Marx: A Very Short Introduction

  3. The exterior of 41 Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill, London, where Marx spent the last fifteen years of his life

  In his last years the satisfaction Marx might have gained from his growing reputation was overshadowed by personal sorrows. Marx’s elder daughters, Jenny and Laura, married and had children, but none of Laura’s three children lived beyond the age of three. Jenny’s firstborn also died in infancy, although she then had five more, all but one of whom survived to maturity. But in 1881 the older Jenny, Marx’s dearly beloved wife, died after a long illness. Marx was now ill and lonely. In 1882 his daughter Jenny became seriously ill; she died in January 1883. Marx never got over this loss. He developed bronchitis and died on 14 March 1883.

  4. Marx with his eldest daughter, Jenny, in 1870

  Chapter 2

  The Young Hegelian

  Little more than a year after his arrival as a student in Berlin, Marx wrote to his father that he was now attaching himself ‘ever more closely to the current philosophy’. This ‘current philosophy’ was the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, who had taught at the University of Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831. Years later, Friedrich Engels described Hegel’s influence in the period when he and Marx began to form their ideas:

  The Hegelian system covered an incomparably greater domain than any earlier system and developed in this domain a wealth of thought which is astounding even today…

  One can imagine what a tremendous effect this Hegelian system must have produced in the philosophy-tinged atmosphere of Germany. It was a triumphal procession which lasted for decades and which by no means came to a standstill on the death of Hegel. On the contrary, it was precisely from 1830 to 1840 that ‘Hegelianism’ reigned most exclusively, and to a greater or lesser extent infected even its opponents.

  The close attachment to this philosophy Marx formed in 1837 was to affect his thought for the rest of his life. Writing about Hegel in 1844, Marx referred to The Phenomenology of Mind as ‘the true birthplace and secret of his philosophy’ (EPM 98). This long and obscure work is therefore the place to begin our understanding of Marx.

  The German word for ‘Mind’ is sometimes translated as ‘Spirit’. Hegel uses it to refer to the spiritual side of the universe, which appears in his writings as a kind of universal mind. My mind, your mind, and the minds of every other conscious being are particular, limited manifestations of this universal mind. There has been a good deal of debate about whether this universal mind is intended to be God or whether Hegel was, in pantheistic fashion, identifying God with the world as a whole. There is no definite answer to this question; but it seems appropriate and convenient to distinguish this universal mind from our own particular minds by writing the universal variety with a capital, as Mind.

  The Phenomenology of Mind traces the development of Mind from its first appearance as individual minds, conscious but neither selfconscious nor free, to Mind as a free and fully self-conscious unity. The process is neither purely historical, nor purely logical, but a strange combination of the two. One might say that Hegel is trying to show that history is the progress of Mind along a logically necessary path, a path along which it must travel in order to reach its final goal.

  The development of Mind is dialectical – a term that has come to be associated with Marx because his own philosophy has been referred to as ‘dialectical materialism’. The dialectical elements of Marx’s theory were taken over from Hegel, so this is a good place to see what ‘dialectic’ is.

  Perhaps the most celebrated passage in the Phenomenology concerns the relationship of a master to a slave. It well illustrates what Hegel means by dialectic, and it introduces an idea echoed in Marx’s view of the relationship between capitalist and worker.

  Suppose we have two independent people, aware of their own independence, but not of their common nature as aspects of one universal Mind. Each sees the other as a rival, a limit to his own power over everything else. This situation is therefore unstable. A struggle ensues, in which one conquers and enslaves the other. The master/ slave relationship, however, is not stable either. Although it seems at first that the master is everything and the slave nothing, it is the slave who works and by his work changes the natural world. In this assertion of his own nature and consciousness over the natural world, the slave achieves satisfaction and develops his own self-consciousness, while the master becomes dependent on his slave. The ultimate outcome must therefore be the liberation of the slave, and the overcoming of the initial conflict between the two independent beings.

  This is only one short section of the Phenomenology, the whole of which traces the development of Mind as it overcomes contradiction or opposition. Mind is inherently universal, but in its limited form, as the minds of particular people, it is not aware of its universal nature – that is, particular people do not see themselves as all part of the one universal Mind. Hegel describes this as a situation in which Mind is ‘alienated’ from itself – that is, people (who are manifestations of Mind) take other people (who are also manifestations of Mind) as something foreign, hostile, and external to themselves, whereas they are in fact all part of the same great whole.

