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 passage 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 classicus 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 embarrassment 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 death sentence passed upon it, to withdraw from the public stage into the study
The first work which I undertook for a solution of the doubts which assailed 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 Class 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 manuscript, 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 manuscript 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 classes, 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 associates 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 crass 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 analyzing 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 "assigns 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 assignment" (previously the discussion was only about the assignment 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 associated with the monarch, the people .is that formless mass 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 mass 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 passes 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] reassertion, 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 pass 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 crass materialism, the materialism of passive 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 passive 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 crass materialism, it manifests its crass 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, analyses 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 assurances 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 assume 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 assure 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 masses 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 assure 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 passages 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 assimilated 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 masses, 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 passions 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 assessed 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 asserts 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 associated 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 associate 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 associate 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 assurance 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 association 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 reassembled 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 passive, 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 analysis, 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 passive, 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-assumes 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 class 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 passion of the head, but the head of passion. 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 passive 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 death, a comic death, 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 passed 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-assuming 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 analysis 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 character 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 masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses 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 passive 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 passed 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 assured 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 class undertakes, from its particular situation, a general emancipation of society. This class emancipates society as a whole, but only on condition that the whole of society is in the same situation as this class; for example, that it possesses or can easily acquire money or culture
No class in civil society can play this part unless it can arouse, in itself and in the masses, a moment of enthusiasm in which it associates 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 class 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 class of civil society to coincide, for one class to represent the whole of society, another class must concentrate in itself all the evils of society, a particular class 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 class to be the liberating class par excellence, it is necessary that another class should be openly the oppressing class. The negative significance of the French nobility and clergy produced the positive significance of the bourgeoisie, the class which stood next to them and opposed them
But in Germany every class lacks the logic, insight, courage and clarity which would make it a negative representative of society. Moreover, there is also lacking in every class 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 classes 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 class has no other basis than the consciousness of being the representative of the narrow and limited mediocrity of all the other classes. 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 passed before it properly existed, and each class, at the very moment when it begins its struggle against the class above it, remains involved in a struggle against the class 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 class 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 class of the population is politically idealistic and considers itself first of all, not as a particular class, but as the representative of the general needs of society. The role of liberator can, therefore, pass successively in a dramatic movement to different classes in the population, until it finally reaches the class which achieves social freedom; no longer assuming 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 class 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 class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, 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 assumptions 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 class, 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 mass of people mechanically oppressed by the weight of society, but the mass resulting from the disintegration of society and above all from the disintegration of the middle class. 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 cock.7
Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts 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 manuscripts, 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 manuscripts, 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 manuscripts 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 manuscripts 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 passages in the manuscripts have been crossed out, apparently by Marx. There is no reason to think that the passages 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 manuscript 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 assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been won by means of a wholly empirical analysis 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, massy mass," the "oratorical orators of the massy mass,"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 assurances 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 masses, 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 asserting 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, asserting, 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 analysis 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 assigns 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 classes-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 passes, 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 assumes 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 assumes 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 death. 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 analysed this concept-hence analysing 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 analysis 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 analysis 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 analysis, 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 analysed 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 relation 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 passes from marriage to general prostitution,7 so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man's objective substance) passes 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 sexes 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 association 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
Death 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 assertion 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 association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.
It is obvious that the human eye gratifies itself in a way different from the crude, non•human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc
To recapitulate; man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object
On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man's essential powers1-human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers-that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinateness of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and therefore also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses
On the other hand, looking at this in its subjective aspect: just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear-is no object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers and can therefore only be so for me as my essential power is present for itself as a subjective capacity, because the sense of an object for me goes only so far as my senses go (has only sense for a sense corresponding to that object) -for this reason the senses of the social man are other senses than those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form-in short, senses capable of human gratifications, senses confirming themselves as essential powers of man ) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses-the practical senses (will, love, etc. )-in a word, human sense-the humanness of the senses-comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present
The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; •it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence both in its theoretical and practical aspects is required to make man's sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance
Just as resulting from the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty-or of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty-the budding society finds to hand all the material for this development: so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being-produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses-as its enduring reality
It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible way, by virtue of the practical energy of men . Their resolution is therefore by no means merely, a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one
It will be seen how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man's essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man's general mode of being-religion or history in its abstract general character as politics, art, literature, etc.,-to be the realityof man's essential powers and man's species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement, just as that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour-that is, industry-activity estranged from itself)
A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word-"need, " "vulgar need"?
The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated a constantly growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the means were lacking. Even historiography pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment and utility arising from individual great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, however directly and much it had to consummate dehumanization. Industry is the actual, historical relation of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material-or rather, its idealistictendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life, albeit in an estranged form. One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie. The nature which comes to be in human history-the genesis of human society-is man's real nature; hence nature as it comes to be through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature
Sense-perception ( see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the twofold form both of sensuous consciousness and of sensuous need-that is, only when science proceeds from nature-is it true science. All history is the preparation for "man" to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and for the needs of "man as man" to become [natural, sensuous] needs. History itself is a real part of natural history-of nature's coming to be man. Natural science will in time subsume under itself the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume under itself natural science: there will be one science
Man is the immediate object of natural science: for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical ) -presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. For his own sensuousness first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man-man-is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-knowledge in the science of the natural world in general, since they can find their objective realization in natural objects only. The element of thought itself-the element of thought's living expression-language-is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about man, are identical terms
It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life activities-the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man-given socialism-receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the- greatest wealth-the other human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is emotion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being
(5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if owe him not only the sustenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life-if he is the source of my life; and if it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The self¬mediated being of nature and of man is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything palpable in practical life
The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geogen -i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the coming-to-be of the earth, as a process, as self-generation. Generatio aequivoca2 is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation
Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said. You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings-a species-act of human beings-has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically, man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect-the infinite progression which leads you further to enquire: "Who begot my father? Who his grandfather?", etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progression, by which man repeats himself in procreation, thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progression which drives me even further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether that progression as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don't think, don't ask me, for as soon as you think and. ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to be?
You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc
But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-be. Since the real existence of man and nature has become practical, sensuous and perceptible-since man has become for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man-the question about an alien being , about a being above nature and man-a question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature and of man-has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this inessentiality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the practically and theoretically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man's positive self-consciousness no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man's positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development-the structure of human society
The Meaning of Human Requirements
We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs has, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production have: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.3 Under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new depend¬ence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction .of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potency of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man; his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being; and the power of his money declines exactly in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases
The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective attribute: just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to something merely quantitative. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this is even partly manifested in that the extension of products and needs falls into contriving and ever¬calculating subservience to inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites.Private property does not know how to change crudeneed into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch-the producer-in order to sneak for himself a few pennies-in order to charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his Christianly beloved neighbours. He puts himself at the service of the other's most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses-all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other's very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven-an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one's neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)
And partly, this estrangement manifests itself in that it produces refinement of needs and of their means on the one hand, and a bestial barbarization, a complete, unrefined, abstract simplicity of need, on the other; or rather in that it merely resurrects itself in its opposite. Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to living in a cave, which is now, however, contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague given off by civilization, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him a n alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day-a place from which, if he does not pay, he can be thrown out any day. For this mortuary he has to pay. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus designated as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, air, etc.-the simplest animal cleanliness-ceases to be a need for man. Dirt-this stagnation and putrefaction of man-the sewage of civilization (speaking quite literally) -comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putre¬fied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and not only in his human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human labour are coming back: the tread mill of the Roman slaves, for instance, is the means of production, the means of existence, of many English workers. It is not only that man has no human needs-even his animal needs are ceasing to exist. The Irishman no longer knows any need now but the need to eat, and indeed only the need to eat potatoes-and scabby potatoes at that, the worst kind of potatoes. But in each of their industrial towns England and France have already a little Ireland. The savage and the animal have at least the need to hunt, to roam, etc.-the need of companionship. Machine labour is simplified in order to make a worker out of the human being still in the making, the completely immature human being, the child-whilst the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakess of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine
How the multiplication of needs and of the means of their satisfaction breeds the absence of needs and of means is demonstrated by the political economist (and the capitalist: it should be noted that it is always empirical business men we are talking about when we refer to political economists-their scientific confession and mode of being). This he shows:
(1) By reducing the worker's need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. Hence, he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he calls even this life human life and existence
(2) By counting the lowest possible level of life (existence) as the standard, indeed as the general standard-general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He changes the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need-be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity-seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving-and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made an abject art in which to clothe this its pet idea: they have presented it, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy-despite its worldly and wanton appearance-is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance, hall, the public¬house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power -all this it can appropriate for you-it can buy all this for you: it is the true endowment. Yet being all this, it is inclined to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have [enough]
Of course a controversy now arises in the field of political economy. The one side (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and execrates thrift. The other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) recommends thrift and execrates luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour (i.e., absolute thrift); and the latter admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth (i.e., luxury). The Lauderdale-Malthus school has the romantic notion that avarice alone ought not to determine the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws in advancing extravagance as a direct means of enrichment. Against it, therefore, the other side very earnestly and circumstantially proves that I do not increase but reduce my possessions by being extravagant. The Say¬Ricardo school, however, is hypocritical in not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice which determine production. It forgets the "refined needs"; it forgets that there would be no production without consumption; it forgets that as a result of competition production can only become more extensive and luxurious. It forgets that it is use that determines a thing's value, and that fashion determines use. It wishes to see only "useful things" produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population. Both sides forget that extravagance and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal
And you must not only stint the immediate ",ratification of your senses, as by stinting yourself of food, etc.: you must also spare yourself all sharing of general interest, all sympathy, all trust, etc.; if you want to be economical, if you do not want to be ruined by illusions
You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another's lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the xth working hour, which is literally correct. ) -Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? ( And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilized countries.) -Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but- But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety-but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yard¬stick-ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular round of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other. Thus M. Michel Chevalier reproaches Ricardo with having abstracted from ethics. But Ricardo is allowing political economy to speak its own language, and if it does not speak ethically, this is not Ricardo's fault. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy in so far as he moralizes, but he really and necessarily abstracts from ethics in so far as he practises political economy. The reference of political economy to ethics, if it is other than an arbitrary, contingent and therefore unfounded and unscientific reference, if it is not being put up as a sham but is meant to be essential, can only be the reference of the laws of polit¬ical economy to ethics. If there is no such connection, or if the contrary is rather the case, can Ricardo help it? Besides, the opposition between political economy and ethics is only a sham opposition and just as much no opposition as it is an opposition. All that happens is that political economy expresses moral laws in its own way.
