Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  To Marx this also means that human agency can never be just individual, as human beings are Gattungswesen (species-being) and depend on interpersonal active relations. Religious contemplation is not sufficient to extricate human beings from their alienation either. By overlooking the role of human consciousness in the perception of reality, Feuerbach’s passive materialism is ultimately conservative.

  The highest point attained by contemplative materialism … which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of separate individuals and of civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]. … The standpoint of the new materialism is human society or social humanity.

  Marx also argues that Feuerbach reduces individuals to their mere economic activities, and hence human practice “is understood and established only in its coarse Jewish manifestation and does not comprehend the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical’ activity.” As in the case of Bauer, Marx seems to recognize in Feuerbach’s thinking echoes of pejorative Christian anti-Judaic images.

  Marx’s new materialism is presented as a dialectical synthesis of a philosophy anchored in traditional materialism but drawing at the same time on the subjective dimensions of human consciousness and agency implied in the idealist heritage: human beings start with a material objective reality, but man as Homo faber has the capacity of changing it through praxis. Human beings are products of nature, but their natural capacities give them the ability to change and transcend these conditions. Marx does not give this “new materialism” a name, and even in his later writings avoids the term, but this is the meaning of “dialectical materialism,” which starts with nature but is not its prisoner. Hence the potential of what Marx refers to in the Theses as “revolutionary praxis.”

  The manuscript of The German Ideology is to a large extent carrying out the agenda implied in the Theses—to move from a philosophical discourse to looking at concrete, historical conditions in which people live and how they form their perceptions of reality and social praxis. Like The Holy Family, this is also a collection of disparate essays, many of them harsh and biting polemics; not surprisingly, Part 1 is called “Feuerbach.” It is here that Marx presents for the first time and develops his theory of history, arguing that different forms of production give rise to different forms of social organization and political control.

  History is nothing but the succession of different generations, each of which exploits the material forces, the forms of capital, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding ones and thus on the one hand continuing the traditional activity … and on the other hand modifies the old circumstances with completely new activities.

  This historicity, which according to Marx is totally alien to Feuerbach’s mechanistic materialism, is responsible for the emergence of political and legal institutions and norms that correspond to the underlying economic and social conditions. Forms of property are formulated accordingly, and consequently the dominant ideas of every society are nothing else than the ideas of its ruling groups and classes.

  What follows in Marx’s analysis is a theory of history related to modes of production, and each historical period is characterized by the specific ways human beings supply their needs—and create, in the process, new needs. Tribal or feudal property forms derive not from theoretical assumptions about the nature of “property as such,” but from the interests of those who control the means of production. Where philosophers and economic theorists are misled, and mislead their readers and students, is in presenting these historically anchored arrangements of law and state as if they were eternal verities rather than expressions of conditions arising from specific historical circumstances and subject to further historical changes.

  But therein lies a paradox: these historically anchored ideas—“ideologies,” as Marx terms them—eventually attain an independent power over people’s imagination and over time people tend to forget that they were human artifacts, brought up by their own consciousness, and thus humans become enslaved to them even when changing circumstances make them dysfunctional and irrelevant. This kind of “false consciousness” becomes a barrier to people’s understanding of reality, and these gaps between actual reality and the way it is perceived by a given society create the tensions that bring about revolutions and historical change. One of the tasks of critical philosophy, Marx argues, is to reveal these ideologies for what they are and to tear away the veil they provide for the ruling classes. He follows this up with a social history of the way changing modes of production gave rise to different classes and ideas of law and property—from primitive common property through slave society, feudalism, and the modern, machine-driven industrial capitalist society.

  These detailed historical studies in The German Ideology became the foundation of Marx’s condensed account of world history in The Communist Manifesto: in a way, the Manifesto is the tip of a much deeper iceberg that Marx had detailed in The German Ideology. This is where he formulated his verdict that “the state is the form in which members of the ruling class realize their common interests and through which all institutions of its civil society are expressed.”

