Marx & Engels: The Intellectual Relationship 0710802293, 9780710802293

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The Intellec:tual Relationship Terrell Carver Lecturer in Politics, University of Bristol

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON

Copyright © 1983 by Terrell Carver

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in Great Britain

Library of Congress catalog card number: 83-48679

ISBN: 0-253-3368 1-3

For MRG

Contents Preface

lX

I ntroduction

Xl

1

The False Start

1

2

'By Another Road'

26

3

' Our Outlook'

51

4

The I n vention of Dialectics

96

5

' Second F iddle' ?

118

Conclusion

1 52

M arx-Engels Chronology

1 59

A bbreviations and Bibliography

1 65

A cknowledgements

1 67

I ndex

1 69

Vll

Preface By i t s very nature t he story o f a relationship i s complex, and that of an i ntellectual relationship particularly so, since a double, i nteractive, and (when one partner survive s) even retrospective development must be analysed . I hope that the reader will find t he M arx-Engels chronology at t he end of t he book u seful i n following my account of two complicated careers a nd of a fa mous relationship t ha t has very nearly taken on a life o f i ts own. I a m gr ateful t o the U n iversity ofBristol, its Library, and the Department of Politics for supporting me in this project. Bristol Decem ber 1 9 82

Terrell Carver

IX

Intro duction In this book I aim t o take a factual look a t t he M arx-Engels intellectual relation s hip in order t o answer a specific set of questions : Why was the first meeting between M arx and Engels unsuccess ful'? What t hen attracted Marx to E ngels in 1 844 when the partnership was founded'? What e ffect did Engels's work ha ve on M a rx'? What exactly was cla rified in t he jointly writ ten German Ideology and for whom'? When did the 'dialectics' , made fa mous by E ngels, first emerge ? What was t he relationship betwee n M arx an d Engels in their mature years ? To what extent is the account of t he relationship given by Engels after M arx's dea t h an accura te one ? What bearing does the M a rx-Engels intellectual relationship have on our reading of t heir respective works ? In answering these questions I have striven to avoid certain fallacies which are all too common in the literature on M arx, Engels and M arxi sm. The first is the 'mirror' fallacy : if the commentator does n ot understand a work by M arx or a passage in one o f his works, Marx must have been confused, i . e . as confused as the commentator. Too many commentators opt m uch too quickly for an ascription of con fusion in order, fallaciously, to 'solve' a problem in tex tual interpretation . I n m y view much more sense can b e made of Marx's work than i s commonly s upposed . Curious ly, commen ta tors are much less reluctant to ascri be confusion to E ngels, whose works, the reader will discover, suffer from very con siderable ambiguities of which he was apparently unaware. The second fal lacy is the 'ch ronological ' one, and its con verse : when an idea first appears in, for example, Marx's XI

Xll

Introduction

surviving works, then that is the first time that he had that idea ; and conversely, whenever M arx first had an idea, he immedi­ ately wrote it down. It surprises me very much how scrupulous concern with tex tual dating goes for nough t when s uch dates are used to 'prove' that the intellectual context of s uccessive works is radically different, when more plausible psychological assumptions, and a more thorough attention to the intended audience and other circumstances surrounding the production of a text, might lead to a theory of intellectual development that i s admittedly more complex , but arguably more accurate and much more informative. The chron ological care lavi shed on M a rx's texts has little paral lel in commentary on E n gels, whose writings, so I shall argue, changed in a more dramatic manner than· M arx's over the years, and whose comments on some subjects need crucially to be related to one date m particular, that o f M arx's death . The third fallacy concerns a teleol ogical conception o f intellectual dvel opment itsel f : i n many a ccounts M arx 's career is conceived as a series of logically related stages, e .g. romantici sm , liberalism, H egeliani sm , and Feuer bachiani sm , which lead as a succession to an ·end' , n amely t he ·self­ clarification' which M arx mentions as a feature of The German Ideo logy. I n these accounts M a rx is p resented as somehow im prisoned intellectually within each stage as a kind of ·ce l l', yet magically granted t he right key i n producing each ' key' tex t , i n order t o unlock tha t particular 'cell' and proceed t o t h e nex t . While there i s considerable continuity o f a developmental sort i n M arx's early (and i ndeed later) works, a mysterious teleology is not required i n explanation . M arx 's po litical interests and circumstances provide a s ufficient cl ue , the one he himself o ffered i n his own autobiographica l ske tch. M o reover t he imprisoning stages are wholly untrue to the powerful ye t voraciously sceptical i ntellect d isplayed i n his work s . While he made use of others ' views , that fact a lone hardly makes him a Hegelian , Feuerbachian, or whatever, and he signally fails stronger tests of di scipleship. His i ntensely ruminative, i nvesti­ gative and scientific approach , i n that he demanded evi dence for statemen ts and did not i n general spin out proposi tions according to his fancy, itself solves the apparent mys tery of his devel opment . H is method served his political interest i n

Introduction

Xlll

tackling issues, writers and circumstances that figured i n his milieu ; the issues, writers and circumstances did n ot determine stages in what is o ften, and erroneously, presented as a wholly intellectual metamorphosis. Curi ously a m uch better case for issues, writers and circum­ stances setting intellectual limits round a thin ker during given periods can be m ade out with respect to E ngels, since his early development lacked Marx ' s single- minded political thrust and unifying sense of vocation . E ngels seemed at times to generate published opinions on whatever subjects were put to him, and he passes some fairly strong tests of discipleship, e.g. to Young Germany, Young H egelianism, communism o f the 1 840s and the Marxism of later years. Since there has been so little consideration of his career, however, no one has fastened on a telos which he fulfilled i n his latter days. While my conception of his career is not teleologica l , I do have a view on where exactly he found his vocation and what signific ance this h ad for his own thought, an d for interpretations of M arx . For reasons that will become clear, the role of Engels, personally and intellectually, is absolutely crucial for a satis­ factory understanding of the M arx-Engels intellectual relations hip. That is why a great deal of this book is concerned with an analysis of Engels's work in the first instance , and M arx's in the second . This reverses t he usual procedure in considering the two and their relationship, when their relation­ ship is considered explicitly or even raised at all. The relation­ ship is a great deal more important than most commentators seem to think, and only by focussing on Engels's life and works can the facts be properly sorted out . B roadly speakin g, commentators on M ar x and M arxism take one of three views on the M arx-Engels relationship, n on e o f w hich i s supported by this book . The first view is that M arx , and Engels were perfect p artners in agreement on all points. M o reover they were the authors of supplementary and/or interchangeable works reflecting a coincidence of interests in some and a division of labour with respect t o others. An examination of texts refutes this story, particularly i n carefully comparing works by Engels, written after 1 859, with M arx's CEuvre, and in t horoughl y e xamining both sides of any relevant exchange i n their correspondence . M ost acade mic commen-

XIV

(

In troduction

tators n ow consider this account of t he M arx- Engels relation­ s hip to be unten able . I t lingers for political reasons, and in some cases because idle writers fi nd it an easy option . The secon d v iew is t ha t in considering M arx, Engels may be safely ignored. I t i s significant that n o one has tried the reverse procedure, and that fact is a clue to the defects i nheren t in declining to consider E ngels's n umerous commentaries o n M arx' s work, since material from those commen taries may then creep i nto an i nterpretation of M arx u nk n ow n to the commentator. Engels's version of M arx's work has had very wide currency, and that fact must be acknowledged. The t hird view is t he most i nteresting and t he most prevalent i n scholarly circles : the later M arx, from 1 8 5 9 onwards , is said to have adopted t he 'determinist' views espoused by Engels in the same period, or less strongly, to have agreed with them, drifted towards t hem, or tolerated t hem tacitly. The most astonishing thing about this vie w is that practically n o evidence is ever cited to support it ; it is simply asserted as true, though never as if it were self-evidently so (which i t is not). I t is t hen particularly difficult t o engage, since t he burden of proo f lies with the sceptic, who must addition ally supply plausible material (thus compromising his or her own case) in order to produce a refutation. This 'determinist' view entails a n umber of substantial theses about M arx, t ho ugh commentators do not always s tate t he m explicitly : 1 ) that his later, 'determinist' works are i nconsistent with his earlier 'philosophical' and/or 'humanist' ones; 2) that the later M arx espoused this 'determ i nism' i nconsistently, because an exami nation of his late r works re veals s u bstantial continuities (in form of words and content) with the earlier material. This double schizophre nia in M arx is never satis­ factorily confronted, but is often served up t o the reader, who i s not encouraged to question its p lausibility, psychological or otherwise. M o reover t he fact that the view is merely put, rather t han argued for, generates vagueness concern ing what as pects of the works by the later M arx and Engels are actua lly at s t ake. It is not clear wherei n this determinism manifests itsel f exactly, and w hat i s and is not an instance of it. Because o f t his vagueness the prospect of sorting out similarities and d if­ ferences between the later M arx and E ngels begins t o look

Introduction

xv

hopeless, and t he reader turn s back with relief to t he Com­ munist M anifesto and earlier work s , o n w hich t hese commen­ tators devote almost all of their e nergies. Once this s hi ft of atte ntion has taken place , the views of t he later Engels have in fact come t o obscure the tenets and indeed t he importance of M arx' s admittedly difficult critique of political economy, because Engels presented M arx's proj ect and his importan t t heoretical propositi ons as consistent with a materi alism which he propou nded. This materi alism was defined (wit h certain ambiguities) in terms of Engels ' s view of natural science. He took natural science to be (poten ti ally) u niversal i n scope, i nductive , causal and particularly con- cerned with t he establi shment o f ' laws '. Thus by default Engels is granted the positi on he assumed - Marx's co-equal - in the role he adopted : ' scientific' t heore tician. Both those 'con­ clusions' n eed examining; neither the word of Engels n or of commentators is sufficient to prove t heir truth. M oreover t he assessment of the M arx- Enge ls relationship those 'con­ clusions' imply is profoundly ambivalent . If we take Engels's philosophising to stand for M arx's critique, his determinism to stand for M arx's 'gu iding t hread', and his interpretative context to stand for M arx ' s own, t hen who was really, as Engels put it, t he ' first violin'?

1

The False Start

Karl Marx and Fried rich Engels first met in Nove mber 1 842 when M arx was twenty- four and E ngels just twenty-two. That meeting was not a success. Yet less than two years later t heir famous i ntellectual p artn ershi p was l au nched. I n considering any intellectual relationship we m ust look care full y at each partner's life and thought before t hey met in order t o determin e what each brought t o the other, w hat experiences and ideas they had in common, and what they t he n accomplis hed toget her. W i t h t h e M arx-Engels relationship we have further facts to explai n : the false start, and the subsequent founda tion o f a partnershi p that l asted the t hirty-n i ne years till M arx ' s death . I t is to Engels's intellectual biography t hat w e must turn i n order t o explain t he reversal i n M arx's attitude between 1 842 and 1 844. This is fortu nate, because the early Engels has received much less critical scrutiny than t he yout hful M arx. Though a more experienced and m ore extensively published writer than M arx, Engels was anxious for M arx' s attenti ons as ... editor and polemicist, since it was M arx who commanded some n otice and respect i n the li beral politics of t he Rhineland. The p artnership was fou nded when Marx swun g round from a curt dismissal to an enthusiastic collaboration, because of what Engels had u ndertaken in the interval between false start and fi rm friendship. M arx's political develop ment to the age of twenty-four, though remarkable, was not really at odds with his back­ ground. His father' s household was that of a liberal l awyer, self-made, self-sufficient, but not rich ; sceptical, i nquiring, 1

2

I

1

Marx and Engels

respect ful of the tradi tional arts and scien ces, toleran t i _ n religious affairs but never atheistic. K arl had an academic educati on based on the cl assics and li beral arts. Destined for university and a professi on , he di sappointed his father by tak ing up philosophy and hi story. His li beral politics exten ded to t he serious considera tion of socialism, atheism and re­ volution - t he agenda, as it were, of t he most radical French revolutionaries of t he 1 790s. German intellectuals of M arx' s day experienced those i deas t hrough the works o f G . W . F. Hegel, dead since 1 8 3 1 but still a dominan t , if highly ambigu ous in fluence. Reactionary traditionali sts and li beral -idealists alike found support in Hegel 's phil osophy, and it was wit h t he radical ca mp that M arx aligned himself, drifting into journalism when an academic career became impossible for someone with his political sympathies. Liberal journali sm was itself a precari ous busi­ n ess ; M arx' s paper, t he Rheinische Zeitung of Cologne, had to n egotiate an imp ossi ble course between its civic backers and t he various political ent husiasms of its con tri but ors. M arx was t he only person able or willing to take up t he c hallenge, and even his considerable dialectical talents kept the paper go ing for only five further months. I t was M arx as the new editor-in-chief of t he Rheinische Zeitung, w ho gave Engels, a contribu tor to t he paper since April 1 842, a frosty reception in late November. Engels's family background was commercial ra ther t han professional, conservative rather t han libera l and deeply reli­ gious rat her than tolerantly sceptical. The W upper Valley, w here he grew up, was one of the first ind ustrialised areas in Germany, and the Engels family had been mill -owners since t he time of Friedrich's great-grandfathe r. Engels grew up in a Pietist house ho ld, w here sober ha bits and Bible-reading reigned supreme in strict acc ord with t he e xtreme Protestant sect. Pietist education was not intended to be inte llectually stimulating, though a certain ra tionalism found its wa y into t he grammar school, which Friedrich left at s ixteen with good references in Latin, Greek ('the easier Greek prose wri ters '), French ('translates t he French c lassics with skill') and Germa n ( 'good, independe nt t houghts' and a 'commend able interest i n t he history of German na tional literature and t he reading of the

The False Start

3

Germ an classics') (CW 2 . 5 84-5). Friedrich went into the family firm rather than to university, and he had his first taste of freedom when he went to work in B re men a year later in the late summer of 1 8 3 8 . I t w as t hen, even before h e was eighteen, t hat Engels became a published poet and w as already complaining about an editor w ho ' has complete ly destroyed 1 ) t he main idea, 2) t he cohesi on of t he poem' . ' A s soon as I saw t he changes', he wrote to his schoolfriends, the G raeber brothers, 'I became very angry and raged in a most barbaric fashi on ' . The ' main idea' was to contrast Bedouin t ribesmen , even in their present humbled conditi on ('And freedom lost without a trace/They jump at money's beck and call'), with his audience in 'Parisian coats an d vests ' who were clearly despised by the poet . Yet Engels commented sceptically on his o wn talent : ' I shall also probably get a poem or two publis hed in some journal because other fel lows also do so who are just as big i f not bigger asses than I am, and because my e fforts will neither raise nor lower German literature' (CW 2. 392-3, 394, 395-6). Engels poured the same scorn on the liberal writers an d critics of t he day, the Young German y move ment of the 1 8 30s, though he singled out Karl Gutzkow, editor of the Hamburg Telegraphfur Deutsch/and as the m ost reasonable of all. Young Germany was ' a fine lot indeed ! ' (CW 2. 4 1 1 ) . The following spring En gels turned to more serious matters , writing to Fried rich G raeber i n February 1 8 39, ' I have just seen in the Telegraph a review of the poems of [J .C. F.] Winkler, the Barmen m ission ary . . . These extracts a re really infinitely revo lting'. ' Religious things', he continued 'are usually non­ sense', (CW 2 . 4 1 5- 1 6) . The next month he w rote the most successful of his early work s, the ' Letters from W uppertal', publi shed in Gutzkow's Telegraph in M arch/April 1 8 39. Engel s protrayed his home district as a 'Zion of the obscurantists ', linking religious fundament alism, municip al feckl essness, poor taste, abysmal architecture, industrial pol­ lution, povert y and exploitation in his survey. The Ri ver Wupper, bright red from effluent, gu ides t he reader up t he valley between smoky factory buildings and yam-strewn b leaching yards. The w o rk ers of the valley occupied Engels ' s immediate attention s when h e contrasted the e ffects of in-

4

Marx and Engels

dus trialisation o n the popul ace with ' the w ho lesome, vigorous life of the people t hat exists almost everywhere i n Germany'. While Engels 's general view of the res t of Germany was somewhat nai·ve, or a t leas t n ai·vely put, his rep ort on the district he knew has t he immediacy and power of an eyewitness account: Every evening you can hear merry fellows strolling through the streets singing their songs, but t hey are the most vul gar, obscene so ngs that ever came from d runken mouths ; one never hears any of the folk-songs which are so familiar throughout Germany and of which we have every right to be proud. A l l the ale-houses are full to overflowing, especially on Saturday and Su nday, and when they close at about eleven o'clock, the d runk s pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter. The mos t degraded of these men are those known as Karrenbinder, totally demoralised people, with no fixed abode or definite employment, who crawl out of t heir refuges, h aystacks, stables, etc. , at dawn, if they have not spent the night on a dungheap or o n a stai rcase. By restric ting the previously indefinite numbers of ale-houses, the aut horities have now to some extent curbed this annoyance (CW 2.7-9).

A bout t he reason s for t his state of a ffairs Engels was utterly succinct : industrialisation . In particular he mention ed wea­ vers, working at home, who ' dessicate their spinal marrow i n fro nt of a ho t s to ve ' ; leat he r workers w h o were ruined physically and mentally after three years ; children deprived of educati on and made victims of industrial acciden ts; and a range of industrial di seases, especially of the lungs. But what really occupied Engels was the peculiar culture that prevailed in the regi on , drawing strength from the conditi ons created by indus tria l de velopmen t . Drunkenness, demoralisation and venereal di sease, he noted, were rife a mo n g w orke rs, who were also to be found miraculously converted (at times) to the fundament alist, puritanical Chris tianity preached by itin­ erant and sometimes frau dulent revivalists. Engels descri bed a related mysticism among mill -owners, o n which he could speak wi t h authori ty and abo ut which the re was rather more to say. The mysticism practised by the higher social strata was o f a more doctrinai re sort, featuring 'savage int olerance' directed towards l iterature (particularly novels), opi nion , amusements and dress (CW 2 . 9- 1 2).

Tlze False Start

5

A fter reviewing the l ocal preachers, their talents and re­ lations with each other, Engels turned to the infl uence of Pietism on other aspects of middle-class life - education and the arts. N ot surp risingly, he claimed that the Pietist spi rit pervades and corrupts every s ingle aspect of life , typically leading parents to identify intellectual p rogress with un­ believers . 'Anyone who pl ays whist and billia rds, who can talk a little about politics and pay a pretty compl iment is regarded as an educated m an in Barmen and El berfeld.' Local journal­ ists, writers and poets found little favour with Engels, w ho concluded that the whole region is submerged in a sea of Pietism and philistinism (CW 2. 1 2-25). E n ge ls 's anal ysis focussed on the bigotry, obscura ntism and anti-intellectual ism of t he property-owning classes of his home dist rict - obvious targets for a rebellious young man who wanted more out of life t han provincial monotony and routine. What is striking about his ' Letters ' is their factual ity, derived from his sharp observations , hunger for knowledge and hat red of dogmatism. To this we can att ribute the i nclusion of his comments on the e nvironment and work i ng-class life . The fact that those comments come first and are t hemselves linked with the scathing account of Pietism is pa rticularly interesting. While never claiming that industrial­ isation had in any way given rise to the cultural phenomena that he depl ored and disliked, Engels attributed the persistence of Reformation sects to the needs and interests of factory workers and owners alike , the former seeking an escape from their miseries t hrough rel igious enthusiasm and the latter fi nd ing a ready exculpation fo r their role as empl oyers and t heir hypocritical poli tics : The wealthy m anufacturers have a flexible conscie nce and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a Pietist's soul to hell, especia lly if he goes to church twice every Sunday. Fo r it is a fact tha t the Pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all ; they use every possi ble means to reduce the wo rkers· wages on the pretext o f dep riving them of the opportunity to get d runk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people (CW 2. I O).

The article seems to have caused a sensation' , Engels

6

Marx and Engels

commented accurately to his fri en d Fried rich G rae ber later in the month, add ing: 'I am p leased with myself for not havi ng said an ything i n the article that I cann ot prove ' (CW 2 . 426-7) . I n the same letter he wrote that unde r the influence of rationalism and D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus he had come to doubt Christian ortho doxy. Strauss subj ected the Gospels to historical scrutiny, pointing out con trad ictions and disc re­ pancies of the sort listed later by E ngels : the ' Ch risti ipsissima verba of which the orthodox boast come out differently in every gospel'. E ngels 's rationalism came forth in his belie f that one who seeks with all his heart to do as much good as possible cannot be eternally damned, and even more striki ngly in his defence of the divi ne in man agai nst the dead letter of Christian orthodoxy ( CW 2 . 426). Having published so s uccessfully i n a paper iden tified with the Yo ung German y movement, Engels modified somewhat his assessment of the trend, writing on 6 M ay 1 8 39 to the Elberfelder Zeitung (which had taken a dim view o f his 'Letters fr om Wuppertal') that he had not ' the hon our of belonging to it', but signing himself to Wi lhelm G raeber a few weeks later as Fried rich Engels , Young German (CW 2.27, 452) . H i s letter t o Fried rich Graber of 1 5 J une summed u p what he adm ired in the movement - the search for truth and the eradication of ignorance and com pulsion in h uman a ffairs : It is with me as with Gutzk ow; w hen I come across so meone who arrogantly dismisses positive [i.e. ra tionalist] Chri stianity, then I defend this teaching, which deri ves from the deepest needs of human nat ure. t he longing for salvation from sin through God's grace; but when it is a matter of defending the freedom of reason, then I protest against all compulsion. - I hope to l ive to see a radical trans­ forma tion in religi ous consciousness of the world . . . Man i s born free, he is free! (CW 2 . 456).

