Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Second Edition

Karl Marx selected writings

Karl Marx selected writings

Edited by

David McLellan

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction and Compilation © David McLellan 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1977 Second Edition 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–878265–9 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

For Raphaelle and Arthur

Note to Second Edition In the two decades and more since this book was first published, an enormous amount of material on Marx has been produced. I have therefore made a major effort to update both the bibliographies for the individual extracts and also the general bibliography. I have, too, added an introduction to each of the five main sections to enable the reader to have an overview of Marx’s concerns at each stage of his thought. I am grateful to Nicola Cooper for her professional expertise in producing this new version and to Helly Langley for her generous encouragement and support. David McLellan January 2000

Contents Abbreviations

xii

Introduction

1

I

The Early Writings 1837–1844 Introduction

3 5

1

Letter to his Father

2

Doctoral Thesis Preface From the Notes to the Dissertation

15 15 17

3

Articles for the Rheinische Zeitung On the Freedom of the Press The Leading Article of the Kölnische Zeitung Communism and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung The Law on Thefts of Wood Letter to Arnold Ruge On the Estates Committees in Prussia Defence of the Moselle Correspondent

22 22 23 25 26 28 29 29

4

Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ On Hegel’s Dialectic On Democracy On Bureaucracy On Voting

32 32 33 36 38

5

A Correspondence of 1843

43

6

On the Jewish Question I On The Jewish Question II The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free

46 46 64

7

Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction

71

8

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Preface Alienated Labour Private Property and Communism Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy On Money

83 83 85 95 104 118

9

Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach

122

On James Mill

124

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II

Critical Remarks on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’

The materialist conception of history 1844–1847 Introduction

III

134 139 141

12

The Holy Family On Proudhon Alienation and the Proletariat On Idealist Philosophy The Idealist View of History The Jewish Question Revisited The French Revolution French Materialism and the Origins of Socialism

145 146 148 150 153 159 161 163

13

Theses on Feuerbach

171

14

The German Ideology Preface The Premisses of the Materialist Method Private Property and Communism Communism and History Communist Revolution Egoism and Communism Power as the Basis of Right Utilitarianism Artistic Talent under Communism The Free Development of Individuals in Communist Society

175 175 176 184 187 196 198 200 201 205 207

15

Letter to Annenkov

209

16

The Poverty of Philosophy Value and Labour Time Class Antagonism Method in Political Economy On Strikes

212 212 215 215 230

17

Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality

234

1848 and after Introduction 18

19

237 239

The Communist Manifesto I Bourgeois and Proletarians II Proletarians and Communists III Socialist and Communist Literature IV Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

270

Wage-Labour and Capital

273

245 246 255 262

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20

Speech on Free Trade

295

21

Articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung The Revolution in Germany England and the Revolution Taxes Marx’s Defence Speech at his Trial

297 297 299 299 300

22

Address to the Communist League

303

23

The Class Struggles in France

313

24

Speech to the Central Committee of the Communist League

326

25

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

329

26

Journalism of the 1850s British Political Parties The Future Results of British Rule in India

356 356 362

27

Speech on the Anniversary of the People’s Paper

368

28

Letters 1848–1857 Prospects for Revolution in Europe Class Struggle and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat The Army and Historical Materialism

370 370 371 372

The ‘economics’ 1857–1867 Introduction

373 375

29

Grundrisse General Introduction The Social Character of Production The Rise and Downfall of Capitalism Alienated Labour Machinery, Automation, Free Time, and Communism

379 380 395 397 400 405

30

Preface to A Critique of Political Economy

424

31

Theories of Surplus Value Alienated Labour in Capitalist Society Unproductive Labour Peasants and Artisans in Capitalist Society Ricardo and the Value of Labour Ricardo and Surplus Value Ricardo and the Middle Class Production and Consumption The Unhistorical Outlook of Classical Economy The Progress of Capitalist Production: A Summary

429 429 431 432 434 435 445 446 447 449

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Capital

452 A. From Volume One

From the Prefaces Commodities: Use-Value and Exchange-Value The Fetishism of Commodities Exchange and Money The General Formula for Capital The Sale of Labour Power The Production of Surplus Value Constant and Variable Capital The Rate of Surplus Value The Working Day The Division of Labour The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Primitive Accumulation The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

