Marx- The Key Ideas

by Gill Hands

  University life

  Marx attended Bonn University in the autumn of 1835 with the intention of studying law. He soon found that it was not to his taste and spent most of his year there in time-honoured student traditions: running up debts and drinking. His father’s letters are full of complaint, accusing him of debauchery, lounging in a dressing gown with unkempt hair and of not taking his studies seriously enough. It is not surprising that he felt this way, for the student Marx was arrested and imprisoned overnight for drunken behaviour and rowdiness, was found with a pistol in his possession (strictly illegal, although he got off without charges when his father intervened), and was later wounded in a duel. The wound was above his left eye and left a lasting scar. As his opponent was a trained soldier he was lucky to get away so lightly.

  Marx was a rather arresting figure with a shock of dark hair, piercing eyes and a rather large flourishing beard. His dark complexion led to the nickname of Moor, which he kept all through his life; it became a special family name for him that even his children used. Although his voice was not commanding (he had a slight lisp), his intellectual abilities and inventive way with words meant that he was often listened to and deferred to by older students. He found an outlet for his ideas in the Poetry Club, where political ideas as well as literature were discussed. This meant that he did not spend as much time on his studies as he should have and eventually his father insisted that he should stop his ‘wild rampaging’ and move to a place with a more rigorous academic atmosphere.

  In the autumn of 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, again with the intention of studying law. Berlin was a much bigger place than Bonn and the university had the reputation of being seriously academic and a centre of radical thought in the form of the ‘Young Hegelians’. These were a group of academics, intellectuals and students who discussed and developed the ideas of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

  Hegel had been the rector at the university and was almost an institution there. He was the nearest thing to an officially endorsed philosopher that existed, having been decorated by Fredrick William III for services to the Prussian Empire. Most of his followers received appointments or preferment in the universities, for even these were controlled by the State. Hegel’s philosophy is rather complex and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, but basically he believed that society progressed by intellectual development or ‘Reason’ and that Reason could be identified with a God-like figure he called the ‘Absolute’. Hegel asserted that the Absolute had developed throughout history, but it had come to consciousness of itself and culminated its development in the state of Prussia. There was no further progress for it to make as it had reached its ideal.

  The Young Hegelians agreed to some extent that the State should be the embodiment of Reason but they interpreted the theories of Hegel in increasingly radical ways. They saw the Absolute not as a God-like figure but as humanity itself. For a reader in the twenty-first century this does not seem particularly shocking but at the time the Church was a very powerful force in society. To suggest that mankind might be at the centre of the universe and not some God or Absolute was very daring. It was much later, in November 1859, that Charles Darwin made his theory of evolution public in The Origin of Species, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw that scientific discoveries had led to Western society becoming more secular and thought this might lead to a nihilistic viewpoint of a world without meaning, didn’t proclaim ‘God is Dead’ until 1882.

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  Insight

  Charles Darwin’s suggestion that mankind had evolved from apes caused more public outcry in its day than any work by Marx and it is still a contentious issue for some people with deeply held religious beliefs.

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  The Young Hegelians were a potentially powerful political force; many of them were atheists and liberals. They argued that the Prussian state was not the culmination of Reason and expression of the Absolute. They believed that things could be changed and Germany could become more democratic. This led to the authorities being increasingly worried about their activities and, as the Prussian state was well supplied with spies and informers, in addition to a large police force, they kept an eye on the activities of the Young Hegelians. Most of their activities were theoretical: they wrote about the problems, discussed them in bars and debated points of philosophy in great academic detail. They did not take action and this was one of the reasons that Marx finally lost patience with them. As he wrote later in his Thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.

  When Marx first arrived at the university he did not think much of the philosophy of Hegel, in fact he disregarded it, for he was meant to be studying law (although he did not find his classes particularly interesting). He spent his first term writing rather a lot of romantic poetry to his childhood friend Jenny von Westphalen. She had grown into a beautiful, cultured and intelligent young woman and they had seen quite a lot of each other during the summer break and had become secretly engaged. Marx told his family about his love for her but it was kept a secret from Jenny’s family for over a year. They were madly in love and wrote each other very romantic letters; Jenny affectionately called him her ‘little wild boar’.

  Although Baron von Westphalen was fond of Marx, the couple did not think that he would approve of the match as Marx was not from the kind of family that a young lady should consider marrying into. The von Westphalens belonged to a much higher social class than a lawyer’s family. Also Jenny was four years older than Marx and officially engaged to a young army officer. She thought it best if they kept their love a secret until she had time to talk to her father.

  As the academic year went on, Marx found he was becoming increasingly uninterested in the study of law, but he was not sure what he wanted to do with his life. He read voraciously and began his lifelong habit of taking notes on everything he read. He tried to write a philosophy of law and he wrote poetry, plays and a short comic novel but it seems that he suddenly realized in a flash that he would never be a ‘real’ poet or writer of the kind he wished to be. Eventually, he had a breakdown and was sent into the country by his doctor for a rest. It was there that he read Hegel and became a convert to the Hegelian point of view, something he had resisted for a long time.

