6

Exile in Brussels, 1845–8

1. RESETTLING THE FAMILY

Karl travelled by coach ahead of his family to Brussels on 3 February 1845. Brussels was the capital of the new kingdom of Belgium, formed as a result of a successful revolt against Dutch rule in 1830–31. The city was the administrative centre of the new kingdom and the home of the new royal court, but was also famed for its manufacture of lace and furniture. Before June 1846, the country had been governed by a series of Catholic–Liberal coalitions. As one of the most tolerant and liberal regimes in the pre-1848 period, it had already provided refuge to Polish democrats, French communists and German republicans. But as a new, small and insecure state fearful of harassment by its more powerful neighbours, it could not wholly ignore diplomatic pressure. In Karl’s case, the Belgian authorities resisted Prussian demands for his expulsion, but insisted that he sign an undertaking not to publish any article with a bearing upon current Belgian politics. When Prussian pressure continued, in exasperation Karl renounced his nationality in December 1845. Henceforth, he was stateless.

Arriving in Brussels, Karl’s first thoughts were not about accommodation for his family, a subject which worried Jenny according to Karl’s notebook.1 There was the more exciting prospect of claiming a poet for the cause of revolution. According to Heinrich Bürgers, who travelled with him and was another member of the Vorwärts! collective, Karl had declared that their first task in Brussels would be to pay a visit to the celebrated young German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had recently relinquished his court pension and joined the ‘party of movement’; and so, Karl said, ‘I must make good that wrong the Rheinische Zeitung did him before he stood “on the party battlements”.’2

Following Karl’s abrupt expulsion from Paris, Jenny was forced to sell off the Marxes’ furniture and linen in order to pay for the journey to Brussels – ‘I got ridiculously little for it,’ she commented in her later reminiscences. The day after his departure, she wrote to Karl that Herwegh was playing with little Jenny, while Bakunin had unburdened himself to her with ‘rhetoric and drama’. The Herweghs put her up for a couple of days and then, ‘ill and in bitter cold weather, I followed Karl to Brussels’. Karl was unable to find suitable lodgings, and so for a month the family lodged at the modest Bois Sauvage Guest House. Thereafter, they stayed briefly in lodgings vacated by Freiligrath following his departure for Switzerland, and finally moved into a small terraced house in the Rue de l’Alliance in the Flemish quarter of the city, where they were soon joined by Moses Hess and his wife, Friedrich Engels, Heinrich Bürgers and a radical Cologne doctor, Roland Daniels. Jenny described a ‘small German colony’ that ‘lived pleasantly together’ with one or two radical Belgians, notably Philippe Gigot, and ‘several Poles’ to be found in ‘one of the attractive cafés that we went to in the evenings … What a colony of paupers there is going to be in Brussels’, Jenny wrote in one of her letters in August 1845.³

The most important family event of 1845 was the birth on 26 September of Karl and Jenny’s second daughter, Laura. In April, Jenny’s mother, Caroline, had sent them her ‘trusty maid’ Lenchen, who was to stay with Karl and Jenny for the rest of their lives. Jenny also planned how the house might be rearranged in preparation for the new arrival. Her brother, Edgar, in Brussels searching for employment, could be housed more cheaply at Bois Sauvage. Once Laura was born, Karl was to move upstairs. ‘The children’s noise downstairs would then be completely shut off, you would not be disturbed upstairs, and I could join you when things were quiet.’

While Karl and Engels went on a research trip to Manchester in July and August, Jenny, Lenchen and little Jenny – by now fourteen months old – returned to Trier to keep Caroline company: ‘oh if only you knew what bliss it is for my mother’. Dithering as to when she should return home, Jenny reflected that although ‘people are petty here, infinitely so’ and ‘life as a whole is a pocket edition’, she felt compelled to say, ‘even in the face of you arch-Anti-Germans’, that ‘I feel altogether too much at ease here in little Germany.’ Mockingly, she went on, for a woman ‘whose destiny it is to have children, to sew, to cook, and to mend, I commend miserable Germany’. There ‘one has the comfort of knowing in one’s heart of hearts that one has done one’s duty’. But now, she conceded, ‘old watchwords’ like ‘duty, honour and the like no longer mean anything’, and, she confessed, ‘we actually feel in ourselves an urge towards sentiments of positively Stirnerian egotism … We, therefore, no longer feel any inclination for the lowlier duties of life. We, too, want to enjoy ourselves, to do things and to experience THE HAPPINESS OF MANKIND in our own persons.’4

Despite the thawing of relations with Karl’s relatives, accomplished by Jenny on her trip from Paris in 1844, the relationship between Karl and his family in Trier remained strained. A year after Jenny’s 1845 visit, Karl’s sister Sophie wrote to thank Karl for his kindness towards their youngest sister, Caroline, yet another victim of consumption. Karl had evidently invited her on a trip after a visit to his Dutch relatives – his Aunt Sophie and her husband, Lion Philips – at Zaltbommel. Caroline had been very excited, but ‘the poor child felt so weak, that the doctor strongly counselled against it’. Sophie was writing to suggest that for the sake of Caroline’s ‘peace of mind’, Karl should explain to her that he had been prevented from carrying out their original plan, and that it should be postponed to another occasion.⁵

Sophie also went on to berate him for his indifference towards the rest of the family. ‘I am so very curious to see your dear children one day; the profoundly sensitive Jenny and the radiant and beautiful little Laura … Give a kiss to the lovely little beings from their aunt who is wholly unknown to them … For’, she went on, ‘however lovingly and well you have treated a sister, everything else appears to you alien, and it seems to me, dear Karl, that you have attempted to reason away the intimacy of family relationships (and those still closer).’ Sophie noted that, in her letter to Caroline, Jenny had congratulated Henriette on her birthday. But ‘you, her own son, for whom she did more than she needed to … the poor suffering mother … who sees there dying her best-loved child, the most wonderful angel, despite all cares and troubles, you have not only failed to congratulate her, but have totally ignored her … I would only wish that you did not deny your heart to such an extent and did not wholly ignore our good mother and your three other siblings.’⁶

2. THE ‘CRITIQUE’ OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

When Karl had arrived in Paris in November 1843 and attempted to contact possible authors as contributors to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, one of the few he met was the socialist writer Louis Blanc. Blanc promised him an article and allowed him to use his address for letters sent from Germany. Through Blanc, Karl quickly became acquainted with the French radical and socialist analyses of free trade, factory production and the modern economy. These themes in large part stemmed from arguments originally put forward by J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi in his New Principles of Political Economy of 1819. Sismondi had first established his reputation in 1803 as a follower of Adam Smith. But in New Principles he argued that the advent of the machine destroyed Smith’s benign picture of the relationship between competition, the division of labour and the extension of the market. Writing in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when European and even global markets were saturated by English goods, Sismondi in 1819 was to ‘protest against the modern organisation of society’ and especially against English economists of the Ricardian School, who were its main defenders.7 He argued that once the extent of market activity crossed national boundaries, ‘overproduction’ became a permanent property of the economic system. Overproduction was the consequence of mechanization. ‘Europe has reached the point of possessing in all its parts an industry and a manufacture superior to its needs.’ Competition on the world market was intensified because in each country production now surpassed consumption.

Competition was linked to the emergence of what Sismondi was one of the first to call ‘the proletariat’. According to Sismondi, the rise in population, noticeable all over Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, could not be fully explained by Malthus’s ratio between population and the quantity of subsistence (his famous claim that population increased ‘geometrically’, while increase in subsistence was only ‘arithmetical). Population increase was limited, not by the quantity of subsistence, but by the demand for labour. He argued that the increase in population was the result of a fall in the age of marriage, consequent upon the displacement of peasants and artisans by a swelling class of day labourers. In England, where this class had almost wholly replaced peasants and artisans, begging and mendicancy were reaching epidemic proportions. Without the prospect of inheriting a landholding or becoming a master-craftsman, members of this new property-less class saw no reason to defer marriage. They were just like what the Romans had called ‘proletarians’. ‘Those who had no property, as if more than all others, were called to have children: ad prolem generandum.’8 This class was a danger to itself and to others, a ‘miserable and suffering population’ which would always be ‘restless and a threat to public order’.

