Julius Kovesi
To study Marx one has to be a geologist. To look on his thought-world as if it presented a contemporaneous landscape is to miss the complexity of his thought. One has to dig to find the different layers and different strata; one has to identify the ages of the different strata, veins and deposits even when subsequent movements, stresses or eruptions have placed them on top of or alongside each other.
In this paper I wish to focus on only one stratum of Marx’s thought which was formed at one particular time of his life and to show that it is continuous with a similar stratum in the thought-world of some of the Young Hegelians, namely those who called themselves ‘True Socialists’. To pinpoint the identity of that stratum I shall have to say something about another layer as well, a layer with which it has usually been identified or at least confused. I want to argue that Marx, at one stage of his life, especially at the end of 1843, when he was writing his Introduction to his proposed work Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, shared an essential and crucial idea with those who called themselves ‘True Socialists’, that idea on which they are usually thought to have differed: the idea that the coming of socialism is tied to the special role of the proletariat. For the ‘True Socialists’ socialism was a moral demand which should appeal to anyone who could respond to such demands. One of the most noted ‘True Socialists’, Moses Hess, appealed to the ‘creative spirit of the people’ and not to socio-economic trends and necessities. To be sure, the coming of socialism was tied to historical factors, but only to those historical factors which indicated to so many of the Young Hegelians that ‘the time is nigh’, and which gave them urgency and assurance that they lived in the fullness of time. Otherwise, however, socialism should have a timeless and classless appeal.
Marx’s critique of the ‘True Socialists’ in the Communist Manifesto brings out this difference well, or, as one might prefer to say, in part creates and constitutes the difference. There he criticises the ‘True Socialists’ for allegedly borrowing their demands for socialism from France, for being the ‘silly echo’ of French social criticism, but forgetting the different economic and political conditions of France and Germany. According to Marx’s argument, France had already had a bourgeois revolution, therefore the next, socialist, revolution was proper for French conditions. In Germany, however, the bourgeoisie was still the growing revolutionary force destined to destroy the feudal conditions, especially the absolute monarchy. According to Marx, the ‘True Socialists’ transferred to Germany the socialist criticism of the bourgeoisie before the conditions were ripe for such a criticism, and thereby in effect joined forces with the feudal absolute government: while it resisted the bourgeoisie from above, the ‘True Socialists’ attacked from below. They should leave the bourgeoisie alone, on this assumption, or even join forces with it while it carried on its historic mission of destroying feudal conditions and establishing its liberal institutions, and attack only afterwards. Marx accused the ‘True Socialists’, in his characteristic style, of ‘representing not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy’.
Having said all this, I want to argue now that nevertheless, at the time of writing his Introduction to his Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, when he first introduced the notion of the proletariat, Marx entertained a distinctively ‘True Socialist’ view of the role of the proletariat, a view, which, because of later developments, is obscured in retrospect. For my argument we have to understand the symbolism of head, heart and stomach in the Young Hegelian iconography and also the symbolic significance for them of France, England and Germany.
The very title of Hess’s work, which brought him into the mainstream of European socialist thought, the European Triarchy, indicates that he is talking there about the three leading nations of his time. He advocated in that work a dialectical union between Germany with her philosophy, France with her political life and England with her economic and industrial developments. He argued that each should contribute its historically allotted elements to the coming final synthesis. Heine had already drawn a parallel between German philosophy and French political life in 1835, the details of which Hess criticised, but the theme was a recurring one. It was the symbolic significance of uniting German theory and French practice, or rather, as we shall see, the French Spirit, that made Marx and Ruge call their new journal in Paris the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, thereby trying to place themselves in the forefront of what the Young Hegelians thought to be the historical development of the world.
Let us place together now some of the jigsaw pieces that will show us the symbolic significance of France for the Young Hegelians.