  From then on Marx became an active member of Hegelian societies in Berlin. He joined the Doctors’ Club in 1837 – a group of young Hegelian intellectuals that included Bruno Bauer, a theology lecturer and Arnold Ruge, a radical philosopher.

  His father disapproved of such radical ideas and was horrified, especially as he could see that his son was being drawn away from his law studies into the world of philosophy and intellectualism that he despised – ‘the workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition’ was his description in a letter. This was the beginning of a major split between Marx and his family, for he never returned home to them in the holidays again and hardly ever replied to their letters. When his father died of tuberculosis later in that year he did not go to his funeral, claiming that he was too busy, although he always kept his father’s photograph and it was finally buried with him.

  Marx attended very few lectures in his three years at Berlin University and he put most of his energies into philosophy. He rather neglected his fiancée Jenny as he was spending a lot of time with free thinking, free drinking intellectuals and their friends, who had a more bohemian way of life than he had experienced in his middle-class, country-town upbringing.

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  Insight

  A bohemian lifestyle was a life of artistic freedom that began to be described in the early nineteenth century. Many creative people often chose voluntary poverty and moved into the poorer quarters of cities as an escape from restrictive social codes, or because they held unconventional moral or anti-establishment views.

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  Marx even became temporarily romantically entangled with a famous poet, Bettina v
on Armin, who was old enough to be his mother. The liaison did not last for long, especially after he took her back home to meet his fiancée.

  One of his closest friends at the time was Bruno Bauer, who later became one of his enemies. Marx had a habit of forming very close friendships throughout his life, but when his ideas moved on and his friends didn’t he often ended up being totally antagonistic towards them, ridiculing them with very personal invectives, even though (and perhaps because) he had once shared the same ideas and believed in the same principles. He poured a lot of his energy into almost childish, involved attacks on people who had once been good friends.

  Bauer was a theology lecturer and prominent in the Young Hegelians. He encouraged Marx to drop his law studies and concentrate on philosophy. He believed Marx would suit an academic life more than that of a small-town lawyer.

  So Marx began work on his thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, hoping that this would allow him to earn a doctorate and enable him to lecture at Berlin University. It was ostensibly a discussion of ancient Greek philosophy but it was actually quite a radical piece of work for the times, as Marx argued that philosophy should be detached from religion and freed from all kinds of dogma.

  Unfortunately, Marx chose a bad time to write on such a contentious subject as there was a radical change of policy at the university and a lot of Young Hegelians lost their jobs. Marx knew that his thesis would be marked by a very stuffy and reactionary lecturer who would probably fail him, so he sent it to the University of Jena which had a reputation of giving degrees quickly and easily. He earned his PhD in April 1841 and then spent most of the summer in Bonn philosophizing and getting drunk with Bruno Bauer. They got up to all sorts of pranks and jokes: galloping donkeys along the main street and writing a comic pamphlet in which they pretended they were shocked by the atheism of Hegel. This last joke backfired, as Bauer was dismissed from his university post and with him went any chance of Marx becoming a lecturer there.

  Life as a journalist

  Now that Marx had no chance of getting the academic post he had been hoping for he was uncertain of what to do next. His father’s death had left him without any allowance and his mother, who he did not visit, had kept back his share of the family estate. He travelled about aimlessly for a few months before settling down to his first and only career. He had always written clearly and lucidly and so he began to publish some of his writing.

  He began his journalistic career with a piece on censorship in the Young Hegelian journal Deutsche Jarbrucker in February 1842; the piece was brilliantly written but sadly and inevitably it was censored before publication. The journal was too radical for the times and it was closed down after a few months.

  Marx then moved to Cologne and began work as a journalist on the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper that had been founded in 1841 by a consortium of wealthy manufacturers and industrialists.

  At that time, Cologne was a city at the forefront of the new technological and industrial advances brought on by the Industrial Revolution and it was the largest city in the Rhineland. It became a magnet for anyone who wished for a more democratic or unified Germany and who believed in freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The industrialists believed in progress and were willing to finance projects that would lead to advances in German society. They thought that the newspaper would be a good way of promoting their aims.

  Adolf Rutenberg, the editor of Rheinische Zeitung, knew Marx very well. He had been a drinking companion in the Doctors’ Club and he was also the brother-in-law of Bruno Bauer. Marx’s assistant at the paper was Moses Hess, who soon became a good friend, although not unusually they were to fall out later.

  Marx was soon writing hard-hitting articles, criticizing both the government and some of the liberals who opposed them in very uncomplimentary ways. His forceful nature meant that he became editor of the paper in October 1842. Once in charge he offended many of the people who had been writing for the paper previously, believing that some of their work was too frivolous. He fiercely criticized theories he felt were not thought out or argued properly.