Blanc elaborated and dramatized this picture; he perceived French society to be in crisis. According to his Organization of Labour of 1841, the ‘bourgeois’ revolution of 1789 had ushered in a ‘commercial society’ based upon egoistic individualism. The ensuing free-market competition was a system of ‘extermination’, which led both to the impoverishment of the workers and to the ruin of large sections of the bourgeoisie. Population increased, the artisan was displaced by the journeyman, the workshop was displaced by the factory, large factories swallowed up small, and exploitation everywhere became more intensive. In England, economists like Malthus and Ricardo were believed to have endorsed a process in which this gulf between rich and poor had been pushed to extremes.

Blanc’s picture of France was reinforced by Friedrich Engels’ reports from England, and thanks to the essay by Moses Hess ‘On the Essence of Money’, the situation could now be described in Feuerbachian terms: the worker was related to the product of his labour as an ‘alien object’.⁹ Karl had already built upon some of Hess’s ideas in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he broadened further Hess’s shift from consciousness to activity. Hess had defined life as ‘the exchange of productive life activity’ involving ‘the cooperative working together of different individuals’. By contrast, in ‘the inverted world’ of money and private property, this ‘species-activity’ was displaced by the ‘egoistic’ satisfaction of private needs; man’s species-attributes became mere means towards individual self-preservation. Karl built upon this shift of perspective by adopting ‘conscious life activity’ as his starting point. For, as he argued, ‘religious estrangement occurs only in the realm of consciousness … but economic estrangement is that of real life’.¹⁰

It was not simply the accounts of social development in England and France that impressed Karl towards the end of 1843. What particularly captured his imagination was the connection which Engels made between these developments and the claims of political economy in his ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’.11 Karl first received an imperfect copy of this manuscript (it had been mangled by the police) that autumn but later published the whole text in the Jahrbücher. Engels interpreted the emergence of political economy as an effect of the expansion of trade, which had developed in parallel with the development of religion and theology. For this reason, Adam Smith was called ‘the economic Luther’, since he had proclaimed the virtues of free trade. But this was to replace ‘the Catholic candour’ of mercantilism by ‘Protestant hypocrisy’, to replace admitted rivalry by pretended friendship. Just as it was necessary to overthrow Catholicism, ‘so it was necessary to overthrow the mercantile system with its monopolies and hindrances to trade, so that the true consequences of private property would have to come to light’ and ‘the struggle of our time could become a universal human struggle’. Smith had claimed that a system of liberty would inaugurate global bonds of friendship. But the reality of free trade meant the extension of exploitation across the globe, the onset of ever-fiercer competition between nations and the expansion of the factory system, leading to dissolution of the family.¹²

What was novel and arresting about Engels’ ‘Outlines’ was its attempt to develop a systematic criticism of the categories of political economy. Engels surveyed the debate about ‘value’ among political economists and deemed it a ‘confusion’. While English economists related value to cost of production (the amount of labour embodied in a commodity), the French, especially Jean-Baptiste Say, derived it from ‘utility’, the usefulness of a commodity in the eyes of the consumer. Engels assumed he had solved the question by defining value as the relationship between cost of production and utility, and price as an effect of the reciprocal relationship between cost of production and competition. He then moved on to attack Malthus’s law of population and Say’s alleged claim (‘Say’s Law’) that there could never be overproduction by pointing to the periodic occurrence of trade crises. He also argued that these continuous fluctuations within the system undermined any moral basis for exchange.¹³

While Engels’ targets were more systematic than those of Blanc, the tone of his attack was similar. Competition was responsible for ‘the deepest degradation of mankind’. Just as Blanc summarized the discussion of French socialists, Engels built upon the economic criticism of the Manchester Owenite socialists.14 In particular, he drew upon the work of the itinerant socialist lecturer John Watts, whose Facts and Fictions of Political Economists of 1842 provided the basis of most of his own arguments.

The most striking feature of Engels’ essay – and in this he diverged from the Owenites – was that it conjoined his analysis of political economy with Proudhon’s attack on private property. Political economy, according to Engels, presupposed private property, while never questioning its existence. As ‘the science of enrichment born of the merchants’ mutual envy and greed’, political economy was largely ‘the elaboration of the laws of private property’. Unbeknown to itself, however, Engels argued, political economy was ‘a link in the chain of the general progress of mankind’. For by ‘dissolving all particular interests’, political economy prepared the way for ‘the great transformation’ towards which the century was headed, ‘the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself’.¹⁵

Undoubtedly, it was this equation between political economy and Proudhon’s idea of private property which inspired Karl to embark upon his own ‘critique of political economy’ in the early months of 1844: political economy provided the theory of civil society, or, as he later termed it, its ‘anatomy’. It was the theoretical expression of this estranged world. As Karl developed the argument in the Manuscripts and The Holy Family, political economy mistook a world in which ‘man’ had alienated his essential human attributes for the true world of man. It conflated ‘the productive life’ of man with Adam Smith’s ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’, and was therefore unable to distinguish species-man from the estranged world in which he currently had to act. This was why Karl claimed a few months later in The Holy Family that What is Property? had the same significance for ‘modern political economy’ as the famous 1789 text of Abbé Sieyès, What is the ‘Third Estate’?, had possessed for ‘modern politics’.¹⁶

Nine notebooks written in the first half of 1844 contained Karl’s first engagement with political economy.¹⁷ He took notes on Jean-Baptiste Say’s Treatise on Political Economy and his Complete Course of Practical Political Economy, standard texts in France, as well as Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and McCulloch’s history of political economy, together with works by the economists and philosophers Skarbek, Destutt de Tracy and Boiguillebert. But he paid little attention to the details of economic reasoning contained in these texts. Say was cited to confirm the idea that ‘private property’ was ‘a fact whose explanation does not concern political economy, but which forms its foundation’, thus confirming Engels’ argument that political economy was ‘in essence … a science of enrichment’.18 There were extensive notes on Smith, but no overall comments except the remark that Smith’s discussion of the relation between exchange and division of labour was a circular one. As to Ricardo, he read the French translation of the first edition together with McCulloch’s appended notice on Ricardo’s life and writings. He was therefore unaware of Ricardo’s second thoughts about the labour or cost of production theory of value which he had adopted initially; this, despite the fact that the edition of Ricardo’s works he had read contained relevant critical notes by Say. Karl seems not to have noticed the criticisms levelled against Ricardo in the 1810s and 1820s, and Ricardo’s revisions in response; in particular, that the inclusion of capital in the value of a commodity introduced instability into the relationship between value and price.¹⁹ Although he was to make a more attentive rereading of Ricardo in 1850–51, in the 1840s he still wholly depended upon McCulloch’s dogmatic reiteration of Ricardo’s argument from the first edition of The Principles in 1817. Karl’s criticism focused not upon the ambiguities of Ricardo’s theory of value, but upon ‘the inversion’ he discerned in the economists’ representation of society: ‘political economy, in order to lend its laws a greater consistency and precision, has to describe reality as accidental and abstraction as real’.²⁰

Similarly, there was no examination of James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy in its own terms, only an attack on money as ‘the estranged mediator’ in human exchanges, and yet another denunciation of abstraction: ‘one sees how political economy fixates the estranged form of social intercourse as essential and original, corresponding to human determination’.²¹ The social relationship involved in exchange was ‘mere appearance’; ‘our reciprocal complementarity’ was likewise ‘mere appearance, which serves mutual plundering’. By contrast, in a ‘human’ world, you could ‘exchange love only for love … Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life’.22

The notes which provided the basis of Karl’s ‘critique’ of political economy in the 1844 Manuscripts consisted of three notebooks. The first notebook was divided into three columns – wages, capital and rent. Under each column were to be found transcriptions or paraphrases of observations in Smith, Schulz, Ricardo and others.²³ This was followed by a passage about labour and estrangement written across the whole page. The second notebook, only seven pages, deals with labour and capital as antitheses, and attacked feudal-Romantic conceptions of the landlord. The third notebook contains discussions of private property, labour, communism and the Hegelian dialectic.

Karl’s intellectual development during this period cannot be reconstructed entirely from these notebooks. Not mentioned, but discussed in the 1844 Manuscripts, were important works like Proudhon’s What is Property? This was notable, not only for its attack on private property, but also because of its criticism of the wage relation and the remuneration of workers. Proudhon maintained that the worker retained the right to his product, even after being paid his wage, since the wage represented only a small proportion of the added value appropriated by the capitalist. Karl also maintained that the capitalist was the sole beneficiary of added productivity made possible by the cooperation between labourers. He thus touched upon the central question underlying radical criticisms of political economy. How did the apparently free and equal exchange between capitalist and wage-earner result in a disproportionate gain for the former and thus provide the basis of capital accumulation? The exchange between capitalist and worker was neither equal nor voluntary. Through the wage relation, producers of value were robbed of the fruits of their labour.

