An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

67 Pages·1969·17.277 MB·English

by  JB Sanderson

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AN INTERPRETATION OF THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF
MARX AND ENGELS
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J B Sanderson
An Interpretation of the
political Ideas of

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,Marx and Engels
JOHN SANDERSON
Lecturer in Politics, University of Strathclyde
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104111 Longmans
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© Longmans, Green and Company Ltd 1969
First published 1969
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Substantial portions of the typescript of this volume have been read by
Professor Allen Potter of the University of Essex and Mr Donald
Gordon of Strathclyde University. Mr Edwin Gibb of Strathclyde also
read the typescript of Chapter 3. I am grateful to these gentlemen for
their advice and assistance. The account of Marxism here presented also
owes not a little to conversations which I had several years ago with
Dr Robert E. Dowse, now of Exeter University. I am grateful also to
Professor J. W. Grove, the editor of this series of monographs, for his
help and guidance. The text is, of course, entirely mine.
Parts of Chapter 4 are substantially reproduced from an article
entitled `Marx and Engels on the state' which appeared in the TVestern
Political Quarterly, xvi, no. 4 (December 1963). I am grateful to the
Editor for his permission to reprint them here.
Strathclyde University,
July 1968
vii
ABBREVIATIONS ONTENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, all the works referred to in this book were INTRODUCTION xi
published by Martin Lawrence or Lawrence and Wishart. The follow-
I MARX AND ENGELS: REVOLUTIONARIES AND MEN OF LETTERS

ing abbreviations of titles of works by Marx and Engels will be used The Young Marx I

in the footnotes (dates of publication in parenthesis): Engels, 1848, and Exile in London II
GI German Ideology (1965). II THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 15
Sw Selected Morks, 2 VOls (1953)• III MARX'S MODEL OF CAPITALISM 44
HF Holy Family (1956).
THE MARXIAN THEORY OF THE STATE 55
Sc Selected Correspondence (1956). IV

PP Poverty of Philosophy (1959). V PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION 75