Engels 's religious doubts, his literary heroes, his jo urnalism and his poli tics were all linked i n his espousal of feeling and rationalism. His letters to F ried rich Grae ber recorded the full scope of his concerns: True, feeling can confirm, but it can m ost certainly n ot furnish a basis - t ha t would be like wanting to smell with one's ears . . . The

The False Start

7

Spirit of God may convince you through yo ur feeling that you are a child of G od - t hat is quite possible ; but it most certainly cannot so convince you that you are a child of God through the death o f Christ ; otherwise feeling would be capable of t hinking and your ears of seeing ( CW 2.460- 1 ) .

' I f you a re consistent', he wrote to Graeber, ' you must consign him [the phi losopher Friedrich Schleiermacher] to damnation, for he does not teach the word of Christ i n your [Pietist] sense, but ra ther i n that of You ng Germany, of Theodor M u ndt and K arl G utzk ow . . . and David Friedrich S trauss' (CW 2 . 462). Yet for Engels the s t ruggles were not m erely p ersonal ones of religious conviction o r i ntellectual battles i n a pure realm of ideas, but real-world s truggles in which i ndividuals and groups , holding different beliefs, conflict with one another in personal, political and social terms : What is rejected by science . . . s hould no longer exist in life either. Pietism may have been an historically justified eleme nt in the development of theology [but] it . . . should not now refuse to make way for speculative theology. I t is only out of this latter that any certainty can be developed (CW 2.457) .

These phrases from one of his published l i terary articles sum up Engels 's mani festo : 'The struggle for freedom which produces all i ts manifestations - the development of con stitu­ tionalism, the resistance to the pressure of the aristocracy, the fight of t he intellect against Pietism and of gaiety against the remnants of gl oomy asce tici sm' (CW 2. 3 2-3). Even a boat trip o n the River Weser i nspired hi m to p ay p rivate tribute i n verse to the anniversary of the Revo lu tion of July 1 8 30 in France (C W 2. 464). However, revo lution ary rhetoric went only so far. Engels retained real religi o us convictions (so far as we can tell from his correspondence with the Graebers), and he was similarly restrained in p ol i tics : I protest against you r insinuations that I have been giving the spirit of t he t i mes one k ick after another in the hindquarters in order to speed i ts progress . . . On the contrary, when the spirit of the times comes along like a hurricane and pulls the train away on the railway l ine,

-

8

Marx and Engels

then I jump quickly into a carriage and let myself be pulled along a little (CW 2.465) .

H e even took to explaining the 'opera tion of historical necessity during the period 1 789- 1 8 39' to 'young f ellows ' in Bremen (CW 2.466) . Evidently Engel s had begun reading the works of Hege l , identifying himself with t h e radical Young H egelian school o f interpretation . 'Authority', he wrote, ' d i d n o t t ak e the trouble to work its way through t he abstruse forms of Hegel ' s system . . . b u t then, h o w could it have k n o w n t h a t this philosophy would ve nture from the q uiet haven of theory onto the stormy sea of actua lity? ' 'When authority pro tected Hege l , ' Engels continued , 'when it elevated h i s teach ing almost to a Prussian phil osophy of the state, it laid itse l f open t o a ttack, a fact which i t now eviden tly regrets' (CW 2 . 1 43). Thus Young Hegeliani sm was not a purely phil osophical movement, as Engels no ted : . . . a few days ago I read in the paper that H egelian philosophy has been banned in Prussia, that a famous H egelian lecturer i n H alle has been induced by a ministerial rescrip t to suspend his lectures and that it has been intimated to several junior H alle lecturers of t he same colour (presumably [Arnold] Ruge, etc.) that they cannot expect appointments (CW 2.48 7).

For Engels, H egel's work represen ted an application of reason to historical q uestions an d a furthe r triumph of science over superstiti on: For I am on the point of becoming a Hegelian. W hether I s hall become one I don 't, of course, k now yet, but Strauss has lit up lights on Hegel for me w hich m ake t he thing qu ite plausible to me . H is (Hegel's) phi losophy of history is anyway written as from my own heart (CW 2.486).

For Engels, Young H egelianism was not merely intellectua l ; it was deeply p olitical : Our future depends more than ever o n the growing generation, for this genera tion will have to decide co ntradictions of ever-heightenin g

The False Start

9

intensity . . . We have a touchstone for t he young in the s hape of the new philosophy; they have to work their way through it and yet not lose the enthusiasm of youth . . . You need not therefore become Old H egelians and throw around 'in and for itself', 'totality', and 'thisness', but you must not fight shy of the labour of think ing . . . I n thi s sen se t he youth o f today has i ndeed gone through Hegel's school, and in the heart of the young many a seed has come up splendidly from t he system's dry husk. This is also the ground for t he boldest confidence in the present; that its fate depends not on the cautious fear of action and the ingrai ned philistinism of the old but on the noble , u nrestrained a rd our of youth. Therefore let us fight for freedom as long as we are young and full of glowing vigour; who knows if we shall still be able to when old age creeps upon us! (CW 2. 1 68-9).

Yet n ot every Young Hegelian won his praise. Karl Grun, a young poet, had very s triking thoughts now and again , Engels said, but was often gui lty of dreadful Hegelian phrases. 'What does this mean', Engels inquired : ' " Sophocles i s the highly m oral G reece which lets its titanic o utbursts break agai nst the wall of absol ute necessity. I n Shakespeare the concept o f absolute character made i t s appearance " ' (CW 2.483-4) . Thus E ngels 's Hegelian i sm was of a discrimi nating kind : 'Through Strauss I have now e ntered o n the straight road to Hegelianism. O f co urse, I s hall n ot become such an i nveterate Hegelia n as [the conservative H . F. W.J Hinrichs and others, but I must nevertheless absorb important things from this col ossal system' (C W 2 . 489) . The most important o f the ideas absorbed b y the yo ung E n gels was the Hegelian idea of God, which he identified as a m odern panthei s m, Hegel's principle that humanity and divi nity a re i n essence identical (CW 2 . 489-90) . This was the foundation stone o f Young Hegelia nism - if man and God are identical, traditional Christiani ty and the conservative p olitics of divi ne right, hierarchy, censorship and established churches m us t be overthrown . 'The enthusiastic, unshakable confidence in the idea, inherent in the New Hegelianism, is the sole fo rtress in which the liberals can fi nd safe retreat whenever reaction gai n s a tempo rary advantage o ver them with aid from above'. 'We stand by our demand ', he wrote, for 'a great u nited natio n o f citizens w i t h equal rights!' (CW 2. 1 43, 1 46).

1

-

10

Marx and Engels

Engels excoriated Fried rich Wilhe lm I I I for his anti-cons ti­ tutionalism : ' his perj u ry i s official . . . This same s habby, rotten, goddam ned k i ng now has it annou nced through [Bishop] Eylert [on 1 9 Jan uary 1 840] t hat nobody i s going to get a constitution from him, for "All for one and one for all is Prussia's pri nciple of governmen t'". Declaring a mortal hatred for the king and for almost every p ri nce ruli ng between 1 8 1 6 and 1 8 30, E ngels announced : 'I expect anything good only o f t hat prince whose ears are boxed right and left b y his people and whose palace windows are smashed by the flying s tones of t he revolution ' (CW 2 . 492-3). So far as we know Engels actually threw no stones, but continued his career as l iterary critic, publishing reviews o n Y oung German poetry and belles /ettres, writing 'prose pieces to p ractice my s tyle', read ing to a p rospective publisher his Odysseus Redivivus - an epic poem on the Greek revolt of 182 1 -5 against t he Turks - and talk ing grandl y o f writing a n ovel (CW 2.488) . H e w rote t o his sister M arie , 'Recentl y, from J uly 27th to 30th [ 1 840] , we celebrated the July revolu tion which broke out ten years ago i n Pari s ; we s pent one evening i n the town-hall cellar and the others i n Richard Roth's tavern . . . There we d ran k the finest Laubenhe imer i n the world and smoked cigars' (CW 2. 50 1 ) . Evidently t hi s conso led him some­ what for t he un sympat hetic cul tural envi ronment of B remen, on w hich he reported , rather i n the manner of the ' Letters from Wuppertal' , for a paper i n St uttgart. A few l ines on soci al con ditions appeared near the e nd of the series - a description of a visit to an em igrant vessel in t he port o f B reme rhave n : All round the steerage runs a row o f berths, se vera l close together a nd even one above the other. An oppressi ve a i r reigns here, where men, women and children are packed next to one another like paving stones in the street, the sick next to the healthy, all together. Every moment one stumbles over a heap of clothes, household goods, etc ; here little children are crying, there a head is ra ised from a bert h. I t i s a sad sigh t ; and what must i t be like when a prolonged storm throws everything into confusion and drives the waves across the deck , so that the hatch, wh ich a lone admits fres h air, cannot be opened! And yet , the a rrangemen ts on the Bremen ships a re t he most humane. Everybody knows wha t it is like for the majority who travel via Le H avre (CW 2. 1 1 7- 1 8).

The False Start

11

Certainly E ngels's facility i n literary criticism dominates the ' Rep orts from B re me n ' , and there is little to suggest any real connection between the p hilis tinism he bemoaned a nd the poor conditi ons for emigrant passage . This contras t with ' Letters from Wuppertal' may, of course, have several explanations: Bremen was a t ow n of merchants rather than manufacturers ; Engels may have judged w hat he wrote to be more suitable for his editor t han the approach adop ted i n the earlier work ; Engels 's long experience i n the Wuppertal was not matched by his brief acquaintance with t he seaport he described . A new elemen t i n his analysis, though, w as an enthusiastic description of an improvement in marine technology, a p rognostication that the new equ ipment would have 'the greatest con­ sequen ces ' , and a concluding generalizati on l i nk i ng mank ind, technology and e mancip ation : A respected young l ocal merchant has recently returned from Lon don where he informed himself exactly about the equipment of the steamer A rch imedes w hich, as you know, has a newly invented method of propulsion by an Archimedean screw . . . We will not have to wait l ong before we can reach New York from any part of Germany in a fortnight, see t he sights of the U n i ted States in a fortnight, and be back home again in a fortnight. A couple of railways, a couple of steamships, and that's that ; since Kant eliminated the cate gories of space and t ime from the sensory impressions of the thinking mind, mank ind has been striving with m ight and main to emancipate itself from these limitations materially too (CW 2. 1 28-9).

At the same time , in t hese j ournalis tic works of 1 840- 1 , Engels t he economic l iberal made an appearance , defending unlimited freedom and divisibility of landed property against t he complicated res trictions present i n most German states. Such restrictions , he argued, aggravate anomalies i n agrarian relations - ' t he development of big landowners i nto an aristo­ cracy' - and create an absurd situa tion i n w hich one gene­ ration has a right to dispose of the p roperty of all future genera tion s . Freeing of the land, Engels argued, resto res 'the bal ance which in i ndivi dual cases i t may, of course, upset ' since it generally allows no extremes to rise. The fettering of landed p roperty, he wrote, ' works directly t o wards a revoluti on' ; t he

12

Marx and Engels

revolutio nary outcome , free trade in land, was compared by Engels to 'the surgin g ocean with its grand freedom ' (CW 2. 1 4 7). In M arch 1 84 1 Engels wrote to his sister, Thank God that I too am leaving this dreary hole [Bremen] where there i s n othing to do but fence , eat, dri nk , sleep and drudge' (CW 2 . 5 29). Barmen, to which he returned , was described as 'pre t ty dry' except for 'some M ay wine or a s tuden t dri nk ing bout' (CW 2 . 5 32). B y August he was wri ting t ha t 'nothing ever happens here', and in September he left for Berlin ' to do my duty as a ci tizen, i.e. , to do w hat I can to evade conscription if possible ' (CW 2 . 5 3 3-4) . Be rlin, a s it happened , o ffered Engels a great deal more than artillery training. He made up to s ome extent for the uni versity educa tion he ne ver had b y a ttending lectures at Berlin as a non­ matriculated st udent, associating with s uch Youn g Hegelians as were in res ide nce, pursuing his jo urnalistic career and attending theatrical performances and poetry readings . He lived in private lodgings and was evidently not too burdened with t he mil itary duties which he sati rised at length in letters to his sister M arie. As usua l E ngels publi s hed an account of his impression s for readers distant from the scene ; this time his medium was the Rheinische Zeitung of Col ogne , to w hich he contri buted the 'Diary of a Guest St udent' i n M ay 1 842.e Unlike his previous works on the W uppertal and Breme n�t h comments on Berlin, and particularly o n t he unive rsity, were highly favourable . T he univers ity, he wrote, was 'the m ost remarkable thing in Berl i n ' , an ins titution which avoided the academic torp or of other German universities and was instead an are na of intellectual battles . Since it 'n umbers representa tives of all trends' o n i ts staff, stude nts get 'an eas y, clear overall picture ' o f prese nt-day thought, particularly the controversy over the new conserva­ tive refutation of Hege l offered by the p hilosopher Fried rich von Schelling. Hegel's work had become tha t dangerous. Of al 1 the lectures Engels attended , the most in teresting, so he wrote , was P. K . M a rhei neke' s on t he in trod uction of H egelian philosoph y into theology. Engels chron icled t he unusual applause w hen M a rheineke reached his t hinly vei led att ack on Schelling as one w ho merely prom ised a refutation

The False Srart

13

but did not keep hi s word . ' The grand, free vision with which H egel surveyed the entire realm of though t and grasped the phenomen a of life ' , Engels explained, 'is also M arheineke's inheritance' (CW 2 . 268-70). Some mont hs previously Engels had attacked Schelling ano nymously in Gutzkow's newspaper and in two substantial pamphlets. I ni tially he conceived the debate in national-histo rical te rm s : Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion i n politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and if he has any idea of the power of the mind over the world he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on t he philosophy of revelation (CW 2. 1 8 1 ) .

These terms broadened, a few paragraphs later, to the world­ histo rical: Judaism and Islam want to see what Christian revelation is all about ; German, French, English, H u ngarian, Polish, R ussian , modern Greek and Turkish, one can hear all spoken together - then the signal for silence sou nds and Schelling mounts the rostrum (CW 2. 1 82).

Engels quoted Schelling at length and the n attacked him for his view t hat philosop hy has 'no cla ims whatever to any influence on the exte rnal world ' . 'The good, nai·ve Hege l ' , Engels wrote, believed in t h e existence of philosophical results and the right of reason to enter into existence , to domin ate being. To these colours Engels rallied the youth of Germany: 'in the end, one will be fo und among us who wi ll prove that the sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius' (CW 2 . 1 86-7). Schelling and Re velation, t hough an anonym ous pam phlet , brought Engels real recognition from the Young Hegelians. A rnold Ruge, Young Hegel ian veteran of poli tical di scri­ m i nation in the uni versities and censorship i n j ournalism, drew the atte ntion of hi s readers i n the newly fo unded Deutsche Jah rbucher to the contro versial pamphlet and later, on learning the identity of i ts author, sough t contributions from Engels himself. I n his pamphlet Engels rei nvoked the tone of his anti-Pietist

14

Marx and Engels

satires, characteris ing Schelling as a phi losophical M essiah from whose hand Christians expected 'the fall of Hegelianism , the death of all atheists and n on-Christia ns . . . by E aster 1842'. But everything turned out d ifferently, E n gels wrote , a nd Hegelian phi losophy lives on in t he young (CW 2 . 192). The bulk of the pamphlet is remarkable for the clear, readable accou nt it contains of the Young H egel i an movement . Engels began with the dying Hegel i n 1831 i n order t o explain how disputes about his phi losophical legacy had arisen, w hy these argumen ts were important , a nd who was i nvolved. For someone w ho was, as he expla ined to Ruge later i n 1842, 'young and self-taught in philosophy', the achievement is particularly impressive (CW 2. 54 5). 'It was only a fter Hegel had died' , Engels wrote , ' that his philosophy really began to live'. T he commentaries by H egel 's pupils opened 'a straight, smooth road' to H egel 's philosophy w hich was seized upon by youth . The p hil osophy itself required reinterpretation, E ngel s claimed, because Hegel had himself confined ' the powerful, youth fully impetuous flood of conclusions from his teaching' within limits set by his own experie nce and personal opinions. H is o wn poli tical vie ws a fter 18 1 5 bore the stamp of t he Res toration, and 'the wo rld­ historical necessity of the J ul y revolution' (which E ngels felt very deeply) neve r became clear to him. H egel had fai led, to some extent, to abstract himsel f from elements w hich were present in him as a p roduct of h is time and thus could not proceed accurately from pure t ho ught alone. All incon­ sis tencies and contrad ictions i n H egel 's philosophy were traceable, accord ing to Engels, to this dual historical and pe rsonal l imitation on t he free work ing of the H egelian method. Hegel's independen t , 'free-minded' principles were thus avai lable to his pupils w ho were able then to jettison t he 'cautious, even illiberal concl usions ' (CW 2 . 195-6) . Hegel's philosophy of re ligion posed a real political dile mma: was it Christian or no t? At first t he radical Hegelians evaded t he issue o r a ttempted t o keep ' the inevitable conclu ­ sions ' esote ric to protect t he mselves from politically motivated allegations of atheism. A t attack b y Heinrich Leo in 1 8 3 8 gave t hem 'clarity about themselves'. Engels traced the growth of philosophical atheism from Strauss's Life of Jesus ( 1 8 35-6) to

The False Start

15

Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity ( 1 84 1 ) and t he anon ymous t ract Die Posaune ( 1 84 1 ) which 'demonstra tes t he relevant conclusions even i n Hegel'. The last work, actually b y Bruno Bauer, was singled out ' because i t s hows how o ften the bold, independent thinker i n Hegel p revailed over the professor who was subject to a thousand i nfl uences '. Christianity, and even religion i tself, have fallen, so E n gels concl uded, before the inexorable criticism o f reason . Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, he wrote, ' i s a necessary comp lement to the speculative teaching on reli gion founded b y Hegel . . . Feuerbach reduces the religi ous categories to subjective human relations ' . I n this way he put the results achieved by S trauss to the rea l test and came to the same result, that the secret o f theology i s anthrop ology. I t is t he most sacred duty, Engels wrote in fine Young Hegelian style, 'of all who have fo l lowed the self-development of t he spirit to transmi t the immense resul t to the consci ousness of the nation' (CW 2. 1 96-7, 237-8) . Poli ticall y E n gels t raced the waning of official Prussian s upport for Hegeli a nism and the corresponding m ovement towards more overtly Christian and monarchical pri nciples. Schelling was called to Berlin (from M uni c h) 'to ban the Hegelian teaching from its own fi eld of phi losophy' (CW 2. 1 98). He attempted thi s, so Engels wrote , by arguing agai nst the l inks p roposed b y Hegel between the reasonable, the necessary and the rea l : ' He gel maintains that anything which is reasonable i s also rea l ; Schellin g says, however, that what i s reasonable is possib le , and thus safe guards himself' (CW 2 . 200-2). Furthermore Schelling misu nderstood Hegel 's powerful di alectic, which Engels described in memorable terms as 'tha t inner motive fo rce which constantly d rives the i ndividual though t categories . . . to ever new development and rebirth until t hey arise from the grave of negation for t he last time as absolute i dea i n imperishable, i mmaculate splendour' (CW 2.206). A nd he had mi staken the relationship in Hegel of the I dea to n a ture and spiri t: 'Schelling again conceives the I dea as an extramundane being, as a personal God, a qiing which never occurred to Hegel. For Hegel the reality of the Idea is n ot hi n g but - nature and spirit ' (CW 2. 2 1 6). A fter a lengthy rehearsal of Schelling's philosophising, E n gels drew the sweeping conclusi on that the 'irreconcilability

16

Marx and Engels

of ph i losophy and Chri stianity has gone so fa r t hat even Schelling falls into a s till worse con tradiction than Hegel ' , who at least had a philosophy, 'even if the outcome was only an apparen t Chri stiani ty' . Sche llin g, by con trast, produced 'nei­ ther Christianity nor phil osophy', bringing home t o one 'how weak are the foundations on which m odern Ch risti an ity rests' (CW 2. 2 3 5). I n his c rit ique Engels attempted t o demo nstrate that Sche lling h ad smuggl ed 'belief in dogma, sentimental mysticism, gnostic fan tasy into t he free science of t h i nking' (CW 2 . 20 1 ) . With a final Young Hegel ian allegory, Engels indicated w hat he expected from such a free science : 'This is our calling, that we s hall become the templars of this G rail, gird the sword rou nd our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in t he last, holy wa r which will be followed by the thousan d-year reign of freedom' (CW 2. 239). From straigh tforward phi losophical an alysis an d political commen t Engels turned once a gain to sati re and t ravesty, publishing another ano nymous pamphlet , Schelling, Plz ilo­ soplzer in Christ. I ts author appeared to be a strict Pie tist, writing in the evangelical idi om familiar to Engels from his birthplace. Having damned Schell ing as a c ritic, he evidently intended to bury him under unwelcome praise from a 'frien d' w ho se ph ilosophical views were frankly obscuranti st : 'Seize/ling has brought back t he good old times when reason surren ders to faith ' (CW 2 . 250). E n gels's Pietist presen ted Schelling as a scou rge to Berliners who interfered in govern­ ment ' instead of leaving unto t he K ing what is t he King's business' (CW 2 . 260). In particular Schelling's missi on was said to be the righteous des t ruction of 'the n otorious Heger and his 'vile worldly wisdom' (CW 2 . 243). All rationalism came under attack, and Engels 's Pie tist waxed approving ove r Schelli ng' s doubt s con cern ing the scope o f nat ural reason and t he appl icabil ity o f philosophical reason ing to reality. Schelling's ' negative phil osophy', according to Engels and his Pietist , maintained t hat 'reason can only comprehend p os si bi­ l ities and n othing ac tual' (CW 2 . 248). Hege l , as interp reted by Young H egel ians, had blas phe mo usl y decl ared reason to be God and t hus t ranscended Christianity and re ligion altogether (CW 2. 250). The. con flict be tween Schelling and his con servative

The False Start

17

Chri stian supporters on the one hand and E ngels and the Young H egel ians on the other proceeded in the press. Some readers were even taken in by E ngels 's sk ill in parodying Pietism. But matters became rather more seri ous w hen Young Hegelians were dismissed fro m their posts for p ol itical reasons, most notably Bruno Bauer in late M a rch 1 842 . Bauer's brother Ed gar, and Engels contribu ted jointly to t he protest movement by publis hing The Triumph of Faith, a (supposedly) Christian epic relating h ow Bruno Bauer ' Seduced by the Devil, Fallen from the True Faith , Became C hief Devi l and Was Well and Truly Ousted in t he End' (CW 2. 3 1 3). The pamphlet reproduced Engels's line on current academic and political disputes : Christians, a rmed with Faith, array themselves against the fo rces of reaso n who trace their lineage from Voltaire through H egel, Strauss and Feuerbach. Bru no Bauer was p ortrayed, tongue-in-cheek , as an a gent of the Devil, whose destruction marks t he 'victory' of t heo logy over phi l osophy, fait h over reason, orthodoxy over free-thinking. M ore or less by name Engels and his co-author listed t he Yo ung Hegel ians, including Ruge, M arx ( 'The M onster') and 'Oswald' (Engels's pen-name). In a caricature on his copy Engels named 'The Free', t he Berlin group of Young H egelians - Ruge, the brothers Bauer, and various others - tho ugh not M arx, the 'swarthy c hap of Trier' mentioned in the poem (CW 2 . 3 3 6) . At the work's conclusion Bauer's dismissal from Bonn U niversity scatters 'The Free' in m ock disarr ay : But what' s this floating down bathed in celestial light ? What's mak ing Bauer shake from head to foot with fright ? It's just a little piece o f parc hment, stra n ge to say. What might be written on it by the heavenly ray ? It flutters down . A t Bauer 's feet i t comes to rest . Shaking, he stoops and picks it up with heaving breast. - Why d oes the cold sweat on his brow spring so abundant ? What does he murmur, stu nned ? He murmurs this - ' Redundant ! ' H ardly has Hea ven's word from H ell's own mouth rung out, Before ' Redundant !' is the universal s hout. The Free an horror-struck, the Angels filled with glee, The Free take flight, the Host pursues relentlessly. The Free are d riven down to Earth in full confusion, That wicked folk s hall all receive due retribution (CW 2 . 3 5 1 ).