Needlessness as the principle of political economy is most brilliantly shown in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even the existence of men is a pure luxury; and if the worker is "ethical," he will be sparing in procreation. ( Mill suggests public acclaim for those who prove themselves continent in their sexual relations, and public rebuke for those who sin against such barrenness of marriage.... Is not this the ethics, the teaching of asceticism?) The production of people appears in the form of public misery
The meaning which production has in relation to the rich is seen revealed in the meaning which it has for the poor. At the top themanifestation is always refined, veiled, ambiguous-a sham; lower, it is rough, straightforward, frank-the real thing. The worker's crude need is a far greater source of gain than the refined need of the rich. The cellar-dwellings in London bring more to those who let them than do the palaces; that is to say, with reference to the landlord they constitute greater wealth, and thus (to speak the language of political economy) greater social wealth
Industry speculates on the refinement of needs, but it speculates just as much on their crudeness, but on their artificially produced crudeness, whose true enjoyment, therefore, is self-stupefaction¬this seeming satisfaction of need-this civilization contained within the crude barbarism of need; the English gin-shops are therefore the symbolical embodiments of private property. Their luxury reveals the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth to man. They are therefore rightly the only Sunday pleasures of the people, dealt with at least mildly by the English police
We have already seen how the political economist establishes the unity of labour and capital in a variety of ways:- (1) Capital is accumulated labour. (2) The purpose of capital within production -partly, reproduction of capital with profit, partly, capital as raw material ( material of labour) , and partly, as itself a working instrument (the machine is capital directly equated with labour)-is productive labour. (3) The worker is a capital. (4) Wages belong to costs of capital. (5) In relation to the worker, labour is the reprod¬uction of his life-capital. (6) In relation to the capitalist, labour is an aspect of his capital's activity
Finally, (7) the political economist postulates the original unity of capital and labour in the form of the unity of the capitalist and the worker; this is the original state of paradise. The way in which these two aspects in the form of two persons leap at each other's throats is for the political economist a contingent event, and hence only to be explained by reference to external factors. (See Mill.) 4
The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous splendour of precious metals, and are therefore still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are -not yet fully developed money-nations.-Contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoreti¬cal riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice, just as true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is still different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man's own labour
Equality is nothing but a translation of the German "Ich=Ich" into the French, i.e., political form. Equality as the groundwork of communism is its political justification, and it is the same as when the German justifies it by conceiving man as universal self-consciousness. Naturally, the transcendence of the estrangement always proceeds from that form of the estrangement which is the dominant power: in Germany, self-consciousness; in France, equality, because politics; in England, real, material, practical need taking only itself as its standard. It is from this standpoint that Proudhon is to be criticized and appreciated
If we characterize communism itself because of its character as negation of the negation, as the appropriation of the human essence which mediates itself with itself through the negation of private property-as being not yet the true, self-originating position but rather a position originating from private property, [ ... ]5
Since in that case8 the real estrangement of the life of man remains, and remains all the more, the more one is conscious of it as such, it may be accomplished solely by putting communism into operation
In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will come to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement-and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it
When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need-the need for society -and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical process in its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man isno mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-h ardened bodies
When political economy claims that demand and supply always balance each other, it immediately forgets that according to its own claim ( theory of population ) the supply of people always exceeds the demand, and that, therefore, in the essential result of the whole production process-the existence of man-the disparity between demand and supply gets its most striking expression
The extent to which money, which appears as a means, constitutes true power and the sale end-the extent to which in general that means which gives me substance, which gives me possession of the objective substance of others, is an end in itself-can be clearly seen from the facts that landed p roperty wherever land is the source of life, and horse and sword wherever these are the true means of life, are also acknowledged as the true political powers in life. In the middle ages a social class is emancipated as soon as it is allowed to carry the sword. Amongst nomadic peoples it is the horse which makes me a free man and a participant in the life of the community
We have said above that man is regressing to the cave dwelling etc.-but that he is regressing to it in an estranged, malignant form. The savage in his cave-a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection-feels h imself no more a stranger, or rather feels himself to be just as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar-dwelling of the poor man is a hostile dwelling, "an alien, restraining power which only gives itself up to him in so far as he gives up to it his blood and sweat"-a dwelling which he cannot look upon as his own home where he might at last exclaim, " Here I am at home," but where instead he finds himself in someone else's house, in the house of a stranger who daily lies in wait for him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent. Similarly, he is also aware of the contrast in quality between his dwelling and a human dwelling-a residence in that other world, the heaven of wealth
Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself-that my activity is something else and that, finally ( and this applies also to the capitalist ) , all is under the sway of inhuman power. There is a form of inactive, extrava-gant wealth given over wholly to pleasure, the enjoyer of which on the one hand behaves as a mere ephemeral individual frantically spending himself to no purpose knows the slave-labour of others (human sweat and blood) as the p rey of his cupidity, and therefore knows man himself, and hence also his own self, as a sacrificed and empty being. With such wealth the contempt of man makes its appearance, partly as arrogance and as the throwing-away of whatcan give sustenance to a hundred human lives, and partly as the infamous illusion that his own unbridled extravagance and ceaseless, unproductive consumption is the condition of the other's labour and therefore of his subsistence. He knows the realization of the essential powers of man only as the realization of his own excesses, his whims and capricious, bizarre notions. This wealth which, on the other hand, again knows wealth as a mere means, as something that is good for nothing but to be annihilated and which is therefore at once slave and master, at once generous and mean, capricious, preumptuous, conceited, refined, cultured and witty-this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an utterly alien power over itself: it sees in it, rather, only its own power, and not wealth but gratification [is its]7final aim and end
* * *
Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society, in which every individual is a totality of needs and only exists for the other person, as the other exists for him, in so far as each becomes a means for the other. The political economist reduces everything ( just as does politics in its Rights of Man) to man, i.e., to the individual whom he strips of all determinateness so as to class him as capitalist or worker
The division of labour is the expression in political economy of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the living of life as the alienating of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species being.
As for the essence of the division of labour-and of course the division of labour had to be conceived as a major driving force in the production of wealth as soon as labour was recognized as the essence of private property-i.e., about the estranged and alienated form of human activity as an activity of the species-the political economists are very unclear and self-contradictory about it
* * *
The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society
If man's feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower] 8 sense, but truly ontological affirmations o-f essential being ( of nature ) , and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as an object of sense, then it is clear:
(1) That they have by no means merely one mode of affirma¬tion, but rather that the distinctive character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinctive mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification.
(2) Whenever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc. ), this is the affirmation of the object
(3) In so far as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., are human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment
(4) Only through developed industry-i.e., through the medium of private property-does the ontological essence cif human passion come to be both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man's establishment of himself by practical activity
(5) The meaning of private property-liberated from its estrangement-is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as the almighty being. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person
"What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours !
And what we take while life is sweet
Is that to be declared not ours?
Six stallions, say, I can afford
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord
As if their legs belonged to me."
( Mephistopheles, in Faust) 9
Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:
" Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods
I am no idle votarist! . . . Thus much of this will
make black white, foul fair
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar l eprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again....Damned earth
Thou common whore of mankind, that putt'st odds
Among the rout of nations."1
And also later :
"O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! Thou visible God!
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss! That speak'st with every tongue
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!"2
Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe
That which is for me through the medium of money-that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy ) -that am I, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's properties a re my properties and essential powers-the properties and powers of its possessor. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness-its deterrent power-is nullified by money. I, in my character as an, individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twentyfour feet . Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and therefore so is its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money therefore transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce? It is the true agent of divorce as well as the true binding agent-the [universal]3galvano-chemical power of Society
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money: (1) It is the visible divinity-the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things : it makes brothers of impossibilities. (2) It is the common whore, the common pimp of people and nations
The overturning and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities-the divine power of money-lies in its character as men's estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not-turns it, that is, into its contrary.
If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence-from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power
No doubt demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the others, and which therefore remains for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the imagined which exists merely within me and the imagined as it is for me outside me as a real object.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need-that is, no real and self-realizing need-to travel. If I have the vocation for studybut no money for it, I have no vocation for study-that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are m erely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections-into tormenting chimeras-just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras-essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual-into real powers and faculties.
In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general overturning of individualities which turns them into their contrary and adds contradictory attributes to their attributes
Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves . It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into l ove, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy
Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things-the world upside-dawn-the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities
He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically¬cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you m ust be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return-that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent-a misfortune
Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy
as a Whole
(6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explaining and justifying the ideas here presented, we might offer some considerations in regard to the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in the Phenomenology and Logic, and also, lastly, the relation to it of the modern critical movement
So powerful was modern German criticism's preoccupation with the past-so completely was it possessed in its development by its subject-matter-that there prevailed a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticizing, together with a complete lack of awareness about the seemingly formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain wholly within the confines of the Hegelian Logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptics4 (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of "abstract nature" by the "self-consciousness" of abstract man) and even in Christianity Discovered.5 Thus in Christianity Discovered, for example, you get:
"As though in positing the world, self-consciousness posits that
which is different from itself, and in what it posits it posits itself
because it in turn annuls the difference between what it has
posited and itself, inasmuch as it itself has being only in the
positing and the movement.-How then can it not have its pur-
pose in this movement?" etc.; or again: "They" ( the French mate-
rialists ) "have not yet been able to see that it is only as the
movement of self-consciousness that the movement of the uni-
verse has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with
itself."
Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the HegelIan approach, but on the contrary, repeat it word for word
How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic dunng the act of criticism ( Bauer, The Synoptics), and how little little this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism is proved by Bauer when, in his The Good of Freedom,6 he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe¬ ''What about logic now?"-by referring him to future critics
But even now-now that Feuerbach both in his Theses in the Anecdotis and, in detail, in The Philosophy of the Future, has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism-criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism, in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world and itself ( the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the category of "the masses" ) and dissolved all dogmatic antithesis into the single dogmatic antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world-the antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the rabble; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own excellence against the dullness of the'masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical Last Judgement in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching when the whole of expiring humanity will assemble before it and be sorted by it into groups, each particular mob receiving its testimonium paupertatis;7 now that it has made known in print8 its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting -fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods-even now, after all these delightful antics of moribund idealism in the guise of criticism (i.e., of Young-Hegelianism)-even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young-Hegelianism-the Hegelian dialectic-and even h ad [nothing] to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. Criticism with a completely uncritical attitude to itself!
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity With which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the reverse
Feuerbach's great achievement is:
(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thoughts and thinking expounded, and that it has therefore likewise to be condemned as another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man;
(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, since Feuerbach also makes the social relationship "of man to man" the basic principle of the theory;
( 3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively grounded on itself
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive, from sense-certainty) as follows:
Hegel sets out from the estrangement of Substance ( in Logic, from the Infinite, the abstractly universal ) -from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put popularly, that he sets out from religion and theology
Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and establishes the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy-annulment of religion and theology)
Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite-restoration of religion and theology
Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself-as the philosophy which affirms theology ( the transcendent, etc. ) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself
The position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position establishing itself by its existence-not a position that justifies itself; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the self-grounded position of sense-certanity.9
But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and self-realizing act of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history; and this historical process is not yet the real history of man-of man as a given subject, but only man's act of genesis-the story of man's origin: We shall explain both the abstract form of this process , and the difference between this process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, that is, in contrast to the same process in Feuerbach's Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity), or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still uncritical process
Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel's Phenomenology, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy
PHENOMENOLOGY1
A. Self-Consciousness
I. Consciousness. (a) Certainty at the level of sense experience; or the "This" and Meaning. (b) Perception, or the Thing with Its Properties, and Deception. (c) Force and Understanding, Appearance and the Super-sensible World
II . Self-Consciousness. The Truth of Certainty of Self. (a) Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness; Lordship and Bondage. (b) Freedom of Self•Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness.
III. Reason. Reason's Certainty and Reason's Truth. (a) Observation as a Process of Reason. Observation of Nature and of Self-Consciousness. (b) Realization of Rational Self Consciousness through its own Activity. Pleasure and Necessity. The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit. Virtue and the Course of the World. (c)The Individuality Which is Real In and For Itself. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and the Deception, or the Real Fact. Reason as Lawgiver. Reason Which Tests Laws
B. Mind
I. True Mind; the Ethical Order
II. Mind in Self-Estrangement-Culture
III. Mind Certain of Itself, Morality
C. Religion
Natural Religion; Religion in the Form of Art; Revealed Religion
D. Absolute Knowledge
Hegel's Encyclopaedia,2 beginning as it does with Logic, with pure speculative thought, and ending with Absolute Knowledge-with the self-conscious, self-comprehending, philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind-is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement-i.e., comprehending itself abstractly. Logic ( mind's coin of the realm, the speculative or thought-value of man and nature-their essence grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence their unreal essence) is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking. Then: The externality of this abstract thinking… nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it-its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as abstract thinking-but as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, Mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin-the thinking which, as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind, is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and relates itself to itself, as absolute knowledge in the hence absolute, i.e., abstract mind, and so receives its conscious embodiment in a mode of being corresponding to it. For its real mode of being is abstraction.
There is a double error in Hegel
The first emerges most clearly in the Phenomenology, the Hegelian philosophy's place of origin. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts . . . They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with Absolute Knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their arrogation of reality. The philosopher sets up himself (that is, one who is himself an abstract form of estranged man) as the measuring-rod of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation-process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought-of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of this alienation and of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject-that is to say, .it is the opposition, within thought itself, between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly,in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that is the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded
The appropriation of man's essential powers, which have become objects-indeed, alien objects-is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought-i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movements of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the criticism really contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phenomenology as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel's later works-that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man-for example, the realization that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness-that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man’s essential powers given over to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world-this appropriation or the insight into this process consequently appears in Hegel in this form, that sense, religion, state-power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The humanness of nature and of the nature begotten by history-the humanness of man's products-appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind-thought entities. The Phenomenology is, therefore, an occult critique-still to itself obscure and mystifying criticism; but inasmuch as it keeps steadily in view man's estrangement, even though man appears only in the shape of mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The "Unhappy Consciousness," the "Honest Consciousness," the struggle of the "Noble and Base Consciousness," etc.,-these separate sections contain, but still in .an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in itself abstract consciousness ( the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement is the identity of self¬consciousness with consciousness-absolute knowledge-the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but going on now oniy within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result
The outstanding thing in Hegel's Phenomenology and its final outcome-that is, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle-is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man-true, because real man-as the outcome of man's own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being ( i.e., as a human being ) , is only possible by his really bringing out of himself all the powers that are his as the species man-something which in turn is only possible through the totality of man's actions, as the result of history-is only possible by man's treating these generic powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement
We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel's one-sidedness and limitations as they are displayed in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, "Absolute Knowledge"-a chapter which contains the concentrated spirit of the Phenomenology, the relationship of the Phenomenology to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel's consciousness concerning both and their relationship to one another
Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel's standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man-as man's essence in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man's coming to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy-the alienation of man in his knowing of himself, or alienated science thinking itself-Hegel grasps as its essence; and he is therefore able vis-à-vis preceding philosophy to gather together its separate elements and phases, and to present his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did¬that they grasped separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, and indeed of abstract self-consciousness-is known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute
Let us now turn to our subject
Absolute Knowledge. The last chapter of the "Phenomenology."
The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness-self-consciousness as object
( Positing of man=self-consciousness.)