452 458 472 481 482 488 492 508 510 512 513 515 521 523

B. From Volume Three

V

The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall The Trinity Formula Classes

526 530 544

33

Results of the Immediate Process of Production Alienation in the Productive Process Capitalism as a Stage towards Socialism Factory Worker and Artisan Productive and Unproductive Labour Alienated Labour The Reproduction of the Capitalist Relationship

547 547 550 551 551 554 556

34

Letters 1858–1868 Marx on his ‘Economics’ On Darwin On Machinery

562 562 565 565

Later political writings 1864–1882 Introduction

569 571

35

Inaugural Address to the First International

575

36

On Trade Unions

583

37

The Civil War in France From the Published Version From the Drafts

584 584 596

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Preface to the Second German Edition of the Communist Manifesto

604

39

On Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy

606

40

Critique of the Gotha Programme

610

41

Letter to Mikhailovsky

617

42

Circular Letter

620

43

Letter to Vera Sassoulitch Letter From the Drafts

623 623 624

44

Comments on Adolph Wagner

629

45

Preface to the Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto

631

46

Letters 1863–1881 On Working-class Consciousness On Ireland On the Commune On Violent Revolution

633 633 638 640 642

38

Chronological Table

645

Bibliography

647

Index of Names

665

Index of Subjects

673

Abbreviations MEGA

K. Marx, F. Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Werke, Schriften, Briefe, 13 vols. Completed, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Moscow, 1927 ff.

MESC

K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1935.

MESW

K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1935, 2 vols.

MEW

K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, 41 vols, Berlin, 1956 ff.

Introduction The aim of this book is to present as comprehensive and balanced a selection of Marx’s writings as possible. I have forgone the opportunity of writing an extended introduction offering either ‘potted’ biography or an interpretation of Marx’s thought. A biography can readily be obtained elsewhere and such contextual details as are necessary for an understanding of each extract are provided with it. An interpretation—to be worthwhile—would have to be fairly lengthy and involve the exclusion of some of Marx’s texts. Nevertheless a few words on the principles of selection are necessary. The most evident difficulty confronting a portrayal of Marx’s thought is that he is politically a controversial figure. And there is the additional difficulty that Marx was a prolific writer, in different styles and contexts, and left half of it unpublished so that it only emerged piecemeal during the years after his death. Up until very recently the most accessible large selection of Marx’s works was issued by the Russian Communists and their allies who claimed to be the political incarnation of Marx’s ideas. Naturally, they saw Marx from their own point of view and their selection had two deficiencies. First, it ignored Marx’s early writings. These were published around 1930 and reveal a more philosophical, humanist Marx, that many thought incompatible with the economic, materialist Marx of Stalinist orthodoxy. Although there was considerable controversy about whether the young or the old Marx was the real Marx and whether there was or was not a continuity in Marxist thought, any selection that ignored these early writings would be seriously deficient. So recent editions of Marx have tended to make selections from the Moscow selections and supplement them with some of the early writings. But the Moscow selections had another drawback: they consisted almost entirely of Marx’s political writings together with some simple summaries of his economic doctrines. Over recent years increasing attention has been paid to the three works that Marx produced between 1857 and 1867—the Grundrisse, the Theories of Surplus Value, and Capital. On almost any reading of Marx these constituted his main theoretical contribution: yet, apart from a few pages of Capital, they are absent from the Moscow selection which tends to concentrate on Marx’s political writings. Believing that it was not enough just to augment the Moscow selection yet again with some extracts from Capital, I have tried to have a fresh look at the whole corpus of Marx’s writings in the light of recent scholarship. This has involved translating certain passages that have never been published in England before and being prepared to include very short extracts when necessary—although I have tried to avoid being too ‘bitty’. The main interest in recent years among interpreters of Marx has focused on his methodology and on his contribution to the science of political economy. Thus any selection satisfying these interests must contain large excerpts from the

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Grundrisse and the Theories of Surplus Value, which, together with Capital, constitute the centrepiece of Marx’s work. To avoid overloading the text with footnotes I have added an annotated name index as well as a full subject index.

