The role which Marx performed for Engels—that of compass that kept him from sailing off his course—he performed also for the Left as a whole.
We have seen how the tradition of the French Revolution passed first into democratic rhetoric, then into skeptical humanism and anti-democratic science, and finally into anti-social nihilism, in proportion as the French historians came more and more to identify their interests with those of the French bourgeoisie and as the ideals of the bourgeoisie became more overwhelming and more vulgar. As a Jew, Marx stood somewhat outside society; as a man of genius, above it. With none of the handicaps of the proletarian from the point of view of intellectual training or of general knowledge of the world, he was yet not a middle-class man—not even a member of that middle-class “elite” in whom men like Renan and Flaubert believed; and he had a character that could not be sidetracked by the threats or baits of bourgeois society. Certainly his character was domineering; certainly his personality was arrogant, and abnormally mistrustful and jealous; certainly he was capable of vindictiveness and of what seems to us gratuitous malignity. But if we are repelled by these traits in Marx, we must remember that a normally polite and friendly person could hardly have accomplished the task which it was the destiny of Marx to carry through—a task that required the fortitude to resist or to break off all those ties which—as they involve us in the general life of society—limit our views and cause our purposes to shift. We must remember that such a man as, say, Renan, who advises us “to accept every human being as good and to treat him with amiability till we have actual proof that he is not” and who confesses that he has sometimes lied in his relations with contemporary writers “not out of interest but out of kindness”—we must remember that the moral force of Renan becomes ultimately dissolved and enfeebled in proportion as it is diffused by his urbanity.
Marx and Engels in their books of this period between their meeting and the Revolution of 1848—The Holy Family, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy—were attempting to arrive at a definitive formulation of their own revolutionary point of view, and this involved a good deal of destructive work, especially on their German contemporaries, as they extricated the insights that seemed to them valid from the cobwebs of metaphysics and from the divagations by which the bourgeois thinkers, as a result of their stake in the status quo, were escaping the logical conclusions from their premises.
The early Marx and Engels are quite exhilarating and very funny when they are knocking the philosophers’ heads together with the brutal but not ungenial German humor and performing variations on the theme which they quote from their friend and disciple Heine: “The land belongs to the Russians and French, The sea belongs to the British; But we possess in the cloudland of dreams The uncontested dominion.” One must imagine a more profound Mencken and Nathan engaged on a greater task. Marx and Engels did find themselves with a marvelous field for the exercise of satirical criticism: their butt, as in the case of Mencken and Nathan, was the whole intellectual life of a nation. And so many of their old allies, as time went on, took to professing compromise forms of Christianity, editing conservative papers or whooping it up for Prussian imperialism. Even Moses Hess, from whom Engels had learned so much, was associated with that school of “True Socialists,” who seemed to the inventors of Marxism to have arrived at the principles of socialism only to transport them back again into the pure empyrean of abstraction and who seemed also to be playing into the hands of the reaction by opposing the agitation for a constitution on the part of the big bourgeoisie, under the impression that they were being uncompromising but actually—so Marx and Engels believed—in order to defend their own petty-bourgeois interests.
Marx by himself is not so genial. His own opinions seem always to have been arrived at through a close criticism of the opinions of others, as if the sharpness and force of his mind could only really exert themselves in attacks on the minds of others, as if he could only find out what he thought by making distinctions that excluded the thoughts of others. In following this method, he is sometimes merely peevish, sometimes unbearably boring; it is true, as Franz Mehring has said, that in his polemical writings of this period he is as likely to make a merely pedantic or a far-fetched and silly point as a piercing and decisive one. When Marx, in The Holy Family, attacked Bruno Bauer and his brothers, even Engels protested that the inordinate length of Marx’s analysis was out of all proportion to the contempt he expressed for his subjects.
Engels himself is usually flowing and limpid; but it is characteristic of Marx that he should alternate between a blind derisive nagging with which he persists in worrying his opponent through endless unnecessary pages, reluctant to let him drop, an arid exercise of the Hegelian dialectic which simply hypnotizes the reader with its paradoxes and eventually puts him to sleep—and the lightning of a divine insight. In spite of all Marx’s enthusiasm for the “human,” he is either inhumanly dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant. He always is either contracted inside his own ego till he is actually unable to summon enough fellow-feeling to get on with other human beings at all or he has expanded to a comprehensive world-view which, skipping over individuals altogether, as his former attitude was unable to reach them, takes in continents, classes, long ages.
