Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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P A R I S

Just now [he wrote to Ruge in March 1843], the president of the Israelites here has paid me a visit and asked me to help with a parliamentary petition on behalf of the Jews; and I agreed. However obnoxious I find the Israelite beliefs, Bauer's view seems to me nevertheless to be too abstract. The point is to punch as many holes as possible in the Christian state and smuggle in rational views as far as we can. That must at least be our aim - and the bitterness grows with each rejected petition.56

Marx's willingness to help the Jews of Cologne suggests that his article was aimed much more at the vulgar capitalism popularly associated with Jews than at Jewry as such - either as a religious body or (still less) as an ethnic group. Indeed, the German word for Jewry - Judentum - has the secondary sense of commerce and, to some extent, Marx played on this double meaning. It is significant, moreover, that some of the main points in the second section of Marx's article - including the attack on Judaism as the embodiment of a money fetishism - were taken over almost verbatim from an article by Hess - who was the very opposite of an anti-semite. (Mess's article, entitled 'On the Essence of Money', had been submitted for publication in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher but the journal collapsed before it could appear).57

The second of Marx's articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher was written after his arrival in Paris: it revealed the immense impact made on him by his discovery there of the class to whose emancipation he was to devote the rest of his life. Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, had a large population of German immigrant workers - almost 100,000. Some had come to perfect the techniques of their various trades; some had come simply because they could find no work in Germany. Marx was immediately impressed:

When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need - the need for society - and what appeared to be a means has become an end. The most striking results of this practical development are to be seen when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and drinking are no longer simply means of bringing people together. Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toilworn bodies.58

Marx attended the meetings of most of the French workers' associations, but was naturally closer to the Germans - particularly to the League of ilie Just, the most radical of the German secret societies and composed of emigre artisans whose aim was to introduce a 'social republic' in

K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Germany.59 He knew intimately both its leaders: Ewerbeck, a doctor, and Maurer who had been a member of Ruge's short-lived phalanstery. But he did not actually join any of the societies.60

Although Marx's second article ended with the forthright proclamation of the proletariat's destiny, the first part was a reworking of old themes. It was written as an introduction to a proposed rewriting of his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right; in fact, several of the arguments outlined in the Critique had already been developed in The Jewish Question. Being only an introduction, it was in the nature of a summary, ordering its themes in a way that reflected the different phases of Marx's own development: religious, philosophical, political, revolutionary. Taken as a whole, it formed a manifesto whose incisiveness and dogmatism anticipated the

Communist Manifesto of 1848.

All the elements of the article were already contained in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, but there was now a quite new emphasis on the proletariat as future emancipator of society. Although written in Paris, the whole article was orientated towards Germany and the possibility of a German revolution; accordingly it started with religion and went on to politics - the two most pressing subjects in Germany (according to his programmatic letter to Ruge of September 1843).

Marx began with a brilliant passage on religion summarising the whole work of the Young Hegelian school from Strauss to Feuerbach. 'So far as Germany is concerned,' he wrote, 'the criticism of religion is essentially complete, and criticism of religion is the presupposition of all criticism.'61 This latter assertion doubtless depended on two main factors: in Germany, religion was one of the chief pillars of the Prussian state and had to be knocked away before any fundamental political change could be contemplated; more generally, Marx believed that religion was the most extreme form of alienation and the point where any process of secularisation had to start, and this supplied him with a model for criticism of other forms of alienation. But he differed from Feuerbach in this: it was not simply a question of reduction - of reducing religious elements to others that were more fundamental. Religion's false consciousness of man and the world existed as such because man and the world were radically vitiated: 'The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion's inverted attitude to the world because they are an inverted world themselves.'62 Religion was the necessary idealistic completion of a deficient material world and Marx heaped metaphor on metaphor: 'Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiri-

tual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification.'65

Marx continued with a series of brilliant metaphors to show that religion was at one and the same time both the symptom of a deep social malaise and a protest against it. Religion nevertheless stood in the way of any cure of social evil since it tended at the same time to justify them. Thus,

the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.. .. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.64

Marx did not write much about religion (Engels wrote much more) and this is the most detailed passage in all his writings. What he said here - that religion is a fantasy of alienated man - is thoroughly in keeping with his early thought. (Later, the element of class ideology was to be much more dominant.) He thought religion at once important and unimportant: important, because the purely spiritual compensation that it afforded men detracted from efforts at material betterment; unimportant, because its true nature had been fully exposed, in his view, by his colleagues - particularly by Feuerbach. It was only a secondary phenomenon and, being dependent on socio-economic circumstances, merited no independent criticism.

