Socialist Party Australia - The Origins and Influences of Marxism

THE REAL WORLD OF CHANGING IDEAS
By Gregory Bradshaw, Melbourne City branch SP

Only eleven mourners stood at the grave of Karl Marx at the Highgate Cemetery in London, 17 March 1883. His theoretical collaborator and life-long friend, Friedrich Engels, gave a short speech noting that: "the greatest living thinker ceased to think…. (but) His name and work will endure through the ages". Indeed, in a BBC News poll over 120 years after his death, Marx was voted the greatest thinker of the millennium, coming ahead of such contenders as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. "It seemed an unlikely boast", stated biographer Francis Wheen, "but he was right".

In his lifetime Marx had managed to master an array of disciplines: from anthropology to sociology; economics to politics; psychology to philosophy. The historical legacy of one man has permeated entire realms of science and ideas across the globe. But as he himself explained, no ideas come from nowhere: Marx’s work was a collection, amalgamation and integration of the theoretical tools of his day.

Marxism is not a set of ideas that can be memorised; it is a method of analysing phenomena so that we can use that knowledge to change things. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Marx’s Theoretical Origins
Marx was born in 1818 to a comfortable middle class family in Trier: the oldest city in Germany and one of the most beautiful. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family, and his father, a typical rationalist of the enlightenment, provided a young Marx with his first critical views of German society. Much of this accompanied the strong opposition to the Prussian-dominated Rhineland - the most industrially advanced area of Germany - which, following its annexation by Napoleon, had been greatly influenced by the principles of the French Revolution.

He spent much of his early years drinking, duelling and writing love poetry dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen, whom he would later marry, have 5 children with, and spend his entire life devoted to. Her father was a City Councillor in Trier, and would later become Prussian Minister of the Interior. He introduced Marx to the Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics that would stay at the foremost of his mind until his discovery of G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘dialectics’ - the other great love of his life.

After initially attending the University of Bonn, Marx’s father sent him to the more prestigious University of Berlin to continue his law degree. But very soon Marx abandoned his formal studies and began to prepare a doctoral thesis. Biographer David McLellan explains:

"With the astonishing capacity for rapid assimilation that distinguished him throughout his life, he filled notebook after notebook, moving from law towards philosophy and finally abandoning Romanticism in favour of the Hegelianism then dominant in Berlin…"

It was to be the single most important philosophical shift in Marx’s theoretical life. A long letter to his father illustrated his sudden conversion:
"There are moments in one’s life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction…. I had to study jurisprudence and above all else felt impelled to struggle with philosophy…. A curtain had fallen, my Holy of Holies was rent asunder and new gods had to be installed. I left behind the idealism which, by the way, I had nourished with that of Kant and Fichte, and came to seek the idea in the real itself. If the gods had dwelt above the earth, they had now become its centre.
I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, but I did not care for its grotesque and rocky melody…. I wrote a short dialogue of about twenty-four pages entitled Cleanthes or the Starting-Point and Necessary Progress of Philosophy…. (It was) a philosophical and dialectical development of the divinity as it manifests itself as idea-in-itself, religion, nature and history. My last sentence was the beginning of Hegel’s system… and is written in such a confused manner [for it had actually to be a new logic] that I can scarcely think myself back into it, this my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the hands of the enemy."

Hegel had held the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831; 5 years before Marx commenced his studies there. Marx, a romantic subjectivist and follower of Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte, had previously rejected Hegel’s conceptual rationalism. But he had never been content with their unsatisfactory separation of logic and reality.

Like the Romanticists before him, Hegel too was an idealist. For him the realm of ideas was a realm that preceded the realm of reality; the world was merely a reflection of what he called the Divine Spirit or the Idea (the Geist). However, Hegel believed that the two realms were not entirely disconnected. He argued that all phenomena, including that great divide of ideas and reality, must be understood dynamically in terms of their interaction with other phenomena, both internal and external, as well as their change and development because of them. This process, the "false siren" of which Marx could not refute, was what Hegel described as ‘dialectics’.

The History of Dialectics
Dialectics had its origins in ancient society, both among the Chinese and the Greeks, where thinkers sought to understand Nature as a whole, and saw that everything is fluid, constantly changing, coming into being, and passing away. Dialectics is the method of reasoning which aims to understand things concretely in all their movement, change and interconnection, with their opposite and contradictory sides in unity.

