PART I
The Early Marx
Marx on the History of His Opinions
This is the preface to Marx's book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859 - The pa**age setting forth the materialist conception of history-one of the few general statements of the theory that Marx gave in his middle and later years-is the locus cla**icus of historical materialism. But the preface is also important as an account by Marx himself of the formative period of Marxism. As such it forms an appropriate introduction to the writings of 1837-1846 gathered here in Part I. The "criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy" which he mentions in the third-to-last paragraph is a reference to his work. The German Ideology, written jointly with Engels.
* * * I am omitting a general introduction which I had jotted down because on closer reflection any anticipation of results still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend from the particular to the general. A few indications concerning the course of my own politico-economic studies may, on the other hand, appear in place here. I was taking up law, which discipline, however, I only pursued as a subordinate subject along with philosophy and history. In the year 1842-44, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung1, I experienced for the first time the embarra**ment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests. The proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag on thefts of wood and parcelling of landed property, the official polemic which Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, opened against the Rheinische Zeitung on the conditions of the Moselle peasantry, and finally debates on free trade and protective tariffs provided the first occasions 'for occupying myself with economic questions. On the other hand, at that time when the good will " to go further" greatly outweighed knowledge of the subject, a philosophically weakly tinged echo of French socialism and communism made itself audible in the Rheinische Zeitung. I declared myself against this amateurism, but frankly confessed at the same time in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung2 that my previous studies did not permit me even to venture any judgement on the content of the French tendencies. Instead, I eagerly seized on the illusion of the managers of the Rheinische Zeitung, who thought that by a weaker attitude on the part of the paper they could secure a remission of the d**h sentence pa**ed upon it, to withdraw from the public stage into the study.
The first work which I undertook for a solution of the doubts which a**ailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of right, a work the introduction to which appeared in 1844 in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher3 published in Paris. My investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of "civil society," that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. The investigation of the latter, which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, whither I had emigrated in consequence of an expulsion order of M. Guizot. The general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or-what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution with the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modem bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production ar,e the last antagonistic form of the social process of production-antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.
Frederick Engels, with whom, since the appearance of his brilliant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories ( in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher), I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence, had by another road (compare his The Condition of the Working Cla** in England in 1844) arrived at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he also settled in Brussels, we resolved to work out in common the opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The man*script, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the man*script to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose-self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which we put our views before the public at that time, now from one aspect, now from another, I will mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and Discours sur le libre échange published by me. The decisive points of our view were first scientifically, although only polemically, indicated in my work published in 1847 and directed against Proudhon : Misere de la Philosophie, etc. A dissertation written in German on Wage Labour, in which I put together my lectures on this subject delivered in the Brussels German Workers' Society, was interrupted, while being printed, by the February Revolution and my consequent forcible removal from Belgium.
The editing of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849, and the subsequent events, interrupted my economic studies which could only be resumed in the year 1850 in London. The enormous material for the history of political economy which is accumulated in the British Museum, the favourable vantage point afforded by London for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development upon which the latter appeared to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, determined me to begin afresh from the very beginning and to work through the new material critically. These studies led partly of themselves into apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to dwell for a shorter or longer period. Especially, however, was the time at my disposal curtailed by the imperative necessity of earning my living. My contributions, during eight years now, to the first English-American newspaper, the New York Tribune, compelled an extraordinary scattering of my studies, since I occupy myself with newspaper correspondence proper only in exceptional cases. However, articles on striking economic events in England and on the Continent constituted so considerable a part of my contributions that I was compelled to make myself familiar with practical details which lie outside the sphere of the actual science of political economy.
This sketch of the course of my studies in the sphere of political economy is intended only to show that my views, however they may be judged and however little they coincide with the interested prejudices of the ruling cla**es, are the results of conscientious investigation lasting many years. But at the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be posted:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto;
Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta.4
Discovering Hegel
KARL MARX
On November 10, 1837, soon after becoming a student at the University of Berlin, Marx wrote a long letter to his father. It shows that at nineteen he had formed two relationships of great importance: a personal one with Jenny von Westphalen of Trier and an intellectual one with the late philosopher Hegel. The love of Jenny led to marriage, the spell of Hegel to Marxism.
Dear Father,
There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction.
* * *
After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing connections, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse myself in science and art.
In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry was bound to be my first subject, at l east the most pleasant and immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous development it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a world beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines . All the poems of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving for poetic fire.
* * *
Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompaniment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy.
* * *
From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.
I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body . My aim was no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.
I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy." Here art and science, which had become completely divorced from each other, were to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set a bout the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system.
* * *
For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which "washes souls and dilutes the tea ."l I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.
* * *
Owning to being upset over Jenny's illness and my vain, fruitless intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as I have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I burnt all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I could give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have not given any proofs to the contrary.
While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples. Through a n umber of meetings with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club,2 which includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy h ere, many conflicting views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape.
* * *
* * *
Your ever loving son,
Karl
Please, dear father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad style; it is almost 4 o'clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my eyes are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not be able to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are dear to me.
Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the most beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.
To Make the World Philosophical
KARL MARX
Marx's doctoral dissertation, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature," written between 1839 and 1841, is chiefly of interest for the following excerpts arguing that after a great world philosophy-Aristotle's in antiquity and Hegel's now-the system's disciples feel an imperious urge to make the world "philosophical." What this would mean Marx hinted in the dissertation's foreword, where he saluted Prometheus' revolt against the gods as a proclamation of "human self-consciousness as the highest divinity." To transform the world in the image of Hegelian philosophy would mean to make of man in existential reality the divinity that, as Marx saw it, Hegel had a1ready made him in thought. "
The last two paragraphs of the selection are taken from Marx's preparatory material for the dissertation, "Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy."
* * *
Also in relation to Hegel it is mere ignorance on the part of his pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one word, explain it in terms of morality. They forget that only a short time ago they were enthusiastic about all his idiosyncrasies [Einseitigkeiten] , as can be clearly demonstrated from their writings.
If they were really so affected by the ready-made science they acquired that they gave themselves up to it in naive uncritical trust, then how unscrupulous is their attempt to reproach the Master for a hidden intention behind his insight! The Master, to whom the science was not something received, but something in the process of becoming, to whose uttermost periphery his own intellectual heart's blood was pulsating! On the contrary, they rendered themselves suspect of not having been serious before. And now they oppose their own former condition, and ascribe it to Hegel, forgetting however that his relation to his system was immediate, substantial, while theirs is only a reflected one.
* * *
It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it. ( From a philosophical point of view, however, it is important to specify these aspects better, since from the specific manner of this turn we can reason back towards the immanent determination and the universal historic character of a philosophy. We see here, as it were, its curriculum vitae 1 narrowed down to its subjective point.) But the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It's the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. But this immediate realization of philosophy is in its deepest essence afflicted with con tradictions, and this its essence takes form in the appearance and imprints its seal upon it.
When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one. Its relationship to the world is that of reflection. Inspired by the urge to realise itself, it enters into tension against the other. The inner self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards. The result is that as the world becomes philosophical, philosophy also becomes worldly, that its realisation is also its loss, that what it struggles against on the outside is its own inner deficiency, that in the very struggle it falls precisely into those defects which it fights as defects in the opposite camp, and that it can only overcome these defects by falling into them. That which opposes it and that which it fights is always the same as itself, only with factors inverted.
This is the one side, when we consider this matter purely objec tively as immediate realisation of philosophy. However, it has also a subjective; aspect, which is merely another form of it. This is the relationship of the philosophical system which is realised to its intel- lectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousnesses in which its progress appears. This relationship results in what confronts the world in the realisation of philosophy itself, namely, in the fact that these individual self-consciousnesses always carry a double-edged demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against philosophy itself. Indeed, what in the thing itself appears as a relationship inverted in itself, appears in these self-consciousnesses as a double one, a demand and an action contradicting each other.
Their liberation of the world from the philosophy that held them in fetters as a particular system. * * *
* * *
As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise philosophy in itself to concretion, apprehend abstract principles in a totality, and thus break off the rectilinear process, so also there are moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person, weaves, as it were, intrigues with the world, emerges from the transparent kingdom of Amenthes and throws itself on the breast of the worldly Siren. That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian, or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that philosophy should then wear character masks. As Deucalion, according to the legend, cast stones behind him in creating human beings, so philosophy casts its regard behind it (the bones of its mother are luminous eyes) when its heart is set on creating a world; but as Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.
While philosophy has sealed itself off to form a consummate, total world, the determination of this totality is conditioned by the general development of philosophy, just as that development is the condition of the form in which philosophy turns into a practical relationship towards reality; thus the totality of the world in general is divided within itself, and this division is carried to the extreme, for spiritual existence has been freed, has been enriched to universality, the heart-beat has become in itself the differentiation in the concrete form which is the whole organism. The division of the world is total only when its aspects are totalities. The world confronting a philosophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart. This philosophy's activity therefore also appears torn apart and contradictory; its objective universality is turned back into the subjective forms of individual consciousness in which it has life. But one must not let oneself be misled by this storm which follows a great philosophy, a world philosophy. Ordinary harps play under any fingers, Aeolian harps only when struck by the storm.
* * *
For a Ruthless Criticism
Of Everything Existing
KARL MARX
The watchword of the young Karl Marx, as of his Young Hegelian a**ociates generally, was Kritik-criticism. In this early article, printed in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher in 1844 in the form of a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx elaborated the idea of criticism into a program of this journal, of which he and Ruge were editors. His future strictures on utopian socialist plans, in the Communist Manifesto and other later writings, were prefigured in the dismissal here of the communist utopias of writers like Etienne Cabet as a "dogmatic abstraction." The Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) came out in Paris in February, 1844, in the German language. Only one double issue of the journal was published.
The translation was made by Dr. Ronald Rogowski for this edition.
M. to R.
Kreuznach
September, 1843
I am delighted that you are resolved and turn your thoughts from backward glances at the past toward a new undertaking. In Paris, then, the old university of philosophy (absit omen!) and the new capital of the new world. What is necessary will arrange itself. I do not doubt, therefore, that all obstacles-whose importance I do not fail to recognize-will be removed.
The undertaking may succeed, however, or not; in any case I will be in Paris at the end of this month, since the air here makes one servile and I see no room at all in Germany for free activity.
In Germany, everything is being forcibly repressed, a true anarchy of the spirit has burst out, stupidity itself reigns supreme, and Zurich obeys commands from Berlin; hence it becomes ever clearer that a new' gathering point must be sought for the really thinking and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would meet a real need, and real needs must surely also be able to find real fulfillment. I therefore have no doubts about the enterprise if only we undertake it seriously.
The inner difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For even if there is no doubt about the "whence;" all the more confusion reigns about the "whither." Apart from the general anarchy which has erupted among the reformers, each is compelled to confess to himself that he has no clear conception of what the future should be. That, however, is just the advantage of the new trend: that we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old. Up to now the philosophers had the solution of all riddles lying in their lectern, and the stupid uninitiated world had only to open its jaws to let the roast partridges of absolute science fly into its mouth. Now philosophy has become worldly, and the most incontrovertible evidence of this is that the philosophical consciousness has been drawn, not only externally but also internally, into the stress of battle. But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present-I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses : The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.
I am therefore not in favor of setting up any dogmatic flag. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatics to clarify to themselves the meaning of their own positions. Thus communism, to be specific, is a dogmatic abstraction. I do not have in mind here some imaginary, possible communism, but actually existing communism in the form preached by Cabet, Dezamy,1 Weitling,2 etc. This communism is only a special manifestation of the humanistic principle which is still infected by its opposite-private being. Elimination of private property is therefore by no means identical with this communism, and it is not accidental but quite inevitable that communism has seen other socialist teachings arise in opposition to it, such as the teachings of Fourier, Proudhon, etc., because it is itself only a special, one-sided realization of the socialist principle.
And the socialist principle itself represents, on the whole, only one side, affecting the reality of the true human essence. We have to concern ourselves just as much with the other side, the theoretical existence of man, in other words to make religion, science, etc., the objects of our criticism. Moreover, we want to have an effect on our contemporaries, and specifically on our German contemporaries. The question is, how is this to be approached? Two circumstances cannot be denied. First, religion, and second, politics, arouse predominant interest in contemporary Germany. We must take these two subjects, however they are, for a starting-point, and not set up against them some ready-made system such as the Voyage en Icarie.3 Reason has always existed, only not always in reasonable form .
The critic can therefore start out by taking any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop from the unique forms of existing reality the true reality as its norm and final goal. Now so far as real life is concerned, precisely the political state in all its modern forms contains, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, the demands of reason. Nor does the state stop at that. The state everywhere presupposes that reason has been realized. But in just this way it everywhere comes into contradiction between its ideal mission and its real preconditions.
çµOut of this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore, one can develop social truth. Just as religion is the catalogue of the theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is the catalogue of its practical struggles. The political state thus expresses, within the confines of its form sub specie rei publicae,4 all social struggles, needs, truths. Thus it is not at all beneath the hauteur des principles to make the most specific political question-e.g., the difference between the corporative5 and the representative system-the object of criticism. For this question only expresses in a political way the difference between the rule of man and the rule of private property. The critic therefore not only can but must go into these political questions (which the cra** kind of socialists consider beneath anyone's dignity) . By showing the superiority of the representative system over the corporative system, the critic affects the practical interests of a large party. By elevating the representative system from its political form to its general form and by bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic at the same time forces this party to go beyond its own confines, since its victory is at the same time its loss.
Nothing prevents us, then, from tying our criticism to the criticism of politics and to a definite party position in politics, and hence from identifying our criticism with real struggles. Then we shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle: "Here is the truth, bow down before it!" We develop new principles to the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the world: "Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of the struggle at you." We only show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that the world must acquire, like it or not.
The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole task can consist only in putting religious and political questions into self-conscious human form-as is also the case in Feuerbach's criticism of religion.
Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through an*lyzing the mystical consciousness, the consciousness which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in religious or political form. Then it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old work.