This topical epic was excerpted i n t he German and S wiss

18

Marx and Engels

press, and i t attracted comment from both conservativ es and liberals. At the same time , summer 1 842, E ngels accepted Ru ge's invitation to contribute to his Young Hegelian j ournal, which he did by reviewing Alexander Jung' s ' Lectures o n M odern German Literature' . I n those articles Engels declared his w holehearted adherence to the Young Hegelian school - 'Strauss, Feuerbach, Bauer' - and announced that ' Young German y has passed away'. His association with Gutzkow was definitively b roken. This intellectual event was connected in E n gels's characteristic fashi o n with contempo­ rary d octrinal , phi losophical and p olitic al controversy, a lbeit very generally conceived : 'The battle over p ri ncip les is a t its height, i t is a questi o n of life or death , Christianity is at s take, the political movement embraces everything' (CW 2 . 285). The catalogue of sins attributed to J u ng and his fellow Young Germa ns (and 'wri ters of what is called Young Literature') is revealing in that it summa rised the results of E n gels's own intellectual and political devel opment as a j ou rnalist, critic and student of phi losophy. W hat he said about Jung is not traceable merely to partisanship - his adherence to o ne coterie rather tha n another - but to defe nsible c riteria, intellectual and political, according to which Young Germany was fou nd wanting. Having accused Jung of being flabby, p altry, boring and cowardly in his published work , E ngels came to the point by attacking Jung's interpretation of Hegel, for it was t here that Jung revealed his deficiencies most tellingl y . J un g w as attacked for hi s academici sm : 'he is up to his ears in a pile of books . . . and he labours to arra nge the vari ous items precisely and neatly into Hegelian categories ' . M ore seriously his use of Hegelian categories revea led a fa ulty understanding of Hegel's philosophy which, according to Engels, led beyond mere assertio ns to 'the reconciliation of the subj ect with obj ective fo rces'. In t hat w ay Jung had missed t he point of Hegel's work, obscuring its clear dema nd for real-world reconciliation with mysterious phrases and an unwarranted rejection of all extremes . These he cons idered evil, so he opted for a fo ggy conciliation and moderation expressed in vague, u nc ritical asserti ons (CW 2. 284-7). For Jung's history o f t he Y oung German move ment Engels substituted his own c ritica l account,

The False Start

19

characteri sing i ts phases and then distributing praise and blame, depending o n how closely a given wri ter approached t he Young Hegel ian view of Hegel and the current political s truggle for l i berali sation of the Prussian regime. The Y oung Germans initially fou nd each other through an outward brilliance o f style and an enigmatic mysticism i n their s logans ; their field was belles-lettres, which t hey conquered and divided ; a fter that their inadequacy in matters of pri nciple became apparent and t he movement disintegrated i nto cliques , squab­ b les and disputes , becoming only a matter of person alities. Engels dis mi ssed them as crank s : ' Liberal political pri nciples differed among various personalities and the position of women gave rise to the most sterile and confused di s­ cussi ons . . . The fantastic form in which these views were propagated could only promote further confusion' (CW 2 . 290- l ) . W hile rej ecting Y oung Germany as a move ment that had had its d ay, Engels reserved judgement on some of its adherents and registered considerable conti nuity in his own opi nions, p articularly in his view of Lud wig Borne ( I 786- 1 8 3 7), whom he had prai sed since 1 8 39 for his political / liberali sm and for what Engels took to be hi s unrecogni sed closeness to t he H egelian outlook , in which B orne 's 'direct, , n a·ive' liberalism ' finds its completi on'. Borne, Engels wrote, ' was a republican by his very nature' whose link to Hegel was i n considering life from t h e political point of vie w : ' Does n o t Hegel do the s a me? I s n o t for him, t o o , the state in its transition to world hi story, and t herefore i n the conditions of home and foreign policy, the concrete reality of the absolute spirit? ' (CW 2. 2 89). A s a final, damning criticism Engels linked Jung's views with Schelling's , wri ting that Jung had set himself up ' as a false prophe t who predicts "a great birth of the positive" . . . which will conquer Strauss, Feuerbach and everyt hing connected with t he m by the sword of the Lord ' . I n Young H egelian fas hi on Enge ls cha racterised tho ught as positive a nd rea lity as , i n a sense, negative, i . e . requiri ng criticism . ' Neo- Schelli ngian scholas tici sm', i n his view, reversed this, characteri sing thought as negative ( 'because it devel ops i ns tead of standing still', Engels commented sourly) and existen t reality as positive

20

Marx and Engels

( 'an old ruined wal l ' for ' feeble ivy-like m inds' t o cling to, in Engels's Y oung Hegelian view of t hi ngs). For Jung, Engels proposed the sort of obl oquy favoured by liberals - frank c ritici sm followed by a free, but wel l deserved obscurity : I n the course of the above article he further discredits himself by indulging in the most trivial talk about the literary despoti sm of the l iberals and defending his own freedom. Let him k eep i t; everyone will be quite ready to let h im go blathering on for all eternity. But let him permit us to thank him for his support a nd to tell him honestly and frankly what we think of him (CW 2. 293, 297).

I ndeed , E ngels' s first contribution to the l i beral Rhe inische Zeitung was written in M arch 1 842, about t he same time that M arx transferred his e f forts from Ruge's Y oung Hegelian Deutsche Jah rbucher t o the same paper. Engels, as a Y oung Hegelian , wrote for both during 1 842 . His li beralism w as of a / simultaneously nation al and internation al variety linked 'to the w hole of world history, and especially German history' . His for the Rheinische Zeitung developed a con trast between \ article south and n orth German liberal ism , the former an eclectic, contradictory and ephemeral deve lopment o f 1 830 and the latter its worthy succe ssor, di stingui shed by 'a high degree o f consistency', ' definiteness' i n demands, a n d 'a consonance o f , means and purpose' . B orne , unsu rp ri si ngly, w a s its precursor and prophet. South German liberali sm made political con­ victions possible in German y and awakened parlia menta ry life ; it represented t he gains o f the July revolutio n in France. Engels's verdict, i nteresti ngly, was that it 'proceeded from practice to t heory and fai led ; so le t us begin the other way rou nd and try t o penetrate from theory into prac tice ' (CW 2 .266- 7). Engels' s interests and ambitions had been shifting from literat ure and philosophy to more i mmediate political concerns since Bruno Bauer's di smissal from Bonn in M arch 1 842 perhaps his contacts with the Rheinische Zeitung reinforced' this trend . What is certain is t hat by the summer of 1 842 Engels was writing on contempora ry political events, as M arx had been doing since January, t hough his a rticles did not always achieve publication. B oth commented c ritical l y o n t he Prussian censorship ins truc tio ns o f December 1 84 1 , and on ·

The False Start

21

other contemporary poli tical debates : M arx on property law and poor relief, E ngels on trial b y j ury and German u nification. M arx' s first published contribution to the Rheinische Zeitung was hi s long review of the 'Proceedings of the Six t h Rhine Province A ssembly' on freedom of the press (written in April 1 842 and published in M ay) , and E ngel s contributed a s ho rt 'Critiq ue of the P russian Press Laws ' , wri tten in June and published i n J uly. Their i ndependent verdicts on t he evil effe cts of censors hip and t he inef fec tual response of German poli ti­ cians we re vi rtually coi ncident. M arx wrote that a censored press has a demoralising e ffect, fostering hypocris y, passivity and superstition since the government hears only its own voice (CW 1 . 1 67-8 ) . Engels exposed t he P russian censors hip as inconsistent and illogical, and declared his intention to 'a wa­ ken more than a l i ttle discontent and dissati sfaction with all obsolete a nd illiberal survivals in our state i nstitutions' (CW 2 . 3 1 1 ) . Their journa listic efforts coincided agai n in resp onse t o a n article b y M oses Hess, published i n M ay i n the Rheinische Zeitung, on t he more t heoretical issue of centralisation and the modern s tate. M arx complai ned that H ess's Hegelian treat­ ment had confused phi losophy with imagination and that the author had s ubstituted his own abstractions for real phi lo­ sophy (CW 1 . 1 82-3). M arx's fragment lay unfinished and unpublished until 1 927, however, whereas Engels 's comments were written and published in Septem ber 1 842. His framework was much m ore obvi ously Hegelian : 'The S tate is bounded on t he one hand , by t he i ndivid ual and, on t he ot her hand , by world hi st ory' . ' History' , Enge ls wrote in a high Hegelia n vein, ' has etern ally had and will always reta i n the right to dispose of the life , t he happi ness, t he freedom of the i ndividual . . . it is the life of the species, and as such it is sovereign ' . H owever, Engels distingui s hed i n Y oung H egelian terms between History and any particular state: Thus, the English workers, who at present have to suffer bitter hunger , have indeed the right to protest against Sir Robert Peel and the English constitution, but not against history, which is mak ing them the standard-bearers and representatives of a new principle of righ t. The same thing does not hold good for the state. It is always a

22

Marx and Engels

particular state and can never cla im the right, which mank ind as a whole naturally possesses in its activity and the development o f history, t o sacrifice t h e i ndividual for t h e general ( C W 2 . 3 56-7).

Centrali sati on, Engels claimed, suffers from a contradiction : every state strives for centralisat i on, for that is its essence, yet this p rincip le 'necessari ly compels the state to reach out beyond itself' by claiming 'the au t hori ty and positio n that belongs only to history'. This contradiction , he argued, was manifested in the history of French absolutism , setting Paris over the provinces , giving rise to a di sadvan tageous disproporti on in culture. 'Through Paris', he commented, ' France can indeed make revolutions and create free insti tutions at a single stroke, but s he cannot keep them'. A s a dedicated l i beral Engels m ourned the betrayal of the July revolution ('made by Paris alone') through the illibera l pol icies o f Fran9ois Guizot. The p rinciples of popular sovereignty, a free press, in dependen t juries and parliamentary government 'have practically been destroyed in France' (CW 2 . 3 55-9). On similar grounds Engels fou nd the regime of the Prussian King Fried rich Wilhelm I V sadly wanti ng. He mainta ined the allia nce between state administration and clerical reaction that was begun in the previ ous reign and had in troduced his 'syste m ' - a fully developed conservative romanticism req uiring church atten­ dance, Sunday restric tions, tightening o f the laws on divorce ( on which M arx later commented in the Rheinische Zeitung) and purging of theol ogical faculties. His tas k was easy beca use he relied on the historical school of law, excoriated by M arx in August 1 842 in the Rheinische Zeitung for 'positive, i . e . uncriticaI' argumen ts from w holly diverse authorities (CW 1 .205). Fri edrich Wilhelm I V, Engels wro te, did n ot recogn ise any un iversal, civic or human rights, only corp ora te rights, monopolies, p rivileges. I n con trast, so Engels claimed, Prussian public opinion was now cen tring around two q ues­ tions : representative government and freedom of the press. I f that were ga ined, Engels foresaw a constituti on, a re­ p resentative system and annulment of the allia nce with Russia (which was actually a fac to r in the demise of the Rheinische Zeitung the following year) . Clearly he l ooked towards a more radical version of the July revolution (represented by ellipses in

The False Start

23

the following passage) , but this time i n German y : ' Prussia's present situation closely resembles that of France before . . . but I refrai n from any premat ure concl usi ons' ( CW 2 . 3 60-7). That article was published abroad, i n S witzerland . A s a Berlin resident Engels was at a considerable remove from t he ed i torial disputes within t he Rheinische Zeitung, in particular the running battle between its li beral backers, look ing for reform p ropagated by a paper that would stay within the law, and Young H egelia n contri butors given to phi losophizi ng about hi story, freed om and revol ution in terms that attracted the unwelcome attention of the aut horities. Then a rival newspaper, in Marx's words, tried to 'saddle' the Rheinische Zeitung wit h 'The Free', about whom, he said, he did not k now t he slightest t hing for sure. M arx continued gl oomily to hi s associa te Ruge : I t is fortunate that [Edgar] Bauer is in Berlin. He, at least, will not allow any 'stupidities' to be committed, and the only thing that disquiets me . . . is the probability that the ins ipidity of the Berliners will make their good cause ridicul ous and that in a serious matter they will not be able to avoid various 'stupidi ties'. Anyone who has spent as much time among these people as I have will find that this anxiety is n o t without foundation (CW 1 . 390) .

I n November 1 842, after he had assumed the editorship, M arx went into print against 'The Free' for 'comp romisi ng the cause and t he party of freed om by t heir p ol itical romanticism, their mania for genius and boasting', and he attacked them for t heir ' fri volity', 'typically Berlin style of behaviour', 'insipid aping of the French clubs ' . Sternly he concl uded that 'rowdi­ ness , blackguardism, must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a p eriod which demands seri ous, man ly and sober-mi nded persons for t he achievement of its lofty aims' (CW 1 . 28 7). M arx ' s ed itorial principle was clear : ' I consider it essential that the Rheinische Zeitung s hould not be guided by its contri­ butors, but t hat, on t he contrary, it should guide t hem' (CW 1 . 39 2) . J ust at t he time t hat Engels, a charter member of 'The Free', turned up at t he ed itorial office, M arx ' s campaign w as in full swing. Ruge w as given full details : As you already know, every day the censorship mutilates us mercilessly, so that freq uently the newspaper is hardly able to appear.

�

24

I \

}

Marx and Engels

Because of this, a mass of articles by 'The Free' have peri shed . But I have allowed myself to throw out as many articles as the censor, for [Eduard] Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and seasoned with a little atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied) . B ecause of (Adolf] Ru ten berg's complete lack of critical sense, independence and ability, Meyen and Co. had become accustomed to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their own, d ocile organ , but I believed I could not any longer permit this watery torrent of words in the old manner. This loss of a few worthless creations of 'freedom', a freedom which strives primaril y 'to b e free from a l l thought', was therefore the first reason for a darkening of the Berlin sky (CW 1 . 393).

M eyen had dared to write to M arx, criticising him for his attit ude to 'The Free' and his editorial policies. M arx said t hat he replied at once, l isting the defects of their writings, 'which fi nd freedom in a licentious, san sculotte-l ike, and at the same t ime convenient, form, rather than in a free, i . e . , independent and profound, conten t' (CW 1 . 394) . M arx' s overa ll criticism of 'The Free ' concerned their lack of pol itical, intellectual and even emp irical awareness : I demanded of them less vague reasoning, magniloquent p hrases and self-satisfied self-adora tion, an d more defi n iteness, more atten tion to the actual state of a ffairs, more expert k nowledge. I stated that I regard i t as inappropriate, even immoral , to sm uggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook , into i ncidental theatrical criticisms, etc. , and t hat I demand a quite different and more thorough di scussion o f communism, if i t s hould be discussed at all . I requested further t hat religion should be criticised in the framework o f criticism of political con ditions rather than that poli tical conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion, since this is more in accord with the nature o f a newspaper and the educational level of the reading public ; for religion in itself is without content, i t owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which i t is the theory, i t will collapse of i tself. Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk about phil osop hy, t here s hould be less trifling with the label 'atheism' (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not a fraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy s hould be brought to the people. Vo ita tou t ( C W 1 . 394-5).

The False Start

25

M a rx's emphasis on expert knowledge and his insiste nce o n a serious medium ( no t reviews o r literary c ri ticism) set him de cidedly agai nst 'The Free' . While his view of religion a nd hi s clear political perspective o n the atheism q uestion were stri kingly like E n gels 's, the young E ngel s was undeniably more give n t o revolutionary rumblings and l ofty He gelian visions than M arx ever was. I n his journalism M arx concerned himself with liberal provincial p ol itics, t he censor's attitude t o a paper that might a ttract the label 'communist ' , and a properly seri ous approach t o social change . A s a result of Engels's associa tion with 'The Free', M a rx received him 'coldly', despite the coi ncidence of inte rests and views ; both had taken social class into account in their works - M arx in his 'Theft s of Wood' and ' M osel' articles, and Engels in his j ournalism on Wuppertal and Bremen ( M EG A (Old Series), 1/2, pp. lx-lxi) . Neither man was the typical Young Hegelian littera teur, though M arx 's strong sense of editorial vocati o n and practical i nvolvement in l ocal politics set him apart from - and at odds with - Engels, the talented writer, critic, satirist and eyewitness reporter. Engels was n ot , however, d ropped from t he Rheinisc/ie Zeitung. The paper conti nued to print contributi ons from i ts young corres­ pondent in England, where E ngels had gone to get acquai nted with the overseas sector of the family cotton-sp inning business. M arx's dis taste for 'The F ree' did not extend to any wholesale ban on thei r work, si nce in Engels he recognised a j ournalist wi th real power and a useful i ntern a tional perspective .

