current is the central event of our chronicle and one of the great intellectual events of the century; and even this electrical image is inadequate to render the organic vitality with which the Marx-Engels system in its growth was able to absorb such a variety of elements—the philosophies of three great countries, the ideas of both the working class and the cultured, the fruits of many departments of thought. Marx and Engels performed the feat of all great thinkers in summing up immense accumulations of knowledge, in combining many streams of speculation, and in endowing a new point of view with more vivid and compelling life.
It would not be worth while here to attempt to trace in detail the influence of all the thinkers that Marx and Engels laid under contribution. In a sense, such attempts are futile. The spotlighting method that I have used in this book must not be allowed to mislead the reader into assuming that great ideas are the creations of a special race of great men. I have discussed some of the conspicuous figures who gave currency to socialist ideas; and Professor Sidney Hook in his admirable From Hegel to Marx has indicated with exactitude the relation of Marx to his background of German philosophy. But behind these conspicuous figures were certainly sources less well-known or quite obscure: all the agitators, the politicians, the newspaper writers; the pamphlets, the conversations, the intimations; the implications of conduct deriving from inarticulate or half-unconscious thoughts, the implications of unthinking instincts.
It is appropriate, nevertheless, to point this out at this particular moment, because it was precisely the conception of intellectual movements as representative of social situations which Marx and Engels were to do so much to implant; and it may be interesting to fill in a little more completely the background of early nineteenth-century thought out of which Marx and Engels grew as well as to understand the relation of these two thinkers to one another.
The great thing that Marx and Engels and their contemporaries had gotten out of the philosophy of Hegel was the conception of historical change. Hegel had delivered his lectures on the Philosophy of History at Berlin University during the winter of 1822–23 (Michelet, it may be remembered, had first come in contact with Vico the next year); and, for all his abstract and mystical way of talking, he had shown a very firm grasp on the idea that the great revolutionary figures of history were not simply remarkable individuals, who moved mountains by their single wills, but the agents through which the forces of the societies behind them accomplished their unconscious purposes. Julius Caesar, says Hegel, for example, did of course fight and conquer his rivals, and destroy the constitution of Rome in order to win his own position of supremacy, but what gave him his importance for the world was the fact that he was performing the necessary feat—only possible through autocratic control—of unifying the Roman Empire.
“It was not then merely his private gain but an unconscious impulse,” writes Hegel, “that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe. Such are all great historical men—whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit. They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount—one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence—from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question. They present themselves, therefore, as men who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves; and whose deeds have produced a condition of things and a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their interest, and their work.
“Such individuals have had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time. It was theirs to know this nascent principle; the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and to expend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men—the Heroes of an epoch—must, therefore, be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed their purposes to satisfy themselves, not others. Whatever prudent designs and counsels they might have learned from others, would be the more limited and inconsistent features in their career; for it was they who best understood affairs; it was they from whom others learned and approved—or at least acquiesced in—their policy. For that Spirit which had taken this fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals; but abides in a state of unconsciousness from which the great men in question aroused it. Their fellows, therefore, follow these soul-leaders; for they feel the irresistible power of their own inner spirit thus embodied.”
We shall examine a little later the peculiar dynamics of Hegel’s conception of historical change. It is enough to note further for the moment that he regarded each of the epochs of human society as constituting an indivisible whole. “We shall have to show,” he announces, “that the constitution adopted by a people makes one substance, one spirit, with its religion, its art and philosophy, or, at least, with its conceptions and thoughts: its culture generally; not to expatiate upon the additional influences, ah extra, of climate, of neighbors, of its place in the world. A State is an individual totality, of which you cannot select any particular aspect, not even such a supremely important one as its political constitution, and deliberate and decide respecting it in that isolated form.”
But where Hegel had tended to assume that the development of history through revolution, the progressive realization of the “Idea,” had culminated in the contemporary Prussian state, Marx and Engels, accepting the revolutionary progress but repudiating the divine Idea, looked for a consummation of change to the future, when the realization of the communist idea should have resulted from the next revolution.
They had by this time their own new notions about communism. They had taken stock of their predecessors and, with their own sharp and realistic minds, they had lopped off the sentimentality and fantasy which had surrounded the practical perceptions of the utopians. From Saint-Simon they accepted as valid his discovery that modern politics was simply the science of regulating production; from Fourier, his arraignment of the bourgeois, his consciousness of the ironic contrast between “the frenzy of speculation, the spirit of all-devouring commercialism,” which were rampant under the reign of the bourgeoisie and “the brilliant promises of the Enlightenment” which had preceded them; from Owen, the realization that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution. But they saw that the mistake of the utopian socialists had been to imagine that socialism was to be imposed upon society from above by disinterested members of the upper classes. The bourgeoisie as a whole, they believed, could not be induced to go against its own interests. The educator, as Marx was to write in his Theses on Feuerbach, must, after all, first have been educated: he is not really confronting disciples with a doctrine that has been supplied him by God; he is merely directing a movement of which he is himself a member and which energizes him and gives him his purpose. Marx and Engels combined the aims of the utopians with Hegel’s process of organic development. By the mid-century they were thus able to see quite clearly, as even John Humphrey Noyes did not do, that it was impossible for small communist units by themselves to effect the salvation of society or even to survive in the teeth of the commercial system; that it was not merely unfortunate accidents and disagreeable personal relations which had rendered the American communist movement futile but its ignorance of the mechanics of the class struggle.
