The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx
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« on: June 06, 2011, 03:20:15 PM »

Given the recent excitement over the President's supposed 'Marxism', I thought it would be enlightening to go through each of Marx's books and pick out the core themes of each work and try to contextualize them. All of Marx's works are in the public domain, and I am indebted to the Marxist Internet Archives for access to all of his books. I will probably self-publish the results of this survey (at a loss), and will be happy to mail the completed book to anyone looking to arrive at a greater understanding of Marxism.

This should not be read as an endorsement of Marx. While I think he said many things worth saying, I question the approach he took in appropriating Hegelianism for himself. But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we render an entire subsection of philosophy, and especially one so important to recent history, off-limits.

My intent is to cover all of the major works, which, to my mind, constitute the following:

The Young Marx (this is more a collection of early articles and essays written while Marx was still labouring under Hegelian Idealism)
The Holy Family
The German Ideology
The Poverty of Philosophy
Grundrisse
Writings on the U.S. Civil War

Capital (all three volumes)

Some might object to my leaving out the Eighteenth Brumaire, but I'm not familiar enough with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France to comment on many of the references there. I will attempt to distinguish Marx the historian from Marx the political philosopher; while it's virtually impossible to completely divorce the two in Marx's thought, I will make an effort to limit the necessity of the former to my elucidation of the latter.

Feel free to stop and ask me questions as I continue this thread. I'll probably finish one book a week until I hit Grundrisse, which will take some time to slough through.
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« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2011, 03:29:05 PM »

I.

The Young Marx, Part I - Marx The Liberal




http://www.archive.org/details/ThisGodlessCommunism

The popular mythology surrounding Karl Marx in the post-Cold War world has him springing fully formed from the heads of rationalist thinkers like Hegel and Feuerbach, and being even as a young boy some sort of opponent of organized religion. A brief examination of his earliest writings, however, will demonstrate that in his youth Marx inherited much of the vaguely deist terminology then in favor with the Prussian petit-bourgeois from which he was born. The earliest poem attributed to him in the collection I linked above, 1835's Reflections Of A Young Man On The Choice Of A Profession, demonstrates as much, as well as his early pre-occupation with place of rank in society:

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Marx's deism left him with his college years, but his youthful rationalism remained with him for much of his early career, when, as a young liberal (in the traditional, European sense), he came to butt heads with a censorious regime endorsed by the Prussian government against its newspapers that prohibited explicitly anti-monarchical or pro-democratic sentiments from appearing therein. Writing in the Rheinische Zeitung on the 5th of May 1842, Marx, disguised simply as "a Rhinelander", lambasted the government's policy by arguing thusly:

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Thus we see that Marx's earliest political allegiance was not to socialism - as it was then called, for only with Marx's maturity was 'socialism' distinguished from 'Communism' or 'Diggerism' or 'leveling' - but with the same Enlightenment -era liberalism that flourished at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Three days later Marx would continue his assault upon the Prussian newspaper policy, and by doing so re-affirm his allegiance to the liberal tradition:

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And so we see that Marx's portrayal as an impertinent, impious brat above is little more than a caricature. While Marx was given over to radical politics from the earliest days of his intellectual maturity, that 'radicalism' shared little more than a historical connection to the philosophy Marx was later to lend his name to - in fact, Marx's earliest liberalism is little distinguishable from the sort of 'classical liberalism' now in fashion among certain segments of the American voting populace, except that it was far more radical in its day, and so open in its discussion of class distinctions.

Tracing the development of Marx the liberal humanist to Marx the 'Marxist' is nearly an impossible task. What the comic above does get right is that the transition began to take root around the time of Marx's introduction to Professor George W.F. Hegel at the University of Berlin. However, what the comic portrays as an immediate conversion to Hegelianism, Marx himself represents as an epistemological break, first between Marx and Enlightenment rationalism, then between Marx and Hegel himself. Marx in fact loathed Hegel's philosophy, saying of it that

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« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2011, 03:36:41 PM »

The Young Marx, Part II - Marx The Hegelian



Marx first became acquainted with the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel while attending classes on philosophy at the University of Berlin in the late 1830s, and found himself fascinated - if disturbed - by the man whose then-novel approach to the philosophy of history had already deeply divided the campus into warring factions of intellectuals. Hegel, whom his fellow professor Arthur Schopenhauer derided as "a commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive and ignorant charlatan, who with unparalleled effrontery compiled a system of crazy nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his mercenary followers", had revived and modified the ancient Greek practice of dialectics: that is, philosophy as process, in which Truth is derived from the reconciliation of contradictory propositions. While Hegel was the first to systematize the concept of the dialectic into an overarching framework, the basic concept stretches as far back as Heraclitus of Ephesus, who wrote five hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Hegel explains the basic concept of his philosophy thusly in the introduction to his Lectures on the subject, which can be found here:

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While Hegel is notorious for being a convoluted writer, the basic elements of his philosophy are not hard at all to grasp: the 'Spirit' of a people (the Geist) realizes itself through transformations in its temporal place (its Zeit - combined, one has the now-commonplace phrase Geist) in its process of constant self-realization through the dialectical process. Hegel's example of the Englishman who says "(he is the man) who navigate(s) the ocean, and ha(s) the commerce of the world" is a prime example: for Hegel, the English Spirit is determined by its geographical location as the product of an island nation; the contradictions which arise from this - easy access to the ocean, but poor access to mainland goods - thus resolve themselves in the establishment of the maritime English empire. In other words, life is the intersection of time and circumstance.

The comic I reference above implies that, because Hegel denied the concept of free will, he consequentially denied God; the truth is quite the opposite. Hegel was quite religious, ascribing all of human society to the Ideal of providence. Thus, for Hegel, the dialectical resolution of the contradictions of society was, in effect, society being 'thought' into being by the Creator:

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It was this theological implication of the Hegelian philosophy that cleaved Hegel's devotees into two nebulous factions, today usually (and possibly wrongly) identified by the monikers of 'Left' and 'Right' Hegelians. Hegel himself was a political conservative who strongly supported German unification under the kaiser and who viewed the Kaiserreich as the highest achievement of the Deutsch Geist. Many of his students, however, viewed the 'idealistic' trend of Hegel's thought as nonsense, while holding nevertheless to the view that dialectics itself could go a long way to explaining the nature of man.

The shining star of these 'Left' Hegelians was Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. A student of anthropology, Feuerbach was an atheist who nevertheless accepted Hegel's dialectic as a satisfactory explanation of man and his society, while arguing that it implicitly undermined the traditional role of Christianity within it. Nevertheless, Feuerbach embraced the Christian ethos, explaining in the appendix of his Essence of Christianity that

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For Feuerbach, then, ever the dialectician, the value of religion was in its role as the summit of a dialectical triad between man-as-individual and humanity at large: in God, and only in God, could man find harmony between the natural demands of a self-propagating species and the desires of an individual to escape the blighted role of living organism. Here Feuerbach stopped: it was enough for him to endorse the trappings of religion and religious morality.