The issue, therefore, is to surmount the ,object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man, to self¬consciousness. The re-appropriation of the objective essence of man, begotten in the form of estrangement as something alien, has the meaning therefore not only to annul estrangement, but objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being
The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in the following way:
The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self-for Hegel that is the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side. Man is posited as equivalent to self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man-man begotten by abstraction. Man is egotistic. His eye, his ear, etc., are egotistic. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say an that account "Self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers." Self-consciousness is rather a quality of h uman nature, of the human eye, etc.; it is not human nature that is a quality of self-consciousness.
The self-abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist-egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.)
For Hegel the essence of man-man-equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self¬consciousness is not regarded as an expression of the real estrangement of the human being-its expression reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought. Instead, the real estrangement-that which appears real-is from its innermost, hidden nature (a nature only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real essence of man, of self¬consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology. All re-appropriation of the estranged objective essence appears, therefore, as a process of incorporation into self-consciousness : The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the re-appropriation of the object
The surmounting of the object of consciousness, comprehensively expressed, means: 4
(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing. (2) That it is the alienation of self¬consciousness which establishes thinghood. (3) That this externalization5 of self-consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance. (4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for self-consciousness itself. (5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance-self-consciousness knows this nullity of the object-because self-consciousness itself alienates itself; for in this alienation it establishes itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-self, establishes the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itself in its other-being as such (7) This is the movement of consciousness and in this movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. (8) Consciousness must similarly have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and have comprehended it from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness through the apprehending of each single one of them as self or through what was called above the spiritual attitude to them
As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing-this is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self.
As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thinghood. Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood is th us established through this alienation (thing hood being that which is an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to him an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is not real Man, nor therefore Nature-Man being human Nature-who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man-self-consciousness-thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-conciousness ). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential powers should have real natural objects of his essence; as is the fact that his self-alienation should lead to the establishing of a real, objective world-but a world in the form of externality-a world, therefore, not belonging to his own essential being, and an over¬powering world. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness can only establish thinghoodthrough its alienation-i.e., establish something which itself is only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any essentiality vis-à-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary, it is a mere creature-something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but a confirmation of the act of positing in which is concentrated for a moment the energy of the act as its product, seeming to give the deposit-but only for a moment-the character of an independent, real substance.1
Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers whose action, therefore, must also be something obfective. A being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects-because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of "pure activity" into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being
Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history
Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life-he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities-as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need-essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous, objects as the objects of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant-an indispensable object to it, confirming its life-just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power
A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective. 1
An unobjective being is a nullity-an un-being.
Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being outside it-it would-exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another-another reality than the object outside me. For this third object I am thus an other reality than it; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, nonsensical thing-something merely thought of (merely imagined, that is)-a creature of abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside one¬self-objects of one's sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.8
Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being-and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential force of man energetically bent on its object
But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is-as it is objectively¬human sensibility, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural has to have its beginning, man too has his act of coming-to-be-history-which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of coming-to-be it is a conscious self-transcending act of coming-to-be. History is the true natural history of man (on which more later)
Thirdly, because this establishing of thinghood is itself only sham, an act contradicting the nature of pure activity, it has to be cancelled again and thinghood denied
Re. 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalization of consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance, and (4) it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for consciousness itself.9 (5) For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance-consciousness knows this nullity of the object because it alienates itself; for in this alienoation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for•itself, the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itself in its other-being as such.
As we have already seen: the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement ( which has to advance from indifferent foreignness to real, antagonistic estrangement) means equally or even primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something negative, self¬annulling nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but a positive meaning for consciousness, for such a nullity of the object is precisely the self•confirmation of the non• objectivity, of the abstraction of itself. For consciousness itself this nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its own self-alienation....
The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its sale act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness in so far as the latter knows this something. Knowing is its sale objective relation. Consciousness; then, knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it) because it knows the object as its self alienation; that is, it knows itself-knows knowing as the object-because the object is only the semblance of an object, a piece of mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which has confronted itself with itself and in so doing has confronted itself with a nullity-a something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself-that lt only externalizes itself; that it itself appears to itself only as an object-or that that which appears to it as an object is only it itself
On the other hand, says Hegel, there is at the same time this other moment in this process, that consciousness has just as much annulled and superseded this externalization and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.
In this discussion are brought together all the illusions of speculation
First of all: consciousness-self-consciousness-is at home with itself in its other-being as such. It is therefore-or if we here abstract from the Hegelian abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man instead of Self-consciousness-it is at home with itself in its other-being, as such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itself-to be the world of sense, the real world, life-thought over-reaching itself in thought (Feuerbach).1 This aspect is contained herein, inasmuch as con¬sciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not at estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such.
Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has recognized and annulled and superseded the spiritual world (or his world's spiritual, general mode of being) as self-alienation, nevertheless again confirms this in its alienated shape and passes it off as his true mode of being-re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for instance, after annulling and superseding religion, after recognizing religion to be a product of self-alienation, he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel's false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology-but it has to be grasped in more general terms. Thus reason is at home in unreason as unreason. The man who has recognized that he is leading an alienated life in politics, law, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself-in contradiction both with the knowledge of and with the essential being of the object-is thus true knowledge and life.
There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel's part vis-à-visreligion, the state, etc.,since this lie is the lie of his principle
If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my own self, the self-consciousness that belongs to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion
In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject
A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation-denial and affirmation-are bound together
Thus, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Private Right superseded equals Morality, Morality superseded equals the Family, the Family superseded equals Civil Society, Civil Society superseded equals the State, the State superseded equals World History. In the actual world private right, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments of man-state of his existence and being-which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion.
In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It first appears and is made manifest in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence within the philosophy of right; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art is, the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion, then, too, it is only as a philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment and the really religious man. But at the same time I assert them, in part within my own existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them-for this is only their philosophic expression-and in part I assert them in their own original shape, for they have validity for me as merely the apparent other-being, as allegories, forms of their own true existence ( i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises
In just the same way, Quality superseded equals Quantity, Quantity superseded equals Measure, Measure superseded equalsEssence, Essence superseded equals Appearance, Appearance superseded equals Actuality, Actuality superseded equals the Concept, the Concept superseded equals Objectivity, Objectivity superseded equals the Absolute Idea, the Absolute Idea superseded equals Nature, Nature superseded equals Ethical Objective Mind, Ethical Mind superseded equals Art, Art superseded equals Religion, Religion superseded equals Absolute Knowledge.2
On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of the thought entity; th us, Private Property as a thought is transcended in the thought of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality-and therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action-this superseding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself-of self• consciousness, of abstraction
From the one point of view the existent which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already become an object of knowledge, i.c., Dogmatics; thc same with Jurisprudence, Political Science and Natural Science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions.3
On the other hand, the religious man, etc., can find in Hegel his final confirmation
It is now time to lay hold of the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm of estrangement
(a) Annulling as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the• estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the annulment of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the annulment of the objective world in its estranged mode of being-just as atheism, being the annulment of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism, and communism, as the annulment of private property, is the justification of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism (or just as atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of private property). Only through the annulment of this mediation-which is itself, however, a necessary premise-does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being
But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction; they are not a losing of the objective world begotten by man-of man's essential powers given over to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real coming-to-be, the realization become real for man, of man's essence-of the essence of man as something real
Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (if even again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man's self¬estrangement, the alienation of man's essence, man's loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as finding of self, change of his nature, his objectification and realization. In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man's act of self¬genesis-conceives man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifesting of h imself as an alien being to be the coming-to-be of species-consciousness and species-life.
(b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the perverseness already described, this act appears in Hegel:
First of all as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human essence itself is taken to be only an abstract, thinking
Essence, conceived merely as. self-consciousness. And
secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the annulment of the alienation becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or again, for Hegel this movement of self-genesis and self¬objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life-of life with itself as its aim, of life at rest in itself, of life that has attained oneness with its essence
This movement, in its abstract form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is nevertheless an abstraction-an estrangement of human life-it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by man's abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from him
Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject first emerges as a result. This result-the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness-is therefore God-absolute Spirit-the self-knowing and self-manifesting Idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates-symbols of this esoteric, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute inversion-a mystical subject¬object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object-the absolute subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienationinto itself, and the subject as this process; a pure, restless revolving within itself
First, the formal and abstract conception of man's act of self¬genesis or self-objectification
Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object-the estranged essential reality of man-is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely¬estrangement's abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstraction-the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity-an abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activity-as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content-the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.)
Hegel's positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human essence and therefore also of human thought, and that Hegel has there-fore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction¬process. For example, superseded Being is Essence, superseded Essence is Concept, the Concept superseded is ... the Absolute Idea. But what, then, is the Absolute Idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to traverse once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to acquiesce in being a totality of abstractions or in being the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself-abandon abstraction-and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary -at nature. Thus, the entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something
The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which "considered with regard to its unity with itself is intuiting,"4 ( Hegel's Encyclopaedia, 3rd edition, p. 222 ) , and which "in its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial characterization and other-being-the immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature" (l.c.)-this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and singular way, and which has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction ( i.e., the abstract thinker)¬abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves still abstract) conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self¬absorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth freely from itself: that is to say, abstraction resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuiting, is nothing else through-and-through but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. This entire transition from Logic to Natural Philosophy is nothing else but the transition-so difficult to effect for the abstract thinker and therefore so queer in his description of it-from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom-the longing for a content
( The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence-that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental shapes or ghosts dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his Logic, laying hold of each of them first as negation-that is, as an alienation of human thought-and then as negation of the negation-that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as even this still takes place within the confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping-short at the last act-the act of self-reference in alienation-as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms;5 and in part, to the extent that this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite weariness with itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the formof the resolution to recognize nature as the essential being and to go over to intuition, the abandonment of abstract thought-the abandonment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought devoid of eyes, of teeth, of ears, of everything.)
But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself-nature fixed in isolation from man-is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a thought-entity-in a shape which is his and yet is esoteric and mysterious even to him-so what he has let go forth from himself in truth is only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity-but with the significance now of being the other-being of thought, of being real, intuited nature-of being nature distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to talk a human language, the abstract thinker learns in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing, from pure abstraction-the entities he believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as pure products of the labour of thought forever weaving in itself and never looking outward-are nothing else but abstractions from characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form . He analyses it and these abstractions over again. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature-is only the conscious repetition by him of the process of begetting his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time equals Negativity referred to itself (l.c., p. 238): to the superseded Becoming as Being there corresponds, in natural form, superseded Movement as Matter. Light is Reflection-in-Itself, in natural form. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to the Logic is on the one side the Positive resting on itself and on the other side the Negative resting on itself. The Earth is the natural form of the logical Ground, as the negative unity of the anti thesis, etc.
Nature as nature-that is to say, in so far as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it-nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions, is nothing-a nothing proving itself to be nothing-is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled
&nb "In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct
premise that nature does not contain within itself the absolute purpose" (p. 225 )
Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction
"Nature has shown itself to be the Idea in the form of
other-being. Since the Idea is in this form the negative of itself
or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external vis-à-vis
this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature" (p. 227 )
Externality here is not to be understood as the self-externalizing world of sense open to the light, open to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense of alienation-a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the Idea. Nature is only the form of the Idea's other-being. And since abstract thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognizes at the same time that sensuousness-externality in contrast to thought weaving within itself-is the essence of nature. But he expresses his contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something defective. Something which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself-intrinsically-has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its being is something other than it itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being
"For us, Mind has nature, for its premise, being nature's truth
and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the Idea arrived at being-
for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the con-
cept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature
the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation
has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has
become identical with itself. But it is this identity, therefore
in being a return out of nature" (p. 392 )
"As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to
the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the mind, which
is free, it is the establishing of nature as the mind's world-an
establishing which at the same time, being reflection, is a presup-
posing of the world as independently-existing nature. Revelation
in conception is the creation of nature as the mind's being, in
which the mind procures the affirmation and the truth of its
freedom."7 "The absolute is mind. This is the highest definition
of the absolute."
Critical Marginal Notes on the Article
"The King of Prussia and Social Reform"
KARL MARX
Apart from showing Marx's pride in being the socialist spokesman of a revolutionarily "philosophical people," the Germans, and his sense of the theoretical preeminence of German socialist thought because of its philosophical depth, this early article is especially notable for its discussion of the relation between social and political revolution. The "Prussian" who wrote the article Marx attacks was Arnold Ruge. The event under discussion was the Silesian weavers' uprising of June 1844. The essay was written in July 1844 and published the following month in the newspaper Vorwarts
No. 60 of Vorwarts contains an article headed "Der Konig von Preussen und die Sozialreform," signed "A Prussian."