We may note the episode of his polemics with Proudhon as the type of his relationships of this period, which remained the type, even intensified with time, of his relationships through the whole of his life. It has also a special importance in the development by Marx of his system.
Marx had made the acquaintance of Proudhon in the summer of 1844. P.-J. Proudhon was a barrelmaker’s son, who had risen to be a printer and who had educated himself in a remarkable way, teaching himself to read Greek, Latin and Hebrew. In 1840, he had published a book of which the title had asked the question, “What Is Property?” and in which he had given an answer: “Property is theft,” that had made its impression on the age. Marx had felt considerable respect for Proudhon and during long nocturnal sessions in Paris, had expounded to him the doctrine of Hegel.
Two years later Marx wrote Proudhon from Brussels inviting him to contribute to an organized correspondence, designed to keep the communists in different countries in touch with one another, which he and Engels were getting up. He took the occasion to warn Proudhon in a postscript against a journalist named Karl Grün, one of the “True Socialists,” against whom he makes charges rather indefinite but stinging in tone and sinister in implication.
Proudhon replies that he will be glad to participate, but that other business “combined with natural laziness” will prevent his really doing much about it; and he goes on to “take the liberty of making certain reservations, which are suggested by various passages of your letter.” “Let us by all means collaborate,” says Proudhon, “in trying to discover the laws of society, the way in which these laws work out, the best method to go about investigating them; but for God’s sake, after we have demolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instil another kind of doctrine into the people; let us not fall into the contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, after overthrowing the Catholic theology, immediately addressed himself to the task, with a great armory of excommunications and anathemas, of establishing a Protestant theology. Germany for three centuries now has been obliged to occupy herself exclusively with the problem of getting rid of M. Luther’s job of reconstruction; let us not, by contriving any more such restorations, leave any more such tasks for the human race. I applaud with all my heart your idea of bringing to light all the varieties of opinion; let us have good and sincere polemics; let us show the world an example of a learned and far-sighted tolerance; but simply because we are at the head of a movement, let us not set ourselves up as the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion—even though this religion be the religion of logic, the religion of reason itself. Let us welcome, let us encourage all the protests; let us condemn all the exclusions, all the mysticisms; let us never regard a question as closed, and even after we have exhausted our last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony. On that condition, I shall be delighted to take part in your association—but otherwise, no!”
Proudhon added that M. Grün was in exile with no financial resources and with a wife and children to support, and that, though he, Proudhon, understood Marx’s “philosophic wrath,” he could not regard it as unnatural that M. Grün should, as Marx had accused him of doing, “exploit modern ideas in order to live.” As a matter of fact, M. Grün was about to undertake a translation of Proudhon’s own work, and Proudhon hoped that M. Marx, correcting an unfavorable opinion produced by a moment of irritation, would do what he could to help M. Grün out of his straits by promoting the sale of the product.
The result of this incident was that Marx was to set upon Proudhon’s new book with a ferocity entirely inconsonant with the opinion of the value of Proudhon’s earlier work which he had expressed and which he was to reiterate later. But in the course of vivisecting Proudhon and exposing his basic assumptions, Marx was led to lay down for the first time in a book that reached the public his own set of counter-assumptions. Karl Marx had originally praised Proudhon for his achievement in “subjecting private property, which is the basis of political economy, to … the first examination of a decisive, relentless and at the same time scientific character.” Now Marx saw that the axiom “Property is theft,” in referring to a violation of property, itself presupposed real rights in property.
It was the old Abstract Man again, who in this case had an inalienable right to own things and who actually concealed the petty bourgeois. Proudhon declared strikes to be crimes against a fundamental “economic system,” against “the necessities of the established order”; and out of the Hegelian theory of development, which Marx had been attempting to explain to him, he had produced a new kind of utopian socialism, which did not require for its realization a genuine Hegelian emergence of the working class as the new force that was to overthrow the old, but which was an affair merely of succoring the poor under the existing system of property relations.
Marx himself now went back to Hegel to get away from the Abstract Man, whom Feuerbach had assumed as well as Proudhon, and to restore the Historical Man, whose principles together with his subsistence were always bound up with the special conditions of the period in which he lived. New conditions could not be inculcated; they had to be developed out of the old conditions through the conflict of class with class.