2

' By A no ther Road '

Though Engels did not really make M arx' s acquai n tance in November 1 842, he did meet M oses Hess, revolutionary and communist, on an earlier visit t o the Rheinische Zeitung in October. The exten t to w hich M arx at this point had fol lowed ' Hess down the road of revo lution ary communism is obscure ; i f he had political sentimen ts beyond the liberal , Young Hegelian framework, they were carefully covered by his blunt concern to defend his paper from the cen sor and any o utraged liberals w ho might be reading or backing it. This seems partly to explain M arx's reluctance to take overtly communist co ntri­ butions ; he commen ted later ' . . . at that time w he n the good will " to go further" greatly o utweighed knowledge of the subject, a philosophically weakly tinged echo of French socialism and communism made i tself audi ble in the Rheinische Zeitung. I declared myself against this amateuris m . ' The remainder of the explanation l ies in M a rx's well-ho ned aca­ demic scepticism abo u t ' French tendencies', i .e. communism, and his frank declaration that ' my previous s tudies did n ot permit me even t o venture any j udgement ' (SW 1 80- 1 ) . T he Rheinische Zeitung was disbanded in M arch 1 843, after harassment from the censor and provincial authori ties. M arx's articles had been critical rather than overtly cons tructive or revolutionary. He exposed the trump h of private interests (of landowners, for example) over their tenants, of state o ffic ia l s over c itizens, of censorship over informed public debate, of burea ucratic indifference over real feeling for the victims o f economic circumstances . A fter the collapse of his paper (and his paid employment) M arx' s private project was a manuscrip t

26

'By A nother Road'

27

critique of Hegel' s Philosophy of Righ t, i .e . his social and political phil osophy, i ncl uding views o n social class, employ­ ment, distribution of wealth, and other issues which m ight be described today as economic. I n criticising Hegel's work M arx sought to destroy at least some of t he more sophisticated a rguments used by conservatives in defending the contempo­ rary p ol itical and social order in Prussia, and at the same time t o expose as clearly as possible the defining principles of that order i tself. I n t hat way, as c ritical analyst, M arx expected to get at the root of things, rather than me rely to prescribe o ne administrative remedy or a nother. The t hrust of M arx's critique was that p iecemeal reform would i nevitably fa ll victim to entrenched political forces so long as t he system itself was still present in its fundamentals. His work on Hegel represents an exhaustive dem olition of every Hegelian hope - conservative or l i beral - for social peace and reconciliation . But during the summer of 1 843 , while Engels was i n England , M arx was n ot wholly preoccupied with private st udy. I n company with Arnold Ruge and M oses Hess, he was attemp ting to set up an expatriate successor to the Rheinische Zeitung t hat would publish u nder more liberal circumstances and have a more significant political impact . As early as M arch 1 843, when M arx drafted some ' Letters' later publ ished by t he group, he wrote very naturally as a revo lutionary, w hich suggests t hat the studied liberalism of the Rheinische Zeitung did n ot represent t he w hole of his pol itical viewpoint . Referring to t he despotic character of t he German state and to German s hame before the French revolutionary t rad ition, M arx called t he regime of Friedric h Wi lhelm IV a 'ship full of fools', and predicted an 'impend i ng revol ution' (CW 3 . 1 3 3-4) . I n M ay he referred to Germany as a 'dehumanised world' in which 'people w ho do n ot feel that they are human beings become the property o f their masters', by which he meant ' hereditary masters', i.e. landowners and other propertied interests. 'Once one has arrived at t he political world of animals ', M arx wrote, 'reaction can go no fart her' . T he only possible advance would be ' the abandonment of the basis of t his world and the transition to t he human world of democracy' - 'a community of human beings united for t heir h ighest aims' (CW 3. 1 37 , 1 39). Specifically, M arx pred icted a ' rupture within present-day

28

Marx and Engels

society' caused by t he �s ystem of industry and trade, o f ownership and explo itation of people'. Elements o f t he com­ mu nist outlook, as p romulgated by M oses H ess for example, were certainly p resent. These included t he humanism to be reali sed in a true community, the invocati on of revolu tionary spirit over animal-like passivity, t he atte ntion t o w hat M arx called the 'theore tical existe nce of man' in religion , science and othe r aspects of intellectual life , and a vision of p roletarians as part icularly victimised and at the same time very p romising revolutionary forces (CW 3 . 1 4 1 , 1 4 3). By Septem ber 1 843, when M arx composed his l ast letter, Ruge and Hess had establis hed o ffices for the new j ournal in Paris, and M arx, recently marri ed, was looking forward to joining t hem. M arx's declared aim was to establish a new rallying point for truly thinking and independent m inds, but he expected a p ronounced seriousness in the enterpri se. H e would have n o truck with any dogmatic abstraction w hich atte mpted to anticipate t he world. ' Philosophers ' , he wrote i ro nically, have hitherto ' had the solution of all riddles lying i n their writing­ desks ' , and t he world ' had o nl y to open its mouth for t he roast pigeons of absolute kn owledge to fly into it.' His alterna tive method was 'ru thless criticism of all tha t exis ts', in particular of communism w hen it was dogm atic, as i n t he ' actually e xi sting communism' taught by Etienne Cabet , for instance, i n his Voyage to Jcaria ( 1 842) and by Wilhelm Weitling, t he first working-class German communist, i n his Mankind as It ls and Ought to Be ( 1 83 8) and Guaran tees of Harmony and Freedom ( 1 842) . Weitling, like H ess, had learned his communism i n Paris, and these works represented the French tendencies o f which M arx w a s s uspicious. H i s reserva tions were more methodological than overtly political ; M arx was not the sort o f liberal who rejected revolution , as we ha ve seen. W hat he fou nd .,..- objectionable in existing communism was a partial approac h to social life, expecting too m uch from the mere abolition of private property. M arx implied that private property was itsel f so objectionable t hat it had 'infected' its com­ munist antithesis. Communists were so far unsuccessful in t hinking beyond the abolition o f private property to t he 'reality of the true human being', w ho engages m important activities other than the mere appropria tion of

'By A nother Road'

29

resources. M arx see med to be suggesting t hat the abolition of private property u nder present p ol itical and cultural condi­ tions would be disastrous and that alternative socialist doc­ trines, such as those put forward by F. M . C. Fourier ( 1 772- 1 8 3 7) and M arx' s near contemporary P.- J. Proudhon ( 1 809- 65), both of whom o ffered pri nciples to guide com­ munist communities, t ook inadequate account of the w ay that contemporary citizens had been moulded by a world in which private property ruled their l ives . Refusing to get involved i n French socialist debates, M arx kept his attention firmly fixed on Germany and on practical politics : . . . we want to influence our contemporaries, paricularly our German contemporaries. T he q uestion arises : how are we to set about i t ? There are two k inds o f facts w hich are undeniable. I n the first place religion, and next to it, politics, are the subjects which form the main i nte rest of Germany today. We must take these, in whatever form they exist, as our point of departure, and n ot confront t hem with some ready-made syste m (CW 3 . 1 42-3).

Some 'extreme Socialists ' , according to M arx, took the lofty view that di scussion o f current political issues , such as represe n tation i n government, w as entirely beneath them. M arx declared that in 'analysing the superiority of the representati ve system over the social-estate system [as prac­ tised i n Pru ssia] , the critic in a p ractical way wins the in terest of a large party'. M arx' s method was t o take 'real struggles' and then to engage i n criticism, rather than to follow the dogmatic method practised by communists and socialists when t hey pro nounced their new principles and then stated, i n M arx' s dramatised account : ' Here i s t he truth, kneel down before i t ! ' ( C W 3 . 1 44) . The real struggles that M arx suggested as his first targets were religi on and politics as perceived i n Germany, where the y embodied ' mystical consciousness'. I t was the critic's vocation to make p lain the truth. This M arx referred to as the 'reform of consciousness', explaining to the world 'the meaning of i ts own actions' and ' awakening i t out of its dream about itself. M arx' s acade mic scepticism was allied to his fee l for practical poli­ tics - revolution could never be as simple as communists had suggested nor as manageable as socialist system-buildi ng h ad

•

30

Marx and Engels

implied. Practical revolution ary activity, he suggested, grows out of the mundane political conflict s i n which people are already engaged and, conversely, an a priori or even messi anic approach which di sdai ned contempora ry politics was doomed, in M arx's view, to fail . In addition he presented a balance and dialogue in the relationship between theorist and citizen that eluded some o f his contemporar ies, who were more i ntel­ lectually a loof when they fo rebore to engage in debates they had not generated themselves (CW 3 . 1 44) . There i s v irtually n othing i n the methodology and the poli tics of these early ' Letters ' that contradict s M arx's later work. He was never, for example, aga inst a reform o f consciousness, the stated m otto of 1 843. Then, a s later, he obj ected t o any pretence that reform came from a dogmatic consciousness alone, or that consciousness was i tself the whole of human life or i ts defining element. The reality of human life for Marx , i n 1 843 as l ater, embraced a com plexity i n practical and theoretical activities that could not be wished away. Within that complexity he turned his critical attention to demystifying 'legal relatio ns' (e .g. pro perty law), 'form s o f state' (e.g. representative government), religio n , and science (e. g. social science s uch as politica l economy) i n o rder to pro mote pol itical change (CW 3 . 1 43-4 ; SW 1 8 1 ) . I n his fo rmative years 1 842-43 , M arx w as u ndoubtedl y a liberal who supported a free press, representative i nstitutions and freedom of thought and opinion, particularly with regard to the cri ticism of religio n . To be a Ii beral in t hat sen se was obviously to be i n radical opposition to a monarchical regime dedicated to hierarchy, obedience, Christianity, paternalism and the division of society into favoured and less favoure d estates. Social class was therefore a n issue tha t neither side could successfully ignore, however obscurely the matter was put, and, because of the radical disagreement between the two sides on fundamental pri nci ples , reform and revo lutio n were not readily distinguishable . Hence we may conclude that Marx w as at least as revolutionary as many more conventional liberals ; given the vehemence with which he wrote i n the Rheinische Zeitung and his fra n k comments on revo lution a fter the paper closed, it seems certain that he was a lso a revo lutionary i n much more than the minimal sense.

'By A nother R oad'

31

Was he also a socialist and communist whose merely liberal a rt icles i n the Rheinische Zeitung reflected a certain s trategic self-censors hip? I f so, was the liberalism in those articles i n some sense insincere, or alternatively w as it sincere but in­ complete as a summary of all that the author believed in? M arx w as evidently not a socialist in the conventional sense of t he time, that is one w ho adhered to doctrine found in the works of writers such as Cabet , Fourier and Proudhon. Nor was he a thorough -going communist: one who looked s pecifi­ cally to work ing-class revol ution to usher in a new age of truly human cooperation . Social ism and communism at this time had as many defi n itions as p ractitioners, and the distinction I have j ust o ffered was not one which all writers would have accepted then, nor is it o ne which would allow us to denomi­ nate an y give n radical as definitely socialist rather than communist or vice versa. Yet it was H ess and Weitling who made w ork ing-class revolutio n an issue in German r adical po l it ics , and it was with that camp that M arx allied him­ sel f when he opted to go to Paris at t he end of Octobe1 1 843 . Even that group, however, was subjected by M arx t o the ruthless criticism he fa voured, and no p ropositions were taken on trust . H i s association with the communist group, rather than with m ore moderate Germans, who were typically (rather l ike Feuerbach) more concerned with phi losophical debates pursued in an academic way, is s ignificant . Yet it is also unsurprising, given M arx's obvious i nterest i n disadvantaged groups in German society. I n h is experience , however , these were peasants and smallholders ; ind ustrial workers were some what outside his ken, al though not therefore excl uded i n adva nce of a n y consideration of their circums tances. Nor were they particularly fa voured merely because Hess, who at this period looked to the Engl is h work ing-class, had announced that they were an essential eleme nt of European revolution . I think it pla i n tha t M arx a t thi s time con sidered pro letarians t o b e disadvan taged, the vic tims o f abso lute monarchy a llied with the pro pertied classes in Germany and simila rly victimised by more mode rn re presentative regimes. H is decla red methodo­ logy in the Rheinische Zeitung - e nga ge ment with t he local po litical issues that invo lved or would involve his reader-

,.

32

1

Marx and Engels

s hi p - makes his preferential attention to the prob lems of German peasants and sma ll-holders expl icable. Though M arx refrained from attacking the monarchy directly, for obvious reasons , his withering criticism of its institutions and administration, particularly whe n the interests of the poor were at stake, leaves little doubt that his few positi ve suggestions , e . g . freed om of the press, do n ot represent the sum total of what he envisaged as an alternative social order. I n fact i t is difficult to imagine, given what he said abo ut the role of the free press in promoting real political dialogue among citizens, that the economic needs of those c itizen s were irrelevant. I n deed, the fact that M arx described them explicitly as 'citizens of the s tate' indicated his p osition, since from t he regime's point of vi e w they were no s uch thing, nor could they ever conceivably be citizen s in t he full egalitarian sense envisaged by M arx. The press, M arx wro te , can 'mitigate the distress ' of t he M osel region, for example, ' by dividing the feeling of it among all' ; moreover 'an exceptional freedom of the press' was required 'to satisfy the existing need' which was detailed in economic terms (CW l . 348-9). The editors of the Deutsch-Franzos ische Jahrbucher (as M arx and Ruge called their new j ournal) received the 'Outlines of a Critique of Political Econ omy' from Friedrich Engels in November 1 843. The effect on M arx was overwhelming. H ere was a guide t o t he most precise social t heory available, the science of political econ omy, that quite eclipsed Hegel's synthetic (and idiosyncratic) treatment o f economic life i n t he Ph ilosophy of Righ t, n ow twen ty years out of date anyway. Evidently M arx had already made t he co n nection between H egel's work o n civil society and the subsequent search for its anatomy in political econ omy, because his comments on E ngels's article appear in the fifth of hi s excerpt n otebook s , which date from t h e beginning of h i s stay in Paris ; n otes o n Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ( 1 776) appear i n the secon d and third . Engels's critical attack on selected political eco­ nomists - Smith , David Ricardo , J . R . M acCulloch, T . R. M althus and others - coincided with M arx's programme o f research. M ore importantly fo r M arx, i t represented a seri ous, systematic critic ism of another 'm ystical conscious ness' (the

'By A nother Road'

33

apol ogetic side o f political econ omy), obscuring the real-world struggles through which a practical revol utionary, interested in what M arx care full y descri bed as ' possi ble communism', might begin t o assist mankind (CW 3 . 1 43, 1 44, 6 1 0 n . 1 36). T hat M arx conti nued to accept contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung from Engels after the cool recepti on in N ovem ber 1 842 argues his interest in an investigation into Hess's hypothesi s t hat t he English work in g-class had a s pecial role to play i n t he European revolution ary m ove ment. Engels, as we have seen, had had his eye on t he condition of i ndustrial workers since the .. sen sational ' Letters from Wuppertal' o f 1 839, and he had vi sited England, incl_udipg t he n orth, very briefly in 1 8 40, so his views on English working-cl ass politics, however sti mul ated by his con tact with H ess t he famous communist, were hardly an applicati o n of newly recei ved ideas from a charismatic mentor. Engels's articles for the Rheinische Zeitung of late 1 842 a rgued that Chartism was essentially a w ork ing-class movement whose interests set it apart from reform ists among t he m iddle­ classes. At the same time Enge ls cast doubt on t he Chart ists' peaceful strategy for t hat very reason : t he middle-class would never 'ren ounce its occupation of the H o use of Common s by agreeing to universal suffrage ' (CW 2 . 3 68-9) . I n his next article Engels argued the truth of the communist hypothesis that the E n glish work ing-class has a revolutionary mission by virtue of its utter depen dence on the econ omic circumstances of in­ dustri al capitalism : For although industry makes a country rich, it also creates a class of u npropertied, absolutely poor people, a class which l ives from hand to mout h , which multiplies rapidly, and w hich cannot afterwards be abolished , because it can never acquire stable possess ion of property. And a third, almost a half, of all English people belong to this class (CW 2 . 3 7 3).

Crucial to En ge ls 's ana lysis was his view t ha t the modern industria l nation is inherently subject to a 'con tradiction ' whic h admits of no solution : Further, a natural consequence of the premises of the industrial state is t hat, in o rder to protect the source of i ts wealth, it has to keep out the industrial product s of other countries by means of prohibitive

34

Marx and Engels

import duties. But since the home industry raises the prices of i ts products in step with the im port d uties on foreign products, this makes i t necessary also to i ncrease import c_i u ties consta ntly, in order that foreign competition shall continue to be elim inated, in accor­ dance with the accepted principle. H ence the result would be a two­ sided process going on to infinity, a nd this alone reveals the contrad iction inherent in t he concept o f the industri a l state (CW 2. 372).

Significantly, Engels claimed that his argument was n ot wholly based on what he called ' these philosophical categories' but could also be confirmed by direct observ ation of the existing interests of foreign and domestic producers and con sumers and the resulting political pressures. The next result for England, so Engels claimed, would be a steady contraction of home industry from w hich the w ork ing-class would s uffer disproportionately: The slightest sta gnation in trade deprives a considerable part of this class of their bread, a large-sc�le trade crisis leaves the whole class without bread. W hen such a sit uation occurs, what is there left for these people to.do but to revolt '? By its n umbers, this class has become the most powerful in England, and woe betide the wealthy English­ men when it becomes conscious of this fact (CW 2 . 3 72-3).

Engels claimed to see the awakening of the w ork ing-class revolutionary perspective in the strikes of August 1 842, though he admitted that they were essentially un organised , non­ revolutionary in their ultimate respect for the lega l order and inchoate in their aims. Continental assessments, presumably communist ones, which saw proletarian revol ution rising i n England were quite premature , Engels argued, though in the longer term he pred icted tha t the 'dispossessed have gained . . . the realisation that a revo lution by peace ful means i s impossible ' a n d that their o n l y hope would be 'a forcible abolition of the exi sting unnatural conditions'. Revo lution was 'inevitable', he argued, beca use the country's economic p ros­ pects were such that 'there cannot fail to be a genera l lack o f food among the workers . . . and then fea r o f death fr om starva tion will be stronger than fear of the law' (CW 2. 3 73 -4). A t the same time Engel s argued t hat England was beh ind the

'By A nother Road'

35

continent in intellectual progress ; p resumably h e meant the Young H egelian philosophy in Germany and the socialism, communism and revolutionary tradition in France. H e deni­ grated Engli sh freedom as purely formal and deplored the enduring po wer of feudalism and its i mmunity from attack in actual fact and in public opinion. In his articles for the Rhein ische Zeitung Engels had evidently moved somewhat beyond the perspecti ve of M oses H ess in his u ncompromising view that revolution would be vi olent and in his l ow opinion of the E ngli shman 's allegedly practical , down-to-earth outlook on life . M oreover, he decl ared that 'it will be interest s and not p rinciples' (as H es s was wont t o i mply) 't hat will begin and carry through the revolution' . Pri nciples have a role to pl ay t hough, since t hey 'develop only from interests', something which 'the o bstinate Briton' does not u nderstand. The Briti sh o utlook, according to Engels , was that 'so-called material interests' (a phrase repeated by M a rx in hi s 1 8 59 autobiogra­ phical sketch) do not operate i ndependently in hi story ; principles, which control 'the threads of hi storical progress\ must be ta ken into account . So in Engels 's view staghation in t rade was not merely some temporary phenomenon of limited significance but part of a complex historical de­ vel opment in which working-class political conscio usness ri ses against the ruling classes. That historical view, in moving beyon d ' surface appea rance' to expose 'the basi s' (terms adopted by Marx, once again, in hi s later works), was part of the continental and particular ly German intellectual progress still alien to 'the national Engl i sh stand point' (CW 2.3 70- 1 , 3 74) . M arx's stated methodol ogy of 1 843 - an alysis of contempo­ rary poli tical i ssues, ruthless cri ticism of exi sti ng analytical categories such as those used by poli tici ans an d philosophers, avoidance of a priori pronouncements and doctrines, clear connections between political manoeuvres and economic in­ terests, and a d rive t o wa rds dial ogue between participant and t heorist - were all reproduced in Engels's works of late 1 842 with stunning clarity. Previ ous works by both M arx and Engels a nticipated this, but did not e xhi bit it exactly, for a va riety o f reasons : the med ium and audie nce fo r any given wqrk, the character of the p ol i tical i ssues u nder discussion, the intentions •

36

�

Marx and Engels

of the author when wri ting (e . g . some of Engels 's early pieces were frankly for en tertainment), and the deve loping skill an d perspective of t he author himself. Overn ight conversi ons and imitative disc i pleship are not helpful categories in exa mining the early inte llectua l deve lopment of M arx and Engels. Enge ls's 'Outlines of a Cri tique of Poli tical Econ omy ' was bri lliant, as M arx later said (SW 1 82). I t displayed a unity o f purpose, systematic approach and clarity of discri mination that set it apart from his work up to that time. H owever good his journ alism and laudable (from M arx's point of view) his investigations into the socialist movement in Britain, Engels must have risen uniquely in M arx's estimation t o a le ve l of esteem quite beyond that accorded to edi toria l co lleagues s uch as Ruge . Engels 's essay was a clear departure in subject matter - con temporary political economy - from previous Young Hegeli an e fforts, and it was moreover an area in w hich Germans were generally weak. Y oung Hegelians and com­ munists alike were at best m uddled and at worst completely ignorant of this important field dominated by the British an d French. The informati ve ye t rut hlessly critical approach must have appealed im men sely to M arx, who was, with typical thoroughness, on ly j ust beginning to t u tor hi mself in t he subject with a long course of reading, and even that was mostly in translati on . M ost remarkably, Marx's manuscript notes on Engels 's essay prefigured the course of his lifework in a few compressed phrases written early in 1 844. He bega n wi th 'Priva te property' . This summed u p the apparen t source o f t he soci al, economic an d political in equa lities about w hich he had written for the Rhe in ische Zeitung in 1 842-43 , and it pointed to his in terest in socialist attacks on the institution. It also indicated for M arx t he need to in vestigate t he commun ist cure-all, which was t he aboliti on of private property in favour o f 'common property', as Engels put it in an article written in October/Nove mber 1 843. I n that artic le he imp lied that ' Dr . M arx' had been party to t hi s conclusi on as early as autumn 1 842, t he begin ning of his ed itorship of the Rheinische Zeitw1g and a year before he set up in t he more obviously pro letarian surround ings of Paris and declared hi s explicitly revo lutionary s ympa thies for t he 'class

'By A nother Road'

37

with radical chains' i n an article (written at the end of 1 843) for the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher ( CW 3 . 1 86, 375, 406). The immediate conseq uence of private property, M arx continued , was ' trade' as it takes place under contemporary capitali� _ arrangements - 'a direct source of gain for the trader' . 'The next category to which trade gi ves rise', he concl uded , 'is value' ( CW 3 . 375). I n effect his poli tical commit­ ment (to an econ omic, social and political system alternative to capitalism and the i negalitarian regimes supporting it), his subj ect matter (politica l economy), his programme of research (a critical accou nt of its categories) and eve n his starti ng point i n presenta tion (theory of value via the concept of the commodity) were strikingly and uniquely stated by M arx, once he had read Engels 's 'sketch on the criticism of the economic categories'. M a rx e ven noted later that he ' maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspo ndence ' with E ngels , t hou gh n othing survi ves nor is mentioned elsewhere by either u ntil their exchange of letters in Oct ober 1 844. This corres­ pondence began after the two had s pe nt ten days together in Pari s on Engels's return to the continent at the end of A ugust \ )'1...1 --'· (SW 1 82). By then the partnership was fou nded . - Certain aspects o f the Young H egelian methodology were prominently displayed in Engels's 'Critique o f Political Economy', later the s u btitle of M a rx's Capital. As i n tha t work the emphasis was on a conceptual analysis that precedes empirical i nvestigation s . The author trusts such research would corroborate the i nitial theoretical work , rather in the ma n ner of scien tific hypothesis and subseq ue nt tests. I n his critique E ngel s used familiar H egelian a pparatus, u ncovering 'the contradiction', i n this case the o ne introduced by the free­ trade s ystem, and then bringing out ' the consequences of both sides'. M a rx's Cap ita / was i n effect a much elaborated specifica­ tion of the contradiction discussed by Engels in his 'Outlines' . A s i n M arx's attempt t o delve beneath the su rface phenomena of the capitalist economy, Engels proposed to do what the political economists had fa i led to do, namely exa mine their theore tical premises, the same premises that 'begot and reared the factory system and modern s lavery, which yields nothi ng in i nh umanity and cruelty t o ancient slavery' . Engels accused the most recent political economists - M acCulloch a nd James

