Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

published in Switzerland in February 1843 in a collection of essays that had been censored from Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbucher. In them Feuerbach applied to speculative philosophy the approach he had already used with regard to religion: theology had still not been completely destroyed; it had a last rational bulwark in Hegel's philosophy, which was as great a mystification as any theology. Since Hegel's dialectic started and ended with the infinite, the finite - namely, man - was only a phase in the evolution of a superhuman spirit: 'The essence of theology is transcendent and exteriorised human thought.'1 s But philosophy should not start from God or the Absolute, nor even from being as predicate of the Absolute; philosophy had to begin with the finite, the particular, the real, and acknowledge the primacy of the senses. Since this approach had been pioneered by the French, the true philosopher would have to be of 'GalloGermanic blood'. Hegel's philosophy was the last refuge of theology and as such had to be abolished. This would come about from a realisation that 'the true relationship of thought to being is this: being is the subject, thought the predicate. Thought arises from being - being does not arise from thought.'16

Marx read a copy of Feuerbach's Theses immediately after publication and wrote an enthusiastic letter to Ruge, who had sent it to him: 'The only point in Feuerbach's aphorisms that does not satisfy me is that he gives too much importance to nature and too little to politics. Yet an alliance with politics affords the only means for contemporary philosophy to become a truth. But what happened in the sixteenth century, when the state had followers as enthusiastic as those of Nature, will no doubt be repeated.'17 For Marx, the way ahead lay through politics, but a politics which questioned current conceptions of the relationship of the state to society. It was Feuerbach's Theses that enabled him to effect his particular reversal of Hegel's dialectic. As far as Marx was concerned in 1843 (and this was true of most of his radical democratic contemporaries also) Feuerbach was the philosopher. Every page of the critique of Hegel's political philosophy that Marx elaborated during the summer of 1843 showed the influence of Feuerbach's method. True, Marx gave his criticism a social and historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach, but one point was central to both their approaches: the claim that Hegel had reversed the correct relation of subjects and predicates. Marx's fundamental idea was to take actual political institutions and demonstrate thereby that Hegel's conception of the relationship of ideas to reality was mistaken. Hegel had tried to reconcile the ideal and the real by showing that reality was the unfolding of an idea, and was thus rational. Marx, on the contrary, emphasised the opposition between ideals and reality in the secular world and categorised Hegel's whole enterprise as speculative, by which he meant

that it was based on subjective conceptions that were at variance with empirical reality.18

Inspired by Feuerbachian philosophy and historical analysis, this manuscript was the first of many works by Marx (up to and including Capital) that were entitled 'Critique' - a term that had a great vogue among the Young Hegelians. The approach it represented - reflecting on and working over the ideas of others - was very congenial to Marx, who preferred to develop his own ideas by critically analysing those of other thinkers. Marx's method in his manuscript - which was obviously only a rough first draft - was to copy out a paragraph of Hegel's The Philosophy of Right and then add a critical paragraph of his own. He dealt only with the final part of The Philosophy of Right which was devoted to the state. According to Hegel's political philosophy - which was part of his general effort to reconcile philosophy with reality - human consciousness manifested itself objectively in man's juridical, moral, social and political institutions. These institutions permitted Spirit to attain full liberty, and the attainment of this liberty was made possible by the social morality present in the successive groups of the family, civil society and the state. The family educated a man for moral autonomy, whereas civil society organised the economic, professional and cultural life. Only the highest level of social organisation - the state, which Hegel called 'the reality of concrete liberty' - was capable of synthesising particular rights and universal reason into the final stage of the evolution of objective spirit. Thus Hegel rejected the view that man was free by nature and that the state curtailed this natural freedom; and because he believed that no philosopher could move outside his own times and thus rejected theorising about abstract ideals, he considered that the state he described was to some extent already present in Prussia.19

In his commentary Marx successively reviewed the monarchical, executive and legislative powers into which (according to Hegel) the state divided itself, and showed that the supposed harmony achieved in each case was in fact false.

With regard to monarchy, Marx's main criticism was that it viewed the people merely as an appendage to the political constitution; whereas in democracy (which was Marx's term at this time for his preferred form of government) the constitution was the self-expression of the people. To explain his view of the relationship of democracy to previous forms of constitution, he invoked a parallel with religion:

Just as religion does not make man but man makes religion, so the constitution does not make the people but the people make the constitution. In a certain respect democracy has the same relation to all the

other forms of state as Christianity has to all other forms of religion. Christianity is the religion par excellence, the essence of religion, deified man as a particular religion. Similarly democracy is the essence of all constitutions of the state, socialized man as a particular constitution of the state.20

In Greece and the Middle Ages the political aspects of life had been intimately linked with the social ones; it was only in modern times that the political state had become abstracted from the life of society. The solution to this problem in which 'the political constitution was formerly the religious sphere, the religion of the people's life, the heaven of its universality over against the earthly and real existence' was what Marx called 'true democracy'.21 This concept could be summed up as a humanist form of government in which free socialised man was the one and only subject of the political process in which the state as such would have disappeared.

Turning to Hegel's views on executive power, Marx produced several interesting passages on bureaucracy which represented his first attempt to give a sociological definition of state power and reflected in part his own difficulties with officialdom when editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.22 Hegel had said that the state mediated between conflicting elements within civil society by means of corporations and bureaucracy: the former grouped individual private interests in order to bring pressure to bear upon the state; the latter mediated between the state and private interests thus expressed. By bureaucracy Hegel meant a body of higher civil servants who were recruited by competition from the middle classes. To them were entrusted the formulation of common interests and the task of maintaining the unity of the state. Their decisions were prevented from being arbitrary by the monarch above them and the pressure of the corporations from below.

