Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  This was a meaning in opposition to the understanding of “secret” as representing the inner logic of a class’s self-interest. The two contrasting meanings were very visible in Marx’s pamphlet on eighteenth-century British foreign relations, an odd work commentators often pass over in embarrassed silence. The title under which it is known today, The Secret History of Eighteenth Century Diplomacy, was given to a reprint after Marx’s death by his daughter Eleanor. But Marx’s own title, Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, made a similar point. In the pamphlet, Marx argued, in very Teutonic English, that from the early eighteenth century onward, the statesmen in charge of British foreign policy had been bribed tools of the czar. To uphold that position, they had to resort to a conspiratorial secrecy.

  In perusing these documents, there is something that startles us even more than their contents—viz., their form. All these letters are “confidential,” “private,” “secret,” “most secret”; but in spite of secrecy, privacy, and confidence the English statesmen converse among each other about Russia and her rulers in a tone of awful reserve, abject servility, and cynical submission, which would strike us even in the public despatches of Russian statesmen. To conceal intrigues against foreign nations secrecy is recurred to [sic] by Russian diplomatists. The same method is adopted by English diplomatists freely to express their devotion to a foreign court.

  Marx believed that the supposed pro-Russian foreign policy was the result of bribery and political manipulation because it did not express the inner logic of the collective interest of the English ruling classes. Commerce with Russia, Marx pointed out, made up just 2 to 3 percent of British foreign trade in the eighteenth century. The explicit justifications of the policy made in economic terms, which Marx (in line with his understanding of the linkage between base and superstructure) would ordinarily regard as the “secret” of British policy, were a fraud to hide the conspiratorial secret of Russian bribery and illicit influence:

  At the time, then, there developed on the Cabinet, at least, the onus of inventing mercantile pretexts, however futile, for their measures of foreign policy. In our own epoch, British Ministers have thrown this burden on foreign nations, leaving to the French, the Germans, etc., the irksome task of discovering the secret and hidden mercantile springs of their actions. Lord Palmerston, for instance, takes a step apparently the most damaging to the material interests of Great Britain. Up starts a State philosopher, on the other side of the Atlantic, or of the Channel, or in the heart of Germany, who puts his head to the rack to dog out the mysteries of the mercantile Machiavellism of “perfide Albion,” of which Palmerston is supposed the unscrupulous and unflinching executor.26

  It is easy enough to understand what is secret about conspiratorial secrecy; but the secrecy that Marx attributed to the inner logic of collective class interests is not quite so self-evident. Its secrecy consisted of the fact that it was not immediately empirically obvious, but was obtained through a theoretical understanding of the world in terms of the centrality of social classes emerging from the mode of production and the division of labor. This understanding, Marx thought, offered a superior interpretation of empirically evident conditions to a simple perception of these conditions, or a positivist evaluation of them in terms of the natural sciences. The priority of theoretical understanding for the interpretation of empirically gained evidence was a Hegelian heritage, but it was more broadly characteristic of the epistemological program of German idealism. Its starting point was Kant’s assertion in the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason that the scientific revolution began when Copernicus rejected the empirically obvious fact that the sun revolved around the earth.

  One example of Marx’s critique of forms of positivist understanding of his contemporaries was his attitude toward the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quételet. One of the most impressive social scientists of the nineteenth century, and a founder of the modern discipline of statistics, Quételet had created, in good positivist fashion, what he called a “social physics,” which emphasized the existence of statistical regularities in society and economy. Marx admired Quételet’s work tremendously, but also noted that although he had proven “how even the seeming accidents of social life through their periodic recurrence and their periodic averages possess an inner necessity,” he had “never succeeded in interpreting this inner necessity.”27 Positivists might dispose of scientifically obtained and mathematically arranged data, but the interpretation of its “inner necessity” required a theoretical analysis.