It was not, however, enough for Marx, who found little to love in Feuerbach's idealism. Marx's first major work, Theses on Feuerbach, while continuing in the Hegelian tradition from which he would soon break, undertook to totally level Feuerbach's bio-religious conception of dialectics and place it on a more materialist footing. The entire work may be read here.

The essence of Marx's objection to Feuerbach is as follows:

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It was in this heady atmosphere that Marx would begin his life-long struggle with the dialectical approach in philosophy.
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« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2011, 03:42:22 PM »

The Young Marx, Part III - Marx the Dialectician and the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Part I




Marx's rupture with Feuerbach was not unprecedented. A fellow 'Young' or 'Left' Hegelian by the name of Johann Kaspar Schmidt (known to posterity as 'Max Stirner') had long been on the warpath against Feuerbach's 'secular Christianity'; unlike Marx, however, he would find respite from it not in economic collectivism, but in the most radical elucidation of individualism to have ever been handed to us by philosophy. Marx's reaction to Stirner will be dealt with later, however; for the moment, suffice it to say that the 'Hegelian' circle at the University of Berlin had been permanently ruptured, with large amounts of the student body lifting the dialectic method of analysis from Hegel while completely rejecting his pan-Germanic, Statist conclusions.

Marx completed his break with Hegel in 1843 by penning a tome called A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In it Marx attempted a subtle maneuver: to refute by means of Hegel's own dialectical process Hegelian philosophy itself. Marx justified this break by ascribing to Hegel blame for Prussian aspirations to war glory and nationalism disguised as pan-Germanism. From the Introduction to that work:

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With these rather bombastic declarations at the opening of the book, Marx makes clear a theme which both he and many other Hegelian writers would start to flesh out: Hegel himself was cast as a Hegelian villain in his own world-historical play; by co-opting Hegel's phrases like "self-estrangement" and "negation" and applying them to Hegel's nationalistic dialectic, the Left Hegelians hoped to show that pan-Germanism, and Prussianism more generally were, rather than the hopeful expressions of the Spirit of a people realized in Time, instead had become the chains with which those people were enslaved.

Marx opens his book (not all of which remains to us today) by quoting from the Third Book of Hegel's Philosophy of Right on the proper place of the State:

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The foregoing paragraph advises us that concrete freedom consists in the identity (as it is supposed to be, two-sided) of the system of particular interest (the family and civil society) with the system of general interest (the state). The relation of these spheres must now be determined more precisely.

From one point of view the state is contrasted with the spheres of family and civil society as an external necessity, an authority, relative to which the laws and interests of family and civil society are subordinate and dependent. That the state, in contrast with the family and civil society, is an external necessity was implied partly in the category of ‘transition’ (Übergangs) and partly in the conscious relationship of the family and civil society to the state. Further, subordination under the state corresponds perfectly with the relation of external necessity. But what Hegel understands by ‘dependence’ is shown by the following sentence from the Remark to this paragraph:

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Thus Hegel is speaking here of internal dependence, or the essential determination of private rights, etc., by the state. At the same time, however, he subsumes this dependence under the relationship of external necessity and opposes it, as another aspect, to that relationship wherein family and civil society relate to the state as to their immanent end.

‘External necessity’ can only be understood to mean that the laws and interests of the family and civil society must give way in case of collision with the laws and interests of the state, that they are subordinate to it, that their existence is dependent on it, or again that its will and its law appear to their will and their laws as a necessity![/quote]

In this Marx criticizes Hegel on grounds which may surprise a reader familiar only with the 'Big-Brother' concept of Marxism omnipresent in modern society: on the grounds that Hegel seeks to make individuals subservient to - and their rights dependent upon - the State. We shall later learn of Marx's ambivalence towards the government in more detail; suffice it to say that at least in this period of his life he identified what would today be dismissed as "big-government politics" with autocratic conservatism.


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« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2011, 03:46:41 PM »

Marx continues in this vein:

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Marx here hits upon something which scores of later readers of Hegel have often overlooked: the rather arbitrary assumption that the Geist of the German peoples ought to be realized in the form of a Reich, or, indeed, a "German government" whatsoever. Hegel does this, Marx claims, by a trick of linguistic sophistry: by identifying the subject 'people' with the predicate 'Germanic' in his discussion of the German dialectic - as if the dialectic were limited to mere discussions of nationalities.

Marx further assails Hegel's statism by calling into question his views on the related issues of constitutionalism and monarchy. The first quotes are Hegel's, the second Marx's:

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Thus the constitution is rational in so far as its moments can be reduced to abstract logical moments. The state has to differentiate and determine its activity not in accordance with its specific nature, but in accordance with the nature of the Concept, which is the mystified mobile of abstract thought. The reason of the constitution is thus abstract logic and not the concept of the state. In place of the concept of the constitution we get the constitution of the Concept. Thought is not conformed to the nature of the state, but the state to a ready made system of thought.[/quote]

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All the first part of this paragraph says is that both the universality of the constitution and the laws and counsel, or the reference of the particular to the universal, are the crown. The crown does not stand outside the universality of the constitution and the laws once the crown is understood to be the crown of the (constitutional) monarch.

What Hegel really wants, however, is nothing other than that the universality of the constitution and the laws is the crown, the sovereignty of the state. So it is wrong to make the crown the subject and, inasmuch as the power of the sovereign can also be understood by the crown, to make it appear as if the sovereign, were the master and subject of this moment. Let us first turn to what Hegel declares to be the distinctive principle of the power of the crown as such, and we find that it is 'the moment of ultimate decision, as the self-determination to which everything else reverts and from which everything else derives the beginning of its actuality', in other words this 'absolute self-determination'.

Here Hegel is really saying that the actual, i.e., individual will is the power of the crown. § 12 says it this way:

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In so far as this moment of ultimate decision or absolute self-determination is divorced from the universality of content [i.e., the constitution and laws,] and the particularity of counsel it is actual will as arbitrary choice. In other words: arbitrary choice's the power of the crown, or the power of the crown is arbitrary choice.[/quote]


Here Marx objects to Hegel's conflation of "constitution" and "crown", or monarchy: Hegel does not distinguish between the two, as virtually every nation in the Western world has since the dawn of the nineteenth century, and he certainly does not oppose the two powers, one to the other. In typical Hegelian fashion, however, he holds that the constitution and the crown are inseparable , positing a joint-identity between them which is indivisible. And Marx, true to his fashion, looks to show that this is the opposite of the dialectical mode of thought - that it posits a unity, a totality, where there ought to be conflicting theses.

