Workers Vanguard No. 846 15 April 2005
How Marx Became a Marxist
by Joseph Seymour
We print below an educational given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour at the Twelfth National Conference of the SL/U.S. held last summer as published in the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard Nos. 840 (21 January), 842 (18 February), 844 (18 March) and 846 (15 April).
Becoming a professional revolutionary of the Marxist persuasion almost always involves an intellectual challenge. You have to learn to think about the world in a fundamentally different way than when you first came to social and political consciousness.
Sometimes it also involves a personal challenge of one kind or another. For example, one's parents may strongly disapprove of this particular career choice. This was definitely not what they wanted and expected for their son or daughter. For those of you who have faced that particular personal challenge, you're in very good company. Throughout her life, Marx's mother believed that her son had wasted his great talents on that communist nonsense. It is said that she once exclaimed: "If only Karl had made some capital instead of just writing about it."
The term "dialectical materialism" was devised by George Plekhanov, often called the founding father of Russian Marxism, as a capsule formula for the Marxist worldview. Dialectics or dialectical understanding is not a mysterious concept, although it has been subjected to a great deal of mystification, not least by professed Marxists. In the course of the faction fight with Burnham and Shachtman over the Russian question in 1939-40, Trotsky commented: "What does this terrible word 'dialectics' mean? It means to consider things in their development, not in their static situation" ("On the 'Workers' Party" [August 1940]).
In the most general sense, dialectics signifies that what exists at present and will exist in the future is determined and conditioned by the entire prior course of historical development or, in some cases, retrogression from it. Change is caused by the interplay of contradictions, tensions, antagonistic elements inherited from the past; the remote past as well as the more recent past.
One of Sigmund Freud's favorite aphorisms is that the child is the father of the man. This is a dialectical approach to individual psychology. How one feels, thinks and acts is strongly influenced by one's early childhood experience, especially one's relations with one's parents or parental figures. Someone may wake up one morning and say to himself: "I really hate what my life has become. I hate what I have become. I want to be happy and successful." Who doesn't? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. You cannot wipe out your entire past experience and reconstruct your life and personality anew according to some preferred model. There is no such thing as being born again. That is true for individuals. It is true for societies. It is true for the non-human natural world.
Like everything else in the world, the origins and also subsequent development of Marxism can only be understood dialectically. As Marx himself stated in this regard: "The biography of a single individual can in no way be separated from the biographies of previous and contemporary individuals: indeed, it is determined by them."
So to understand how Marx became a Marxist, we have to start by looking at the socioeconomic, political, cultural and intellectual universe which Marx encountered and entered as a young liberal idealist in western Germany in the mid-late 1830s. Marx grew up in a society in which a developing industrial economy, based on modern technology, both confronted and coexisted with a political and cultural complex inherited from the late medieval world.
When Marx was nine years old, Alfred Krupp established a steel-making foundry in the Ruhr city of Essen which later developed into one of the great industrial empires in the modern world. The year Marx graduated gymnasium, the equivalent of high school, in 1835, the first railroad was launched in Germany. Two years later, when Marx was at the University of Berlin, August Borsig founded a subsequently famous machinery works in that German city.
At the same time, despite its liberal facade, the Prussian state was a form of monarchical absolutism in which the political personality of the monarch mattered. When the old king died in 1840, he was succeeded by his son, a religious reactionary, who instituted a more repressive policy toward academic and intellectual life. One consequence was that Marx left Germany and moved to Paris, which was then the center of the communist and socialist movements. It was then and there that Marx himself became a communist.
Prussia was officially a "Christian state." Thus in order to practice law, Marx's father, who was a secularized and non-believing Jew, had to legally convert to Lutheranism and also change his name from Herschel to Heinrich.
Marx first entered the political scene in 1837 as part of a radical intellectual circle called the Left Hegelians or Young Hegelians. This movement had been initiated a few years earlier with the publication of a book titled The Life of Jesus by David Strauss. This was a work of biblical criticism which questioned whether Jesus had actually performed the miracles ascribed to him. It ignited an intellectual and political firestorm because decisive sections of the German ruling class, especially the Prussian landed nobility (the so-called Junkers), identified a skeptical, not to speak of hostile, attitude toward orthodox Christianity with the ideology of the French Revolution, with what was called "red republicanism." "First, they question the truth of the Bible; next they'll be calling for the execution of the king of Prussia." This was the mindset of the men who ruled Germany when Marx entered the political scene. In 1843, Marx published an important work in which he called for eliminating the "Middle Ages" in Germany because the heritage of the Middle Ages was so strongly present in the Germany of the day.