In his Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy Feuerbach made the following observation. It might not strike us as a serious contribution to the world of ideas, but for the history of ideas we had better take note of it:
The true philosopher who is identified with life and man must be of Franco-German lineage. Do not be scared by this mixture, you chaste German. The Acta Philosophorum had expressed this idea already in 1716: ‘If we weigh the Germans and the French against each other and judge that the latter have more nimbleness in their temperament and the former more weightiness, then we can say justly that the temperamentum Gallico-Germanicum is best suited for philosophy, or we can say that a child which had a French father and a German mother would (ceteris paribus) be endowed with a good ingenium philosophicum’. Quite right [commented Feuerbach on this], only we must make the mother French and the father German. The heart — the feminine principle, the sense for the finite, the seat of materialism — is a French disposition; the head — the masculine principle, the seat of idealism, is German. The heart revolutionizes, the head reforms; the head brings things into being, the heart sets them in motion.
Without pausing to comment on the feminist implications of such a line of thought, I want to say that we can hear an echo in this of some of the key terms in one of Marx’s better known passages. Let us read that passage again:
But a radical revolution in Germany seems to encounter a major difficulty.
Revolutions need a passive element, a material basis….It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must strive towards thought.
… 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 the emancipation of man. Philosophy is the head of the emancipation and the proletariat is its heart. [The italics are Marx’s, the underlining mine.]
There are two important points to note in this passage. One is that here the proletariat seems to be replacing France (I shall argue it still replaces France only in Germany while in France, because France still represents the heart, there is no need for the proletariat). The other point to note is that the proletariat represents the heart. And I shall argue that according Marx at that time, only Germany needed such a heart.
For the significance of the proletariat representing the heart we have to return to Hess for a minute. In his long essay On the Socialist Movement in Germany Hess refers back to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher as being only the first step in the all-important union of German Theory and French Praxis. In that essay Hess also reviewed and criticised Lorenz von Stein’s work on Socialism and Communism in Present-Day France. It was Stein who first diagnosed the difference between the poor and the proletariat. Though his views were a bit more complex and subtle than Hess makes them out to be, the important passage for us is to note is the one where Hess criticises him for connecting the emergence of socialism with the proletariat as a class:
It is an error [writes Hess] and this error is due to the egoistic narrowness which cannot rise to a truly human outlook–yes, it is an error diligently spread by the reaction, and by Stein above all, that socialism develops only among the proletariat, and among the proletariat only as a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach. The French have given no excuse for this error. The French socialism comes not from the necessity of thought, not from the need of the head, nor from the need of the stomach, but from the need of the heart; it comes from the sympathy for the suffering of mankind.
At first sight here we can again see the difference between Hess and Marx. The usual argument runs that Marx, however vaguely, already at the end of 1843 recognised the important role of the proletariat, while Hess here still believes in the generosity of the spirit, in the political idealism of the people, and relied on these for political action. This belief prompted Marx to criticise the True Socialists later, in the Manifesto, for not recognising the significance of the relative development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in France and Germany.
But let us note that Hess rejected the idea that the proletariat was the agency of socialist revolution only in so far as the proletariat was represented by Stein–or as Hess understood it to be so represented by him–as acting out of selfish material interest. This is why he accused Stein of an early version of having a limited as against a universal consciousness, of ‘egoistic narrowness which cannot rise to a truly human outlook’, an early version also of attributing to the observer the narrowness that, in Hess’ ideology and only there, that observation would imply about the proletariat.
However that may be, Hess claims that socialism is not ‘a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach’, nor does it come from the need of the head but it comes from the need of the heart. But we noted that for Marx the proletariat represents the heart. Marx is not talking about Stein’s version of the proletariat. Marx introduces the proletariat as something that Germany needs, and needs as the heart of that of which philosophy is the head. In Germany, says Marx,
There is equally lacking in every class that breadth of soul which identifies itself, if only momentarily, with the soul of the people–that genius for inspiring material force toward political power, that revolutionary boldness which flings at its adversary the defiant words, I am nothing and I should be everything….
