The Political Writings

Karl Marx

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788736879
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. For the first time ever, this book brings together all of his essential political and historical writings in one volume. These writings allow us to see the depth and range of Marx's mature work from the tumultuous revolutions of 1848 that rocked European society through to the end of his life. Including The Communist Manifesto, The Class Struggles in France and The Critique of the Gotha Programme, this volume shows Marx at his most astute, analysing the forces of global capitalism as they played out in actual events.

Volume I

The Revolutions of 1848

Introduction to Volume I

From Philosophy to Politics

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, on 5 May 1818. His parents were of Jewish origin, but were baptized into the Prussian state church while Marx was still a small child. The ideology of the French Enlightenment had won a strong base in the Rhineland, which had been annexed to France from 1798 to 1815, and from his father and schoolteachers Marx acquired a liberal and humanist education.

The Germany in which Marx grew up was still a backward country by comparison with its western neighbours. It was overwhelmingly agricultural; urban production was still dominated by the guild system, and modern industry was making its first inroads only in the northern Rhineland. The German cities had grown little, if at all, since the sixteenth century, and the total urban population of Germany was only half as much again as the population of Paris. This economic backwardness was reflected in German political structures. Germany had not experienced any form of bourgeois revolution and was still divided between thirty-nine states, mainly absolutist, in a confederation underwritten by the Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria and Russia.

However backward, German history was not static. The French Revolution had inspired a strong democratic sentiment among the artisans and intelligentsia in the German cities. This had not been entirely eradicated by the experience of Napoleonic domination and was still available to inspire a popular revolution. The ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813, although fought under Prussian leadership, aroused enthusiasm for German unification, which merged with the democratic current and led to the formation of secret societies known as the Burschenschaften (students’ associations). Although confined to the universities, their demonstrations, particularly at the Wartburg festival of 1817, provided a focus for the national-democratic movement. In 1819 the repressive measures of the Karlsbad decrees, dictated by the Holy Alliance, were introduced to suppress this movement, which flared up again after the French July revolution of 1830 and received a new dose of repression.

Industrial development, both in textiles and heavy industry, got seriously under way in the 1830s and took advantage from the first of the technological advances made in England over the past sixty years. Railway building followed rapidly in the 1840s. The North German Zollverein (customs union) had been set up under Prussian auspices in 1834 to pre-empt bourgeois demands for national unification, but as capitalist development advanced, liberal pressure for a constitution built up in Prussia, particularly in the Rhineland, intensifying after the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840. The German population increased by 50 per cent between 1816 and 1846, despite a steady emigration to America, and this aggravated the pressure on the land, particularly in the eastern provinces of Prussia. The indebtedness of the peasantry in south and west Germany also intensified. In the 1840s an agrarian and trade depression began to cause rural and urban unrest. Economic, political and ideological factors were thus being formed which would fuse in the revolutionary conjuncture of 1848.

A paradoxical effect of German backwardness marked intellectual life, one sphere in which Germany was unquestionably advanced. From the time of the French Revolution onwards, German philosophy underwent a peculiar ‘overdevelopment’, producing the powerful idealist systems of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the context of their national historical backwardness, German intellectuals were forced, as Marx put it, to ‘think what others had done’,¹ and this forced abstraction of their thought made the German philosophy of this period unequalled in the scope of its syntheses, culminating in Hegel’s systematic integration of the natural sciences, logic and social theory.

In 1836 Marx began his university career at Bonn, but transferred the next year to Berlin. He had originally intended to read law, but his theoretical inclination soon drew him towards philosophy. In 1831 Hegel had died in office as Professor of Philosophy at Berlin, but by the middle of the decade his legacy was already in dispute, as the ‘Left’ or Young Hegelians fired their first shot at orthodoxy with the publication of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus.²

In the peculiar German circumstances of economic and political backwardness coupled with theoretical overdevelopment, the Hegelian philosophy, with its ambiguous political implications and internal tension between system and method, was for the next decade to provide a terrain for political battles that could not yet be fought out in the arena of open class struggle.