So, we can express the trend of our journal in one word: the work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggle and its own desires. This is work for the world and for us. It can only be the work of joint forces. It is a matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right
KARL MARX
In line with his program of effecting "a ruthless criticism of everything existing," Marx during 1843 took up the criticism of politics, He set a bout this by working on a commentary on Hegel's treatise on the state, * To the Hegelian political philosophy (which he called, following Feuerbach, "speculative philosophy") he applied the method of "transformational criticism" that Feuerbach had applied to the Hegelian philosophy of religion,* * *
Although the work was left incomplete and unpublished, it was, as Marx later said (see p. 4, above), a milestone on his road to historical materialism: it led him to the view that instead of the state being the basis of "civil society," as Hegel held, civil or bourgeois society is the basis of the state.
Despite its incompleteness-the extant part of the commentary starts with paragraph 261 of Hegel's treatise and deals only with selected further sections up to paragraph 308-this work remains of interest as Marx's most extensive single piece of purely political writing, although his standpoint at the time of writing was no more than proto-Marxist.
The State and Civil Society1
* * *
The idea is made the subject and the actual relation of family and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy things are inverted. When the idea is made the subject, however, the real subjects, namely, civil society, family, "circumstances, caprice, etc.," become unreal objective elements of the idea with a changed significance.
* * *
Rationally interpreted, Hegel's propositions would mean only this : The family and civil society are parts of the state. The material of the state is distributed amongst them "by circumstances, cap rice and the individual's own choice of vocation." The citizens of the state are members of families and members of civil society.
"The actual idea, mind, divides itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society, that is, its finite phase"- hence, the division of the state into family and civil society is ideal, i.e., necessary as part of the essence of the state. Family and civil society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences of the will; they are modes of existence of the state. Family and civil society constitute themselves as the state. They are the driving force. According to Hegel, they are, on the contrary, produced by the actual idea. It is not the course of their own life which unites them in the state; on the contrary, it is the idea which in the course of its life has separated them off from itself. Indeed, they are the finiteness of this idea. They owe their presence to another mind than their own. They are entities determined by a third party, not self-determined entities. Accordingly, they are also defined as "finiteness," as the "actual idea's" own finiteness. The purpose of their being is not this being itself; rather, the idea separates these presuppositions off from itself "so as to emerge from their ideality as explicitly infinite actual mind." That is to say, there can be no political state without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua non. But the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product. The actual idea only degrades itself into the "finiteness" of the family and civil society so as by transcending them to enjoy and bring forth its infinity. "Accordingly" (in order to achieve its purpose), it "a**igns to these spheres the material of this, its finite actuality" (this? which? these spheres are indeed its "finite actuality," its "material" ), "individuals as a multitude" ("the individuals, the multitude" are here the material of the state; "the state consists of them"; this composition of the state is here expressed as an act of the idea, as an "allocation" which it undertakes with its own material The fact is that the state issues from the multitude in their existence as members of families and as members of civil society. Speculative philosophy expresses this fact as the idea's deed, not as the idea of the multitude, but as the deed of a subjective idea different from the fact itself), "in such a way that with regard to the individual this a**ignment" (previously the discussion was only about the a**ignment of individuals to the spheres of the family and civil society) "appears mediated by circumstances, caprice, etc." Empirical actuality is thus accepted as it is. It is also expressed as rational, but it is not rational on account of its own reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has a different significance from it itself. The fact which is taken as a point of departure is not conceived as such, but as a mystical result. The actual becomes a phenomenon, but the idea has no other content than this phenomenon. Nor has the idea any other purpose than the logical one of being "explicitly infinite actual mind." The entire mystery of the philosophy of law and of Hegel's philosophy as a whole is set out in this paragraph.
* * *
If Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a mystical fashion into a subject. "In its truth, however," says Hegel, "subjectivity exists only as subject, personality only as person." This too is a piece of mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of the subject, personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of conceiving them as predicates of their subjects. Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects.
The existence of predicates is the subject, so that the subject is the existence of subjectivity, etc.; Hegel transforms the predicates, the objects, into independent entities, but divorced from their actual independence, their subject. Subsequently the actual subject appears as a result, whereas one must start from the actual subject and look at its objectification. The mystical substance, therefore, becomes the actual subject, and the real subject appears as something else, as an element of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts from the predicates of the general description instead of from the real ens (lnr0XEtltn'ov, subject), and since, nevertheless, there has to be a bearer of these qualities, the mystical idea becomes this bearer. The dualism consists in the fact that Hegel does not look upon the general as being the actual nature of the actual finite, i.e., of what exists and is determinate, or upon the actual ens as the true subject of the infinite.
Sovereignty
So in this case sovereignty, the essential feature of the state, is treated to begin with as an independent entity, is objectified. Then, of course, this objective entity has to become a subject again. This subject then appears, however, as a self-incarnation of sovereignty; whereas sovereignty is nothing but the objectifed mind of the subjects of the state.
* * *
As if the actual state were not the people. The state is an abstraction. The people alone is what is concrete. And it is remarkable that Hegel, who without hesitation attributes a living quality such as sovereignty to the abstraction, attributes it only with hesitation and reservations to something concrete. "The usual sense, however, in which men have recently begun to speak of the sovereignty of the people is in opposition to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. In this antithesis the sovereignty of the people is one of those confused notions which are rooted in the wild idea of the people."
The "confused notions" and the "wild idea" are here exclusively Hegel's. To be sure, if sovereignty exists in the monarch, then it is foolish to speak of an antithetical sovereignty in the people; for it is implied in the concept of sovereignty that sovereignty can not have a double existence, still less one which is contradictory. However:
1) This is just the question: Is not that sovereignty which is claimed by the monarch an illusion? Sovereignty of the monarch or sovereignty of the people-that is the question.
2) One can also speak of a sovereignty of the people in opposi tion to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. But then it is not a question of one and the same sovereignty which has arisen on two sides, but two entirely contradictory concepts of sovereignty, the one a sovereignty such as can come to exist in a monarch, the other such as can come to exist only in a people. It is the same with the question: "Is God sovereign, or is man?" One of the two is an untruth, even if an existing untruth.
"Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole which is necessarily and directly a**ociated with the monarch, the people .is that formless ma** which is no longer a state. It no longer possesses any of the atrributes which are to be found only in an internally organized whole-sovereignty, government, courts of law, the administration, estates of the realm, etc. With the appearance in a nation of such factors, which relate to organisation, to the life of the state, a people ceases to be that indeterminate abstraction, which, as a purely general notion, is called the nation." All this is a tautology. If a people has a monarch and the structure that neces- sarily and directly goes with a monarch, i.e., if it is structured as a monarchy, then indeed, taken out of this structure, it is a formless ma** and a purely general notion. "If by sovereignty of the people is understood a republican form of government and, more specifically, democracy...then...there can be no further discussion of such a notion in face of the developed idea." That is indeed right, if one has only "such a notion" and not a "developed idea" of democracy.
Democracy
Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy inconsistent with itself; the monarchical element is not an inconsistency in democracy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of the whole demos [people]. In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole. The entire constitution has to adapt itself to this fixed point. Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is one species, and a poor one at that. Democracy is content and form. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the content.
In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is, the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here, not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the con- stitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people, and established as the people's own work. The constitution appears as what it is, a free product of man. It could be said that in a certain respect this applies also to consti- tutional monarchy; but the specific distinguishing feature of democracy is that here the constitution as such forms only one element in the life of the people-that it is not the political constitution by itself which forms the state.
Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified state; democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man. Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect the relation of democracy to all other forms of state is like the relation of Christianity to all other religions. Christianity is the religion INSERT TEXT,2the essence of religion-deified man as a particular religion. Similarly, democracy is the essence of all state constitutions-social- ised man as a particular state constitution. Democracy stands to the other constitutions as the genus stands to its species; except that here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore as one particular species over against the others whose existence does not correspond to their essence. To democracy all other forms of state stand as its Old Testament. Man does not exist for the law but the law for man-it is a human manifestation; whereas in the other forms of state man is a legal manifestation. That is the fundamental distinction of democracy.
All other state forms are definite, distinct, particular forms of state. In democracy the formal principle is at the same time the material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of the general and the particular. In monarchy, for example, and in the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has his particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a private individual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society, all appear here (as Hegel shows quite correctly with regard to these abstract state forms, but he thinks that he is expounding the idea of the state) as particular modes of existence alongside the political state, as the content to which the political state is related as organising form; properly speaking, the relation of the political state to this content is merely that of reason, inherently without content, which defines and delimits, which now affirms and now denies. In democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content and distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content and particular form of existence of the people. In monarchy, for example, this particular, the political constitution, has the significance of the general that dominates and determines everything particular. In democracy the state as particular is merely particular; as general, it is the truly general, i .e., not something determinate in distinction from the other content. The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political state, as constitution, no longer pa**es for the whole.
In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the constitution is what rules, without really ruling-i.e., without materially permeating the content of the remaining, non-political spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people.
Incidentally, it goes without saying that all forms of state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy.
Politics: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
In the states of antiquity the political state makes up the content of the state to the exclusion of the other spheres. The modern state is a compromise between the political and the unpolitical state.
In democracy the abstract state has ceased to be the dominant factor. The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a struggle within the abstract state. The political republic is democracy within the abstract state form. The abstract state form of democracy is therefore the republic; but here it ceases to be the merely political constitution.
Property, etc., in short, the entire content of the law and the state, is the same in North America as in Prussia, with few modifications. The republic there is thus a mere state form, as is the monarchy here. The content of the state lies outside these constitutions. Hegel is right, therefore, when he says: The political state is the constitution, i.e., the material state is not political. What obtains here is merely an external identity, a determination of changing forms. Of the various elements of national life, the one most difficult to evolve was the political state, the constitution. It developed as universal reason over against the other spheres, as ulterior to them. The historical task then consisted in its [the constitution's] rea**ertion, but the particular spheres do not realise that their private nature coincides with the other-worldly nature of the constitution or of the political state, and that the other-worldly existence of the political state is nothing but the affirmation of their own estrangement. Up till now the political constitution has been the religious sphere, the religion of national life, the heaven of its gener- ality over against the earthy existence of its actuality. The political sphere has been the only state sphere in the state, the only sphere in which the content as well as the form has been species-content, the truly general; but in such a way that at the same time, because this sphere has confronted the others, its content has also become formal and particular. Political life in the modern sense is the scho- lasticism of national life. Monarchy is the perfect expression of this estrangement. The republic is the negation of this estrangement within its own sphere. It is obvious that the political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the democracy of unfreedom.
The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product.
In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political; the material content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too. In the Middle Ages the political constitution is the constitution of private property, but only because the constitution of private property is a political constitution. In the Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are identical. Man is the actual principle of the state-but unfree man. It is thus the democracy of unfreedom-estrangement carried to completion. The abstract reflected antithesis belongs only to the modern world. The Middle Ages are the period of actual dualism; modern times, one of abstract dualism.
"We have already noted the stage at which the division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy has been made the standpoint, that is, of that unity which is still substantial, which still remains within itself, and has not yet come to its process of infmite differentiation and inner deepening,: at that stage, the element of the final self-determining resolution of the will does not emerge explicitly into its own proper actuality as an immanent factor in the state." In the spontaneously evolved monarchy, democracy and aristocracy there is as yet no political constitution as distinct from the actual, material state or the other content of the life of the nation. The political state does not yet appear as the form of the material state. Either, as in Greece, the res publica 3 is the real private affair of the citizens, their real content, and the private individual is a slave; the political state, qua political state, being the true and only content of the life and will of the citizens; or, as in an Asiatic despotism, the political state is nothing but the personal caprice of a single individual; or the political state, like the material state, is a slave. What distinguishes the modern state from these states characterized by the substantial unity between people and state is not, as Hegel would have it, that the various elements of the constitution have been developed into particular actuality, but that the constitution itself has been developed into a particular actuality alongside the actual life of the people- that the political state has become the constitution of the rest of the state.
* * *
Bureaucracy
The "state formalism" which bureaucracy is, is the "state as formalism"; and it is as a formalism of this kind that Hegel has described bureaucracy. Since this "state formalism" constitutes itself as an actual power and itself becomes its own material content, it goes without saying that the "bureaucracy" is a web of practical illusions, or the "illusion of the state." The bureaucratic spirit is a jesuitical, theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats are the jesuits and theologians of the state. The bureaucracy is la republique pretre.
Since by its very nature the bureaucracy is the "state as formalism," it is this also as regards its purpose. The actual purpose of the state therefore appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the "formal state spirit." The bureaucracy therefore turns the "formal state spirit" or the actual spiritless ness of the state into a categorical imperative. The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state. Because the bureaucracy turns its "formal" objectives into its content, it comes into conflict everywhere with "real" objectives. It is therefore obliged to pa** off the form for the content and the content for the form. State objectives are transformed into objectives of the department, and department objectives into objectives of the state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the under standing of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.
The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state the spiritualism of the state. Each thing has therefore a double meaning, a real and a bureaucratic meaning, just as knowledge (and also the will) is both real and bureaucratic. The really existing, however, is treated in the light of its bureaucratic nature, its other worldly, spiritual essence. The bureaucracy has the state, the spiritual essence of society, in its possession, as its private property. The general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved within itself by the hierarchy and against the outside world by being a closed corporation. Avowed political spirit, as also politicalmindedness, therefore appear to the bureaucracy as treason against its mystery. Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the deification of authority is its conviction. Within the bureaucracy itself, however, spiritualism becomes cra** materialism, the materialism of pa**ive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behaviour, and of fixed principles, views and traditions. In the case of the individual bureaucrat, the state objec tive turns into his private objective, into a after higher posts, the making of a career. In the first place, he looks on actual, life as something material, for the spirit of this life has its distinctly separate existence in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy must therefore proceed to make life as material as possible. Secondly, actual life is material for the bureaucrat himself, i .e., so far as it becomes an object of bureaucratic manipulation; for his spirit is prescribed for him, his aim lies beyond him, and his existence is the existence of the department. The state only continues to exist as various fixed bureaucratic minds, bound together in subordination and pa**ive obedience. Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as actual life seems dead; for this imaginary knowledge and this imaginary life are taken for the real thing. The bureaucrat must therefore deal with the actual state jesuitically, whether this jesuitry is conscious or unconscious. However, once its antithesis is knowledge, this jesuitry is like wise bound to achieve self-consciousness and then become deliberate jesuitry.
