Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

political half which shows that he intended to continue the themes of his

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and essays On the Jewish Question by writing a detailed critique of the institutions of the liberal state viewed as a stage leading towards the abolition of both the state and of civil society." Engels had urged Marx even before he left Paris to finish the book as 'people's minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron is hot'.7 Marx received many letters of inquiry and encouragement and Engels even announced in the New Moral World that it was in print.8 Engels, who was sitting in his parents' home in Barmen finishing off his

Condition of the Working Classes in England and in close contact with the Rhineland socialists, produced a constant stream of publishing projects. On two of these Marx agreed to collaborate: a critique of Friedrich List as the chief proponent of protective tariffs as a means to ensure Germany's economic development; and a series of translations of Utopian socialists with critical introductions, beginning with Fourier, Owen, Morelly and the Saint-Simonians. But neither of these projects came to anything. But Marx was never a man to be hurried in his researches; and during the first few months in Brussels he buried himself in the municipal library to read books in French on economic and social problems in an effort to understand more fully the workings of bourgeois society, the factors that determined the general historical process, and the possibilities of proletarian emancipation.

Engels said later that when he moved to Brussels at the beginning of April Marx 'had already advanced from these principles [i.e. 'that politics and its history have to be explained from the economic conditions and their evolution and not vice versa'] to the main aspects of his materialist theory of history';9 and in the Preface to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto he wrote that Marx had already worked out his theory in the spring of 1845 'and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here'.10 The only writing of Marx's surviving from this period are the famous eleven Theses on Feuerbach rightly called by Engels 'the first document in which the brilliant kernel of the new world view is revealed'.11 From his first reading of Feuerbach in the early 1840s Marx had never been entirely uncritical; but both in the 'Paris Manuscripts' and in the Holy Family Marx had nothing but praise for Feuerbach's 'real humanism'. Marx was now becoming identified too closely as a mere disciple of Feuerbach from whose static and unhistorical views Marx was bound to diverge owing to the growing attention he was paying to economics. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx gave a very brief sketch of the ideas that he and Engels elaborated a few months later in The German Ideology. By any standard The German Ideology is one of Marx's major works. In it by criticising Feuerbach, the most 'secular'

contradiction and revolutionised in practice.'16 The final, and the bestknown, thesis read: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.'17

In the three months following Engels' arrival he and Marx 'set about the task of elaborating the newly gained theory in the most different directions'.18 For Engels this took the form of a large-scale History of English Society and for Marx his Critique of Economics and Politics. In July 1845 they both undertook a six-week trip to England. According to a subsequent letter from Marx to his publisher, this journey was undertaken exclusively for research on his book19 Most of the time they spent in Manchester reading economic works by writers such as Petty, Tooke, Cooper, Thomson and Cobbett in the Old Chetham Library. Much later Engels still recalled with pleasure 'the small alcove and the four-sided desk where we sat 24 years ago. I like the place a lot: because of the stained glass window it always seems fine and sunny there.'20 On their return Marx and Engels stayed a few days in London where they met the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, editor of the most influential working-class paper, The Northern Star. Engels also introduced Marx to the leaders of the German workers' organisations in London - contacts that were to become the centre of Marx's preoccupations the following year - and together they attended a meeting of the leaders of various national groups to discuss the founding of some form of international democratic association. This took form as the Fraternal Democrats in September 1845.21

While Marx was away in England, Jenny went to stay with her mother in Trier for two months. Their second daughter, Laura, was to be born at the end of September and Jenny prolonged her stay as long as possible in order to keep her lonely mother company. She wrote to Marx on his return from England:

The little house will have to do. Anyway, in winter a lot of room is not necessary. When I have finished the big business on the upper floor, I will move downstairs again. Then you can sleep in your present study and set up tent in the big lounge. That's fine. Then the children's noise is sealed off below. You are undisturbed above, I can join you in peaceful moments and we can keep the room in some sort of order. In any case, a good hot stove with accessories must be installed in the room as soon as possible. That is Breuer's22 affair, since nobody rents a room that is impossible to heat... Everything else I will see to later... ,23

Once back from England Marx's socio-economic studies were interrupted by his decision to write a definitive critique of the Young Hegelians.

3 0 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

In a letter of explanation to Leske he wrote: 'It seemed to me very important that a work polemicising against German philosophy and current German socialism should precede my positive construction. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the point of view of my Economics which is diametrically opposed to the previous German intellectual approach.'24 The Holy Family had not accomplished this: it was written before Marx had developed his systematically materialist approach to history. Further, Bauer had published a reply to the Holy Family in which Marx and Engels were labelled as 'Feuerbachian dogmatists';25 and in November 1844 another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, had published The Ego and its Own, an anarcho-existentialist work of extraordinary power and fascination which branded all the forces that oppressed mankind, whether religion or liberalism or socialism, as illusions from which men should free themselves by refusing any form of self-sacrifice and indulging in conscious egoism.26 And Marx and Engels had naturally been the object of strong criticism from Stirner as communist disciples of Feuerbach. The German Ideology was thus conceived primarily as a work to make clear the disagreements between Marx and Engels and Feuerbach, and also to deal

criticism of Feuerbach - 'the only one who has at least made some progress'27 - into which critiques of Bauer and Stirner were to be inserted. By April 1846 these critiques had grown to the size of a large book in its own right which was prepared for publication and taken to Germany by Weydemeyer who had been staying with the Marx family for the first few months of 1846. T h e section on Feuerbach, however, remained unfinished and, in fact, contained very little on Feuerbach himself. T h e second volume dealt with current socialist trends in Germany. It reached only a hundred or so pages and work on the manuscript was abandoned in August 1 8 4 6 . "

By far the most important part of The German Ideology is the unfinished section on Feuerbach. Marx and Engels began by making fun of the philosophical pretensions of the Young Hegelians which they described as 'the putrescence of Absolute Spirit' and characterised as follows:

In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity by bolder and stronger rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was child's play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45 more of the

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past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries. All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought.29

The main body of the section is then divided into three parts: a general statement of the historical and materialist approach in contrast to that of the Young Hegelians, a historical analysis employing this method, and an account of the present state of society and its immediate future - a communist revolution.

Marx and Engels began by stating their general position, which deserves lengthy quotation as it is the first concise statement of historical materialism:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. We begin with real individual men, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human beings. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature ....

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not

individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.30

Marx and Engels went on to state that 'how far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to

the separation of industrial from commercial labour, and so on. Next they summarised the different stages of ownership that had corresponded to the stages in the division of labour: tribal ownership, communal and state