Even without contributions from die Freien, the Rheinische Zeitung was too radical for the Prussian authorities to tolerate, and the paper was suppressed in early 1843. The following autumn, Marx moved to Paris, having just married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. They lived in a housing complex with other German leftist radicals, among them Georg Maurer, who was a leader of the Paris branch of the League of the Just. This was a group of German communists, mainly artisans, who were closely tied to their French counterparts. A few years earlier, the League's cadre had participated in a failed insurrection led by Auguste Blanqui, the foremost representative of Jacobin communism in that era.
For the first time in his life, Marx now socialized with communist and socialist workers—French as well as German—whose political views were as advanced as his own, if not more so. And it was then that Marx became a communist. He might well have arrived at communism in Germany through a purely intellectual path, as had Moses Hess and Engels before him. But the fact is that he didn't. In the notebooks he kept at the time, he expressed his deep admiration for the communist workers he had come to know. One gets the impression that this experience dispelled an element of intellectual elitism in Marx's outlook. He recognized that workers with little formal education, not only intellectuals like himself, could be deeply committed to the struggle for a future world free of oppression and exploitation.
Part 4
On Left Hegelian Radicalism
The period between late 1843 and the spring of 1845, when Marx wrote the "Theses on Feuerbach," was a transitional period in his thinking. His ideas did not constitute a consistent and coherent whole. Elements of left Hegelian idealism coexisted with rudimentary elements of what Plekhanov would later term "dialectical materialism."
Thus in late 1843, Marx projected an imminent revolution in Germany led by the proletariat. At the same time, he by no means rejected and opposed Feuerbach's concept of the "religion of humanity." He wrote to Feuerbach in 1844:
"In these writings you have provided—I don't know whether intentionally—a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!" [emphasis in original]
Marx was here still operating with a concept of man in society which was class undifferentiated.
A superficial and ahistorical reading of Marx's early writings might give the impression that he was more radically leftist in 1843-44 than in 1847-48. In the introduction to his "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law," written in late 1843, Marx declared:
"In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages is possible only as emancipation from the partial victories over the Middle Ages as well. In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage. The thorough Germany cannot make a revolution without making a thoroughgoing revolution. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat." [emphasis in original]
However, in the Communist Manifesto, written four and a half years later, Marx projected:
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."
How does one explain Marx's change in position on the crucial question of the social character of the coming revolution in Germany? The answer is that in 1843-44 Marx was not yet a Marxist. He used the terms "proletariat," "revolution" and "communism," but these terms were placed within a left Hegelian conceptual framework. The proletariat was assigned the role of the revolutionary negation or antithesis of the existing social and political order in Germany. Marx defined the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat essentially, indeed entirely, in negative terms. It was
"a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it." [emphasis in original]
—Introduction to "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law"
None of Marx's early writings investigate the actual socio-economic condition of the German proletariat, its various components (such as artisans versus factory workers), its organizations and political consciousness. The empirical reality represented by the term "proletariat" in Germany in the 1840s was fundamentally different than it is today or, for that matter, half a century later. No more than a third of urban wage earners worked in factories. The large majority were employed in small workshops using pre-industrial technology. And they considered having to work in a factory a form of social degradation which they resisted as best they could.
When the political situation opened up in 1848, the newly formed mass working-class organizations did not look forward to a collectivized industrial economy, but rather backward to a protected artisanal economy. They demanded higher tariffs to protect German workers from cheap manufactured imports from Britain. They agitated for laws to protect artisans from competition from goods made in German factories. On a few occasions, small groups of artisans physically attacked and sought to demolish factories. "We are destroying industrial capitalism...literally. Smash! Take that, you evil factory!"
I want to digress a little on the present-day significance of left Hegelian radicalism. Because of Marx's involvement in this movement, left Hegelianism is usually identified with Germany in the early-mid 1840s. But the German left Hegelian movement was very short-lived. Even before 1848, its leading figures—Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge—had dropped out of radical politics, while Marx and Engels transcended left Hegelian idealism.
It was not German but rather Russian left Hegelians—notably Alexander Herzen and his colleague Mikhail Bakunin—who founded historically significant political-ideological tendencies which exist to this day. Herzen was the founding theorist of Russian populism—the idea of a peasant-based revolution leading to peasant-based socialism. Bakunin was the founding figure of anarcho-communism both as a doctrine and a movement.