These ideas were propagated in Ancient Greece by the philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus was regarded by the Greeks to be one of their best thinkers, and is considered by some experts of Antiquity to be more fundamental than Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the formation of European logic. Unfortunately there are only fragmentary remains of his writings; but in his most famous passage he describes that:

"Everything flows. The sun is not new everyday, but continuously new… we cannot step into the same river, for its waters are ever flowing, ever changing… all objects are and are not, they are never the same, but always changing into something else."

The metaphoric river that represents the world is in perpetual change. But despite this perpetual change, the interconnectedness of the world (the flows of the river) continues to be one unified whole (a single flow). All things "are and are not, they are never the same" – they are contradictory wholes in motion. But they can be understood: there are reasons for this change and an underlying order. This process he termed the Logos - and by Hegel: Aufhebung. Both referred to the process of ‘dialectics’.

Heraclitus deliberately cultivated an obscure writing style that made his work frustratingly ambiguous. It was so obscure in fact that the Greeks nicknamed him ‘the Riddler’ (quite a feat considering the ambiguous nature of much Ancient Greek writings). An interesting historical similarity can be made when comparing this to a series of epigrams Marx wrote titled On Hegel, prior to his conversion to dialectics:
"Words I teach all messed up into a devilish muddle, Thus anyone may think just what he chooses to think…"

The Young Hegelians
But Marx had seen through the riddlish double-speak that was dialectics and quickly joined the contemporary followers of Hegel known as the ‘Young Hegelians’. With this group of hyper-intellectuals he delved into a plethora of classic texts ranging from Antiquity (particularly looking at the Greek polis in great detail) to the French Enlightenment (of which Freidrich Engels would later write "cleared men’s minds for the great French Revolution").

The main aim of the Young Hegelians was to theoretically smash religion by using the rationalism and idealist dialectic of their master. Hegel’s radical young followers had in their hands a powerful critical tool with which they ruthlessly attacked Christianity, the dominant doctrine of the day. Marx wrote:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions…. It is the opium of the people."

But Marx knew full well that the way forward lay in the application of dialectics to the ‘real’ world. Travelling to Paris, Marx was desperate to know why the seemingly excellent principles of the French Revolution, the implementation of the ideals of the Enlightenment, had failed to solve the fundamental problem of wealth distribution in society. Even before he left for Paris he had started to read socialist literature and their critiques of the French Revolution.

The down to earth nature of the workers’ clubs and his research into French social poverty (particularly the destitution of the Moselle wine growers) while he was there made a lasting impression. He later wrote that these provided him with "the first occasions for occupying myself with economic questions" and impressed on him how closely the laws were formed to match the interests of those in power.

Here the political situation and Marx’s communist tendencies would lead him to split with his more orthodox Young Hegelian companion Arnold Ruge. Instead he began to spend time with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and leading French socialist/anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In Paris Marx would also meet a young Friedrich Engels: a Young Hegelian, his closest theoretical collaborator, and only life-long friend. He too applied dialectics to the ‘real’ world, in two key ways much more specifically than Marx had up until now: natural science and economics. As Engels expounded of dialectics:
"The whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process - i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development."

Feuerbach and Idealism
In his youth, Hegel had also been a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, writing in his greatest work, the Phenomenology: "man’s existence has its centre in his head, i.e. in Reason, under whose inspiration he builds up the world of reality". But he had later grown complacent, believing that a truly mature man should recognise "the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it".

In line with the Philosophes of the Enlightenment, Hegel believed that there existed an absolute knowledge attainable by humanity, and that various stages of knowledge could be charted in reference to the ultimate knowledge (the Idea). The type of society that existed at a given time was reflective of the level of knowledge humanity possessed. He believed that the state was "the complete realisation of the Spirit in existence" - "the Divine Idea in so far as it is existent on earth". Only the objective apparatus of the state allowed humans, not yet at the highest level of the Divine Idea, full liberty. It was the only social organisation that was capable of uniting particular rights and universal reason.

The state Hegel had in mind was particularly that of the Prussian state of Kaiser Wilhelm Frederick II: an absolute monarchy. But the repressiveness of the state brought Hegel’s idealism into direct battle with the rationalist liberal Young Hegelians. Hegel wrote: "All that is real is rational", but in rebuttal to their master the Young Hegelians preferred the second half of his famous dictum: "all that is rational is real."

