The First Marx

A Philosophical Introduction

Peter Lamb, Douglas Burnham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350029613
• eBook ISBN: 9781350026872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Marx's early work is well known and widely available, but it usually interpreted as at best a kind of stepping-stone to the Marx of Capital. This book offers something completely different; it reconstructs, from his first writings spanning from 1835 to 1846, a coherent and well-rounded political philosophy. The influence of Engels upon the development of that philosophy is discussed. This, it is argued, was a philosophy that Marx could have presented had he put the ideas together, as he hinted was his eventual intention. Had he done so, this first Marx would have made an even greater contribution to social and political philosophy than is generally acknowledged today. Arguments regarding revolutionary change, contradiction and other topics such as production, alienation and emancipation contribute to a powerful analysis in the early works of Marx, one which is worthy of discussion on its own merits. This analysis is distributed among a range of books, papers, letters and other writings, and is gathered here for the first time. Marx's work of the period was driven by his commitment to emancipation. Moreover, as is discussed in the conclusion to this book, his emancipatory philosophy continues to have resonance today. This new book presents Marx in a unique, new light and will be indispensable reading for all studying and following his work.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

In the early to mid-1840s, Karl Marx produced a wide and varied range of writings which, when considered together, comprise a coherent and cogent political philosophy. Beginning with the doctoral dissertation (DD, CW1) he submitted in the spring of 1841, and spanning the next five years until he and Friedrich Engels wrote The German Ideology (GI, CW5) in 1845 and 1846, the building blocks of this philosophy emerged in an untidy assortment of books, journalistic pieces, letters, drafts and various other documents. The majority of these items were never published in Marx’s lifetime and the fragments of the philosophy embedded in this assortment have yet to be satisfactorily pieced together.

The Marx one finds in the fragments is generally seen not as a political philosopher in his own right, but as merely a prologue or anticipation of his later work. This book challenges that view. It should perhaps be stressed from the outset that we are not suggesting that the philosophy assembled in its chapters will somehow enlighten readers with very broad truths about the world. Indeed, as Jonathan Wolff suggests in his introductory book Why Read Marx Today? such truths are rarely considered to be the main concern one has in mind when suggesting that the work of a long-deceased philosopher is worth reading again. As Wolff (2002: 101) puts it, ‘we value the work of the greatest philosophers for their power, rigour, depth, inventiveness, insight, originality, systematic vision, and, no doubt, other virtues too’. He comments briefly on such virtues as can be found in Marx’s early writings. We hope that by piecing the different parts of those writings together in a more detailed study, such virtues will be very clear to see. Although we broadly sympathize with much of what Marx had to say in this early work, the intention is certainly not to put him on a pedestal as some kind of prophet. Echoing what Terry Eagleton (2011: x) has recently said of Marx’s work more generally, this book suggests that the early ideas may be presented ‘not as perfect but as plausible’. In other words, there is a middle ground between idolizing a historical thinker as our ‘contemporary’ and treating him or her as of mere historical interest. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being of historical interest, but the coherence of the topic matters little in that case. Eagleton calls this middle ground ‘plausible’, but we prefer the term ‘fertile’. That is to say, there are ideas and analyses in the early Marx that merit our attention, and implications or extensions that have not been pursued to their fullest extent. Indeed, since, as we have claimed, this period of Marx’s work has not yet received sustained treatment on its own terms, this fertility might prove greater than anyone expects.

The doctoral dissertation and The German Ideology were among the early works that were published only posthumously. While these two items may be identified as marking imprecise boundaries of the period in question, they should not be considered as strictly prescribed outer limits that the present study should not cross. Occasionally, indeed, some of his very early writings warrant attention. The same can be said regarding some of his later ones, insofar as they may shed illumination upon the period in question. Nevertheless, as the earlier writings were written in his youth and the later ones when his main interests had changed, one can find in the period on which we concentrate the political philosopher to whom we might refer as the first Marx. In what follows, we identify and analyse a self-contained, coherent, plausible and indeed fertile philosophical account of human being, production, alienation, exploitation, change and emancipation in works including the dissertation published in 1841, The German Ideology which Engels and he completed early in 1846 and various writings in between.