Whilst the bureaucracy is on the one hand this cra** materialism, it manifests its cra** spiritualism in the fact that it wants to do everything, i.e., by making the will the causa prima. For it is purely an active form of existence and receives its content from without and can prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restricting this content. For the bureaucrat the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
When Hegel calls the executive the objective aspect of the sovereignty dwelling in the monarch, that is right in the same sense in which the Catholic Church was the real presence of the sovereignty, substance and spirit of the Holy Trinity. In the bureaucracy the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.
The abolition of the bureaucracy is only possible by the general interest actually-and not, as with Hegel, merely in thought, in abstraction-becoming the particular interest, which in turn is onlv possible as a result of the particular actually becoming the general interest. Hegel starts from an unreal antithesis and therefore achieves only an imaginary identity which is in truth again a contra- dictory identity. The bureaucracy is just such an identity.
* * *
On the Jewish Question
KARL MARX
In this essay, written in the autumn of 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, Marx pursued his critical aims through a review of two studies on the Jewish question by another Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. The criticism of politics is developed in the first part, leading to the conclusion that human emancipation requires the ending of the division between man as an egoistic being in "civil society" and man as abstract citizen in the state. In the second part, Marx proceeds to the criticism of economics or commerce, which he equates with "Judaism." His concluding call for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" (which has been seen on occasion as a manifesto of anti-Semitism) is in fact a call for the emancipation of society from what he here calls "huckstering," or from what he was subsequently to call "capitalism." This, however, is not to deny that Marx, although he himself was of Jewish origin, harbored antiJewish attitudes, nor is it to deny that such attitudes found expression in this essay.
1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage1
The German Jews seek emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they want? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer replies to them: In Germany no one is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How then could we liberate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand for yourselves, as Jews, a special emancipation. You should work, as Germans, for the political emancipation of Germany, and as men, for the emancipation of mankind. You should feel the particular kind of oppression and shame which you suffer, not as an exception to the rule but rather as a confirmation of the rule.
Or do the Jews want to be placed on a footing of equality with the Christian subjects? If they recognize the Christian state as legally established they also recognize the regime of general enslavement. Why should their particular yoke be irksome when they accept the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?
The Christian state recognizes nothing but privileges. The Jew himself, in this state, has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he possesses rights which the Christians do not have. Why does he want rights which he does not have but which the Christians enjoy?
In demanding his emancipation from the Christian state he asks the Christian state to abandon its religious prejudice. But does he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has he then the right to insist that someone else should forswear his religion?
The Christian state, by its very nature, is incapable of emancipating the Jew. But, adds Bauer, the Jew, by his very nature, cannot be emancipated. As long as the state remains Christian, and as long as the Jew remains a Jew, they are equally incapable, the one of conferring emancipation, the other of receiving it.
With respect to the Jews the Christian state can only adopt the attitude of a Christian state. That is, it can permit the Jew, as a matter of privilege, to isolate himself from its other subjects; but it must then allow the pressures of all the other spheres of society to bear upon the Jew, and all the more heavily since he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew likewise can only adopt a Jewish attitude, i.e. that of a foreigner, towards the state, since he opposes his illusory nationality to actual nationality, his illusory law to actual law. He considers it his right to separate himself from the rest of humanity; as a matter of principle he takes no part in the historical movement and looks to a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole. He regards himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews demand emancipation? On account of your religion? But it is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? But there are no citizens in Germany. As men? But you are not men any more than are those to whom you appeal.
Bauer, after criticizing earlier approaches and solutions, formulates the question of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated, and the nature of the Christian state which is to emancipate him? He replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, an*lyses the religious opposition between Judaism and Christianity, explains the essence of the Christian state; and does all this with dash, clarity, wit and profundity, in a style which is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.
How then does Bauer resolve the Jewish question? What is the result? To formulate a question is to resolve it. The critical study of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. Here it is in brief : we have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.
The most stubborn form of the opposition between Jew and Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. And how is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind-snake skins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed himself in them-they will no longer find themselves in religious opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human relationship. Science will then constitute their unity. But scientific oppositions are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew, in particular, suffers from the general lack of political freedom and the pronounced Christianity of the state. But in Bauer's sense the Jewish question has a general significance, independent of the specifically German conditions. It is the question of the relations between religion and the state, of the contradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the Jew who wants political emancipation, and for the state which should emancipate him and itself be emancipated.
"Very well, it may be said ( and the Jew himself says it) but the Jew should not be emancipated because he is a Jew, because he has such an excellent and universal moral creed; the Jew should take second place to the citizen, and he will be a citizen although he is and desires to remain a Jew. In other words, he is and remains a Jew, even though he is a citizen and as such lives in a universal human condition; his restricted Jewish nature always finally triumphs over his human and political obligations. The bias persists even though it is overcome by general principles. But if it persists, it would be truer to say that it overcomes all the rest." "It is only in a sophistical and superficial sense that the Jew could remain a Jew in political life. Consequently, if he wanted to remain a Jew, this would mean that the superficial became the essential and thus triumphed. In other words, his life in the state would be only a semblance, or a momentary exception to the essential and normal. "2
Let us see also how Bauer establishes the role of the state. "France," he says, "has provided us recently,3 in connexion with the Jewish question ( and for that matter all other political questions ), with the spectacle of a life which is free but which revokes its freedom by law and so declares it to be merely an appearance; and which, on the other hand, denies its free laws by its acts."4
"In France, universal liberty is not yet established by law, nor is the Jewish question as yet resolved, because legal liberty, i .e. the equality of all citizens, is restricted in actual life, which is still dominated and fragmented by religious privileges, and because the lack of liberty in actual life influences law in its turn and obliges it to sanction the division of citizens who are by nature free into oppressors and oppressed."5
When, therefore, would the Jewish question be resolved in France?
"The Jew would really have ceased to be Jewish, for example, if he did not allow his religions code to prevent his fulfilment of his duties towards the state and his fellow citizens; if he attended and took part in the public business of the Chamber of Deputies on the sabbath. It would be necessary, further, to abolish all religious privliege, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If, thereafter, some or many or even the overwhelming majority felt obliged to fulfil their religious duties, such practices should be left to them as an absolutely private matter."6 "There is no longer any religion when there is no longer a privileged religion. Take away from religion its power to excommunicate and it will no longer exist."7 "Mr. Martin du Nord has seen, in the suggestion to omit any mention of Sunday in the law, a proposal to declare that Christianity has ceased to exist. With equal right ( and the right is well founded ) the declaration that the law of the sabbath is no longer binding upon the Jew would amount to proclaiming the end of Judaism."8
Thus Bauer demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce Judaism, and in general that man should renounce religion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he considers, and this follows logically, that the political abolition of religion is the abolition of all religion. The state whic presupposes religion is not yet a true or actual state. "Clearly, the religious idea gives some a**urances to the state. But to what state? To what kind of state?"9
At this point we see that the Jewish question is considered only from one aspect.
It was by no means sufficient to ask : who should emancipate? who should be emancipated? The critic should ask a third question: what kind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential conditions of the emancipation which is demanded? The criticism of political emancipation itself was only the final criticism of the Jewish question and its genuine resolution into the "general question of the age."
Bauer, since he does not formulate the problem at this level, falls into contradictions. He establishes conditions which are not based upon the nature of political emancipation. He raises questions which are irrelevant to his problem, and he resolves problems which leave his question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation that "Their error was simply to a**ume that the Christian state was the only true one, and not to subject it to the same criticism as Judaism,"1 we see his own error in the fact that he subjects only the "Christian state," and not the "state as such" to criticism, that he does not examine the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation, and that he, therefore, poses conditions which are only explicable by his lack of critical sense in confusing political emancipation and universal human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews : Have you, from your standpoint, the right to demand political emancipation?.We ask the converse question: from the standpoint of political emancipation can the Jew be required to abolish Judaism, or man be asked to abolish religion?
The Jewish question presents itself differently according to the state in which the Jew resides. In Germany, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is purely theological. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which proclaims Christianity as its foundation. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology; a double-edged criticism, of Christian and of Jewish theology. And so we move always in the domain of theology, however critically we may move therein.
In France, which is a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is maintained here, if only in the insignificant and self-contradictory formula of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jews to the state also retains a semblance of religious, theological opposition.
It is only in the free states of North America, or at least in some of them, that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a truly secular question. Only where the state exists in its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the religious man in general, to the political state appear in a pure form, with its own characteristics. The criticism of this relation ceases to be theological criticism when the state ceases to maintain a theological attitude towards religion, that is, when it adopts the attitude of a state, i .e. a political attitude. Criticism then becomes criticism of the political state. And at this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical.
"There is not, in the United States, either a state religion or a religion declared to be that of a majority, or a predominance of one religion over another. The state remains aloof from all religions."2 There are even some states in North America in which "the constitution does not impose any religious belief or practice as a condition of political rights."3 And yet, "no one in the United States believes that a man without religion can be an honest man."4 And North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont,"5 Tocqueville6 and the Englishman, Hami1ton,7 a**ure us in unison. However, the states of North America only serve as an example. The question is : what is the relation between complete political emancipation and religion? If we find in the country which has attained full political emancipation, that religion not only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself. Religion no longer appears as the basis, but as the manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain the religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular constraints upon them. We do not claim that they must transcend their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular limitations. We claim that they will transcend their religious narrowness once they have overcome their secular limitations. We do not turn secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been resolved into superstition; but we now resolve superstition into history. The question of the relation between political emancipation and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation. We criticize the religious failings of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, disregarding its religious failings. We express in human terms the contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for example Judaism, by showing the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements, between the state and religion in general and between the state and its general presuppositions.
The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian-of the religious man in general-is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state emancipates itself from religion in its own particular way, in the mode which corresponds to its nature, by emancipating itself from the state religion; that is to say, by giving recognition to no religion and affirming itself purely and simply as a state. To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.
The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state with- out man himself being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he makes political emancipation depend upon the following condition.
"It would be necessary, moreover, to abolish all religious privileges, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If some people, or even the immense majority, still felt obliged to fulfil- their religious duties, this practice should be left to them as a completely private matter." Thus the state may have emancipated itself from religion, even though the immense majority of people continue to be religious . And the immense majority do not cease to be religious by virtue of being religious in private.
The attitude of the state, especially the free state, towards religion is only the attitude towards religion of the individuals who compose the state. It follows that man frees himself from a constraint in a political way, through the state, when he transcends his limitations, in contradiction with himself, and in an abstract, narrow and partial way. Furthermore, by emancipating himself politically, man emancipates himself in a devious way, through an intermediary, however necessary this intermediary may be. Finally, even when he proclaims himself an atheist through the intermediary of the state, that is, when he declares the state to be an atheist, he is still engrossed in religion, because he only recognizes himself as an atheist in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. Religion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his nondivinity and all his human freedom.
The political elevation of man above religion shares the weaknesses and merits of all such political measures . For example, the state as a state abolishes private property (i .e. man decrees by political means the abolition of private property) when it abolishes the property qualification for electors and representatives, as has been done in many of the North American States. Hamilton interprets this phenomenon quite correctly from the political standpoint : The ma**es have gained a victory over property owners and financial wealth.8 Is not private property ideally abolished when the non- owner comes to legislate for the owner of property? The property qualification is the last political form in which private property is recognized.
But the political suppression of private property not only does not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence. The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty, and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature. Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universality only in opposition to these elements. Hegel, therefore, defines the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly when he says: "In order for the state to come in to existence as the selfknowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential that it should be distinct from the forms of authority and of faith. But this distinction emerges only in so far as divisions occur within the ecclesiastical sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular churches, has attained to the universality of thought-its formal principle-and is bringing this universality into existence."9 To be sure! Only in this manner, above the particular elements, can the state constitute itself as universality.
The perfected political state is, by its nature, the species-life l of man as opposed to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the political sphere, as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence-celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers . The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society, and overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane world; i .e. it has always to acknowledge it again, re-establish it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man, in his most intimate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being,2 man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality.
The conflict in which the individual, as the professor of a particular religion, finds himself involved with his own quality of citizenship and with other men as members of the community, may be resolved into the secular schism between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois 3 "life in the state is only an appearance or a fleeting exception to the normal and essential." It is true that the bourgeois, like the Jew, participates in political life only in a sophistical way, just as the citoyen4 is a Jew or a bourgeois only in a sophistical way. But this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the religious man and the citizen is the same as that between the shopkeeper and the citizens, between the day-labourer and the citizen, between the landed proprietor and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the political man, is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citizen, and the member of civil society with his political lion's skin.
This secular opposition, to which the Jewish question reduces itself-the relation between the political state and its presuppositions, whether the latter are material elements such as private property, etc., or spiritual elements such as culture or religion, the conflict between the general interest and private interest, the schism between the political state and civil society-these profane contradictions, Bauer leaves intact, while he directs his polemic against their religious expression. "It is precisely this basis-that is, the needs which a**ure the existence of civil society and guarantee its necessity -which exposes its existence to continual danger, maintains an element of uncertainty in civil society, produces this continually changing compound of wealth and poverty, of prosperity and distress, and above all generates change."5 Compare the whole section entitled "Civil society,"6 which follows closely the distinctive features of Hegel's philosophy of right. Civil society, in its opposition to this political state, is recognized as necessary because the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by expelling it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves, albeit in a specific and limited way and in a particular sphere, as a species-being, in community with other men. It has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contraomnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of differentiation. It has become what it was at the beginning, an expression of the fact that man is separated from the community, from himself and from other men. It is now only the abstract avowal of an individual folly, a private whim or caprice. The infinite fragmentation of religion in North America, for example; already gives it the external form of a strictly private affair. It has been relegated among the numerous private interests and exiled from the life of the community as such. But one should have no illusions about the scope of political emancipation. The division of man into the public person and the private person, the displacement of religion from the state to civil society-all this is not a stage in political emancipation but its consummation. Thus political emancipation does not abolish, and does not even strive to abolish, man's real religiosity.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is not a deception practiced against the political system nor yet an evasion of political emancipation. It is political emancipation itself, the political mode of emancipation from religion. Certainly, in periods when the political state as such comes violently to birth in civil society, and when men strive to liberate themselves through political emancipation, the state can, and must, proceed to abolish and destroy religion; but only in the same way as it proceeds to abolish private property, by declaring a maximum, by confiscation, or by progressive taxation, or in the same way as it proceeds to abolish life, by the guillotine. At those times when the state is most aware of itself, political life seeks to stifle its own prerequisites-civil society and its elements-and to establish itself as the genuine and harmonious species-life of man. But it can only achieve this end by setting itself in violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence, by declaring a permanent revolution. Thus the political drama ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, of private property, of all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with the conclusion of peace.