  As in his other writings, Marx does not discuss in detail the institutional structures of a future communist society, though he claims that “it differs from all previous movements in that it overturns all earlier relations of production.” One of the premises of industrial production is the division of labor, which according to Marx just adds to human alienation, as it defines every person exclusively through his function in a chain of productive processes that he does not control. In a playful passage he contrasts this with how a future communist society would look:

  As soon as the division of labor is introduced, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic …

  In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critical critic.

  This is indeed splendid, yet the bucolic examples (drawn from a draft by Fourier which Marx obviously makes fun of) of course do not give an adequate answer to what a post-division-of-labor industrial society would look like. In Fourier’s plan, each person is allotted set hours every day for each of these activities (which actually preserve a coercive system, though a different one), but Marx’s flight of imagination does at least focus on the emancipatory and liberating aspects of overcoming the division of labor, though it fails in terms of a concrete, workable proposal. By focusing on pre-industrial occupations, he avoids the much trickier answer to the question of how the division of labor can be overcome in an industrial society. This did not prevent his edenic postulate from becoming immensely popular, especially among New Age socialists.

  TOWARD THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

  Marx’s prolific writing activity in the Paris and Brussels years was embedded in the political activities of various radical groups that brought together émigré German artisans and intellectuals with French and later also English activists. As it often happens with radical groups, especially in exile, internal schisms and disagreements sometimes loomed larger than concrete activities, clandestine or public, against the powers that be. Despite their relative insignificance, these groups and their members were under the constant surveillance and scrutiny of the political police in different continental countries, leading, as we have seen, to Marx’s expulsion from France and his move to Brussels.

  What characterized these groups, despite their marginality, was that they brought together radicals from different countries and thus created a common European revolutionary ambience, though the disparate groups never coa
lesced into a coherently organized movement. Among the various groups, whose names constantly changed, one of the more significant ones was called the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten), which started initially as a German conspiratorial gathering but then reached out to French and English radicals of various stripes—French followers of Auguste Blanqui, British Chartists and Christian socialists. The league’s motto was “All Men are Brothers,” clearly echoing Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” [Alle Menschen werden Brüder]. In one of these groups, which became known as the Communist Correspondence Society, Marx served for some time as coordinating secretary. After numerous internal debates and quarrels, at a meeting in London in June 1847—which Marx could not attend—it changed its name to the League of Communists (Bund der Kommunisten), absorbing the Brussels-based Correspondence Society. At another meeting, in November 1847, also in London (which Marx did attend), a decision was made to publish a founding manifesto, and Marx and Engels were asked prepare it.

  Marx finished the final German draft in January 1848. Because of censorship laws on the Continent, it was printed in February 1848 in London under the auspices of the innocuously named “Workers Educational Association,” with an address in the East End (46 Liverpool Street, Bishopgate). The pamphlet does not mention the names of either Marx or Engels as authors. Translations into English, French, Italian, Danish, and Flemish were promised in the prefatory note, but only Polish and Danish translations followed; an English translation appeared for the first time only in 1850 in a serialized form in a Chartist paper.

  A few days after the Manifesto’s initial publication, the February Revolution broke out in Paris—unexpected by the authors of the pamphlet as by everyone else—triggering the revolutions of 1848–49 across Europe. The Manifesto was hardly noticed, and Marx’s name was not connected to it publicly. The League of Communists did not play any significant role in any of the 1848 revolutions, even though in the later Marxist narrative, the two became almost inseparable.

  Yet the Manifesto’s obscurity on publication stands in stark contrast to its eventual theoretical and historical significance: despite its relative brevity, it certainly is one of the most significant statements of Marx’s thought, and its posthumous fame, especially after the Soviet Revolution, gave it a world-historical resonance. Even if the role ascribed to it by the Communist parties of the twentieth century is wholly unmerited and historically false, its combination of a profound historical analysis with powerful rhetoric justifies placing it as a defining text in the pantheon of world history. Comparison to the Sermon on the Mount may not be an exaggeration.