Marx ends the first part of his attack on Hegel by musing the contradictions between democracy and monarchism in a dialectical manner, defending the former against the latter:

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The Young Marx was highly libertarian.
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« Reply #5 on: June 06, 2011, 03:49:43 PM »

The Young Marx, Part III - Marx the Dialectician and the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Part II

As we have seen, part of Marx's initial break came over Hegel's attempt to weld the dialectical method to the aspirations of the fledgling unification movement in the then-confederated German States, and, through this, to the concept of a Germanic State itself. Marx was perhaps more prescient than many modern commentators who see in Hegel's philosophy of the State an underground that would one day emerge and contribute to the creation of the National Socialist government in Germany.

Marx's issues with his former mentor were, however, much deeper than the temporal concerns of Germany. Indeed, Marx took issue with Hegel's rather enthusiastic construction of Executive (in this context, Imperial) authority altogether. As before, the first quotes are those of Hegel in the Third Book of his Philosophy of Right, the second from Marx's Critique:

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This is the usual interpretation of the executive. The only thing which can be mentioned as original with Hegel is that he coordinates executive, police, and judiciary, where as a rule the administrative and judiciary powers are treated as opposed.

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This is a simple description of the empirical situation in some countries.

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Hegel has not developed the executive. But given this, he has not demonstrated that it is anything more than a function, a determination of the citizen in general. By viewing the particular interests of civil society as such, as interests which lie outside the absolutely universal interest of the state, he has only deduced the executive as a particular, separate power.[/quote]

What Hegel here is arguing for, and what Marx is assailing him for doing, is assuming a broad view - in a very real sense, a modern one comparable to current theories in the United States of a 'unitary executive' - of the powers of a head-of-state. Marx furthers this line of argument henceforth.

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« Reply #6 on: June 06, 2011, 03:54:38 PM »

Marx's basic point of contention in this section is Hegel's championing of the burgeoning Prussian authoritarian State. He extends this critique to Hegel's interpretation of the German civil code, as the following rather lengthy excerpts show. As before, the interior quote comes from Hegel, the exterior from Marx's reaction to it:

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What Hegel says about 'the Executive' does not merit the name of a philosophical development. Most of the paragraphs could be found verbatim in the Prussian Landrecht. Yet the administration proper is the most difficult point of the development.

Because Hegel has already claimed the police and the judiciary to be spheres of civil society, the executive is nothing but the administration, which he develops as the bureaucracy.

First of all, the 'Corporations', as the self-government of civil society, presuppose the bureaucracy. The sole determination arrived at is that the choice of the administrators and their officials, etc., is a mixed choice originating from the members of civil society and ratified by the proper authority (or as Hegel says, 'higher authority').

Over this sphere, for the maintenance of the state's universal interest and of legality, stand holders of the executive power, the executive civil servants and the advisory officials, which converge into the monarch.

A division of labour occurs in the business of the executive. Individuals must prove their capability for executive functions, i.e., they must sit for examinations. The choice of the determinate individual for civil service appointment is the prerogative of the royal authority. The distribution of these functions is given in the nature of the thing. The official function is the duty and the life's work of the civil servants. Accordingly they must be paid by the state. The guarantee against malpractice by the bureaucracy is partly its hierarchy and answerability, and on the other hand the authority of the societies and Corporations; its humaneness is a result partly of direct education in thought and ethical conduct and partly of the size of the state. The civil servants form the greater part of the middle class. The safeguard against its becoming like an aristocracy and tyranny is partly the sovereign at the top and partly Corporation-rights at the bottom. The middle class is the class of education. Voila tout! Hegel gives us an empirical description of the bureaucracy, partly as it actually is, and partly according to the opinion which it has of itself And with that the difficult chapter on 'the Executive' is brought to a close.[/quote]

This requires some parsing, which I will now attempt to do:

Most striking is Marx's comparison to Hegel's conceptualization of executive power as comparable to that found in the Landrecht - this ought to be utterly unsurprising, as, despite his pretensions to having invented a universal system explaining all societies everywhere, Hegel had adopted the attitude of a German patriot.

The Allgemeines Landrecht was the German civil service law established by Frederick II of Prussia in 1794. The Tenth Part of the Second Section of the code describes the role of the Prussian bureaucracy thusly:

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The Landrecht continues in this fashion when laying out the very hierarchical nature of the Prussian civil service. Several such examples are as follows:

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Thus we see that the Prussian executive practiced as sort of collective punishment quite in keeping with the order of rank both they and Hegel embraced. In a roundabout way, by deriding Hegel's views as being first an unhistorical (and consequentially undialectical) expansion of the authoritarian Prussian bureaucracy, he simultaneously overturns Hegel's conception of dialectics while assailing him for substituting German Statism for the truth - an irony an observer a century and a half on can only marvel. It likewise completely falsifies the modern view, in light of the historical circumstances surrounding the establishment and maintenance of the Soviet Union, that Marx was a mere worshiper at the altar of the State. In his earliest years, at least, Marx blended a liberal's distrust of State authority with a class-based conceptualization of that State's constitution.
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« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2011, 03:56:54 PM »

The Young Marx, Part III - Marx the Dialectician and the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Part III

Concluding his tirade against the Hegelian conception of the State as the synthesis of a national dialectic, Marx takes special aim at the concept of a bureaucracy, seeing in it the embodiment of Hegel's thinking on the subject of the government. In what is perhaps the most ironic bit of writing to be found in his youthful output when considered against the bureaucracy-choked experience that was 20th century Marxism, the author here vents his spleen against the civil service:

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What Marx refers to as "the separation of the state and civil society" will become part-and-parcel of his criticism of the capitalist State in future writings, insofar as Marx conceives of it as obscuring the 'real' - economic - activity of a people through the mystification of the political process, positing a division where Marx saw only unity. This theme would be expanded upon in the future by Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci; for the purpose of this writing, however, Marx saw fit to adopt a more humanistic attitude towards the problem of this division, adopting a democratic attitude in contrast to the explicitly authoritarian tendencies of his mentor:

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And so we see that Marx's ultimate break with Hegel came not upon his 'discovery' of materialist dialectics, but rather from and through his opposition to Hegel's conservative-Statist tendencies, which surely offended Marx's then-liberal sensibilities as much as they do those of so many modern readers today. In a very real way, then, one can say that it was Marx's liberalism which, by leading to his break with Hegel, opened space for the rise of Marxism as a self-contained ideological orientation.

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« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2011, 04:24:32 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part I


Having secured his independence from Hegelian thought with the publication of Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx had also turned himself into a sensation in the parlours of Berlin. Never before had anyone sought to refute Hegel's philosophy 'from within'; while other authors had objected to it upon the basis of their own principles - most famously the Danish proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard and the German pedagogue Arthur Schopenhauer - none other had thought to turn to the dialectic method in order to show up the old man.

And so, having demonstrated both his own intellectual fortitude and the ability to apply it with wit, Marx expanded his vision, deciding to take aim at the whole of 'Left' or 'Young' Hegelianism, those disciples of Hegel's who, though they applied his method towards the end of social justice, nevertheless employed the means and language of Hegelian idealism to get there. Before he could undertake this endeavor, however, he moved from Germany to Paris in order to oversee the public of the radical newspaper Die Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (The German-French Chronicles). It was here that he met Friedrich Engels in August of 1844, a man who would forever be indelibly linked (perhaps to the detriment of his own legacy) to Karl Marx.