First of all this alleged Prussian sets out the content of the royal Prussian Cabinet order on the uprising of the Silesian workers and the opinion of the French newspaper La Reforme on the Prussian Cabinet order. The Reforme, he writes, considers that the King's "alarm and religious feeling" are the source of the Cabinet order. It even sees in this document a presentiment of the great reforms which are in prospect for bourgeois society. The "Prussian" lectures the Réforme as follows :
The King and German society has not yet arrived at the ‘pre-sentiment of
their reform," even the Silesian and Bohemian uprisings have not aroused
this feeling. It is impossible to makesuch an unpolitical
country as Gemany regard the partial distressof the factory districts
as a matter of general concern, let alone as an affliction of the whole civilised
world. The Germans regard this event as if it were of the same nature as
any local distress due to flood or famine. Hence the King regards it as due
to deficiencies in the administration or in charitable activity. For this
reason, and because a few soldiers sufficed to cope with the feeble weavers
the destruction of factories and machinery, too, did not inspire any "alarm"
either in the King or the authorities.Indeed, the Cabinet order was not
prompted even by religious feeling: it is a very sober
expression of the Christian art of statesmanship and of a doctrine which
considers that no difficulties can withstand its sole medicine-"the well
-disposed Christian hearts." Poverty and crime are two great evils; who can
cure them? The state and the authorities? No, but the union of all Christian
hearts can
The alleged Prussian denies the King's "alarm" on the grounds, among others, that a few soldiers sufficed to cope with the feeble weavers
Therefore, in a country where ceremonial dinners with liberal toasts and liberally foaming champagne-recall the Dusseldorf festival inspired a royal Cabinet order;1where not a single soldier was needed to shatter the desires of the entire liberal bourgeoisie for freedom of the press and a constitution; in a country where passive obedience is the order of the day-<:an it be that in such a country the necessity to employ armed force against feeble weavers is not an event, and not an alarming event? Moreover, at the first encounter the feeble weavers were victorious. They were suppressed only by subsequent troop reinforcements. Is the uprising of a body of workers less dangerous because it did not require a whole army to suppress it? Let the wise Prussian compare the uprising of the Silesian weavers with the revolts of the English workers, and the Silesian weavers will be seen by him to be strong weavers
Starting out from the general relation of politics to social ills, we shall show why the uprising of the weavers could not cause the King any special "alarm." For the time being we shall say only the following: the uprising was not aimed directly against the King of Prussia, but against the bourgeoisie. As an aristocrat and absolute monarch, the King of Prussia cannot love the bourgeoisie; still less can he be alarmed if the submissiveness and impotence of the bourgeoisie is increased because of a tense and difficult relationship between it and the proletariat. Further: the orthodox Catholic is more hostile to the orthodox Protestant than to the atheist, just as the Legitimist is more hostile to the liberal than to the Communist. This is not because the atheist and the Communist are more akin to the Catholic or Legitimist, but because they are more foreign to him than are the Protestant and the liberal, being outside his circle. In the sphere of politics, the King of Prussia, as a politician, has his direct opposite in liberalism. For the King, the proletariat is as little an antithesis as the King is for the proletariat. The proletariat would have to have already attained considerable power for it to stifle the other antipathies and political antitheses and to divert to itself all political enmity. Finally: in view of the well-known charac¬ter of the King, avid for anything interesting and significant, it must have been a joyful surprise for him to discover this "interesting" and "much discussed" pauperism in his own territory and con-sequently a new opportunity for making people talk about him. How pleasant for him must have been the news that henceforth he posseses his "own," royal Prussian pauperism! Let us suppose * * * that the "Prussian's" remarks about the German Government and the German bourgeoisie-after all, the latter is included in " German society"-are entirely well founded. Is this section of society more at a loss in Germany than in England and France? Can one be more at a loss than, for example, in England, where perplexity has been made into a system? When today workers' revolts break out throughout England, the bourgeoisie and government there know no better what to do than in the last third of the eighteenth century. Their sole expedient is material force, and since this material force diminishes in the same proportion as the spread of pauperism and the understanding of the proletariat increase, England's perplexity inevitably grows in geometrical progression
Finally, it is untrue, actually untrue, that the German bourgeoisie totally fails to understand the general significance of the Silesian uprising. In several towns the masters are trying to act jointly with the apprentices. All the liberal German newspapers, the organs of the liberal bourgeoisie, teem with articles about the organisation of labour, the reform of society, criticism of monopolies and competition, etc. All this is the result of the movements among the workers.* * *
* * *
Let us pass now to the oracular pronouncements of the "Prussian" on the German workers. "The German poor," he says wittily, "are no wiser than the poor Germans, i.e., nowhere do they see beyond their own hearth and home, their own factory, their own district; the whole question has so far still been ignored by the all-penetrating political soul."
In order to be able to compare the condition of the German workers with the condition of the French and English workers, the "Prussian" would have had to compare the first form, the start, of the English and French workers' movement with the Germanmovement that is just beginning. He failed to do so. Consequently, his arguments lead to trivialities, such as that industry in Germany is not yet so developed as in England, or that a movement at its start looks different from the movement in its subsequent progress. He wanted to speak about the specific character of the German workers' movement, but he has not a word to say on this subject of his
On the other hand, suppose the "Prussian" were to adopt the correct standpoint. He will find that not one of the French and English workers' uprisings had such a theoretical and consciouscharacter as the uprising of the Silesian weavers
First of all, recall the song of the weavers,2 that bold call to struggle, in which there is not even a mention of hearth and home, factory or district, but in which the proletariat at once, in a striking, sharp, unrestrained and powerful manner, proclaims its opposition to the society of private property. The Silesian uprising begins precisely with what the French and English workers' uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy. Finally, not a single English workers' uprising was carried out with such courage, thought and endurance
As for the educational level or capacity for education of the German workers in general, I call to mind Weitling's brilliant writings, which as regards theory are often superior even to those of Proudhon, however much they are inferior to the latter in their exe¬cution. Where among the bourgeoisie including its philosophers and learned writers is to be found a book about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie-political emancipation similar to Weitling's work: Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit? It is enough to compare the petty, faint-hearted mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and briliant literary debut of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete. It has to be admitted that the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its econo¬mist, and the French proletariat its politician. It has to be admitted that Germany is just as much classically destined for a social revolution as it is incapable of a political one. For, just as the impotence of the German bourgeoisie is the political impotence of Germany cial capability of Germany. The disparity between the philosophical and the political development of Germany is not an anomaly. It is an inevitable disparity. A philosophical people can find its corresponding practice only in socialism, hence it is only in the proletariat that it can find the dynamic elements of its emancipation
* * *
Why does the "Prussian" judge the German workers so contemptuously? Because he finds that the "whole question"-namely, the question of the distressed state of the workers-has "so far still" been ignored by the "all-penetrating politicalsoul" He expounds his platonic love for the political soul in more detail as follows : "Alluprisings which break out in this disastrous isolation of people from the community, and of their thoughts from social principles, will be smothered in blood and incomprehension; but when distress pro¬duces understanding, and the political understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then in Germany too these events will be appreciated as symptoms of a great revolution."
* * *
Thatsocial distress produces political understanding is so incorrect . that, on the contrary, what is correct is the opposite : social well-being produces political understanding. Political understanding is a spiritualist, and is given to him who already has, to him who is already comfortably situated. Let our "Prussian" listen to a French economist, M. Michel Chevalier, on this subject: "'When the bourgeoisie rose up in 1789, it lacked in order to be free only participation in governing the country. Emancipation consisted for it in wresting the control of public affairs, the principal civil, military and religious functions, from the hands of the privileged who had the monopoly of these functions. Rich and enlightened, capable of being self-sufficient and of managing its own affairs, it wanted to escape from the system of arbitrary rule."3
We have already shown the "Prussian" how incapable politicalunderstanding is of discovering the source of social distress. Just oneword more on this view of his. The more developed and universal the political understanding of a people, the more does the proletariat-at any rate at the beginning of the movement-squander its forces in senseless, useless revolts, which are drowned in blood. Because it thinks in the framework of politics, the proletariat sees the cause of all evils in the will, and all means of remedy in violence and in the overthrow of a particular form of state. The proof: the first uprisings of the French proletariat.4 The Lyons workers believed that they were pursuing only political aims, that they were only soldiers of the republic, whereas actually they were soldiers of socialism. Thus their political understanding concealed from them the roots of social distress, thus it falsified their insight into their real aim, thus their political understanding deceived their social instinct.
But if the "Prussian" expects understanding to be produced by distress, why does he lump together "smothering in blood" and "smothering in incomprehension"? If distress is in general a means of producing understanding, then bloody distress is even a very acute means to this end. The "Prussian" therefore should have said: smothering in blood will smother incomprehension and procure a proper current of air for the understanding
The "Prussian" prophesies the smothering of uprisings which break out in "disastrous isolation of people from the community, and in the separation of their thoughts from social principles."
We have shown that the Silesian uprising occurred by no means in circumstances of the separation of thoughts from social principles. It only remains for us to deal with the "disastrous isolation of people from the community." By community here is meant the political community, the state. This is the old story about unpolitical Germany
But do not all uprisings, without exception, break out in a disas-trous isolation of man from the community? Does not every uprising necessarily presuppose isolation? Would the 1789 revolution have taken place without the disastrous isolation of French citizens from the community? It was intended precisely to abolish this isolation
But the community from which the worker is isolated is a community the real character and scope of which is quite different from that of the political community . The community from which the worker is isolated by his own labour is life itself, physical and mental life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature. Human nature is the true community of men. The disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal, more intolerable, more dreadful, and more contradictory, than isolation from the political community. Hence, too, the abolition of this isolation and even a partial reaction to it, an uprisingagainst it-is just as much more infinite as man is more infinite than the citizen, and human life more infinite than political life. Therefore, however partial the uprising of the industrial workersmay be, it contains within itself a universal soul; however universal a political uprising may be, it conceals even in its most grandioseform a narrow-minded spirit
The "Prussian" worthily concludes his article with the following sentence: "A social revolution without a political soul (i.e., without an organising idea from the point of view of the whole ) is im¬possible."
We have already seen that a social revolution is found to have the point of view of the whole because even if it were to occur in only one factory district it represents man's protest against a de- humanised life, because it starts out from the point of view of a separate real individual, because the community, against the separation of which from himself the individual reacts, is man's true community, human nature. The politicalsoul of revolution, on the other hand, consists in the tendency of classes having no political influence to abolish their isolation from statehood and rule. Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstractwhole, which exists only through separation from real life, and which is inconceivablewithout the organized contradiction between the universal idea of man and the individual existence of man. Hence, too, a revolution with a political soul, in accordance with the limited and dichotomous nature of this soul, organises a ruling stratum in society at the expense of society itself
We want to divulge to the "Prussian" what a "social revolutionwith a political soul" actually is; we shall thereby at the same time confide the secret to him that he himself is unable, even in words, to rise above the narrow-minded political point of view
A "social" revolution with a political soul is either a nonsensical concoction, if by "social" revolution the "Prussian" means a "social" as opposed to a political revolution, and nevertheless endows the social revolution with a political soul instead of a social one; or else a "social revolution with a political soul" is only a paraphrase for what was usually called a "political revolution," or "simply a revolution." Every revolution dissolves the old society!' and to that extent it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old powerand to that extent it is political.