NOTE Most of the extracts have been previously published elsewhere. In those which I translated myself, I have made a few minor alterations for the present collection.

I The Early Writings 1837–1844

Introduction In these early writings we can trace Marx’s evolution to a position where he was able to articulate his theory of historical materialism—which formed the basis of what later came to be known as Marxism. But although the writings in this section represent Marx before Marxism, they are nevertheless essential for an understanding of what follows: many of the positions worked out in these early writings are simply taken for granted in his later works— for example, the view that productive interchange with nature is the most basic of human activities. Engels said of Marx that his ideas were based on a synthesis of German idealist philosophy, French political theory, and English classical economics. Marx’s writings up to 1844 show his struggle to come to terms with the German philosophical tradition, and above all Hegel; with his move to Paris in 1843, Marx had to confront the French versions of socialism; by 1844, particularly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he had begun to incorporate into his thought the classical political economy coming from Britain. Marx started out life as an idealist. As he explained in the lengthy letter to his father, written when he was 19 from his student residence in Berlin, he believed in a romantic opposition of what is and what ought to be. But he soon found himself forced to succumb to the Hegelian philosophy which was then predominant in Berlin: ‘if the gods before had dwelt above the earth, they had now become its centre’. Marx’s struggle to come to terms with Hegel was central to all his early writings and, to an important extent, continued throughout his life. For however much he was to criticize Hegel, accuse him of idealism, and try to stand his dialectic ‘on its feet’, Marx was the first to admit that his method stemmed directly from his master of the 1830s. In his greatest work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel traced the development of mind, or spirit, reintroducing historical movement into philosophy and asserting that the human mind can attain to absolute knowledge. He analysed the development of human consciousness from its immediate perception of the here and now to the stage of self-consciousness, the understanding that allowed human beings to analyse the world and order their own actions accordingly. Following this was the stage of reason itself, understanding of the real, after which spirit, by means of religion and art, attained to absolute knowledge, the level at which human beings recognized in the world the stages of their own reason. These stages Hegel called ‘alienations’, insofar as they were creations of the human mind yet mistakenly thought of as independent and superior to the human mind. This absolute knowledge was at the same time a sort of recapitulation of the human spirit, for each successive stage retained elements of the previous ones at the same time as it went beyond them. This movement, which suppressed and yet conserved, Hegel called Aufhebung, a word that has this double

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sense in German. Hegel also talked of ‘the power of the negative’, thinking that there was always a tension between any present state of affairs and what it was becoming. For any present state of affairs was in the process of being negated, changed into something else. This process was what Hegel meant by dialectic. Hegel had died in 1832. Although thought of as a rather conservative thinker, with the Owl of Minerva only rising at dusk and looking backwards, his legacy proved ambivalent. In particular, emphasis on the negative and dialectical side of Hegel’s philosophy could obviously give it a radical bent—a development associated with a group of intellectuals known as the Young Hegelians whose central figure was Bruno Bauer, a university lecturer who became Marx’s mentor. They embarked on a process of secularization, progressing from a critique of religion to one of politics and society. It is important to recognize that Marx in his early writings looked at his ideas in interaction with the members of this close-knit movement. His doctoral thesis clearly reflected the Young Hegelian climate: its field—postAristotelian Greek philosophy—was one of interest to the Young Hegelians who felt that they lived in the shadow of Hegel much as the post-Aristotelians had to find something to say after the great Aristotle had summed it all up. When Bruno Bauer was dismissed from his university post for the same sort of antireligious idealism that permeated Marx’s doctoral thesis, the latter had to abandon his ambition of an academic career. He briefly became a journalist and editor of the liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. Although still ambivalent about the communist ideas spreading from France, Marx dealt with such topics as the privatization of previously commonly held timber and the poverty of the Moselle wine growers. These subjects, as he stated later, ‘provided the first occasions for occupying myself with economic questions’. In so doing Marx came to realize how closely the laws were formed by the interests of the ruling class— in this case the forest and vineyard owners. The Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed by the government in October 1842. Marx took the opportunity, as he put it later, ‘to withdraw from the public stage into the study’. Here he read a lot on the French Revolution and meditated on the question of why a revolution which proclaimed the excellent principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality did not result in a society which actually embodied these principles. He also became increasingly interested in the philosophy of his fellow Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach. Although Engels exaggerated when he said later that ‘we all became Feuerbachians’, this influence was profound. Feuerbach was fundamentally interested in religion, and his main thesis was that God was merely a projection of human attributes, desires, and potentialities. If human beings once realized this, they would be in a position to appropriate these attributes for themselves by realizing that they had created God, not God them, and thus be in a position to restore to themselves their alienated ‘species-being’ or communal essence. The main result of Marx’s study was a lengthy paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on Hegel’s great political treatise The Philosophy of Right. What interested Marx was the application of Feuerbach’s approach to Hegel’s philosophy, which Feuerbach regarded as the last bulwark of theology, in that Hegel started from the ideal rather than the real. Feuerbach wrote: ‘The true relationship of thought to being is this: being is the subject, thought the