  Marx’s study of economics, as will be seen in the next chapter, was filled with the exposure of secrets and mysteries, showing how things looked different when viewed in the light of the inner logic of the capitalist system than when they were empirically perceived in the system’s operation. Marx regarded the exposure of these secret connections of inner logic as essential to creating a Wissenschaft, an organized body of knowledge. In 1868 he wrote to Dr. Kugelmann about this topic, denouncing the “vulgar economists,” a group Marx identified with the pro-capitalist followers of David Ricardo, whom he saw as intellectually far more superficial than their master:

  The vulgar economist has not the slightest suspicion that the genuine daily relationships of exchange and the extent of [commodities’] value cannot be immediately identical. . . . And then the vulgar economist believes he has made a great discovery, when in response to the unveiling of the inner connection, he insists that things look different in their appearance. In fact, he insists on holding fast to semblance and regards that semblance as the ultimate. In that case, why bother with a Wissenschaft?28

  This eminently Hegelian passage, a version of which also appeared in the third volume of Capital, unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, even used Hegel’s term, “semblance,” to denounce the insufficiency of empirical perception for obtaining of knowledge. In this passage, Marx was presenting an intellectual program quite different from the positivist conception of knowledge as empirically obtained through scientific procedures. If Marx’s outline of historical stages showed him at his most positivist, his account of the nature of Wissenschaft involved an affirmation of the Hegelian intellectual legacy and a skepticism toward the positivism that replaced it as a dominant mode of thought. The secret, one might say, of Marx’s account of social and political action in terms of base and superstructure was the continued and even renewed presence of Hegel’s ideas.29

  THEORIES OF RACE AND historical accounts devised in terms of racial difference became increasingly common in Europe after 1850. Darwin’s theories, but also the growth of historical linguistics (contemporaries said “philology”), with its figure of the Aryan, encouraged the development of racial theories in an age when science appeared as a model for the acquisition of knowledge.30 The first major formulation of racist ideas came in 1853 with a treatise by the French author Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau, the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Two individuals who had been important sources of Marx’s ideas, Bruno Bauer and Moses Hess, abandoned the previous Hegelian idealism and turned to concepts of race. Under the influence of the Crimean War, Bauer became convinced that the future of Europe lay in a struggle between the inferior Slavic and the superior Germanic race; to these ideas he added the notion that Jews were racially alien to Germans and so could never be equal citizens in a Germanic state. Hess shared Bauer’s belief in Jewish racial distinctiveness, but used it to argue that the Jews should have their own nation-state in Palestine, making him one of the very first proponents of Zionism.31

  Marx was well acquainted with theories of racial superiority and had a low opinion of them. He read Gobineau’s book with some care and remarked that “to such people it is always a source of satisfaction to have somebody whom they think themselves entitled to despise.”32 Marx practiced what he preached, since the letter was written to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who was partly of African descent. Quite aware of Lafargue’s racial background, Marx described him in letters as “the N
egrillo” and “our Negro.” He had no problem with his daughter marrying a man of mixed race—at least, the problem he had was with Lafargue’s lack of a steady income, not his origins. Writing to his son-in-law’s father, François Lafargue, about Reconstruction policy in the United States after the Civil War, Marx remarked in a celebrated (in retrospect, overly optimistic) observation, which he repeated in Capital: “The workers of the North have finally completely understood that labor, in so far it is branded in black skin will never be emancipated in white skin.” Marx was less sanguine about the southern states, noting that there, “the poor whites relate to the niggers” just as English workers related to the Irish. In other words, their feelings of superiority, strongly encouraged by the ruling class, diverted them from class solidarity—a conclusion it would be hard to dispute.33

  One might wonder if such racial speculations would have included Jews, in view of the increasing perception of them as a race by Bauer and Hess. Marx, like most Europeans of the mid-nineteenth century, seemed generally to have viewed Jews in religious and cultural terms; the many caustic comments about Jews in his letters certainly went in that direction. The one time when Marx used racial language to characterize a Jew was in a letter to Engels in 1862, at the end of Ferdinand Lassalle’s unhappy visit with the Marxes in London. Marx, given to endless anti-Semitic observations about Lassalle, wrote in the language of racial denigration:

  It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, he [Lassalle] stems from the Negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The pushiness of this lad is also nigger-like.34

  This was an ugly outburst, even by the standards of the nineteenth century. It also demonstrated Marx’s non-racial understanding of Jews. The “combination of Jewry and Germanism” that Marx saw in Lassalle was cultural and political—the efforts of a man from a religious Jewish family in Silesia to become a prominent German literary and philosophical figure and a leader of German nationalism. The biological deprecation referred to Lassalle’s ostensible African ancestry, and this letter shows Marx adopting quite a different attitude toward African descent than he took with his own son-in-law’s family, or in his discussion of the corrosive effects of racism on working-class solidarity. Marx wrote this letter to Engels at the same time he was deeply concerned about the prospects of the Union and the anti-slavery cause in the Civil War. It shows an inconsistency between his public advocacy of anti-racist policies and his private ventilation of racial stereotypes; or perhaps it was just that the hostility in the letter was more directed toward Lassalle than toward Africans.

  Most of the time when Marx and Engels thought about racial differences, it was not Jews or Africans they had in mind, but Europeans, Russians in particular. In September 1863, at the time of the Polish uprising against Russian rule, Marx met a Polish émigré in London and described him to Engels:

  The most interesting acquaintance that I have made here is that of Colonel Lapínski. He is undoubtedly the most intelligent and creative Pole that I have met to date—and simultaneously a man of action. His sympathies are all on the German side, although in manners and speech he is French. Instead of the struggle of nationalities, he knows only the struggle of races. He hates all Orientals, and counts equally in their ranks Russians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians etc.35

  Marx certainly seems to have been intrigued by the Polish colonel, but it is unclear if he agreed with him about race, or what Marx meant by “race” altogether. Was a race, in Marx’s usage, a distinct biological group, a sort of generic grouping of nationalities, similar to the way philologists of the time created families of languages, or was it just a description of the inhabitants of a region? When Engels wrote to Marx a year before, calling Gottfried Kinkel a “model Rhinelander, with all the prejudices and small-mindedness of the race,” the word was evidently not a reference to Kinkel’s inherent biological characteristics.36

  A clue to Marx’s thought comes from his opinions on Russia. According to a book on the Polish question written by a French author, Elias Regnault, Marx reported to Engels that the original Russians were “Mongols or Finns. . . . They are not Slavs; do not belong in any way to the Indo-Germanic race. . . . Panslavism in the Russian sense a government invention.” Marx changed his mind after reading Pierre Trémaux, whose innovations on Darwin’s evolutionary theory he appreciated, even if no one else did. Another of the advantages of Trémaux’s work was that “In historical and political application” it was “much more important and much richer than Darwin. For certain questions, such as nationality etc., here alone the natural basis found.” As part of his theory of the influence of geology on biological descent, Trémaux asserted that the Russians were in fact Slavs, not Mongols, but as a result of their residence on “the dominant ground formations in Russia the Slav is tartarized and mongolized.” Trémaux, Marx noted, had applied the same theory to Africa to prove that “the common Negro type is only the degenerate form of a much higher one.”37

  With these comments, Marx seemed to be moving in the direction of a biological or geological explanation of differences in nationality—in any event, one connecting nationality to descent, explained in terms of natural science. The form was idiosyncratic, but it was certainly within the bounds of European racial thinking at the time, and another example of the influence on Marx of positivist ideas about the intellectual priority of the natural sciences. The point of all these different racial categorizations of Russians was political: to show that Russians were different from and alien to other Slavs. Science would delegitimize “Pan-Slavism,” Russian aspirations to leadership of the Slavic world, and provide additional support for the Polish demand for liberation from tyrannical Russian rule.