Let the "Prussian" choose between theparaphrase and the nonsense! But whereas a social revolution with a political soul is a para-phrase or nonsense, a political revolution with a social soul has a rational meaning. Revolution in general-the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of the old relationships is a politi¬cal act. But socialism cannot be realised without revolution. It needs this political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution. But where its organizing activity!' begins, where its proper object, its soul, comes to the fore-there socialism throws off the
Political cloak
* * *
Alienation and Social Classes
KARL MARX
A meeting between Marx and Engels in Paris at the end of August, 1844, inaugurated their lifelong collaboration. Their first jointly written work, published in 1845, was The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, a heavily satirical polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. The following passage, probably written by Marx, shows the alienation doctrine of the 1844 manuscripts merging into the class struggle doctrine as we encounter it in The German Ideology and later Marxist writings. It is also of value as a revelation of Marx's special way of conceiving and ex¬plaining historical necessity
The translation for this edition is by R. C. Tucker
* * *The proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a whole. They are both products of the world of private property. The whole question is what position each of these two ele¬ments occupies within the opposition. It does not suffice to pro-claim them two sides of one whole
Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its opposite, the proletariat. This is the positive side of the antagonism, private property satisfied with itself
The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its conditioning opposite private property which makes it a proletariat. This is the negative side of the antagonism, its disturbance within itself, private property abolished and in the process of abolishing itself
The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation.2 But the former feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence. To use Hegel's expression, this class is, within depravity, anIndignation against this depravity, an indignation necessarily aroused in this class by the contradiction between its human natureand its life-situation, which is a blatant, outright and all-embracing denial of that very nature
Within the antagonism as a whole, therefore, private property represents the conservative side and the proletariat the destructiveside. From the former comes action aimed at preserving the antago¬nism; from the latter, action aimed at its destruction
In its economic movement, it is true, private property presses towards its own dissolution, but it does this only by means of a developmental course that is unconscious and takes place independently of it and against its will, a course determined by the nature of the thing itself. It does this only by giving rise to the proletariat as proletariat this poverty conscious of its own spiritual and physical poverty, this dehumanization which is conscious of itself as a dehumanization and hence abolishes itself.3 The proletariat executes the sentence that proletariat producing private property passes upon itself, just as it executes the sentence that wage labour passes upon itself by producing others' wealth and its own poverty. When the proletariat wins victory, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it wins victory only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Both the proletariat itself and its conditioning opposite-private property disappear with the victory of the proletariat
If socialist writers attribute this world historical role to the proletariat, this is by no means, as critical criticism assures us, because they regard the proletarians as gods. On the contrary. Since the fully formed proletariat represents, practically speaking, the completed abstraction from everything human, even from the appearance of being human; since all the living conditions of contemporary society have reached the acme of inhumanity in the living conditions of the proletariat; since in the proletariat man has lost himself, although at the same time he has both acquired a theoretical consciousness of this loss and has been directly forced into indigna¬tion against this inhumanity by virtue of an inexorable, utterly unembellishable, absolutely imperious need, that practical expression of necessity-because of all this the proletariat itself can and must liberate itself. But it cannot liberate itself without destroying its own living conditions. It cannot do so without destroying all the inhuman living conditions of contemporary society which are concentrated in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the harsh but hardening school of labour. It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal . It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically becompelled t o d o . Its goal and its historical action are prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organization of contemporary bourgeois society. There is no need to harp on the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is continually working to bring this consciousness to full clar¬ity
Society and Economy in History
KARL MARX
This selection comes from Marx's letter of December 28, 1846, to P. V. Annenkov, who had asked for his opinion of Pierre• Joseph Proudhon's new book The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx subsequently expanded his critique of the book into a book-length polemic, The Poverty of Philosophy( themeat of which is succinctly stated in this letter)
The material here presented is of interest as a trenchant statement of the materialist conception of history, Marx's enlarged understanding of the division of labor as a ubiquitous fact of human historical development, his view on the evolution of machinery, and his notion of dialectics as a process that finds final resolution in a social condition beyond conflict ("contradictions") . Since this document appeared at the close of Marx's early period, it conclusively disproves the notion of a hiatus between a Hegelian-Feuer- bachian philosophical early Marx who hadn't reached historical materialism, and a scientific mature Marx who had.* It was in and through the early writings represented in this section of our reader that Marx created historical materialism
* * *
* * *M. Proudhon sees in history a series of social developments; he finds progress realised in history; finally he finds that men, as individuals, did not know what they were doing and were mistaken about their own movement, that is to say, their social development seems at the first glance to be distinct, separate and independent of their individual development. He cannot explain these facts, and so the hypothesis of universal reason manifesting itself comes in very handy. Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, that is to say, phrases which lack common sense
But when M. Proudhon admits that he understands nothing about the historical development of humanity-he admits this by using such high-sounding words as : Universal Reason, God, etc.¬is he not implicitly and necessarily admitting that he is incapable of understanding economic development?
What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of men's reciprocal action. Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. Assume a particular state of development in the productive faculties of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil society and you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society. M. Proudhon will never understand this because he thinks he is doing something great by appealing from the state to civil society that is to say, from the official resume of society to official society
It is superfluous to add that men are not free to choose their productive forces-which are the basis of all their history for every productive force is an acquired force, the product of former activity. The productive forces are therefore the result of practical human energy; but this energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men find themselves, by the productive forces already acquired, by the social form which exists before they do, which they do not create, which is the product of the preceding generation. Because of this simple fact that every succeeding generation finds itself in possession of the productive forces acquired by the previous generation, which serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises in human history, a history of humanity takes shape which is all the more a history of humanity as the productive forces of man and therefore his social relations have been more developed. Hence it necessarily follows that the social history of men is never anything but the history of their individual development, whether they are conscious of it or not. Their material relations are the basis of all their relations. These material relations are only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is realised
M. Proudhon mixes up ideas and things. Men never relinquish what they have won, but this does not mean that they never relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive forces. On the contrary, in order that they may not be deprived of the result attained and forfeit the fruits of civilisation, they are obliged, from the moment when their mode of carrying on commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms. I am using the word "commerce" here in its widest sense, as we use Verkehr in German. For example: the privileges, the institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory regime of the Middle Ages, were social relations that alone corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the social condition which had previously existed and from which these institutions had arisen. Under the protection of the regime of cor-porations and regulations, capital was accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were founded. But the fruits of this menwould have forfeited if they had tried to retain the forms under whose shelter these fruits had ripened. Hence burst two thunder¬claps-the Revolutions of 1640 and 1688. All the old economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, the political conditions which were the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed in England. Thus the economic forms in which men produce, consume, and exchange, are transitory and historical. With the acquisition of new productive faculties, men change their mode of production and with the mode of production all the economic relations which are merely the necessary relations of this particular mode of production
This is what M. Proudhon has not understood and still less demonstrated. M. Proudhon, incapable of following the real movement of history, produces a phantasmagoria which presumptuously claims to be dialectical. He does not feel it necessary to speak of .the seven teenth, the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, for his history proceeds in the misty realm of imagination and rises far above space and time. In short, it is not history but old Hegelian junk, it is not profane history-a history of man-but sacred history-a history of ideas. From his point of view man is only the instrument of which the idea or the eternal reason makes use in order to unfold itself. The evolutions of which M. Proudhon speaks are understood to be evolutions such as are accomplished within the mystic womb of the absolute idea. If you tear the veil from thisaP1ystical language, what it comes to is that M. Proudhon is offering you the order in which economic categories arrange themselves inside his own mind. It wi1l not require great exertion on my part to prove to you that it is the order of a very disorderly mind
The series of economic evolutions of the eternal reason begins with divisionof labour. To M. Proudhon division of labour is a perfectly simple thing. But was not the caste regime also a particular division of labour? Was not the regime of the corporations another division of labour? And is not the division of labour under the system of manufacture, which in England begins in the middle of the seventeenth century and comes to an end in the last part of the eighteenth, also totally different from the division of labour in large-scale, modern industry?
M. Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects what even the profane economists attend to. When he talks about division of labour he does not feel it necessary to mention the world market. Good. Yet must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when there were still no colonies, when America did not as yet exist for Europe, and Eastern Asia only existed for her through the medium of Constantinople, have been fundamentally different from what it was in the seventeenth century when colonies were already developed
And that is not all. Is the whole inner organisation of nations, areall their international relations anything else than the expression of a particular division of labour? And must not these change when the division of labour changes?
M. Proudhon has so little understood the problem of the division of labour that he never even mentions the separation of town and country, which took place in Germany, for instance, from the ninth to the twelfth century. Thus, to M. Proudhon, this separation is an eternal law since he knows neither its origin nor its development. All through his book he speaks as if this creation of a particular mode of production would endure until the end of time. All that M. Proudhon says about the division of labour is only a summary, and moreover a very superficial and incomplete summary, ofwhat Adam Smith and a thousand others have said before him
The second evolution is machinery. The connection between the division of labour and machinery is entirely mystical to M. Proud¬hon. Each kind of division of labour had its specific instruments of production. Between the middle of the seventeenth and themiddle of the eighteenth century, for instance, people did not make everything by hand. They had instruments, and very complicated ones at that, such as looms, ships, levers, etc
Thus there is nothing more absurd than to derive machinery from division of labour in general
I may also remark, by the way, that M. Proudhon has understood very little the historical origin of machinery, but has still less understood its development. One can say that up to the year 1825-the period of the first general crisis-the demands of consumption in general increased more rapidly than production, and the development of machinery was a necessary consequence of the needs of the market. Since 1825, the invention and application of machinery has been simply the result of the war between workers and employers. But this is only true of England. As for the European nations, they were driven to adopt machinery owing to English competition both in their home markets and on the world market. Finally, in North America the introduction of machinery was due both to competition with other countries and to lack of hands, that is, to the disproportion between the population of North America and its industrial needs. From these facts you can see what sagacity Monsieur Proudhon develops when he conjures up the spectre of competition as the third evolution, the antithesis to machinery!
Lastly and in general, it is altogether absurd to make machineryan economic category alongside with division of labour, competition, credit, etc
Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox which draws the plough. The application of machinery in the present day is one of the relations of our present economic system, but the wayin which machinery is utilised is totally distinct from the machinery itself. Powder is powder whether used to wound a man or to dress his wounds
* * *
M. Proudhon, mainly because he lacks the historical knowledge, has not perceived that as men develop their productive faculties, that is, as they live, they develop certain relations with one another and that the nature of these relations must necessarily change with the change and growth of the productive faculties. He has not perceived that economic categories are only abstract expressions of these actual relations and only remain true while these relations exist. He therefore falls into the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal and not as historical laws which are only laws for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the political-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Monsieur Proudhon, thanks to a mystic inversion, sees in the real relations only embodiments of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the heart of God the Father since the beginning of the world
* * *
Monsieur Proudhon has very well grasped the fact that men produce cloth, linen, silks, and it is a great merit on his part to have grasped this small amount! What he has not grasped is that these men, according to their abilities, also produce the social relationsamid which they prepare cloth and linen. Still less has he understood that men, who produce their social relations in accordance with their material productivity, also produce ideas, categories, that is to say the abstract ideal expressions of these same social relations. Thus the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To M. Proud¬hon, on the contrary, abstractions, categories are the primordial cause. According to him they, and not men, make history. Theabstraction, the category taken as such, i.e., apart from men and their material activities, is of course immortal, unchangeable, unmoved; it is only one form of the being of pure reason; which is only another way of saying that the abstraction as such is abstract. An admirable tautology!
Thus, regarded as categories, economic re1'ations for M. Proudhon are eternal formulas without origin or progress
* * *
M. Proudhon is therefore necessarily doctrinaire. To him the historical movement, which is turning the present-day world upside down, reduces itself to the problem of discovering the correct equilibrium, the synthesis, of two bourgeois thoughts. And so the clever fellow by virtue of his subtlety discovers the hidden thought of God, the unity of two isolated thoughts which are only isolated because M. Proudhon has isolated them from practical life, from present-day production, which is the combination of the realities which they express. In place of the great historical movement arising from the conflict between the productive forces already acquired by men and their social relations, which no longer correspond to these productive forces; in place of the terrible wars which are being prepared between the different classes within each nation and between different nations; in place of the practical and violent action of the masses by which alone these conflicts can be resolved in place of this vast, prolonged and complicated movement, Monsieur Proudhon supplies the whimsical motion of his own head. So it is the men of learning that make history, the men who know how to purloin God's secret thoughts. The common people have only to apply their revelations. You will now understand why M. Proudhon is the declared enemy of every political movement. The solution of present problems does not lie for him in public action but in the dialectical rotations of his own head. Since to him the categories are the motive force, it is not necessary to change practical life in order to change the categories. Quite the contrary. One must change the categories and the consequence will be a change in the existing society
In his desire to reconcile the contradictions Monsieur Proudhon does not even ask if the very basis of those contradictions must not be overthrown. He is exactly like the political doctrinaire who wants to have the king and the chamber of deputies and the chamber of peers as integral parts of social life, as eternal categories . All he is looking for is a new formula by which to establish an equilibriumbetween these powers whose equilibrium consists precisely in the actual movement in which one power is now the conqueror and now the slave of the other. Thus in the eighteenth century a number of mediocre minds were busy finding the true formula which would bring the social estates, nobility, king, parliament, etc., into equilibrium, and they woke up one morning to find that there was in fact no longer any king, parliament or nobility. The true equilibrium in this antagonism was the overthrow of all the social relations which served as a basis for these feudal existences and for the antagonisms of these feudal existences
Because M. Proudhon places eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, on the one side and h uman beings and their practical life, which, according to him is the application of these categories, on the other, one finds with him from the beginning a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body, a dualism which recurs in many forms. You can see now that this antagonism is nothing butthe incapacity of M. Proudhon to understand the profane origin and the profane history of the categories which he deifies
My letter is already too long for me to speak of the absurd case which M. Proudhon puts up against communism. For the moment you will grant me that a man who has not understood the present state of society may be expected to understand still less the movement which is tending to overthrow it, and the literary expressions of this revolutionary movement
Thesole point on which I am in complete agreement with Monsieur Proudhon is in his dislike for sentimental socialistic day¬dreams. I had already, before him, drawn much enmity upon myself by ridiculing this sentimental, utopian, mutton-headed socialism. But is not M. Proudhon strangely deluding himself when he sets up his petty-bourgeois sentimentality-I am referring to his declamations about home, conjugal love and all such banalities-in opposition to socialist sentimentality, which in Fourier, for example goes much deeper than the pretentious platitudes of our worthy Proudhon? * * *
Theses on Feuer bach
KARL MARX
Marx wrote the "Theses 'on Feuerbach" in the spring of 1845 as he and Engels were starting their collaborative work The German Ideology. More than forty years later, Engels found them in one of the notebooks that had come into his possession after his friend died. He published them as an appendix to his essay of 1888 on Ludwig Feuerbachand the End of Classical German Philosophy, and described them in the foreword to this essay as " the brilliant germ of the new world outlook," They have fascinated Marx scholars ever since, and an extensive literature of exegesis of the "Theses" has accumulated. The eleventh thesis, in which Marx proclaims it the task of philosophy not simply to interpret but to change the world, is one of his most frequently quoted statements
Before resorting to commentaries, however, the reader' should apply himself to Marx's own amplification of the "Theses" in Part I of The German Ideology, which follows this selection
Engels made a few small changes in the "Theses" when he published them in 1888: he added the phrase "in Robert Owen, for example," in parentheses, at the end of the first paragraph of Thesis ' III; italicized "social product" in Thesis VII; italicized "contemplative" and placed quotation marks around "civil society" in Thesis IX, The version presented below is Marx's
I
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism that of Feuerbach includedis that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism-but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary," of practicalcritical, activity
II
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sided ness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question
III
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice
IV
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and revolutionised in practice
V
Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human sensuous activity
VI
Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
(1) To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract -isolated-human individual
(2) The human essence, therefore, can with him be comprehended only as "genus," as an internal, dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals
VII
Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the "religious sentiment" is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society
VIII
Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice
IX
The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in civil society
X
The standpoint of the old materialism is "civil" society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialised humanity
XI
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
The German Ideology : Part I
KARL MARX
Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology in 1845-46 in order (as Marx later recalled) "to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience." He further explained: "The manuscript, 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. Vie abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice, all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose self-clarification."* The work was first published in 1932 by the Marx¬Engels Institute in Moscow
The original difficulty of publication was very probably connected with the fact that most of this very bulky work consisted of satirically written, rather arid polemics against Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Karl Grun, and others. But Part I (here presented in full) is a different matter. Although polemical at various points, it is basically a work of exposition. It gives every appearance of being the work for which the "Theses on Feuerbach" served as an outline; hence we may infer that it was written by Marx. It is, in essence, a restatement, minus much of the German philosophical terminology, of the theory of history adumbrated in the manuscripts of 1 844. Marx now calls it the materialist conception of history." It is particularly valuable and important to the student of Marxist thought because Marx never again set down a comprehensive statement of his theory of history at such length and in such detail. This point is not contradicted by Engels' remark in the 1888 foreword that the exposihon of the materialist conception of history in The German Ideology "proves only how incomplete our knowledge of economic history still was at that time."