Contradictions of Enlightenment Thought
A basic premise of materialism is that external reality exists independently of our consciousness. Thus in understanding the intellectual development of the young Marx, it is useful to consider not only what he thought at the time but what others thought about him. When Marx was a member of the Left Hegelian movement, a close colleague, Moses Hess, wrote the following appreciation of him in a letter to a friend:
"Dr Marx (that is my idol's name) is still a very young man—about twenty-four at the most. He will give mediaeval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused not juxtaposed—and you have Dr Marx."
—reproduced in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (1981)
Hess was not simply saying that Marx was a very smart and very knowledgeable guy who had read and assimilated the ideas of the main progressive thinkers from the mid 18th-century French Enlightenment through the then-present day. He was saying something much more significant than that.
Why? Because Rousseau and Voltaire represented fundamentally different and indeed counterposed worldviews within the universe of progressive social thought. They were protagonists in the most famous debate in Enlightenment literature. The question was whether civilization was progressive or retrogressive, with Voltaire maintaining the former and Rousseau the latter.
Rousseau summarized his ideas thus: "Man is naturally good and that it is by institutions alone that men become evil." He maintained that man in a so-called state of nature was instinctively empathetic to the sufferings of fellow members of his species. However, the institution of private property had turned men against one another. Men in society had become murderously acquisitive, driven by greed and envy.
Rousseau himself was a deepgoing historical pessimist. He was a moralist critic of the existing social and political order in Europe. He believed that the large majority of men had become irremediably corrupted by millennia of civilization.
However, during the course of the French Revolution, Rousseau's ideas were in a sense inverted into a naive, world-conquering optimism. The leaders of the Jacobin regime like Robespierre and Saint-Just, who revered Rousseau, believed that the revolutionary transformation of institutions had brought about the moral regeneration of the French people. The establishment of a democratic republic had imbued the citizens of the French nation with the spirit of patriotism and virtue.
In opposition to Rousseau, Voltaire maintained that the betterment of humanity and the progress of society were centrally dependent upon the further development of science and technology. One of his early works was a popular exposition of Isaac Newton's theories of physics. If Voltaire had summarized his worldview in a sentence, it would have been something like: "Man is naturally ignorant, and it is only by the acquisition of knowledge that he gradually becomes enlightened."
But who are the social agents who will so enlighten the benighted mass of humanity? For Voltaire, they were and could only be benevolent and rational members of the upper classes and intellectuals, like himself, who could influence the ruling circles.
In addition to Rousseau and Voltaire, Hess mentions another leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Holbach, whose ideas influenced the young Marx. Holbach, who was a wealthy nobleman, was a thoroughgoing materialist, in effect an atheist. But he believed that such advanced views were the limited preserve of exceptional members of the upper classes like himself. "The people," he wrote, "reads no more than it reasons; it has neither the leisure nor the ability to do so."
So how did Marx fuse the democratic egalitarianism identified with Rousseau with the intellectual elitism of Voltaire and Holbach? To oversimplify, Marx combined the goal of Rousseau with the means of Voltaire by way of a dialectical conception of history derived from Hegel, while purged of the latter's idealist metaphysics.
The goal of communism is an egalitarian and harmonious society in which all men support the needs and interests of other men. But such a future society can come into being only through the overcoming of economic scarcity by qualitatively raising the level of production and labor productivity through the further progressive development of science and technology. Moreover, throughout the history of civilization prior to advanced industrial capitalism, raising the level and forces of production necessarily entailed the exploitation and oppression of the mass of humanity by a small class of property owners. In other words, private property and class-divided society were not a tragic historical mistake which could have been avoided if only people had known better.
A very good capsule statement of the Marxist worldview in this regard is to be found in one of Marx's lesser-known works, Theories of Surplus-Value (1863):
"Although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed."
This conception fundamentally differentiates dialectical materialism from all variants of radical idealism, such as anarchism.
Liberalism, Communism, Socialism
In the period in which Marx and also Engels first came to political consciousness, the terms liberalism, communism and socialism were commonly used in conventional political discourse. However, liberalism, at least in emphasis, meant something significantly different than it does today, while communism and socialism meant something fundamentally different than today.