In fact, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Christian state which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and thus adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions; it is, rather, the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion among the other elements of civil society. The state which is still theological, which still professes officially the Christian creed, and which has not yet dared to declare itself a state, has not yet succeeded in expressing in a human and secular form, in its political reality, the human basis of which Christianity is the transcendental expression. The so-called Christian state is simply a non-state; since it is not Christianity as a religion, but only the human core of the Christian religion which can realize itself in truly human creations.
The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but not at all the political realization of Christianity. The state which professes Christianity as a religion does not yet profess it in a political form, because it still has a religious attitude towards religion. In other words, such a state is not the genuine realization of the human basis of religion, because it still accepts the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is an imperfect state, for which the Christian religion serves as the supplement and sanctification of its imperfection. Thus religion becomes necessarily one of its means; and so it is the hypocritical state. There is a great difference between saying: (i) that the perfect state, owing to a deficiency in the general nature of the state, counts religion as one of its prerequisites, or ( ii) that the imperfect state, owing to a deficiency in its particular existence as an imperfect state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter, religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former, the imperfection even of perfected politics is revealed in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political consummation. On the contrary, it can dispense with religion, because in this case the human core of religion is realized in a profane manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude towards religion, and a religious attitude towards politics. It reduces political institutions and religion equally to mere appearances.
In order to make this contradiction clearer we shall examine Bauer's model of the Christian state, a model which is derived from his study of the German-Christian state.
"Quite recently," says Bauer, "in order to demonstrate the impossibility or the non-existence of a Christian state, those pas- sages in the Bible have been frequently quoted with which the state does not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely."
"But the question is not so easily settled. What do these Biblical pa**ages demand? Supernatural renunciation, submission to the authority of revelation, turning away from the state, the abolition of profane conditions. But the Christian state proclaims and accomplishes all these things. It has a**imilated the spirit of the Bible, and if it does not reproduce it exactly in the terms which the Bible uses, that is simply because it expresses this spirit in political forms, in forms which are borrowed from the political system of this world but which, in the religious rebirth which they are obliged to undergo, are reduced to simple appearances. Man turns away from the state and by this means realizes and completes the political institutions ."7
Bauer continues by showing that the members of a Christian state no longer constitute a nation with a will of its own. The nation has its true existence in the leader to whom it is subjected; but this leader is, by his origin and nature, alien to it since he has been imposed by God without the people having any part in the matter. The laws of such a nation are not its own work, but are direct revelations . The supreme leader, in his relations with the real nation, the ma**es, requires privileged intermediaries; and the nation itself disintegrates into a multitude of distinct spheres which are formed and determined by chance, are differentiated from each other by their interests and their specific pa**ions and prejudices, and acquire as a privilege the permission to isolate themselves from each other, etc.8
But Bauer himself says : "Politics, if it is to be nothing more than religion, should not be politics; any more than the scouring of pans, if it is treated as a religious matter, should be regarded as ordinary housekeeping."9 But in the German-Christian state religion is an "economic matter" just as "economic matters" are religion. In the German-Christian state the power of religion is the religion of power.
The separation of the "spirit of the Bible" from the "letter of the Bible" is an irreligious act. The state which expresses the Bible in the letter of politics, or in any letter other than that of the Holy Ghost, commits sacrilege, if not in the eyes of men at least in the eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges the Bible as its charter and Christianity as its supreme rule must be a**essed according to the words of the Bible; for even the language of the Bible is sacred. Such a state, as well as the human rubbish upon which it is based, finds itself involved in a painful contradiction, which is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness, when it is referred to those words of the Bible "with which it does not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely." And why does it not wish to dissolve itself entirely? The state itself cannot answer either itself or others. In its own consciousness the official Christian state is an "ought" whose realization is imposible. It cannot affirm the reality of its own existence without lying to itself, and so it remains always in its own eyes an object of doubt, an uncertain and problematic object. Criticism is, therefore, entirely within its rights in forcing the state, which supports itself upon the Bible, into a total disorder of thought in which it no longer knows whether it is illusion or reality; and in which the infamy of its profane ends ( for which religion serves as a cloak) enter into an insoluble conflict with the probity of its religious consciousness ( for which religion appears as the goal of the world ). Such a state can only escape its inner torment by becoming the myrmidon of the Catholic Church. In the face of this Church, which a**erts that secular power is entirely subordinate to its commands, the state is powerless; powerless the secular power which claims to be the rule of the religious spirit.
What prevails in the so-called Christian state is not man but alienation. The only man who counts-the King-is specifically differentiated from other men and is still a religious being a**ociated directly with heaven and with God. The relations which exist here are relations still based upon faith. The religious spirit is still not really secularized.
But the religious spirit cannot be really secularized. For what is it but the non-secular form of a stage in the development of the human spirit? The religious spirit can only be realized if the stage of development of the human spirit which it expresses in religious form, manifests and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is what happens in the democratic state. The basis of this state is not Christianity but the human basis of Christianity. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because it is the ideal form of the stage of human development which has been attained.
The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious in the sense that man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual existence, as if it were his true life; and in the sense that religion is here the spirit of civil society, and expresses the separation and withdrawal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian in the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there considered a sovereign being, a supreme being; but it is uneducated, unsocial man, man just as he is in his fortuitous existence, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, alienated, subjected to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements, by the whole organization of our society-in short man who is not yet a real species-being. Creations of fantasy, dreams, the postulates of Christianity, the sovereignty of man-but of man as an alien being distinguished from the real man-all these become, in democracy, the tangible and present reality, secular maxims.
In the perfected democracy, the religious and theological consciousness appears to itself all the more religious and theological in that it is apparently without any political significance or terrestrial aims, is an affair of the heart withdrawn from the world, an expression of the limitations of reason, a product of arbitrariness and fantasy, a veritable life in the beyond. Christianity here attains the practical expression of its universal religious significance, because the most varied views are brought together in the form of Christianity, and still more because Christianity does not ask that anyone should profess Christianity, but simply that he should have some kind of religion (see Beaumont, op. cit.) . The religious consciousness runs riot in a wealth of contradictions and diversity.
We have shown, therefore, that political emancipation from religion leaves religion in existence, although this is no longer a privileged religion. The contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is a state which acknowledges itself simply as a state and ignores the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion.
We do not say to the Jews, therefore, as does Bauer: you cannot be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves completely from Judaism. We say rather: it is because you can be emancipated politically, without renouncing Judaism completely and absolutely, that political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. If you want to be politically emancipated, without emancipating yourselves humanly, the inadequacy and the contradiction is not entirely in yourselves but in the nature and the category of political emancipation. If you are preoccupied with this category you share the general prejudice. Just as the state evangelizes when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, the Jew acts politically when, though a Jew, he demands civil rights.
But if a man, though a Jew, can be emancipated politically and acquire civil rights, can he claim and acquire what are called the rights of man? Bauer denies it. "The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself avows that he is constrained by his true nature to live eternally separate from men, is able to acquire and to concede to others the universal rights of man."
"The idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the Christian world, in the last century. It is not an innate idea; on the contrary, 'it is acquired in a struggle against the historical traditions in which man has been educated up to the present time. The rights of man are not, therefore, a gift of nature, nor a legacy from past history, but the reward of a struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges which history has hitherto transmitted from generation to generation. They are the results of culture, and only he can possess them who has merited and earned them."
"But can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he remains Jewish the limited nature which makes him a Jew must prevail over the human nature which should a**ociate him, as a man, with other men; and it will isolate him from everyone who is not a Jew. He declares, by this separation, that the particular nature which makes him Jewish is his true and supreme nature, before which human nature has to efface itself."
"Similarly, the Christian as such cannot grant the rights of man."1
According to Bauer man has to sacrifice the "privilege of faith" in order to acquire the general rights of man. Let us consider for a moment the so-called rights of man; let us examine them in their most authentic form, that which they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French! These rights of man are, in part, political rights, which can only be exercised if one is a member of a community. Their content is participation in the community life, in the political life of the community, the life of the state. They fall in the category of political liberty, of civil rights, which as we have seen do not at all presuppose the consistent and positive abolition of religion; nor consequently, of Judaism. It remains to consider the other part, namely the rights of man as distinct from the rights of the citizen.
Among them is to be found the freedom of conscience, the right to practise a chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized, either as a right of man or as a consequence of a right of man, namely liberty. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: "No one is to be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious opinions." There is guaranteed, as one of the rights of man, "the liberty of every man to practise the religion to which he adheres."
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793, enumerates among the rights of man (Article 7 ) : "The liberty of religious observance." Moreover, it is even stated, with respect to the right to express ideas and opinions, to hold meetings, to practise a religion, that: "The necessity of enunciating these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent memory of despotism." Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XII, Article 354.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, 3: "All men have received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish or support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul."
Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: "Among these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them."2
The incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is so little manifest in the concept of the rights of man that the right to be religious, in one's own fashion, and to practise one's own particular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.
A distinction is made between the rights of man and the rights of the citizen. Who is this man distinct from the citizen? No one but the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called "man," simply man, and why are his rights called the "rights of man"? How is this fact to be explained? By the relation between the political state and civil society, and by the nature of political emancipation.
Let us notice first of all that the so-called rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. The most radical constitution, that of 1 793, says : Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: Article 2. "These righ ts, etc. ( the natural and imprescriptible rights ) are : equality, liberty,security, property.
What constitutes liberty?
Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything which does not harm the rights of others . "
Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others. The limits within which each individual can act with out harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake. It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew not fitted to acquire the rights of man? "As long as he remains Jewish the limited nature which makes him a Jew must prevail over the human nature which should a**ociate him, as a man, with other men; and it will isolate him from everyone who is not a Jew." But liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation. of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself.
The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property. What constitutes the right of private property?
Article 16 ( Constitution of 1793 ) "The right of property is that which belongs to every citizen of enjoying and disposing as he will of his goods and revenues, of the fruits of his work and industry . "
The right of property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This individual liberty, and its application, form the basis of civil society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty. It declares above all the right "to enjoy and to dispose as one will, one's goods and revenues, the fruits of one's work and industry."
There remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
The term "equality" has here no political significance. It is only the equal right to liberty as defined above; namely that every man is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795, defines the concept of liberty in this sense.
Article 5 ( Constitution of 1 795 ) ' "Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or punishes ."
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793) "Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property."
Security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the concept of the police. The whole society exists only in order to guarantee for each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil society "the state of need and of reason."
The concept of security is not enough to raise civil society above its egoism. Security is, rather, the a**urance of its egoism.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice. Man is far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself-society-appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the presentation of their property and their egoistic persons.
It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation ( and is, therefore, urgently called for ), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793 ). The matter becomes still more incomprehensible when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man; and consequently, that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic "man," that the sphere in which man functions as a species-being is degraded to a level below the sphere where he functions as a partial being, and finally that it is man as a bourgeois and not man as a citizen who is considered the true and authentic man.
"The end of every political a**ociation is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man." ( Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1791, Article 2.) "Government is instituted in order to guarantee man's enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights." (Declaration, etc. 1793, Article 1 .) Thus, even in the period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a means, whose end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revo lutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. While, for instance, security is declared to be one of the rights of man, the violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly considered. W,hile the "unlimited freedom of the Press" ( Constitution of 1793, Article 122 ) , as a corollary of the right of individual liberty, is guaranteed, the freedom of the Press is completely destroyed, since "the freedom of the Press should not be permitted when it endangers public liberty."3 This amounts to saying: the right to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is no more than the guarantee of the rights of man-the rights of the individual man-and should, therefore, be suspended as soon as it comes into contradiction with its end, these rights of man. But practice is only the exception, while theory is the rule. Even if one decided to regard revolutionary practice as the correct expression of this rela tion, the problem would remain as to why it is that in the minds of political liberators the relation is inverted, so that the end appears as the means and the means as the end? This optical illusion of their consciousness would always remain a problem, though a psy chological and theoretical one.
But the problem is easily solved.
Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society, upon which the sovereign power, the alienated political life of the people, rests. Political revolution is a revolution of civil society. What was the nature of the old society? It can be characterized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly political character; that is, the elements of civil life such as property, the family, and types of occupation had been raised, in the form of lordship, caste and guilds, to elements of political life. They determined, in this form, the relation of the individual to the state as a whole; that is, his political situation, or in other words, his separation and exclusion from the other elements of society. For this organization of national life did not constitute property and labour as social elements; it rather succeeded in separating them from the body of the state, and made them distinct societies within society. Nevertheless, at least in the feudal sense, the vital func tions and conditions of civil society remained political. They excluded the individual from the body of the state, and trans formed the particular relation which existed between his corpora- tion and the state into a general relation between the individual and social life, j ust as they transformed his specific civil activity and situation into a general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the state as a whole and its consciousness, will and activity-the general political power-also necessarily appeared as the private affair of a ruler and his servants, separated from the people.
The political revolution which overthrew this power of the ruler, which made state affairs the affairs of the people, and the political state a matter of general concern, i.e. a real state, necessarily shattered everything-estates, corporations, guilds, privileges-which expressed the separation of the people from community life. The political revolution therefore abolished the political character of civil society. It dissolved civil society into its basic elements, on the one hand individuals, and on the other hand the material and cultural elements which formed the life experience and the civil situation of these individuals. It set free the political spirit which had, so to speak, been dissolved, fragmented and lost in the various culs-de-sac of feudal society; it rea**embled these scattered frag ments, liberated the political spirit from its connexion with civil life and made of it the community sphere, the general concern of the people, in principle independent of these particular elements of civil life. A specific activity and situation in life no longer had any but an individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation between the individual and the state as a whole. Public affairs as such became the general affair of each individual, and political functions became general functions.
But the consummation of the idealism of the state was at the same time the consummation of the materialism of civil society. The bonds which had restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society were removed along with the political yoke. Political emancipation was at the same time an emancipation of civil society from politics and from even the semblance of a general content.
Feudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into egoistic man who was its real foundation.
Man in this aspect, the member of civil society, is now the foundation and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as such in the rights of man.
But the liberty of egoistic man, and the recognition of this liberty, is rather the recognition of the frenzied movement of the cul- tural and material elements which form the content of his life.
Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business .
The formation of the political state, and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals whose relations are regulated by law, as the relations between men in the corporations and guilds were regulated by privilege, are accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society-non-political mannecessarily appears as the natural man. The rights of man appear as natural rights because conscious activity is concentrated upon political action. Egoistic man is the pa**ive, given result of the dissolution of society, an object of direct apprehension and consequently a natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil society into its elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves or subjecting them to criticism. This revolution regards civil society, the sphere of human needs, labour, private interests and civil law, as the basis of its own existence, as a self-subsistent precondition, and thus as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is identified with authentic man, man as distinct from citizen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Thus man as he really is, is seen only in the form of egoistic man, and man in his true nature only in the form of the abstract citizen.
The abstract notion of political man is well formulated by Rousseau: "Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature itself, of transforming each individual who, in isolation, is a complete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than himself, from which in a sense, he derives his life and his being; [of changing man's nature in order to strengthen it;] of substituting a limited and moral existence for the physical and independent life [with which all of us are endowed by nature]. His task, in short, is to take from a man his own powers, and to give him in exchange alien powers which he can only employ with the help of other men."4
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, to a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.
2. Bruno Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen
Juden und Christen frei zu werden"5
It is in this form that Bauer studies the relation between the Jewish and Christian religions, and also their relation with modern criticism. This latter relation is their relation with "the capacity to become free."
He reaches this conclusion: "The Christian has only to raise himself one degree, to rise above his religion, in order to abolish religion in general," and thus to become free; but "the Jew, on the contrary, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also with the process towards the consummation of his religion, a proc- ess which has remained alien to him."6
Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious question. The theological doubt about whether the Jew or the Christian has the better chance of attaining salvation is reproduced here in the more enlightened form : which of the two is more capable of emancipation? It is indeed no longer asked: which makes free-Judaism or Christianity? On the contrary, it is now asked: which makes free-the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?
"If they wish to become free the Jews should not embrace Christianity as such, but Christianity in dissolution, religion in dissolution; that is to say, the Enlightenment, criticism, and its outcome, a free humanity."7
It is still a matter, therefore, of the Jews professing some kind of faith; no longer Christianity as such, but Christianity in dissolution.
Bauer asks the Jews to break with the essence of the Christian religion, but this demand does not follow, as he himself admits, from the development of the Jewish nature.
From the moment when Bauer, at the end of his Judenfrage, saw in Judaism only a crude religious criticism of Christianity, and; therefore, attributed to it only a religious significance, it was to b.e expected that he would transform the emancipation of the Jews into a philosophico-theological act.
Bauer regards the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew-his religion-as the whole of his nature. He, therefore, concludes rightly that "The Jew contributes nothing to mankind when he disregards his own limited law," when he renounces all his Judaism.8
The relation between Jews and Christians thus becomes the following: the only interest which the emancipation of the Jew presents for the Christian is a general human and theoretical interest. Judaism is a phenomenon which offends the religious eye of the Christian. As soon as the Christian's eye ceases to be religious the phenomenon ceases to offend it. The emancipation of the Jew is not in itself, therefore, a task which falls to the Christian to per- form.
The Jew, on the other hand, if he wants to emancipate himself has to undertake, besides his own work, the work of the Christian-the "criticism of the gospels," of the "life of Jesus," etc.9 "It is for them to arrange matters; they will decide their own destiny. But history does not allow itself to be mocked."l
We will attempt to escape from the theological formulation of the question. For us, the question concerning the capacity of thc Jew for emancipation is transformed into another question: what specific social element is it necessary to overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew to emancipate himself expresses the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the contemporary world. The relation results necessarily from the particular situation of Judaism in the present enslaved world.
Let us consider the real Jew: not the sabbath Jew, whom Bauer considers, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew.
What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.
Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society. On the other hand, when the Jew recognizes his practical nature as invalid and endeavours to abolish it, he begins to deviate from his former path of development, works for general human emancipation and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self estrangement.
We discern in Judaism, therefore, a universal antisocial element of the present time, whose historical development, zealously aided in its harmful aspects by the Jews, has now attained its culminating point, a point at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final an*lysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish fashion.
"The Jew, who is merely tolerated in Vienna for example, determines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may be entirely without rights in the smallest German state, decides the destiny of Europe. While the corporations and guilds exclude the Jew, or at least look on him with disfavour, the audacity of industry mocks the obstinacy of medieval institutions."2
This is not an isolated instance. The Jew has emancipated him self in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.
Thus, for example, Captain Hamilton reports that the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and h is counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of his competitors.3
In North America, indeed, the effective domination of the Christian world by Judaism has come to be manifested in a common and unambiguous form; the preaching of the Gospel itself, Christian preaching, has become an article of commerce, and the bankrupt trader in the church behaves like the prosperous clergyman in business. "This man whom you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his business having failed he has become a minister. This other began as a priest, but as soon as he had accumulated some money he abandoned the priesthood for trade. In the eyes of many people the religious ministry is a veritable industrial career. "4
According to Bauer, it is "a hypocritical situation when, in theory, the Jew is deprived of political rights, while in practice he wields tremendous power and exercises on a wholesale scale the political influence which is denied him in minor matters ."5
The contradiction which exists between the effective political power of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Politics is in principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has become its bondsman.
Judaism has maintained itself alongside Christianity, not only because it constituted the religious criticism of Christianity and embodied the doubt concerning the religious origins of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit-Judaism or commerce6-has perpetuated itself in Christian society and has even attained its highest development there. The Jew, who occupies a distinctive place in civil society, only manifests in a distinctive way the Judaism of civil society.
Judaism has been preserved, not in spite of history, but by history.
It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.
What was, in itself, the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.
The monotheism of the Jews is, therefore, in reality, a polytheism of the numerous needs of man, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine regulation. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and is revealed as such in its pure form as soon as civil society has fully engendered the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private property and money, is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation of nature, which does indeed exist in the Jewish religion but only as a creature of the imagination.
It is in this sense that Thomas Munzer declares it intolerable "that every creature should be transformed into property-the fishes in the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the creature too should become free."7
That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish reli gion-contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an end in himself-is the real, conscious standpoint and the virtue of the man of money. Even the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce. Woman is bartered away.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the trader, and above all of the financier.
The law, without basis or reason, of the Jew, is only the religious caricature of morality and right in general, without basis or reason; the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest encircles itself.
Here again the supreme condition of man is his legal status, his relationship to laws which are valid for him, not because they are the laws of his own will and nature, but because they are dominant and any infraction of them will be avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer dis covers in the Talmud, is the relationship of the world of self interest to the laws which govern this world, laws which the world devotes its principal arts to circumventing.
Indeed, the operation of this world within its framework of laws is impossible without the continual supersession of law. Judaism could not develop further as a religion, in a theoretical form, because the world view of practical need is, by its very nature, circumscribed, and the delineation of its characteristics soon completed.
The religion of practical need could not, by its very nature, find its consummation in theory, but only in practice, just because prac tice is its truth.
Judaism could not create a new world. It could only bring the new creations and conditions af the world within its own sphere of activity, because practical need, the spirit of which is self-interest, is always pa**ive, cannot expand at will, but finds itself extended as a result of the continued development of society.
Judaism attains its apogee with the perfection of civil society; but civil society only reaches perfection in the Christian world. Only under the sway of Christianity, which objectifies all national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species bonds of man, establish egoism and selfish need in their place, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic individuals.
Christianity issued from Judaism. It has now been re-absorbed into Judaism.
From the beginning, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; consequently, the Jew is the practical Christian. And the practical Christian has become a Jew again.
It was only in appearance that Christianity overcame real Judaism. It was too refinedtheoretical fashion, the alienation of man from himself and from nature.
It was only then that Judaism could attain universal domination and could turn alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, saleable objects, in thrall to egoistic need and huckstering.
Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money.
In its perfected. practice the spiritual egoism of Christianity nec essarily becomes the material egoism of the Jew, celestial need is transmuted into terrestrial need, subjectivism into self-interest. The tenacity of the Jew is to be explained, not by his religion, but rather by the human basis of his religion-practical need and egoism.
It is because the essence of the Jew was universally realized and secularized in civil society, that civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is precisely the ideal representation of practical need. It is not only, therdore, in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but also in contemporary society, that we find the essence of the present-day Jew; not as an abstract essence, but as one which is supremely empirical, not only as a limitation of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism-huckstering and its conditions-the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object. The subjective basis of Judaism-practical need-a**umes a human form, and the conflict between the inaividual, sensuous existence of man and his species-existence, is abolished.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: Introduction
KARL MARX
Written at the close of 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbuche in 1844, this essay is a consummate expression of the radical mind. It proclaims the need for a "radical revolution" as the way to man's self-realization. Germany is taken as the focal point of this revolution, and the proletariat-the concept of which makes its first appearance in Marx's writings here-as its cla** vehicle. In August 1844 Marx sent a copy of the essay to Ludwig Feuerbach along with a long letter expressing love and respect for that thinker, whose writing had provided, he wrote, a "philosophical foundation for socialism" by bringing the idea of the human species from "the heaven of abstraction to the real earth." Feuerbach's influence, along with that of Hegel, is clearly visible in the essay.
For Germany, the cristicism of religion has been largely completed; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised once its celestial oratio pro aris et focis has been refuted. Man, who has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself-a non-human being-where he seeks and must seek his true reality.
The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found him self or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, the state. This state, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic com pendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the I halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.
It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven is trans- formed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
The following exposition1-which is a contribution to this undertaking-does not deal directly with the original but with a copy, the German philosophy of the state and of right, for the simple reason that it deals with Germany.
If one were to begin with the status quo itself in Germany, even in the most appropriate way, i .e. negatively, the result would still be an anachronism. Even the negation of our political present is already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. I may negate powdered wigs, but I am still left with unpowdered wigs. If I negate the German situation of 1843 I have, according to French chronology, hardly reached the year 1789, and still less the vital centre of the present day.
German history, indeed, prides itself upon a development which no other nation had previously accomplished, or will ever imitate in the historical sphere. We have shared in the restorations of modern nations without ever sharing in their revolutions . We have been restored, first because other nations have dared to make revolutions, and secondly because other nations have suffered counter revolutions; in the first case because our masters were afraid, and in the second case because they were not afraid. Led by our shep herds, we have only once kept company with liberty and that was on the day of its internment.
A school of thought, which justifies the infamy of today by that of yesterday, which regards every cry from the serf under the knout as a cry of rebellion once the knout has become time-honoured, ancestral and historical, a school for which history shows only its a posteriori as the God of Israel did for his servant Moses-the Historical school of law2-might be supposed to have invented German history, if it were not in fact itself an invention of German history, A Shylock, but a servile Shylock, it swears upon its bond, its historical, Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people.
On the other hand, good-natured enthusiasts, German chauvinists by temperament and enlightened liberals by reflection, seek our history of liberty beyond our history, in the primeval Teutonic forests. But how does the history of our liberty differ from the history of the wild boar's liberty, if it is only to be found in the forests? And as the proverb has it: what is shouted into the forest, the forest echoes back. So peace upon the primeval Teutonic forests!
But war upon the state of affairs in Germany! By all means ! This state of affairs is beneath the level of history, beneath all criticism; nevertheless it remains an object of criticism just as the criminal who is beneath h umanity remains an object of the executioner. In its struggle against this state of affairs criticism is not a pa**ion of the head, but the head of pa**ion. It is not a lancet but a weapon. Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy. For the spirit of this state of affairs has already been refuted. It is not, in itself, an object worthy of our thought; it is an existence as contemptible as it is despised. Criticism itself has no need of any further elucidation of this object, for it has already understood it. Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal task.
It is a matter of depicting the stifling pressure which the different social spheres exert upon other, the universal but pa**ive ill-humour, the complacent but self-deluding narrowness of spirit; all this incorporated in a system of government which lives by conserving this paltriness, and is itself paltriness in government.
What a spectacle! Society is infinitely divided into the most diverse races, which confront each other with their petty antipathies, bad conscience and coarse mediocrity; and which, precisely because of their ambiguous and mistrustful situation, are treated without exception, though in different ways, as merely tolerated existences by their masters. And they are forced to recognize and acknowledge this fact of being dominated, governed and possessed, as a concession from heaven! On the other side are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.
The criticism which deals with this subject-matter is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight; and in such a fight it is of no interest to know whether the adversary is of the same rank, is noble or interesting-all that matters is to strike him. It is a question of denying the Germans an instant of illusion or resignation. The burden must be made still more irksome by awakening a consciousness of it, and shame must be made more shameful still by rendering it public. Every sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie Honteuse of German society; and these petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The nation must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it courage. In this way an imperious need of the German nation will be satisfied, and the needs of nations are themselves the final causes of their satisfaction.
Even for the modern nations this struggle against the limited character of the German status quo does not lack interest; for the German status quo is the open consummation of the ancient régime, and the ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern state.The struggle against the political present of the Germans is a struggle against the past of the modern nations, who are still continually importuned by the reminiscences of this past. It is instructive for the modern nations to see the ancien régime, which has played a tragic part in their history, play a comic part as a German ghost. The ancien régime had a tragic history, so long as it was the established power in the world while liberty was a personal fancy; in short, so long as it believed and had to believe in its own validity. So long as the ancien régime, as an existing world order, struggled against a new world which was just coming into existence, there was on its side a historical error but no personal error. Its decline was, therefore, tragic.
The present German regime, on the other hand, which is an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally accepted axioms-the nullity of the ancien régime revealed to the whole world-only imagines that it believes in itself and asks the world to share its illusion. If it believed in its own nature would it attempt to hide it beneath the semblance of an alien nature and look for its salvation in hypocrisy and sophistry? The modern ancien régime is the comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough, and it goes through many stages when it conducts an ancient formation to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical formation is comedy. The Greek gods, already once mortally wounded in Aeschylus' tragedy Prometheus Bound, had to endure a second d**h, a comic d**h, in Lucian's dialogues. Why should history proceed in this way? So that mankind shall separate itself gladly from its past. We claim this joyful historical destiny for the political powers of Germany.
