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Leandro Vargas Llosa

Auferstehung der Idee: The Role of Ideas in Karl Marx and their Neglect in Friedrich Engels


Karl Marx (left) and Friedrich Engels (right) (Source: Wikimedia)

Introduction

Karl Marx wrote extensively about history, but he never published, at least in his own lifetime, a theory so comprehensive as the ‘Historical Materialism’ of his followers. The Bolshevik inheritance of an expression more attributable to Friedrich Engels than Marx,[1] ‘Historical Materialism’ posits a strictly material road to communism, a ‘scientific’ inevitability. Or, as Isaiah Berlin sees it, a ‘half-positivist, half-Darwinian’ interpretation of Marx.[2] Looking more closely at what Marx wrote however, reveals, in Karl A. Wittfogel’s words, a work that ‘[is] far more complex than, and profoundly different from, the socio-historical views offered by the Soviet ideologists.’[3] The crux of the profound difference is Marx’s use of ideas, both as a methodology and as a causal variable internal to his analysis.


This essay does not attempt to piece together a theory of history that is true to Marx. What it does is argue that it is a mistake to neglect Marx’s idealism in toto and that a true interpretation of his work reflects how he wove together the theoretical remnants of his Young Hegelian past with his materialist critique of the very circle that gave him his intellectual stripes. Indeed, the essay goes so far as to argue that a certain metaphysic is an indispensable frame for Marx’s historical analysis.


Section I looks at Marx on alienation, a concept directly borrowed from the Young Hegelians, together with some comments about alienation’s presence throughout Marx’s later manuscripts. This section argues that a study of alienation can shed light on Marx’s use and interpretation of abstraction in other works and, on its heels, section II provides a cross-examination with The German Ideology, along with further comments about the role this work should play in Marx’s oeuvre. In section III, Engels and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific are taken to task for neglecting the insights of sections I and II. Section IV concludes.


I. Alienation

Marx’s theory of alienated labour was an important conceptual device for his own understanding of capitalist exploitation and serves as a lasting residue of German Idealism in his work. Broadly speaking, ‘alienation’ is the gradual separation and eventual split between a subject and an object, both of which initially formed a composite whole.[4] As a linchpin of Left Hegelianism, the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, despite opposed conclusions, both utilised the term to define religion as a type of self-deception, an unconscious ignorance of one’s human nature.[5] Marx sought a more material basis for alienation, namely production, from which ‘human nature’ could be treated more thoroughly.


In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, men, or ‘workers,’ are the clear subjects. Discerning the object is more complicated and Marx indicates four, each initially more closely tethered to the worker than the last, with the object-subject distinction even blurring at times. Firstly, workers are alienated from the direct products of their labour. For Marx, ‘nature affords the means of life for labour’ in a double sense: by providing objects on which the worker can perform a physical activity and by fulfilling subsistence needs. There is a pernicious duplexity to these two activities. Because one’s labour is necessary for converting natural miscellany into congestive, subsistence-satisfying goods, the mere act of providing for one’s health in fact defines man’s work qua ‘labour.’ The worker becomes ‘a slave to his object,’ as only his laborious activity can maintain his physical being and vice-versa. In other words, the fruits of his labour have an external power over the worker, a relationship Marx refers to as ‘alienation.’[6]


Secondly and in addition to the direct products of his labour, the worker becomes alienated from the actual activity of production itself. Labour is not the essence of the worker; there is nothing inherent to man that pigeonholes him to the role of labourer. All labour then is forced production and exemplary of the worker’s deploying ‘no free physical and intellectual energy.’ His activity is directed against his will and this extrinsic sway, as with the objects he produces, essentially separates the worker from his productive activity.[7]


Third, the worker is alienated from his humanity, made up of his own, personal essence and of his relations to fellow man. Marx here differentiates between ‘vital activity’ and ‘conscious vital activity,’ with purely vital activity the stuff of animals, the productive use of physical objects for purely existential needs. The particular form that vital activity takes for a species contributes to that species.’ characterisation Humans appear to have something that goes beyond the purely material, a more cerebral activity that differentiates them from other animals: conscious vital activity. Animalistic productivity is inextricable from survival and progeniture, while man has the freedom to apply his productive capacities in domains that transcend the merely vital, an ability to contrive and reflect on his own world, creating for the sake of, say, ‘the laws of beauty.’ When the product of his labour is wrestled away from him, so too are the ‘nature and the intellectual faculties of his species,’ his creative independence, the very cognitive traits that make him human.[8]