Central to the liberal worldview was a belief in raising the level of production and productivity through the application of science and technology. Scottish and English political economists—from Adam Smith in the late 18th century to David Ricardo in the early 19th to lesser lights like James Mill in Marx's formative years—were leading intellectual representatives of liberalism. They maintained that the wealth of nations—to use the title of Adam Smith's classic and seminal work—would be maximized by the institutional framework of a competitive market economy made up of a multiplicity of capitalist entrepreneurs. In order to maximize profits and avoid losses (and potential bankruptcy), such entrepreneurs would supposedly be compelled to continually reduce the costs of production through technical innovation.
What I want to emphasize here is that in this period it was liberalism, not communism or socialism, which was identified as centrally concerned with and committed to increasing what Marx later called "the forces of production." The intellectual hegemony of liberalism as a doctrine of economic production was a major factor that later caused Marx to write Capital. Throughout Capital, there are polemical arguments against David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and other economic ideologists of the new bourgeois order. Some years ago, a perceptive Polish ex-Stalinist intellectual observed that Marx was the first major left-wing thinker who took on liberalism on its own chosen terrain, that of political economy.
What then of communism and socialism? Communism, both as a doctrine and movement, originated as an episode in the last phase of the French Revolution with Gracchus Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals in 1795-96. This was a movement of former left-wing Jacobins who had come to the conclusion that their principles could be realized only by a revolutionary dictatorship, brought to power through a popular insurrection, which would establish a communism of distribution and consumption.
That is, peasants would continue to grow crops on their small farms as before. Artisans—tailors, shoemakers, carpenters—would continue to produce their goods in small workshops as before. However, instead of selling these on the market they would be deposited in a kind of gigantic state-run warehouse system, and the government would distribute them on an egalitarian basis. Families with more children would receive larger houses and proportionally more food, clothing and the like.
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Marx wrote of the Babouvist movement in this way:
"The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form."
This leveling-down conception of communism was necessarily conditioned by the pre-industrial character of French society at the time.
In the lengthy period of reaction in Europe following the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815, what I have called the Jacobin communist tradition was perpetuated and promoted by one of the surviving leaders of the Babouvist movement, Philippe Buonarroti. In the late 1820s he published a book about it, including original documents, which became known as "the bible of revolutionaries." A little later I'm going to discuss Buonarroti's ideas in another context. But here I want to emphasize that even after the advent of industrial capitalism in continental West Europe in the 1820s, the term "communism" retained its programmatic connotation of a leveling-down. It evoked in popular consciousness, as well as among the ruling classes, the spirit and the image of the French Revolution in its most radical phase, that is, a violent uprising of the poor against the rich, of the have-nots against the haves.
In the period we're talking about, the difference between communism and socialism was more sharply delineated than it later became and is today. Whereas communism was insurrectionary—it meant red revolution—socialism was reformist and pacific at two fundamental levels. First, all socialist tendencies appealed to the supposedly benevolent and rational-minded members of the ruling class to promote their program. For example, Robert Owen, the foremost British socialist of the era, dedicated a section of his pioneer work, A New View of Society, written in 1813, to the prince regent of England.
Secondly, with the important exception of the Saint-Simonians (whom I'll discuss in a bit), all major socialist schools—the Owenites in Britain, the followers of Charles Fourier and Étienne Cabet in France—advocated a system of decentralized, self-governing communities based on economic cooperativism. Such socialist communes, so to speak, could be established and coexist within the overall framework of the developing capitalist economies of the day. People would be able to see for themselves in practice that socialist cooperativism was in every respect a better way to organize society. More and more people would form more and more socialist communes until, peacefully and gradually, they completely displaced the existing class-divided and exploitative society. In short, socialists sought to transform society through the force of example rather than the force of force.
In the early 19th century, numerous attempts were actually made to establish socialist communities. Many of these attempts were made in the northern part of the United States with its relative political liberty, fluid social structure and cheap land. However, one of the most interesting and historically noteworthy attempts to form a socialist commune was made in, of all places, Romania. An eccentric Romanian landowner was an enthusiastic admirer of the ideas of Charles Fourier. So he set up a commune—it was called a phalanstère—for his peasants on Fourierist principles.
Fourier was a pioneer advocate of what was later called "free love." He opposed traditional marriage and sexual monogamy. It turned out that many of these young Romanian peasant men and women appreciated Fourier's ideas in this respect and practiced them. Pretty soon news of the strange and scandalous goings-on of this estate reached the ears of the Romanian Orthodox clergy and government authorities who were, of course, outraged. They organized a reactionary mob to attack and demolish this commune. I'm happy to report that the Fourierist peasants of Romania heroically defended their socialist commune. A small historic victory for our cause.