  Mind cannot be free in an alienated state, for in such a state it appears to encounter opposition and barriers to its own complete development. Since Mind is really infinite and all-encompassing, opposition and barriers are only appearances, the result of Mind not recognizing itself for what it is, but taking what is really a part of itself as something alien and hostile to itself. These apparently alien forces limit the freedom of Mind, for if Mind does not know its own infinite powers it cannot exercise these powers to organize the world in accordance with its plans.

  The progress of the dialectical development of Mind in Hegel’s philosophy is always progress towards freedom. ‘The History of the World is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,’ he wrote. The Phenomenology is thus an immense philosophical epic, tracing the history of Mind from its first blind gropings in a hostile world to the moment when, in recognizing itself as master of the universe, it finally achieves self-knowledge and freedom.

  5. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose philosophy provided the framework for Marx’s ideas

  Hegel’s philosophy has an odd consequence which would have been embarrassing to a more modest author. If all history is the story of Mind working towards the goal of understanding its own nature, this goal is actually reached with the completion of the Phenomenology itself. When Mind, manifested in the mind of Hegel, grasps its own nature, the last stage of history has been reached.

  To us this is preposterous. Hegel’s speculative mixture of philosophy and history has been unfashionable for a long time. It was, however, taken seriously when Marx was young. Moreover we can make sense of much of the Phenomenology even if we reject the notion of a universal Mind as the ultimate reality of all things. We can treat ‘Universal Mind’ as a collective term for all human minds. We can then rewrite the Phenomenology in terms of the path to human liberation. The saga of Mind then becomes the saga of the human spirit.

  This is what a group of philosophers known as Young Hegelians attempted in the decade following Hegel’s death. The orthodox interpretation of Hegel was that since human society is the manifestation of Mind in the world, everything is right and rational as it is. There are plenty of passages in Hegel’s works which can be quoted in support of this view. At times he seems to regard the Prussian state as the supreme incarnation of Mind. Since the Prussian state paid his salary as a professor of philosophy in Berlin, it is not surprising that the more radical Young Hegelians took the view that in these passages Hegel had betrayed his own philosophy. Among these was Marx, who wrote in his doctoral thesis: ‘if a philosopher really has compromised, it is the job of his followers to use the inner core of his thought to illuminate his own superficial expressions of it’ (D 13).

  For the Young Hegelians the ‘superficial expression’ of Hegel’s philosophy was his acceptance of the state of
politics, religion, and society in early nineteenth-century Prussia: the ‘inner core’ was his account of Mind overcoming alienation, reinterpreted as an account of human self-consciousness freeing itself from the illusions that prevent it achieving self-understanding and freedom.

  During his student days in Berlin and for a year or two afterwards Marx was close to Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology and a leading Young Hegelian. Under Bauer’s influence Marx seized on orthodox religion as the chief illusion standing in the way of human self-understanding. The chief weapon against this illusion was philosophy. In the Preface to his doctoral thesis, Marx wrote:

  Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus – in a word, I detest all the gods – is her own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be no other beside it.

  (D 12–13)

  In accordance with the general method of the Young Hegelians, Bauer and Marx used Hegel’s own critique of religion to reach more radical conclusions. In the Phenomenology Hegel referred to the Christian religion at a certain stage of its development as a form of alienation, for while God reigns in heaven, human beings inhabit an inferior and comparatively worthless ‘vale of tears’. Human nature is divided between its essential nature, which is immortal and heavenly, and its non-essential nature, which is mortal and earthly. Thus individuals see their own essential nature as having its home in another realm; they are alienated from their mortal existence and the world in which they actually live.

  Hegel, treating this as a passing phase in the self-alienation of Mind, drew no practical conclusions from it. Bauer reinterpreted it more broadly as indicating the self-alienation of human beings. It was humans, he maintained, who had created this God which now seemed to have an independent existence, an existence which made it impossible for humans to regard themselves as ‘the highest divinity’. This philosophical conclusion pointed to a practical task: to criticize religion and show human beings that God is their own creation, thus ending the subordination of humanity to God and the alienation of human beings from their own true nature.

  So the Young Hegelians thought Hegel’s philosophy both mystifyingly presented and incomplete. When rewritten in terms of the real world instead of the mysterious world of Mind, it made sense. ‘Mind’ was read as ‘human self-consciousness’. The goal of history became the liberation of humanity; but this could not be achieved until the religious illusion had been overcome.

  Chapter 3

  From God to Money

  The transformation of Hegel’s method into a weapon against religion was carried through most thoroughly by another radical Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach.