The ‘Right’ – i.e. orthodox – Hegelians fought for conservatism by defending Hegel’s system, which under the dictum that ‘the real is the rational’ provided a legitimation for everything that existed, in particular the Christian religion and the Prussian monarchy. The ‘Left’ Hegelians used Hegel’s dialectical method to criticize existing institutions as non-rational and therefore ‘non-real’, i.e. having outlived their historical moment and due to be changed. They thus re-fought, though in more sophisticated terms, the battles against religion and absolutism that the French Enlightenment had fought in the previous century. Rather than deny the truth of religion on its own ground, the Young Hegelians sought to explain religious dogma in terms of a different level of reality, which in the first instance was that of ethics. In 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach achieved what appeared to the Young Hegelians as a decisive ‘abolition’ of religion with his book The Essence of Christianity,³ in which he transformed Hegel’s idealism into a radical humanism by substituting for the abstract subject of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind the human species, and explaining religion as man’s alienation of his own powers or essence and his subsequent domination by his own creations. In Prussia and the other absolutist states of Germany, religion was the natural starting point of rationalist criticism, as the state and the traditional social order still founded their legitimacy on a religious basis. Marx himself eagerly plunged into religious criticism, and his doctoral thesis, completed in 1841, was conceived as an anti-religious work.⁴

Marx approached politics under the aegis of his Young Hegelian colleague Bruno Bauer, who made the transition from religious to explicitly political criticism with his book The Christian State. In the summer of 1841 Marx joined Bauer in Bonn and worked with him for a while on an abortive plan for a journal, hoping also to obtain a place beside Bauer at the university. A few months later, however, Bauer’s subversive activities led to his dismissal from Bonn, an event which simultaneously ditched Marx’s own hopes of an academic career.

Marx’s first political article was published in February 1842 in the Young Hegelian journal Anekdota. Commenting on the Prussian censorship, Marx exposed the inherent contradictions of the censorship system, and argued a liberal and rationalist defence of a free press and public opinion.⁵

During the course of 1842 Marx became increasingly involved with the recently founded Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette), and was eventually appointed its editor. The Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne, represented a short-lived alliance between the Young Hegelian philosophers, already verging on radicalism, and the liberal Rhineland bourgeoisie who were restless with the failure of the new king to grant the long promised constitution. In the Rheinische Zeitung Marx dealt with current political questions within the limits of the liberal opposition, for he still believed possible and necessary the ‘laborious task of winning freedom step by step’.⁶ It was while working on the Rheinische Zeitung that Marx first came into contact with French socialist and communist ideas, which became current in Germany in 1842 with the propaganda of Moses Hess⁷ and the publication of Lorenz von Stein’s book The Socialism and Communism of Contemporary France. But Marx’s attitude to French communism was still extremely cautious. When Hess came under attack for articles he had written in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx wrote editorially, ‘The Rheinische Zeitung … cannot even concede theoretical reality to communistic ideas in their present form, and can even less wish to consider possible their practical realization.’ However, he conceded that ‘writings such as those by Leroux, Considérant, and above all Proudhon’s penetrating work, can be criticized only after long and deep study’.⁸

It was more immediately important for Marx’s development that as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung he was confronted practically with the ‘social question’. Previously Marx had been concerned exclusively with religion and politics, in which fields he had been able to ascribe conflicts between men, in the idealist fashion, simply to the truth or falsity of their ideas. Now Marx came up against conflicts of material interest for the first time, in connection with the Rhineland Diet’s⁹ legislative encroachment on common timber rights and the destitution of the Mosel grape growers caused by the Zollverein. Marx criticized the Rhineland Diet for its class-biased legislation, but still believed that political reason could resolve such conflicts, the conditions for this being a free press and public debate.¹⁰ As Marx later acknowledged, however, it was the problems presented by these issues that first led him away from the mainstream of Young Hegelian philosophical criticism and towards the theory of historical materialism.¹¹