Between the French Revolution and Marx's formative years, the Industrial Revolution crossed the channel, so to speak, from Britain to France, Germany and elsewhere in continental West Europe. This opened up a historical possibility which did not previously exist and could not have been envisioned by even the most far-sighted progressive intellectual. It now became possible to envision the limitless expansion of material wealth available to all members of society, not just a small privileged class of property owners.
This idea was first developed in programmatic form by the followers of Saint-Simon after he died in 1825. Henri de Saint-Simon is usually and rightly described as an idiosyncratic genius. He was a wealthy French nobleman who claimed direct descent from Charlemagne, the founder of the early medieval French feudal state. Saint-Simon himself was a liberal and in the last phase of his life he became a leading spokesman and publicist for the bourgeois liberal opposition—bankers and industrial entrepreneurs—to the reactionary Bourbon monarchy.
However, he was a liberal imbued with the ideas of rational humanism. Even in this early stage of capitalism, he recognized what Marx would later call the anarchy of the market. There were periods in which industrial production declined instead of increasing. Factories went bankrupt, causing great suffering to their former workers, because the owner had miscalculated future market conditions. Useful inventions were not introduced into production because bankers and entrepreneurs would not take the financial risk. To solve these problems, Saint-Simon advocated what could be called centralized capitalist planning. That is, all financiers and industrialists should get together through the banking system and coordinate their operations so as to continually maximize production.
After Saint-Simon died, his followers took the next logical step. This is, they advocated a public institution that would take over all the factories, railroads, mines and other industrial resources and direct these so as to maximize the production of society in line with the progressive development of science and technology. In 1830, they published the Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, the crux of which was:
"A social institution is charged with these functions which today are so badly performed; it is the depository of all the instruments of production; it presides over the exploitation of all the material resources; from its vantage point it has a comprehensive view of the whole which enables it to perceive at one and the same time all parts of the industrial workshop....
"The social institution of the future will direct all industries in the interest of the whole society, and especially of the peaceful laborers." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (1969)
These ideas were so far ahead of their time that they found no point of support in the French society of the day. The bourgeois liberals who had sponsored Saint-Simon were, of course, appalled by the new radical ideas of his followers. But neither did Saint-Simonian socialism get a sympathetic hearing in the working class. The mass of urban wage earners were artisans using pre-industrial technology. They aspired to own their own small shops. A typical French carpenter, furniture maker, watchmaker would have considered a central institution directing a technologically dynamic industrial economy as both utterly fantastical and deeply repugnant to his perceived interests.
Completely politically isolated, the Saint-Simonian school soon disintegrated into antagonistic sects. And I am using the term "sect" in the literal religious sense. One of the latter-day Saint-Simonian groups believed in the Great Mother. This personage was supposedly an Oriental Jewess living in the Near East who was destined to unite East and West, man and woman, matter and spirit. The leaders of this group went to Egypt, Palestine, Turkey searching for the Great Mother. The left was a lot more imaginative and interesting in those days. These were wild and crazy guys. Almost all of our left opponents today are real dullards by comparison.
Although the Saint-Simonian school had disintegrated while Marx was still in his early teens, its ideas gained a widespread and sympathetic currency among progressive-minded intellectuals in France, Germany and elsewhere in continental West Europe. One such intellectual was a learned Prussian nobleman and middle-level government official, Ludwig von Westphalen, who was a friend of the Marx family in Trier. He saw in young Karl a kindred spirit—hungry for knowledge, committed to the betterment of humanity—and he took him under his wing. Marx later described von Westphalen as a "paternal friend," who also became his father-in-law. The two would go for long walks in the Rhenish countryside where they would exchange ideas on everything from Shakespeare to socialism.
In this way Marx early on acquired a knowledge of the Saint-Simonian school, that is, of a far more advanced conception of the future collectivist organization of the economy than the crude leveling-down of the Jacobin communist tradition or a system of decentralized socialist communes. When in the mid 1840s Marx made the transition from radical democrat to communist, he operated with a basically Saint-Simonian conception of the future organization of the economy.
Part 2 Buonarroti and Hegel on the French Revolution
In 1843, commenting on the increasingly repressive policies of the Prussian state, Marx wrote in a letter to a colleague, Arnold Ruge:
"The mantle of liberalism has been discarded and the most disgusting despotism in all its nakedness is disclosed to the eyes of the whole world.