It wasn't the first time they'd been introduced. Engels, like Marx, had been a student of Hegel's philosophy, his first exposure to it coming from a stay in Berlin while stationed there as an artilleryman in the Austrian Army, and he brought home with him the conviction in favor of social justice that was common among the students of Hegel. Wanting to purge this new influence from Engels' mind, his family sent him to work at a mill in Britain; en route, he'd stopped at a printer's where Marx had been employed. The two had taken up correspondence, and Marx was impressed enough with Engels' understanding of Hegelian philosophy to invite him to work on a book refuting what had then been considered its furthest development.

The Holy Family was the product of their joint venture. Its subtitle, A Critique of Critical Criticism, portends the line of argument it advances and the biting, sarcastic tone it will take; the opening sentence, written by Engels, brings that line into focus:

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This sentence might be seen to represent a symbolic lengthening of the point-of-view of Marx's prior book, the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. If before Marx had seen fit to leave questions of ontology at the door and accept prima facie Hegel's idealistic philosophical structure, only attempting to refute it 'from within', he has here with Engels advanced beyond Hegelian idealism, embracing what will soon come to be a hard materialist vantage point against the 'spiritualistic' conceptions of even the most left-winged of Hegel's disciples.

Engels continues, and clarifies the chief target against which their combined arrows will be notched:

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Bruno Bauer, even more than Feuerbach, had been a leading champion of the Left Hegelian tendency. Bauer had sought to show that Christianity, far from being of primarily Judaic derivation, had in fact been a Judaization of essentially Greek philosophical impulses cloaked in the garb of the 'common faith' and employed to assimilate the first-century Jews into the Empire. Bauer had switched positions on the issue, writing first to defend the narrative of the Gospel account as it was portrayed within the New Testament, only later to commit to a volte face and seek to undermine it through a peculiar adaptation of Hegelian philosophy to philology. This would later influence Bauer's associate, Friedrich Nietzsche, who would continue Bauer's line of Biblical exegesis while ditching the underpinning Hegelian methodology. Bauer had later taken to attacking Hegel from an ironic position, as an ultraconservative looking to 'expose' Hegel's conservatism and piety as a disguise for a revolutionary philosophy - the real purpose of which was to convert conservative Hegelians to a leftist position. These views he published in the General Literary Gazette, at first to Marx's approval, but, as Bauer became increasingly moralistic in his approach and idealistic in his philosophy, Marx became convinced that Bauer still harbored conservative Hegelian tendencies. Exposing these tendencies and advancing a materialistic point-of-view became his and Engels' aim in writing The Holy Family.
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« Reply #9 on: June 06, 2011, 04:28:22 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part II


Marx and Engels divided up the writing of The Holy Family between them, with Engels taking the first three chapters solo, Marx the eighth and ninth (and final) chapters, and the rest being split evenly between them. Engels opens the book proper with a torrent of caustic irony:

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In Mr. Reichardt*, the audacity of style always corresponds to the audacity of the thought. He makes transitions like the following:

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etc. After these samples it is no wonder that Critical Criticism gives us a further "explanation" of a sentence which it itself describes as expressed in "popular language", for it "arms its eyes with organic power to penetrate chaos". And here it must be said that then even "popular language" cannot remain unintelligible to Critical Criticism. It is aware that the way of the writer must necessarily be a crooked one if the individual who sets out on it is not strong enough to make it straight; and therefore it naturally ascribes "mathematical operations" to the author.[/quote]

(* Mr. Reichardt was the publisher of the General Literary Gazette, as well as its sometimes-contributor)

Engels' criticism here is likely not to make much sense with anyone not familiar with the writings of Bruno Bauer and his associates, but at its core is this: that they had made an art of sophistry, using an imaginary language to refer to imaginary ideals which at no point were in contact with the physical reality of the subject of their discussions. Despite the claims of the Left-Hegelians to speak from the throat of the vox populi, Marx and Engels believed them to have become completely detached from the material conditions of those for whom they claimed the right to speak, not the least cause of which was their continued loyalty to Hegel's philosophical idealism. Indeed, Engels closes out the first brief chapter with a statement saying as much:

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In this Engels would anticipate the long-standing conflict which even then was germinating between liberalism and, later, 'social democracy', both so often predicated upon moralistic sentimentality and lofty idealism while remaining utterly divorced from the concerns that concerned them, and Marxism, which attempted to ground itself, as much as possible, upon the class whose interests it aspired to champion.



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« Reply #10 on: June 06, 2011, 04:33:57 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part III


Engels' second chapter continued and extends this line of argumentation further:

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What Engels means here is simple, but in its simplicity stands as resolute a condemnation of idealistic leftism as has ever existed: refusing to acknowledge the facts of historical change as they have occurred, the idealistic (the 'Critic') instead falsifies history in order to fit his picturesque, placid view of man and society. We see this process at work all the time, even today, among American Great Society revanchists who will profess to the heavens that "Lyndon Johnson died for our sins" while pining for a return to the political structures he established, strike-breaking and all.

Engels then continues to point out several very real historical flaws in the arguments of the Left-Hegelians:

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One might today apply Engels' line of argumentation here to the man who sees capitalism in the slave system by which the Pharaohs constructed their pyramids and rationed out wheat to the workers from centralized graineries, or who understands the Roman plantation as standing unchanged through to the Spanish hacienda. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" says the Critic.

Engels' criticism of the Critical conception of history extends past their understanding of the dawn of industrialized society, expanding to include their notions of the recent Corn Laws controversy in England:

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What is here meant is the lack of understanding on the part of the 'Critics' to why the industrial workers of England did not immediately join in with their peasant brothers in pushing for the repeal of the protectionist measures created by the Tory government of 1815. Bauer and his idealists seemed to Engels to be incapable of comprehending the real distinctions between rural agricultural workers and labourers; the Corn Laws drove up industrial wages by keeping food prices high and farmers on their farms. It was only with the proposition of a Ten Hour Bill limiting the amount of time worked in a day that labourers as a class finally joined in for the push for repeal.