Marx’s theory of alienated labour incorporates ideas in two respects, one methodological and the other internal to the actual theory. Methodologically, the above is in itself idealistic and serves to frame, abstractly, discussion of political economic terms rooted in material history. In Marx’s own words, alienated labour is ‘a fact of political economy,’ but, nonetheless, ‘a fact expressed…in conceptual terms.’[9] It is only now that alienated labour has been explained conceptually that Marx can discern how it ‘represent[s] itself in reality’ and its relationship ‘to the development of human history.’ Since only man can enjoy the fruits of man’s labour, it must be that the alien force arrogating the worker’s product, productive activity and humanity, is another man. The external, alienating force, an idealistic space throughout most of Marx’s account, is now filled by a physical body, ‘the capitalist, or whatever one wishes to call the master of the labour.’[10]


The inequitable capitalist-worker relationship is, of course, a historical development. But there is an element of continuity as well, one which Marx propounds with a second, this time endogenous application of ideas. Here ideas feature as a historical gel that allows the dominant class, whether consciously or unconsciously, to uphold its dominant position, with political economy as a discipline having a particularly strong influence. Private property and wages, conceptual staples of political economy, are said to be ‘explained by exterior circumstances,’ with no reference to their historical development. Competition and free trade, for Marx the inevitable result of a historical process that gave rise to ‘monopoly, corporations and feudal property,’ are, according to political economy, ‘natural laws’ and the results of ‘fortuitous circumstances.’ True, Marx refers to his own theory of alienation as a ‘law,’ but unlike the political economist, who ‘presupposes as a historical fact what he should be explaining,’ Marx’s theory is developmental, explicated first and historical later.[11]


II. The Ideology

Marx’s alienation theory made but one appearance among the works published in his lifetime: a short section in The Holy Family (1844). Alienation’s meagre presence in Marx’s published lifetime is remarkable considering its relatively inflated detectability in his posthumous work, appearing in the Manuscripts (1844; source for the example above), the Grundrisse (1857-8), Theories of Surplus Value (1863) and Results from the Immediate Process of Production (1864). Louis Althusser famously postulated an epistemological break away from Feuerbach and idealism in Marx’s writings, marked by The German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach, both written in 1845. Yet alienation, an idealist inheritance, finds a place in three manuscripts written post-1857, Althusser’s proposed ‘mature,’ ‘scientific’ period for Marx, including two (Surplus Value and Process of Production) well on the mature side of Marx’s supposed ‘transitional’ period of 1845-57.[12] Nor should we doubt the importance Marx attributed to his unpublished notes and manuscripts, at least insofar as they helped clarify his thinking. With regards to Ideology, Marx wrote in 1859 that, despite remaining unpublished, the work achieved its ‘main purpose – the clearing up of the question to ourselves,’ referring to his and Engels’ ideological rift with post-Hegelianism.[13] While it is impossible to prove that Marx would have been satisfied with the form in which the aforementioned manuscripts were published (he referred to the Grundrisse as a ‘real hotchpotch’[14]), they are at the least, and by his own admission, revealing of his thought process.


One significant aspect of Ideology is its treatment and adoption of ideas in a manner redolent of alienation theory. Marx and Engels begin their section on Feuerbach with the premise, consistent with species-specific vital activity, that the way in which men produce depends firstly on the nature of the actual means with which they produce, and that ‘what they are’ depends on both ‘what they produce and how they produce.’[15] Once a general characterisation has been made, they move to slightly more concrete claims. A nation’s internal structure, they say, depends on the stage of development achieved by production within in which, in turn, depends on the extent to which the division of labour has grown throughout that country’s history. From there the examples become more directly historical. Since the division of labour determines the productive relationship between individuals, whatever stage of development the former reaches corresponds to a particular form of ownership. Hence human history has progressed from tribal ownership, at an ‘undeveloped stage of production,’ to ancient communal and State ownership, at which point private property creeps in but ‘as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership,’ to feudal or estate-property, when a ‘hierarchical system of land ownership’ gives noblemen power over serfs.[16] Though their ‘premises can…be verified in a purely empirical way,’ Marx and Engels nonetheless felt the premises should come before the history. Still, even after the premise is established, the actual historical examples are held in abeyance until a clearer picture of the general historical process emerges as an outline.