Attempts to characterise Marxism as a religion, although plausible within their own terms, confuse the issue, as also do attempts to claim that Marx was not really an atheist. This is the usual approach of writers who stress the parallel between Marxism and the Judaeo-Christian history of salvation65 - though some say that Marx took over this tradition when already secularised by Schelling or Hegel into an aesthetic or philosophical revelation.66 It is true that Marx had in mind the religion of contemporary Germany dominated by a dogmatic and over-spiritual Lutheranism, but he wrote about 'religion' in general and his rejection was absolute. Unlike so many early socialists (Weitling, Saint-Simon, Fourier), he would brook no compromise. Atheism was inseparable from humanism, he maintained; indeed, given the terms in which he posed the problem, this was undeniable. It is, of course, legitimate to change the meaning of 'atheism' in order to make Marx a believer malgre lui, but this tends to make the question senseless by blurring too many distinctions.67

Marx then turned from a summary of past criticism, and what it had achieved, to current developments:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he may throw away the chains and pluck living flowers. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act and fashion his own reality as a disillusioned man come to his senses; so that he may revolve around himself as his real sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.68

Criticism had, consequently, to turn to a deeper alienation, that of politics:

It is therefore the task of history, now the truth is no longer in the beyond, to establish the truth of the here and now. The first task of philosophy - which is in the service of history - once the holy form of human self-alienation has been discovered, is to discover self-alien- ation in its non-religious forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.6'

Following this introduction, the body of Marx's article consisted of two parts: an analysis of the gap between the reactionary nature of German politics and the progressive state of German philosophy; and the possibilities of revolution arising from this contrast. Marx began by pointing out that even the necessary negation of Germany's present was anachronistic and would still leave Germany fifty years behind France.

Indeed, German history can congratulate itself on following a path that no people in the historical firmament have taken before and none will take after it. For we have shared with modern peoples in restorations without sharing their revolutions. We have had restorations, firstly because other peoples dared to make a revolution, and then because they suffered a counter-revolution; because our masters were at the one moment afraid and at another not afraid. Without shepherds at our head, we always found ourselves in the company of freedom only once - on the day of its burial.70

But there was, Marx argued, one aspect in which Germany was actually in advance of other nations and which afforded her the opportunity for a radical revolution: her philosophy. This view, shared by all the contributors to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, made them appear to the French as some sort of missionaries; it had been current in the Young I Iegelian movement since Heine (in his History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, written in 1835) had drawn a parallel between German

philosophy and French politics and prophesied a radical revolution for Germany as a consequence. To be at the heart of contemporary questions it was German philosophy that had to be criticised. In Germany it was only political philosophy that was abreast of modern conditions.

Marx then clarified his own position by pointing to two different attitudes both of which seemed to him to be inadequate. The first, which in some respects recalled the views of Feuerbach, Marx called the 'practical political party':

This party is justified in demanding the negation of philosophy. Their error consists not in their demand, but in being content with a demand that they do not and cannot really meet. They believe that they can complete that negation by turning their back on philosophy. You ask that we start from the real seeds of life, but forget that until now the real seed of the German people has only flourished inside its skull. In a word: you cannot transcend philosophy without giving it practical effect.71

The second attitude, characteristic of the theoretical party - by which Marx meant Bruno Bauer and his followers - committed the same error but from the opposite direction:

It sees in the present struggle nothing but the critical struggle of philosophy with the German world and does not reflect that earlier philosophy itself has belonged to this world and is its completion, albeit in ideas. Its principal fault can be summed up thus: it thought it could give practical expression to philosophy without transcending it.72

Bauer's philosophy, because it refused any mediation with the real, was undialectical and condemned to sterility. What Marx proposed was a synthesis of the two views he condemned: a mediation with the real that would abolish philosophy 'as philosophy' while giving it practical expression. This was akin to his later advocacy of the 'unity of theory and practice', and took up a theme that had been in his mind since his doctoral thesis (if not before): that of the secularisation of philosophy. From Cieszkowski's praxis in 1838 to Hess's 'Philosophy of Action' in 1843 this was a theme central to Hegel's disciples trying to break loose from their master's system so as to get to grips with contemporary events. It was along these lines that Marx saw the only possible way of solving Germany's political problems.

In the second part of his article, Marx then turned to an exploration of the possibility of a revolution that would not only eliminate Germany's backwardness, but also thrust her into the forefront of European nations by making her the first to have achieved emancipation that was not merely political. Thus he put the question: 'Can Germany achieve a praxis that