It was in their opposition to this latter measure that Engels sees a lingering conservatism on the part of the 'Left'-Hegelians:


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The working class of England happily embraced the Ten Hour Bill, not merely because it would ease their working conditions but also, and even primarily, because it meant for them less exposure to the pressures of cheap foreign trade; conversely, the factory operators and their rentiers opposed it for just this reason. This conservatism quickly becomes the focal point of Engels' extended criticism:

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proves it to workers who drag Anti-Corn-Law agitators down from the platform at every public meeting, who have seen to it that the Anti-Corn-Law League no longer dares to hold a public meeting in any English industrial town, who consider the League to be their only enemy and who, during the debate of the Ten Hour Bill -- as nearly always before in similar matters -- had the support of the Tories.[/quote]

The issue at hand, finally, was the conflation of what Engels calls 'Criticism' of farmer and worker, lumped together under the nomenclature of "the poor" with no distinct interest apart from the amelioration of their poverty. Towards this end they falsified history, exploding the support of the workers for the repeal of the Corn Law beyond all measure and underplaying their desire for a Ten Hour Bill to the point of non-existence. This conservative trend of the 'Leftists' will be the dominant theme of The Holy Family.
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« Reply #11 on: June 06, 2011, 04:38:57 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part IV


The third chapter of The Holy Family begins with a consideration of the political activities of Dr. Karl Nauwerck, a radical teacher at the University of Bonn who was dismissed from his post for disseminating Left-Hegelian concepts to his students, and whose work has gone largely untranslated (and unread) today. Engels begins by mocking the overly-complicated explanation the Left-Hegelians would give to answer Nauwerck's situation:

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The controversy Engels discusses here was the reaction of the Faculty of Philosophy to Nauwerck's dismissal: reliant upon the State for funds, they could not therefore come out and champion his radical cause to all the world, but nevertheless felt it necessary for the sake of professional camaraderie to defend him from the charges resulting in his canning. Implied herein is that the Left-Hegelians inflated not only their own personal importance, but could not even admit to a far simpler explanation for the firing: that Nauwerck's propagandizing ran afoul of the class interests of the proprietors of the University of Bonn. Where the Hegelians saw all manner of idealistic irony in the disputation between a teacher of their own persuasions and the university which rejected those convictions, Engels and Marx saw an ideological squabble between employee and employer. This, of course, might also be seen to serve as a retroactive indictment of the deterministic 'dialectical materialism' of the Soviet Union.

Engels concludes this third chapter, and the last of his own hand, with this insightful paragraphs:

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This is the essence of Engels' critique: that because 'Critical Criticism' is idealistic in nature and "radical" in politics, it often falls into the trap of setting itself at the center of all goings-on; it sees itself as the sun around which the rest of human history revolves. Of course, it is not merely Left-Hegelianism that falls into this trap, but many forms of left-winged discourse, and Marxism through the years has been no exception, often losing sight of the working class in favor of itself as a 'vanguard party' of revolutionaries with force of will enough to compel the workers into revolution. It might be instructive for any Marxist to read these lines and substitute the phrase 'Critical Criticism' with the word 'Leninism', and the whole remains just as intelligible as before.

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« Reply #12 on: June 06, 2011, 04:45:11 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part V


Engels concludes his individual writing in the first section of the fourth chapter of The Holy Family. In it, he briefly considers two works by two different authors, each of whom argued from a broadly 'Left'-Hegelian perspective but in favor of different means: the first an excerpt from a piece by Edgar Bauer, the younger brother of Bruno who at one point had been an associate of Marx's; the second, a singular work by a Frenchwoman, Flora Tristan, titled Union Ouvrière (The Workers Union) and published in 1843, a year before The Holy Family was released. The complete text can be read here. In it, Mrs. Tristan made an effort to link Left-Hegelian philosophy with the burgeoning feminist movement of the day, considering the plight of workers and women to be inseparable. In the course of this noble task, however, she made the mistake of minimizing the importance of the worker in the composition of society, saying that

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Likewise Bruno Bauer made the same mistake, and the first portion of the chapter is dedicated to correcting it. As always, the first quote is from the subject in question (in this case, Edgar Bauer) and the second the author of the piece (Engels):

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Here Criticism achieves a height of abstraction in which it regards only the creations of its own thought and generalities which contradict all reality as "something", indeed as "everything", The worker creates nothing because he creates only "individual", that is, perceptible, palpable, spiritless and un-Critical objects, which are an abomination in the eyes of pure Criticism. Everything that is real and living is un-Critical, of a mass nature, and therefore "nothing"; only the ideal, fantastic creatures of Critical Criticism are "everything".

The worker creates nothing, because his work remains individual, having only his individual needs as its object, that is, because in the present world system the individual interconnected branches of labour are separated from, and even opposed to, one another; in short, because labour is not organized.[/quote]


Far from considering the problem from the standpoint of 'consciousness', as the idealist Bauer seems to, Engels attacks the problem head-on, finding in the worker's inability to create "everything" (or, rather, a world of their own) a symptom of their social disorganization and displacement as a result of economic specialization; rather than a class who acts cohesively in their class interests, they are apt to fight amongst one another more often than they fight with the bosses, seeing the illusion of specialization for the reality of their constitution as a class. Engels furthers this in his assault upon Tristan:

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What Engels has argued against these past few chapters is any vaguely 'left-wing' point which sets the workers and the worker's movement aside in favor of some abstraction into principle, or into morality, or into 'social justice', or into the brotherhood of man: while such things certainly concerned him and it would be a mistake to paint Engels as a mere producerist, he certainly conceived of the working class as the axis about which the wheel of social change rotated, seeing in that class the means by which to establish the conditions necessary for the fulfillment of other concerns. Everything else to him was mere idealism.
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« Reply #13 on: June 06, 2011, 04:51:13 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI


Picking up where Engels left off, Marx continues in the rest of the third chapter of The Holy Family to attack the writings of the younger Bauer brother, Edgar, this time taking offense at a concept of 'love' Bauer inherited in largely unmodified form from the German romantics: the subject of consideration are the novels of Henriette von Paalzow, a German author of radically-oriented romances.

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In order to change love into "Moloch", the devil incarnate, Herr Edgar first changes it into a goddess. When love has become a goddess, i.e., a theological object, it is of course submitted to theological criticism; moreover, it is known that god and the devil are not far apart. Herr Edgar changes love into a "goddess", a, "cruel goddess" at that, by changing man who loves, the love of man, into a man of love; by making "love" a being apart, separate from man and as such independent. By this simple process, by changing the predicate into the subject, all the attributes and manifestations of human nature can be Critically transformed into their negation and into alienations of human nature.[/quote]

Marx's critique might seem pedantic, relying as it does on the semantics by which Bauer chose to express his opinion of 'love', but when understood properly it makes logical sense: Bauer treats love as an object in itself, idealized and completely independent of the man who feels it. Even in their conceptions of basic human emotion, Marx finds the 'Left-Hegelians' to have put the cart before the horse, the idea before the man who holds it.

Marx continues his attack along these lines, looking to demonstrate by semantics the abstractive fallacy he saw in Edgar Bauer:

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Marx's statements on this matter might find an odd bedfellow in Friedrich Nietzsche's criticism of religious love as an abstraction from the real and sensuous world, and, consequentially, as a denial - a devaluation - of that world. In both cases, the romantic and the religious view of 'love', the emotion is held to a higher moral standard than the mind which produces it: the lover is a Platonic shadow of his love. By exploring the ontological structure of love - which requires an object for its subject - Marx hoped to refute this entire line of thinking.
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« Reply #14 on: June 06, 2011, 05:00:24 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI


The subject of the fourth chapter of The Holy Family may come as a surprise to anyone who, for whatever reason, is familiar with the broad history of Karl Marx's life and work but who nevertheless has not read any of his writings - a spirited defense (or, perhaps, appropriation) of the life's work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a man often considered a founding father of anarchism.