And here we encounter what Karl Marx himself claimed to be one of his only original contributions to the system that afterwards came to be known as Marxism. Engels says that when he, Engels, arrived in Brussels in the spring of 1845, Marx put before him the fully developed theory that all history was a succession of struggles between an exploiting and an exploited class. These struggles were thus the results of the methods of production which prevailed during the various periods—that is, of the methods by which people succeeded in providing themselves with food and clothing and the other requirements of life. Such apparently inspired and independent phenomena as politics, philosophy and religion arose in reality from the social phenomena. The current struggle between the exploiters and the exploited had reached a point at which the exploited, the proletariat, had been robbed of all its human rights and had so come to stand for the primary rights of humanity, and at which the class that owned and controlled the industrial machine was becoming increasingly unable to distribute its products—so that the victory of the workers over the owners, the taking-over by the former of the machine, would mean the end of class society altogether and the liberation of the spirit of man.
Marx and Engels—who had assimilated with remarkable rapidity the social and historical thinking of their time—thus emerged with a complete and coherent theory, which cleared up more mysteries of the past, simplified more complications of the present and opened up into the future a more practicable-appearing path than any such theory which had been hitherto proposed. And they had done more: they had introduced a “dynamic principle” (a phrase of Marx’s in his doctor’s dissertation)—we shall have more to say of it later—which got the whole system going, motivated convincingly a progression in history, as none of the other historical generalizations had done, and which not only compelled one’s interest in a great drama but forced one to recognize that one was part of it and aroused one to play a noble role.
Of this theory they had given the first full account in the opening section of The German Ideology, begun that autumn in Brussels; but, as this book was never published, it was not till the Communist Manifesto, written for the international Communist League at the turn of the year, 1847–48, that their ideas really reached the world.
Here their glass has been turned quite away from the large and vague abstract shapes that have inhabited the German heavens—they are not concerned any longer even to mock at them—and directed upon the anatomy of actual society. The Communist Manifesto combines the terseness and trenchancy of Marx, his logic which anchors the present in the past, with the candor and humanity of Engels, his sense of the trend of the age. But nowhere can we see demonstrated more strikingly what Engels owed to Marx than at this point where we can compare the first draft by Engels with the material after it had been worked over by Marx. The Principles of Communism by Engels—written, it is true, in haste—is a lucid and authoritative account of the contemporary industrial situation, which generates little emotion and leads up to no compelling climax. The Communist Manifesto is dense with the packed power of high explosives. It compresses with terrific vigor into forty or fifty pages a general theory of history, an analysis of European society and a program for revolutionary action.
This program was “the forcible overthrow of the whole extant social order,” and the putting in force of the following measures: “1. Expropriation of landed property, and the use of land rents to defray state expenditure; 2. A vigorously graded income tax; 3. Abolition of the right of inheritance; 4. Confiscation of the property of all émigrés and rebels; 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; 6. Centralization of the means of transport in the hands of the State; 7. Increase of national factories and means of production, cultivation of uncultivated land, and improvement of cultivated land in accordance with a general plan; 8. Universal and equal obligation to work; organization of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; 9. Agriculture and urban industry to work hand-in-hand, in such a way as, by degrees, to obliterate the distinction between town and country; 10. Public and free education of all children. Abolition of factory work for children in its present form. Education and material production to be combined.”
But to present the Communist Manifesto from the point of view of its evolution is to deprive it of its impact on the emotions and of its effect of a searching shaft of light. The case against the Marxist attitude has been put at its most eloquent by Proudhon in the letter we have quoted above. It is true that Marx and Engels were dogmatic; it is true that they were unjust to individuals—for Engels had now become almost as intolerant as Marx, almost as intolerant as old Caspar, his father. But such boldness and such ruthlessness were required to blow down the delusions of that age. We have indicated how both the historians and the socialists had been addicted to dealing with troublesome problems by opposing to them the capitalized ideals—a special export, precisely, from Germany—of abstract virtues, ideas, institutions. These words had been performing the same function as “that blessed word Mesopotamia,” from which the pious old woman in the story explained that she had absorbed so much comfort in the exercise of reading her Bible; and they were never really the same again after the Communist Manifesto.