Of this class struggle Marx had learned first from his reading of the French historians after he had come to Paris. Augustin Thierry in his History of the Conquest of England, published in 1825, had presented the Norman Conquest in terms of a class struggle between the conquerors and the Saxons. Guizot, in his History of the English Revolution, had shown, from the bourgeois point of view, the struggle between the middle class and the monarchy.
But it remained to root the class struggle in economics. We have seen how Friedrich Engels had come to appreciate the importance of economics as the result of his experience in Manchester. Karl Marx owed more to his reading. The idea of the fundamental importance of economic interests was not new in the eighteen-forties. A French lawyer named Antoine Barnave, who had been president of the revolutionary Assembly of 1790, had asserted that the difference between classes was the result of economic inequalities, that the class which was in power at any epoch not only made laws for the whole of society in order to guarantee its own hold on its property but also “directed its habits and created its prejudices,” that society was constantly changing under the pressure of economic necessities, and that the rising and triumphant bourgeoisie which had displaced the feudal nobility would in turn produce a new aristocracy. Barnave, who was a moderate in politics and compromised himself with the royal family, was guillotined in 1793. A collected edition of his writings was published in 1843; but Marx never seems to have mentioned him, and it is not known whether he had ever read him. In any case, the thought of the period was converging during the first years of the forties toward the Marxist point of view. Friedrich List, the patriotic German economist, had published in 1841 his work on The National System of Political Economy, in which he had described the development of society in terms of its industrial phases; and in 1842 a French communist named Dézamy, a former associate of Cabet, published his Code de la Communauté. Karl Marx had read Dézamy at Cologne. This writer had criticized Cabet for believing that anything could be done for labor by invoking the aid of the bourgeoisie, and, accepting the brute fact of the class struggle, had projected a somewhat new kind of community, based on materialism, atheism and science. Though Dézamy had not as yet arrived at any ideas about proletarian tactics, he was sure that the proletariat, among whom he included the peasants, must unite and liberate itself. And it may be noted that the importance of the bottom class had already been emphasized by Babeuf when he had declared in the course of his defense that “the mass of the expropriated, of the proletarians” was generally “agreed to be frightful,” that it constituted now “the majority of a nation totally rotten.”
In the December of 1843, Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, in which he had postulated the proletariat as the class which was to play the new Hegelian role in effecting the emancipation of Germany: “A class in radical chains, one of the classes of bourgeois society which does not belong to bourgeois society, an order which brings the break-up of all orders, a sphere which has a universal character by virtue of its universal suffering and lays claim to no particular right, because no particular wrong, but complete wrong, is being perpetrated against it, which can no longer invoke an historical title but only a human title, which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the consequences of the German state but in an absolute antagonism to its assumptions, a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without freeing itself from all the other spheres of society and thereby freeing all these other spheres themselves, which in a word, as it represents the complete forfeiting of humanity itself, can only redeem itself through the redemption of the whole of humanity. The proletariat represents the dissolution of society as a special order.”
Yet even though Marx has got so far, the proletariat remains for him still something in the nature of a philosophical abstraction. The primary emotional motivation in the role which he assigns to the proletariat seems to have been borrowed from his own position as a Jew. “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism”; “a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society”—these are the conclusions in almost identical words of two essays written one after the other and published, as it were, side by side. Marx, on the one hand, knew nothing of the industrial proletariat and, on the other hand, refused to take Judaism seriously or to participate in current discussions of the Jewish problem from the point of view of the special case of Jewish culture, holding that the special position of the Jew was vitally involved with his money-lending and banking, and that it would be impossible for him to dissociate himself from these until the system of which they were part should be abolished. The result was that the animus and rebellion which were due to the social disabilities of the Jew as well as the moral insight and the world vision which were derived from his religious tradition were transferred in all their formidable power to an imaginary proletariat.
Perhaps the most important service that Engels performed for Marx at this period was to fill in the blank face and figure of Marx’s abstract proletarian and to place him in a real house and real factory. Engels had brought back from England the materials for his book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, and he now sat down at once to get it written. Here was the social background which would make Marx’s vision authentic; and here were cycles of industrial prosperity which always collapsed into industrial depressions—due, as Engels could see, to the blind appetites of the competing manufacturers—and which could only result in a general crash: that millennial catastrophe that for Marx was ultimately to dethrone the gods and set the wise spirit of man in their place.