Germany has not got a heart, while France is heart. ‘In France’, says Marx, ‘every class of the nation is politically idealistic and experiences itself first of all not as a particular class but representing the general needs of society.’ In France, according to Marx at the end of 1843, there was no need for a proletariat to turn us into truly human universal beings.
The fact that Marx quotes Siéyès’ ‘defiant words’ ‘I am nothing and I should be everything’ and that he earlier mentions in one sentence the general significance of the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution makes McLellan remark that ‘The context thus shows that Marx’s account of the role of the proletariat was drawn from his study of the French Revolution, however much his language may be that of Young Hegelian journalism.’1 It is hard to see, however, how the claims that ‘in France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything… In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation… In France every class of the nation is politically idealistic and experiences itself first of all not as a particular class but as representing the general needs of society’, like most of the claims in that article, are empirical, historical or sociological claims. These observations can make sense only as part of the iconography we are deciphering, as indeed McLellan’s remark itself makes sense only if we take it symbolically, where Marx’s account stands for something different in opposition to the Young Hegelian language.
I said earlier that Marx seems to have substituted the proletariat for France as the heart. We can see now what has happened. In a way France is still the heart as Germany is the head. This is why France is politically idealistic and there is there a generosity of spirit. As Hess said, ‘the French have given no excuse for [Stein’s] error’ that in France ‘socialism develops only among the proletariat, and among the proletariat only as a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach’. Marx agreed with Hess that the appeal to the heart would do the work for France–provided that the French would learn more German philosophy as well. But, as we noted, in Germany ‘a radical revolution … seems to encounter a major difficulty’. Germany lacks what Feuerbach called the French disposition, ‘the heart, the feminine principle, the sense for the finite, the seat of materialism’. Germany needs the proletariat because, Marx says, ‘revolutions need a passiveelement, a material basis’. While in France, ‘every class of the nation is politically idealistic and experiences itself first of all not as a particular class but as representing the general needs of society’…
in Germany every class lacks not only the consistency, penetration, courage, and ruthlessness which could stamp it as a negative representative of society. There is equally lacking in every class that breadth of soul which identifies itself, if only momentarily, with the soul of the people… In Germany, by contrast … no class in civil society has any need or capacity for general emancipation until it is forced to it by its immediatecondition, by material necessity, by its very chains.
It is because, as Marx complains, in Germany there is lacking a ‘generosity of spirit’ that Germany needs a proletariat as a heart. And he thought, so to speak, that if only a sphere of society or a class would become hungry enough, their stomachs would turn into hearts.
Where, then is the positive possibility of German emancipation?
Answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but universal wrong is perpetrated on it….
The proletariat is then introduced as a suffering redeemer: ‘a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.’ As we know, four years later Marx speaks differently in the Manifesto, but at this stage of his thinking all this applied to Germany only. ‘Always seeking fundamentals, Germany can only make a fundamental revolution. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of mankind. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat‘.
I also want to say something about another stratum of Marx’s thought in order to show that by contrast the notion of the proletariat does not originate from that stratum, from that economic interpretation of history according to which, following an iron law of history, socialism will replace capitalism as capitalism replaced feudalism. The role of the proletariat in these two strata has usually been conflated.
I want to look, very briefly, at the well known economic interpretation of history in Marx’s Introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, and argue that there is no place and no role for the proletariat in that scheme.