The German Ideology has recently appeared in a re-edited version containing several previously unknown pages of the manuscript that were discovered in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where the original manuscript is kept. Part I appears here in this new and fuller version as translated from the German and edited by S. Ryazanskaya, and published in English by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in 1964. In preparing this new translation, the translator made use of an earlier English translation made by VI. Lough and edited by R. Pascal
Feuerbach : Opposition of the Materialistic
and Idealistic Outlook
As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy, which began with Strauss, has developed into a universal ferment into which all the "powers of the past" are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity by bolder and stronger rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was child's play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times inthree centuries
All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought
Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the putrescepc.e of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum1 began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances. The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing h is apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements
If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which awakens even in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of national pride, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movementand in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany
A. IDEOLOGY IN GENERAL, GERMAN IDEOLOGY
IN PARTICULAR
German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this-each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as "substance" and "self-consciousness," later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as "species," "the Unique," "Man," etc
The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological, conceptions; and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man-"man" in the last resort as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was sanctified to an ever• increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all
The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticized everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate
Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against "phrases." They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few ( and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance
It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their ownmaterial surroundings
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, notdogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the realindividuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both thosewhich they find already existing and those produced by their active-ity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established isthe physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself geological, orohydrographical,climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with howthey produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production
This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr]of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production
The relations ofdifferent nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But not onlythe relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productice force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitive extension of productive forces already known ( for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land ), causes a further development of the divisionof labour
The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial fromagricultural labour, and hence to the separationof town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation ofcommercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce ( patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes ). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour
The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it pre-supposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe; finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter
The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable,and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as; in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonismof town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed
This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and robbery, etc., have been accepted as the driving force of history. Here we must limit ourselves to the chief points and take, therefore, only the most striking example--:the destruction of an old civilisation by a barbarous people and the resulting formation of an entirely new organisation of society. ( Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks.) With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as indicated above, a regular form of intercourse; which is the more eagerly exploited as the increase in population together with the traditional and, for it, the only possible, crude mode of production gives rise to the need for new means of production. In Italy, on the other hand, the concentration of landed property (caused not only by buying-up and indebtedness but also by inheritance, since loose living being rife and marriage rare, the old families gradually died out and their possessions fell into the hands of a few) and its conversion into grazing land (caused not only by the usual economic forces still operative today but by the importation of plundered and tribute corn and the resultant lack of demand for Italian corn) brought about the almost total disappearance of the free population. The very slaves died out again and again, and had constantly to be replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the whole productive system. The plebeians, midway between freemen and slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble. Rome indeed never became more than a city; its connection with the provinces was almost exclusively political and could, therefore, easily be broken again by political events
With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome ( as the Licinian agrarian law proves ) and proceeded very rapidly 'from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebejan small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing To its intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development
The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with them. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the bar barbar-ians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the infiluence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directlyproducing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but theenserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure oflandownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of associtation and the relation to the direct producers were differentbecause of the different conditions of production. This feudal system of landownership had its counterpart in thetowns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisationof trades.Here property consisted chIefly in the Ia hour of each •individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country
Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chainedto it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organization ofboth was determined by the restricted conditions of production the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, alld-Ihe craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there wasno division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations
The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas:Is, etc-real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite deve1opment of their productlve forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence andthe existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from Hayen to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from .what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the develop¬ment of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness,thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists ( themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subject, as with the idealists
Where speculation ends-in real life-there real, positive science begins : the representation of the practical activity, of the practical, process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by summing up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these' abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata.But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epoch of history. On the contrary,our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement the real depiction of our historical material,whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process arid the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistioncion to the ideologists, and shall iilustrate them by historical examples
1. History
Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men,must be in a position to live in order to be able to "makehistory.’’2 But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. Tne first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an histori¬cal act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno, it presup¬poses the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never a historian.The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-calledhistory only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry
The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need ( theaction of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of newneeds is the first historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual ancestry of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they run out of positive material and when they can serve up neither theological nor political nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the "prehistoric era." They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we proceed from this nonsensical "prehistory" to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this "prehistory" with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves safe there from interference on the part of "crude facts," and, at the same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the .only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relatIons and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one ( except in Germany), and must then be treated and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to "the concept of the family," as is the custom in Germany.3 These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the Germans, three "moments," which have existed simultaneously since the dan ofhistory and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today
The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode, of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation ' is itself a "productive force." Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the ‘’history humanity’’ must always be studied and treated in relation to thehistory of industry and exchange. But it is also clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history, because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of comprehension and the material but also the "evidence of their senses," for across the Rhine you cannot have any experience of these things since history has stopped happening. Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is evertaking on new forms, and thus presents a ‘’history’’ independentlyof the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would especially hold men together
Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects ofthe primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness”;4 but, even so, not inherent, not "pure" consciousness. From the start the "spirit" is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical conscious¬ness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me : the animal does not enter into "relations" with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consiousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who" is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousnessof nature (natural religion)
We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men's restricted relation to nature, just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically; and, on the other hand, man's consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of he consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increasedprodyctivity, the increase of needs, and, what isfundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc., etc. Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears.5 Fromt this moment onwards consciousness can really Ratler"Itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without represent- ing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc., comes into contrawith the existing relations, this c only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a particular national sphere of'relations through the appearance of the contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national consciousness and the practice of other nations,6 i.e., between the national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in Germany)
Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these threeoments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradicfion with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility,naythe fact that intellectual and material activity-enjoyment and labour, production and consumption devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that "spectres," "bonds," "the higherbeing," "concept," "scruple," are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move
With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual. families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously thedistri-bution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitive and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavely in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest," but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particu¬voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce intoan objective power above us, growing out of control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now
And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as theState, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration-such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other interests and especial1y, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc.,are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another (of this the German theoreticians have nof the fainest inkling, although they have received a sufficient introduction to the subject in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher and Die heilige Familie). Further, it follows that every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them as an interest "alien" to them, and "independent" of them, as in its turn a particular, peculiar "general" interest; or they themselves must remain within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the practicalstruggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory ‘’general’’ interest in the form of the State, The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien forceexisting outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these
This’’estrangement’’ (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two
Practical premises. For it to become an "intolerable" power, i.e., a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless," and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces isa universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, ( 1)communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universaldevelopment of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. How otherwise ccould for instance property have had a history at all, have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example, according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand-a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to b established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. Moreover, the mass of propertylessworkers-the utterly precarious position of labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life-presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals, i.e., existenceof individuals which is directly linked up with world history
The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces af all previous historical stages, and in its turn determingthese, is civil society. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its premises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called tribe, and the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated in our remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states
Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces.It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itseld as State. The term ‘’civil society’’ [burgerliche Gesellschaft]7 emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name
2. Concerning the Production of Consciousness
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more below) and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world¬historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e., fantastic, terms as "self-generation of the species" ("society as the subject"), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself, It is clear here that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves either in the nonsense of Saint Bruno, or in the sense of the "Unique," of the "made" man
This conception of history depends on our ability to .expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into "self-consciousness" or transformation into "apparitions," "spectres," "fancies," etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into "self¬consciousness" as "spirit of the spirit," but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation,but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as m uch as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self¬consciousness" and the "Unique." These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present
( namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very "production of life" till then, the "total activity" on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves
In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely "political" or "religious" motives, although "religion" and "politics" are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The "idea," the "conception" of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their practice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this crude social form . While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the "pure spirit," and make religious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence, reduced to its "finest expression," of all this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno, as a series of "thoughts" that devour one another and are finally swallowed up in "self¬consciousness";8 and even more consistently the course of history appears to the Blessed Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere tale of "knights," robbers and ghosts, from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by "unholiness." This conception is truly religious: it postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting point of history; and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself. This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has only local interest for the Germans, as for instance the important question treated several times of late: how really we "pass from the realm of God to the realm of Man" -as if this "realm of God" had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the "realm of Man" to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime ( for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly conditions. Always, for these Germans, it is simply a matter of resolving the nonsense of earlier writers into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining this theoretical talk from the actual existing conditions. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e .g., religion, etc., these have now long been dissolved by circumstances
The purely national character of these questions and solutions is shown again in the way these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like "the God-Man," "Man," etc., have presided overindividual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that "only criticism and critics have made history") and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from "Mongolism" to history "with meaningful content," that is to say, to the history of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbucher and the dis¬solution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig Book Fair and the mutual quarrels of "Criticism," "Man," and "the Unique." If these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth centrry, they merely give a history of the i deas of the times, torn away from the facts and the practical development fundamental to them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the real historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of anun historic person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic invasion of politics into history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century. These high-falutin and haughty hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-quaffing philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical: they live in Germany, to Germany, and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French State, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints B runo and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany
It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when (Wigand's Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Volume 2) by virtue of the qualification "common man" he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of "man," and thereby thinks it possible to change the word "communist," which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category. Feuerbach's whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need and alwayshave needed each other. He wants to est a blish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a correct consciousness aboutan existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things. We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher. It is characteristic, however, that Saint Bruno and Saint Max seize on Feuerbach's conception of the communist and put it in place of the real communist which occurs, partly, in order that they can combat communism too as "spirit of the spirit," as a philosophical category, as an equal opponent and, in the case of Saint Bruno, partly also for pragmatic reason. As an example of Feuerbach's acceptance and at the same time misunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with our opponents, we recall the passage in the Philosophie der Zukunft where he develops the view that the existence of a thing or a man is at the same time its or his essence, that the conditions of existence, the mode of life and activity of an animal or human individual are those in which its "essence" feels itself satisfied. Here every exception is expressly conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot be altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their "existence" does not in the least correspond to their "essence," then, according to the passage quoted, this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and will prove this in time, when they bring their "existence" into harmony with their "essence" in a practical way, by means of a revolution. Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such cases, but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in nature which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, every advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, so that the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachian propositions is steadily shrinking. The "essence" of the fish is its "existence," water to go no further than this one proposition. The "essence" of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the "essence" of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which the Blessed Max Stirner offers to the discontented, saying that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament,whereupon they should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as little from Saint Bruno's allegation that these unfortunate circumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the muck of "substance," have not advanced to "absolute self-consciousness," and do not realise that these adverse conditions are spirit of their spirit
We shall, of course, not take the trouble9 to enlighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the "liberation" of "man" is not advanced a single stepl by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to "self-consciousness"2 and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases,3 which have never held him in thrall.4 Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing. real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam¬engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. "Liberation" is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the [development] of industry, commerce, [agri]culture, the [conditions of intercourse] * * * 5
In Germany,6a country where only a trivial historical development is taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development, and they take root and have to be combated. But this fight is of local importance.7
* * * 8in reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things . When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach's "conception" of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says "Man" instead of "real historical man." "Man" is really "the German." In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things whichcontradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature.9 To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the "flatly obvious" and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the "true essence" of things. He does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become "sensuous certainty" for Feuerbach
Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are and happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno goes so far as to speak of "the antitheses in nature and history" (p. 110), as though these were two separate "things" and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of which all the "unfathomably lofty works" on "substance" and "self-consciousness" were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that the celebrated "unity of man with nature" has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the "struggle" of man with nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis. Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution, the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-looms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this "pure" natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca; 1 but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from n ature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach
Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the "pure" materialists in that he realises how man too is an "object of the senses." But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an "object of the senses," not as "sensuous activity," because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the abstraction "man," and gets no further than recognising "the true, individual, corporeal man" emotionally, i.e., he knows no other "human relationships" "of man to man" than love and friendship, and even then idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when, for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the "higher perception" and in the ideal "compensation in the species," and thus to relapse into idealism at the very p oint where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure. As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which inciden¬tally is already obvious from what has been said
History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g., the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes "a person ranking with other persons" (to wit: "Self-Consciousness, Criticism, the Unique," etc.), while what is designated with the words "destiny," "goal," "germ," or "ideal" of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence which earlier history exercises on later history
The further the separate spheres, which act on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labour between various nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee which have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious "Vars of Liberation of 1813. From this it follows that this transformation of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the "self-consciousness," the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectualforce. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law."