We're all aware of the revival of anarchism in the post-Soviet period. However, there has been a revival of left Hegelian radicalism, in substance though not form, since the 1960s. From the late 1950s until his early death in 1961, Frantz Fanon, a left-wing intellectual from the French West Indies, served as a publicist for the Algerian petty-bourgeois nationalists then waging a war of liberation against French colonial rule. In that capacity he published a book whose title, The Wretched of the Earth, instantaneously entered into the vocabulary of the left internationally.
Fanon maintained that the industrial working class in the advanced capitalist countries, and also the colonial and semicolonial countries, had become bourgeoisified. The revolutionary negation of the global capitalist-imperialist system was now to be found in the "wretched of the earth"—the poorest and most downtrodden section of the peasantry and the impoverished slum dwellers in cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In the U.S., Fanon's views strongly influenced the leaders of the Black Panther Party like Huey Newton and David Hilliard, who maintained that black lumpens—the "brothers on the block"—were the social vanguard of the American revolution. To speak Hegelian, the black lumpenproletariat was the revolutionary antithesis of the American racist, capitalist social and political order.
All of us in the SL/U.S. are familiar with the expression: the most oppressed is the most revolutionary. This is the crux of left Hegelian political radicalism which Marx and also Engels transcended in the course of becoming Marxists.
Toward Dialectical Materialism
Looking back in the 1880s, Engels considered that the "Theses on Feuerbach," written by Marx in the spring of 1845, was the first coherent expression of historical materialism. The following year, Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, which was in a sense an explanation and elaboration of the ideas which the "Theses" presented in a highly encapsulated, almost cryptic, form. Marx later wrote that The German Ideology was a work of "self-clarification," thereby implying that it criticized ideas which he and Engels had recently shared with other left Hegelians, notably Feuerbach.
I want to emphasize three aspects of the new Marxist worldview which sharply differentiated it from left Hegelian idealism. First, external reality cannot be adequately understood through passive contemplation. Thought is purposive. People think in order to pursue their needs and interests. One can expand and deepen one's understanding of the world only by seeking to change it, by trying to act upon it. One can then assess the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of such efforts and therefore the validity and adequacy of one's understanding of the world. As Marx wrote in the second thesis on Feuerbach:
"The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question."
Second, Marx insisted that the elimination of oppression and exploitation in their various historically derived forms required the development of the productive forces of society. It was not enough to expose and refute the ideological legitimations of the existing social and political order such as religion and nationalism or, for that matter, liberalism. Thus a key passage in The German Ideology:
"We shall, of course, not take the trouble to explain to our wise philosophers that the 'liberation' of 'man' is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the rubbish to 'self-consciousness' and by liberating 'man' from the domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor shall we explain to them that it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is a historical and not a mental act."
Marx and Engels did not, of course, deny or minimize the importance of combating the influence of bourgeois ideology among the mass of the working class. Such propagandistic activity was a necessary precondition for a proletarian revolution. But it was the proletarian revolution that was the necessary and decisive act of social liberation in the real world.
This bears on a third important aspect of Marxism as it differentiated itself from left Hegelian radicalism. This was a dialectical materialist understanding of the working class. Here I believe Engels' contribution was of crucial importance. Unlike Marx, during this period Engels acquired firsthand knowledge of a mass political movement of an industrial proletariat, the British Chartist movement of the 1840s.
In 1843, Engels was sent to help manage the family textile factory in Manchester, England. At the time he was a pure left Hegelian communist who believed that what is rational must soon become real, especially in Germany. Soon after arriving in England, he wrote an article, "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent," for the Owenite socialist journal, The New Moral World, in which he stated:
"The Germans are a philosophical nation, and will not, cannot abandon Communism, as soon as it is founded upon sound philosophical principles: chiefly if it is derived as an unavoidable conclusion from their own philosophy....
"There is a greater chance in Germany for the establishment of a Communist party among the educated classes of society, than anywhere else. The Germans are a very disinterested nation; if in Germany principle comes into collision with interest, principle will almost always silence the claims of interest. The same love of abstract principle, the same disregard of reality and self-interest, which have brought the Germans to a state of political nonentity, these very same qualities guarantee the success of philosophical Communism in that country." [emphasis in original]
So how did Engels become a Marxist? Certainly, an important factor was that he developed a close political relationship with the leaders of the left wing of the Chartist movement, notably Julian Harney and Ernest Jones. He came to recognize both the potential social power of the organized industrial proletariat and the many obstacles to and difficulties in organizing the mass of workers on a revolutionary program.