The identification of The German Ideology as marking the end of the period of the first Marx may surprise some readers. It is, indeed, traditionally considered as a text in which Marx had abandoned the concern with the nature and alienation of the human being and began instead to focus on what later came to be known as the materialist conception of history – a conception based on a scientific analysis of society and economics which charts a historical trajectory. While we agree with Robert Tucker’s suggestion in his Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx that alienation was not abandoned but rather had ‘gone underground’ (Tucker, 1961: 176) in the later period, we argue that The German Ideology, while indeed a transitional study, included enough of the first Marx as to warrant the last major study of the early period rather than the first of the so-called mature Marx. Although he and Engels focused in that study on the division of labour rather than the alienated human being, the concern with the latter remained. Marx and Engels argued that upon the abolition of the division of labour, communism would be built. Human nature would change, traits such as greed and envy would diminish, and humans would flourish in a communal, cooperative society in which they would not be tied to the drudgery of an unrewarding occupation (Lamb, 2010: 862–3). This notion of human nature will be an important theme in the present study.

Although after The German Ideology he did not suddenly change his mind about humanity, Marx began to believe that this should not be his concern. In a letter to the Russian intellectual Pavel Annenkov in December 1846, Marx criticized Pierre-Joseph Proudhon for using ‘high-sounding words’ such as ‘Universal Reason’ and ‘God’, and thus showing a misunderstanding of the historical development of humanity, which meant economic development. The ‘social history of man’, Marx stressed, was ‘never anything else than the history of his individual development, whether he is conscious of this or not’. The material relations at the base of all relations between humans were, however, ‘only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is realised’ (LA, 28/12/1846, CW38: 96). Marx’s concern was clearly now with systemic relations of humans in their society, rather than with the nature of those humans. In his The Poverty of Philosophy – a critical study of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty – which he wrote over the winter of 1846–47, Marx ridiculed Proudhon as follows for reviving (as had Marx in the foreword to his doctoral dissertation six years earlier: DD, CW1: 30–1) the mythical emancipatory Prometheus to argue for an egalitarian economy.

What then, ultimately, is this Prometheus resuscitated by M. Proudhon? It is society, social relations based on class antagonisms. These are not relations between individual and individual, but between worker and capitalist, between farmer and landlord, etc. Wipe out these relations and you annihilate all society, and your Prometheus is nothing but a ghost without arms or legs. (PP, CW6: 159)

One finds discussions of relations among workers, capitalists, farmers, landlords and so on in Marx’s earlier works, but after The German Ideology he was not merely unconcerned with, but also dismissive of, the significance of human nature for the understanding of society.

The task of this book

Of course, the very fact that some of the most significant of Marx’s manuscripts of the period, including The German Ideology, remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime indicates that, in order to construct the political philosophy of the first Marx, extensive work is needed to knit together the key ideas of the various fragments. That, indeed, is the task of this book. Immediately our description of this task may provoke objections that, if such construction needs to be done at all, the result will be a concoction, putting words into Marx’s mouth to which he never intended to give voice. This objection can be met with a two-staged reply. First, although after 1846 he basically lost interest in this political philosophy as his mind turned to other political and intellectual projects, this does not mean that the collection of fragments he abandoned was incoherent, but only that for reasons that seemed at the time to him compelling, he happened to move in a different direction. Second, as this book will show, there are enough synergies in the writings to indicate that he was aware of connections between his analyses of the period.

