Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union was a direct corollary of the circumstances of Lenin’s accession to power and the unavoidable failure of the attempt to realize in a pre-industrialized society Marx’s analysis and project, which as he himself had repeatedly emphasized, were grounded in the conditions of western European societies. The coercive imposition of Soviet-style communism on Eastern European countries after 1945 gave rise to regimes with a total lack of legitimacy and local support: the repeated anti-communist uprisings, in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, only prefigured the quick implosion of these regimes when they were deprived after 1989 of the support of the Soviet bayonets that had put them in power in the first place after World War II.

  But even though in the purely political realm, Marx’s thought cannot claim many achievements beyond the defensive measures aimed at preventing his own prophecies of doom, his impact on other major fields of human activity are enormous, and cannot be denied.

  Marx’s writings have dramatically revolutionized historical, social, cultural, and economic research. Since Marx, one cannot write history without acknowledging and researching the links between economic issues and political structures. As Marx himself showed in his meticulous analysis of post-1848 French and German political developments, one does not have to follow the dichotomic polarization theories of the Manifesto to realize how economics and politics are structurally interwoven. Sociology and anthropology owe debts to Marx that are not always acknowledged. “Alienation” figures centrally in sociology and psychology, while in philosophy and religious studies the way Marx developed his theories of alienation plays a central role: Catholic liberation theology is unthinkable without his input. And political economy, following in the steps of Marx without always being doctrinally encumbered by him, is now part and parcel of the way economics is academically presented. These disciplines, as well as law and various aspects of literary studies, can now be said to stand on the shoulders of Marxian analysis, even if many of their protagonists may quarrel with his conclusions. What Plato has been to classical philosophy, Marx is to modern studies in the humanities. Some of this may occasionally appear as uncritical infatuation, but it cannot be denied how much Marx has impacted modern scholarship.

  There are two paradoxes involved in this: the growing presence of Marx in academic and intellectual discourse has been accompanied by the decline of Marxian-oriented political activity, mainly the weakening of trade unions and working-class political parties in modern industrialized societies. It sometimes appears as if the academic salience of Marx’s legacy may be a substitute for the political diminution of his action-oriented philosophy, a return, so to speak, to “idealist” Hegelian positions: some who despaired of political radical activism may have found refuge in the halls of academe. Yet despite the fact that it is obvious that critical theory in university English departments is a poor alternative to mounting the barricades, Marx’s presence in the intellectual discourses of so many fields of human activity is a powerful testimony to the force of his theories, and it does have an influence, albeit an indirect one, on political and social development.

  This is accompanied by the fact that Marx’s impact on contemporary intellectual discourse does not draw in most cases on what have been considered his canonical writings as published, republished, commented upon, and translated into tens of languages as part of his standard Selected Works. Most of his influence comes from the publication of his manuscripts that Engels did not see fit to include in the canon: mainly the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, as well as the various unpublished drafts of Das Kapital, eventually published as the Grundrisse, as well as The German Ideology, published by Engels somewhat reluctantly and with obvious reservations.

  This was the second posthumous flourishing of Marx’s writings, after the first one initiated by the editorial efforts of Engels in the 1890s. To a large extent this saved Marx—and his legacy—from the decline of political Marxist-oriented parties and movements. It helped Marx’s thought to transcend the immediate—and ephemeral—circumstances of its historical origins and made it into a classic of human thinking of lasting value.

  In the language of his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx evidently helped to interpret the world in different ways—as well as to change it. Yet both his interpretation and the changes it wrought turned out to be somewhat different from what he had envisaged himself. But true to his dialectical thinking, he would not have been surprised.

  Epilogue: Distant Echoes?

  AMONG THE MANY ARTICLES Marx wrote for the New York Daily Tribune on European politics was one about the outbreak of the Crimean War. It was published on 15th April 1854, and in it Marx gave a detailed account of the inner composition of society in the Ottoman Empire—issues not well known in Europe, let alone across the Atlantic. He further explained the millet system under which non-Muslim communities, Christian and Jewish, were allowed a degree of internal autonomy and self-government in matters of personal status and control of their places of worship and religious shrines. Marx’s account is informative and appears well researched.

  Since one of the casus belli leading to the Crimean War had to do with conflicting claims to custody over certain areas in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, toward the end of his article Marx offered a concise profile of the city. The passage starts with the following demographic data:

  The sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of which 4,000 are Mussulmans [Muslims] and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs, and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect.