  He also came into conflict with the censor many times. Every paper in Prussia had to be checked over by a public censor before it was allowed to be published, and Marx delighted in baiting and annoying the censor with obscure references and word games. When the censor believed something was not suitable for publication (as he often did), Marx would spend long hours arguing with him. Marx used his formidable intellectual powers to persuade the censor to change his mind and he often worried that Marx would make him lose his job.

  It was during his time at the paper that Marx realized his knowledge of social and economic matters was not very wide and was too theoretical. He began to study political economy seriously and to take a more practical and materialistic interest in the world around him. One of his most controversial pieces was written about the plight of peasants when a new law was brought out dealing with thefts of wood.

  Under the old feudal system of government the peasants had the right to gather firewood in the forests. When the forests passed into private ownership the peasants had to pay for their wood and most of them could not afford to. The laws were so strictly absurd that people could even be fined for picking up a fallen twig. Marx did not hesitate to write a strongly worded article about this. He also wrote about the plight of wine growers in the Moselle region who had been badly affected by the imposition of tariffs and the importing of tariff-free wines. These were some of the earliest incidences of documentary reporting and it was at this time that Marx first began to think and write about matters of private property, economics, class struggle and State power.

  The readership of the paper grew greatly under his editorship and it began to cause consternation in government circles. In January 1843, the paper and its editor were prosecuted for the article about the peasants’ firewood and the paper was closed down by order of the government in Berlin. The closure of the paper was largely due to the intervention of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had taken exception to an anti-Russian piece that had also appeared in the paper that January.

  Although Marx was now out of a job again he was not unhappy about it, because he had begun to realize he was feeling restricted by government policies, censorship and the need to placate officials. He saw that Bauer and his other old friends at the Doctors’ Club were intellectually isolated and too theoretical, spending far too much time on academic argument and the denunciation of religion. Marx wanted to do more. He wanted to be able to write freely and passionately about what he believed in. He knew that this would no longer be possible for him in Prussia and so in 1843 he moved to Paris.

  Marx moved to Paris as a married man, for he had finally taken Jenny as his wife after a seven-year engagement. Baron von Westphalen had eventually given his approval of the match but had died before the wedding. The happy couple married in June 1843 at Kreuznach, a fashionable spa town. Jenny’s half-brother Ferdinand was head of the family and showed his disapproval by not attending, but her younger brother Edgar attended, as did her mother who gave them a large sum of cash to set up home with. This was soon gone as they spent it on having a good time during their honeymoon. They were also given a present of some old family silver that became very useful to them later in their marriage but possibly not in the way that Jenny’s mother had intended – it was often in the pawn shop!

  Even during his honeymoon Marx continued to write, working on the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This was not published until 1927 but in it we can see that Marx hoped for radical political change in German society through democratic means. At that time he had not formulated any theories of workers’ revolution.

  Paris was the revolutionary capital of Europe with a large population of refugees including thousands of expatriate Germans. Dissidents were drawn in by the reputation of past revolutions, even though France was once again under the rule of a monarchy. It was here
that Marx came into contact with communist and revolutionary sects, with numerous members from all walks of life including artisans and workers.

  Marx had moved to Paris after persuasion from Arnold Ruge, his old friend from Berlin University. Ruge hoped that his family, Marx and Jenny and the German poet Heine and his wife, could live together in a communal way as a kind of experiment. Heine’s wife would have nothing to do with it and the experiment failed after only two weeks because Ruge and his wife could not tolerate Marx’s untidiness and his nocturnal writing. Marx and Jenny moved into their own apartment and their first child Jenny, also known as Jennychen, was born in May 1844.

  Marx became editor of a new paper that Ruge had set up, The German-French Annals. Although this only ran for one issue because of censorship problems, it was an important part in the development of Marx’s thought processes because it was the first time that he had written something that was directed more at the worker than the intellectual.

  It was in Paris that Marx really came face to face with working-class people and it totally changed the way he thought about the possibilities of communism.

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  Insight

  It is important to remember that communism existed as a development from the ideals of French revolution before Marx wrote about it, but Marx and Engels were the first to popularize the term as founding members of the Communist League.

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  As a student Marx wrote in theoretical and abstract terms; as a journalist he began writing about the practical problems of the poor and their struggle against private property but he was not really involved with them in any real sense. Finally, in Paris he began to meet with workers and to study political economists, such as Adam Smith. He began to think about society and the economy in materialist terms – real terms not abstract visions. He became convinced by the power of working men to change society during an uprising of Silesian weavers. This led to a huge argument with Ruge who wrote about the weavers’ rebellion in very critical terms. It ended their friendship and Marx’s connection with the Young Hegelians.