Often in popular discourse on the subject Proudhon and Marx are presented as opposites: Proudhon as an anarchic libertine, Marx as a studious family man of sorts. The overt hostility that Marx would show against the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in the International Working Men's Association two decades later is sometimes transferred over to Marx's relations with Proudhon. In point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth - in a letter from Marx to Proudhon dated May 1846, and thus a year and a half after the publication of The Holy Family, Marx closes by telling the recipient of "the deep respect your writings have inspired in me", and, indeed, there's reason to believe that it was Proudhon who first demonstrated to Marx the 'necessity' of abolishing private property.

At any rate, Marx was not the only German follower of the French anarchist: Edgar Bauer, the focus of the bulk of The Holy Family's ire, had undertaken to publish a translation of Proudhon's famous What Is Property? in the pages of his brother's paper. It is towards this translation that Marx directs his animosity:

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As only the works of the Critical point of view possess a character of their own, the Critical characterization necessarily begins by giving a character to Proudhon's work. Mr. Edgar gives this work a character by translating it. He naturally gives it a bad character, for he turns it into an object of "Criticism".[/quote]

The first example of Edgar Bauer's mistranslation that Marx offers is comes from the opening paragraphs of What Is Property?. In it, Proudhon makes the radical assertion that

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Marx finds Bauer's translation of this sentiment rather watered down:

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The characterized Proudhon confines himself to will and opinion, because "good will" and unscientific "opinion" are characteristic attributes of the un-Critical Mass. The characterized Proudhon behaves with the humility that is fitting for the mass and subordinates what he wishes to what he does not wish... A writer who begins his book by saying that he does not wish to give any system of the new, should then tell us what he does wish to give: whether it is a systematised old or an unsystematised new. But does the characterized Proudhon, who does not wish to give any system of the new, wish to give the abolition of privilege? No. He just wishes it.[/quote]

Marx then juxtaposes the "Critically-translated" Proudhon against the man he takes to be the real one:

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The literary implication herein is simple to grasp: Proudhon realized over the course of his studies that mankind had no knowledge of the meaning of the words behind the slogan. Bauer's translation inverts the vague timeline Proudhon established and, by doing so, its very meaning:

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The Left-Hegelian Bauer thereby attempted to turn the decidedly un-Hegelian Proudhon into one of his own, assuming that Proudhon understood 'a priori' that those liberal phrases had no meaning. What's more, Bauer assumes that Proudhon shared with the 'Left'-Hegelians a mode of study that might today be considered "ivory tower", because, taken at face value, it may have seemed impossible to him that a member of the "rabble" might have undertaken a thorough study of political theory. What seems at first hand to be an egalitarian attempt to translate a radical author into a language not his own is exposed as a conservative attempt to water that author down to suit the social tastes of his new audience; what to a layman seems a mere semantical battle over language differences shows itself as important in grasping the essentials of an author's work.

Marx picks out numerous other examples of what he considers to be mistranslations on the part of Bauer in this chapter; several more will be considered in a later section. This 'un-translation' constitutes the bulk of the rest of the book.
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« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2011, 05:09:01 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI, Continued


Marx's assault continues with an attack upon Edgar Bauer's characterization of the following paragraph from the first chapter of Proudhon's What Is Property?, concerning professional politicians and their proposed cures for the ills of society:

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Bauer's translation of the above paragraph is, as given by Marx, partially as follows:

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Marx, on the other hand, renders the quotation thusly:

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Bauer's Proudhon attributes the discord in politics to a 'mere' misunderstand of men among men; Marx's Proudhon, sees the root of political error as resulting of a self-misunderstanding of politicians among themselves, that is, as a class. Bauer gives a relatively conservative tilt to what the quotation actually suggests, and Marx is as eagle-eyed as ever in detecting it and then calling Bauer out on it:

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Even in their interpretation of history - always a central concern to the Left as it then existed - Bauer's Proudhon and Marx's Proudhon are widely divergent. The former states that he

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In this rendition of the phrase, the possibility that what has historically been considered "just and right" may be false would mean nothing more if it were found to be correct than opening the possibility that the applications of those systems of morality in law may be in error. This is quite a conservative approach, maintaining the possibility - as evinced by the use of the word "evidently" - that institutions founded on wrong principles may nevertheless execute the right methods. Marx's Proudhon, however, is far more straightforward:

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With this reading, Marx's Proudhon makes the positive assertion that, if "what is just and right were badly defined", it would consequently be evident that any applications of "just" and "right" must be "bad" - that is, that good institutions cannot come from bad principles. This is, as always, a far more radical rendition than that of the 'radical' Bauer's. But it is not with Bauer's interpretation of Proudhon's interpretation of history that Marx mainly concerns himself, but with his (tenuous) grasp of Proudhon's political philosophy - a subject to be covered in the next section
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« Reply #16 on: June 06, 2011, 05:17:56 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI, Continued



One of the most valuable sections in the whole of The Holy Family is Marx's given interpretation of Proudhon's What Is Property?. Unlike Edgar Bauer, who considered Proudhon an ethicist, Marx treats his writings the way he considered them: as a 'scientific' study of property rights which, when prescription is made at all, at least attempts to ground that prescription on some form of material analysis.

Proudhon himself desired to reconcile the 'moral world' with the 'material world' in his analysis, as he says in the opening chapter of What Is Property?:

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Thus there is in Proudhon's writings no distinction between the 'ought' and the 'is' (or, more properly, the 'ought' and the 'can be'); in Proudhon's volunteerist conception of morality, actors can change the material conditions of their world to bring it more in accord with their moral values.

Marx's focus is on Proudhon's analysis, as he states in its opening paragraphs:

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It is therefore to the material character of What Is Property? that Marx looks for the basis of his analysis, and the first thing Marx notes is Proudhon's rejection of the category of 'private property':

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Proudhon certainly seems to have adopted this 'scientific' mode of discourse for himself, beginning with the second chapter of his book in which he undertakes to examine (I) the legal basis of modern notions of private property (he finds it in the constitution of the Roman Empire) and (II) the implicit distinction, under the law, between 'possession' and 'proprietorship', or between what Proudhon calls, borrowing his terms from the Roman legal system, jus in re and jus ad rem.