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predicate. Thought arises from being—being does not arise from thought.’ In convoluted and often obscure language, Marx attempted to apply this view to Hegel’s discussion of such topics as democracy, bureaucracy, and the extension of the suffrage. Marx can be seen here as groping towards a description of how radical democratic change might reform society by bringing back to it the social essence of humans as communal beings—an essence that had been stolen from them and transferred to the sphere of political constitutions that had no effect on their real life. In October 1843 Marx moved to Paris which was then a magnet for all politically minded intellectuals. He quickly published two lengthy articles which were as incisively brilliant as his unpublished commentary on Hegel had been obscure. In the first, entitled On the Jewish Question, he took issue with his former mentor Bruno Bauer. For Marx, Jewish emancipation, and indeed emancipation in general, would not be achieved simply by the extension of political rights as proclaimed in the French and American revolutionary constitutions. The limitations of political emancipation were shown by the fact that the state could free itself from religion without its citizens being freed. Indeed, the existence of religion was thereby presupposed, as was the existence of private property by its abolition as a qualification for voting. This kind of problem arose because human beings were forced into a dual personality: the communal, social aspect of their nature only existed, in an unreal form, at the level of constitutions and talk of ‘citizenship’, whereas in their real everyday life they were isolated individuals involved in the economic war of all against all. Talk of rights simply led people to see in others not the realization but the limitation of their own freedom. Marx’s second article was intended as a lengthy preface to his meditation on Hegel’s political philosophy. In it he identified the agent of the process of human emancipation that he had described in his first article. Marx began with his famous epigrams on religion as the opium of the people, flowers on the chain, etc. He then proclaimed Germany’s backwardness as an opportunity to leap over those countries which had merely had a bourgeois revolution—France and Britain—to head the revolutionary league. This would be possible by uniting German radical philosophy with the emerging class which had a universal destiny in that it represented the interests of the whole of society rather than simply a section of it. This class was the proletariat, with whose spokesmen and organizations Marx had begun to become acquainted in Paris. Of the proletariat he wrote that it was a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only to a human one. It is, finally, a sphere that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating these other spheres themselves. In a word, it is the complete loss of humanity and thus can only recover itself by a complete redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat . . .

This class, therefore, would the agent capable of bringing in an era of universal human emancipation. But the proletariat was produced by the economic organization of society and, in the