  Marx was considering these ideas about race at the same time that he was devising a theory of historical stages shaped by different modes of production. One has to wonder about the relationship between the two. As is so often the case with Marx’s thinking on philosophical, historical, and sociological questions in this period, there are no written traces of a systematic confrontation with the problem, but there are some interesting clues. These lie in a series of articles on Pan-Slavism that Engels wrote for the New York Tribune toward the end of the Crimean War, under Marx’s name and with Marx’s encouragement and editorial suggestions. Rejected by the Tribune, the manuscripts themselves have not survived, but Engels’s detailed prospectus for the series has been preserved.38

  The prospectus began: “General Introduction. Romans, Teutons and Slavs. 2000 year long struggle of the first 2, eliminated by civilization, revolution & impossibility of the lasting rule of one tribe over another. Entrance of the Slavs as the third great race, demand, however, not just equal status, but domination of Europe.” If these rough notes of Engels’s correspond in any way to Marx’s ideas, then they suggest that the two men saw racial differences primarily as a feature of pre-capitalist societies. The continuing significance of race in Russia would just be another proof of the socioeconomic backwardness of the realm of the czar. This idea that the growth of bourgeois civilization was making racial differences less important seems very much like the prediction in the Communist Manifesto that national differences were on the wane in view of the growth of the capitalist world market—and about as accurate.

  Marx’s ideas about race were part of his broader confrontation with new scientific developments, and the increasing intellectual hegemony of a form of philosophical and social theorizing based on these developments. Certainly not rejecting new intellectual trends, Marx sought to use them to advocate and defend his own conceptions, of the philosophical bases of perception, the stages of historical development, the nature of a capitalist economy, or the relationship between economic structures and social action. In part, he began to articulate his ideas in the
language of these intellectual trends, and even to identify his own ideas with them. But Marx was not just an adherent of positivism; he was a critic of it as well. The understanding of Wissenschaft he had absorbed in his study of Hegel during his youth never left him. Marx insisted that true knowledge emerged from understanding the hidden inner logic of empirically observable phenomena, rather than simply from empirical observations themselves, even when those observations were carried out using the methods of the natural sciences. This was another reaffirmation of the intellectual heritage of Hegel and of German idealism, and a rejction of positivist conceptions of knowledge.

  AFTER MARX’S DEATH, ENGELS became his chief interpreter, and ideas of Marxism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century spread primarily via Engels’s writings. There have been many strongly clashing investigations of just how accurately Engels represented Marx’s views. Authors who stress intellectual differences between the two men tend to do so by comparing the Hegelian-inflected young Marx of the 1840s with the positivist elderly Engels, some four or five decades later. While these were the periods when both men produced their most complete statements, such a comparison downplays Marx’s own intellectual development after the middle of the century. Proponents of an opposing interpretation, intent on establishing the fundamental agreement between Marx and Engels, emphasize the positivist passages in Marx’s later works, omitting or downplaying his ambivalence toward positivism.39

  It would be fair to say that Engels was always a positivist. In the very first letter he wrote to Marx in October 1844, he described the circumstances in his native Wupper Valley, to which he had returned after his year in Manchester and his visit with Marx in Paris. Engels talked of how his homeland “has made greater progress in every respect than over the last 50 years.” He praised the more civilized tone of society, the growth of political opposition to the Prussian government, and noted that “Industry has made rapid progress . . . whole forests are extirpated and the whole thing stands now rather above than below the level of German civilization. . . .” Part of this progressive development was the growth of the proletariat in the Wupper Valley. If the workers developed “according to the same laws as their English counterparts,” they would soon become communists.40 Communism as the logical outcome of the progress of industry and civilization, occurring through stages of history, as represented by natural laws—in this letter, the young Engels was presenting a distinctly positivist view of society. The only part of the positivist program missing was the normative character of the natural sciences for other forms of human understanding. This would be explicitly formulated fifteen years later, when Engels read Darwin.