Marx began by denouncing this attempted mediation that did not resolve, and at best only masked, historically determined oppositions. Hegel had well understood the process of the dissolution of medieval estates, the growth of industry and the economic war of all against all. Indeed some of Marx's most striking characterisations of the capitalist ethic were taken almost directly from Hegel.2' But in trying nevertheless to construct a formal state unity, Hegel only created a further alienation: man's being, which was already alienated in monarchy, was now even more alienated in the growing power of the executive, the bureaucracy. All that he offered was an empirical description of bureaucracy, partly as it was, and partly as it pretended to be. Marx rejected Hegel's claim that the bureaucracy was an impartial and thus 'universal' class. He reversed the Hegelian dialectic by asserting that, though their function was in

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principle a universal one, the bureaucrats had in practice ended by turning it into their own private affair, by creating a group interest separate from society. Thus bureaucracy, being a particular, closed society within the state, appropriated the consciousness, will and power of the state. In the battle against the medieval corporations the bureaucracy was necessarily victorious as each corporation needed it to combat other corporations, whereas the bureaucracy was self-sufficient. Bureaucracy, which came into existence to solve problems and then engendered them in order to provide itself with a permanent raison d'etre, became an end rather than a means and thus achieved nothing. It was this process that accounted for all the characteristics of bureaucracy: the formalism, the hierarchy, the mystique, the identification of its own ends with those of the state.

Marx summed up these characteristics in a passage whose insight and incisiveness merit lengthy quotation:

Bureaucracy counts in its own eyes as the final aim of the state The aims of the state are transformed into the aims of the bureaux and the aims of the bureaux into the aims of the state. Bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The apex entrusts the lower echelon with insight into the individual while the lower echelon leaves insight into the universal to the apex, and so each deceives the other.

Bureaucracy constitutes an imaginary state alongside the real state and is the spiritualism of the state. Thus every object has a dual meaning - a real one and a bureaucratic one, just as knowledge is dual - real and bureaucratic (and it is the same with the will). But the real thing is treated according to its bureaucratic essence, its other-worldly spiritual essence. Bureaucracy holds in its possession the essence of the state - the spiritual essence of society; the state is its private property. The general ethos of bureaucracy is secrecy, mystery, safeguarded within by hierarchy and without by its nature as a closed corporation. Thus public political spirit and also political mentality appear to bureaucracy as a betrayal of its secret. The principle of its knowledge is therefore authority, and its mentality is the idolatry of authority. But within bureaucracy the spiritualism turns into a crass materialism, the materialism of passive obedience, faith in authority, the mechanism of fixed and formal behaviour, fixed principles, attitudes, traditions. As far as the individual bureaucrat is concerned, the aim of the state becomes his private aim, in the form of competition for higher posts - careerism. He considers the real life as a material one, for the spirit of this life has its own separate existence in bureaucracy.24

Marx's fundamental criticism of Hegel was the same as that contained m the preceding sections: the attributes of humanity as a whole had been

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transferred to a particular individual or class, which thus represented the illusory universality of modern political life.

Finally Marx dealt with Hegel's discussion of legislative power and particularly the Prussian Estates which, according to Hegel, constituted a synthesis between the state and civil society. Marx objected that such a view in fact presupposed the separation of the state and civil society - regarding them as entities to be reconciled, and therein lay the whole problem since 'the separation of the political state from civil society appears necessarily as a separation of political man - the citizen - from civil society, from his own actual empirical reality'.25 In order to give himself a historical perspective from which to criticise Hegel, during the summer of 1843 Marx had not only immersed himself in the political theories of Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Rousseau; he also took extensive notes on recent French, English, American and even Swedish history, and wrote a chronological table of the period A.D. 600-1589 that covered eighty pages. These readings led Marx to the conclusion that the French Revolution had completely destroyed any political significance that the Estates enjoyed in the Middle Ages: Hegel's idea of their being adequate representatives of civil society was archaic and indicative of German underdevelopment. Hegel's conceptual framework was based on the ideas of the French Revolution, but his solutions were still medieval; this was a mark of how far the political situation in Germany was retarded when compared with German philosophy. Indeed, the only Estate in the medieval sense of the word that still remained was the bureaucracy itself. The enormous increase in social mobility had rendered obsolete the Old Estates as originally differentiated in terms of need and work. 'The only general difference, superficial and formal, is merely that between country and town. But in society itself, differences developed in spheres that were constantly in movement with arbitrariness as their principle. Money and education are the main distinguishing characteristics.'26 Marx broke off here, noting that the proper place to discuss this would be in later sections (never written) on Hegel's conception of civil society. He did, however, go on to say, in a remark that foreshadowed the future importance of the proletariat in his thought, that the most characteristic thing about contemporary civil society was precisely that 'the property-less, the class that stands in immediate need of work, the class of physical labour, formed not so much a class of civil society as the basis on which society's components rest and move'.27 Marx summarised his objection to Hegel, as follows: 'As soon as civil estates as such become political estates, then there is no need of mediation, and as soon as mediation is necessary, they are no longer political... Hegel wishes to preserve the medieval system of estates but in the modern context of legislative power; and he wants