*

The suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung in March 1843 marked the end of the hope that Prussia could progress through constitutional monarchy to democratic freedom. The Young Hegelians now branched in different directions. Some, like Bruno and Edgar Bauer and Max Stirner, went on to develop increasingly radical theoretical positions, but kept safely away from all practical activity; others, particularly Arnold Ruge,¹² Moses Hess, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, began to seek the means of turning the ‘arm of criticism’ into the ‘criticism of arms’.¹³ To that end Ruge and Marx left Germany in October 1843 for Paris, where Hess was already living, and where they planned to produce a journal, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (Franco-German Yearbooks). The move to Paris was not only necessitated by the Prussian censorship. As the title of their journal implied, Marx and his colleagues hoped to combine their philosophic results with the achievements of French political theory, and thus to arrive at the guiding principles of the radical revolution that they now believed necessary in Germany.

During the course of 1843 Marx had become an ardent follower of Feuerbach, who had developed his full position in that year with the publication of his Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy. Feuerbach had already taught that the religious account of God as subject and Man as predicate had only to be inverted in order to reveal the true relationship. In the Provisional Theses he claimed that this ‘transformative method’ was the means to criticize all speculative philosophy (such as German idealism), since this was nothing more than religion in a secular guise. Feuerbach’s key critical concept was that of Gattungswesen, or species-being, which he used to denote the sum of humanity’s collective powers, and it is this that Marx sought to apply, first to the political state, then to the capitalist economy, in two major texts written in 1843 and 1844.

Marx wrote his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State in the summer of 1843.¹⁴ He had just married Jenny von Westphalen, to whom he had been engaged for seven years, and was shortly to move with her to Paris. In this text Marx attacked Hegel’s presentation of the relation between the state and civil society (i.e. economic life) as a typical case of speculative philosophy. For Hegel, civil society was the sphere of material needs, while the state was the higher sphere of reason in which conflicts of material interest were resolved. Marx based himself on Feuerbach’s humanism to assert that civil society, not the state, was the sphere of man’s real life as a ‘species-being’, and that the ‘reason’ that governed the state presented man’s real relations in an inverted form. Far from the state bureaucracy rationally mediating conflicts of material interest, it weighed on man’s real existence as an oppressive force.

In this critique Marx already saw the resolution of the antagonism between state and civil society as requiring the dissolution of the former into the latter, a position he was later to integrate into his scientific communism. But at this stage in his development Marx had as yet only a vague conception of class antagonisms. He believed that universal suffrage would spell the dissolution of the oppressive state and the liberation of man’s species-life, and did not yet recognize the abolition of private property – i.e. communism – as the essential condition of this liberation.

Feuerbach’s doctrine of the species-being, however, easily led in the direction of communism, and Marx was rapidly to take this further step. Marx’s conversion to communism came soon after his move to Paris, where he studied at first hand the French socialist and communist tendencies and engaged in discussion with the militants of the French workers’ movement. In the class-conscious workers of Paris Marx found the solution to the problems he had analysed in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, and his first mention of the proletariat is in the Introduction published in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher to a projected edition of that manuscript. Here Marx argues that the only class that can make a radical revolution in Germany (i.e. one that would realize the goals of Feuerbach’s humanist philosophy) is

a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society … a class which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general … This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.¹⁵

With his stay in Paris in 1843–4, Marx outgrew his early formation in German philosophy. He not only continued his study of French political theory, intending at one point to write a history of the French revolutionary Convention, but also, under the stimulus of his contacts with the proletarian movement, began to read the English economists who analysed the ‘anatomy’ of bourgeois society. Yet in the first text in which Marx dealt with the problems of economic theory and communism – the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 – he still attempted, for the first and last time, to integrate this new subject matter into the framework of Feuerbachian humanism.

In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx applied Feuerbach’s ‘transformative method’ to political economy, criticizing the bourgeois economic system and its apologists for inverting the true relations of labour and capital. Instead of capital being the subject of the economic process and lab...