But as soon as criticism concerns itself with modern social and political reality, and thus arrives at genuine human problems, it must either go outside the German status quo or approach its object indirectly. For example, the relation of industry, of the world of wealth in general, to the political world is a major problem of modern times. In what form does this problem begin to preoccupy the Germans? In the form of protective tariffs, the system of prohibition, the national economy. German chauvinism has pa**ed from men to matter, so that one fine day our knights of cotton and heroes of iron found themselves metamorphosed into patriots. The sovereignty of monopoly within the country has begun to be recognized since sovereignty vis-á-vis foreign countries was attributed to it. In Germany, therefore, a beginning is made with what came as the conclusion •in France and England. The old, rotten order against which these nations revolt in their theories, and which they bear only as chains are borne, is hailed in Germany as the dawn of a glorious future which as yet hardly dares to move from a cunning3 theory to a ruthless practice. While in France and England the problem is put in the form : political economy or the rule of society over wealth; in Germany it is put in the form : national economy or the rule of private property over nationality. Thus, in England and France it is a question of abolishing monop-oly, which has developed to its final consequences; while in Germany it is a question of proceeding to the final consequences of monopoly. There it is a question of the solution; here, only a question of the collision. We can see very well from this example how modem problems are presented in Germany; the example shows that our history, like a raw recruit, has so far only had to do extra drill on old and hackneyed historical matters.
If the whole of German development were at the level of German political development, a German could have no greater part in contemporary problems than can a Russian. If the individual is not restricted by the limitations of his country, still less is the nation liberated by the liberation of one indivdual. The fact that a Scythian was one of the Greek philosophers>sup>4 did not enable the Scythians to advance a single step towards Greek culture.
Fortunately, we Germans are not Scythians .
Just as the nations of the ancient world lived their pre-history in the imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have lived our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are the philosophical contemporaries of the present day without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history.When, therefore, we criticize, instead of the oeuvres incompletes of our real history, the oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history-philosophy, our criticism stands at the centre of the problems of which the present age says : that is the question. That which constitutes, for the advanced nations, a practical break With modern political conditions, is in Germany where these conditions do not yet exist, virtually a critical break with their philosophical reflection.
The German philosophy of right and of the state is the only German history which is al pari with the official modern times. The German nation is obliged, therefore, to connect its dream history with its present conditions, and to subject to criticism not only these existing conditions but also their abstract continuation. Its future cannot be restricted either to the direct negation of its real juridical and political circumstances, or to the direct realization of its ideal juridical and political circumstances. The direct negation of its real circumstances already exists in its ideal circumstances, while it has almost outlived the realization of its ideal circumstances in the contemplation of neighbouring nations. It is with good reason, therefore, that the practical political party in Germany demands the negation of philosophy. Its error does not consist in formulating this demand, but in limiting itself to a demand which it does not, and cannot, make effective. It supposes that it can achieve this negation by turning its back on philosophy, lookingelsewhere, and murmuring a few trite and ill-humoured phrases. Because of its narrow outlook it does not take account of philosophy as part of German reality, and even regards philosophy as beneath the level of German practical life and its theories. You demand as a point of departure real germs of life, but you forget that the real germ of life of the German nation has so far sprouted only in its cranium. In short, you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it.
The same error was committed, but in the opposite direction, by the theoretical party which originated in philosophy.
In the present struggle, this party saw only the critical struggle of philosophy against the German world. It did not consider that previous philosophy itself belongs to this world and is its complement, even if only an ideal complement. Critical as regards its counterpart, it was not self-critical. It took as its point of departure the presuppositions of philosophy; and either accepted the conclusions which philosophy had reached or else presented as direct philosophical demands and conclusions, demands and conclusions drawn from elsewhere. But these latter-a**uming their legitimacy-can only be achieved by the negation of previous philosophy, that is, philosophy as philosophy. We shall provide later a more comprehensive account of this party. Its principal defect may be summarized as follows : it believed that it could realize philosophy without abolishing it.
The criticism of the German philosophy of right and of the state which was given its most logical, profound and complete expression by Hegel, is at once the critical an*lysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the definitive negation of all the past forms of consciousness in German jurisprudence and politics, whose most distinguished and most general expression, raised to the level of a science, is precisely the speculative philosophy of right. If it was only Germany which could produce the speculative philosophy of right-this extravagant and abstract thought about the modern state, the reality of which remains in the beyond ( even if this beyond is only across the Rhine ) -the German representative of the modern state, on the contrary, which leaves out of account the real man was itself only possible because, and to the extent that, the modern state itself leaves the real man out of account or only satisfies the whole man in an illusory way. In politics, the Germans have thought what other nations have done. Germany has been their theoretical consciousness. The abstraction and presumption of its philosophy was in step with the partial and stunted char
acter of their reality. If, therefore, the status quo of the German political system expresses the consummation of the ancien régime, the thorn in the flesh of the modern state, the status quo of German political science expresses the imperfection of the modern state itself, the degeneracy of its flesh.
As the determined adversary of the previous form of German political consciousness, the criticism of the speculative philosophy of right does not remain within its own sphere, but leads on to tasks which can only be solved by means of practical activity.
The question then arises: can Germany attain a practical activity a la hauteur des principles; that is to say, a revolution which will raise it not only to the official level of the modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate future of those nations.
It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the ma**es. Theory is capable of seizing the ma**es when it demon-strates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. What proves beyond doubt the radicalism of German theory, and thus its practical energy, is that it begins from the resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being-conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs : "'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!"
Even from the historical standpoint theoretical emancipation has a specific practical importance for Germany. In fact Germany's revolutionary past is theoretical-it is the Reformation. In that period the revolution originated in the brain of a monk, today in the brain of the philosopher.
Luther, without question, overcame servitude through devotion but only by substituting servitude through conviction. He shattered the faith in authority by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into laymen by turning laymen into priests . He liberated man from external religiosity by making religiosity the innermost essence of man. He liberated the body from its chains because he fettered the heart with chains.
But if Protestantism was not the solution it did at least pose the problem correctly. It was no longer a question, thereafter, of the layman's struggle against the priest outside himself, but of his struggle against his own internal priest, against his own priestly nature. And if the Protestant metamorphosis of German laymen into priests emancipated the lay popes-the princes together withtheir clergy, the privileged and the philistines-the philosophical metamorphosis of the priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But just as emancipation will not be confined to princes, so the secularization of property will not be limited to the confiscation of church property, which was practised especially by hypocritical Prussia. At that time, the Peasant War, the most radical event in German history, came to grief because of theology.
Today, when theology itself has come to grief, the most unfree phenomenon in German history-our status quo-will be shattered by philosophy. On the eve of the Reformation official Germany was the most abject servant of Rome. On the eve of its revolution Germany is the abject servant of those who are far inferior to Rome; of Prussia and Austria, of petty squires and philistines.
But a radical revolution in Germany seems to encounter a major difficulty.
Revolutions need a pa**ive element, a material basis. Theory is only realized in a people so far as it fulfils the needs of the people. Will there correspond to the monstrous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality a similar discrepancy between civil society and the state, and within civil society itself? Will theoretical needs be directly practical needs? It is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive towards thought.
But Germany has not pa**ed through the intermediate stage of political emancipation at the same time as the modern nations. It has not yet attflined in practice those stages which it has transcended in theory. How could Germany, in salta mortale, surmount not only its own barriers but also those of the modern nations, that is, those barriers which it must in reality experience and strive for as an emancipation from its own real barriers? A radical revolution can only be a revolution of radical needs, for which the conditions and breeding ground appear to be lacking.
But if Germany accompanied the development of the modern nations only through the abstract activity of thought, without taking an active part in the real struggles of this development, it has also experienced the pains of this development without sharing in its pleasures and partial satisfactions. The abstract activity on one side has its counterpart in the abstract suffering on the other. And one fine day Germany will find itself at the level of the European decadence, before ever having attained the level of European emancipation. It will be comparable to a fetishist who is sickening from the diseases of Christianity.
If the German governments are examined it will be found that the circumstances of the time, the situation of Germany, the outlook of German culture, and lastly their own fortunate instinct, all drive them to combine the civilized deficiencies of the modern political world (whose advantages we do not enjoy) with the barbarous deficiencies of the ancien régime (which we enjoy in full measure); so that Germany must participate more and more, if not in the reason at least in the unreason of those political systems which transcend its status quo. Is there, for example, any country in the whole world which shares with such naivete as so-called constitutional Germany all the illusions of the constitutional régime without sharing its realities? And was it not, of necessity, a German government which had the idea of combining the torments of censorship with the torments of the French September laws5 which presuppose the liberty of the Press? Just as the gods of all the nations were to be found in the Roman Pantheon, so there will be found in the Holy Roman German Empire an the sins of all the forms of State. That this eclecticism will attain an unprecedented degree is a**ured in particular by the politico-aesthetic gourmandise of a German king who proposes to play all the roles of royalty feudal or bureaucratic, absolute or constitutional, autocratic or democratic-if not in the person of the people at least in his own person, and if not for the people, at least for himself Germany, as the deficiency of present-day politics constituted into a system, will not be able to demolish the specific German barriers without demolishing the general barriers of present-day politics.
It is not radical revolution,universal human emancipation, which is a Utopian dream for Germany, but rather a partial, merely political revolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing. What is the basis of a partial, merely political revolution? Simply this: a section of civil society emancipates itself and attains universal domination; a determinate cla** undertakes, from its particular situation, a general emancipation of society. This cla** emancipates society as a whole, but only on condition that the whole of society is in the same situation as this cla**; for example, that it possesses or can easily acquire money or culture.
No cla** in civil society can play this part unless it can arouse, in itself and in the ma**es, a moment of enthusiasm in which it a**ociates and mingles with society at large, identifies itself with it, and is felt and recognized as the general representative of this society. Its aims and interests must genuinely be the aims and interests of society itself, of which it becomes in reality the social head and heart. It is only in the name of general interests that a particular cla** can claim general supremacy. In order to attain this liberating position, and the political direction of all spheres of society, revolutionary energy and consciousness of its own power do not suffice. For a popular revolution and the emancipation of a particular cla** of civil society to coincide, for one cla** to represent the whole of society, another cla** must concentrate in itself all the evils of society, a particular cla** must embody and represent a general obstacle and limitation. A particular social sphere must be regarded as the notorious crime of the whole society, so that emancipation from this sphere appears as a general emancipation. For one cla** to be the liberating cla** par excellence, it is necessary that another cla** should be openly the oppressing cla**. The negative significance of the French nobility and clergy produced the positive significance of the bourgeoisie, the cla** which stood next to them and opposed them.
But in Germany every cla** lacks the logic, insight, courage and clarity which would make it a negative representative of society. Moreover, there is also lacking in every cla** the generosity of spirit which identifies itself, if only for a moment, with the popular mind; that genius which pushes material force to political power, that revolutionary daring which throws at its adversary the defiant phrase: I am nothing and I should be everything. The essence of German morality and honour, in cla**es as in individuals, is a modest egoism which displays, and allows others to display, its own narrowness. The relation between the different spheres of German society is, therefore, not dramatic, but epic. Each of these spheres begins to be aware of itself and to establish itself beside the others, not from the moment when it is oppressed, but from the moment that circumstances, without any action of its own, have created a new sphere which it can in turn oppress. Even the moral sentiment of the German middle cla** has no other basis than the consciousness of being the representative of the narrow and limited mediocrity of all the other cla**es. It is not only the German kings, therefore, who ascend their thrones mal a propos. Each sphere of civil society suffers a defeat before gaining the victory; it erects its own barrier before having destroyed the barrier which opposes it; it displays the narrowness of its views before having displayed their generosity, and thus every opportunity of playing an important role has pa**ed before it properly existed, and each cla**, at the very moment when it begins its struggle against the cla** above it, remains involved in a struggle against the cla** beneath. For this reason, the princes are in conflict with the monarch, the bureaucracy with the nobility, the bourgeoisie with all of them, while the proletariat is already beginning its struggle with the bourgeoisie. The middle cla** hardly dares to conceive the idea of emancipation from its own point of view before• the development of social conditions, and the progress of political theory, show that this point of view is already antiquated, or at least disputable.
In France it is enough to be something in order to desire to be everything. In Germany no one has the right to be anything without first renouncing everything. In France partial emancipation is a basis for complete emancipation. In Germany complete emancipation is a conditio sine qua non for any partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of a progressive emancipation which must give birth to complete liberty. In France every cla** of the population is politically idealistic and considers itself first of all, not as a particular cla**, but as the representative of the general needs of society. The role of liberator can, therefore, pa** successively in a dramatic movement to different cla**es in the population, until it finally reaches the cla** which achieves social freedom; no longer a**uming certain conditions external to man, which are none the less created by human society, but organizing all the conditions of human life on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, on the contrary, where practical life is as little intellectual as intellectual life is practical, no cla** of civil society feels the need for, or the ability to achieve, a general emancipation, until it is forced to it by its immediate situation, by materia necessity and by its fetters themselves.
Where is there, then, a real possibility of emancipation in Germany?
This is our reply. A cla** must be formed which has radical chains, a cla** in civil society which is not a cla** of civil society, a cla** which is the dissolution of all cla**es, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status, a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but is totally opposed to the a**umptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without, therefore, emancipating all these other spheres, which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular cla**, is the proletariat.
The proletariat is only beginning to form itself in Germany, as a result of the industrial movement. For what constitutes the proletariat is not naturally existing poverty, but poverty artificially produced, is not the ma** of people mechanically oppressed by the weight of society, but the ma** resulting from the disintegration of society and above all from the disintegration of the middle cla**. Needless to say, however, the numbers of the proletariat are also increased by the victims of natural poverty and of Christian-Germanic serfdom.
When the proletariat announces the dissolution of the existing social order, it only declares the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of this order. When the proletariat demands the negation of private property it only lays down as a principle for society what society has already made a principle for the proletariat, and what the latter already involuntarily embodies as the negative result of society. Thus the proletarian has the same right, in relation to the new world which is coming into being, as the German king has in relation to the existing world when he calls the people his people or a horse his horse. In calling the people his private property the king simply declares that the owner of private property is king.
Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has penetrated deeply into this virgin soil of the people, the Germans will emancipate themselves and become men.
Let us sum up these results. The emancipation of Germany is only possible in practice if one adopts the point of view of that theory according to which man is the highest being for man. Germany will not be able to emancipate itself from the Middle ages unless it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany no type of enslavement can be abolished unless all enslavement is destroyed. Germany, which likes to get to the bottom of things, can only make a revolution which upsets the whole order of things. The emancipation of Germany will be an emancipation of man. Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition 6 of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy.
When all the inner conditions ripen, the day of German resurrection will be proclaimed by the crowing of the Gallic co*k.7
Economic and Philosophic
Man*scripts of 1844
KARL MARX
Soon after moving to Paris in November, 1843, Marx applied himself to the criticism of political economy-the new phase of his critical program foreshadowed in his two essays in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. Between April and August of 1844 he produced the rough draft of what, judging by his preface, Was to have been a book. He did not finish it for publication, however, and it lay unpublished for more than eighty years. The surviving parts, comprising four man*scripts, were given the name shown above. An incomplete version in Russian translation was published in Moscow in 1927. The first full edition in German, prepared by D. Riazanov of the Marx•Engels Institute in Moscow, was published in Berlin in 1932, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe.
The fundamentals of the Marxist interpretation of history are to be found in the 1844 man*scripts, including the notion of the proletarian revolution and future communism as the goal of the historical process. The theory is set forth, however, in terms of philosophical concepts drawn by Marx from Hegel and Feuerbach, most notably the concept of man's "self-alienation" or "self-estrangement." History, particularly under modern capitalism, is seen as a story of man's alienation in his life as producer, and communism is presented as the final transcendence of alienation via a revolution against private property. Because the 1844 man*scripts show us Marxism at the moment of its genesis in Marx's mind and because they help to clarify both the relation of Marxism to earlier German philosophy and its ethical significance, their publication has profoundly affected schoolarship on Marx and Marxism in our time.
A part of the man*scripts consists largely of excerpts from writings of the political economists on such topics as wages of labor, profit of capital, and rent of land. The material reprinted here, comprising the extant portions in which Marx expounds his own position, consists of the preface and the sections entitled "Estranged Labour," "Private Property and Communism," "The Meaning of Human Requirements," "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society," and "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole."
A number of pa**ages in the man*scripts have been crossed out, apparently by Marx. There is no reason to think that the pa**ages crossed out had ceased to represent what Marx thought. He may well have been guided by editorial considerations in working over the draft of a man*script originally intended for publication. *
Preface
I have already given notice in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher of the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. In the course of elaboration for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated, could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the impression of arbitrary systematizing. I shall therefore issue the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and at the end try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and finally, shall make a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched on in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself ex professo1 touches on these subjects.
It is hardly necessary to a**ure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been won by means of a wholly empirical an*lysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.
[Whereas the uninformed reviewer who "tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the "utopian phrase" at the positive critic's head, or again such phrases as "pure, resolute, utterly critical criticism," the "not merely legal but social-utterly social-society," the "compact, ma**y ma**," the "oratorical orators of the ma**y ma**,"2 this reviewer has yet to fur" nish the first proof that besides his theological family-affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of worldly matters.
It goes without saying that besides the French and English Socialists I have made use of German socialist works as well. The only original German works of substance in this science, however-other than Weitling's writings-are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen,4 and Engels Umrisse ZlL einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie5 in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher where, likewise, I indicated in a very general way the basic elements of this work.
[Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole-and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy¬owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach, against whose Philosophie der Zukunft6 and Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie7 in the Anecdotis,8 despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of silence.]
It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, widespread and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach's writings, the only writings since Hegel's Phanomenologie and Logik to contain a real theoretical revolution.
In contrast to the critical theologians9 of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of the present work-the settling of accounts with Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy as a whole-to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This lack of thoroughness is not accidental, since even the critical theologian remains a theologian. Hence, either he had to start from certain presuppositions of. philosophy accepted as authoritative; or if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people's discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them without vindication and in a cowardly fashion, abstracts from them showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this dependence merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner.
[In this connection the critical theologian is either forever repeating a**urances about the purity of his own criticism, or tries to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other immature form of criticism outside itself-say eighteenth-century criticism-and the backwardness of the ma**es, in order to divert the observer's attention as well as his own from the necessary task of settling accounts between criticism and its point of origin-Hegelian dialectic and German philosophy as a whole-from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity. Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as Feuerbach's) are made about the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if he were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of catch-phrases at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy; partly he even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by covertly a**erting in a veiled, malicious and sceptical fashion elements of the Hegelian dialectic which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism-not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, a**erting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, selforiginating truth, etc., in a way peculiar to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be done by philosophy, so that he can chatter away about purity, resoluteness, and utterly critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true conqueror of philosophy whenever he happens to feel some "moment" in Hegel1 to be lacking in Feuerbach-for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of "self-consciousness" and "mind" the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.] 2
On close inspection theological criticism-genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement-is seen in the final an*lysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological caricature. This interesting example of the justice in history, which now a**igns to theology, ever philosophy's spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy-i.e., the process of its decay-this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion.
[How far, on the other hand, Feuerbach's discoveries about the nature of philosophy required still, for their proof at least, a critical settling of accounts with philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.]
Estranged Labour3
We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land-likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumu¬lation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears and that the whole of society must I fall apart into the two cla**es-the property-owners and the propertyless workers.
Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulae the material process through which private property actually pa**es, and these formulae it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws-i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy does not disclose the source of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the
relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to evolve. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently fortuitous circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how, to it, exchange itself appears to be afortuitous fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious competition.
Precisely because political economy does not grasp the connections within the movement, it was possible to counterpose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft-liberty to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate-for competition, craft-liberty and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as fortuitous, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation; and feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.
Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.
Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primor dial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. He a**umes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce-namely, the necessary relationship between two things-between, for example, division of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it a**umes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.
We proceed from an actual economic fact.
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity-and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces-labour's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.4
So much does labour's realization appear as loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to d**h. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital.
All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself-his inner world-becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his product.
The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.
But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense-i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.
Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour-to be his labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.
Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.
(The laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature's bondsman.)
Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things-but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces-but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty-but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines-but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence-but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.
The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship-mid confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later.
When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.
Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker's relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production¬within the producing activity itself. How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production.
If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual-that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity-in the same way the worker's activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
As a result. therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal.
We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process. This relation is the relation of theworker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity-as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the estrangement of the thing.
We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two already considered.
Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but-and this is only another way of expressing it-but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.
The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art-his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible-so too in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body-both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man's inorganic body-nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature-means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.
For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need-the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species-its species character-is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.
In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces. only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal's product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.
It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of la bour is, therefore, the objectification of man's species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence.
The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him a means.
Estranged labour turns thus:
(3) Man's species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.
(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. "What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man, and to the other man's labour and object of labour.
In fact, the proposition that man's species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man's essential nature.5
The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.
Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker.
We took our departure from a fact of political economy-the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept of this fact-estranged, alienated labour. We have an*lysed this concept-hence an*lysing merely a fact of political economy.
Let us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself. If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?
If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong?
To a being other than me.
Who is this being?
The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers.
The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of labour is provided, can only be man himself.
If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life's joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.
We must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man's relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man.
Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through 'the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labour man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production as the, loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he begets his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own.
Till now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint of the worker and later we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.
Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.
Private property thus results by an*lysis from the concept of alienated labour-i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of. estranged man.
True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from political economy. But on an*lysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.
Only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.
This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.
(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything. From this contradiction Proudhon has concluded in favour of labour and against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour.
We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical: where the product, the object of labour pays for labour itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour's estrangement, for after all in the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclusions.
A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.
Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.
Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other.
(2) From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation-and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.
Just as we have found the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by an*lysis, in the same way every category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression of the first foundations.
Before considering this configuration, however, let us try to solve two problems.
(1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human, social property.
(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have an*lysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question as to the origin of private property into the question as to the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity's development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of being concerned with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly concerned with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.
As to (1): The general nature of private property and its rela¬
tion to truly human property.
Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually condition one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement.
We have considered the one side-alienated labour in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself. The property-relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour we have found as the product, the necessary outcome of this relation of alienated labour. Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations-the relation of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor.
Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person-we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its object of this person who is alien to labour and the worker.
First it has to be noticed, that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-wor ker as a state of alienation, of estrangement.
Secondly, that the worker's real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind ) appears in the non-worker confronting him as a theoretical attitude.
Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.
Let us look more closely at these three relations.6
Private Property and Communism
Re. p. XXXIX. The antithesis of propertylessness and property so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an antithesis of indifference, not grasped in its active connection, its internal relation-an antithesis not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property ( as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction-hence a dynamic relationship moving inexorably to its resolution.
Re. the same page. The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective aspect-but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be annulled "as such" (Proudhon). Or a particular form of labour-labour levelled down, parcelled, and therefore unfree-is conceived as the source of private property's perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men; for instance, Fourier, who, like the physiocrats, also conceived agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary type, whilst Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is the essence, and now also aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers condition. Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property-at first as universal private property. By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:
(1) In its first form only a generalization and consummation of this relationship. It shows itself as such in a two fold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to abstract by force from talent, etc. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of labourer is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of counter posing universal private property to private property finds expression in the bestial form of counter posing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the contmunity of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism. Just as the woman pa**es from marriage to general prostitution,7 so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man's objective substance) pa**es from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. In negating the personality of man in every sphere, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which avarice re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thoughts of every piece of private property-inherent in each piece as such-are at least turned against all wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. The crude communism is only the consummation of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it.
The community is only a community of labour, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital-the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined- universality-labour as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.
In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural procreative relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the s**es man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature-his own natural function. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature has to him become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of development. It follows from the character of this relationship how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence-the extent to which his human nature has come to be nature to him. In this relationship is revealed, too, the extent to which man's need has hecome a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need-the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being. The first positive annulment of private property-crude communism-is thus merely one form in which the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community, comes to the surface.
(2) Communism (a) of a political nature still-democratic or despotic; (b) with the annulment of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property (i.e., by the estrangement of man). In both forms communism already knows itself to be re-integration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.
(3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being-a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully-developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man-the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its coming-to-be. That other, still immature communism, meanwhile, seeks an historical proof for itself-a proof in the realm of the existent-amongst disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focussing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this proc¬ess contradicts its claims, and that, if it has once been, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to being essential.
That the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property-in that of the economy, to be precise-is easy to see.
This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement production and consumption-is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all production hitherto-i.e., the realization or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life is, therefore, the positive transcendence of all estrangement-that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to this human, i.e., social made of existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man's inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces bath aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends an whether the true and for them authentic life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world-is mare ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, it is still mostly an abstraction.
The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract, philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent an action.
We have seen haw an the premise of positively annulled private property man produces man-himself and the other man; haw the object, being the direct embodiment of his individuality, is simultaneously his awn existence far the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence far him. Likewise, however, bath the material of labour and man as the subject, are the paint of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whale movement: just as society itself produces man as man, So is society produced by him. Activity and consumption, bath in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social consumption; the human essence of nature first exists only far social man; for only here does nature exist far him as a bond with man-as his existence for the other and the other's existence for him-as the life-element of the human world; only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence became his human existence, and nature became man for him. Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature-the true resurrection of nature-the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature bath brought to fulfilment.
Social activity and social consumption exist by no means only in the farm of same directly communal activity and directly communal consumption, although communal activity and communal consumption-i.e., activity and consumption which are manifested and directly confirmed in real a**ociation with other men-will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociality stems from the true character of the activity's content and is adequate to the nature of consumption.
But again when I am active scientifically, etc.,-when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others-then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own, existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it. Consequently, too, the activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is my theoretical existence as a social being.
What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of "Society" as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried out together with others-is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species life are not different, however much-and this is inevitable-the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.
In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species-consciousness and is for itself in its generality as a thinking being.
Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being) , is just as much the totality-the ideal totality-the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself; just as he exists also in the real world as the awareness and the real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human life-activity.
Thinking and being are thus no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other.
d**h seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the definite individual and to contradict their unity. But the determinate individual is only a determinate species being, and as such mortal.
(4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the a**ertion of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realization is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: conversely, the positive transcendence of private property-i.e., the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements-is not to be conceived merely in the sense of direct, one-sided gratification-merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving-in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object, the appropriation of the human world; their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human world;8 it is human efficaciousness and human suffering, for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it-when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.,-in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property-labour and conversion into capital.
In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses-the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. ( On the category of "having," see Hess in the Twenty-One Sheets. )
The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object-an object emanating from man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man,9and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost their egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.
In the same way, the senses and enjoyments of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct a**ociation with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.
Footnotes:
1. For further particulars on the publishing history, see the Note on Texts and Terminology, below.
2. The notion that Marxism has its foundation in "dialectical materialism," a general world-view of which historical materialism is the application to human history, is a later growth particularly a**ociated with Russian and subsequently Communist Marxism, and is not the cla**ical Marxist position. For Marx the prime subject of Marx ism was human history, hence historical materialism was the foundation of the teaching. Moreover, historical materialism was itself dialectical in that the human historical process showed a revolutionary pattern of development through opposition and conflict. To this it must be added that Engels, who more than Marx was interested in the progress of natural science in the nineteenth century, did give an initial impetus to the later emergence of a Marxist "dialectical materialism" by his speculations on the presence of dialectical laws in natural processes. He began but never completed a book on this subject, the man*script of which was first published in the twentieth century under the title Dialectics of Nature. The term "dialectical materialism" was put into currency by the Russian Marxist GeorgiPlekhanov in one of his writings of the late nineteenth century. For a long while the authoritative version of the viewpoint of Communist Marxism on this subject was the essay by. Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," published as a part of Chapter Four of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, many editions).
3. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Cla**ical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works,2 vol. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol.II, p.387.
4. From a review, written in 1859, of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Italics added.
5. On this see Marx's own testimony in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p 4, below. For the commentary itself, see pp. 16-25, 53-65, below.