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summer of 1844, Marx devoted himself to a serious study of what was to be his fundamental interest—political economy. The manuscripts which resulted—known alternatively as the Paris Manuscripts, the 1844 Manuscripts, or the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—are the most important of Marx’s early writings. They contain a radical critique of capitalism based partly on Engels’s pioneering articles on political economy, partly on the anti-industrial ideas of such German Romantics as Schiller, and partly on Feuerbach’s humanism. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts contain three main sections. In the first, Marx analysed the phenomenon that he considered to be at the root of the capitalist system and that he called alienated labour. Alienated labour had four aspects to it. First, the workers were related to the product of their labour as to an alien object; it stood over and above them, opposed to them with a power independent of the producers. Second, the workers became alienated from themselves in the very act of production; for workers did not view their work as part of their real life and did not feel at home in it. Third, peoples’ ‘species-life’, their social essence, was taken away from them in their work which did not represent the harmonious efforts of people as ‘species-beings’. Fourth, individuals found themselves alienated from other individuals. The positive potential of labour was sketched out in Marx’s contemporaneous notes on James Mill and elaborated in the second section of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on communism. Here Marx criticized his French predecessors and various ‘crude’ versions of communism (sometimes strikingly like the later Stalinism), and described his own—sometimes almost mystical—vision of a communist society. In the third and final section, Marx mediated on his ambivalence towards Hegel. On the one hand, Hegel had rightly seen human beings as their own creation, labour as their central activity, and the necessity for human beings to reclaim as their own the products of this activity. But, on the other hand, Hegel remained an idealist and wrote as though transcendence of alienation could all happen in the mind. Marx, by contrast, defined his position as a consistent naturalism or humanism which avoided both idealism and crude materialism. But however insightful (and influential when published and widely translated more than 100 years later) Marx’s critique of capitalism proved to be, it still remained rather in the air. The next few years would be devoted to uncovering the historical and economic conditions which would, he claimed, allow communism to become a reality.

1 Letter to his Father On leaving school Marx spent a year at the provincial University of Bonn, where he thoroughly absorbed the prevalent Romantic mood before moving to the University of Berlin. Seventeen letters from his father to Marx have been preserved, but this is the only one from Marx in reply. It was written on 10 November 1837, when Marx was nineteen years old, after he had spent just over a year in the Law Faculty at Berlin. Usually Marx’s letters to his father were short, so the length of this one indicates its importance. The letter recounts the evolution of his ideas during the previous year and criticizes them from his newly won Hegelian standpoint, the Hegelian philosophy being the one then dominant in Berlin. What attracted Marx to Hegel, after the romanticism of his year at Bonn and his brief enthusiasm for the idealism of Kant and Fichte, was the bridge he conceived Hegel to have built between what is and what ought to be. In this letter he touches on many of the themes that were to run right through his work: historical consciousness, for example, an attempt to situate himself within an evolving process, and the desire, following Hegel, to find the identity of the real and the rational.

Dear Father, There are moments in one’s life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction. In such a period of transition we feel ourselves compelled to consider the past and present with the eagle eye of thought in order to come to a realization of our actual position. Yes, History itself likes this sort of stock-taking and introspection which often make it look as though it were going backwards or standing still, whereas it is merely throwing itself into an armchair to understand itself and comprehend intellectually its own mental processes. An individual, however, becomes lyrical at such moments, for every change is partly a swansong, partly an overture, to a new epic that is trying to find a form in brilliant colours that are not yet distinct. Yet we want to erect a memorial to our past experiences so that they may find again in our emotions the place that they have lost in our actions; and there could be no more sacred home for this memorial than the heart of parents, the mildest of judges, the most intimate sympathizers, a sun of love whose fire warms the inmost centre of our endeavours. How better could much that is disgraceful and blameworthy find forgiveness and excuse than when it appears as the result of an essentially

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necessary state of affairs, how else could the often untoward fall of chance and the mind’s errors escape being thought the products of a deformed spirit? So now that I am casting an eye back over the events of the year that I have lived here and thus answering, my dear father, your most precious letter from Ems, allow me to consider my situation (as I do life in general) as the result of an intellectual activity that finds expression on all sides—in science, art, and personal matters. When I left you, a new world had just begun to exist for me, the world of love that was at first drunk with its own desire and hopeless. Even the journey to Berlin, which would otherwise have charmed me completely, excited me to an admiration of nature, and inflamed me with a zest for life, left me cold and even, surprisingly, depressed me; for the rocks that I saw were no rougher, no harsher than the emotions of my soul, the broad cities no more full of life than my blood, the tables of the inns no more overladen and indigestible than the stocks of fantasies that I carried with me, nor, finally, was any work of art as beautiful as Jenny. When I arrived in Berlin I broke off all the connections that I had hitherto contracted, made rare and reluctant visits, and tried to steep myself in science and art. Considering my state of mind then it was inevitable that lyric poetry should be my first project and certainly the pleasantest and readiest to hand. But my attitude and all my previous development made it purely idealistic. My heaven and art became a Beyond as distant as my love. Everything real began to dissolve and thus lose its finiteness, I attacked the present, feeling was expressed without moderation or form, nothing was natural, everything built of moonshine; I believed in a complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, and rhetorical reflections occupied the place of poetic thoughts, though there was perhaps also a certain warmth of emotion and desire for exuberance. These are the characteristics of all the poems of the first three volumes that Jenny received from me. The whole scope of a longing that sees no limits is expressed in many forms and broadens poetry out. But poetry was to be, and had to be, only a sideline; I had to study jurisprudence and felt above all impelled to struggle with philosophy. Both were so interconnected that I examined Heineccius, Thibaut, and the sources completely uncritically like a schoolboy, and thus translated the first two books of Pandects into German and at the same time tried to elaborate a philosophy that would cover the whole field of law. As introduction I prefixed a few metaphysical propositions and continued this unhappy opus as far as public law, a work of almost three hundred pages. Here the same opposition of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ which is the hallmark of idealism was the dominating and very destructive feature and engendered the following hopelessly mistaken division of the subject-matter: firstly came what I