Following this discussion of the basis of Proudhon's system of analysis, Marx records what is one of the earliest fully-realized discussions of his critique of 'political economy':

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Proudhon was certainly well-acquainted with what Marx takes to be a (dialectical) contradiction between the object of capitalism and the mode of its operation, and not merely on the basis of contractual (wage) 'freedom', writing that

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For both Proudhon and Marx, the whole of capitalist society (and not merely the relation between wage-labourers and capitalists, as is often assumed) was racked with internal contradictions. One such contradiction they saw was the eagerness with which economists who supported capitalist economics attacked some forms of private property:

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Today we might see reflections of this sort of behavior among liberal 'luminaries' such as Paul Krugman, who lend their services to every conceivable cause under the sun where they conflict with the rights of property - except to the cause of the abolition of property as a whole in itself. Even Ralph Nader, beloved of middle-class liberals as he is, is quick to reaffirm his attachment to private property and to capitalism as a whole: especially to those 'green industries' he champions on the public stage.

Marx continues on this subject:

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We will examine this 'inhuman reality' in greater detail in the next section.
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« Reply #17 on: June 06, 2011, 05:30:17 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI, Continued


Marx continues by criticizing Bauer's construction of Proudhon's philosophy of wealth, beginning with a rather odd circumlocution of Bauer's:

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The tranquillity of knowledge tells us that Proudhon sees in the fact of poverty a contradiction to justice, that is to say, finds it unjustified; yet in the same breath it assures us that this fact becomes for him absolute and justified.[/quote]

Taken at face value, Bauer's misstatement here would mean that Proudhon found "the fact of (misery)... absolute and justified", something that neither Proudhon nor Edgar Bauer himself likely believed. More substantial is Marx's criticism of Bauer's comprehension of political economy. The internal quotation is Edgar Bauer's.

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Criticism, which has hitherto understood nothing of the facts of property and of poverty, uses, "on the other hand", the deed which it has accomplished in its imagination as an argument against Proudhon' s real deed. It unites the two facts in a single one, and having made one out of two, grasps the inner link between the two. Criticism cannot deny that Proudhon, too, is aware of an inner link between the facts of poverty and of property, since because of that very link he abolishes property in order to abolish poverty. Proudhon did even more. He proved in detail how the movement of capital produces poverty. But Critical Criticism does not bother with such trifles. It recognizes that poverty and private property are opposites -- a rather widespread recognition. It makes poverty and wealth a single whole, which it "investigates as such to find the preconditions for its existence" an investigation which is all the more superfluous since it has just made "the whole as such" and therefore its making is in itself the precondition for the existence of this whole.[/quote]

Grasping the distinction Marx draws here between Bauer's understanding of the question of property and Proudhon's is essential for understanding differences between Marxist theories of wealth and those of other left-winged (yet non-Marxist) ideologies. Bauer's tautological understanding of poverty - poverty is the absence of property; property is the presence of wealth - is simplistic, and, if taken to its logical conclusion, leads to mere re-distributive welfare programmes; after all, if poverty can be got rid of by merely transferring property from the 'haves' to the 'have nots', it would make sense to endorse such a policy.

But this neglects an understanding of capitalism as a process, which creates wealth and poverty together. As Marx says later in the chapter:

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No clearer a statement of his dialectical understanding of wealth and capitalism can be found in Marx's early writings, and emphasis ought to be placed on what he takes to be the self-negating aspect of the proletariat: contrary to the popular understanding of Marxism, it is insufficient for the proletariat merely to 'destroy' the bourgeoisie; they must, in turn, destroy themselves and their historically determined composition as a class before their dialectical role in history may be dissolved.

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« Reply #18 on: June 06, 2011, 05:36:42 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI, Continued


This dialectical conception of history has a tremendous implication for any interpretation of Marx's thought. Marx himself seems not to have thought it possible for the destructive activity of the working class to occur before capitalism had fully formed as a global economic system; moreover, he held that it was the activities of capitalism itself that would lead to its own dissolution:

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What this means in 'plain English' is simply that, through capitalism's own activity, the means are created by which capitalism may someday be overcome; a certain on-line file sharing community to which I belong exemplifies this, using computers created and sold for profit to upload media also intended to turn a profit, for no material recompense. This logic may be extended to the whole of society, and to the whole of the economic system upon which that society is founded. If in their haste to mechanize their factories and so obviate the need for wage labour, what have the capitalists done except destroy the social category of 'wage labour' itself?

Marx further clarifies his understanding of 'the proletariat' in the next paragraph:

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Thus, unlike earlier socialist writers, Marx claims not to have based his views upon any romanticized vision of the working classes; he sees them for what they are, in all of their dirty, scruffy glory, not only fallible because of their humanity but especially fallible because of the poor conditions which condition them. It is upon these 'ragamuffins' that he privileges as the spokes upon which the wheel of history will turn. The vaguely left-winged proscriptions of the Left-Hegelians pale in comparison.

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Property and absence of property have received metaphysical consecration as Critical speculative antitheses. That is why only the hand of Critical Criticism can touch them without committing a sacrilege. Capitalists and workers must not interfere in their mutual relationship.[/quote]

Marx's issue with Edgar Bauer here is the latter's typical liberal elitism; what today has become a rallying point of the populist Right was, at one point, a real concern of genuine leftist and people's movements the world over. The liberal academician, haughty in his knowledge, believes the solution to all the world's ills is for those suffering them to 'get like him' - to become a cosmopolitan buffoon whose 'refined' tastes are serviced by a 'refined' capitalism.
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« Reply #19 on: June 06, 2011, 05:42:27 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VI Continued



The liberal is capital's velvet glove, the conservative its gauntleted fist: one is courageous enough to signal his blows to the working class, the other hits below the belt. This is the message Marx relates to us in The Holy Family, and, indeed, his separation from and hostility towards the Left-Hegelians will be a defining theme throughout the course of his career.

The disputation between Karl Marx and Edgar Bauer over the appropriate interpretation of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's political philosophy, which has until now taken on the tones of high-spirited philosophical debate, now resolves itself in Chapter Four in a far more material concern: the nature of paid wage labour under the capitalist system.

Proudhon argues thusly in the third chapter of What Is Property?:

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The essence of Proudhon's argument is so simple that a child could grasp it: through the process of the division of labour, the capitalist class has managed to defraud the working classes of appropriate compensation for its efforts as an amalgamate; where individual workers may be well-compensated, and even over-compensated for the work that they do, as a whole they are grossly underpaid, because unlike the private artesan, the working class works as a whole. Regardless of whether or not one accepts this logic, this is the clearly intended meaning of the paragraph above.

I can find in it no commonalities with Edgar Bauer's interpretation of Proudhon's theory of wages, which Marx hands down to us in this quotation by him:

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What Bauer here suggests is that Proudhon attributes this act of mass defrauding to a basic error in the intellectual thought process of individual workers. Marx - rightly, in this author's opinion - corrects him on the matter:

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In short and in sum, Marx attributes Bauer's errors of translation to a fundamental flaw in his philosophical temperament: idealism. And this temperament has implications on Bauer's proscriptions for society: by finding the fault to lie with the workers and their 'consciousness', rather than with their "industrial masters" and the economic functions thereof, Bauer has implicitly adopted a conservative and conservatizing stance - he blames the workers for their own situation, for their own status in life, and, despite his protestations to the contrary, has therefore conceded to the owning class that they are innocent in the matter.