Marx and Engels

38

M ill - of the worst sophistry and hypocrisy in evading the t rue consequenc es of private p roperty. The science of political economy wa s conceived by Engels as itself an emanation of the merchants' mutual envy and greed, bearing 'on its brow the mark of the most detesta ble selfishness' (a metaphor, possibly borrowed from the Book of Revela tion, la ter ad opted by M arx in his di scussion of value and money m Cap ital) (CW 3 . 4 1 8 -2 1 ). The overall historica l framework in Engels 's 'Outl ines' was more overtly and more con t ro ve rsially of the Hegelian schoo l , since h e t raced a process of re volutionary social tra n s forma­ tion through the resolution o f 'contradiction s ' . This view is less ea sily identifiable in M arx 's works, though th ere are traces of it in some of his more apocalyptic accounts of proleta rian re volution and the end of the capi talist system. Working from the recent past, Enge ls identified eighteenth-century revol - utions as 'one-sided and bogged down in antitheses '. Eco­ nom ically the age did not get beyond 'antithesis' and 'sham philanthropy' ; in politics the socia l contract was counter­ posed t o divine right, and republic to m onarchy ; in phil osophy abstract materia lism was set in opposition t o abstract s pi ritual­ ism and Na ture elevated over M an, just as the Christian God confronted humanity as humiliated and contemptible sinners. Engels's commun ism u ndermined those religi ous and philo­ sophica l contradictions by using Feuerbach 's critique o f Hegelia n idea lism from the Essence of Christianity and else­ where. His wo rk was praised by Engels in the attacks on Schelling of early 1 842 and in ot her articles ; Feuerbach was later specifically cited as an imp orta nt cri tical figure in Engels's own history of the Y oung H egelian peri od, his Ludwig Feuerba c/1

and

the

End of Classical

German

Plii/osoplty

(CW 3 . 4 1 9-20, SW 592). The econ omic and political cont radic tions were also t ackled within Engels's communis t outlook when he took the validi ty ofp riva te p roperty ' t o be the key question . H is view p roceede d ' from a purely hu man , universal ba sis' ; only from tha t ba sis c�rn ld the 'concep tual confusio n' and 'd ouble-to ngued logic' of nva l schools of poli tica l econom y be sorted out. H ence 'the English S oc �alists' ha ve long since 'pro ved practic ally a nd . t heoreti ca lly that, as oppone nts of private prope rty, they are '

'By A nother Road'

39

in a pos ition to settle economic questions more correctly than are political economists whether free-traders or mo nopolists. Engels argued that analysis would i n any case re vea l free ­ traders t o b e more invetera te monopoli sts than their rivals the mercantilist s . H e was however less i nfo rmative o n the exact resol ut ion of the political contradictions he had identified ; 'the stru ggl e of o u r t ime', he said gnomically, will become 'a uni versal h u man struggle ' . Eve n more obscure was his use of a quasi-H egel ian doctrin e of historical necessity : I t was necessary for the theory o f private property to lea ve the purel y empi rical path of merely objective inquiry and to acq uire a more scientific characte r which would also make it responsible for the consequences, and thus transfer the matter to a universally huma n sphere. I t was necessary to carry the immorality contained in the old economics to i ts highest pitch , by attempting to deny it and by the hypocrisy introduced (a necessary resul t of that attempt) (CW 3 . 4 1 9-42 1 ).

Once pa st his i ntroduction, Engel s posed the topic which M a rx took u p in the opening se ntence of Capital : 'The wealth of those societies i n which the capitalist m ode o f production p revails, p resents i tself as "an immense accumulation of commodities'' . . . ' [t he quotation i s from M arx's earlier pub­ li shed work of 1 8 59, A Con tribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (CAP 1 . 43) . I n a sense M arx ' s own exposition provided the ' meaning' Engels called for early in his 'Outlines' : The term national wealth has on ly arisen as a result of li beral econom ists' passion for generalisation. As long as private property exists, this term has no mea ning. The 'na tional wea lth' of the English i s very great and yet they are the poorest people under the sun . One m ust either discard this term completely, or accept s uch premises as give it meaning (CW 3.42 1 ).

Engels then analysed trade in terms that were rather nea rer the surface phenomena of real economic practice than those cons idered in M arx's late r published critique. This was un­ s u rp rising, given Engels's practical experience as a business­ man . I n langu age that appeared later in the Commu nist M a nifesto, Enge ls assessed the impact of capitalist trade in spreading civi lisation and fraternity among peoples, and

40

Marx and Engels

dissolving na tionalities, wh ile at the same time subjecting the whole earth to 'one great, basic mon opoly, property', inte nsify­ ing e nmity between individuals and dest roying the family. All o r this he traced. a s i n his methodology or late 1 842, t o a principle, the separation o r in terests of buyer and seller, the very basis or the free-trade s ystem. 'Once a principle is set in mo tion ' , he con cl uded, ' it wo rks by its own im pet us, through all its consequences'. This was much as Marx argued late r i n deduc ing the soc io-eco nomic consequences of the law of val ue in Capital. in w hic h he specified how E n gels's separation ari ses. Engels. however. concl uded more grandly that eve n the 'egoistical reaso n in g' or the pol itica l econ omists 'form s but a l ink 1 11 the cha in o r man k i n d ' s u n i versal progress' (CW 3 . 42 3-4) . Similarly Engels's anal ysis of value revolved around the surface co ncept 'price' , rather than M arx' s more deeply theoretical investigation of the value - labour relati o nship, merely mentioned by E n gels (in i nverted commas) as the ' "source of wealth' " (CW 3 . 4 3 1 ). The remaining catego ries of the an alysis, 'the rent' for land , 'the capital with its profit' and 'the wages ' for labour, were the three ado pted by M a rx in writing the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of April-August 1 844 : 'Wages of Labour' , ' Profit of Capital ' and ' Rent of Land' (CW 3 . 2 3 5 , 246, 259, 42 7). E ngel s was not, in his short work, abo ut to la unch into such a ruminative, excerpt-heavy investigation or what the maj o r pol itical econo­ mists had said on these subjects. M uch more interestingly he appealed to natural science in its technological appl ications in industry as a category more approp riate to an analysis which goes ' beyond the division of inte rests as it is fo u nd with the econ omist ' (CW 3 . 427-8). I n doing so he prefigured the 'premi ses' of the man uscript German Ideology (o r 1 84 5- 6), a work to which M a rx attrib uted pa rt icular significance in his own autobiographical sketc h of 1 8 59. T hese premi ses are presupposed in all M arxian an alysis. The first prem ise of all human history is. of course, the existence of living human individ uals. Thus the first fact to be est ablished is the physical organisation of these i ndivid uals and their c onsequent relation to the rest of nature . . . M e n can be distinguished from animals by consci o usness , by re ligion or a nything else you like. They

'By A nother Road'

41

themselves begin to distinguish t hemselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their mean s of subsistence (CW 5. 3 1 ).

Engels's earlier comments i n the 'Outlines' derived m uch the same result from a c ritical inquiry into the characteristic assu mptions of political economist s, w hich Engels found m ystificatory and deficient : Accord ing to the econ omists , the production costs o f a commod i ty consist of three elements : the ren t for the piece of land req uired to produce the raw material ; the capi tal with i ts profit ; and the wages for t he labour req uired for prnducti on and manufactu re. But i t becomes immediately evident t h a t capital and l abour are identical, since t he economists t hemsel ves confess that capital is 'stored-up l abour'. We are therefore left with on ly two sides - the nat ural, objective side, land ; and the hu man, su bjective side, labour, which includes capital an d, besides capital, a third factor w hich the econ omist does not think abou t - I mean the mental element of invention , of thought . . . the advances of science . . . We have, then, two elements of production in operation - nature and man, with man again active physically and mentally (CW 3.427-8).

Engels's few sentences are n ot themselves 'the brilliant germ of the new world outlook' t hat he detected in M arx's Theses on Feuerbach of early 1 84 5 (SW 585). The y were however part o f the inspiration o n which M arx drew in h i s own Economic and Philosophical Manuscrip ts that were written in 1 844, j u st a fter the notebooks on p olitical ec on omy w hich contain hi s resu me of Engels's ' Outlines' . T hese now famous man uscripts of 1 844 display an intermediate stage of conceptual elaboration be­ tween Engels 's critique of the econo mists' basic categories, and t he much cris per 'premises' of The Gerrnan Ideology. H ere is wha t M a rx wrote in 1 844 : The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like t he animal) lives on inorganic nature . . . T he universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasm uch as n ature i s ( I ) his direct mean s of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity (CW 3 . 275 -6) .

M arx 's 'premises' o f 1 84 5-6 arose, so I have argued, a s his

42

Marx and Engels

critical approach to private pro perty m o ved from the con­ sideration of social and political phil osophy to t he more specific prop ositions of the pol i tical economists concerning the production of privately distributed 'wealth ' . These 'premises' underlie al l his later work . His 'gu iding thread ' of 1 8 59 makes little sense without them, and the purpose of Capital within his larger plans cannot really be grasped in any other terms. In the Theses on Feuerbach t he category 'production ' , which also figures large in the 1 844 manuscripts and The German Ideology and in Engels's ' Outlines ', was subsumed into the more general, more abstract 'sensuous human activity, practice ', 'practical human-sensuous activity' and ' human prac tice ' terms more relevant t han 'production ' in a response to the abstractions of Feuerbachian phi l osophy (CW 5 . 3 -5). In the very late Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Plt ilosoplLy, an overtly philosophical work, Engels attributed a speci al significance to M arx' s Theses whi ch seems somewhat mispl aced compared to the preci sion of The German Ideology, and unduly denigratory of his own work in the inspira tional 'Outlines' (SW 585). Marx i ncluded the ' Outlines ' in the notes to Capital n o less than fo u r times, most s trikingly when he revealed, earl y in t he work , his own answer to the riddle o f the trade c risis posed in graphic terms by Engels : The law o f competi tion is that demand and supply always st rive to complement each other and therefore never do so . . . The econ omist comes along with his l ove ly theory of demand and supply, proves to you that 'one can never produce t oo m uch', and practice repl ies with trade crises . . . What are we to t hink of a law w hich can only assert itself through peri odic upheavals '? (CW 3 . 43 3-4).

Besides resolving the cause of crises (to his own satisfaction) M arx also managed to pin down Engels's metaphor in t his passage from Capital : . . . in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange­ relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their productio n forcibly asserts itsel f like an over-ridi ng law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears (CA P 1 . 80).

'By A nother R oad'

43

Certain con clusion s in t he 'Outlines' were mirrored in M arx's vi sion in Capital of the conscious regulation of production 'in accordan ce with a settled plan ' , and in these words on 'the k nell o f capitalist private property' strategically placed n ear the end of the very l ong volume : Along with the constantly diminishing n umber of the magnates o f capital, w h o usu rp a n d mon opoli se all advantages o f this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation ; but with this too grows t he revolt of t he working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, u n ited, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production i tself (CA P 1 . 84, 7 1 5).

Engels's views o f late 1 843 a re virtually identical : If the prod ucers as s uch knew how much the consumers requ ired, if they were to organise production, if they were to share it out amongst themse lves, then the fluctuations of com petition and its tendency to cri si s would be i mpossible. Carry on production consciously as human beings - not as dispersed atoms witho ut consciousness of your species - and you have overcome all these artificial and u ntenable antit heses. But as long as you continue to produce in the present u nconscio us, thoughtless manner, at t he mercy of chance - for j u st so long trade crises will remain ; and each s uccessive crisis is bound to become more universal and there fore worse than the preceding one ; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of the class who live by labour alone , thus considerably enl arging the mass of labour to be employed (the major problem of our econo­ mists) and fin ally causing a social revolution such as has never been dreamt of in t he philosophy of the economists (CW 3 . 434).

Characteristically Engels also went beyond what M arx, in his c ri tical ret icen ce, was ever will ing to say about t he social rel ations of the future . M arx was little given to fa vo urable comment s on other socialists, possibly for fear of being saddled with the job of defending ideas he could not w holly endorse , and he certainly never recommended their views on future society in such a sweeping way : The commu nity will have to calculate w hat it can produce with the

44

Marx and Eng els

means at i ts d isposal ; and in accordance with the relationship of this productive power to the mass o f consumers it will determine how far it has to raise or lower prod uction, how far it has to give way to, or curtail, l uxury. But so that they may be able to pass a correct judgement on this relationship and on the increase in productive power to be expected from a rational state of affa irs with i n the community, I invite my readers to consult the writings of the English Socialists, and partly also those of Fou rier. Subjective competi tion - the contest of capital against capital , of labour against labour, etc . - will under these conditions be reduced to the spirit of emulation grounded in human nature (a concept tolerably set forth so far only by Fourier), which after the trans­ cendence of opposing interests will be confined to its proper and rationa l sphere (CW 3. 435).

\..

After his association with Marx had begu n in earnest, howe ver, Engels displayed a more critical approach t o t hose w hom M arx considered utopians and to w hat M arx dismissed in 1 8 7 3 as 'receipts . . . for the cook-shops of the fu ture ' (CAP 1 . 26). The remainder of Engels's article is almost a con spectus of volume one of M arx's Cap ital, once the t heories of val ue, surpl us value and expl oitation are established . Engels considered une mployme nt and took to task the t heory of overpopulation found in M althus ( M a rx footn oted Engels's work on this point at CA P 1 . 594) ; like M arx, he attributed great import ance i n the dynamic of capitalist development to technological change through the application of science. Engels dismi ssed glib theories that i n its final result machinery is fa vo u rable to the worke rs in capitalist producti on , because in the change-over from one type of e mployment to another the newer type is almost i nvariably an absol ute impossibility for the adult work er . This was just as M arx concluded in his long chapter on ' M achi nery and M odern I nd ustry' : the original victims, whose j obs disappeared with tech no logical change , for the most part starve and perish (CW 3 . 443 ; CA P 1 . 4 1 5) . A t the end of t h e 'Outlines' Engels indicated h i s intention t o move on from t he e ffects o f machi nery t o a n expos ition i n detail of the 'despicable immoral ity' o f the factory syste m (C W 3 . 443) . H e d id this in The Conditio n of the Work ing Class in England, researched in 1 844 and published i n 1 845. H e referred to that work i n 1 8 88 w hen he wrote , ' H ow fa r I had independently progressed towards [M arx ' s prem ises] is best

'By A nother Road'

45

shown b y m y Condition of the Working Class in England' (SW 1 .29) . M arx commented in 1 8 59 that Engels ' had by an other road (compare his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1 844) arrived at the same result as I ' (SW 1 82). The book i s Engels's masterpiece, an d in undertaking the work there is n o doubt that he was proceeding alon g another road from M arx's c ritical path through contemporary social t heory. The empirical s tudy of working-cl8 ss l i fe may indeed display M arx's premises as En gel s understood t hem, but the omission of the mo re theore tical ' Out lines' from Engels's own history o f t h e period (whereas M a rx included it) seems obscurely modest, given the use M arx m ade of his materi al and the striking way in which Engels antic ipated the presuppositions fundamen tal to Marx's 'new' materia lism - living men, their productive activities , and the ma teri al world in which t hese activities take place (CW 5. 5 3 1 ) . For M arx t h e other road taken by Engels proved to b e o f considerable methodological sign ifican ce . Curiously it was not a road on w hich Engels e ver trave lled again to any significan t extent. H e surveyed contempora ry working-class conditions i n England 'from personal observation a n d authentic sources', as the tit le-page boldly proclai med (CW 4 . 295, 299) . For M arx this work represe nted an introduction to the world o f Parliamentary inquiries into poor-relief, facto ry conditions and child labour ; pioneering journ alism in radical Engl ish n ews papers ; and other contempo ra ry surveys of proletarian life. This w as a worl d quite separate from the works of econ omic t heory in which he had been immersed, though the connection between the two is o bvious. Engels and M arx were both convinced of a discrepan cy between t he general i sations and presc ription s of the political econ omists and the real world of capitalist p roduction. This was best documented in B ritain, which was not only industri ally more advanced than other coun tries but also freer in a llowing and even spon soring go vernmental and p rivate inquiries. Engels had materi al for his book with him w hen he met with M arx once aga in in August/September 1 844 and their collaboration began. He wrote his man uscript while in German y, and finished it in M arc h 1 845. Publication came in M ay 1 845, a month or so after Engels had joined M arx in Brussels, following the

� ··

46

Marx and Engels

expulsion of commu nists from Paris in J anuary. Not l ong a fter the pu blication of The Condition of the Working Class in England E ngels took M arx t o M anchester to see it all fo r hi mself. The Condition of the Working Class in England and volume one of Capital have a n umber o f common sources, incl uding documents from the I n quiry Commission on the Em ployment of Children in Factories, the reports of H M I ns pectors of Factories, Hansard , and periodicals both radical and establish­ ment. M arx, of cou rse, had many more sources available to him in the 1 860s than had Engels in 1 844, but apart from that difference the methodology employed and the points made are very much t he same. Engels's published work itself served M arx as an important source on which to bui ld his own accou nt, and he ent husiastically recommended it to his readers in a note to Capital as an acco unt of con ditions up to 1 84 5 . Enge ls's book was re ferred t o ten ti mes b y M arx i n vol ume one of Capital, with a nu mber of end orsements not merely of its historical relevance but of its actual contents, since in certain bra nches of industry, so M arx concluded from up-to-date sources, conditions had not changed in the twent y years between the two books : How completely Engels understood the nat ure of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports, Reports on M ines, etc . , that have appeared since 1 845, and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most superficial comparison of his work with the official report s of the Children 's Employment Commission, pu blished 1 8 to 20 years later ( 1 863- 1 867) . These deal especially with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to 1 862, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced . Here, then , little o r n o alteration had been en forced, b y a uthority, in the conditions painted by Engels (CA P 1 . 230 n. 2).

I n his book Engels surve yed cond itions of work before the industrial revolution, t he emergence of the ind u stri al and agricu ltura l proletariat (in va rious trades), the growth of towns to contain the new ind ustrial workers, t he e ffects of c om ­ petition o n prole tarians (particularly i n times o f c risis), immigration, and then a catalogue o f speci fic abu ses : p hysical an d moral degradation at work, the horrors of pauperism,

'By A nother R oad'

47

and the usurpation by employe rs of new and excepti onal powers o ver t he lives of other human beings. M arx referred most o ften to Engels's accounts of speci fic abu ses, particularly t hose t hat still recurred even w hen continuously complained of (somew hat hypocritically, according to M arx ) in the press. Marx also used Engels's work in his account of the general p rocess in which manufacture repl aced hand-work in industry, most notably in t he textile trade. From t hat M arx drew ad­ ditional s upport, so he thought, for the specific theories which he deve loped in his own econo mic work , begun in earnest a fter his read ing of Enge ls's 'Outlines' and Condition of the Working Class in England and then ·summarised in the propositions on t he commodity, value and la bo ur which eventually appeared in vo lume one of Capital. Engels ' s econo mic theorising never ascen ded to t he level of abst raction reached by M arx ; hi s advice on those sections of Capital was concerned exclusi vely with t he present ation of this admittedly difficult material. I n that theoretical work M arx had moved on from the major catego ries of the 'Outl ines ' - private property and com­ pe tition - to what M arx himself considered to be the more fundamental phenomenon of value as it operates in i ndustrialised societ y. M anu facture, according to M arx, 'made it possible for a smalle r n umber o f labou rers, with the add ition of relatively less living labour, not only to con sume [e.g.] the wool prod ucti vely, and put into it new value, but to preserve in the form of ya rn etc. its old value '. I n this way M arx thought that he had id entified , as Smith, Ricardo and the French economist J . - B . Say had not , the specific mechanisms by which the int rod uction of man ufac ture in an industry then 'stimulated increased reproduction of [e. g.] wool: E ngels had chronicled just t his process for the late eighteenth century, and M arx fo und this empirical economic history useful i n backing up his t heoretical c laim t hat ' t he con stant appropri ation of surplus­ labour by the capitalists' appears as 'a constant self-expan sion of capital' (CA P 568-9). M ost stri k i ngl y M arx quoted Engels in support of a political conclusion i n Cap ital about the nature of t he factory system itself in capitalist society. M arx portrayed the fact ory owner as a private legislator exerci sing an autocracy over his work­ people that w as quite at odds with the po litical forms promoted

A-f arx and Engels

48

b y the bourgeoisie i n other spheres : division o f responsibility and representation i n governmen t. Out of m odern mechani sed production capitali sts had e vo lved a s ystem of s oci al re­ gu lation i n which 'the place of the s lave d river's lash is t aken by t he over looker 's book of penalties ' . I ronically M a rx concluded that vi olati on of the factory-owner's rules was ' i f possi ble , more p rofita ble to him than t he keeping of them', and produced detail from Engels , wh o had declared twe nty yea rs earlier that in the 'slavery' binding proletariat to b ourgeoisie 'all freedom comes to an e nd, both at law and i n fact' (CAP 1 . 400 and n 2) . H owever cold M arx was in N o ve mber 1 842 to the Berli n ' Free' and their associate Fried rich Engels, his political interest in communist-i nspired reports from England w as dem ons­ trated when Enge ls's articles continued to appear i n Rheinische Zeitung under his edi torship. That E ngels was warml y received i n Pari s in August 1 844 cannot then be attributed to a purely intellectual break with the Berlin Y oung H egelians, though this had ce rtainly occurred . Engels's prac tical activities i n England put him i n quite another class ; most i nte restingly fo r M arx t hose activities were n ot excl usi vely poli tical j ournalis m and industrial investigations but included a theoretical proj ect the 'Outlines of a Cri tique of Political Econom y' - w hi ch di splayed a knowledge of the literature and an analytical expertise well beyond M arx's current accomplishments . It was that aspect of Engels's work which M a rx found most promising i n a colleague an d co llaborator, even though there were n o plans at this time or later for joint theoretical work in t he economic field . The m ove from contem porary phi l osophy and politics towards political economy as the supreme object of c ritical study was t he deci sive intellectual test of a colleague for M arx, si nce his plans for his work from 1 844 onwards took a c ritica l account of political economy to be the founda tion for w hatever other works - on the 'state, law, morals, bourgeoi s life etc' , were e nvi saged (see Carver ( 1 97 5) , 1 3 a n d passim) . Engels seems to have surrendered political economy wholly to M arx after 1 844 and never t o have e xpressed regret or further i ndependent interest ; M arx seems to ha ve taken on this theoretical burden with the driving m on omania necessary for a .