"That, too, is a revelation, although one of the opposite kind. It is a truth, which, at least, teaches us to recognise the emptiness of our patriotism and the abnormity of our state system, and makes us hide our faces in shame. You look at me with a smile and ask: What is gained by that? No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind; shame is actually the victory of the French Revolution over the German patriotism that defeated it in 1813."
The French Revolution was the Russian question of the day. One's attitude toward the French Revolution and its various phases centrally defined one's political outlook and program. If you opposed the French Revolution in toto from the beginning, you were a monarchical reactionary. If you supported the early moderate period of the revolution—expressed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which explicitly included the right of private property deemed "sacred and inviolate"—then you were a liberal. If you supported the Jacobin regime of Robespierre, you were a radical democrat. And if you supported Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals, you were a communist.
In our Enlightenment pamphlet, I said one could think of two roads leading from the French Revolution to the Marx of the Communist League and Communist Manifesto of 1848, a rightward road and a leftward road. The rightward road ran from the Napoleonic occupation of western Germany through Hegel to the left Hegelians. The leftward road ran from Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals through Buonarroti and Auguste Blanqui to the German worker-communists of the League of the Just in the 1830s and 1840s.
In keeping with this approach, one can say that Marx had two political godfathers, a liberal political godfather, Hegel, and a Jacobin communist political godfather, Buonarroti. Both had been members of the defeated progressive party. Buonarroti had been a left-wing Jacobin, part of Robespierre's personal circle. Hegel had been one of the few prominent German liberal intellectuals who supported the Napoleonic occupation throughout as historically progressive. He called Napoleon the "world spirit on horseback." If you understand that image, then you can understand Hegel. In 1813, Hegel advised his students not to join the German volunteer corps fighting the French army in the so-called "wars of liberation."
In the long period of reaction following Napoleon's decisive defeat at Waterloo in 1815, both Buonarroti and Hegel thought long and hard about the causes of the defeat of the French Revolution. Why had Robespierre been overthrown? Why had Napoleon been defeated? More fundamentally, why had the ideals of the French Revolution expressed in the slogan, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" not been realized in the Europe of the day?
Buonarroti and Hegel arrived at fundamentally different answers and corresponding programmatic conclusions. Buonarroti operated with a Rousseauean worldview. Hegel rejected the concept of natural law and natural right in favor of a dialectical—though not materialist—conception of historical development.
To use a term and concept with which we're all familiar, Buonarroti maintained that the French Revolution was "betrayed." Robespierre was overthrown by a group of Jacobin leaders who had become morally corrupted by access to the wealth which their newfound political power and influence gave them. He maintained and truly believed that had Robespierre continued to rule France, he would gradually have introduced communism in the Babouvist sense.
What then was to be done? To use another term and concept with which we're all familiar, Buonarroti maintained that the crisis of humanity had been reduced to the crisis of "revolutionary leadership." He and his successor Auguste Blanqui sought to construct an organization of morally stalwart revolutionaries which at a suitable moment would launch an insurrection to establish a revolutionary dictatorship on the Jacobin model. This regime would install a communist system based on the egalitarian distribution of the means of consumption, which would in fairly short order bring about the moral regeneration of the citizens of the new "red republic."
Doubtless everyone in this room has relatives and friends who say that communism is contrary to human nature. But the main body of communists in early 19th century Europe believed just the opposite, that it was private property which was unnatural. Communism was that form of social organization which corresponded to man's instinctual empathy with the fellow members of his species.
Hegel rejected that concept, both its programmatic conclusion and theoretical premise. He maintained that society was not governed by man's supposedly instinctual nature. Men's consciousness changed qualitatively over the course of history as it expressed the progressive development of what he called the "absolute spirit." The ideals of the French Revolution could not be realized because European civilization had not attained a sufficient level of spiritual maturity.
What did Hegel mean by "spirit"? Not an easy question to answer. I've read a couple of dozen books and articles on this subject and have gotten several different and mutually exclusive explanations. In the early 1840s, Ludwig Feuerbach exercised a strong influence on Marx and also Engels. At this time he summarized his own intellectual evolution in this way: First, I believed in God. Then I believed in reason (that's when he was a more or less orthodox Hegelian). Now, I believe in man. All of us understand what it means to believe in God, doubtless some of you from bitter personal experience. And you can understand what Feuerbach meant when he said he now believed in man. If you recognize the illusory character of an all-powerful supernatural deity, then you can believe that man is the master of his own fate.