In a French context these arguments were not particularly original. Proudhon was drawing upon assumptions which had become widespread in French debates and were by no means confined to socialists. In 1836–7, Pellegrino Rossi, Say’s successor at the Collège de France, had criticized the treatment of labour in the writings of Ricardo and McCulloch as if the worker were a factor of production just like any other. Rossi’s approach was in turn developed and elaborated by Eugène Buret in his response to a prize essay question, set by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques: ‘to determine the nature and signs of poverty in several countries’ and ‘investigate the causes that produce it’. He won the prize in 1840 and used his prize money to visit England. He wrote up his findings in De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (The Misery of the Working Classes in England and France), where he argued that labour was not a commodity, a fixed quantity, which could be freely disposed of by the worker.24 The worker was not in the position of a free seller in relation to the employer; labour could neither be accumulated nor saved: ‘Labour is life, and if life is not exchanged every day for food, it soon enough perishes. For the life of man to be a commodity one would have to restore slavery.’ Capital, on the other hand, was ‘in an entirely different position; if it is not employed, it ceases only to make a profit, it is not destroyed’.²⁵

Buret’s work was important not just because of its descriptions of the condition of workers in England and France, but also because of its emphasis upon the fact that the commodity the worker sold was not labour, and that the daily exchange of ‘life’ for food entailed in the wage contract was neither free nor equal. In substance, this approach was not dissimilar to that eventually adopted by Karl in his distinction between ‘labour’ and ‘labour power’ around 1857–8. But that was not Karl’s preoccupation in 1844. In the summer of that year, he read and annotated the first volume of Buret’s study, but showed no particular interest in the critical discussion of the wage contract developed by Rossi, Buret, Proudhon and others in the 1830s and early 1840s.²⁶ Around 1844, Karl’s reading of the works of Ricardo, Buret, Proudhon and others was almost solely governed by his search for evidence of immiseration. Karl’s argument purported to be based upon what he called a ‘wholly empirical analysis’. But what this meant was indicated at the end of his notes on wages, capital and rent in the first notebook: ‘From political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker descends into a commodity, and the poorest sort of commodity, and that the poverty of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and extent of his production.’²⁷ In that context, even Proudhon’s work was unsatisfactory. It was the best that could be done from ‘the standpoint of political economy’. But the point was to ‘rise above the level of political economy’.²⁸

This was the intention of Karl’s analysis of ‘estranged labour’. The greater the development of private property and the division of labour, the more the labour of the producer fell ‘into the category of labour to earn a living, until it only has this significance’.29 In contrast to the cynicism of political economists, who paid no attention to the worker’s estrangement, Karl proceeded from ‘an actual economic fact: the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces’. This ‘fact’, Karl claimed, meant that ‘the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object’, the economic criticism of the French was now blended with a Feuerbachian inversion.

Estrangement related not only to the product of labour, but also to the activity of labour itself. The activity of the worker was ‘an alien activity not belonging to him’, a ‘self-estrangement’. In other words, as in Hess’s work, Man’s ‘essential being’ became ‘a mere means to his existence’. The ‘life of the species’ became ‘a means of individual life’. Labour was no longer the satisfaction of a need, but ‘merely a means to satisfy needs external to it’ – animal needs to maintain individual physical existence. Thus man only felt himself ‘freely active in his animal functions’. What was animal became human and what was human became animal.

Finally, estranged labour meant not only the estrangement of man from his species-nature, but also the estrangement of man from man. ‘The alien being, to whom labour and the product of labour belongs … can only be some other man than the worker.’ Every self-estrangement of man appeared in his relation to other men. His labour belonged to another and was therefore unfree. It was the labour ‘of a man alien to labour and standing outside it’, or the relation to it of ‘a capitalist’.³⁰

Karl stated, in what might originally have been intended as a preface, that the purpose of the text was once more to highlight the defects of the ‘critical theologian’ – Bruno Bauer.³¹ But in the course of 1844 the aim of the work may have shifted. When he resumed his project in Brussels, the stated purpose in the contract signed with the Darmstadt publisher Karl Leske, on 1 February 1845, was to produce a two-volume work entitled A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy.³² This particular contract was to be cancelled, but the idea of such a critique was to remain his major preoccupation over the next twenty-five years. The subtitle of Capital (Das Kapital) in 1867 was again ‘Critique of Political Economy’.

The original aim was to build a ‘German positive criticism of political economy’ which would be ‘positive, humanistic and naturalistic’. It would be based upon ‘the discoveries of Feuerbach’.33 This meant establishing a close link between Karl’s picture of the economy and Feuerbach’s picture of religion. Karl now claimed the more wealth the worker produced, the poorer the worker became. ‘It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object.’³⁴ This connection between the economy and religion was a continuation of the argument Karl had put forward in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, where Christian religious doctrine was likened to Judaic economic practice. The argument about spiritual abasement combined with the notion of capital as accumulated labour seems to have been the origin of the later argument connecting industrialization with material immiseration put forward in Capital and thereafter vigorously debated among economic historians from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Karl claimed political economy mistook a world in which man had alienated his essential human attributes for the true world of man. In civil society, where every individual appeared as ‘a totality of needs’ and in which ‘each becomes a means for the other’, these human attributes only appeared in alien guise. The patterns of behaviour observed and turned into laws by political economists were patterns produced by estrangement. Karl made no objection to the accuracy of these observations; nor did he make a specific economic criticism. The defects of political economy were not occasional, but fundamental. From the beginning, political economy treated the relation of person to person as a relationship between property-owner and property-owner. It proceeded as if private property were a natural attribute of man or a simple consequence of ‘the propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ described by Adam Smith. As a result, political economy was unable to distinguish ‘the productive life’ of man from the ‘whole estrangement connected with the money system’. The task of the critic was to uncover the essential reality of species-man buried beneath this inverted world and to translate the estranged discourse of political economy into a truly human language.³⁵

Like Fourier in his critique of ‘civilization’, authentic human passions found expression in it, but in a distorted and anti-social form. Thus the meaning of private property outside estrangement was ‘the existence of essential objects for man’. Exchange – or barter – was defined as ‘the social act, the species-act … within private ownership’ and therefore ‘the alienated species-act’, ‘the opposite of the social relationship’. The division of labour became ‘the economic expression of the social character of labour within … estrangement’. Money was ‘the alienated ability of mankind’. In a ‘human’ world, the general confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities expressed by money and exchange value would be impossible.36

Just as Feuerbach had argued that it was estrangement that had produced religion and not religion that had produced estrangement, so Karl maintained that it was estrangement that had produced private property.³⁷ There was no evidence to support this assertion, but without it Karl could not have reached his apocalyptic conclusion: that private property was the product of alienated labour, a ‘secret’ only revealed once private property had completed its domination over man. It was only once private property became ‘a world historical power’, and most of mankind was reduced to ‘abstract’ labour, and everything had been reduced to ‘quantitative being’, that the antithesis between property and lack of property was transformed into that between capital and labour, bourgeois and proletarian.³⁸

In this way private property would be driven towards self-destruction by its own economic movement. As Karl wrote in The Holy Family, ‘the proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat’.³⁹ For as private property advanced to ‘world dominion’, the condition of the proletariat became ever more ‘inhuman’. This polarization meant that at one pole there was the ever-greater sophistication of imaginary appetite (the dietary and sexual excesses of the metropolitan rich), while at the other were the treadmill and rotten potatoes (a reference to workhouse punishment and the meagre diet of the Irish poor).

But this journey of man through the vale of estrangement was not wholly negative. Firstly, private property forced man to become more productive, to the point where with the aid of steam power and automatic machinery, he now stood on the threshold of abundance.⁴⁰

Secondly, dehumanization – which Engels would capture most graphically in his 1844 account of Manchester slums – was generating proletarian revolt. Revolutionary crisis was therefore imminent.⁴¹ This would in turn usher in socialism, for ‘when the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite’.⁴²

3. BETWEEN OWEN AND FEUERBACH: THE COMMUNISM OF FRIEDRICH ENGELS

The issues raised by Feuerbach, which were to the fore in Karl’s reading of political economy, were reinforced by his meeting with Friedrich Engels, and the development of their close political companionship.43 There had been a brief and not particularly cordial encounter in the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in November 1842. Thereafter, respect for each other grew as they discovered a need for each other’s work. The friendship between them developed in the ten days they had spent together in Paris between 28 August and 6 September 1844.

Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, Westphalia, the eldest son of a textile manufacturer. While Karl possessed the qualifications of a university-trained classicist, lawyer and philosopher, Engels was equipped with the skills deemed requisite for a merchant. Brought up in a strongly Calvinist household, Friedrich attended the Gymnasium in the neighbouring town of Elberfeld before being sent to Bremen to study relevant commercial and accounting skills. But from school onwards, Engels had developed radical literary ambitions. Unlike Karl, his first political attitudes had been strongly shaped by the liberal nationalist literary movement of the 1830s. His earliest heroes had been drawn from Teutonic mythology; in Bremen, for example, he extolled the legend of Siegfried as a symbol of the courageous qualities of Young German manhood in its struggle against the petty and servile Germany of the princes.⁴⁴ He was drawn to Young Germany, particularly to the writings of Ludwig Börne, a Jewish radical and Parisian exile, whose republican denunciations of German princes and aristocrats were combined with a polemic against the Francophobe tendencies of German nationalism.

Engels gravitated towards the Young Hegelians after reading David Strauss’s Life of Jesus in Bremen towards the end of 1839. He therefore chose Berlin, near Bruno Bauer and his circle, as the place to perform his year’s military service. Military service was an activity which his patriotic father would support wholeheartedly, and so – at least for a time – Engels escaped the family firm. It was his first chance to break out from his home town and to savour life in a large city free from the surveillance of his elders. But peace-time soldiering brought its own forms of tedium, so Engels spent his spare hours socializing in the cafés and taverns frequented by the Young Hegelians. Young Hegelianism not only offered a bohemian diversion, but also gave him a chance to engage with what he called ‘the ideas of the century’. He duly attended the famous Berlin course of lectures delivered by Friedrich Schelling, the erstwhile companion and now conservative foe of Hegel, and within weeks of his arrival, writing under the pseudonym ‘Frederick Oswald’, he published pamphlets denouncing Schelling’s ‘Philosophy of Revelation’.

When Engels first got to know Karl, he was impulsive, intrepid and eclectic. He had no contact with the university and no philosophical training; and so the growing disagreements between Young Hegelians appear to have made little impression upon him. Until he joined forces with Karl in Paris in the summer of 1844, Engels’ journalistic writings showed no awareness of the growing rift between the supporters of Bauer and those of Feuerbach. He saw in them a common assault upon Christianity which would lead to the replacement of theology by anthropology. In politics, too, Engels was barely touched by Hegel. Unlike most of the other Berlin Young Hegelians, he was a republican and a revolutionary democrat before he became a Hegelian. In Berlin, he still believed he could combine Hegel’s philosophy of history with Börne’s republican view of politics. In 1842, in a satirical poem about Bruno Bauer’s dismissal from his university post co-written with Bruno’s younger brother, Edgar, Engels referred to himself as the Jacobin ‘Oswald the Montagnard’: ‘A radical is he, dyed in the wool and hard / Day in, day out, he Plays the guillotine/a single, solitary tune and that’s a cavatina.’ Enthusiasm for Jacobinism together with the vehement rejection of Louis Philippe’s juste milieu liberal constitutionalism in France was one way of expressing his off-the-record delight in shocking the respectable. Another was joining in with the anti-Christian excesses of the ‘Free’.45

Engels’ acquaintance with the character of Young Hegelianism was largely confined to the debate over Christianity. His distinctive voice developed not within the Young Hegelian circles of Berlin, but in England, to which he was sent to represent the firm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester between November 1842 and August 1844. There he regularly attended Owenite debates, and became more conversant with the Owenite philosophical assumptions expressed in the Manchester Hall of Science than with the philosophical tradition of German idealism.

During the summer of 1842 at the height of Chartist agitation, Hess – the foreign editor of the Rheinische Zeitung – foretold the final onset of an ‘approaching catastrophe’. In a meeting with Hess in Cologne on his way to England in November 1842, Engels had been converted to ‘communism’. For Hess’s prophecy seemed to be coming true, and within days of his arrival in England Engels was writing in similar catastrophist terms.46 In an article written in 1843 Engels defined his shift as a consequence of discussions among the Young Hegelians. He stated that in 1842 the Young Hegelians were ‘atheist and republican’, but that by the autumn of that year ‘some of the party contended for the insufficiency of political change, and declared their opinion to be, that a Social revolution based upon common property, was the only state of mankind agreeing with their abstract principles’. He described Hess as ‘the first communist of the party’.⁴⁷

During his stay in England, Engels continued his double life. He was a businessman in office hours, but wrote frequently for the English and German radical press and began collecting materials for his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, which appeared in 1845. Outside his life as a businessman, he developed a relationship with a radical Irish mill worker, Mary Burns, and got to know some of the leading Owenites and Chartists around Manchester. Much of the enduring interest of his book derived from these encounters and from the first hand observation which resulted from them.

Engels followed Hess in believing that in each of the three major European nations, events were leading to the conclusion that ‘a thorough revolution of social arrangements based on community of property’ was an ‘urgent and unavoidable necessity’. The English had arrived at this conclusion ‘practically’, the French ‘politically’ and the Germans ‘philosophically by reasoning on first principles’. Engels was particularly impressed by the practical perspectives of the Owenites. In the autumn of 1843, he wrote that ‘in everything bearing on practice, upon the facts of the present state of society, we find that the English Socialists are a long way before us’.⁴⁸ Around the same time he wrote ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ – much of it again taken from Owenite sources. In it he claimed that private property was responsible for the contradictions of political economy, and that after the approaching triumph of free trade, it would propel England towards its final social crisis.49

In subsequent essays, published in the Jahrbücher and Vorwärts!, Engels went on to enlarge upon this crisis and its historical causes. His starting point resembled that of Thomas Carlyle’s famous essay of 1843, Past and Present: individualism was dissolving all social ties. After the dissolution of feudalism, mankind was no longer to ‘be held together by force, by political means, but by self-interest, that is, by social means’. ‘The abolition of feudal servitude has made “cash payment the sole relation between human beings” ’.⁵⁰ Mercantilists had acknowledged the antagonism which underlay buying cheap and selling dear. But Adam Smith had praised commerce as ‘a bond of union and friendship’.

This ‘hypocritical way of misusing morality for immoral purposes’ was ‘the pride of the free-trade system’. All small monopolies were abolished ‘so that the one great basic monopoly, property, may function the more freely and unrestrictedly’. By ‘dissolving nationalities’, the liberal economic system had intensified ‘to the utmost the enmity between individuals, the ignominious war of competition’; ‘commerce absorbed industry into itself and thereby became omnipotent’. Through industrialization and the factory system, the last stage was reached, ‘the dissolution of the family’. ‘What else can result from the separation of interests, such as forms the basis of the free-trade system?’ Money, ‘the alienated empty abstraction of property’, had become the master of the world. Man had ceased to be the slave of men and has become the slave of things. ‘The disintegration of mankind into a mass of isolated mutually repelling atoms in itself means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular interests and is the last necessary step towards the free and spontaneous association of men.’⁵¹

The overarching framework of Engels’ analysis was that of a final crisis of Christianity: ‘the Christian world order cannot be taken any further than this’. His portrayal of the roots of this crisis drew upon both Bauer and Feuerbach without much discrimination. Following Moses Hess, he argued that the crisis was happening in England because ‘only England has a social history … Only here have principles been turned into interests before they were able to influence history’. ‘Democratic equality’, Engels wrote in March 1844, was a ‘chimera’. But the democracy towards which England was moving ‘was not that of the French Revolution, whose antithesis was the monarchy and feudalism, but the democracy whose antithesis is the middle class and property … the struggle of democracy against the aristocracy in England is the struggle of the poor against the rich. The democracy towards which England is moving is a social democracy.’52

The origin of the present crisis was to be traced back to ‘the Christian-Germanic view of the world’ whose basic principle was ‘abstract subjectivity’. After the disintegration of feudalism, this idea had culminated in ‘the Christian state’. More generally, it had elevated ‘interestedness’ which was ‘subjective and egotistical’ to ‘a general principle’ and the consequence was ‘universal fragmentation, the concentration of each individual upon himself’, the hegemony of individual interest and the domination of property.⁵³