One of these Young Hegelians by the name of Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out that the ‘Holy Family’ of religious texts was merely a Heavenly image of the Earthly family. He quoted the French philosophe Montesquieu: "If triangles had a God, they would give him three sides." The main aim of Feuerbach’s doctoral thesis, The Essence of Christianity, was to carry on the theoretical assault against religion begun by the Young Hegelians. He elucidated that God was merely a projection of human attributes, desires and potentialities; humans had created God in their own image; God had not created humans in his. As soon as we realised this, Hegel believed that we would be in a position to return ourselves to our communal essence, or ‘species-being’.

However, by criticising theology with philosophy, the Young Hegelians were only doing the same as the Christians: Hegel’s Absolute Idea, the Geist was just another name for God! For Feuerbach, ideas were a reflection of the material world and he held it to be ridiculous that an Idea could determine the world: "Divine was illusionary process of the real".

Feuerbach had declared himself a materialist, and Hegel’s idealism had been utterly smashed. The effect was as profound as it was sudden. Engels, a little exaggeratedly, remarked of himself, Marx, and the other Young Hegelians: "at once we all became Feuerbachians!"

Marx elaborated on Feuerbach’s rebuke of Hegel’s idealistic view of the state. As Hegel had mistakenly started with the Idea of the state, he had moulded everything else – family, social groups, and so on – on this Idea. Applying materialism to specific issues, Marx declared himself in favour of democracy: "Just as religion does not create man, but man creates religion, so the constitution does not create the people but the people create the constitution."

Continuing his conclusions, Marx refuted that the state played a bureaucratic, mediating function between different social groups - playing a type of ‘universal class’. Rather, Marx considered that the state encouraged and facilitated the political divisions that were preconditions for its own existence; pursuing its own ends to the detriment of the community at large. He wrote:
"…all forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.… the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities"

Dialectical Materialism
However, in his thorough dismantling of idealism, Feuerbach had theoretically thrown the baby out with the bath water: he had failed to separate dialectics from the Geist. Soon after Marx and Engels took up an opposition to Feuerbach in order to restore the Hegelian dialectic that he had abandoned. Marx complained: "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."

But they also wanted to free dialectics from the rigidity of the idealistic Hegelian system and place the method on a materialist basis. In other words, Marx wanted to stand dialectics "on its feet". Engels described:
"Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realised pictures of the ‘Idea’, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world."

Thus, for Marx and Engels, thoughts were not the passive and independent reflections of the material world, but products of human labour. Dialectics was not something imposed on to the world from outside, which could be discovered by the activity of pure reason, but was a product of human labour changing the world. The contradictory (dialectical) nature of our thoughts had their origin in the contradictions (dialectics) within human society – so they can only be overcome by changing them in practice, as well as in thought. Indeed, the only way the nature of dialectics itself can be understood is through this dialectical struggle.

One of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, later exemplified how Marx and Engels rooted materialist dialectics (or ‘dialectical materialism’ as it was later termed by Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov) in nature:
"Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic out of the inorganic; the solar system out of nebulae. On all the rungs of this ladder of development, the quantitative changes were transformed into qualitative. Our thought… is only one of the forms of the expression of changing matter. The dialectic of thinking having grown out of the dialectic of nature possesses consequently a thoroughly materialist character."

Having settled accounts with their "erstwhile philosophical conscience", Marx turned to political economy, having Engels teach him all he knew of the classical English economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was this combination that led Engels to describe the heart of Marxism as taking shape through the best of German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. The German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle characterised Marx as a "Hegel turned economist and Ricardo turned socialist".

Unfortunately, much of his writings were unfinished: only the first volume of eight, Das Capital, of his six-part all-encompassing work Economics was ever completed. Both during and after his death, various individuals and groups have claimed either their adherence or inheritance of his ideas. In response to the some of the more perfidious French socialist sects of his day claiming to be ‘Marxist’, Marx quipped in his famous response: "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste!" (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist!).

But Marx never offered hard and fast conclusions: only a scientific process of analysis. The Marxian dialectic is a unity of subjective and objective factors of both the theory and practice - both of which were constantly interacting and evolving as Marx aged. Engels wrote: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history."

Marx died alone, with a small attendance of mourners to mark his death. But the legacy of his life work has been the inspiration of struggle and resistance for millions across the globe. Marx had left behind the theoretical toolkit of socialism. Perhaps he himself described it best in that monumentous letter to his father by saying:
"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people."