Abstract
The Introduction offers an overview of the life and work of Karl Marx, emphasizing the importance of the historical social context into which he was born. Both Marx’s personal life and the whole of European society were profoundly marked by the quarter century of ferment in politics and ideas, with warfare across Europe and beyond, sparked by the French Revolution of 1789. He was motivated from his youth to come to terms with the potential for epochal revolutionary social transformation, on the one hand, yet also the inadequacies and failures of the Revolution’s actual politics, on the other. Beginning with his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx found a key to understanding humanity’s history of economic and social alienation, and the alternative possibility of society based on freedom, equality, and democracy, through the critique of political economy. Marx thereafter pursued a historical materialist understanding of human social development, culminating in the revolutionary self-emancipation of the working class. Far beyond the limited, if real, achievements of merely political freedom, he saw the capacity for class struggle to create a form of communist society entirely devoid of exploitation and oppression, establishing a new and enduring basis for socially just civilization.
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- 1.
These philosophers are often referred to as the “Young Hegelians”. Whatever their failings, they were variously recognized to be radicals in the context of the day, and the primary distinction was always political, not a question of age.
- 2.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
- 3.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MECW, vol. 3, 29–33, 49; Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 154.
- 4.
Moses Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen Aus Der Schweiz (Zurich: Verlag Das Literarisches, 1843). The same volume contained the chapter by Bruno Bauer that Marx addresses in the second part of “On The Jewish Question”.
- 5.
Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 172–4.
- 6.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 241.
- 7.
Ibid., 293–4.
- 8.
Ibid., 296.
- 9.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965).
- 10.
As will be argued later in this book, until after 1848, capitalism in any form, and its industrial revolution, were almost entirely absent from the European continent, and only just becoming truly dominant in England.
- 11.
Beethoven famously had originally dedicated his Third—“Heroic”—Symphony to Napoleon, only retracting the dedication after hearing that Bonaparte had crowned himself Emperor. Many less discerning, or more desperate, residents of oppressive monarchies continued to look to the Emperor in hopes of liberation.
- 12.
Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 86–93.
- 13.
Boris Nicolaievsky, and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), 7; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: Norton, 2013), 6. Such numbers are more indicative than definitive.
- 14.
Sperber, Karl Marx, 17.
- 15.
Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 8.
- 16.
Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, 9–10; Sperber, Karl Marx, 28–9.
- 17.
Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 181.
- 18.
The term bourgeoisie in old regime France referred to townspeople able to live without performing demeaning labour, but lacking noble status. Only Marx’s loose use of it as a synonym for the class of capitalists—informed by pervasive liberal ideas about the causes of the French Revolution—gave to it that particular sense. In fact, most bourgeois had been lawyers and owners of state offices, and no more than 10% engaged in commerce or industry of any sort. While these bourgeois generally were the wealthiest, they normally purchased ennobling offices in the state as soon as possible, leaving behind both their bourgeois status and commercial business, which was incompatible with nobility. François Guizot—renown liberal historian and politician, but a politically conservative liberal—gave lectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1820s (François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe (New York: Appleton, 1896)) that, while more conciliatory than the work of other, more radical liberal historians, still emphasized the rise of the bourgeoisie and their struggle for progress as central to European history. See George C. Comninel, Rethinking theFrench Revolution (London: Verso, 1987).
- 19.
This is the core idea of the concept of bourgeois revolution, and it is perfectly captured in the first section, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, of The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6). While Guizot expressed largely moderate views on the historical role of the bourgeoisie, the significance of their revolutionary role was emphasized by other liberal historians. In 1817, Augustin Thierry wrote “Vue des révolutions d’Angleterre”, a history of the heroic liberalism of the English Civil War that really was a thinly veiled account of the Revolution in France (in vol. 6 of Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1851). In 1824, François Mignet published the first liberal history of the Revolution in terms of a class revolution of the bourgeoisie (History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 (London: David Bogue, 1846)), the account with which The Manifesto most strongly resonates. As I noted in Rethinking the French Revolution (72–3), the very first account cast in terms of bourgeois class revolution actually was written by the leading revolutionary Antoine Barnave in 1792, but it was not published until 1843.
- 20.
Oxford English Dictionary: “ancient Greek ιστορία inquiry, knowledge obtained by inquiry, account of such inquiries, narrative”, OED Online, September 2012, Oxford University Press, December 4, 2012.
- 21.
Feudalism is widely misunderstood to correspond to the manorialism of the early Middle Ages, when in fact it emerged through a sudden social transformation around the year 1000 that had profound impact on subsequent European history. See George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53; George C. Comninel, “Feudalism”, in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, ed. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 131–7.
- 22.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301.
- 23.
Ellen M. Wood, Liberty and Property (London: Verso, 2012), 153–61.
- 24.
Ibid., 175–6.
- 25.
Ibid., 257, 308–10; Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 67–8; George C. Comninel, “Marx’s Context”, History of Political Thought XXI (2000): 474.
- 26.
For the classic critical account, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931).
- 27.
Wood, Liberty and Property, 193.
- 28.
Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution.
- 29.
They did not, however, have comparable private social property relations in the primary means of production, as will be discussed below.
- 30.
Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 64–74.
- 31.
For more on the nature and influence of Locke’s ideas, see Neal Wood’s books The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
- 32.