The most important effect of the eighteenth century for England was the creation of the proletariat by ‘the industrial revolution’. The social upheaval of the industrial revolution and the expansion of trade were portents of ‘the assembling, the gathering of mankind from the fragmentation and isolation into which it had been driven by Christianity; it was the penultimate step towards the self-understanding and self-liberation of mankind’. Engels had been confident about the ‘irresistible progress’ of the human species through history, ‘its ever certain victory over the unreason of the individual’. ‘Man has only to understand himself’, Engels wrote in 1844, and ‘to organise the world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature and he will have solved the riddle of our time’.⁵⁴

After his conversations with Karl in Paris, Engels somewhat modified his position on England. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, which he wrote up in the months following, the focus was no longer simply upon private property, individualism and social dissolution. These themes were now joined by an emphasis upon the redemptive role of the proletariat, a theme he had probably derived from a reading of Karl’s depiction of its role in his introduction to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in the Jahrbücher, as well as from his discussions with him in August 1844. The story told in the book derived from the categories of Feuerbach. Starting from an account of the bucolic innocence of English pre-industrial textile workers, Engels recounted how industrialization had dragged these workers into the mainstream of world history and progressively reduced them to the horrific animal conditions detailed in his description of Manchester. But pauperization and dehumanization formed the essential prelude to the recovery of humanity through proletarian revolt, beginning with crude acts of individual violence and culminating with Chartism, the organized labour movement and social revolution.

Engels still aligned himself with the Owenites, but his view was becoming markedly more critical of their political passivity. In the summer of 1844 he still believed like the Owenites that ‘social evils cannot be cured by People’s Charters’. By 1845 in The Condition of the Working Class in England, he criticized the Owenites for their disapproval of ‘class hatred’ and for not discerning ‘the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order’. He now considered naive their ambition ‘to place the nation in a state of communism at once, overnight, not by the unavoidable march of its political development’. He argued that they should ‘condescend to return for a moment to the Chartist standpoint’; this might enable them to conquer ‘the brutal element’ in what would otherwise be the ‘bloodiest war of the poor against the rich’ ever waged.55

Engels was the first to identify the revolutionary possibilities of modern industry, to highlight the place of the factory worker and to dramatize for German socialists the character of modern industrial class struggle. His study of England connected the stages of the formation of proletarian class-consciousness to phases of industrial development. His focus on the steam-powered factory rather than on the workshop also led him to emphasize the relationship between workers and the means of production, rather than the product alone, and to describe the relation between classes, rather than the competition between alienated individuals; and this account made a deep impression on Karl. Almost twenty years later, Karl wrote to Engels, ‘so far as the main theses in your book are concerned … they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844’.⁵⁶

The result of the ten-day meeting between Engels and Karl in Paris was an agreement to produce a joint attack on Bruno Bauer. Although the ensuing pamphlet, The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Criticism against Bruno Bauer and Company appeared in February 1845 under both their names, only a dozen or so of its more than 200 pages – a small section dealing with conditions in England – were written by Engels. The Holy Family took the form of a prolonged attack on the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, a journal produced between the end of 1843 and October 1844 by the Bauer brothers and their small coterie of supporters in Berlin.

The Holy Family began with the grandiloquent claim that ‘real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism.’57 Its length and detail were excessive. Georg Jung, one of Karl’s most devoted Cologne admirers, congratulated him on the pamphlet’s treatment of Proudhon and of the popular novelist Eugène Sue, but found ‘the many enumerations of trivia terribly tiring at first … I have only one request to make,’ he went on, ‘don’t be deflected again by other works.’ He urged him to get on with his work on political economy and politics.⁵⁸ Engels writing from Barmen in March 1845 pointed out the main defect of the book. ‘The supreme contempt’ evinced towards the Literatur-Zeitung was in glaring contrast to the length devoted to it. Furthermore, the criticism of speculation and abstract being in general would be incomprehensible to a wider public.⁵⁹

The book did not add substantially to Karl’s previous critique of Bauer’s position. More interesting was its application in the discussion of some of the themes found in the Literatur-Zeitung. These included the French Revolution, Proudhon’s political economy, Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, and a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-French materialism. The political scenario was still that originally laid out by Hess and reiterated by Karl in his attack on Ruge in The King of Prussia and Social Reform. Each of the three main European states, France, England and Germany, would pursue its own path to emancipation. Thus, in the case of France, against Edgar Bauer’s attempt to cast Proudhon as a moralist, Karl declared his work to be a ‘scientific manifesto of the French proletariat’.⁶⁰

Back in Barmen and writing up The Condition, Engels pursued a similar course. He firmly predicted that England was destined to experience an apocalyptic social revolution; but, in Germany, he still hoped for a peaceful change inaugurated by the philosophers. In March 1845 he was delighted (incorrectly) to inform the readers of the Owenite New Moral World of ‘the most important fact’ that ‘Dr Feuerbach has declared himself a communist’ and that ‘communism was in fact only the practice of what he had proclaimed long before theoretically’.61 In speeches which he made around the same time to ‘the respectables’ of Barmen and Elberfeld, together with Moses Hess, Engels also argued that the transition to communism in Germany ought to be a peaceful one. Middle-class audiences were urged to embrace communism on prudential grounds. Their position, he warned, was being undermined by the polarization between rich and poor, by the impact of competition and by the chaos resulting from periodic trade crises. As an alternative to revolution, he argued for the benefits of planning and for the gradual introduction of community of goods. In the interim, helpful measures could be introduced – free education, the reorganization of poor relief and a progressive income tax.⁶²

4. ANSWERING STIRNER

In October 1844, Max Stirner published his attack on Feuerbachian humanism, The Ego and Its Own. Both Engels and Hess read an early specimen copy sent by the publisher, Otto Wigand. Stirner’s basic objection to this form of humanism was its quasi-religious ethos. Feuerbach’s criticism of religion had focused upon the separation of human attributes (‘predicates’) from human individuals (‘subjects’) – hence ‘the inversion of subject and predicate’ – and their reassembly as attributes of a fictive God. But, as Stirner pointed out, Feuerbach himself did not return these alienated attributes to human individuals, but rather to another equally fictive creation, ‘man’ or ‘species-being’. ‘Man’ continued to be presented to individuals as their ‘vocation’ or ethical goal. ‘Man’ was in effect just another version of the Protestant God; and this was an attack made worse by Feuerbach’s own admission that he had taken the term ‘species’ from Strauss, who had employed it as a dynamic substitute for the place of Christ in orthodox Christianity. In place of Feuerbach’s humanism, Stirner advocated the primacy of the ego:

To the Christian the world’s history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or ‘man’; to the egoist only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself, not the mankind-idea, not God’s plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, and the like. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby.63

Engels and Hess disagreed about the book. Engels’ first reaction was favourable. Writing to Karl from Barmen in November 1844, he compared Stirner with Bentham: ‘We must not simply cast it aside, but rather use it as the perfect expression of present-day folly and, while inverting it, continue to build on it.’ This, because it was so one-sided, he argued, would immediately result in ‘communism’. ‘In its egoism, the human heart’ is ‘unselfish and self-sacrificing’; ‘we are communists out of egoism’. ‘It is out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not mere individuals.’⁶⁴

Hess strongly disagreed. He was shocked that readers, unaware of Young Hegelian developments, might assume that ‘recent German Philosophers’ – in particular Stirner – ‘have published their writings at the instigation of reactionaries’. Hess focused especially upon Stirner’s assertion that ‘as the individual is the whole of nature, so he is the whole of the species too’. Stirner’s erasure of the difference between the particular man and the human species ignored the fact that this man remained ‘divided’; and this division could only be resolved through ‘socialism’. Instead of believing ‘that we will only be something through a social union with our neighbouring men’, the implication of Stirner’s position, like that of Bauer, was that our misery could be cast out, that the divisiveness of our social isolation could be pushed aside and that ‘we could be divinised and humanised by mere theoretical knowledge alone’. Socialists proposed that ‘we should become real species-beings’, and thereby create a society in which ‘everyone can cultivate, exercise and perfect their human qualities’. Stirner wanted to ‘know nothing of this actual man’. His response was: ‘I, the egoist, have not at heart the welfare of the “human society”, I sacrifice nothing to it, I only utilise it; but to be able to utilise it completely I transform it rather into my property and my creature; that is, I annihilate it, and form in its place the Union of Egoists.’⁶⁵