And for Engels, on his side, here in Marx was the backing of moral conviction and of intellectual strength which was to enable him to keep his compass straight in his relation to that contemporary society whose crimes he understood so well, but out of which he himself had grown, and to which he was still organically bound as Marx was not. Besides, Marx had more weight and more will. Engels wrote with lucidity and ease; he had sensibility and measure and humor. He is so much more like a French writer of the Enlightenment—something between a Condorcet and a Diderot—than a philosopher of the German school that one is inclined to accept the tradition that his family had French Protestant blood. This young man without academic training was an immensely accomplished fellow: he had already learned to write English so well that he was able to contribute to Robert Owen’s paper; and his French was as good as his English. He had a facility in acquiring information and a journalist’s sense of how things were going; his collaborator Marx used to say that Engels was always ahead of him. But Engels had not Marx’s drive; it is what we miss in his writing. From the beginning Marx is able to find such quarrel in matters like the wood-theft debates that he can shake us with indignation against all violators of human relations; while Engels, with his larger experience of the cruelties and degradations of industrial life, does not—even in The Condition of the Working Class in England—rouse us to protest or to fight but tends rather to resolve the conflict in an optimistic feeling about the outcome. “Marx was a genius,” wrote Engels later. “The rest of us were talented at best.”
It is perhaps not indulging too far the current tendency toward this kind of speculation to suggest that Marx took over for Engels something of the prestige of paternal authority which the younger man had rejected in his own father. There was always something boyish about Engels: he writes Marx in the September of 1847, when he is twenty-seven, that he does not want to accept the vice-presidency of one of their communist committees, because he looks “so frightfully youthful.” Young Friedrich had been rebelling since his teens against old Caspar Engels’ combination of the serious crassness of business with the intolerance of religion; but old Engels’ decisions for his son had hitherto determined his practical career. And, in spite of Friedrich’s final enfranchisement from theology, some of the fervor of his father’s faith had nevertheless been communicated to him. He had grown up in Elberfeld-Barmen under the pulpit of the great Calvinist preacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, who with an eloquence that Engels had found impressive had used to alternate the legends of the Bible and a majestic oratory drawn from its language with illustrations from ordinary life and who had harrowed and subdued his congregations with the terrible Calvinist logic which led them either to damnation or grace. Karl Marx was a great moralist, too, and, on occasion, a formidable preacher. He seems to have provided the young apostate from Pietism with a new spiritual center of gravity.
When Engels went back to Barmen, at any rate, to live with his family and work in the family business, he continued to correspond with Marx; and he grew more and more dissatisfied and uncomfortable in an impatience which this correspondence must have fed.
He had evidently contracted some sort of engagement with a young lady of his own class and locality before he had left Barmen for Manchester; and now this seems to involve in his mind—his letters to Marx leave it all rather dark—the obligation to go to work for the firm. “I have let myself in through the persuasions of my brother-in-law and the melancholy faces of my parents for at least an attempt in this filthy trade, and for fourteen days now I’ve been working in the office—the outlook in connection with my love affair has also brought me to it; but I was depressed before I started in: money-grubbing is too frightful; Barmen is too frightful, the waste of time is too frightful, and above all it is too frightful to continue to be, not merely a bourgeois, but actually a manufacturer, a bourgeois working against the proletariat. A few days in my old man’s factory have compelled me to recognize the horror of it, which I’d rather overlooked before… . If it weren’t for the fact that I apply myself every day to getting down on paper in my book the most dreadful accounts of English conditions, I believe I should have gone to seed already, but this has at least kept the rage in my bones. One can very well be a communist and yet keep up a bourgeois position, if only one doesn’t write; but to work at serious communist propaganda and at industry and trade at the same time—that’s really absolutely impossible.”
He was holding working-class meetings with Moses Hess, who had become his ally in the Wuppertal; and they were getting out a communist paper in Elberfeld. As the weeks go on, his letters to Marx become irradiated by his characteristic hopefulness. One found communists everywhere now, he wrote.
But now old Engels became indignant, tragic. He could not stand Friedrich’s associating with Hess, he could not stand his preaching communism in Barmen. “If it were not for the sake of my mother, who has a sweet and human nature and is only powerless against my father, and whom I really love, it would never occur to me for a moment to make even the pettiest concession to my fanatical and despotic old man. But my mother is gradually grieving herself sick and gets a headache that lasts for eight days every time she is specially worried about me—so I can’t endure it any longer, I must get away, and I hardly know how I’m going to be able to get through the few weeks that I’ll still have to stay.”
Finally, he learned that the police were lying in wait for him, and he left Barmen in the spring of ‘45. There is a passage in one of his letters from which it is possible to form the conjecture that he had been rather hoping to get into trouble in order to be forced to part with, as well as perhaps to be compromised in the eyes of, the young lady to whom he was somehow committed.
He joined Karl Marx in Brussels. The latter had himself had to leave Paris as a result of expulsion from France at the insistence of the German government, which was worried by the activities in Paris of revolutionary German refugees, and on an order from that Guizot, now Prime Minister, who had helped teach Marx the mechanics of the class struggle.
Then Engels went straight back to Manchester to find his friend Mary Burns again and to bring her over to France. He took Karl Marx along on the trip—exhibited to him the activities of Manchester and introduced him to the political economists in English. He reminded him a quarter of a century later of how they had used to look out through the colored panes of the bay-window of the Manchester library on weather that was always fine. It had been the light of that human intellect which they felt was now coming to maturity and which would vindicate the dignity of man, in the midst of that inhuman horror of filthiness and deformity and disease that hemmed the city in.