The division of labour, which we have already seen above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, how¬ever, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period pre¬supposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above
If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to therp an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas whichincreasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of univer¬sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as thewhole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.2 It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they became bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule
This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or the "general interest" as ruling
Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas " the idea," the notion, etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate ideas and concepts as "forms of self-determination" on the part of the concept developing in history. Itfollows then naturally, too, that all the relationships of men can be derived from the concept of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by the speculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the Geschichtsphilosophiethat he "has considered the progress of the concept only" and has represented in history the "true theodicy." Now one can go back again to the producers of the "concept," to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes then to" the conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all times been dominant in history : a conclusion, as we see, already expressed by Hegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history ( hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three efforts
No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from these actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in history
No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is managed by understanding them as "acts of self-determination on the part of the concept" ( this is possible because by virtue of their empirical basis these ideas are really connected with one another and because, conceived asmere ideas, they become self-distinctions, distinctions made by thought)
No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this "self-determining concept" it is changed into a person-"Self-Consciousness"¬or, to appear thoroughly materialistic, into a series of persons, who represent the "concept" in history, into the "thinkers," the "philosophers," the ideologists, who again are understood as the manufacturers of history, as the "council of guardians," as the rulers.3Thus the whole body of materialistic elements has been removed from history and now full rein can be given to the speculative steed
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true
This historical method which reigned in Germany and especially the reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g., the illusions of the jurists, politicians (of the practical statesmen among them, too ), from the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour
[B. THE REAL BASIS OF IDEOLOGY] 4
1. Intercourse and Productive Forces
The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day ( the Anti-Corn Law League)
The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc., in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town¬animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition which again depends on a mass of material premises and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development of capital independent of landed property-the beginning of property having its basis only in labour and exchange
In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready¬made from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had become free, each man's own particular labour was his only property apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of serfs constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the country against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised municipal military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of labour, the necessity of common buildings for sale of their wares at a time when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country: these were the causes of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds. We have not at this point to go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system, which arise through later historical developments. The flight of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the country, came separately into the towns, where they found an organised community, against which they were powerless and in which they had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. These workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power, since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to their interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and therefore not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never managed to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for day-labourers in the towns created the rabble
These towns were true "associations," called forth by the direct need, the care of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying the means of production and defence of the separate members. The rabble of these towns was devoid of any power, composed as it was of individuals strange to one another who had entered separately, and who stood un organised over against an organised power, armed for war, and jealously watching over them. The journeymen and apprentices were organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The patriarchal relationship existing between them and their masters gave the latter a double power-on the one hand because of their influence on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and separated them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to the existing order by their simple interest in becoming masters themselves. While, therefore, the rabble at least carried out revolts against the whole municipal order, revolts which remained completely ineffective because of their powerlessness, the journeymen never got further than small acts of insubordination within sepa-rate guilds, such as belong to the very nature of the guild system. The great risings of the Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the peasants
In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was as yet [quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds themselves, not at all developed between the individual workers. Every workman had to be versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that was to be made with his tools. The limited commerce and the scanty communication between the individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labour, and therefore every man who wished to become a master had to be proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason, however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him
Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consisting of a house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers; and not being realisable, on account of the backwardness of commerce and the lack of circulation, it descended from father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can be assessed in money and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or that, this capital was directly connected with the particular work of the owner, inseparable from it and to this extent estate capital
The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of production and commerce, the formation of a special class of merchants; a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a former period, had been handed down ( among other things with the Jews ) and which very soon appeared in the newly formed ones. With this there was given the possibility of commercial communications transcending the immediate neighbourhood, a possibility, the realisation of which depended on the existing means of communication, the state of public safety in the countryside, which was determined by political conditions ( during the whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants travelled in armed caravans ), and on the cruder or more advanced needs ( determined by the stage of culture attained) of the region accessible to intercourse
With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the extension of trade through the merchants beyond the immediate surroundings of the town, there immediately appears a reciprocal action between production and commerce. The towns enter intorelations with one another, new tools are brought from one town into the other, and the separation between production and commerce soon calls forth a new division of production between the individual towns, each of which is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down
In the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to unite against the landed nobility to save their skins. The extension of trade, the establishment of communications, led the separate towns to get to know other towns, which had asserted the same interests in the struggle with the same antagonist. Out of the many local corporations of burghers there arose only gradually the burgher class. The conditions of life of the individual burghers became, on account of their contradiction to the existing relationships and of the mode of labour determined by these, conditions which were common to them all and independent of each individual. The burghers had created the conditions insofar as they had torn themselves free from feudal ties, and were created by them insofar as they were determined by their antagonism to the feudal system which they found in existence. When the individual towns began to enter into associations, these common conditions developed into class conditions. The same conditions, the same contradiction, the same interests necessarily called forth on the whole similar customs everywhere. The bourgeoisie itself, with its conditions, develops only gradually, splits according to the division of labour into various fractions and finally absorbs all propertied classes it finds in existence5( while it develops the majority of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied classes into a new class, the proletariat) in the measure to which all property found in existence is transformed into industrial or commercial capital. The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence overagainst the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as thlre subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labour and can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labour itself. We have already indicated several times how this subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc
It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for later development or not. As long as there exists no commerce transcending the immediate neighborhood, every invention must be made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions of barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a country with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start right over again from the beginning. In primitive history every invention had to be made daily anew and in each locality independently. How little highly developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians,6 whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting in the Middle Ages. Only when commerce has become world commerce and has as its basis large-scale industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces assured
The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of produc¬tion which had outgrown the guild-system. Manufactures first flour¬ished, in Italy and later in Flanders, under the historical premise of commerce with foreign nations. In other countries, England and France for example, manufactures were at first confined to the home market. Besides the premises already mentioned manufactures depend on an already advanced concentration of population, particularly in the countryside, and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals, partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among the merchants
That labour which from the first presupposed a machine, even of the crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development. Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the peasants as a secondary occupation to procure their clothing, was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further development through the extension of commerce. Weaving was the first and remained the principal manufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, consequent on the growth of population, the growing accumulation and mobilisation of natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual extension of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus, which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing. Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, whocontinued, and still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the whole home market and usually for foreign markets too:
Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and soon splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted the trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly in villages and market centres without guild organisation, which gradually became towns, and indeed the most flourishing towns in each land
With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly changed. The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital was provided by the rise of merchants whose capital was from the beginning movable, capital in the modern sense as far as one can speak of it, given the circumstances of those times. The second advance came with manufacture, which again made mobile a mass of natural capital, and altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against that of natural capital
At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants from the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly, just as earlier the guild-towns had [served] as a refuge for the peasants from [the oppressive landed nobility]
Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture, and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the disintergration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry VIlI of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually
With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered into a competitive relationship, the struggle for trade, which was fought out in wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the nations, insofar as they were connected at all, had carried on an inoffensive exchange with each other. Trade had from now on a political significance
With the advent of manufacture the relationship between worker and employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relationship between journeyman and master continued to exist; in manufacture its place was taken by the monetary relation between worker aad capitalist-a relationship which in the countryside and in small towns retained a patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, the real manufacturing towns, quite early lost almost all patriarchal complexion
Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers, colonisation; and above all the extension of markets into a world market, which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into which in general we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the nations amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly greater extension and animosity
The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumulation of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated to extend their production, natural capital remained stationary or even declined. Trade and manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to bow to the might of the great merchants and manufacturers.7Hence the decline of the guilds, as soon as they came into contact with manufacture
The intercourse of nations took on, in the epoch of which we have been speaking, two different forms. At first the small quantity of gold and silver in circulation involved the ban on the export of these metals; and industry, for the most part imported from a broad and made necessary by the need for employing the growing urban population, could not do without those privileges which could be granted not only, of course, against home competition, but chiefly against foreign. The local guild privilege was in these original prohibitions extended over the whole nation. Customs duties originated from the tributes which the feudal lords exacted as protective levies against robbery from merchants passing through their territories; tributes later imposed likewise by the towns, and which, with therise of the modem states, were the Treasury's most obvious means of raising money
The appearance of American gold and silver on the European markets, the gradual development of industry, the rapid expansion of trade and the consequent rise of the non-guild bourgeoisie and of money, gave these measures another significance. The State, which was daily less and less able to do without money, now retained the ban on the export of gold and silver out of fiscal considerations; the bourgeois, for whom these masses of money which were hurled on to the market became the chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly content with this; privileges established earlier became a source of income for the government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation there appeared the export duty, which, since it only [placed] a hindrance in the way of industry, had a purely fiscal aim
The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and navigation had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which played a secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable consumers; and after long struggles the separate nations shared out the opening world market among themselves. This period begins with the Navigation Laws and colonial monopolies. The competition of the nations among themselves was excluded as far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and treaties; and in the last resort the competitive struggle was carried on and decided by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime nation, the English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture. Here, already, we find concentration in one country
Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as much as possible by differential duties . The working-up of home-produced material was encouraged ( wool and linen in England, silk in France ), the export of home-produced raw material forbidden (wool in England), and the [working-up] of imported material neglected or suppressed (cotton in England ). The nation dominant in sea trade and colonial power naturally secured for itself also the greatest quantitative and qualitative expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be carried on without protection , since, if the slightest change takes place inother countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably favourable conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for this very reason can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the mode in which it is carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century, in the countryside, it is to such an extent inter-woven with the vital relationships of a great mass of individuals, that no country dare jeopardise its existence by permitting free competition. Insofar as it manages to export, it therefore depends entirely on the extension or restriction of commerce, and exercises a relatively very small reaction [on the latter] . Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of [the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants and especially the shippers who more than anybody else pressed for State protection and monopolies; the manufacturers also demanded and indeed received protection, but all the time were inferior in political importance to the merchants. The commercial towns, particularly the maritime towns, became to some extent civilised and acquired the outlook of the big bourgeoisie, but in the factory towns an extreme petty bourgeois outlook persisted. Cf. Aiken, etc. The eighteenth centurywas the century of trade. Pinto says this expressly: "Le commerce fait la marotte du siècle";8 and: "Depuis quelque temps il n'est plus question que de commerce, de navigation et de marine. "9
This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the export of gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in money; by banks, national debts, paper money; by speculation in stocks and shares and stockjobbing in all articles; by the development of finance in general. Again capital lost a great part of the natural character which had still clung to it
The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country, England, developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradually created for this country a relative world market, and thus a demand for the manufactured products of this country, which could no longer be met by the industrial productive forces hitherto existing. This deinand, outgrowing the productive forces, was the motive power which, by producing big industry the application of elemental forces to industrial ends, machinery and the most complex division of labour called into existence the third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages. There already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new phase: freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of theoretical mechanics, etc. ( Indeed, the science of mechanics perfected by Newton was altogether the most popular science in France and England in the eighteenth century. )( Free competition inside the nation itself had everywhere to be conquered by a revolution-1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France. ) Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations ( the old duties were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in spite of these protective measures ( it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade ), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation ( development of the financial system ) and the centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed natural growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour exists, and resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of the commercial town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the automatic system. [Its development] produced a mass of productive forces, for which private [property] became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the developing craft. These productive forces received under the system of private property a one¬sided development only, and became for the majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces could find no application at all within this system. Generally speaking, big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old worldand at the same time stands pitted against it. Big industry makes for the worker not only the relation to the capitalist, but labouritself, unbearable
It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level ofdevelopment in all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created by big industry assume leadership of this movement and carry the whole mass along with them, and because the workers excluded from big industry are placed by it in a still worse situation than the workers in big industry itself. The countries in which big industry is developed act in a similar manner upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as the latter are swept by universal commerce into the universal competitive struggle.l
These different forms are just so many forms of the organisation of labour, and hence of property. In each period a unification of the existing - productive forces takes place, insofar as this has been rendered necessary by needs
2. The Relation of State and Law to Property
The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle Ages, is tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war, with the Germans by the rearing of cattle. In the case of the ancient peoples, since several tribes live together in one town, thetribal property appears as State property, and the right of the individual to it as mere ‘’possession’’ which, however, like tribal property as a whole, is confined to landed property only. Real private property began with the ancienfs, as with modern nationll, with movable property.(Slavery and community) ( dominium ex jure Quiritum2 ). In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages-feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture-to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e., pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property. To thismodern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bour Geoisie is forced to organize itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside Civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, forthe mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man
Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised, it follows that the State mediates in the formation of all common institutions and that the institutions receive a political form. Hence the illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis on free will. Similarly, justice is in its turn reduced to the actual laws
Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the disintegration of the natural community . With the Romans the development of private property and civil law had no further' industrial and commercial consequences, because their whole mode of production did not alter.3 With modern peoples, where the feudal community was disintegrated by industry and trade, there began with the rise of private property and civil law a new phase, which was capable of further development. The very first town which carried on an extensive maritime trade in the Middle Ages, Amalfi, also developed maritime law. As soon as industry and trade developed private property further, first in Italy and later in other countries, the highly developed Roman civil law was immediately adopted again and raised to authority. When later the bourgeoisie had acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in order to overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie, there began in all countries-in France in the sixteenth century-the real development of law, which in all countries except Eng-land proceeded on the basis of the Roman Codex. In England, too, Roman legal principles had to be introduced to further the development of civil law (especially in the case of movable property). (It must not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent cc history as religion.)