6. This is a main theme of the important section of the 1844 man*scripts on estranged labor. See below. pp. 70-81.
7. The account given here of the origin and development of Marx's thought follows the lines of the interpretation presented in greater length and detail, with supporting evidence, in Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1961 ; 2nd ed., 1972).
8. I am referring to Erich Fromm's Man for Himself (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1 947). See also his autobiographical study, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962 ). For a discussion of Marx from an existentialist viewpoint, see F. H. Heinemann,.Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
9. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Man*scripts of 1844, edited by Dirk J. Struik (New York: Inter national Publishers, 1 964), pp. 197,226. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" appears here as an appendix.
1. See in this connection the selection included here under the title "Working-Cla** Manchester" (pp. 579-585, below).
2. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Moscow, 1939-41). The full text in English is available in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). (See below, pp.221-293, for selections. )
3. See the selection en titled "Alienation and Social Cla**es," below
4. On Marx's use of the terms "mode of production" and "relations of production," see Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W.W.Norton, 1969) , chapter 1.
5. Dirk J.Struik has pointed out that Marx does not completely renounce the Term "alienation" in his later economic writings. It makes a reappearance in the Grundrisse and in the following pa**age from Capital, Vol. III, Part I, chapter 5, section 1: "The relations of capital conceal indeed the inner connection.(of the facts) in the complete indifference, exteriorization and alienation in which it places the worker in relation to the conditions of the realization of his own labour (The Economic and Philosophic 111 man*scripts of 1844, p. 235).
6. For Marx's scorn of the distributive orientation in socialist thought, see particularly his comments in The Critique of the Gotha Program, pp. 528- 532, below. On the problem of dis tributive justice in Marx, see Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 2.
7. What Is to Be Done?, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p.19. By "movement" in this context Lenin meant an organized political movement led by a political party
8. "The work of Marx on the Civil War of 1871 has an extraordinary historical significance: for by this bold step Marx annexed the memory of the Commune. It is only since then that Marxism has possessed a revolutionary tradition in the eyes of mankind. By 1870 Marx had already acquired a reputation as an outstanding theoretician of the labour motivement, but the general public knew nothing of the political and revolutionary activity of the Marxists .... It is only since 1871 that Marxism has been clearly a**ociated with the labour revolution .... In this manner Marx provided an important tradition for the future movements of the working cla**. and he placed his own doctrines in the centre of these movements" (Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism [Boston : Beacon Press. 1965]. pp. 204-205).
9. See Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, pp. 2 02-205, for further particulars and a discussion of this issue.
1. When informed in 1864 that the newspaper of the General German Workers' Society would be called The Social Democrat, Engels wrote to Marx: "What a disgusting title-The Social Democrat! Why don't those fellows frankly call the thin g : The Proletarian?" Marx answered: "Social Democrat is a bad title. Yet one shouldn't immediately use the best title for something which may turn out to be a failure" (Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 162). A Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party came into existence in 1 898. In 1917, out of disgust with the behavior of the Social Democratic leaders of various countries who had supported their governments in World War I in contravention of Marxist internationalism, Lenin persuaded his Bolshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Party to change its name to "Communist Party."
2. See the text of this speech. below .
3.For Lenin's argument see The State and Revolution in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton. 1975), p. 337. For Kautsky's position and the Lenin-Kaut-sky conflict, see Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,196 4), and Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 3. Soviet Marxism's espousal of the concept of a peaceful path is an*lyzed in chapter 6 of the latter work.
4. Engels, "The Tactics of Social Democracy," below.
5. Engels, Ludwig Feuerback and the End of Cla**ical German Philosophy. p.386.
6. Selections from this work appear below.
7. See below.
1. For one of Marx's versions of the grand project, see the Grundrisse, below p.244. The successive versions are discussed by Joseph J. O'Malley in "Marx's 'Economics' and Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Essay on Marx's Hegelianism," Political Studies, vol. XXIV, no. 1 (March 1976),pp. 48 ff.
2. For this and other particulars about the Institute I have drawn upon E.A.Stepanova, "O sobirianii i nauchnoi publikatsii v SSSR literaturnogo
nasledstva osnovopolozhnikov marksizma," in Iz istorii marksizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1961), pp.6-59.
3. I am indebted to Professor Joseph J.O'Malley for this information.
4. See below, pp.291-292, and Martin Nicolaus' discussion of the point in his Foreword to the full translation ( Karl Marx, Grundrisse : Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [New York: Vintage Books, 1 9731. p. 32).
5. The meaning of Aufhebung in the context of Hegel's philosophy of spirit is explicated in Robert C.Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: 1972), pp. 51-52, 59-60.
1. Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette) : A daily radical newspaper published in Cologne in 1842-43 ; from October 15, 1842, to March 18, 1843, its editor was Marx.
2. Marx has in mind his article, "Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung" ( Communism and the Augsburg General Journal) , Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, B. I, Halbband I, Frankfurt am Main, 1927, S. 260-65.
3. Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) : Organ of revolutionary and communist propaganda, published by Marx in Paris in 1844
4. Here all mistrust must be abandoned And here must perish every craven thought.(Dante. The Divine Comedy)
1. Heine.
2. The Doctors' Club was founded by representatives of the radical wing of the Hegelian school in Berlin in 1837.Among its members were lecturer on theology of Berlin University Bruno Bauer. gymnasium history teacher Karl Friedrich Koppen, and geography teacher Adolf Rutenberg. The usual meeting place was the small Hippel cafe. The Club, of which Marx was also an active member, played an important part in the Young Hegelian movement.
* For a fuller statement of this interpretation, see Robert C. Tucker. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx", pp. 75-80.
1. Course of life.
1. Theodore Dezamy, author of Code de la nature (1842). [R.T.]
2. Wilhelm Weitling, a German journeyman tailor whose Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842) advocated communism. [R.T.]
3. This is the title of Cabet's utopian noyel published in Paris in 1840. At that time Cabet's followers were called "communists." [R.T.]
4. From the political point of view.[R.T.]
5. The system of representation by estates (cla**es) as opposed to the system of representation by individuals. [R.T.]
* The treatise is available in English as Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T.M.Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). The complete text of Marx's commentary is available in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated and edited by Joseph J, O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
** For more on transformational criticism and Marx's application of it in this commentary, see the Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv, above.
l. Subheadings supplied by R.C.T.
2. Par excellence -i.e., "Christianity is the pre-eminent religion."
3. I.e., state, republic; etymologically, "public affairs."
1. The Jewish question. [Braunschweig, 1843.-Marx]
2. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden," Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 57. [Marx] Emphases added by Marx.
3. Chamber of Deputies. Debate of 26th December, 1840. [Marx]
4. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 64. [Marx]
S. Ibid., p. 65. [Marx]
6. Loc. cit. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 71. [Marx]
8. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 66.[Marx]
9. Ibid., p. 97. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 3. [Marx]
2. Gustave de Belaumont, Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, Bruxelles, 1835, 2 vols., II, p. 207. [Marx] Marx refers to another edition, Paris, 1835.
3. Ibid., p. 216. Beaumont actually refers to all the States of North America.
4. Ibid., p. 217. [Marx]
5. G. de Beaumont, op. cit. [Marx]
6. A. de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique. [Marx]
7. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in North America, Edinburgh, 1833, 2 vols. [Marx] Marx quotes from the German translation, Mannheim.1834
8. Hamilton, op. cit., I, pp. 2 88, 306,309. [Marx]
9. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophiedes Rechts, Ier Aufgabe, 1821, p. 346. [Marx] See the English translation by T. M. Knox, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Oxford, 1942, p.173.
1. The terms "species-life" (Gattungsleben) and "species-being" (Gattungswesen) are derived from Feuerbach. In the first chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence oj Christianity], Leipzig, 1841, Feuerbach discusses the nature of man, and argues that man is to be distinguished from animals not by "consciousness" as such, but by a particular kind of consciousness. Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual ; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a "human essence" which is the same in himself and in other men. According to Feuerbach this ability to conceive of "species" is the fundamental element in the human power of reasoning: "Science is the consciousness of species." Marx, while not departing from this meaning of the terms, employs them in other contexts : and he consciousness" defines the nature of man, man is only living and acting authentically (i.e. in accordance with his nature) when he lives and acts deliberately as a "species-being," that is, as a social being.
2. See previous note.
3. I.e. as a member of civil society.
4. I.e. the individual with political rights.
5. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p.8. [Marx]
6. Ibid., pp. 8-9. [Marx]
7. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, p.55. [Marx]
8. Ibid., p.56. [Marx]
9. Ibid., p.108. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, pp. 19-20. [Marx]
2. Beaumont, op.cit., II, pp. 2 06-7. [Marx]
3. Buchez et Roux, "Robes pierrejeune," Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution francaise, Tome XXVIIIp. 1 59. [Marx]
4. J.J. Rousseau, Du contrat social, Book II. Chapter VII, "The Legislator." Marx quoted this pa**age in French, and added the emphases; he omitted the portions enclosed in square brackets.
5. The capacity of the present-day Jews and Christians to become free. [In Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Ed. G. Herwegh ) , pp. 5 6-71 .-Marx]
6. Loc. cit., p. 71. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 70. [Marx]
8. Loc. cit., p. 65. [Marx]
9. Marx alludes here to Bruno Bauer, Kritik der e'llangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Vols. I-II, Leipzig, 1 841; Vol. III, Braunschweig, 1842,and David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols. Tubingen, 1835-6 An English translation of Strauss' book by Marian Evans (George Eliot) was published in 1846 under the title Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
1. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit ... etc. ," p.71. [Marx]
2. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
3. Hamilton, op. cit., I, p. 2 1 3. [Marx] Marx paraphrases this pa**age.
4. Beaumont, op. cit., II, p. 1 79. [Marx]
5. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
6. The German word judentum had, in the language of the time, the secondary meaning of "commerce," and in this and other pa**ages Marx exploits the two senses of the word.
7. Quoted from Thomas Munzer's pamphlet against Luther, "Hochverrusachte
Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbarmliche Christenheit also ganz jammerlich besudelt hat." (p.B iii. 1 524.) [Marx]
1. Marx refers to his intention to publish a critical study of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, to which this essay was an introduction, One of Marx's preliminary man*scripts for such a study has been published entitled "Aus der Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts" (MEGA I,11, pp. 403-553).
2. The principal representative of the Historical school was F. K. von Savigny (1779-1861) who outlined its programme in his book Vom BeTuf unserer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (On the Vocation of our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence) .Heidelberg, 1814. Marx attended Savigny's lectures at the University of Berlin in 1836-7 ; but he was more attracted by the lectures of Eduard Gans (1798- 1839), a liberal Hegelian influenced by Saint-Simon, who emphasized in his teaching and writings the part played by reason in the development of law, and who was Savigny's principal opponent in Berlin.
3. In German, listigen; Marx is punning upon the name of Friedrich List
( 1789-1846 ), the apostle of industrial capitalism in a nationalist and protectionist form, who published in 1 840 his influential book, Das nationale System de,. politischen Okkonomie.
4. Anacharsis.
5, The laws of September, 1835, which increased the financial guarantees required from the publishers of news papers and introduced heavier penalties for "subversive" publications.
6. Aufhebung [R. T.]
7. I.e., the future German revolution will be sparked by revolutionary developments in France. (This last paragraph does not appear in the original Bottomore translation used here) [R.T]
* The cross-outs are indicated by pointed brackets in the complete text of the 1844 man*scripts as published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Marx and Engels: 1843-44) (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1975), pp. 249-346. I am indebted to Thomas Ferguson for bringing the crossed-out material to my attention.
1. Particularly.
2. Marx refers here to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who had published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol.1, December, 1843; vol. 4, March, 1844. The expressions "utopian phrase" and "compact ma**" can be found in Bauer's article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand del' Kritik?" published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 8, July, 1844. Allgemeine Literatuf-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly, was published by Bauer in Charlottenburg from December, 1843,to October, 1844.
3. Pa**ages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his man*script.
4. The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil, Ziirich and Winterthur, 1843.
5. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy."
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843.
7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy) published in Anekdota, vol. II.
8. Marx's abbreviation for Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by Arnold Ruge in 'Switzerland. It included Marx's Notes on the Latest Prussian Instruction to Censors and Luther-the Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Koppen, Arnold Ruge, etc.
9. Marx has in mind Hauer and his followers, who were a**ociated with the
Allgemeine Lite,atur-Zeitung.
1. "Moment" is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement.
2. In Hegel, "feeling" (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective are still confused together "Consciousness" (Bewusstein)-the name given by Hegel to the first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind-denotes those forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend an object. "Self-consciousness" and "mind" denote subsequent, higher phases in the evolution of "absolute knowledge" or "the absolute."
3. Die Entjremdete Arbeit. See the Note on Texts and Terminology. p. xli. above. for a discussion of this term. [R.T.]
4. "Alienation"- EntiiusseTung
5. "Species nature" (and, earlier, "species being")- Gattungswesen; "man's essential nature"- menschlichen Wesen.
6. At this point the first man*script breaks off unfinished.
7. Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes-and the latter's abomination is still greater-the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. [Marx]
8. For this reason it is just as highly priced as the determinations of human essence and activities. [Marx]
9. In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly. [Marx]
1. "Essential powers"-Wesenskrcijte: i.e., powers belonging to me as part of my essential nature, my very being.
2. Spontaneous generation.
3. Forces of human nature: menschlichen Wesenkraft; human nature: menschlichell Wesens.
4. James Mill, Elements of Political Economy.
5. In the man*script the lower left corner of the page is torn off. Just the right-hand endings of the last six lines remain, making restorations of the text impossible. It is possible to surmise, however, that Marx here criticizes Hegel's idealistic "transcending" of estrangement ( the words that have survived are cited in the next footnote ) .
6. In "transcending" estrangement "in the old German manner-the manner of the Hegelian phenomenology," i.e., in transcending it exclusively in the "consciousness" of the subject.
7. The bottom of the page is torn. Three or four lines are missing.
8. This word is illegible.
9. Goethe, Faust, ( Part I-Faust's (Penguin, 1949 ) , p.91. Study, III), translated by Philip Wayne
1. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck German translation. ( Marx's emphasis .)
2. Ibid.
3. An end of the page is torn out of the man*script.