  5

  The Communist Manifesto and the Revolutions of 1848

  OF ALL OF MARX’S WRITINGS, The Communist Manifesto is undoubtedly the one best known and clearly most influential. It is a bravura performance, with lapidary slogans that have echoed across generations and continents: “All history is the history of class struggle”; “The workers have no homeland”; “The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains”; “Workers of all countries—unite.” Millions of people—from academics to workers and peasants—immediately recognize them.

  Yet much of this is also misleading, including the very title of the work. Written, as we have seen, for a group of radicals who called themselves the League of Communists, it was published as The Manifesto of the Communist Party—which sounded, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, as if it were the forerunner of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that renamed itself after seizing power as the Russian (and later Soviet) Communist Party. The document from 1848 thus appeared as its legitimate progenitor.

  But the League of Communists, of course, was nothing like a modern organized political party. Marx used the term “Party” (Partei) in a much less rigid and more fluid sense—as we have seen in Engels’s report on socialist activity in Germany: it meant “group” or “tendency,” especially in a period when the existence of modern political parties was still rather embryonic. But there is no doubt that attaching the term “Party” to what was basically a loose group of corresponding societies, without a distinct organization structure, gave the Manifesto an image of power and possible influence it did not possess at the time of its publication. When republished with a new introduction by Marx and Engels in 1873, in a totally different political environment, it endowed the 1848 text with a posthumous aura that it continued to possess in the following decades. And as we shall see later, it had very little impact on the dramatic developments of the European revolutions of 1848–49, and it did not foresee their outbreak a few weeks after its publication.

  HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM

  The text of the Manifesto itself moves, sometimes uneasily, between two levels of discourse: on one hand, the soaring world-historical analysis of the relationship between social classes and political power, and comments, somewhat marginally and certainly ephemerally about the attitude of the League of Communists to various radical social groups in France, Germany, and England, coupled with a searing critique of other socialist groups. In both cases the Manifesto expresses in pithy and concise language the fruits of Marx’s studies in the previous years, when he formed his own theories about historical development as well as his critique of practically every other socialist thinker or school. Writing the Manifesto forced Marx to distill complex arguments into catchy phrases: this is the work’s great achievement, but it sometimes presents Marx’s complex arguments in what may appear as simplistic catchwords if one is not aware of the enormous preparatory work that went into them.

  The opening paragraph of the Manifesto has become the doctrinal foundation of latter-day Marxism. Marx’s own post-1848 studies have presented a much more nuanced and differentiated analysis of class and politics, both in France and in Germany; but the resounding cadences of the powerful opening paragraph have been presented, both by followers of Marx as well as by his opponents and critics, as if they are the quintessential sum of his social philosophy:

  The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman—in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried an uninterrupted, sometimes hidden, sometimes open fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

  Marx then moves to describe the social and economic conditions brought about by the rise of bourgeois society: polarization between bourgeois and proletarians, the increasing pauperization and alienation of the working class leading to rising social tensions. The more capitalism develops, “the bourgeoisie produces, above all, its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” The social studies Marx undertook in the EPM and The German Ideology in great detail are now spelled out in the staccato phrases of the Manifesto.

  Yet the most intriguing passage in Marx’s description of the rise and working of bourgeois society is his extensive and detailed analysis of the role of the industrial revolution in demystifying the world and reducing all human relations to a mere cash nexus.

  Historically, the bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superior,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than the naked self-interest, the callous “cash payment.” … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up the single unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. … The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

  The inner logic of the capitalist mode of production necessarily leads to a novel phenomenon—for the first time in history creating a world market, base
d on the necessity for constant change.

  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society. … The need for a constant expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its expansion of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country …

  In place of the old needs, satisfied by the products of the country, we find new needs, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. … The bourgeoisie draws even the most barbaric nations into civilization. The cheap prices of the commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It forces all nations, on the pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.

  By creating a world economy, this globalization of material production and the creation of new, globally anchored needs has profound impacts on all spheres of life, beyond the mere material. The philosophical and rich literary background of Marx’s schooling and research becomes clearly evident in a passage showing that his economic studies have not left him unaware of the spiritual dimension of human existence and historical development.

  In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have universal interdependence of nations.

  And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.