Karl certainly felt targeted in Stirner’s attack upon the religiosity of Feuerbach’s language of ‘man’, and therefore required to reply.⁶⁶ In Paris, in December 1844, he wrote to Börnstein, the editor, explaining that his ‘review of Stirner’ for Vorwärts! would not be ready for the next number, but promising it for the following week.67 His reaction to Stirner’s book was evidently closer to that of Hess. For Engels wrote to Karl again from Barmen around 20 January 1845, regretting the first impression the book had made upon him. He stated that he was now in entire agreement with Karl, and with Hess, who ‘after several changes of mind came to the same conclusion as yourself’.⁶⁸

As in his polemic against the Bauers in The Holy Family, Karl’s ‘review’ of Stirner was of inordinate length and lacking in any sense of proportion. The unpublished manuscript totalled more than 300 pages. The urgings of Jenny, of Engels and of Jung and other friends were to get on with his Critique of Politics and of Political Economy. But, despite this, the polemic against Stirner appears to have preoccupied Karl during the first half of 1845. In the summer of that year, it even prompted plans made together with Engels and Joseph Weydemeyer to produce a polemical volume akin to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher criticizing ‘German philosophy’.⁶⁹ Like Hess, in his ‘review’ Karl evaded Stirner’s main point: the moralistic, normative and still quasi-religious character of socialist rhetoric. But Stirner’s criticism was tacitly conceded. Karl replaced the normative tone by recourse to the notion of class struggle, an idea which had been commonplace in French political writing since the Revolution.⁷⁰ ‘Communism’ was redescribed. It was no longer ‘an ideal to which reality’ would ‘have to adjust itself’. It was now ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.⁷¹

Karl’s attack on Stirner, ‘Saint Max’, was an elephantine elaboration of Hess’s argument. Stirner’s emphasis upon the identity of the individual and the species, according to Karl, implied that Stirner was intent upon some covert form of self-divinization. Just about acceptable as a jeu d’esprit, Karl’s satirical polemic became silly when it was pushed too far, and especially so when it was accompanied by a leaden humour about saints and church councils. In fact, as Stirner replied to his critics, he had no belief in the metaphysical reality of the divine. Nor was he damaged by Karl’s criticism that the Stirnerian ‘ego’ was shaped by the social and cultural environment of which it was part. All that mattered from Stirner’s point of view was that the individual ego lived according to its own will.⁷²

5. A MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY?

Forty years later, in the decade following Karl’s death, Engels recalled, in his essay ‘On the History of the Communist League’, of 1885, his first extended meeting with Karl in Paris at the end of August 1844. ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time. When, in the spring of 1845, we met again in Brussels,’ Engels went on, ‘Marx had already fully developed his materialist theory of history in its main features.’73

This was a truly misleading account. Karl and Engels converged on certain points of current interest: the espousal of Feuerbach, for instance, the adoption of a socialist rather than a republican agenda, and, above all, a belief in the central importance of political economy. Engels’ tendency to defer to Karl’s intellectual authority also smoothed out some areas of possible contention. But their intellectual trajectories had been different and the differences between them persisted. The disagreement between Hess, Engels and Karl in their reactions to Stirner provides one important clue to their deeper differences. Both Hess and Karl over the previous year had emphasized a conception of life as ‘the exchange of productive life activity’ or ‘conscious life activity’. There was no such emphasis in Engels, whose viewpoint had remained much closer to that of the Owenites, and who, therefore, thought that by a change of circumstances Stirnerian self-love could assume a ‘communist’ form.

The textual support for Engels’ second claim about the foundation of a ‘materialist conception of history’ may have derived from his rereading in much changed circumstances of the opening lines of The Holy Family. There he read that ‘real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes “self-consciousness” or “spirit” for the real individual man’.⁷⁴ Engels’ understanding of idealism remained superficial.⁷⁵ He may not therefore have seen any reason to distinguish between Karl’s obsessive and mildly patricidal desire to differentiate himself from Bruno Bauer – his former Doktorvater – and the idealist tradition as a whole. Engels’ elaboration of his account in the essay ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’ (1886) compounded this error. He explained the philosophical conflicts of the period as a battle between ‘two great camps’: ‘those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature and, therefore in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other … comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.’76 This imaginary battle between ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ was a product of Engels’ conflation of the debates of the mid-1840s with his particular version of a much later post-Darwinian materialism premised upon the primacy of nature. It was remote from the substance of the Young Hegelian debates of the 1840s.

These errors and misunderstandings contained in Engels’ account of the advent of ‘the materialist conception of history’ were amplified in the work of Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), the so-called ‘father of Russian Marxism’.⁷⁷ He presented Karl’s learned attempt to correct Bauer’s account of Enlightenment philosophy in The Holy Family as an endorsement of the Anglo-French materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁷⁸

The last steps towards the invention of this new theoretical tradition were taken in the twentieth century. Karl’s theory was now called ‘historical materialism’. The process was completed in the 1920s and 1930s with the publication of what was presented as the second joint composition of Karl and Engels, The German Ideology. It began with the publication by David Riazanov of a single chapter, ‘I. Feuerbach’ in Russian in 1924.⁷⁹ A German edition of this ‘chapter’ followed in 1926, and then – assembled together with the essays on Stirner and Bauer and a putative second volume dealing with ‘the prophets of true socialism’ – these manuscripts were published as a complete book in 1932. What purported to be the first chapter, entitled ‘Feuerbach’, soon became famous and was republished innumerable times as a supposed résumé of ‘Marxism’ or ‘historical materialism’. But it has recently been demonstrated that it was ‘factitiously’ put together by Riazanov and his associates in the 1920s. The purpose of its publication during the early years of the Soviet Union was to complete the exposition of ‘Marxism’ as a system by connecting what Karl in 1859 had called a process of ‘self-clarification’ with Engels’ claim about Karl’s development of ‘the materialist conception of history’ in 1885.⁸⁰

According to Engels, Karl developed his new ‘materialist conception of history’ between his completion of The Holy Family in the autumn of 1844 and his reunion with Engels in Brussels in the spring of 1845. During these months, Karl did not publish anything. The only piece of relevant documentation, which Engels discovered when going through papers dating from that period, was a two-page entry in one of Karl’s notebooks, entitled ‘Ad Feuerbach’.81

This document referred to materialism at various points. But its main aim was to criticize the passivity of the materialist approach; passivity was ‘the chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included)’.⁸² Such a criticism could not be construed as a contribution towards what Engels meant by ‘the materialist conception of history’. The supposed battle between ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ invoked by Engels was a late-nineteenth-century preoccupation. During his years in Paris and Brussels, Karl’s ambition – like that of all German philosophers in the pre-1848 period – was not to develop a ‘materialist conception’, but rather to construct a philosophical system that reconciled materialism and idealism, and incorporated nature and mind without assigning primacy to one or the other.

Feuerbach was criticized, both in the ‘Theses’ and in Karl’s other writings of the time, for the passivity inherent in his association of man with sensuousness, rather than with ‘practical human sensuous activity’. According to Karl, Feuerbach did not see that the sensuous world he invoked was ‘the product of industry and the state of society’ and that ‘the social system’ was modified ‘in accordance with changed needs’.⁸³ As will be seen, this was a criticism which derived not so much from ‘materialism’ as mainly from the legacy of idealism.⁸⁴ It is also important to remember that Karl was reluctant to concede too much to ‘idealism’ because its most obvious standard-bearer was Bruno Bauer. The argument that idealism ‘does not know sensuous activity as such’ was inaccurate.⁸⁵ So far as the claim had any validity, it mainly applied to Feuerbach, whose conception of activity was very circumscribed.