In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi4 itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illu¬sion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing. In practice, the abuti5 has very definite economic limitations for the owner of private property, if he does not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi pass into other hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with reference to his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true property in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which the philosophers call an idea 5 ). This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the mere will, necessarily leads, in the further development of property relationships, to the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing without really having the thing. If, for instance, the income from a piece of land is lost owing to competition, then the proprietor has certainly his legal title to it along with the jus utendi et abutendi. But he can do nothing with it: he owns nothing as a landed proprietor if in addi¬tion he has not enough capital to cultivate his ground. This illusion of the jurists also explains the fact that for them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that individuals enter into relationships among themselves (e.g., contracts); it explains why they consider that these relationships [can] be entered into or not at will, and that their content rests purely on the individual [free] will of the contracting parties
Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g., ensurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property
[3. Natural and Civilised Instruments of Production and Forms
of Property ]
* * * 7 From the first, there follows the premise of a highly developed division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the second, the locality. In the first case the individuals must be brought together, in the second they find themselves alongside the given instrument of production as instruments of production themselves. Here, therefore, arises the difference between natural instruments of production and those created by civilisation. The field (water, etc.) can be regarded as a natural instrument of production. In the first case, that of the natural instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, property (landed property) appears as direct natural domination in the second, as domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second that they are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first case, what is involved is chiefly an exchange between men and nature in which the labour of the former is exchanged for the products of the latter; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men among themselves. In the first case, average, human commonsense is adequate-physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity; in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must already be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over the property less may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third party¬money. In the first case, small industry exists, but determined by the utilisation of the natural instrument of production and therefore without the distribution of labour among various individuals; in the second, industry exists only in and through the division of labour
Our investigation hitherto started from the instruments of production, and it has already shown that private property was a necessity for certain industrial stages. In industrie extractive private property still coincides with labour; in small industry and all agriculture up till now property is the necessary consequence of the existing instruments of production; in big industry the contradiction between the instrument of production and private property appears for the first time and is the product of big industry; moreover, big industry must be highly developed to produce this contradiction. And thus only with big industry does the abolition of private property become possible
In big industry and competition the whole mass of conditions of existence, limitations, biases of individuals, are fused together into the two simplest forms : private property and labour. With money every form of intercourse, and intercourse itself, is considered for¬tuitous for the individuals. Thus money implies that all previous intercourse was only intercourse of individuals under particular conditions, not of individuals as individuals. These conditions are reduced to two: accumulated labour or private property, and actual labour. If both or one of these ceases, then intercourse comes to a standstill. The modern economists themselves, e.g., Sismondi, Cherbuliez, etc., oppose "association of individuals" to "association of capital." On the other hand, the individuals themselves are entirely subordinated to the division of labour and hence are brought into the most complete dependence on one another. Private property, insofar as within labour itself it is opposed to labour, evolves out of the necessity of accumulation, and has still, to begin with, rather the form of the communality; but in its further development it approaches more and more the modern form of private property. The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the splitting-up of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself. The more the division of labour develops and accumulation grows, the sharper are the forms that this process of differentiation assumes. Labour itself can only exist on the premise of this fragmentation
Thus two facts are here revealed.8 First the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property themselves. Never, in any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals, because the.ir inter¬course itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand, standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals.
The only connection which still links them with the productive forces and with their own existence-labour has lost all sem¬blance of self-activity and only sustains their life by stunting it. While in the earlier periods self-activity and the production of material life were separated, in that they devolved on different persons, and while, on account of the narrowness of the individuals themselves, the production of material life was considered as a subordinate mode of self-activity, they now diverge to such an extent that altogether material life appears as the end, and what produces this material life, labour ( which is now the only possible but, as we see, negative form of self-activity ), as the means
Thus things have now come to such a pass, that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse. The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. This appropriation is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all
This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society
Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive forces through united individuals, private property comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and the particular private gain of each man have themselves become accidental
The individuals, who a re no longer subject to the division of labour, have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name "Man." They have conceived the whole process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of "Man," so that at every historical stage "Man" was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole process was thus conceived as a process of the self-estrangement of "Man," and this was essentially due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of history into an evolutionary process of consciousness
Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions: (1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces ( machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class. (2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied, are the conditions of the rule C?f a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the State; and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class, which till then has been in power.9 (3) In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society; and (4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew
C. COMMUNISM. THE PRODUCTION OF THE FORM
OF INTERCOURSE ITSELF
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it over¬turns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material' production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, in so far, as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves. Thus the communists in practice treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them. The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different times-e.g., the estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life. What appears accidental to the later age as opposed to the earlier-and this applies also to the elements handed down by an earlier age-is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite stage of development of the productive forces. The relation of the productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the occupation or activity of the individuals. (The fundamental form of this activity is, of course, material, on which depend all other forms-mental, political, religious, etc. The various shaping of material life is, of course, in every case dependent on the needs which are already developed, and the production, as well as the satisfaction, of these needs is an historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or a dog. (Stirner's refractory principal argument adversus hominem), although sheep and dogs in their present form certainly, but malgre eux, are products of an historical process.) The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other, so long as the above-mentioned contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these definite individuals, living under definite relations, can alone produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity.1 The definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their condi¬tioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists for the later individuals. Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well
These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of inter¬course, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals-a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond at every stage to the simultaneous development of the productive forces, their history is at the same time the history of the evolving productive forces taken over by each new generation, and is, therefore, the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves
Since this evolution takes place naturally, i.e., is not subordinated to a general plan of freely combined individuals, it proceeds from various localities, tribes, nations, branches of labour, etc., each of which to start with develops independently of the others and only gradually enters into relation with the others. Furthermore, it takes place only very slowly; the various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards. It follows from this that within a nation itself the individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have quite different developments, and that an earlier interest, the peculiar form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that belonging to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in possession of a traditional power in the illusory community ( State, law), which has won an existence independent of the individuals; a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution. This explains why, with reference to individual points which allow of a more general summing-up, consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical relationships, so that in the struggles of a latter epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities
On the other hand, in countries which, like North America begin in an already advanced historical epoch, the development proceeds very rapidly. Such countries have no other natural premises than the individuals, who settled there and were led to do so because the forms of intercourse of the old countries did not correspond to their wants. Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of the old countries, and, therefore, with the correspondingly most advanced form of intercourse, before this form of intercourse has been able to establish itself in the old countries.2 This is the case with all colonies, insofar as they are not mere military or trading stations. Carthage, the Greek colonies, and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, provide examples of this. A similar relationship issues from conquest, when a form of intercourse which has evolved on another soil is brought over complete to the conquered country: whereas in its home it was still encumbered with interests and relationships left over from earlier periods, here it can and must be established completely and without hindrance, if only to assure the conquerors' lasting power. (England and Naples after the Norman conquest, when they received the most perfect form of feudal organisation.)
Nothing is more common than the notion that in history up till now it has only been a question of taking. The barbarians take the Roman Empire, and this fact of taking is made to explain the transition from the old world to the feudal system. In this taking by barbarians, however, the question is, whether the nation which is conquered has evolved industrial productive forces, as is the case with modern peoples, or whether their productive forces are based for the most part merely on their association and on the community. Taking is further determined by the object taken. A banker's fortune, consisting of paper, cannot be taken at all, without the taker's submitting to the conditions of production and intercourse of the country taken. Similarly the total industrial capital of a modern industrial country, and finally, everywhere there is very soon an end to taking, and when there is nothing more to take, you have to set about producing. From this necessity of producing, which very soon asserts itself, it follows that the form of community adopted by the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of development of the productive forces they find in existence; or, if this is not the case from the start, it must change according to the productive forces. By this, too, is explained the fact, which people profess to have noticed everywhere in the period following the migration of the peoples, namely, that the servant was master, and that the conquerors very soon took over language, culture and manners from the conquered. The feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial organisation of the army during the actual conquest, and this only evolved after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries. To what an extent this form was determined by the productive forces is shown by the abortive attempts to realise other forms derived from reminiscences of ancient Rome (Charlemagne, etc.)
Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. Incidentally, to lead to collisions in a country, this contradiction need not necessarily have reached its extremelimit in this particular country. The competition with industrially more advanced countries, brought about by the expansion of international intercourse, is sufficient to produce a similar contradiction in countries with a backward industry (e.g., the latent proletariat in Germany brought into view by the competition of English indus¬try)
This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse, which, as we saw, has occurred several times in past history, without, however, endangering the basis, necessarily on each occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of various classes, contradiction of consciousness, battle of ideas, etc., political conflict, etc. From a narrow point of view one may isolate one of these subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these revolutions; and this is all the more easy as the individuals who started the revolutions had illusions about their own activity according to their degree of culture and the stage of historical development
The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships ) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour.3 This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association
It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the communal relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, only insofar as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class-a relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class. With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals (assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control conditions which were previously abandoned to chance and had won an independent existence over against the separate individuals just because of their separation as individuals, and because of the necessity of their combination which had been determined by the division of labour, and through their separation had become a bond alien to them. Combination up till now (by no means an arbitrary one, such as is expounded for example in the Contrat social, but a necessary one) was an agreement upon these conditions, within which the individuals were free to enjoy the freaks of fortune (compare, e.g., the formation of the North American State and the South American republics). This right to the undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has up till now been called personal freedom. These conditions of existence are, of course, only the productive forces and forms of intercourse at any particular time
If from a philosophical point of view one considers this evolution of individuals in the common conditions of existence of estates and classes, which followed on one another, and in the accompanying general conceptions forced upon them, it is certainly very easy to imagine that in these individuals the species, or "Man," has evolved, or that they evolved "Man"-and in this way one can give history some hard clouts on the ear.4 One can conceive these various estates and classes to be specific terms of the general expression, subordinate varieties of the species, or evolutionary phases of "Man."
This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a class has taken shape, which has no longer any particular class interest to assert against the ruling class
Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on themselves within their given historical conditions and relationships, not on the "pure" individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course of historical evolution, and precisely through the inevitable fact that within the division of labour social relationships take on an independent existence, there appears a division within the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions pertaining to it. (We do not mean it to be understood from this that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc., cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relationships, and the division appears only in their opposition to another class and, for themselves, only when they go bankrupt.) In the estate (and even more in the tribe) this is as yet concealed: for instance, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner, apart from his other relationships, a quality inseparable from his individuality. The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things. The difference from the estate comes out particularly in the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the estate of the urban burghers, the corporations, etc., emerged in opposition to the landed nobility, their condition of existence-movable property and craft labour, which had already existed latently before their separation from the feudal ties appeared as something positive, which was asserted against feudal landed property, and, therefore, in its own way at first took on a feudal form. Certainly the refugee serfs treated their previous servitude as something accidental to their personality. But here they only were doing what every class that is freeing itself from a fetter does; and they did not free themselves as a class but separately. Moreover, they did not rise above the system of estates, but only formed a new estate, retaining their previous mode of labour even in their new situation, and developing it further by freeing it from its earlier fetters, which no longer corresponded to the development already attained.5
For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give them control. The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class,)has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class
Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present) , namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hith¬erto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State
Footnotes:
* The cross-outs are indicated by pointed brackets in the complete text of the 1844 manuscripts 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 mass" 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. Passages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his manuscript
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 associated 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 manuscript 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 manuscript 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 manuscript