To those people who talked about Justice, Marx and Engels replied, “Justice for whom? Under capitalism it is the proletariat who get caught most often and punished most severely, and who also, since they must starve when they are jobless, are driven to commit most of the crimes.” To people who talked about Liberty, they answered, “Liberty for whom?—You will never be able to liberate the worker without restricting the liberty of the owner.” To people who talked about Family Life and Love—which communism was supposed to be destroying—they answered that these things, as society stood, were the exclusive possession of the bourgeoisie, since the families of the proletariat had been dismembered by the employment of women and children in the factories and its young women reduced to love-making in mills and mines or to selling themselves when mills and mines were shut down. To people who talked about the Good and the True, Marx and Engels replied that we should never know what these meant till we had moralists and philosophers who were no longer involved in societies based on exploitation and so could have no possible stake in oppression.
With all this, the Communist Manifesto gave expression to the bitterest protest that had perhaps yet been put into print against the versions of all these fine ideals which had come to prevail during the bourgeois era: “Wherever the bourgeoisie has risen to power, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relationships. It has ruthlessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound men to their ‘natural superiors’; it has left no other bond between man and man but crude self-interest and callous ‘cash-payment.’ It has drowned pious zeal, chivalrous enthusiasm and popular sentimentalism in the chill waters of selfish calculation. It has degraded personal dignity to the level of exchange value; and in place of countless dearly bought chartered freedoms, it has set up one solitary unscrupulous freedom—that is, freedom of trade. In a word, it has replaced exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions by exploitation that is open, unashamed, direct and brutal.”
The last words of the Communist Manifesto, with their declaration of war against the bourgeoisie, mark a turning-point in socialist thought. The slogan of the League of the Just had been: “All men are brothers.” But to this Marx and Engels would not subscribe: Marx declared that there were whole categories of men whom he did not care to recognize as brothers; and they provided the new slogan which was to stand at the end: “Let the ruling classes tremble at the prospect of a communist revolution. Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. PROLETARIANS OF ALL LANDS, UNITE!” The idea of righteous war, and with it the idea of righteous hatred, has been substituted for the socialism of Saint-Simon, which had presented itself as a new kind of Christianity. All men are no longer brothers; there is no longer any merely human solidarity. The “truly human” is that which is to be realized when we shall have arrived at the society without classes. In the meantime, those elements of society which alone can bring about such a future—the disfranchised proletariat and the revolutionary bourgeois thinkers—in proportion as they feel group solidarity among themselves, must cease to feel human solidarity with their antagonists. Their antagonists—who have “left between man and man no other bond but crude self-interest and callous ‘cash-payment’ ”—have irreparably destroyed that solidarity.
We have hitherto described Marx and Engels in terms of their national and personal origins. The Communist Manifesto may be taken to mark the point at which they attain their full moral stature, at which they assume, with full consciousness of what they are doing, the responsibilities of a new and heroic role. They were the first great social thinkers of their century to try to make themselves, by deliberate discipline, both classless and international. They were able to look out on Western Europe and to penetrate, through patriotic sentiments, political catchwords, philosophical theorizings and the practical demands of labor, to the general social processes which were everywhere at work in the background; and it seemed clear to them that all the movements of opposition were converging toward the same great end.
The Communist Manifesto was little read when it was first printed—in London—in February, 1848. Copies were sent to the few hundred members of the Communist League; but it was never at that time put on sale. It probably had no serious influence on the events of 1848; and afterwards it passed into eclipse with the defeat of the workers’ movement in Paris. Yet it gradually permeated the Western world. The authors wrote in 1872 that two translations had been made into French and that twelve editions had appeared in Germany. There had been early translations into Polish and Danish; and in 1850, it had appeared in English. There had been no mention in the Communist Manifesto of either Russia or the United States: both at that time seemed to Marx and Engels the “pillars of the European social order”—Russia as a “bulwark of reaction,” a source of raw materials for Western Europe and a market for manufactured goods, the United States as a market and source of supply and as an outlet for European emigration. But it had been found worth while by the early sixties to translate the Manifesto into Russian; and in the year 1871 three translations appeared in the United States. So it did actually reach that audience of the “workers of all lands” to whom it had been addressed: it made its way to all continents, both hemispheres, rivaling the Christian Bible. As I write, it has just been translated into Afrikaans, a Dutch dialect spoken in South Africa.
Marx and Engels, still in their youth and still with the hope of ‘48 ahead of them, had in a moment of clairvoyance and confidence such as they were never quite to know again, spoken, and spoken to be heard, to all who had been crushed by the industrial system and who could think and were ready to fight.