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had so graciously christened the metaphysics of law, i.e. first principles, reflections, definitions distinct from all actual law and every actual form of law—just as you find in Fichte only here more modern and with less substance. This meant that from the outset the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism where one circles round a subject, reasoning back and forth, without letting it unfold its own rich and living content, prevented any grasp of the truth. The mathematician constructs and proves the triangle, but it remains a pure abstraction in space and does not develop any further; you have to put it beside something else and then it takes up other positions and it is the juxtaposition of these different things that gives it different relationships and truths. Whereas in the practical expression of the living world of ideas in which law, the state, nature, and the whole of philosophy consist, the object itself must be studied in its own development, arbitrary divisions must not be introduced, and it is the ratio of the object itself which must develop out of its inner contradictions and find unity within itself. The second part consisted of the philosophy of law, i.e. in accordance with the opinion I held at that time, a discussion of the development of ideas in positive Roman law, as though the development of the ideas of positive law (I don’t mean in its purely finite terms) could ever be anything different from the formation of the concept of law which the first part should already have dealt with! Moreover, I had further divided this section into formal and material legal doctrine, the first of which was to describe the pure form of the system in its consistent development, its divisions and range, while the second was to describe the self-incarnation of the form in its content. This was an error that I held in common with Herr v. Savigny, as I found out later in his learned work on property, only with the difference that he calls the formal definition of the idea ‘the finding of the place that such and such a doctrine occupies in the (fictional) Roman system’, and material ‘the doctrine of the positive content that the Romans included in a concept thus defined’, whereas I meant by form the necessary structure of the expressions of an idea and by matter the necessary quality of these expressions. The fault here was that I believed that the one could and must develop itself independently of the other and thus I did not obtain a true form but merely a desk into whose drawers I proceeded to pour sand . . . At the same time I translated Tacitus’s Germania and Ovid’s Tristia and began to learn English and Italian on my own, i.e. out of grammars, though I have not yet got anywhere with them. I also read Kelin’s Criminal Law and his Annals and all the latest literature, though this latter only as a sideline. At the end of the term I again sought the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs and in the last volume that I sent you the forced humour of Scorpion and