R The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels VI FUTURE SOCIETY 98
(ed. D. Ryazanoff) (1930). CONCLUSION IIO
OR On Religion (1958). 115
APPENDIX: MARX'S VERDICT' ON RUSSIA
RM The Russian Menace to Europe (ed. P. W. Blackstock and I17
B. F. Hoselitz) (Allen & Unwin, INDEX
1953)•
EPM Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844 (1959).
INTRODUCTION
This monograph on Marx and Engels purports to give an historian's
account of their political thought. Though in the body of the work I
use the word `history' in the usual ways (to indicate either the past
will
or a study of the past), the historian, as I understand his activity, has a
distinctive manner of approaching the past. Unlike the practical man, he
is concerned with a past that is dead; not, that is to say, with a past that
is alive in the sense of yielding to the investigator conclusions or
maxims which are relevant to current predicaments. The historian is
concerned solely with the reconstruction of the past by means of the
evidence presently available to him, and his past has no particular con-
nection with the present, although in order to make the former intel-
ligible he must assume a certain minimal similarity between past and
present.
If these premises are granted, it will be clear that from the point of
view of the historian the great majority of the existing studies of Marx
and Engels are imperfectly historical, for the existence of communist
régimes and communist parties claiming Marx and Engels as their
intellectual precursors has made it wellnigh impossible for communists
and non-communists alike to take a dispassionate view of the pair,'
and discussion of their works has primarily been in the `idiom' of
practice,2 being concerned for the most part with such practical
questions as whether Marx's analysis of capitalism is or is not mistaken,
or whether his system of ideas is to be esteemed pernicious or otherwise.
Thus even in such a scholarly work as Dr Tucker's Philosophy and
Myth in Karl Marx3 this idiom is clearly discernible. Capital, we learn
from Dr Tucker, is to be regarded as `an intellectual museum piece',
1 For an account of the relatively disinterested British assessments of Marx's
contribution to historical and economic studies made before the appearance of what
was understood to be the menace of communism, see E. J. Hobsbawm, `Dr Marx
and his Victorian critics' (New Reasoner, 1, Summer, 1957).
2 For an account of the respective `idioms' of practice and history, see Michael
Oakeshott, `The activity of being an historian', reprinted in his collection of essays
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962).
3
Cambridge University Press (1961).
Xi
xii Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels xiii
Introduction
less relevant to today than a short paper on aesthetics written by Marx terpretation of the Politicalldeas of Marx and Engels is intended as an
in 1844. Nevertheless, Tucker is at pains to demonstrate the short- In
introductory account, and perhaps it will not be wholly without value
comings of Marxism (an `aberration of the human mind') because it
if it provokes an inclination to turn from the commentary to the
is potentially—and in communist countries has actually become—sub-
text.
versive of human freedom.
My account of them will not, I hope, reveal any disposition to regard
our authors either as omniscient beings or as the twisted progenitors of
vile political establishments, for such dispositions should be alien to the
historian. Thus I hope to treat Marx and Engels in the same way that
one might treat, say, Auguste Comte or John Stuart Mill.
Studies of Marxism are, of course, legion. But as well as being
practical in orientation, most of them seem to have been preoccupied
with what might be described as the `sociology' of Marx and Engels, or
with their economic theory. The following study concentrates upon a
reconstruction of their specifically political thought which it will
endeavour to locate within the context of their more general socio-
logical, economic and philosophical doctrines.
In the present advanced state of scholarship in the field of Marx
studies, I have taken it as absolutely necessary to quote frequently, and
sometimes at considerable length, from the works of Marx and Engels.
This may not make the book easier to read, but I think that today such
quotation is to be regarded as an inevitable feature of serious works on
the Marxian system. Some of the passages that I quote are exceedingly
well known, and although I have not gone out of my way to include
them, at the same time I have not felt myself debarred from their use
merely on account of their familiarity. For the most part, I have quoted
from readily available editions of the works concerned.
While concentrating on Marx, I have treated Marx and Engels, in
the period of their association between 1844 and Marx's death in 1883,
as the authors of a single system of ideas. I have clearly indicated the
date of Engels's post-1883 works to which I refer, and I present this
illustrative material for what it is worth. Engels's views do not seem,
either during Marx's life or after, to have exactly coincided with those
of Marx, but I think that in the forty-year period in question they are
sufficiently similar to allow of the treatment as a unified whole here
attempted. In expounding the Marxian system I have made no reference
to Engels's early essays and his book on The Condition of the Working
Class in England in z844, which I take to be `pre-Marxian' works. An
MARX AND ENGELS: REVOLUTIONARIES
AND MEN OF LETTERS
THE YOUNG MARX
By the graveside of Marx, Frederick Engels gave a convincing summary
of the former's life and intentions:
His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another,
to the overthrow of capitalist society ... to contribute to the libera-
tion of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make
conscious of its position and its needs, conscious of the conditions
of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with
a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival ... And,
consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man
of his time ... he died ... mourned by millions of revolutionary
fellow workers—from the mines of Siberia to California .. his
name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.'
The subject of this oration was born at Trier in Prussia in 1818 and
was baptized a Protestant after his Jewish father, an eminent local
lawyer, had found it prudent to become a Christian in trans. 1824. From
1835 to 1841 the young Marx pursued university studies at Bonn and
Berlin, writing romantic poetry which he soon came to regard as
puerile, and taking his doctorate in philosophy in the latter year at the
University of Jena. Like most young Germans of his generation who
had intellectual pretensions, Marx fell to some extent under the omni-
present influence of Hegel, and Marx is said to have read day and night
in order to master the formidable philosopher's system, though he
seems never to have wholly succumbed to it.
While being impressed by many parts of this system (as we shall see)
Marx rejected Hegel's conservatism, and became one of the so-called
`Young Hegelians'. Now the Young Hegelians, while adhering sub-
stantially to what might be called the German philosophical tradition,
were radicals in that they rejected as irrational various elements in the
1 SIF 14 p. 154.
and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters
2 Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels árx 3
acquainted were those he read about in books. He consulted the works
current social and political structure of Germany. Indeed, `criticism'
of the French socialists (which had inspired the socialist contributions
was their motto. Religious belief was the particular object of their
Rheinische Zeitung), but also seems to have been influenced (as
hostility, and before he took his doctorate Marx had planned, together to the
were indeed not a few of his German contemporaries) by a book pub-
with his (at this time) close friend Bruno Bauer, to establish a journal
lished in 1842 written by Lorenz von Stein, a conservative Hegelian
which would be called The ,4rchive of ~4theisrn.1 But the scheme col-
and strong supporter of monarchical institutions in Prussia.
lapsed when Bauer, advertising his unbelief too openly, failed to get
Two years earlier, von Stein had been commissioned by the Govern-
a professorship in Theology at the University of Bonn, a failure which
ment of Prussia to go to Paris and make a firsthand report on the dan-
effectively crushed Marx's own hopes of entering academic life. Thus
gerous left-wing doctrines said to be rampant there. Now von Stein
it was as a radical opponent of the status quo that Marx became associ-
gave a full account of these ideas, and also of the proletariat, the class
ated with the Rheinische Zeitung, a newly founded opposition news-
which, it was sometimes held, would bring them to fruition by their
paper. Marx was appointed editor in October 1842 but some months
joint action. He wrote that this class `may very properly be called a
later the paper was suppressed, apparently at the instigation of Czar
dangerous element, dangerous in respect of its numbers and its often
Nicholas I, acting in his capacity as guarantor of European legitimacy.
tested courage; dangerous in respect of its consciousness of unity; dan-
At this stage, then, Marx was a radical revolutionary who anticipated
gerous in respect of its feeling that only through revolution can its aims
the appearance of a cataclysm which would shatter the existing order of
be reached, its plans accomplished'.' And it was apparently from pas-
things in Europe. But he had not yet arrived at the doctrine of historical
sages such as this that Marx drew much of the inspiration for his idea
materialism, the doctrine for which he is probably most famous; nor was
of the proletariat as history-making force, so that in his important early
there as yet in his writings anything specifically indicating the pro-
essay on the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written in 1843,
letariat as the revolutionary agency.
Marx is still to be found calling in Young Hegelian fashion for criti-
However, in 1843, his interest having been aroused by articles in the