The one area in which Karl identified himself with a materialist position was in his support for Feuerbach’s denial that abstractions possessed any existence beyond their empirical content. This was the basis of Karl’s belief that there was a parallel between religious alienation in the spiritual realm and social alienation in the domain of material production. But this was not the product of a newly developing ‘materialist conception’ in 1845. The attack on abstraction had already become a prominent feature of his thought in 1843. Furthermore, it was to remain an important and recurrent theme throughout his subsequent work. As his well-known section on ‘the fetishism of commodities’ in Capital was to testify, it remained a central element in his ‘critique of political economy’.86

In the mid-1840s, this critique of abstraction not only guided his criticism of economists, but also his approach to all forms of thought. At the end of 1846 in his letter to Pavel Annenkov, for instance, he explained his criticism of Proudhon: ‘He fails to see that economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that they are truths only insofar as those relations continue to exist. Thus he falls into the error of bourgeois economists, who regard those economic categories as eternal laws, and not as historical laws, which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces.’ He claimed that Proudhon failed to understand that ‘those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity – also produce the ideas, categories, i.e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations’.⁸⁷

The thought was equally present almost twenty years later. In the economic manuscripts of 1863, he wrote, ‘The rule of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer … This is exactly the same relation in the sphere of material production, in the real social life process … as is represented by religion in the ideological sphere: the inversion of the subject into the object and vice versa.’⁸⁸ Lastly, it is worth noting Karl’s continuing enthusiasm for this procedure in a somewhat different area of inquiry, his excitement about the concrete empirical origins of the language of abstraction in Hegel’s Science of Logic: ‘But what would Old Hegel say, were he to learn in the hereafter that the general [das Allgemeine] in German and Nordic means only the communal land, and that the particular, the special [das Sondere, Besondere], means only private property divided off from the communal land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of “our intercourse” after all.’⁸⁹

6. THE LEGACY OF IDEALISM: A NEW VISION OF LABOUR

In these years spent in Brussels, Karl first declared his intellectual independence, not only from Bauer and Ruge, but also from Feuerbach. It is, therefore, a good point at which to pick out what was most novel and distinctive about Karl’s political and philosophical position, just as its main features were beginning to acquire a permanent shape.

Most striking during these years was the change in his vision of socialism and the proletariat in the light of a new conception of the historical significance of labour. What inspired this new conception was not his putative materialism, but a particular appropriation of the basic assumptions of German idealism. This becomes clear when Karl’s approach is compared with the approaches of other radicals and socialists at the time. Their outlook was shaped by a naturalistic version of materialism. Their starting point, standard in England from the time of Locke through to Bentham, prevalent among the Philosophes and Idéologues in France and the followers of Spinoza in Germany, was a conception of man as a natural being. This meant that man’s actions were motivated by the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. As a creature of nature, man was primarily defined by his needs and impulses. Throughout the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, this position offered a welcome alternative to the orthodox Christian emphasis upon original sin.

Not surprisingly, this was also the founding assumption of the many varieties of socialism that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s; and it was explicitly espoused by the largest socialist groupings, the followers of Owen in England and of Cabet in France. In this approach, man was a product of his environment, a consumer governed by his appetites and needs. By improving this environment through better education and a more enlightened attitude towards reward and punishment, it would be possible to transform human nature and increase the extent of human happiness. This had also been Karl’s starting point in 1843, when he and Ruge planned the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher as a journal which would address ‘those who think and those who suffer’.

Karl’s innovation in the course of 1844 was to apply the insights of idealism to the understanding of labour, to recuperate its emphasis upon activity and man’s position as a producer. Most striking was the connection made in these writings between two areas of discourse hitherto unrelated to each other: on the one hand, discussion of the social question and the plight of the proletariat and, on the other, the world-transforming significance accorded to labour in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. By making this connection, Karl identified socialism with human self-activity as it had been invoked in the idealist tradition following the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant.90

Kant and Fichte had already challenged the passivity of the view of man as a natural being. But in the Phenomenology, Hegel built upon this idealist inheritance and translated it into a vision of history. According to Karl, Hegel had grasped ‘the self-creation of man as a process’ and in so doing had grasped the essence of labour, and comprehended the creation of man as ‘the outcome of man’s own labour’.⁹¹ Man, according to Karl, was not merely a ‘natural being’, but ‘a human natural being’, whose point of origin was not nature, but history. Unlike animals, man made his activity ‘the object of his will’. He could form objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. Thus history could be seen as the humanization of nature through man’s ‘conscious life activity’ and, at the same time, the humanization of man himself through ‘the forming of the five senses’. History was the process of man becoming Gattungswesen (‘species-being’) and the basis of man’s ability to treat himself as ‘a universal, and therefore a free being’, not determined by his particular needs.⁹²

The idealist tradition was crucial in focusing upon the capacity of subjects to resist or override natural desires or needs and to submit these impulses to rational scrutiny. Already in 1786, Kant had reinterpreted the biblical story of the Fall as a parable about man’s escape from a natural condition. Despite his yearning to escape ‘the wretchedness of his condition … between him and that imagined place of bliss, restless reason would interpose itself, irresistibly impelling him to develop the faculties implanted within him … It would make him take up patiently the toil which he yet hates, and pursue the frippery which he despises … Man’s departure from that paradise … was nothing but the transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state of humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control – in a word, from the tutelage of nature to the state of freedom.’⁹³

This ability to resist natural desires or submit them to rational scrutiny was what was meant by the term spontaneity in the idealist tradition. Spontaneity meant inward self-determination and was present in German philosophy from the time of Leibniz and became the centrepiece of Kant’s conception of practical reason. Its crucial political implication was that individuals might shape their actions not in pursuit of welfare and happiness, but in the establishment of morality and right.94 One of Hegel’s crucial achievements in the Phenomenology was to show how the concept of right might extend beyond the conscience of the individual, and become embodied in institutions and in interpersonal relations, and form the basis of what he called ‘ethical life’.⁹⁵ Karl’s invocation of the self-making of man by labour in the 1844 Manuscripts contained his version of spontaneity and freedom as human attributes. Labour was a form of activity which entailed a continuous process of interaction with nature, not one simply driven by need, for as the 1844 Manuscripts emphasized, it could also be associated with freedom, for man could shape things according to the law of beauty. Labour as the activity of self-directed individuals was purposive and teleological (driven by pursuit of an end). The resistance to be overcome in any labour process was either natural – the operation of causal mechanisms in the physical world – or historical – the conflict it might occasion with existing social relations. In this sense human history might be understood as the continual and cumulative process of interaction between teleology and causality.

In the light of this approach, the depiction of man as a passive being, as a consumer dependent upon nature to supply his needs, became Karl’s principal criticism of contemporary socialism. That was why his so-called ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, written early in 1845, were as much a criticism of socialism as of Feuerbach himself. This was certainly true of the third thesis, which argued ‘that the materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated’.⁹⁶ It also explains part of Karl’s objection to Proudhon. In Karl’s view, the labour question was not simply about consumption or wages. The ambition of organized workers was not simply to attain ‘greater happiness’ through the acquisition of more material goods, but to change productive relations.

According to Karl’s account in 1844, ‘socialism’ as the transcendence of ‘self-estrangement had followed the same path of development as self-estrangement itself’. Its first crude emanation had been the extension of the category of worker to all men. In its most brutish form it had substituted for marriage (a ‘form of exclusive private property’) the ‘community of women’ and general prostitution. This type of communism was ‘the logical expression of private property’. It was ‘the culmination of envy’ and ‘the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation’, ‘the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man, who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not even reached it’. Developed communism would get beyond ‘the vileness of private property which wants to set itself up as the positive community system’. Communism had still to reach the ‘return of man to himself’. True communism was ‘the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development … This communism as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.’ It was ‘the riddle of history solved’.97

The idea that freedom meant self-activity, and that the capacity to produce was man’s ‘most essential’ characteristic, led Karl to conclude in 1844 that ‘estranged labour’ formed the basis of all other forms of estrangement and, therefore, that ‘the whole of human servitude’ was ‘involved in the relation of the worker to production’. For ‘estranged labour’ was the inversion of ‘conscious life activity’. Man’s ‘essential being’ became a mere means to his ‘existence’. Karl never published his 1844 reflections on ‘estranged labour’. But his basic assumption remained. In Kantian terms, wage work was a form of heteronomy, an inversion of freedom conceived as the self-activity of the producer.