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Felix and the misconceived fantastic drama of Oulanem are shot through with idealism which finally changes completely, dissolving into purely formal art which has no objects to inspire it and no exciting progress of ideas. And yet these last poems were the only ones in which suddenly, as though at the touch of a magic wand—oh! the touch was at first shattering—the kingdom of true poetry glittered opposite me like a distant fairy palace and all my creations dissolved into nothingness. With these various occupations I had been forced during the first term to sit up through many nights, to fight through many a struggle and endure much excitement from within and without, and yet was not much richer at the end in spite of having deserted nature, art, and the world, and spurned friends. These thoughts were registered by my body and a doctor advised me to go to the country, and so for the first time I went through the whole of the long city and out of the gate to Stralow. I did not suspect that there my anaemic and languishing body would mature and acquire a robust strength. A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed. I left behind the idealism which, by the way, I had nourished with that of Kant and Fichte, and came to seek the idea in the real itself. If the gods had before dwelt above the earth, they had now become its centre. I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, but I did not care for its grotesque and rocky melody. Once again I wanted to dive off into the sea, but with the firm intention of finding the nature of the mind as necessary, concrete, and firmly established as that of physical nature, for I wanted to stop fencing and bring the pure pearls up to the sunlight. I wrote a dialogue of about twenty-four pages entitled ‘Cleanthes or the starting-point and necessary progress of philosophy’. Here art and science, which had become completely separate, regained to some extent their unity, and I vigorously set about the job itself, a philosophical and dialectical development of the divinity as it manifests itself as idea-in-itself, religion, nature, and history. My last sentence was the beginning of Hegel’s system, and this work for whose sake I had made some acquaintance with natural science, Schelling, and history, which had caused me endless headaches and is written in so confused a manner (for it had actually to be a new logic) that I can now scarcely think myself back into it, this my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy. My vexation prevented me from thinking at all for several days and I ran like a madman around the garden beside the dirty waters of the Spree ‘which washes souls and makes weak tea’. I even went on a hunting party with my landlord and rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every old tramp I saw. Soon afterwards I undertook only positive studies, the study of ownership by Savigny, Feuerbach and Grohlmann’s Criminal Law, the De Verhorum Significatione of Cramer, Wenning-Ingenheim’s System of Pandects, Mühlenbruch’s

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Doctrina Pandectarum, which I am still working through, and finally a few titles from Lauterbach, Civil Trials and above all Canon Law, the first part of which—the Concordia discordantium Canonum of Gratian—I have read and excerpted almost entirely in the corpus, as also the supplement Lancelotti’s Institutiones. Then I translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric in part, read the De Argumentis Scientiarum of the famous Baco of Verulam, was very busy with Reimarus whose book On the Instincts of Animals I followed with delight, and also came across German law, though principally only in so far as I went through the capitularies of the Frankish kings and the letters that the Popes addressed to them. My vexation at Jenny’s illness, my fruitless and failed intellectual endeavours, and my consuming anger at having to make my idol a view that I hated, made me ill, as I have already written to you, dear father. When I recovered I burnt all my poems and sketches for novels, etc., fancying that I could be completely free from them, which has at least not yet been disproved. During my illness I had got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples. Through several gatherings with friends in Stralow I obtained entrance into a graduate club among whose members were several university lecturers and the most intimate of my Berlin friends, Dr. Rutenberg. In the discussions here many contradictory views appeared and I attached myself ever more closely to the current philosophy that I had thought to escape. . . In the hope that by and by the clouds that surround our family will retreat and that I may be allowed to suffer and weep with you and perhaps give you tangible proofs of the deep and sincere sympathy and immeasurable love that I can often only express so badly; in the hope, too, that you, dearly beloved father, will take into consideration the often very disordered state of my mind, and forgive where my heart has seemed to err, overcome by my fighting spirit, and that you will soon be completely restored to health so that I may myself press you to my heart and tell you all. Your ever loving son Karl Forgive, dear father, the illegible handwriting and bad style; it is almost four o’clock. The candle is burnt right down and my eyes are sore; a real anxiety has come over me and I will not be able to quieten the ghosts I have roused until I am near you again. Please give my love to dear, wonderful Jenny. I have already read her letter twelve times and I still find new delights. It is in every particular, including that of style, the most beautiful letter that I can imagine written by a woman.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY ORIGINAL

MEGA I (i) 2, pp. 213–21. PRESENT TRANSLATION

K. Marx, The Early Texts, ed. D. McLellan, Oxford, 1971, pp. 1–10. OTHER TRANSLATIONS

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat, New York, 1967, pp. 40–50. W. Glen-Doepel, in B. Delfgaauw, The Young Marx, London, 1967, pp. 135–47. K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, New York, 1975, Vol. 1, pp. 10–21. COMMENTARIES

W. Johnston, ‘Marx’s Verses of 1836–7’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Apr. 1967. D. McLellan, Marx before Marxism, Harmondsworth, 1972, pp. 66 ff. F. Mehring, Karl Marx, London, 1936, pp. 10–12. S. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, New York, 1978, Ch. 4.