Marx concludes this fourth chapter of The Holy Family with this argument:

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We who have lived in the early 21st century might, with the benefit of hindsight, see shades of this 'Bauerian' thinking in both the Russian Revolution (as focused as it was on vanguardism and 'class consciousness') and in the 'New Left' phenomenon of the 1960s, which abandoned material reality to conservatism to take a trip into the celestial reaches of the feel-good. Marx's own words might have proven most instructive to these 'Marxists' - had they bothered with them.

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« Reply #20 on: June 06, 2011, 05:54:52 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VII


The fifth and final chapter of The Holy Family marks the end of its authors consideration of Edgar Bauer's interpretation of Proudhon, and embarks instead upon a destruction of the literary and artistic pretenses of the Left-Hegelians, in the form of a response to a review. The subject of that review was Frenchman Joseph Eugéne Sue's inflammatory novel Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris); its reviewer was Zychlin von Zychlinski (writing under the nom de plume Szeliga), then an adjutant in the Prussian military and a long-standing associate of Bruno Bauer. The subject of The Mysteries of Paris - which this author has not read, and therefore must base his opinion of on other reviewers - involves a member of the nobility who has taken leave of his office to live among the common man, a veritable Christ among the desolate. Zychlinski's review is not available to us, and so we must take Marx at his word on its content. I do not at any rate intend to give much space to it, except to select a few choice excerpts from Marx's review of a review which I believe give broader insight into his thought processes at the time of its writing.

The first stems from a statement of Marx's that offers insight into the mind of a reactionary consumed by fears of social 'decadence':

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What would a natural scientist say if one were to prove to him that the bee's cell does not interest him as a bee's cell, that it has no mystery for one who has not studied it, because the bee "feels at home precisely" in the open air and on the flower?... For Parisians in general and even for the Paris police the hide-outs of criminals are such a "mystery" that at this very moment broad light streets are being laid out in the Cité to give the police access to them.[/quote]

Marx's intent with this statement seems two-fold: first, to reinforce the notion that the concerns of social classes should not be romanticized (as any modern criminal will happily admit, the 'criminal mystique', which today takes the form of 'gangstaism' in America and 'chavism' in England, is mostly cultivated intentionally for 'professional' purposes); and, also, that by ceding any credibility to this mystique, Szeliga has unconsciously buttressed the rhetoric by which the policy make their wanton assaults upon the working class, who live and die in the midst of the great cities of the world.

It is not merely on the subject of criminals and criminality that Marx finds Szeliga to be mystified:

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Marx sets out to undermine the philosophically idealist origins of this mystification:

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The process of abstraction which the author attacks here is not limited to Hegelian idealism; this particular fruit tree has far older roots, appearing in modified form, for instance, in Kant's ontological justification for his categorical imperative. If one were so inclined, it could be traced through Christianity directly to neo-Platonism and its falsification of material reality. But it is only beginning with Hegel that the process of abstraction from reality, rather than the results of that abstraction itself, becomes enshrined as a triumph in the intellectual history of humankind.

Marx points out the obvious flaw with this line of thinking in the subsequent paragraph:

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Implicit in Marx's denunciation of abstraction is a philosophical commitment to nominalism, or the conceit that words, concepts, and categorical groupings do not define the objects they reference. But the Hegelian philosophy should not be confused with mere Platonism; they are wiser, and had invented a workaround this particular problem:

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The philosophical system Marx explains here is, in broad strokes, a simplified version of that held by all Hegelians, left and right. As in Plato (they hold) there exists an analogue to a Form, a perfect Idea of any given object; but this Form manifests itself to our senses through a dialectical process which provides for the differentiation and diversification of things into sets or groups. Marx believes this mode of thought to be a form of supreme egoism; perhaps, even, solipsism:

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We will look more at Marx's objection to this line of philosophizing in a future segment.
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Liberté
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« Reply #21 on: June 06, 2011, 06:00:05 PM »

The Holy Family: Karl Marx At The Altar, Part VII, Continued


The final chapter of The Holy Family concludes, as noted, with a critique of von Zychlinski's review of The Mysteries of Paris. Insofar as this constitutes an examination of a literary source, it need not be considered but in brief, which is relieving to this author, as I've not bothered to read it. The focus of this work is on Marx's political philosophy, and only a few more things can be taken on the subject from this chapter.

Most important here is probably Marx's statements on sensuality and sensualism, comparing and contrasting the approach on the subject taken by 'Speculative Philosophy' - that is, again, the vaguely left-winged philosophy in fashion with liberal Hegelians of the age - and Christianity. Marx finds a surprising amount of common ground between the two on the subject, by means of the analysis of a sermon given by a fictional pastor in the work in quesion:

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The parson advises us, after the fashion of speculative theology, to recognise sensuality as our own nature, in order afterwards to be able to dominate it, i.e., to retract recognition of it. True, he wishes to dominate it only when it tries to assert itself at the expense of Reason – will-power and love as opposed to sensuality are only the will-power and love of Reason. The unspeculative Christian also recognises sensuality as long as it does not assert itself at the expense of true reason, i.e., of faith, of true love, i.e., of love of God, of true will-power, i.e., of will in Christ.

The parson immediately betrays his real meaning when he continues:

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The parson hits the nail on the head. To overcome sensuality he must first of all overcome the nerve currents and the quick circulation of the blood.– Herr Szeliga believes in the “narrow” meaning that greater warmth in the body comes from the heat of the blood in the veins; he does not know that warm-blooded animals are so called because the temperature of their blood, apart from slight modifications, always remams at a constant level.– As soon as there is no more nerve current and the blood in the veins is no longer hot, the sinful body, this seat of sensual lust, becomes a corpse and the souls can converse unhindered about “general reason”, “true love”, and “pure morals”.[/quote]

This point might be taken as mere pedantism on Marx's part, digressing as it does from the discussion of the political root and biases of abstractive left-winged philosophy, but it is important to the topic by way of comparison. Just as Eugéne Sue's reverend distinguishes the physiological reactions of a man in heat from the more idealized conception of love, and in the process of doing so devalues the former in favor of the latter - what is natural is in the parson made sinful - so too does the 'speculative philosopher' regard the material activities of individuals and classes as a pale reflection of their idealistic role within speculative philosophy.

This, in so many words, is the 'meaning' of The Holy Family: by idealizing and abstracting the lower classes they claim to champion, non-materialist leftists often find themselves in the service of the forces they nominally oppose. This critique stands at the heart of the next book we will consider, The German Ideology.
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« Reply #22 on: June 06, 2011, 06:02:23 PM »

Two down, five to go. I'll start in on The German Ideology sometime next week. Until then, I'm here to take any questions about Marx you may have or complains with my interpretation of him you might dream up.
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