The theory is a miniature model of a Hegelian dialectical development. Men, the Subject, in their productive activities, create certain objectively-existing conditions, the purpose of which is to help those activities. When new means of production come into being, then these, after a while, can no longer be accommodated within the objectively-existing conditions, and so these conditions become fetters of production. What was a rational arrangement turns into a self-contradictory irrational state of affairs. But why is it irrational to have steam engines under feudal modes of production? After all they could be used for pumping up the ornamental fountains in the gardens of Versailles, or be used as playthings in village squares. In order to create a self-contradictory state of affairs that needs to be resolved by a higher, more rational synthesis, two requirements are needed. One is that the new instruments should be regarded as means of production and not regarded under some other formal aspect such as amusement or the devil’s work. If the invention of the steam engine is regarded as the devil’s work devised by an alchemist, rather than a means of production invented by an engineer, then it will not come into conflict with the existing relationships of production. The other requirement is that the standard of rationality must be identified with the fullest possible use of productive forces. Only if we regard the fullest possible use of productive forces as the standard of rationality can we say that the arrangements that do not help this are irrational and must give way, whether they are the land rights of feudal lords or of primitive tribes, or such parts of our ‘superstructure’ as our enjoyment of the beauties of our lakes and countryside. It is never suggested that the alleged contradiction might be resolved by curtailing the means of production.
My point, however, is not that this model is the expression of the bourgeois entrepreneurial mentality universalised, as ideology, into a philosophy of history. My point is that the proletariat does not fit into this model. The peasants were the oppressed class, of feudal society, but capitalism did not come about by peasants overthrowing the feudal lords in order to establish capitalism after a brief period of the dictatorship of the peasantry. Why would one even think of such an absurd idea if in the historical progression the proletariat, as the new oppressed class, had not been assumed to have been cast into this role of establishing the next stage of history?
If there was a class struggle, it was not between the peasants and feudal lords: a new class grew up with the new means of production which wanted to create more liberal institutions for its economic practices and also eventually brought forth people like Moses Hess, Marx or John Stuart Mill who wanted to make these institutions even more liberal and human according to their image of what is human. But this new class, the bourgeoisie, was not the oppressed class of feudalism. If we want to follow this pattern of development, then we should expect within the capitalist world a new class to develop with new means of production, which leaves behind the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the bourgeoisie left the feudal lords and the peasants behind. But I do not want to contemplate such a scenario for some new class of technocrats.
In order to claim that one has found a scientific law of history, one should be able to produce at least two examples of that scientific hypothesis. We have two hypotheses here. On one hypothesis it is the oppressed classes which by their struggle bring about the new stage of history, in which case we are committed to the claim that the peasants bought about capitalism by overthrowing the feudal lords. On the other hypothesis it is the new means of production and the people associated with those productive forces that bring about the new stage of history, in which case the proletariat is as irrelevant as the peasants were in the process. As a matter of fact there is no place for the proletariat in this theory nor did Marx intend one. Nor is there any possibility for the other scenario of a new class emerging with a new means of production that cannot be accommodated within the existing relations of production. For a revolutionary situation to occur, according to this scientific theory of revolution, the ossified relationships of production should be unable to accommodate the new instruments of production. But this is what Marx has to say about the bourgeoisie in the Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
This is a tremendous insight to have had in 1848. I also think that Marx’s other insight in the Manifesto, that the ‘True Socialists’ are actually helping the absolute monarchy by attacking the bourgeoisie whose natural task it is to break the shackles of absolutist governments is a very important insight. Moreover it has continuing relevance, for there are always ‘True Socialists’ who are supporting what they think to be socialist movements in societies that might not have reached, in the eyes of Marx, even the stage of Germany in 1848–and, who do not look to France now as a model. Marx criticised the ‘True Socialists’ for confronting the bourgeois political movement
with the socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by the bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions, and the political constitution adopted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
The disagreement between Marx and the ‘True Socialists’ about the role of the proletariat was, to a large extent a disagreement about the role of the bourgeoisie but I wish now only to point to the continuing relevance of their debate.
Since the time of Plato’s Republic where society is divided into the three parts of head, heart–or spirit–and stomach, social theorists have made various uses of this symbolism. I was trying to decipher their use among the Young Hegelians and argued that the notion of the proletariat belongs to that layer of Marx’s thought which was concerned with this iconography of head, heart and stomach and not to the layer of his economic investigations, even if various forces pushed that earlier layer into a new stratum.
- David McLellan, Karl Marx. His Life and Thought (London: MacMillan, 1973), 97. ↩︎