Contrast this with ‘the materialist conception of history’, as Plekhanov later understood it. In his conception, the role not only of politics but also of the relations of production was given only a derivative and secondary importance. Rather than falling for a ‘dualism’ between ‘economy’ and ‘psychology’, Plekhanov argued, both should be seen as the product of ‘the state of productive forces’, which he, following Darwin, equated with ‘the struggle for existence’. ‘The struggle for existence creates their economy, and on the same basis arises their psychology as well. Economy itself is something derivative, just like psychology.’⁹⁸ Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), the editor of Die Neue Zeit and a major Marxist theorist of the Second International, went even further. His intellectual ambitions were always dominated by the attempt to discover universal natural scientific laws of development, to which human, animal and vegetable were alike subject. In particular, he was concerned to prove the universality of the ‘social instincts in the plant, animal and human world’. It was these organic instincts and drives which he thought to underlie what philosophers had defined as ethics. According to Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, published in 1906, ‘what appeared to Kant as the creation of a higher world of spirits, is a product of the animal world … an animal impulse and nothing else is the moral law … the moral law is of the same nature as the instinct for reproduction’.99

This form of nature-based determinism had little in common with the forms of belief and behaviour which Karl, following Feuerbach, had defined as ‘abstraction’ or ‘alienation’. Abstraction was a product of culture rather than nature and arose in a situation in which self-determination took a perverse form. Man makes himself the victim of the abstractions which he has created and builds upon these misperceptions. Thus the teleological forward movement, together with the energy embodied within it, remained, but expressed itself, on the one hand, in the ‘political state’ and, on the other, in a market fuelled by private interests. It was because this dynamic was the result of self-determination rather than natural determination that man retained the capacity to free himself from the alienating institutional structure which came into being with patriarchy, private property and religion.

7. RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF CIVIL SOCIETY

During his time in Brussels in 1845 and 1846, Karl elaborated his new insights into the place of labour or ‘production’ in the self-making of man. This meant transforming his ideas about civil society from an aggregation of fragmented exchangers, each driven by self-interest, to a relationship between producers. Such a conception provided a new basis for the existence of classes. To aid his depiction of labour in 1844, Karl used Hegel’s depiction of ‘external teleology’ in his Science of Logic.¹⁰⁰ This enabled him to distinguish three moments in the labour process – ‘the subjective purpose’, ‘the means’ and ‘the realized purpose’. When set against the ideal of autonomy (purposeful activity freely decided upon by the self or free self-activity), Karl was able to highlight the forms of heteronomy embodied in the ownership of the means of production or the determination of its purpose by another.

In the following year, 1845, Karl developed a second model, in which the function of labour was placed within an overall social and historical process.101 In this account, the process and purpose of labour were presented as independent of the will of the labourers. This made possible a dynamic vision of history underpinned by a teleology punctuated by a succession of historical stages. In place of a vaguely delineated rise of a post-classical civil society, from feudal society to the French Revolution, he articulated a more precise historical sequence of property forms. This historical sequence relied on the researches of the German Historical School of Law, with ‘tribal’, ‘ancient/communal’ and ‘feudal’ phases.¹⁰² ‘The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society.’¹⁰³ Such an approach opened up ways of presenting a systematic and cumulative history of labour, and of introducing the idea of modes of production. These constituted different types of relationship between labourers, means of production and the product. ‘History’, Karl argued, ‘is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity.’¹⁰⁴

In the course of 1845 and 1846, Karl managed to express more succinctly his picture of the relationship between social relations and productive development. In late 1846, in a letter to the wealthy Russian traveller and intellectual Pavel Annenkov, he outlined the new approach:

If you assume given stages of development in production, commerce or consumption, you will have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding organization, whether of the family, of the estates or of the classes – in a word, a corresponding civil society. If you assume this or that civil society, you will have this or that political system, which is but the official expression of civil society …

Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive forces – upon which his whole history is based – for every productive force is an acquired force, the product of previous activity. Thus the productive forces are the result of man’s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the condition in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation …

[If he is not] to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, man is compelled to change all his traditional social forms as soon as the mode of commerce ceases to correspond to the productive forces acquired.105

One of the ways in which Karl’s thinking shifted in the course of rethinking civil society was in the place he now accorded to the bourgeoisie. Hegel’s modernity was characterized by the tension between particularity and universality, civil society and the state, as necessary constituents of objective spirit. In Karl’s essays on the attainment of a rational state in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, the part played by individual economic interest and private property was purely negative. In the 1844 Manuscripts, similarly the dynamics of civil society were ignored except as part of a pathology of immiseration, which had ultimately turned a distinction between property and non-property into the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.¹⁰⁶ But, in 1847, in The Poverty of Philosophy, there was an altogether more positive appreciation of the development of the forces of production and class struggle as the underpinnings of the forward movement of history: ‘the very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and immediate labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms.’¹⁰⁷

By the time Karl composed the Communist Manifesto, his thought had come full circle. From the base defender of private property, the ‘bourgeoisie’ had become an epic hero of the forward march of humanity: ‘It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals … In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction the products of different lands and climes.’¹⁰⁸ The bourgeoisie was entering the last phase of its rule. Not only had there been the first instances of proletarian revolt, but there were the first signs that the further advance of production was being ‘fettered’ by the bourgeois property form.109 But, in the meantime, what more powerful instance could there be that ‘the self-creation of man’ was ‘the outcome of man’s own labour’.¹¹⁰

Karl had developed a post-Kantian vision of the role of labour in history and its capacity for self-emancipation: a vision based on reason, spontaneity and freedom. But his adoption of this vision was only partial. Karl was silent about the individual rights to freedom and self-determination, and his position remained the one he had adopted in his reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The rights of man were the barely concealed expression of the primacy of private property and the bourgeois individual in relation to the modern state. Similarly, while he ascribed a capacity for self-emancipation to the proletariat as a collective entity, he did not extend that capacity for freedom and self-determination to the plurality of individuals of which it was composed.

In this sense, Karl’s picture of the proletariat was an ill-digested conflation between material need and the cause of freedom. In The Holy Family he wrote that ‘man has lost himself in the proletariat’ and ‘yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss … but is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity’.¹¹¹ How this ‘theoretical consciousness’ was acquired is not explained. In its lack of private property, and in its absence of religion – which he imagined to be the case in Paris – the proletariat represented the imminent embodiment of species-being, ‘the return of man to himself’. But, as individuals, these proletarians were accorded neither spontaneity nor self-determination. Their common consciousness arose from a shared condition. Driven by necessity they were presented as unreflective ‘moments’ of the whole. Need would drive them to revolt irrespective of any rational conviction they may have acquired. For, as Karl wrote in The Holy Family, ‘It is not a question what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.’¹¹² Vocations were ascribed to classes in the same way in which Feuerbach had defined species-being or ‘man’ as the vocation of human individuals. This unexplained shift from ought to is was another facet of Karl’s inability to provide a convincing answer to Stirner’s charge that the arguments of Feuerbach and his followers were moralistic and still relied upon a set of assumptions derived from religion.

Like all philosophers in a post-Kantian tradition, Karl had acknowledged that man was both a natural being, subject to natural needs and desires, and a rational subject, capable of subjecting these desires to rational scrutiny, and of exercising will in accordance with self-imposed rules. But Karl did not endow his proletarians with individuality. They were subsumed under the presumption of common interests and predetermined ends. Any aberrant manifestation of individual behaviour on the part of a particular proletarian was ascribed to the pathology of estrangement.113

Not surprisingly, Karl’s attempt to equate the universal path to human emancipation with the desires and needs of a particular class was one of the main issues in contention between republicans and socialists among the Young Hegelians in the mid-1840s. Alienation, Ruge claimed, was not a condition which afflicted the proletariat alone. Karl’s picture was open to the same sort of criticism which Bruno Bauer had directed against Strauss and Feuerbach. Their employment of a pantheistic notion of immanence derived from the metaphysics of Spinoza, rather than of self-consciousness, to explain the displacement of Christianity by humanism or species-being.¹¹⁴ In Bauer’s view, this meant invoking an immediately effective, universal species-being, without showing how it came to be adopted, how it operated or how it was internalized by the individual. Karl’s notion of proletarian class-consciousness was susceptible to the same sort of objection. But, in his case, the source of his position seems not to have been any particular affinity to Spinoza. The obstacle to an acceptance of the Kantian conception of the individual for him appears to have been the result of his distaste for any form of individualism, which he associated with the destruction of the ancient politics and its replacement by the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ introduced by civil society. There was no distinction between the individual and the citizen in Aristotle’s polity. The fall of the polis and the coming of Christianity had produced the emergence of the individual as a being apart from the citizen in civil society. The ‘social question’ and the advent of the proletariat contained the promise to end this division.

Republicans, while often sympathetic to the plight of labour, were sceptical. Labour, Bruno Bauer objected, was ‘sunken in matter’.¹¹⁵ The consciousness of workers was rudimentary, and immediate; it would fight for its particular interests. Due to a lack of education and its narrow surroundings, it was in a poor position to embrace the idea of its self-determination. How could the proletariat embody the trajectory of humanity as a whole? In what sense could the repetitive character of proletarian work make possible the vision of emancipation ascribed to such a class?