  After this statement which points out that even under Turkish Muslim rule the Jews constituted a majority in Jerusalem, Marx continues in his correct, though not always idiomatic English, to make the following somewhat surprising description of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, not actually relevant to the main theme of an article dealing with causes of the Crimean War:

  Nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called haret-el-yahoud, in the quarter of dirt, between Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated—the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins [that is, Catholics], and living only upon the scant alms transmitted by their European brethren. The Jews, however, are not natives, but from different and distant countries, and are only attracted to Jerusalem by the desire of inhabiting the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and to die on the very place where the redemption is to be expected. “Attending their death,” says a French author, “they suffer and pray. Their regards turned to that mountain of Moriah, where once rose the Temple of Lebanon, and which they dare not approach, they shed tears on the misfortunes of Zion and their dispersion over the world.”

  This is surely an extraordinary passage in its empathy for the small and beleaguered Jewish community in Jerusalem. No similar sentiments about any other Jewish community anywhere else can be found in Marx’s voluminous oeuvre.

  In 1976, as director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I headed the Israeli delegation to the UNESCO General Assembly meeting that year in Nairobi. At that time Israel was under attack at UNESCO by the Arab countries and their Soviet and Islamic allies, which had been making accusations that its archeological excavations in East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967, were neglecting the non-Jewish layers of the city’s history—Roman, Byzantine, Omayyad, Crusader, and Ottoman—in an attempt, it was asserted, to “Judaize” Jerusalem. Israel was on the verge of being expelled from UNESCO, and one of the major items of the Nairobi assembly was devoted to Jerusalem.

  The legal counsel’s office of the ministry provided a legal—or should I say highly legalistic—brief for my speech at the assembly. I decided to add it to the assembly’s documentation but to pursue a different approach in my speech to the plenary session.r />
  My argument was that obviously Jerusalem has a complex and multi-religious history, but the claim that Israel was trying to “Judaize” Jerusalem was absurd. The fact of the matter is that in modern times there has been—even before the advent of Zionism—a Jewish majority in the city, as testified by many nineteenth-century travelers and writers. I then moved to quote from Marx’s article, which clearly states that Jerusalem had a Jewish majority as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. But I introduced the Marx passage without naming him, merely referring to it as a description written “by one of the most important nineteenth-century thinkers, viewed by some as THE most important thinker of that century.” Then, after I finished reading the lengthy passage, I added: “As I hope our Soviet colleagues realize, I was quoting from an 1854 article by Karl Marx.”

  And then the incredible happened: a member of the Soviet delegation sprang up, interrupting me, and shouted: “This is a forgery! Marx never wrote this!” Still at the speaker’s podium, I took out the volume I was reading from, showed it to the audience, and said: “I am quoting from this volume published in Moscow by the Soviet official Foreign Languages Publishing House. I am sure the Soviet delegate is not implying that an official Soviet publication is involved in a forgery of a text by Karl Marx.”

  I can still relish the general outburst of loud laughter in the hall. Eventually, with the help of western delegations, we managed to work out a formula that enabled Israel to continue its excavations with an accompanying UNESCO presence.

  The same evening, at a reception at the Canadian embassy, two persons in Mao jackets approached me. The younger, obviously the interpreter, introduced the older person as the head of the delegation of the People’s Republic of China (at that time Israel did not have diplomatic relations with Beijing). With a wry smile, the senior Chinese delegate said: “We may not agree with the political points you made at the General Assembly. But we always like when someone quotes Karl Marx to the Soviets.” I thanked him, commenting that it sometimes does help to be acquainted with what Marx actually said and wrote.

  There is a coda to this, and it relates to a further passage from the same article, which I did not quote in Nairobi:

  To make these Jews more miserable, England and Prussia appointed, in 1840, an Anglican bishop at Jerusalem, whose avowed object is their conversion. He was dreadfully thrashed in 1845, and sneered at alike by Jews, Christians and Turks. He may, in fact, be stated to have been the first and only cause of union between all the religions at Jerusalem.

  This cryptic statement needs some elaboration. The reference is to the first Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, indeed appointed jointly by the Church of England and the Prussian Lutheran Landeskirche with the explicit mandate from the London Society for the Conversion of the Jews to try to convert members of the Jewish community of Jerusalem. The bishop appointed by the two Protestant churches was the Reverend Michael Solomon Alexander, himself a converted Jew from Posen (Pozńan), then in Prussia. He was born Michael Wolff, immigrated to England, where he served first as a rabbi in Norwich and later converted and was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. His thrashing—almost certainly by members of the Jewish community—became a minor cause célèbre in mid-nineteenth-century Jerusalem.