That a process of construction is needed reflects the fact that Marx did not intentionally set out with such a single, finished product already in mind. Nevertheless, in that intensely enquiring mind many of the fragments were, to some degree consciously but in some cases less so, connected with one another. Occasionally Marx acknowledged that there were such connections. In the preface to what, as will be seen in the following chapters, is perhaps the most important of the fragments – The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 – he was quite clear about this. He noted that while this was primarily a work of political economy, he had ‘already announced in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of Law’ (EPM, CW3: 231). He was referring to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction (CCHPLI, CW3) which, written earlier that year, had been intended to cover a rich and diverse array of subjects. He now realized that this array ‘could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style’ and that this ‘would have given the impression of arbitrary systematism’. ‘I shall,’ he went on (EPM, CW3: 231), ‘therefore publish the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and afterwards try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole, showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and lastly attempt a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material.’ The ‘critique’ mentioned would be a comprehensive critique of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his later followers, which would also be a comprehensive statement of Marx’s own philosophy. Marx’s early work is replete with such announcements, providing at least prima facie indication of the approach mentioned earlier.

Had he gone on to complete the project, there are indications that the earlier ideas would not have been compartmentalized and forgotten. For example, in his article On the Jewish Question published the previous year, he had discussed political and ethical issues, criticizing Hegel’s view of the roles of state and civil society in the defence of property rights (OJQ, CW3: 163). This would appear to be material that would have fitted into one of the pamphlets and also the specially connected whole. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he wrote in Paris in 1844 (referred to hereafter as Paris Manuscripts), moreover, Marx criticized Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness and the view of alienation that it entailed (EPM, CW3: 326–46). Marx had criticized self-consciousness as an abstract principle in his doctoral dissertation (DD, CW1: 73), and one gets a fuller picture of his view on this concept by reading both the dissertation which had been finished in the spring of 1841 and the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. These are just two examples of ideas that, sometimes in revised forms, were retrieved and revived in Marx’s early writings, influencing others that emerged against the backdrop of his intellectual, political and social environment in a period characterized by rapid change. Often, as his interests changed, the revised ideas, those that they influenced, and yet others that thereby emerged dialectically were also put to one side rather than published, but his statement being in the Paris Manuscripts about independent pamphlets and a connected whole gives a clue that those revised ideas were being stored, or finding their place in a revised whole, rather than discarded.

Although the ideas of the first Marx began to take shape from 1837, when he expressed some of his youthful views of the world and his role in it, two very relevant landmarks were, as mentioned earlier, his doctoral thesis and The German Ideology. The dissertation was his first major piece of work, and over the course of the few years that followed, he developed some of the ideas further. After The German Ideology of 1845–46, the focus and emphasis of his work changed. He began to follow his own well-known mantra, stated in his Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, that: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (TF, CW5: 5). Philosophy began to be relegated in his mind to a position of less importance than political struggle and political economy. Such was the waning of his and co-author Engels’ enthusiasm for political philosophy that, as Marx recalled in 1859, when the publishing deal fell through for the completed manuscript, they abandoned The German Ideology ‘to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self clarification’ (CPE, CW29: 264).

‘Self-clarification’ is a hugely significant term in this context. It indicates that he moved away from the early political philosophy onto new projects not because he thought the earlier work was of no value or that it was fundamentally flawed, but because, on the contrary, he was reasonably content with what he had written, even though he felt no pressing urgency to spell it out for other people to read. There was thus now no reason at this point, if ever, to complete the project he had mentioned in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. What we aim to do in this book is precisely to spell out what the project would likely have been. Even though Marx lost interest – and again not because he felt the project was inadequate in some way, but rather because other more pressing concerns confronted him – one finds, by completing the project, a political philosophy of the first order that stands the test of time as an account of human nature and the extant and immanent human condition.

It is worth adding that the famous comment on the Young Hegelian thinker Ludwig Feuerbach quoted earlier did not emerge from the sky like a thunderbolt and rapidly render political philosophy impotent: echoes of this observation can be found much earlier, and indeed are of a piece with the criticisms of Hegel on abstraction one finds in the preface to the Paris Manuscripts. In an article in the Kölnische Zeitung of 1842 he h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Referencing
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Production
• Chapter Three Alienation
• Chapter Four Exploitation
• Chapter Five Change
• Chapter Six Emancipation
• Chapter Seven Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page