Even among the relatively advanced workers who participated in and supported the Chartist movement, there were significantly different levels of political consciousness. The Chartist movement, whose central programmatic demand was universal suffrage, had a well-defined right-left factional spectrum. Workers who supported the right wing were willing to settle for moderate reforms and were prepared for that purpose to collaborate with bourgeois liberals. The leaders and militants of the Chartist left were "red republicans," and indeed, later chose that term for the name of their newspaper.
Unlike Marx's earlier writings, the Communist Manifesto presents, albeit briefly, a dialectical materialist analysis of the modern working class, explaining the interaction between objective economic development and the organization and political consciousness of the proletariat. The Manifesto also for the first time clearly defines the fundamental difference between the communist vanguard and the relatively more backward workers:
"The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."
The same month that the Manifesto was published, a popular, working-class-centered uprising in Paris overthrew the government of Louis Philippe, known as "the bankers' king." This initiated revolutions throughout continental west and central Europe. The revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels' participation in them, their defeat and aftermath lie beyond the scope of this educational, which is plenty ambitious as it is.
However, one episode in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions bears directly on one of the themes I've been discussing. By 1850, following the defeat of the revolution in Germany, the leadership of the Communist League reassembled in London. In the fall of that year, the League experienced a factional struggle leading to a split. A group around Karl Schapper, the veteran leader of the organization before Marx, maintained that the victory of monarchical reaction in Germany was transient. Schapper and his cothinkers projected a renewed imminent revolutionary upsurge which would be even more radical than before, since the bourgeois liberals had discredited themselves with the workers and petty-bourgeois masses.
Marx and Engels considered this wishful thinking. In the course of the fight, Marx exclaimed:
"The materialist standpoint of the Manifesto has given way to idealism. The revolution is seen not as the product of realities of the situation but as the result of an effort of will. Whereas we say to the workers: You have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to go through in order to alter the situation and to train yourselves for the exercise of power, it is said: We must take power at once, or else we may as well take to our beds." [emphasis in original]
The basic point is that the revolutionary capacity of the working class is not simply a result of the condition of oppression and exploitation but is a product of its own historical development, in which the communist vanguard plays a crucial role.
In 1850, Marx and Engels did not foresee and could not possibly have foreseen that the reactionary conditions in Germany and also France would last another decade and a half. And even after that, except for the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, there was no prospect for proletarian revolution in Europe during Marx and Engels' lifetimes.
When the Communist Manifesto was published, there were a couple of thousand members and supporters of the Communist League in Germany and elsewhere in West Europe. Ten years later only a handful of these were still communists. The overwhelming majority of "Red '48ers," as they were called, had come to terms with the developing bourgeois order. One even ended up as German finance minister under Bismarck. A goodly number of former "Red '48ers" emigrated to the United States where they played an honorable and important role as officers and soldiers in the Union Army in the American Civil War. But they did so as radical democrats, no longer communists.
A parallel development occurred in Britain. In 1850, the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto was published on the front page of the journal of the Chartist left, the Red Republican. However, over the next decade, the Chartist movement disintegrated completely. First Julian Harney, then Ernest Jones became demoralized, moved to the right and came out for collaboration between the workers movement and bourgeois liberals.
Almost uniquely among the leading "red republicans" of the 1840s, Marx and Engels continued to stand for and fight for communism for the rest of their lives. They modified their concrete program in line with changing historical conditions (for example, on the colonial question), but they did not change their ultimate goal. Eventually, they were able to intersect a new generation of young militant leftists—represented by Jules Guesde in France and Georgi Plekhanov in Russia—who had not been scarred by the historic defeat of 1848.
If, in the years or decades after 1848, Marx and Engels had abandoned communism as a utopian fantasy, the Communist Manifesto would today be as little known and little read as the writings of Wilhelm Weitling, Étienne Cabet, Auguste Blanqui, Robert Owen and the many other communists and socialists of the pre-1848 era. Marx and Engels were the human, that is, material, agents necessary to transmit their ideas to future generations.
We, too, now operate in the aftermath of a world-historic defeat: the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. And we, too, are the only human agents—there's no one else out there—who can transmit the principles and program of communism and the understanding of dialectical materialism to future generations. That's just the way it is.
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