  Perhaps one should not read too much into these passages: neither into Marx’s statement that the Jews make up the largest religious community in Jerusalem, nor into his extraordinary description of their suffering and messianic longings connected to the Holy City and the Temple Mount. Maybe one should not even attach too much significance to his evident Schadenfreude at the humiliations of a Jew converted to Christianity who saw his life mission in drawing his former co-religionists, and in Jerusalem of all places, away from their ancestral attachment and lead them into the salvationist bosom of Christianity. But being aware of the convoluted history of Marx’s family conversion, one may still wonder.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

  Despite Marx’s political and intellectual prominence, there still is no complete and full critical edition of his works, nor does there exist one authoritative English translation of all his writings. Numerous partial editions of his works have been published over the years, initially by editors connected to the German Social Democratic Party and then under the auspices of various Soviet institutions. Under these circumstances their selection and editing reflected in many cases their respective political orientations and agendas.

  Most of Marx’s work was written in German, but he also wrote some of his pieces in English, mainly the dozens of articles he submitted for publication in the New York Daily Tribune; so also were the addresses he prepared in the 1860s and 1870s on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, most notably his account of the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France). An English version of The Communist Manifesto was prepared and published under Marx’s own supervision; and shortly after his death an English translation of volume 1 of Das Kapital was overseen by Engels.

  The most well known and widely distributed English collection of Marx and Engels’s Selected Works was published in two volumes in the 1960s in Moscow by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, accompanied by an edition of Selected Correspondence. It was highly selective, did not include any of Marx’s early writings, and lacked a scholarly apparatus. In many cases it was also a faulty and tendentious translation.

  Over the years other, more reliable partial translations have appeared. Among them the following should be mentioned: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Philosophy and Politics, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y., 1959); Karl Marx, Early Writings, edited by T. B. Bottomore (London, 1963); The Portable Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka (New York, 1983); Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, edited by Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge, England, 1994); Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver (Cambridge, England, 1996).

  The first attempt to publish a full critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels was initiated in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, entitled Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe [Marx-Engels Complete Edition] (MEGA), under the editorial direction of David Riazanov and later Vladimir Adoratsky. It was discontinued during the Stalinist purges, with tragic consequences for some of the editors (Riazanov was arrested, put on trial, and executed).

  In the 1960s the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, published a forty-volume edition of Marx and Engels’s works (Marx-Engels Werke). It followed a Soviet, Russian-language edition and at the time of its publication was the most extensive collection available of the works of Marx and Engels. It still lacked an adequate critical apparatus; articles, books, and letters written by Marx in English or French appeared not in the original language but in a German translation, and no attempt was made to compare published versions with original manuscripts available in various archives. It was this incomplete edition that became the basis for the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels, published beginning in 1976. This edition contains many of the faults of the East German Werke (and its Russian editorial origins), as well as in many cases questionable translations, is still highly selective, and of course despite its title is far from being a complete edition of Marx’s works.

  One of the major faults of these Soviet-inspired editions is that in presenting the works of Marx and Engels as one canonical corpus they do intellectual injustice to their separate identity as distinct persons and authors.

  It is because of the lack of one authoritative English translation, and the history of previous problematic and sometimes conflicting translations, that for this volume I have rendered my own translations of quotations from Marx’s German texts, consulting existing translations for possible guidance. In addition, this avoids the tendentious translations which in many cases have helped to distort the way Marx’s thinking has been perceived over the years. Two examples will suffice: Marx makes central use in his theoretical wr
itings of the Hegelian term bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and it is a serious question whether and when this should be translated as “bourgeois society” or “civil society” (although certainly not as “bourgeoisie”). Similarly, the term Judentum, as it appears in his pivotal essay “Zur Judenfrage,” should obviously be translated as “Judaism,” and not as “Jewry” or “Jewishness.”

  Passages from works that Marx wrote and published in English are, of course, quoted in his original version, as are works that were translated under his supervision (including The Communist Manifesto and The Civil War in France). Occasionally this results in somewhat archaic or stilted language that he used.

  The effort to provide a full critical edition of all of Marx’s writings is currently under way in an ongoing project—Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe-2 (also known as MEGA-2). This edition is being prepared by the Internationale Marx-Engels Stiftung (IMES), a joint enterprise of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Academy of Sciences of Berlin-Brandenburg. Until now more than fifty volumes have appeared, containing not only the necessary apparatus but also comparisons of text variants from different editions, comparisons of various drafts, and a detailed publication history of each item; a similar number of volumes is still to appear. The editorial policy followed by MEGA-2 has also been to try to decouple the long-established tradition of treating Marx and Engels as virtually one single author. This is aimed at restoring to each of them his own discrete identity and integrity, despite their decades’-long close cooperation.