But what does it mean to believe in reason instead of and in between believing in God and in man? Reason is not an all-powerful entity; it's an activity. Men reason, they think in order to pursue their needs and interests. But for Hegel, it was the other way around. Man in the natural, biological sense existed to serve the needs and interests of reason. Men were the necessary agents to actualize the progressive development and self-consciousness of the absolute spirit.
But let's try to set aside the semimystical, metaphysical component of Hegel's philosophy. What was he saying in real-world terms about Europe in the era of the French Revolution? He was saying that the leaders of the French Revolution like Robespierre had failed because they tried to wipe out in one stroke the cultural inheritance of millennia of European civilization—the Christian religion, respect for monarchical authority. At another level, Hegel maintained that no government, including a revolutionary government, could eliminate individual egoism—material self-interest. He held that the role of the state was to represent the general interests of the community by mediating between the conflicting material interests of individuals and groups, for example, between employers and workers.
Hegel maintained that social progress had to be organic and gradual—in his case, very gradual. Thus he wrote in his major work on political philosophy that political change should be such that "the advance from one state of affairs to another is tranquil in appearance and unnoticed. In this way a constitution changes over a long period of time into something quite different from what it was originally" (The Philosophy of Right [1821]).
As Marx developed historical or dialectical materialism, he incorporated Hegel's understanding that one could not reconstruct the world anew according to some ideal model. He likewise agreed with Hegel that Europe during the French Revolution and in subsequent decades was not sufficiently developed to realize the principles of "liberty, equality and fraternity." But he came to understand that underlying what Hegel called the "spiritual immaturity of European civilization" was its material or economic immaturity.
In one of Marx's last major writings he stated: "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines" (Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875]). This statement encapsulates the fundamental difference between Marxism and both the Rousseauean concept of natural law and the Hegelian concept of the autonomous and transcendent development of consciousness or culture. How Marx arrived at this understanding is the subject of the next session.
Many, many years ago I did a multi-part series of educationals under the general heading of "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." One reason was because I thought the Hegelian contribution to Marxism had been overvalued, especially by bourgeois academics, and the influence on Marx and Engels of contemporary plebeian and proletarian radicalism—red republicanism— had been undervalued.
So I'd like to conclude this session with the wisdom of Philippe Buonarroti, a great and noble-minded man. For decades, usually under conditions of severe repression, he sought to form and lead revolutionary communist organizations. On one occasion he made a list of the personal qualities he looked for in recruits:
"Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interests and pleasure."
"Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger, of work and hardship."
"Reflection, gravity, prudence." It's a dangerous world out there, so be careful.
"Patience and perseverance."
"Scorn for wealth, position, men, and power...."
"Inviolable respect for the word, the promise, and the vow." Say what you mean and mean what you say.
"Willingness to overlook personal wrongs." In other words, don't be subjective, don't be cliquist.
"Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors." Well, that's really a matter of personal taste.
"The habit of speaking little and to the point." This will make local meetings a lot shorter, comrades.
"No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself." In other words, don't try to be a star.
"Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's heart." That really is a matter of personal style.
And finally: "Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity." With that we can all agree.
Part 3
Marx was born in 1818 in the city of Trier in the German Rhineland bordering on France. It was the region of Germany most directly affected by and sympathetic to the French Revolution. It was the main concentration of German radical democrats ideologically akin to the French Jacobins. The French revolutionary army occupied the Rhineland a decade before Napoleon occupied the rest of western and southern Germany. So the French Revolution was extended to this region in its more radical and democratic phase. Marx grew up in a city in which many bourgeois notables had been ardent revolutionary democrats in their youth, and some retained a sentimental attachment to their old ideals.
In the earlier session, I cited Freud's aphorism that the child is the father of the man. But the father is also the father of the child who is the father of the man. And Marx revered his father throughout his life. A boyhood friend of Marx and later his brother-in-law, Edgar von Westphalen, described Heinrich Marx as a "real eighteenth-century Frenchman, who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out."
Heinrich Marx was a leading figure in the Trier liberal social club. On one occasion he and some other members had a little too much to drink, and they started singing the "Marseillaise," the anthem of the French Revolution. This was rather like singing the "Internationale" at a local Democratic Party headquarters. News of the scandal got out, and the Trier liberals involved were strongly denounced by the Prussian authorities, including the crown prince. Fortunately, nothing worse came of it for Marx's father.
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