cism, but also adding that the weapon of criticism must be supple-
Rheinische Zeitung dealing with economics and advocating socialism,
mented by the criticism of weapons, and declaring that `as philosophy
Marx moved to Paris, at that time the main centre of proletarian and
finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its
revolutionary activity in Europe, where he embarked upon a study of
spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has
these matters.2 Previously, while rejecting Hegelian conservatism, he
squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of
had at the same time rejected socialism also, and it appears that his
the Germans into men will be accomplished.'2
appointment as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung was intended by the
Another German writer who was to influence Marx and who had
paper's proprietors to have had the effect of preventing any further
also, like von Stein, been to Paris and there come into contact with
socialistic material finding its way into the paper's columns. At the same
left-wing ideas was Moses Hess. Now at this stage in his career Hess
time Marx confessed that his limited knowledge of the relevant subjects
was what Marx and Engels were later to call a `True Socialist': that is
put him in a poor position to make any final judgments. Thus his studies
to say, he believed in socialism not so much because he saw its appear-
in Paris were in this context to be decisive. Hitherto in Marx's career it
ance as historically inevitable, but because he regarded it as morally
seems almost certain that the only proletarians with whom he was
obligatory, a spiritual necessity, and hoped that it would be recognized
1 See Leopold Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian (Hamish Hamilton, 1948), P. 50. as such by the rich and powerful, against whom, therefore, he contem-
2 This fruitful sojourn in Paris was ended at the beginning of 1845 by an expul- plated no violence. Thus he assured his readers that `no social class
sion order from the Guizot government, acting under pressure from the Prussian
government which took exception to hostile articles appearing in a journal with 'Q uoted by Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, p. 115.
which Marx was connected. Marx proceeded to Brussels. Here he made contact
with the London-based Communist League, and it was for this organization that 2 OR, p. 57•
3 By 1847 he had temporarily adopted Marxian beliefs.
he wrote the Communist Manifesto.
ME-E