,

I

'By A nother Road'

49

forty-year project and occasionally to have sought Engels' s advice o n minor points. The work o n w hich they agreed initially to collaborate was one that used Engels's undoubted gifts as a polemicist, satirist and H egelian insider to bes t effect . This was a c ri tical attack on their former associates and on Young Hegelian p hil osophising i n general entitled The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. A gainst Bruno Bauer and Company. A s Marx had explained i n early 1 844 (in his 'Critique o f Hegel 's Philosophy of Right . Introduction'), h i s political project was initially conceived as a defi n itive critique of German i ntellectual radicalism, which he considered to be unsound and unseri ous, by means of the cri tical destruction of their inspiration, H egel himself, in t he Philosophy of Right. In hi s c ri ticism of this work , so M arx tells us i n the preface to t he 1 844 manuscripts , he recognised t he need to disentangle t he material on political econo my (which he had come to see as fundamen­ tal to an u nderstanding o f co n temporary political and social life) from his critical views on the s tate, law, morals, etc. and on the Hegelian presuppositions themselves, even as i nterpreted by readers of Strauss and Feuerbac h w ho rejected any glibly conservative account of H egel's work. M arx evidently felt t he destruction of Young Hegeli an i sm to be imminently necessary, because of its discouraging political effect on w hat he con- J> sidered to be a real engagement with current i ssues. That political task was evidently conceived as one that would be swiftly accomplished, leaving him free to pursue his t heoretical inquiry i n to t he anatomy of bourgeois society as laid bare by a thorough-go ing critique of political economy (see Carver ( 1 982), passim) . T he a nti-young Hegelian Holy Family was planned along the lines of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (which had i ndividually signed contributions), rat her than on the model of a large work jointly written. At publication Engels ' s name a ppeared befo re M arx's on t he title page. capitalising on his national reputation in Germany, his now declared opposition to former associates, and perhaps even his inte rnational connections with o ther peri od icals. By com­ parison M arx, t hough an experienced editor, was somewhat obscure ( see Carver ( 1 98 1 ) . chs 1 -4). T he e ffect of Engels 's work i n t he ' Outlines o f a Critique of ·

50

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Marx and Engels

Political Economy' and The Condition of the Working Class in England on M arx, while fully acknowledged, has been hitherto unexplored. The reproduction of theoretical material in Capital, similar p rojecti on s o f econ omic and p ol itical trends, an identity o f views on certain aspects o f com m unist society, and most i ntriguingly t he very kernel o f M arx's p remi ses t hem ­ sel ves can all be traced i n a detailed comparison o f E ngels's early wo rk with M arx's critique of p ol i tical econ omy from t he Economic and Philosophical Manuscrip ts o f 1 844 t o Capital. Yet t here is little chance t hat Engel s was imparting to M arx thoughts that he was unlikely ever to h ave had by himse lf. H owever strikingly Engels anticipated M arx at t his peri od, there i s a clear d rift i n the latter's work towards the views t hat Engels expressed. At his most influential Enge ls represented a short-cut i n M arx' s development , a considerable i n spiration to fu rther e fforts and a usefu l source of supportive material on t he hist ory and operati on o f capita list industry. The effect of M arx's t houghts on Engels, or rat her of M arx's work as Engels perceived it, w as quite differe nt, i n that Engels responded by large ly abandoning his own emp irical researches. A solitary post script of 1 845 to his Condition of the Work ing Class in England w as neve r followed up. Simi larly his theoreti­ cal work on political economy, i n s o fa r as th at i ntere s t was directed toward s serious, i ndependent projects, w as s uddenly dropped. This response by Engels to the M arx- Engels collaboration was almost the i nverse of Marx's, since Marx's theoretical and empirical work grew i ncreasi ngly to rule his l i fe , at least w hen t he essentials o f li fe itsel f were not absolutely at t he forefront of his concern s . Thus began t he fa mous partnership which fl owered with t he joint works of t he 1 840s i n which M arx and E ngels devel oped what t he y called 'our o utlook'.

3

' O ur Outl o ok '

M ar x and Engels agreed to work t ogether i n August 1 844 ; this is attested by their c ontinu ing coll aborati o n from that date and by their subsequent memoirs. It is also evident from their initi al j oint efforts that they aimed to distinguish themselves very s harply from their former associates, with w hom they might otherwise continue t o be bracketed by present and future sympathisers with t he communist cause. Their way of doing this w as much more theoretical t han political, i n an organisa­ tional sense, since formal communist organisation hardly existed as yet . M ar x and Engels had been i n touch wit h the largely emigre League of the Just in London and Paris, but both eviden tly decl ined to join, sensing a lack o f an alytical discriminati o n in its members which both men craved (t hough perhaps to a different extent) in their associates. Thus M arx and E n gels set out to distinguish themselves from the theoreti­ cally sophis ticated and unsophis t icated alike, choosing the Young H egeli ans as a first and in a sense easier target, si nce they had m ore or less organised views to knock down. M arx's early j ournalism showed him to be a di alectician in the classical manner : he established his arguments, in the first insta nce , through successive refutati ons of plausible but ul­ timately un satisfactory t heses selected to serve the author's d idactic p u rposes. Engels employed t his method to some extent in his 'Outl ines of Pol itical Economy', though he was rather less diffident than the critically scrupul ous M arx in setting out his own positive views. A Critique of Critical Criticism . Against Bruno Bauer and Co . by Friedrich Engels and Karl M arx was given the furt her appe llation The Holy Family on the sugges51

52

Marx and Engels

tion o f the publisher, who thus s ummarised the authors' extended metaphor t hat t he Young H egelians were at bott om idealist philosophers and possibly crypto-Christian s de voted to a pure real m of ideas beyond m u ndane reality. Engels completed hi s portion of the work very quickly and l e ft Paris in September 1 844 for Barmen ; M ar x laboured until N o ve mber, expanding the work quite beyond their original e xpect ati ons. A t t he opening of t he book Engels and M arx identified Bruno B a uer and the contributors to his A llgemeine Literatur­ Zeitung a s adherents of 'speculative idealism' , w hich t hey declared t o be 'in all respects below t he leve l a lready attained by German theoretical development '. Evidently t his made its demolition all the more urgent ; it was t o be accomplished by asserting 'the already achieved results' by contrast. Further development was put forward to ' the independent work s in which we - each of u s for himself, of course - s hall p resent our positive vi ew' ( CW 4. 7-8) . Other t han the j ointly-written German Ideology and Communist M anifesto, and a number o f short communic ations and articles, j ointly signed, M arx and Enge ls stuck to this programme o f independent publicati on throughout the rest of t heir careers . S uch exchanges o f information a s occu rred are w holly insufficient to s u pport a general theory o f joint authors hip (notwithstand ing the ap­ pearance of on ly one name on t he various title-pages), nor does the extensive manuscript material w h ich is preserved lead to the conclusion that the two thought as one. A theory that joint authors hip occu rred in unrecorded conferences does not square with t he recorded comments of the two men, since these do n ot suggest that intensive collaboration had a lready t aken place . Their queries and replies frankly tended towards the superficial even w hen i mportant publis hed w ork s of the two aut hors were me ntioned. Engels wrote the opening sections of The Holy Family, cri ticising ' Ba uer and Co.' primaril y for factual err ors in their comments on British politics, industrial development, techno­ lo gy and the manufacturing process itself. H e ridicu led t heir high-flown consideration of social i ssues and concluded : ' Formu lae , nothing but fo rmulae . ' These were merely con­ structed, he wrote, 'out of the existing Hegelian philosophy and the exi sting social aspi rations' (CW 4. 20) . Engels sati rised a

'Our Outlook '

53

rather pompously self-conscious philosophy by portraying i t as H egel's God-l ike Spiri t , loving in i t s consciousness but irremediably abstract . The lin k here with his pre vio us theo­ logical satires is unmistakable , as is t he re-use of material from his ' Condition of Engl and' articles publi shed earlier in 1 844 w hi le he was collecting materi al for his empirical study of the English working class. M arx' s criticisms were m ore fundamental, though perhaps less academically j us tifiable in that they relied on t he de­ molition of a common phil osophical positio n imputed to 'Critical C ri ticism' , which he took to be a simple-minded use of the subject - p redicate reversal that Feuerbach had recom­ mended in making sense of H egel : 'By this simple process, by changing the p red icate into the su bject, all the attribu tes and ma nifesta tions of human na ture can be Critically trans­ formed . . . Thus, for e xample , Critical Cri ticism makes criti­ cis m , as a predicate and activity of man, into a subject apart' (CW 4.2 1 ) . H o weve r, M a rx spent l ittle time o n what he later described with a musement as ' the cult of Feuerbach ' ( see McLellan ( I 973), 1 3 5 n. 2), but directed his cri tici sm of the 'cri tical cri tics ' to their treatment o f P.-J . Proudhon 's widely read What Is Property ?, fi rs t publi shed in 1 840 with a second edition in 1 84 1 . Self-consciously bu ilding on Engels's 'Outlines', M arx ad­ vanced his own work on political economy ('our main interest') by defending Proudhon, while also declaring his work to be somewhat inferior to the much less publicised 'Outlines' in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. Proudhon used 'economic premises' when he a rgued against the political economists, whereas Enge ls considered what appeared to be premises - the categories wages , trade, value , price, money etc. - as 'forms of pri vate property in themselves'. By claiming a connec tion be tween these su rface pheno mena and one u nderlying category, Engels's work was analytically more elegant and p otentially much mo re powerful. Even so, Proud hon's c ritical i n vestigation was ' t he fi rs t resolute, ruthless, and at t he same time scientific investiga tion' of t he ' the basis of political eco nomy, priva te property', and M arx had had his eye on it for some ti me, desc ribing i t in an a rticle of October 1 842 as 's harp-witted' (CW 4. 3 1 -4 ; CW 1 . 220). Engels had praised

54

Marx and Engels

Proudhon's work extravagantly i n The New Moral World i n November 1 843, and this perhaps rei nforced M arx's e ver­ critical enth usiasm for an appreciative confro n tation : This is the most philosophical work, on the part of the Communists, in the French l anguage ; and, if I wish to see any French book translated into the English language, it is t his. The right of private property, the consequences of this institution, competition , i mmo­ rality, misery, are here developed with a power of intellect , and real scientific research, which I never since found united in a single volume (CW 3 . 399).

A fter establishing a cri tical hierarchy in contemporary comment on political economy - Engels , Proudhon, the 'cri ti­ cal critics' i n that descending order - M arx s truck out on his own , using material freshly written in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscrip ts of 1 844. T he meth odology, how­ e ver, was adapted from Engels's 'Outlines', where t here was a focus on 'contradiction s ' i n socia l life : . . . political econ omy operates i n permanent contradictio n to its basic premise, private property . . . The economists themselves occasiona lly feel these contradictions . . . Thus, as an exception . . . t he economists occasion ally stress t he semblance of humanity in economic relations, but sometimes, and as a rule, they take these relati ons precisely i n their clearly pronounced diffe rence from the human (CW 4. 32-3).

Pro ud hon , like Engels , took 'the human semblan ce o f the econ omic relations seriously' and contrasted to i t the 'inhuman reality' of real conditions . Like Engels, he fo und the root o f all economic contradiction i n private property as such and i n its entirety, rather than i n its specific form s such as w ages, profit , e tc. The 'essence ofpriva te property', M arx concluded, was 'the vital question of political econ omy and jurisprudence', the poi n t on which communists must be crystal clear. The 'critical critics' missed t hi s utterl y and spread con fusion i n t heir works t hrough a faulty, s uperficial methodology remote from what M arx termed the 'real movement' which he aimed t o clarify (CW 4. 3 3, 3 5). Proudhon h ad proceeded from ' t he poverty bred by the movement o f pri vate property', s op histically concealed , M arx claimed, b y political econ omy, but central to the concern s of

'Our Outlook '

55

communists (Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England was, as M arx knew, then i n preparation). Political econ omy had proceeded from weal th 'which t he movement of private property [in production and trade], supposedly creates for the natio ns' . ' Proletariat and wealth are opposites', M arx declared, but 'the question i s exact ly w hat place each occupies in t he antithesis'. Cri tical cri ticism, he wrote, had merely declared them to be two sides of a single w ho le and thereby remained o utside t he o bjec t with which it pretended to deal (CW 4 . 34-5). T he 'real move ment' of private property was depicted by M arx i n stark con trast t o the 'speculative anti theses' of critical criticism. Although proletariat and private property as wealth were antithetical, the positive and negative sides of this antithesis were , for M arx, real, spec ifiable processes i n society : ' since the conditions of l ife of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society t oday in their m ost i nhuman form ; since man . . . i s driven d irectly t o revolt against this in­ humanity, i t follows that the proletariat can and must em­ ancipate i tsel f . ' A large part of t he English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task', M arx wrote, 'and is constantly working to deve lop that conscious­ ness into complete clarity' (CW 4. 36-7). M arx's cri tical treatmen t of pol itical economy was to be his contribution to this inte rnational move ment, and there is little doubt that i n a t heore tical sense he regarded this task as the decisive step towards 'clarity' (CW 4. 37). H ow preci sely Marx's severe notions o f theoretical exactitude were to make their impact on proletari an politics i n a practical sense was presumably to be worked out as com mu nists and proletarians joined together, an activit y which M arx and Engels supported during this period, most n otably in Brussels w here t hey moved in 1 84 5 . Proudhon hi mself was accurately declared by M ar x to have been 'a proletarian , an ouvrier', a n d his work was 'a scientific manifesto of the French pro le tariat' - as opposed to the 'literary botch work' of the critical critics. Yet Proudhon , as stated earlier, remained captive to the premises o f political economy in his category 'possession', which was not a ppro­ priate ly deve loped (CW 4 . 4 1 - 3) . Similarly Proudhon's treatmen t o f the labour theory of

56

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Marx and Engels

value was on the right track, but still within econ omic premises of t he sort M arx aimed t o expose : ' By m aking labour time . . . the measure of wages and t he determinant of the value of the product, Proudhon makes t he human side the decisive factor. In old political economy, on the other hand, the decisive factor was the material power o f capital and of landed property' . ' In other words', M arx concluded, ' Proudhon reinstates man in his rights , but still in an economic and therefore con tr adictory w ay' (CW 4 . 49) . M arx's real c on trast t o the critic al critics as 'absolute idealists ' was not Proudhon , despite the merit s of his 'scientific manifesto', nor Enge ls, w hose s uperior an alytic al grip on political economy w as highly praised, but contem por ary workers t hemse lves w hen t hey ' formed associations i n which they exchange opinions n ot only on their immediate needs as workers, but on t heir needs as human beings' . Thus M arx' s work was not intended to be merely another point of view derived from pure inte l lectual s peculation but was rather to take i ts presuppositions and s ubject-matter from life as experienced i n t he M anchester or Lyons w orkshops. There 'property, capital, m oney, wage-labour a nd the like are n o ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective p r oducts' t hat, accord­ ing t o M arx, ' must be abolished in a practical, objective way, for man t o become man ' (CW 4. 52-3). Howe ver obvious and inevitable M arx considered this m ovemen t t o be, it was sharply distinguished (in his mind, a nywa y) from teleological, and particularly Hegelian philosophies of history, t o which philo­ sophers and pseudo-phi losophers appealed in support of their general views on man, his fa te and the meaning of life . M arx would have n one of it : For H err [Bru no] Bauer, as for H egel, truth is an automaton that proves itself. M an must follow it . . . Just as, according to the earlier teleologists , plants exist to be eaten by animals, and animals to be eaten by men, h istory exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating pro ving. M an exists so that h istory may exist, and h istory exists . . . so that truth may arrive at self-consciousness . . . This is why A bsolute Criticism uses phrases like these : ' History does not allow itself to be mocked . . . [etc.]' (CW 4. 79) . -

M oreo ver, i n M arx's view, ' History d oes no th ing', it

'Our Outlook '

57

"' possesses no imme nse wealth'", it " 'wages no battles'". I t i s 'real, l iving man w h o d oes a l l that, who possesses and fights . . . history is no thing but the activity o f man pursuing his . aims' (CW 4.93). M arx's historical j udgements were derived , so he claimed, from considerati on of 'empirical man ' who lives 'deep down in an E ngl ish ce lla r or at the top of a French block of flats' ; these judge ments were not derived from ' hi story' as 'an etherea l subject' (CW 4 . 80) . Empirica l m a n h a d been cons idered by communist and socialist writers with some degree of accuracy, despite various flaws in their understandin g of economic life and, often , an oversimplified view of the difficulties i n volved in rectifying the horrors wr ought by modern society. Still , 'the communist criticism', M arx wrote , 'had p ractically at once as i ts counter­ part the movement of the great mass . . . One must know the studiousness, the cravi ng for k nowledge, the moral energy and the unceasing urge for development of the French and English workers to be able to form an idea of the human nobility of this movement ' (CW 4. 84). In considering socialism, 'critica l criti­ cism' had missed this altogether and would never get near it, because of a dilettante approach, a lack of resolution i n seeking what M arx called 'a social theory' , and an overall purposeless­ ness in theorising : Criticism is talking here about Fourierism - if it is talking about anything - and in particular of the Fourierism of La Democratie pacifique [newspaper published 1 843-5 1 in Paris] . But this is fa r from being the 'social theory' of the French. The French have social theories, but not a social theory ; the diluted Fourierism that La Democratie pacifique preaches is nothing but the social doctrine of a section of t he philan t hropic bourgeoisie. The people is communistic, an d, as a matter of fact, split into a multitude of different groups ; the true movement and the elaboration of these different social shades is not on ly n ot exhaus ted, it i s really only beginning. But it wil l not end in pure, i.e. , abstract , theory as Critical Criticism woul d like i t to ; i t will end in a quite practical practice that will not bother at all about the categorical categories o f Cri t icism (CW 4. 1 52-3) .

M arx's alternative was t h e unity o f theory and practice, modelled on a p re-exi sting u nity in real life, pointing parti­ cularl y to England (as described by Engels) and to France , as he experienced it himself. This was, of course , a highly selective

/ --

\

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Marx and Engels

account o f experience, but for M arx t he trend towards a unity of revo lutionary t heory and proletaria n practice was poten­ tially of much more significance t han other aspects o f li fe, working-class or otherwise :

1

The criticism of the French and the English is not an abstract , pre ternatural personality outside man k in d ; i t i s the real human activity of individuals who are active members of society and who suffer, feel, think an d act as human beings. That i s why their criticism is at the same time practical, thei r communism a socialism in which they give practical, concrete measures, and in which they not only think but even more act, it is the l i ving, real criticism of existing society, the recognition of the causes of ' the decay' (CW 4. 1 53).

To aid t hi s practical activity M arx proposed a theoretical project, t he e lements o f which were present in 'Critical Criticism' but in the wrong relationship : I t s own [Critical Cri ticism's] theory is confined to stating that everything determinate is an opposite of the bou ndless generality of self-con sci ousness and is, therefore, of n o significance ; for example, the state, private property, etc. I t must be s how n , on the contrary, how the sta te, private property, etc. , turn human beings into abstracti on s, or are products o f abstract man, instead of being the reality of individua l , concrete human beings (CW 4. 1 93).