2 Doctoral Thesis In 1839, Marx, still in Berlin, began writing a doctoral thesis which would help him to get a job as a university lecturer. Pressure from his friend Bruno Bauer, quarrels with his family, his engagement to Jenny v. Westphalen and the consequent need to obtain a job quickly, made Marx present his thesis in a hurry and he obtained his degree in absentia from the University of Jena in April 1841. The title of the thesis was ‘The Difference between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ Philosophy of Nature’. Many of Marx’s Young Hegelian colleagues were interested in this post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy, both because it seemed to them to present the same problems as confronted post-Hegelian philosophy and also because it was the intellectual climate in which Christianity started—and religion was a constant subject of debate among the Young Hegelians. The body of Marx’s thesis is of little interest: it consists of a criticism of those who equated the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus and a catalogue of the differences between these philosophies. Marx attacked Democritus’ mechanistic determinism and praised Epicurus for introducing the idea of spontaneity into the movement of the atoms. The following extracts come from the far more interesting digressions interspersed between the notes and references and no doubt intended to be incorporated into a revised and enlarged version of the thesis for publication. Marx’s starting-point in these digressions is Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he intended to revise and push further. The extracts develop the problem raised by Marx’s letter to his father: what is the philosopher’s task after the seductive solution to the problem of the relationship of the real to the rational as offered by Hegel? Marx’s answer, couched in rather obscure and abstract language, is that Hegel has to be radically rethought and put on a new basis, a basis that will involve the disappearance of philosophy at the same time as its realization. For the function of philosophy is to criticize existing reality and make the gap between the ideal and the real intolerable. Marx also introduces here the notion of praxis, though as yet in an idealistic form.

Preface The form of this treatise would have been both more strictly scientific and also less pedantic in many of its developments had it not originally been intended to be a doctoral thesis. Extrinsic reasons have none the less persuaded me to have it printed in this form. Moreover, I think that I have here solved a

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problem in the history of Greek philosophy that has hitherto remained a mystery. Specialists know that for the subject of this treatise there are no previous works that are at all useful. The blatherings of Cicero and Plutarch have been reproduced right up to the present time. Gassendi’s exposition, which freed Epicurus from the interdict which the Church fathers and the Middle Ages, the period of unreason incarnate, had laid on him, is only an interesting stage. He tries to reconcile his Catholic conscience with his pagan science and Epicurus with the Church, which of course was a waste of effort. It is as though one wanted to put a Christian nun’s habit on the serenely blooming body of a Greek Laïs. Gassendi has to learn too much philosophy from Epicurus for him to be in a position to teach us much about it. This treatise should be considered as only the preliminary to a larger work in which I will describe in detail the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptic philosophies in their relationship to the whole of Greek speculation. The deficiencies in the form and so on of the present treatise will then disappear . . . Hegel has, it is true, by and large correctly described the general characteristics of these systems—but the admirably broad and bold plan of his history of philosophy, which really gave birth to the history of philosophy as a subject, made it impossible to enter into details; and also his conception of what he called ‘speculative par excellence’ prevented this giant of a thinker from recognizing the great importance that these systems have for the history of Greek philosophy and the Greek mind in general. These systems are the key to the true history of Greek philosophy . . . The reason for adding a critique of Plutarch’s polemic against Epicurus’ theology as an appendix was that this polemic does not stand in isolation, but represents a genre in that it strikingly conveys the attitude of the theological mind to philosophy. My critique does not discuss, among other things, how completely false Plutarch’s whole approach is when he calls philosophy before the bar of religion. On this subject, let a passage from David Hume suffice instead of any argument: It is certainly a sort of insult for philosophy whose sovereign views should be recognized on all sides, when she is compelled on every occasion to defend herself because of her consequences and justify herself in the eyes of every art and science that is offended by her. One is put in mind of a king who is accused of high treason against his own subjects.

As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: ‘α$σεβ—v δε οÍχ À τοÌv τéν πολλéν θεÌv α$ναιρéν, α$λλ Á τα`v τéν πολλéν δ¾ζωv

the early writings 1837–1844

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θεο´v προσα´πτων’. (The profane man is not the one who destroys the gods of the multitude but the one who foists the multitude’s doctrines onto the gods.) Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus—‘α