Abstract
This chapter focuses on the way in which Marx’s early concern with the need for both political freedom and social emancipation was transformed through his exposure to the ideas of political economy. It was Friedrich Engels—who worked at (and later inherited) his father’s cotton mill in Manchester—who first introduced Marx to these ideas, in “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, written for the Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher that Marx was editing in 1843. Although Engels first articulated a number of important ideas that he and Marx came to share—including that the contradictions of the capitalist system of production would lead to a radical social revolution—it was Marx’s critique in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that situated the capitalist alienation of labour in relation to the entire historical development of property relations, and the achievement of true human emancipation in the form of communist society. This marked his definitive break with philosophy as an agency for revolutionary transformation. Instead, he recognized that the historical realization of communism as the transcendence of human alienation “finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely in that of the economy”.
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Notes
- 1.
On this period of Marx’s life, see especially Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 21–30.
- 2.
Fraternité might be translated as “fraternity” or “brotherhood”, but its implications went beyond the sense generally conveyed by those terms in the context of Anglo-American liberal ideology. Inherent in early modern French political thought was a robust idea of the centrality of society in human experience, both informing and informed by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. See Ellen M. Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s ‘General Will’”, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montréal: Concordia University, 1989).
- 3.
See George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987).
- 4.
Jean Bruhat, “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx”, Annales historique de la Révolution française 38, no. 2 (1966): 141.
- 5.
Marx not only completed and published the first volume of Capital, but left lengthy, uncompleted manuscripts of the critique of political economy. His brief notes on Levasseur, however, were his only writings on the French Revolution as such, apart from passages in other primarily political works such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In moving ever more decisively beyond the politics of the French Revolution, he also moved beyond studying it as such.
- 6.
R. C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton & Co., 1978), 145. This is my preferred translation from the German, but there are many alternatives.
- 7.
See J. P. Poly and E. Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation: 900–1200 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991); G. C. Comninel, “Feudalism”, in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, eds. Ben Fine, A. Saad Filho, and M. Boffo (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2012), and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, no. 4 (2000): 1–53. As I note in these latter works, England had a unique form of “feudalism” in which sovereignty was not truly parcelled among lords, unlike the experience on the Continent, and in which as many as one quarter of the peasantry remained legally free, and protected (as freeholders) in the public courts.
- 8.
See Justin Rosenberg, “Secret Origins of the State”, in The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994).
- 9.
Even in the period of the Empire, both in theory and generally in practice, Roman citizens enjoyed protection of their liberty under law, and the state in principle remained “the public thing”—the literal meaning of res publica.
- 10.
Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, Past & Present 70 (1976), 60–9 (reprinted in T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)); “On the Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review 104 (1977), 25–92; “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, Past & Present 97 (1982): 16–113 (reprinted in Aston and Philpin); “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in The First Modern Society, ed. A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Ellen M. Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”, New Left Review 127 (1981): 66–95 (also in her Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)). See also Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution and “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”.
- 11.
See Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution.
- 12.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW, vol. 11, 137–63.
- 13.
Ibid., 181–97.
- 14.
Comninel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism”.
- 15.
See Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
- 16.
Frederick Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, MECW, vol. 3, 392.
- 17.
Ibid., 400; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, vol. 3, 182, 290.
- 18.
Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, 400.
- 19.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, ‘Preface’”, MECW, vol. 21, 262.
- 20.
Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Book I, Chap. 2, §8–9.
- 21.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 79.
- 22.
This is not to say that there were not, implicit in Hegel’s work, significant points that looked beyond the existing absolutist state. What he did not do, however, was elaborate such points in explicit criticism of the existing state.
- 23.
István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970).
- 24.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, Chap. 25, Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec25.htm).
- 25.
Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, MECW, vol. 3, 146–68.
- 26.
Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity.
- 27.
Moses Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, pt. 1 (Zurich: Verlagsort, 1843), 329. I am greatly indebted to Marcello Musto for bringing this point to my attention.
- 28.
Moses Hess, The Essence of Money, Chap. 14, Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/hess/1845/essence-money.htm.
- 29.
Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 173.
- 30.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, MECW, vol. 3, 29.
- 31.
Ibid., 186.
- 32.
Ibid., 187.
- 33.
The German communist theologian Thomas Müntzer, and the English “Digger” Gerrard Winstanley, had both produced writings that argued human freedom required abolition of both the state and private property, but their works are not accepted as part of the “canon” of political thought.
- 34.
See Chap. 2, this volume.
- 35.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 239.
- 36.
Ibid., 271–3.
- 37.
Ibid., 241.
- 38.
Ibid., 293–4.
- 39.
Ibid., 296.
- 40.
Ibid., 297.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 241.
- 43.
This point is apparent in much of anthropology and sociology, and figures centrally in the history of political thought. See, for example, Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967) or Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997).
- 44.
Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme, Section I”, MECW, vol. 24, 81–90.
- 45.
Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, MECW, vol. 24, 87.
- 46.
Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, MCEW, vol. 3, 175–6. I prefer the translation “opiate” to “opium”, recognizing that at the time opiates were readily available at pharmacies to alleviate the pains incurred through exhausting labour. Religion was not so much a means of exhilaration as of escape from the physical and mental pain of overwork with inadequate compensation or rest.
- 47.
Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question”, 168.
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Comninel, G.C. (2019). Emancipation in Marx’s Early Work. 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_3
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