E ngels 's work i n The Holy Family s howed him t o be a skil ful polemicist in exposing factual error and Hegelian mum bo­ jumbo. His view of t he progressive character of certain developments in working-cl ass politics, particularly Chartism, and his rejection o f philosophical idealism were both in evidence. For Young H egelian error he put forward fact and for t heir idealism he substituted an implicit realism in w hich, as he put it about a year earlier in t he 'Outlines', production takes place, i n volving men , ' acti ve physically and mentally', and nature (CW 3 .428). Evidently t he more explicit t heoretical treat ment of the alternati ve to Young H egelian idealism w as left to M arx w h o stated t hat, contrary to t he predi l ections o f t he critical criti cs , 'there i s a world i n which conscio usness and being are disti nct ; a world which contin ues to e xist when I merely abolish i ts existence i n t hought . . . i . e. , w hen I modi fy

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m y own subject ive consciousness wit hout altering the objective reality in a rea ll y objective way'. To the critical critics' ' world of self- consciousness' M arx opposed 'my own objective reality and that of other men ' (CW 4 . 1 92- 3). 'Objective reality' for M arx was ' industry . . . the immediate mode o f production o f li fe itself, w hich proceeds fro m 'the t heoretica l and practical relation of man to n ature , i . e . natural science and industry', the very premises put forward by Enge ls when he discussed production in his ' Out lines' (CW 4. 1 50). This was the world of M arx's 'opposites ' - pro letariat and wea lth. These were opposites, because weal th was private property and the proletariat, through t he competitive s ystem of production , could get little of it. The key to this world, so M arx revea led, lay in political econ omy. The difficulty for communists was that political economy itself presupposed and justified private propert y ; hence its presuppositions and apologetic aspects must be overcome by thorough criticism. Engels had begun this task, but j udging from M arx's work on Proudhon, and his particular focus on the labour t heory of value (treated o n ly cursorily by Enge ls), it was M arx who proposed to finish the job. On 1 February 1 845, j ust after seeing The Holy Family through the press, M arx signed a contract for a Critique of Politics and Political Economy (see Carver ( 1 9 75), 1 2- 1 4). While M arx's work was acquiring a certain kind of theoreti­ cal m omentum i n terms of clarity o f subject matter , purpose and presuppositions, Engels continued in his role as publicist, p ropagandist and reporter for the communist cause, writing for both German and English audiences and giving, inter alia, published n otice of ' M essrs M arx and E ngels . . . detailed refutation [in The Holy Family] of the p ri nciples advocated by B . B auer' ; ' Dr M arx ' s forthcoming Review of Politics and Political and Political Economy' ; and ' M r F. Engels' Condition of the Working Classes of Great Britain' (CW 4. 240- 1 ) . I n one of his articles, disbelieving Germans were given an account of ' Recently Founded Commu nist Colonies still i n Existence ' to cou nter objections that communism - 'social existen ce and activity based on community of goods' - was inherently im­ practical with respect t o menial and unpleasant tasks and t o t he equal claim b y all on communal possessions.

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Engels d isposed of the first line of objection by citing community spirit and improved techn ology, and of the secon d b y commenting t hat 'all communist colonies so far have become so enorm ously rich after ten or fi fteen years t hat they have everything they can desire i n greater abundance than t hey can consume , so that no gro unds for dispute exist ' . Engels's source w as mainly a series o f letters publi shed i n t he radical English press covering A merican colonies - Shakers, H armonists, Separatists - and the English Owenites, though Engels di stanced communi sm as s uch fro m the religious practices of t hese communities. 'Of the more recent colonies', he commented, ' almost all are in any case quite free of religious nonsense ' (CW 2 1 4- 1 5) . The concl usions Engels drew for his German readers prefigured the d irectness of the Communist Manifesto a nd its thesis that part of the bo urgeoisie would j oi n t he proletariat : If the workers are united among themselves, hold together and pursue one purpose, they are i nfinitely stronger than the rich. A nd i f, moreover, they have set their sights upon such a rational purpose, and one which desires the best for all mankind, as community of goods, it is sel f-evident that the better and more i n telligent among the rich will declare t hemselves in agreement with the wo rkers and support them (CW 4. 227-8).

For the English audience Engels reviewed the ' Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany' , writing t hat socialism had progressed miracul ously there over the preceding two years and chronicling the ' first Socialist publication . . . a year ago [the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher]' . Though t here were ' some hun dreds of German Communists' abroad, legal restric­ tions and official disco uragement at home limited their in­ fluence. Enge ls's definition o f s oci ali sm encom passed all societies 'for ameliorating the condition of the work i n g people ', s o h i s claim that ' a strong Socialist party has grown up' is n ot quite so astonishing as i t appears. A dmitting that the stronghold of socialism i s t he m iddle class, Engels n oted that 'we, however, hope to be i n a short time s upported by the working classes, w ho always, and e verywhere, m ust form the stren gth and body of the Socialist party', thus i ntroducing the communist perspective without t he immediate fi·isson a tten-

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dant on the name. A n yway, Engels inform e d his readers that t he German middle class 'is far more d isinterested, imparti al, i' and inte lligent, than in England', though thi s was because it was poorer. E xcitedly Engels looked forward. to a community erected by ' practical men of business', bui lding o n the ex­ peri ences of Owen , Fourier, A merican communities, and Engli s h experiments ; the ' most active literary characters' in German Soci alism were listed separately and i ncl uded M arx, Engels and Hess (CW 4. 229-32). Engels's ne xt i nsta lment on ' Rapid Progress' was much mo re straig htforwa rd about communism and its pri nciples 'organi sation o f l abour, protection o f labour agai nst t he power of capital, etc . ' (CW 4 . 2 34- 6). A n d i n t he final , article he summarised various communist s peeches, recently de livered, among them his own at Elberfeld, i n which ' Mr Engels . . . proved . . . t hat the present state of Germany was such as could n ot but produce i n a very s hort time a social revolution ' . M oreover, ' this imminent revolution was not to be averted by an y possi ble measures for promoti ng commerce and man u facturing i ndustry' but could only be p revented by the 'i n troduction of, and the preparation for, the Community sys tem'. Otherwise there would be 'a revolutio n more terri ble than any of the mere subversi ons of past his tory' • (CW 4 . 2 3 8 -9). These meetings i n Elberfeld m obi lised middle-class opi nion, according to Engels, because ' nearly every patrici an and moneyed family of the t own had one of its members [e.g. Fried rich Engels] or relatives present at the large table occupied by the Commu nists' . In conclusi on he virtually wrote off sociali sm in favour of communi sm ; t hi s w as perhaps a ma tter of tactics i n gradually i ntroducing an English socialist audience to a more radical, revo lutionary and cl ass-conscious perspective. I n Germany, he wrote, ' the word Soci alism means nothing but the different vague, undefined, and undefinable i maginations of t hose who see that something m ust be done , and who ye t c an not make up their minds to g o the whole length of t he Communi ty s ystem' (CW 4 . 239-4 1 ). The ' Speeches i n Elberfeld' t o which Engels referred were de livered on 8 and 1 5 February 1 845 and published in A ugust. There is n ot hing like them i n M arx's works t o that date, partly ·

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no doubt because M arx l acked the opportunity to address an in fluential n on-acade mic audien ce i n public, but partly beca use his style - learned, complex, ultra-inte llec tual - was more s uited to a se mi-censored pape r than to middle-class meetings. M arx' s later attempts (in Brussels and London) to presen t his work in a simple, oral style were directed at work ing-class audiences and were confined to the basic elements of his economic c riticism . Engels was obviously a t home with the middle classes of Elbe rfeld, and his presentati on - factual, graphic, oriented to business and politics - m ust have struck t he right level, even if one discounts E ngels 's own vers ion of his s uccess : . . . not a word was offered in reply . . . a few days afterwards those who had publicly advocated our cause were overrun by n um bers of people who asked for book s and papers from which they might get a view of t he w hole system (CW 4.238, 240) .

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The 'Speeches' presented aspects of Engels 's r ather m ore complex 'Outlines ' in s imple, discursive terms that o ne recognises now as the familiar cadences of the Communist M anifesto. Free competition was the basic economic assumpti on fr om which he drew his communist conclusion : 'Thus there arises the glaring contradicti on between a few rich people on t he one hand, and many poor on the other . . . the contradic tion will develop more and more s harply u n til finally necessity compels society to reo rga nise itself on more ra tional princ i ples' (CW 4. 244). Free competition was irrati onal, Engels wrote, beca use 'each man works on his own , each strives fo r his own enrichment and is not in t he least concerned with what the rest are doing' . 'All of us work each fo r his own advantage, u nconcerned abo ut the wel fare of others', whereas 'it is an o bvious, self-evident truth that t he i nterest, the well-be ing, the happiness of e very individual is i n separably bound up with t hat of his fellow-men ' . A s long a s bourgeois society remains a 'war of a l l against all' this unregulated economic system will lead to disaster, in particular to the ruin of the small middle class, w ho were presumably n umerous i n Engels's a udience and doubtless terri fied of t he propertyless fate he foresaw for t hem (CW 243-8). Engels wrote excitedly to M arx (on 22

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February - 7 M arch 1 845) that 'All Elberfeld and Ba rmen were there, from money-aristocracy to grocery, excepting only the proletariat ' . He estimated atte ndance at the t hree meetings as successively 40, 1 30 and 200 ( M EGA (New Series) 1 1 1 / 1 .267) . A s ys tem predicated o n opposed i nterests in free competition led , in Engels 's view, to 'a cry i ng disproportion between production and consump tion' and the terrors of commercial crisis . M an ufacturers work haphazardly, relying on the con­ s tantly fl uctuating leve l of prices w hich inevitably leads to interruptions in trade, short-time working, bankruptcies, stock clearance and the l oss of capital. Commun ism would solve t hese d ifficulties : I n communist society, where the interests of individuals are not opposed to one another but, on the contrary, are united, competition is eliminated . . . I n communist society it will be easy to be informed about both production and consumption. Since we know how much, on the average , a person needs, it is easy to calculate how much is needed by a given number of individuals, and since p roduction is no longe r in the hands of private producers but in those of the community and its administrative bodies, i t is a trifling matter to regula te p roduction according to needs (CW 4.243-6).

Other evils w hich would be abolished in communist society included 'intermediary swi ndlers, speculators, agents, ex­ p orter s, commission agents' etc. (all anathema to small manufacturers), crimes against property (which w ould 'cease of their own accord where everyone receives what he needs t o satisfy h i s na tural a n d spiritual urges'), standing armies (since revolution and aggressive war would be unthinkable, t hough n a tional defence would be willingly u ndertaken) , waste of ' labour power ' i n useless domestic service, unemployment and prostitution . One further result w ould be a reduction of 'present customary labour time ' b y half, s i nce waste and disadvantageous use of labour would be eliminated (CW 4.246-52). All this was not mere theory, Engels claimed, because i t was n ot 'r ooted in pure fa ntasy' but t ook reality into account. The English, he op ined, 'will probably begin by setting up a number o f colonies and leavi ng it to every i ndividual w hether t o j o i n or

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not', whereas t·he French 'will be lik ely to prepare and im plement communism on a national basis ' . By way o f German preparation Engels suggeste d universal state educa­ tion, reorganisation of poor relief so that t he destitute would work for themselves in colonies rather than for private employers, and t he introduction of progressive taxation on capital to finance those measures. Thus common o wnership would not be intr oduced 'overnight and against the will of the nation' (CW 4. 253-5). I n his next speech Engels retu rned t o the possibility of social revolution, giving his three measures towards 'practical com­ munism' greater bite : The proletariat must under all circumstances not only continue to exist but also enlarge itself continually, become an ever more threatening power in our society as long as we continue to produce each on his own and in opposition to everyone else. But one day the proletariat will attain a level of power and of insight at which it will no longer tolerate the pressure of t he entire social structure always bearing down on its s houlders, when it will demand a more even distribution of social burdens and rights ; and then - unless human nature has changed by t hat time - a social revolution will be inevitable (CW 4.253, 2 57).

Ne ither free -trade nor protectionism would save German industry, he argued : 'proceeding from competition in general . . . the unavoidable resul t of o ur existing social relations . . . will be a social revolution '. That revolution , he deduced, would be ' far fiercer and bloodier t han all those t hat preceded it' and will moreover not st op half-way but 'will deal with the real causes of want and poverty, of igno rance a nd crime . . . b y t he proclamation o f t he princ iples of comm unism ' . This deduction was based o n two claim s : 1 ) t hat previ ou s revolutions i n England a n d Fran ce had realised what t hey aimed for, and 2) t hat the contemporary l abour m ovement s in those countries were 'all based on the princ iple of common property' , excepting only the adherents of Fourier. To his audience Engels recommen ded the ' peaceful introduction or at least preparation of communism' to a vo id ' the bloody solution of the social problem'. I n conclusion he p ortrayed communism as a generalisation of some of the things member s of t he

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middle-class audience u nd oubtedly wanted for t hemselves : 'no need to fear any vio lent s ha ttering of [one's] condition' , and more provocatively a re lease from ' t he semblance' o f e njoy­ ment they might have in t heir p resent station with in a deeply contradictory and disordered society (CW 4.26 1 -4) . E ngels promoted communism in a n analysis that seemed complete , and it operated in terms familiar to his middle-class readers and audiences. He took free competition as his framework, deduced the necessity of crises, p roletarianisation and unemplo yment, and produced a plausible accoun t of a fu ture i n which work ing-class consciousness coincided with m ore theoretical speculation on man and society. Even 'Dr Feuerbach, t he most eminent philosophical genius i n Germany at the present time, has declared himself a Communist', Engels wrote in The New Moral World. According to his u nidentified informan t , Feuerbach viewed communism as a n ecessary consequence of the princi ple he had formulated, and t hat Communism was , i n fact, only ' The practice of w hat he had proclaimed long before t heoretically' . Now he felt 'much inclined' to dedicate his next work to Wi l helm Weitling, t he working-class communist. 'Dr M arx', said Engels , had predict­ ed t his 'union between t he German philosophers . . . and t he German working men' i n t he Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher , w here he wrote that the 'head of this emancipation [of man] is philosophy, its heart is t he proletariat' (CW 3 . 1 87 ; cw 4 . 2 3 5 -6). N one of M arx's writings for this period shows t he sweep that , Engels displayed i n his analysis, w hich reappears i n the j ointly written Commu nist M anifesto and in disjointed fashion in M arx's Cap ital itself. A t the time, however, t hat E ngels promulgated communism as a deductive exercise from political economy, provided that free competition was correctly u nder­ stood , M arx was d igging be neath tha t category to p ri va te property (Engels's 'opposed interests') and deeper still to the concept of value i tself. H owever rudimentary his work at this stage, and however far rem o ved from t he later sophistication of Capital, there is still a discernible direc tion of inquiry in M arx's work that is lacking, for w hatever reason, contingen t or i n t ellectual, i n Engels's more polished and influential efforts up to the spring o f 1 84 5 .

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While M arx pursued hi s economic researc hes, n ow u sing English texts as we ll as French, Engels was starting, so he said in a lette r to M arx of 20 January 1 845, a wo rk on English history and socialism. Whi le we have no man u script ma terial, it seems reasonable to assume this to be the 'more comprehen­ sive work on the social history of England' mentioned in the preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England and a continuation of his works of 1 843-4 for e . g . , t he Deutsch­ Franzosische Jahrbucher and Vonviirts, t he Paris paper with which M arx and Engels were associated during t heir stay t here . Engels had actually completed a long review o f Thomas Carlyle 's Past and Present entitled 'The Condition of England' and two further a rticles on 'The Eighteent h Century' and ' The English Constitution' in 1 844 ( M EGA (New Series) I l l / 1 . 260 ; CW 4. 302). Thus in the early months of their partnershi p Engels brought to M arx works of exciting sophistication in two fields : economic criticism (t he 'Out lines o f a Critique of Po litical Economy'), and contemporary empirical research and obser­ vation ( The Condition of the Working Class in England). These studies, and a t hi rd - the history of the industrial revolution ­ were o f pro found interest to M a rx . Yet he had done little i f any work on two - industrial development and contem po rary observation - and had merely begun , wit h agomsmg thoroughness, a critical investigation of poli tical economy. Those economic studies were summarised to a certain de gree in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of mid - 1 844, but at a high leve l of substantive and methodological abstraction . Perhaps M arx could have worked his way from t hat level to the specific consideration of German , even Rheni sh soci al con­ ditions and politics u ndertaken by Engels in his 'Speeches in Elberfeld', when he moved from his 'Outlines' t o contem­ porary communist politics. Perhaps not, but the obvious utility of Engel s's work - on the history, theory and contem porary politics of industrial society - challe nges us to consider what, after all, was the real character of M arx' s early writi ngs . From his early journ alism onwards, M arx was in volved with the 'social questi on' , i.e. the treatment o f the poor in contemporary society, yet his tac tics - using a l iberal paper - meant that his focus had to be on offici al politics and politicians, whom he c riticised with merciless but highly

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abs tract a rgume n ts conce rning man , citizenship , the law, rights an d freedom. German radicals fou nd little favour with M arx, as we have seen , and his weapons aga i nst them were sim ilarly devastating yet remote from actual experience. The social world which M arx portra yed, in contrast to a Young Hegelia n cloud-land, presen ted material production as the paradigm for man ' s rea l relati o nship with nature. All uding to t hat world, however, was rather differen t from writing its history, chronicl­ i ng its depreda tions and giving a theore tica l account of its operation. Engels had done all t hese - to a minimal but reasonable s tandard of accuracy, comprehensive ness and analytical elegance . M arx had not. H owever, M arx had the wit to recognise that abstract arguments, though ult imately devastating aga inst fairly s ophisticated opponents, would not by themselves c rush t he opposi tion , whether l i beral or idealist or both. The 'social question' a nd the 'objective world' coincided ana lytica lly in his mind, but the history and current state of i ndustrial soci ety were essential specificati ons of this 'outlook ' that would reveal its p lausibility and pol i tical character . The theoretical st udy of p olitical econ omy would reveal its truth. On returning to Brussels from M anchester i n late summer 1 84 5 , M arx and E ngels di scovered that ' Bauer and Co. ' were n ot devastated by The Holy Family but had dared to reply. M arx and Engels responded anonymously in the same Leipzig peri odical : 'By resorti ng to i ncompetent jugglery, to the most dep lorable conj u ring trick , Bruno Bauer has in the final analysis confirmed the death sentence passed upon him by Engels and Marx in The Holy Family'. ( CW 5 . 1 8) . A mere resp onse, however , was not good en ough . Commenting on his career in 1 8 59 M arx wrote that 'in the spring of I 845 . . . we resolved to work out in common t he opposi tion of our view to the ideo logical view of German phil osophy, in fact, t o set tle accounts with our erstwhi le phil osophical conscience. The resolve w as carried out in the form of a criticism of post­ H egeli an phi losophy' (SW I 82-3). While working o n the manuscript (never published as a w hole in M arx's or Engels' s lifetimes) M arx wrote excuses to t he prospective publisher of his Critique ofPolitics and Political Economy : ' I t seemed very important to me to preface my

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positive work with a polemic agai nst German phil osophy and con temporary German socialism . . . t o prepare t he public fo r the basi s o f my econ omic work which i s wholly opposed to previous studies i n Germany' ( M EGA ( N ew Series) I I I /2 . 2 3) . The representatives o f m odern German p hil osophy attacked i n The German Ideology were Ludwig Feuerbach, B runo Ba ue r a n d M ax Stimer (author of the recently publi shed Ego and Its Own) (CW 5 . 1 9) . This group was surely t he 'erst-whi le philo­ sophical conscience ' mentioned by M a rx . In much of the li terature on Tile German Ideology it i s erroneously assumed that M arx and Engels (see SW 584) were re ferring to their own 'consci ence ' as formerly phi losophical and thus, it is er­ roneo usly concluded , the two were somehow rejectin g philo­ sophy as such. While the re is no doubt t ha t M a rx a nd Engels rejected ideology, academic phil osophy, moralising and non­ sen se generally, a rejection o f phi losophy as a whole i s vi rtually meaningless , give n the tlleore tical character o f M arx's c ritique of political economy , in which philosophical concepts were openly empl oyed (such as 'qua lity' a nd 'quantity' in Capital) . Late in l i fe Engels involved himself in what he termed 'basic' questions (e .g. mind a nd matter) which were resolved, so he claimed., accordi ng to the ' M arxist world outlook'. Whi le disti nct, in Engels's view, from con ventional phi l osophy, the origi n of t hose issues and many o f the terms were un mistakably phil osophical, and it woul d be a very preci ous qui bble to ma i ntain that in some sen se what M arx and Engels declared in The German Ideology was that t heir work would henceforth di spe nse with phi losophy altogether, when in fact they con­ ti nued to work hard straightening out phi losophers, usi n g phi l osophy in their works a n d revising phi l osophy itsel f implici tly ( M a rx's usua l mode), and explici tly (as Engels did in the 1 8 70s and 1 8 80s). Though M arx and Engels achieved a defi niti ve fo rmulation o f t heir ' view' i n Tile Ger111a11 Ideology, the conventi onal assumpti on t ha t thei r earlier works proceede d on some other basis is not warrante d . As we have seen, the premises of The German Ideology can be traced explicitly i n M a rx's work t o the 1 843 ' Letters ' to the Deutsc h-Fran::osische Jallrbu cller and implicitl y in the j ournalis m of 1 842, despite the li beral - Young H egelian context a nd li beral audience . E ngels, n e ver as

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t heoretically focussed as M arx, displayed the premises of The German Ideology in his 'Outli nes' , and we can trace his concern with industrial production back to t he ' Letters from Wuppertal' of 1 8 39. H owever inexplicit were his premises, and however vari ous were his j udgements in selecting topics and dispensing praise and criticism, there is a recurrent theme in Engels 's works that sets him apart from a vague but simple concern with poverty and revo lution and identifies him as peculiarly conscious of the role of productive activities in socie ty and politics. The German Ideology was a true collaboratio n by M arx and Enge ls, in that they seem ge nuinely t o have wri tte n it together (though they a lso solicited some contri butions from M oses Hess). The manuscript occupied them from November 1 845 to about A ugust 1 846 ; Engel s wrote up some fu rther material on 'The True Socialists' (presented in the original man uscript as a phi l osophical amalgamation o f English and French com­ munist ideas) t he following year. The authors could n ot find a publisher , so M a rx i n formed us in 1 8 59, and as a res ult they 'abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice ' . This was tantalising news fo r his reade rs, who might have won dered why they were informed in a short au tobio­ graphical sketch about a work they could never expect to obta i n . ' Self-clarification' was the main purpose, accordi ng to M arx, and the authors advanced toge ther and ind iv idually to other projects which 'put our views be fore the public . . . now from one aspect , now from an other ' (SW 1 8 3). W hat exactly was clarified, and to whom, in The German Ideology is of particular i mp ortance , beca use the work made explicit the premises held by M arx and Engels, and as such we have a prolego menon to later wri tings in which this material i s presupposed, but n o t stated in so many words. Moreover Engels revisited this period later in life and provided his own 'short, coherent account of our re lation to the H egelian philosophy' in a fa r more i n fluenti al work publi shed after M arx's death (SW 5 84). Whether he was right about the content of The German Ideology, the relation of his and M arx ' s earlier works t o i t , a n d the contributi ons each author made t o the work, can only b e judged if The German Ideology is scru­ tinised i n its context without the benefit of E ngels's later gloss.