  Friedrich Engels later wrote of the impact of the work that made Feuerbach famous: ‘Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity… One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians.’ Like Bauer, Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity characterized religion as a form of alienation. God, he wrote, is to be understood as the essence of the human species, externalized and projected into an alien reality. Wisdom, love, benevolence – these are really attributes of the human species, but we attribute them, in a purified form, to God. The more we enrich our concept of God in this way, however, the more we impoverish ourselves. The solution is to realize that theology is a kind of misdescribed anthropology. What we believe of God is really true of ourselves. Thus humanity can regain its essence, which in religion it has lost.

  When The Essence of Christianity appeared, in 1841, the first meeting between Marx and Engels still lay two years ahead. The book may not have made as much of an impression on Marx as it did on Engels, for Marx had already been exposed to similar ideas through Bauer; but Feuerbach’s later works, particularly his Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy, did have a decisive impact on Marx, triggering off the next important stage in the development of his thought.

  Feuerbach’s later works went beyond the criticism of religion to the criticism of Hegelian philosophy itself. Yet it was a curious form of criticism of Hegel, for Feuerbach continued to work by transforming Hegel, using Hegel’s method against all philosophy in the Hegelian mode. Hegel had taken Mind as the moving force in history, and humans as manifestations of Mind. This, according to Feuerbach, locates the essence of humanity outside human beings and thus, like religion, serves to alienate humanity from itself.

  More generally, Hegel and other German philosophers of the idealist school began from such conceptions as Spirit, Mind, God, the Absolute, the Infinite, and so on, treating these as ultimately real, and regarding ordinary humans and animals, tables, sticks and stones, and the rest of the finite, material world as a limited, imperfect expression of the spiritual world. Feuerbach again reversed this, insisting that philosophy must begin with the finite, material world. Thought does not precede existence, existence precedes thought.

  So Feuerbach put at the centre of his philosophy neither God nor thought, but man. Hegel’s tale of the progress of Mind, overcoming alienation in order to achieve freedom, was for Feuerbach a mystifying expression of the progress of human beings overcoming the alienation of both religion and philosophy itself.

  Marx seized on this idea of bringing Hegel down to earth by using Hegel’s methods to attack the present condition of human beings. In his brief spell as editor of the Rhenish Gazette, Marx had descended from the rarefied air of Hegelian philosophy to more practical issues like censorship, divorce, a Prussian law prohibiting the gathering of dead timber from forests, and the economic distress of Moselle wine-growers. When the paper was suppressed Marx went back to philosophy, applying Feuerbach’s technique of transformation to Hegel’s political philosophy.

  Marx’s ideas at this stage (1843) are liberal rather than socialist, and he still thinks that a change in consciousness is all that is needed. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, a fellow Young Hegelian with whom he worked on the short-lived German–French Annals, Marx wrote: ‘Freedom, the feeling of man’s dignity, will have to be awakened again in these men. Only this feeling… can again transform society into a community of men to achieve their highest purposes, a democratic state.’ And in a later letter to Ruge about their joint venture:

  we can express the aim of our periodical in one phrase: A selfunderstanding (equals critical philosophy) of the age concerning its struggles and wishes… To have its sins forgiven, mankind has only to declare them for what they are.

  (R 38)

  Up to this point Marx had followed Feuerbach in reinterpreting Hegel as a philosopher of man rather than Mind. His view of human beings, however, focused on their mental aspect, their thoughts, and their consciousness. The first signs of a shift to his later emphasis on the material and economic conditions of human life came in an essay written in 1843 entitled ‘On the Jewish Question’. The essay reviews two publications by Bruno Bauer on the issue of civil and political rights for Jews.

  Marx rejects his friend’s treatment of the issue as a question of religion. It is not the sabbath Jew we should consider, Marx says, but the everyday Jew. Accepting the common stereotype of Jews as obsessed with money and bargaining, Marx describes the Jew as merely a special manifestation of what he calls ‘civil society’s Judaism’ – that is, the dominance in society of bargaining and financial interests generally. Marx therefore suggests that the way to abolish the ‘problem’ of Judaism is to reorganize society so as to abolish bargaining.

  6. Marx in 1836, aged 18. Detail from the lithograph on p. 4

  The importance of this essay is that it sees economic life, not religion, as the chief form of human alienation. Another German writer, Moses Hess, had already developed Feuerbach’s ideas in this direction, being the first, as Engels put it, to reach communism by ‘the philosophic path’. (There had, of course, been many earlier communists who were more or less philosophical – what Engels meant was th
e path of Hegelian philosophy.) Now Marx was heading down the same route. The following quotation from ‘On the Jewish Question’ reads exactly like Bauer, Feuerbach, or Marx himself, a year or two earlier, denouncing religion – except that where they would have written ‘God’ Marx now substitutes ‘money’:

  Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.