“Master and slave” is a poor translation of Herrschaft und Knectschaft, which really means lordship and servitude. Discussion of this concept rarely recognizes that the idea of class struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy was in circulation before Hegel completed his Habilitation, and was commonplace before the defeat of Napoleon. It is impossible to understand Hegel without recognizing the view—widespread among reactionaries and conservative liberals—that the aristocracy of the old regime descended from Germanic conquerors; whereas the Third Estate descended from those reduced to servitude. The other side to that coin was the liberal emphasis on the long historical rise of the bourgeoisie relative to the lords following the Germanic conquests, eventually displacing them as the basis for the modern nation—ideas central to Guizot’s work. Hegel’s dialectic in this regard, as so often in his work, slyly brought together the reactionary and the liberal, ceding the future to the latter without repudiating the former.
- 33.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 79.
- 34.
The subtlety of Hegel’s thought is such that it is not impossible to see in his ideas a more materialist unfolding of the universe, the comprehension of which, by the human mind, constitutes the basis for the Idea. The human mind, after all, can be understood to be the only form of consciousness that exists. Thus, the material historical development of human consciousness can be equated with that of consciousness itself, turning the history of philosophy into the development of Mind, as such. Marx clearly did not credit Hegel with the possibility of such a slyly materialist conception, and Hegel certainly did not force such a view on his readers. Whatever Hegel’s own conception, he certainly never sought to promote liberal—let alone radical—ideas in any obvious way.
- 35.
Marx, “On The Jewish Question”.
- 36.
Karl Marx, “From the Mémoires de R. Levasseur (De La Sarthe). Paris, 1829”, MECW, vol. 3, n177, 606.
- 37.
The title in the MECW refers to “Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, though the standard translation of the German original is Philosophy of Right.
- 38.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, MECW, vol. 3, 29.
- 39.
Ibid., 31–2.
- 40.
Other than the protectionist ideas of List’s “national economy”.
- 41.
Ibid., 30.
- 42.
Ibid. 47. State office as a form of “politically constituted property” was central to the politics of France from the Revolution through the whole of the nineteenth century, and figured importantly in Prussia.
- 43.
Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 174.
- 44.
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, 186.
- 45.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 235. As revealed in the detailed notes of the MECW, these manuscripts are not, and never have been, published in the order in which they were written.
- 46.
Ibid., 241.
- 47.
Ibid., 358.
- 48.
Ibid., 323.
- 49.
Ibid., 330.
- 50.
Ibid., 331–2.
- 51.
Ibid., 345.
- 52.
Ibid., 333.
- 53.
Ibid., 348.
- 54.
Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482.
- 55.
- 56.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 162. For a variety of reasons, this is my preferred edition. In the MECW, the Grundrisse appears as Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, (First Version Of Capital), in vol. 28 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), and the cited passage is on p. 99, in a different translation using the word “estrangement” instead of “alienation”.
- 57.
Marx, Grundrisse, 515. In the MECW edition, this passage appears on p. 438, with the cited words identically translated.
- 58.
Marx, Grundrisse, 17–23.
- 59.
Ibid., 399–439.
- 60.
Hobsbawm, “Introduction”, 19.
- 61.
Marx, Grundrisse, 28–44.
- 62.
Ellen M. Wood, “Historical Materialism in ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’”, Karl Marx’sGrundrisse: Foundations of Political Economy 150 Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 70–92.
- 63.
Ibid., 87.
- 64.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 705–6.
- 65.
Ibid., 707.
- 66.
George C. Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53; Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002).
- 67.
Marx, Capital, Volume I, 609.
- 68.
While actual rent on the worst land affects the whole structure of rents, it has no effect on differential rent, which can therefore be calculated as if the worst land has no rent.
- 69.
Ibid., 749–51.
- 70.
Ibid., 777.
- 71.
Ibid., 777–8.
- 72.
Ellen M. Wood, Capitalism against Democracy: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34–7. Wood, “Historical Materialism in Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production”, 80–2.
- 73.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974). Regrettably, Anderson recognized the possibility of new modes of production only in the histories of non-European societies.
- 74.
Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, “Guizot, Pourquoi La Révolution d’Angleterre a-T-Elle Réussi? Discours Sur L’histoire de La Révolution d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850”, MECW, vol. 10, 251–6.
- 75.
Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 202–3.
- 76.
Kevin B. Anderson, “Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity”, Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 3 (2010): 7–22.
- 77.
Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevskij (Kovalelvsky)”, in The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), 343–412.
- 78.
Karl Marx, Notes on Indian History: (664–1858) (New York: International Publishers, 1960).
- 79.
Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, ed. Lawrence Krader, 2nd ed. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974).
- 80.
Karl Marx, “Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich”, MECW, vol. 24, n398, 640.
- 81.
Ibid., n400, 641.
- 82.
Ibid., n397 and n398, 640.
- 83.
Karl Marx, “Letter to Vera Zasulich” MECW, vol. 24, 371; Anderson, “Not Just Capital and Class”, 11–2.
- 84.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 17.
- 85.
Setting aside early modern radicals who couched their beliefs in religious terms.
- 86.
Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 34–6.
- 87.
As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1957), capitalism is unique as a system for the social organization of production and distribution because these essential human functions are not embedded in broader structures of normative social relationships—such as kinship, custom, and law—but stand apart in what is construed to be an autonomous economic sphere. It is because the “disembedded” capitalist economy is determined as a whole by the fundamentally unplanned consequences of myriad individual economic relationships that it must be approached by means of abstract analysis and the deduction of “laws”. On the historical connection between political economy and agrarian capitalism (and, subsequently, industrial capitalism), see David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
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Comninel, G.C. (2019). Introduction. In: Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_1
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