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The initial section of The German ideology recapitulated, in a sen se, much of M arx's and Engels's previous work. Young and Old Hegeli ans were equated as idealists and their d iffere nces dismissed as superfic ial or misleading. Both ' attribute a n indepe nde nt existence ' t o 'co nceptions, though ts, ideas . . . all the products of consciousness'. These they declare to be the bonds or chains of society (Old and Young Hegelians , respectively), and from the Young H e gelian point of view it fo l lows that one need fight 'only a gainst these i ll usio ns' to be free . Th us Young H egelians put to me n 'the moral postulate of exchanging thei r prese n t consci ous ness for huma n , c ri tica l or egoistic consciousness' ( Feuerbach, B . Bauer and Stirner, respectively) . I n M arx and E ngels' view, however, these Young H egelians were 'in no way combating the rea l existi ng world ' when they fought phrases with phrases. The concl usion drawn by M arx and Enge ls poin ted to the economic, historical, empirical and even political work undertaken pre-emi nently by Engels : 'It has not occ urred to any one of these philosophers t o inqu ire into the connection of German phil osophy with German reality, the connection o f their criticism with their own material su rrou ndings' (CW 5 . 29- 30). I n order to do that, genuinely non-idealist premi ses were required , and here we detect M arx 's sharp an alytical mind at work on materi al d ating in explicit form to Engels's 'Outlines', and impl icitly to much earlier work by both authors. These premises were defined as 'real' and clearly disti nguished fr om any abstraction that migh t be made from them : 'They are the real ind ividuals, their activity and the materi al conditions of their l i fe , both those which they find a lready e xi sting and those produced by their activi ty' . Production, the aut hors conti nued , distinguishes man from o ther anima ls in practice, and fr om this pre mise they proceeded to characte rise production as such and production as it had deve loped within and (more speculatively) be fore the hi sto rical record . From there it was not d ifficult to establish a genera l relations hip between ' productive fo rces , the division o f labour and inte rnal interc ou rse ' , and a more partic ular account of the historic al deve lopment of production (in Europe , though this is unstated) . Their conclusion was that the re lative position o f groups in soci ety (e. g . states, classes) is determined by the way work is organised (CW 5 . 3 1 -7).

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With this establi shed, the aut hors announced a progra mme for st udying ' the actual li fe-process and the activity of the individuals o f each epoch'. The methodology was to be empirical (n o 'empty phrases'), though abstractions derived from observation would play a role in arranging material and ind ica tin g sequence. In n o way would t he abstracti ons function as 'a self-sufficient phil osophy' of the idealist type for 'nea tly trimmi n g t he epochs of history', includ ing presumably future epochs. Once again the H egelian-style phi losophy of history was rejected ; a realm o f abstractions to which human li fe could not but e ven t ually con form was explicitly ruled out ( CW 5 . 3 7) . Thus Marx and Engels did n ot reject a role for individua ls i n historical a n d contemporary e vents ; their study presupposed individuals w hose activi ties have characte ristically resul ted in t he formation o f grou ps such as estates or classes whose poli tical sign ifi cance was obvious . I t is this explicit linkage betwee n t he generalities of the man - Nature relationship and the specifics o f t he soci o-political groups in which communists were interested that makes The German Ideology a n important collective achieve ment for M arx and Engels. The hi storical and empi rical materia l employed to ill ustrate thi s scheme was largely deri ved from E n gels's work on England ; the ve hement and telling an ti-idealism was reminiscent of both authors i n their previ ous polemics , tho ugh the material was mostly M arx's - t here is e ven use of a section on Democritus and Epicurus from hi s doctoral dissertation begun in 1 8 39 (CW 5 . 1 40-2) . The cri sp concern with premi ses was also probably M arx's contri buti on - the Tlzeses on Feuerbach pre­ ceded En gels's return t o B russels and the initial work on The German Ideology by perhaps a few week s. M arx's later account of his 'guiding thread ' in his 1 859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy reproduced the theoretical material in The German Ideology in very similar phrases. A n extended compari son be tween the two texts n ot only reveals that M arx's initial premises held good in the later summary o f his basic view of society and social change ; such a comparison also sheds m uch-needed light on the somewhat murky yet highly in fluential 1 8 59 propositions themselves, p articularly when The German Ideology challenges us to re-think traditiona l interpreta tions of the ' guiding t hread' :

72

Marx and Engels

The German Ideology ( 1 845-6)

Preface ( 1 8 59)

Empirical observation m ust in each separate instance bri ng out empirically, and without any mystification and speculati on, the connection of the social and poli tical structure with produc­ tion (CW 5. 35).

M y investigation led to the result that legal relations as wel l as forms of state are to be grasped nei ther from themselves nor from th e so-ca l led general de­ velopmen t of the hu man m ind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of l i fe (SW 1 8 1 ).

The fact is, therefore, that de­ finite indivi d uals who are pro­ ductively active in a defini te way enter into these definite social and political relations . . . They work under definite material li­ m its , presuppositions and con­ di tions independent of their will (CW 5.35- 6t---_

I n the socia 1 prod uction of their l i fe, men enter into definite re­ lations that are indi spensable of their independent and will . . . ( SW 1 8 1 ).

j

. . . the whole internal struct ure of the nation itself depends on the stage of developmen t reached by its production and its interna l and external intercourse (CW 5. 32).

. . . relations of production which correspond to a defin ite stage of developmen t of their material prod uctive forces (SW 1 8 1 ).

The social struct ure and the state are continually evolving out of the l i fe-process of definite in ­ di viduals . . . ( CW 5 . 3 5).

. . . the econ omic structure of so­ ciety, the real fou ndation . on which rises a legal and political superstructure . . . (SW 1 8 1 ).

The vari ous stages o f deve lop­ ment in the division of labour are j ust so many di fferent forms of property . . . (CW 5. 32).

. . . existing relations of produc­ tion, or - what is but a lega l same the fo r expression re lati ons thing - . . . propert y (SW 1 8 1 ).

This mode o f prod uction must not be considered si m ply as be­ ing the reproduction of the physical existence of the indi-

The m ode o f production of ma­ terial life conditions the soci al, political and intellectual l i fe pro­ cess in general (SW 1 8 1 ).

'Our Outlook '

73

viduals. Rather i t is a definite form of activity of these indi­ viduals, a definite form of ex­ p ressing their life, a defin i te mode of life on their part . A s indi­ viduals express their life, so they are. What they are , there fore, coincides with thei r production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. H ence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of pro­ duction (CW 5. 3 1 -2). It is not consciousness that dete r­ mines li fe, but li fe that dete r­ mines consciousness (CW 5 . 3 7).

It is not the consci ousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social be­ ing that determ ines their con­ sci ousness (SW 1 8 1 ).

Jn the development of produc­ tive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercou rse are brought into be ing which, under the exist­ ing relations, only cause mis­ chief, and are no longer pro­ ducti ve bu t destructive forces . . . (CW 5. 52).

From forms of development of the productive forces t hese re­ lations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolu tion (SW 1 8 1 -2).

. . . t he communist revolution is With the change of the economic directed aga inst t he hitherto fou ndation the entire i m mense existing mode of activity, does superstructure is more or less away with labour [as 'a parti­ rapidly transformed (SW 1 82). cular, exclusive sphere of ac­ tivity'] . . . The revolution is nee- { essary, therefore, not only be ­ ca use the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class o ver- 1 \ thro wing i t can only in a re­ volution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages . . . (CW 5.47, 52-3).

74

Marx and Engels

This conception of history t hus relies on expounding the real p rocess of production - starting from the ma terial production of life itsel f - and comprehending the form of intercourse connec­ ted with and created by this mode of production, i .e., civil society in i ts vari ous stages, as the basis of all histo ry ; describ­ ing i t in its action as the state, and also explaining ho w all the d i f­ ferent theoretical products and forms of conscio usness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc. , arise from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that ba­ si s . . . (CW 5 . 5 3).

In considering s uch transforma­ tions a distinction s hould always be made between the material trans formation o f the eco nomic conditions of production, which can be determ ined with the p re­ cision o f natural science, and the legal, political, religio us, aes­ thetic or phil osophic - in s hort, ideological forms in which men become consci ous o f this conflict and fight i t out. Just as our opinion o f an individual i s not based on what he thinks o f him­ self. so can we not j ud ge o f such a period of transformation by its own consciousness ; on the con­ trary, this conscio usness m ust be explained rather from the contradictions of material l i fe, from the existing conflict be­ tween the social productive for­ ces and the relations of pro­ duction (SW 1 82) .

Co mmunism is not fo r us a state of affairs which is to be estab­ lished, an ideal to w hich reality [wi l l] have to adj ust i tself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state o f things . . . And if these material elements of a complete revo ­ lution are not present - namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on t he other the formation of a revolutionary mass . . . then it is absol utely im­ material for practical develop­ ment whether the idea of t his revolution has been exp ressed a already . . . times hundred (CW 5.49, 54).

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for w hich there is room in it have developed ; and new, higher re­ lations of production never ap­ pear before the material con­ ditions of their existence have matured in the womb of t he old society i tself. Therefore mankind always sets i tsel f only such tasks as i t can solve ; since , looking at t he matter more closely, i t will always be found that the task i tsel f arises only when t he ma­ terial co nditions for its solutio n al ready exist or a re at least in the process of fo rmation (SW 1 82).

'Our Outlook '

75

T he first form o f property is tribal property . . . T he second form is the ancient communal and state property . . . T he third form is feudal or estate pro­ perty . . . The expansion of com­ merce and manufacture accelera­ ted the accum u lation of movable capita l . . . created the big bour­ geoisie (CW 5. 32-3 , 69-70).

In broad outlines Asiatic, an­ cient, feudal, and modern bour­ geois modes of production can be designated progressive epochs in t he economic formation o f society (SW 1 82).

. . . connected with t his [develop­ ment of producti ve forces] a class is called forth w hich has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which is ousted from society and forced i n to the sharpest contradiction to all other classes ; a class which forms t he maj ority of a ll mem­ bers of society, and from which emanates the consci ousness o f the necessity o f a fundamental the communist revo lution, consciousness, which may, of course, a rise among the other classes too t hrough the contem­ plation of the situation of this class . . . The bourgeoisie i tself develops only gradually together with i ts conditions, spli ts accord­ ing to the division of labour i n to various sections and finally ab­ sorbs all propertied classes i t fi n d s i n existence . . . The se­ parate individuals form a class only i nsofar as they have to carry on a common battle against ano­ ther class ; in other respects they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On t he other hand, the class i n i ts t urn assumes an independent exis­ tence as against the i ndividuals,

T he bourgeois relations of pro­ duction are the last antagonistic form of the social process o f production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual anta­ gonism but of one arising from the social conditions o f l i fe of the individuals ; at the same t ime the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for t he sol ution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, t herefore, the prehistory of hu­ man society to a cl ose (SW 1 82).

76

Marx and Engels

so that the latter find their condi­ tions of li fe prede term ined, and have their position in life and hence their personal develop­ ment assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed u nder it. This is the same pheno­ menon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the di­ vision of labour and can only be removed by the abolition of pri­ vate property and of labour itself (CW 5 . 52, 7 7).

The following summary of M arx 's 'outlook' from The German Ideology is arguably very much plainer that the terse phrases of the 1 8 59 Preface, since in the earlier text mode o f product ion , interests, social relations, alienation , insti t u t ions and ideology are linked together i n the very question s to which the 'guid ing thread' is the answer : H ow is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of individ uals, into class interests, into common interests which acq uire independent e xi stence in relation t o the individual persons, and in their i ndependence assume the form of general interests ? How is it that as s uch t hey come into contradiction with the actual i ndividuals and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as religious . . . interests ? H ow is it that in this process of private interests acqu i ring independent existence as class interests the personal behaviour of the individual is bound to be objectified , estranged, and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and witho ut him, created by interco urse, and is t ran sformed into social relations. into a series of powers which determine and subord i nate the individual . . . ? The fact [is] that within the framework of defi nite modes ofproductio11, which, o f course, a re not dependent on the will, alien practical forces, which are i ndependent not only o f i solated individ uals but even of all of them toget her, a lways come to stand above people (CW 5.245).

M arx 's 'guid i n g thread' of 1 8 59 reprod uced the premises and social theory of The German Ideology without any significant di screpancy. M arx, as he stated i n his a utobio-

'Our Outlook '

77

graphical sketch, achieved 'self-clarificati on' in 1 845, without an y mention o f rad ical depart ure from previ ous work , just as I have a rgued. M oreover his 'outlook' remained constan t t hroughout h i s work in Capital a n d associated manuscripts. There are, however, slight differences between the 1 8 59 Preface an d The German Ideology worth noting ; n ot all t he differen ces are really to t he advan tage o f t he later text, which suffers acutely from compressi on , l ack of empirical ill ustra­ tio n , proli feration of appa rent synon yms and/or undefined distinctions, and the introduction of a less than successful metapho r - foundati on/superstructure - which has been pro­ moted by commentators to a position superior to the terms to w hich it (very roughly) refers. The German Ideology, as one would expect of a text left unfi nished and unedite d by the authors , suffers greatly from disorganised presen tation a nd somewhat rambli n g generalisations, but the i n vestigative char­ acter of the aut hors ' work, t heir involvement with h istorical and contemporary e vents, their rejection of a phil osophy o f history a n d their o vert political purposes are a l l very m uch clearer. The concept of class, which was merely implied in the 1 8 59 ' guiding thread' (possi bly to avoid offending a censor and/or an academic audience) , received m uch more informa­ tive treatment in The German Ideology, as it did in t he Communist M an i festo, which is probably a good compromise between the relative advantages and disadvantages of the 1 845-6 and 1 8 5 9 versi on s of t he new o utlook . Within The German Ideology itself the emphasis on history - a view of it, the activi t y of writing it - probably arose from Engels's historical work and his intention to proceed wit h a social history o f industrial Engl and ; the attacks o n i dealist phi losophy, histori ography and politics deri ve very largely from M arx ' s determination to stamp out misleading views in Germany i n order to prepare the way for his critical treatment of political econ omy and soci alism. These are speculati ons , however , a s w i t h few exceptions t he actual text o f The German Ideology cannot be assigned to one writer or the other. While t he manuscript is largely in Engels's han d, it is generally assumed that, at some points an yway, he acted as an ama­ n uensis for M arx, whose handwriting was poor ; J oseph Wedeme yer, a fellow communist, seems to have performed a

•

78

Marx and Engels

similar function in places, tho ugh it would be rash t o assign even those passages excl usively to M a rx, since a process o fjoint composition was surely possible and indeed most likely. Whether Engels achieved the same 'self-clarification' as M a rx is rather more obscure, since succeed ing chapters o f the present work will revea l a di screpancy between his later views and the outlook of The German Ideology, t he 1 8 59 Preface and M a rx's work in Capital, despite Engels's claim that he was merely summarising this ma terial. The Communist M an i festo represents the m ost influential, readable and politically accessible of the three important joint works by M arx and Engels. I t was in a sen se very largel y Engels' s work and was almost t he last one to demonstrate unambiguously his authorial virtues. While E ngels had criti­ cised Christians, conservatives, and Hegelians Old and Young, he never wrote c ritiques with the t heoretical comp lexit y and sophi sticati on shown by M arx . It was ra ther in his empirical, economic, historical and political work of 1 843-5 t ha t he put real distance between himself and his former Young H egeli an associates. M uch o f the complex analysis by M a rx fo u nd in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher a rticles and the Theses on Feuerbach was not specifically reproduced in the Communist M anifest o, though there are no real disc repancies. What appea rs in the later text derives more from Engels's 'Outlines' , Condition of the Working Class in England, his material on industria l development in England and G ermany, and his poli tical emphasis on class struggle as revealed in the ' Speeches in El berfeld'. M oreover the sections on socialism can be linked t o wo rk done by Engels on Fourier, True S ocialism and the Library of the Best Foreign Socialis t Writers (in German translation) promoted by Engels to M arx, but never completed by either (CW 4. 697 n. 8 9 ; 5 . 60 7 n. 1 44) . The level o f the Communist M a nifesto was very m uch that of the ' Speeches in El berfeld', th ough the material was presented rather d i fferently when a i med a t commu nists rather than the middle classes. The Communist M an i festo was innocent of M arx's more abstruse analyses o f idealist and rea list ontol ogy, the ultimate contradictions o f the liberal state, and the peculiar nat ure o f ideological conscio usness ; re­ ferences to this material were brief and to the poin t . H ow

'Our Outlook '

79

different the Communist M an ifest o would have been if M arx's highly theoretical elaborations - such as the examples quoted below - had intruded. While I do not mean t o imply that Engels restra ined M arx, who probably had no i nte ntion o f writing t hat type o f ma teri al into a popular work, i t does seem that M arx was either so thoroughly adept with E ngels 's materi al that Enge ls himself was superfluous, or (more plau­ sibly) that E ngels and his works played a preponderant role i n the making of the Communist M an i fest o. This sort o f dis­ cussi on by M arx is notably absent from the M an i festo : German philosophy ofla w and state is the only German history which is al pari with the official modern reality. The German nation must therefore take into account not only its present conditions but also i ts dream-history, and subject to criticism not only t hese existing conditions but at the same time their abstract continuation. Its future cannot be limited either to the i mmediate negation of its real conditions of state and law or to the immediate i mplementation of its ideal sta te and legal conditions, fo r it has t he i mmediate negation of i ts rea l conditions in its ideal conditions, and it has a lmost outlived the immediate i mplementation of its ideal conditions in the contempla­ tion of neighbouring nations. Hence it is with good reason that the practical political party i n Germany demands the negation of philosophy (CW 3. 1 80) . I f from real apples, pears, strawberries and a lmonds I fo rm the general idea 'Fruit ', if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea 'Fruit' , derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then - in the language ofspecula tive philosophy - I am declaring that 'Fruit' is the 'Substance' of the pear, t he apple, the almond, etc . . . . M y finite understandi ng supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences i nessential and irrele­ vant . . . Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is 'the substance' - 'Fruit' (CW 4.57-8). The state o f affairs in Germany at the end o f the last century is full y reflected in Kant's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft . . . Kant was satisfied with 'good will' alone, even if it remained entirely without result, and he transferred the realisa tion of t his good will, the harmony between i t and the needs and i mpulses of i ndividuals, to the world beyond. Kant's good will fully corresponds to t he impotence,

80 depression and (CW 5. 1 93).

Marx and Engels wretchedness

of

German

the

burghers . . .

Econ omists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two k inds of institutions for t hem, artificial and natural. The i nstitutions of feudalism are artificial i nstitutions , those of the bourgeoisie are natural inst itutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two k inds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emana tion from God (CW 6. 1 74).

M arx and Engels' Euro-centric view of the 'history of all hitherto existing soc iety', as they presented it in the Commu nist M anifesto , can be traced to Engels's ' Co ndition o f E ngland' articles written (independently of M arx) in early 1 844 and published in Paris where M arx could certai n l y have read them later that year. 'On t he Continent too there have been poverty, misery and social oppression . . . The misery and poverty o f the work ing class i n present day England has national and e ven world-histo rical importa nce . ' The Reformation, Engels con­ tinued, ' brought about a major social change, the transforma­ tion of serfs into "fr ee" workers' (CW 3 . 474). There are striking parallels between Engels's 'Con dition of Englan d ' articles a n d the Communist M an i festo, j ointly writte n in 1 847-48 : 'Condition of England' ( 1 844)

Communist M anifesto ( 1 84 7-8)

The abol ition of feudal servi tude has made 'cash-payment the sole relation of human bei ngs'. Property, a natural, spiritless pri nciple, as opposed to the hu­ man and spiri tual principle, is thus enthroned , and ultimately, to complete this al ienation, money - the ali enated, empty of property - is abstraction made master of the world . M an has ceased to be the slave of men and has become the slave of things ; the perversion of t he hu­ man condition is complete ; the

The bourgeoisie, w herever it h as got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patri archal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'na­ tural superi ors', and h as left re­ maining no other nexus between man and man than naked self­ interest, than callous 'cash pay­ ment'. It has drowned the m ost heavenly ecstacies of religious fervo ur, o f chivalrous en­ thusiasm, of ph ilistine sentimen­ talism, in the icy water of egot\ _\

'\

l1.

c·

'Our Outlook '

81

servi tude of the modern com­ mercial world, this highly de­ veloped, total, uni versal ve­ nality, is more i nhuman and more all-embrac ing than the serf