It is easy to miss the abstraction’s in Ideology since any notion of the authors’ using idealism becomes a suspect proposition when the work’s polemicist tone is taken at face value. There is no shortage of ad hominems for its idealist antagonists, Feuerbach notwithstanding, and the style has disappointed some of Marx’s followers (Franz Mehring judged portions of the work as ‘puerile’)[17]. But accepting the histrionics is the first step to overcoming them, and when one realises that the work has a target it is ostensibly unwilling to compromise with, one gleans a compromise. It is not so much that abstraction has ‘no value whatsoever,’ but that it has no value when ‘viewed apart from history.’ In fact, Marx and Engels seem unable to talk actual history until laying out their abstract premises. Before the subsection on history, Marx and Engels preface by ‘select[ing] here some of these abstractions, which we use to refute the ideologist, and shall illustrate by historical examples.’ Here is the only explicit admission of a philosophical, framing procedure, yet it is the very procedure implied by the example in the previous paragraph. Indeed, ‘facilitating the arrangement of historical material’ is about as much as the authors are willing to grant to philosophy, but their denigrating language belies how essential a recourse to such an arrangement actually is for them.[18]


Furthermore, as in the Manuscripts, the work confers a central, moulding role for ideas within its abstract framework. Marx and Engels here take aim at the idealists who, content to descend ‘from heaven to earth,’ ignore the fact that ‘what men say, imagine, conceive,’ are ‘sublimates of their material life-process.’[19] It is real men who produce ideas and, as it is their material circumstances and forms of production that determine what men are, so too can a causal tether be drawn from the material to the ideal. Marx and Engels can then account for the material genesis of ‘the whole mass of theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc.’[20]


Far from just pointing out ideas’ material basis, Marx and Engels give the intellectual sphere a causal function as well, at least once the ideas gush out of their material wellspring. They want to expound ‘the reciprocal action’ of ideal and material.[21] The ruling class, or, rather, their dominant position, is a historical phenomenon, an inevitable result from the expansion of the division of labour and the eventual development of its concomitant: private property. With a material hierarchy established, the ideas start to flow and the ruling class, because it has control over the means of material production, also controls ‘the means of mental production’ to which ‘the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject.’ These ‘conceptive ideologists’ crystalize their hold over the means of production by instilling in the proletariat an ideal version of the very top-down relationship to which they are subject. Throughout history dominant classes have advanced their ideas as ‘rational [and] universally valid,’ ‘attribut[ing] to them an independent existence’ worthy of natural law. Their inferiors (i.e. the proletariat) are mere passive receptors, too active in the production process ‘to make up illusions and ideas about themselves.’[22]


III. The Engels’ Strict Materialism

Terrell Carver begrudgingly claims that Ideology is an indispensable source for later Marxists[23], a sentiment echoed by Gareth Stedman Jones.[24] Both attribute to it and Engels the underpinnings of a more strictly materialist Marxism than would have gratified the movement’s namesake. It is surprising, then, that some of Engels’ later works differ so starkly with Ideology, the manuscript of which he co-authored, as well as alienation theory. This section proposes to examine some of these differences with reference to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.


According to Engels, any social change or political revolution that will disrupt contemporary ownership relations ‘are to be sought, not in men’s brains,’ but exclusively in changes to the mode of production. He conceives of the conflict between producers and owners, along with the eventual rupture of the system maintaining their disproportionate relations, as occurring ‘independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on.’[25] In addition to the scientific jargon and talk of an independent force, a point scrutinised in more detail below, Engels’ remarks are notable for effectively depriving the proletariat of any determinant agency. On revolution, Ideology speaks somewhat similarly but with an important, subtle difference. Here, two determining elements are presented as necessary before an overthrow: ‘the existence of productive forces’ and ‘the formation of a revolutionary mass.’ While revolution is ‘immaterial’ if these conditions are not met, it does not follow that a force acting independently from the revolutionaries is a sufficient condition for rupture,[26] and there is no suggestion that reaching a certain industrial stage is enough to force a revolution on its own.

Looking at the section on alienation in The Holy Family (also co-authored with Engels), further differences on the same point abound. Here, proletariat and private property are taken as opposites and so parts of the same whole, their relationship a parasitic one. The antithetical nature of their coexistence is reinforced by the motivations the relationship impels, with private property ‘compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat,’ while the proletariat ‘is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its opposite.’[27] What is crucial is the personal language, personal in that it lays a possessive onus of liberation on the proletariat and emotively decries the aggrievance that forebodes its insurgence. The only remedy for alienated labour is victory, but not the fated, hands-off victory Engels suggests in Socialism, ‘for [the proletariat] is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite … the proletariat can and must free itself’ (emphasis mine). In other words, victory is the toil of the victorious. Furthermore, alienated labour is ‘an indignation,’ a sign of ‘powerlessness,’ a ‘semblance of human existence’ that makes one ‘feel annihilated.’[28] It is difficult to see why such an emphasis on the emotional backlash of alienation is relevant if revolution is an inevitability existing outside the mind of the revolutionary.


Carrying on with his scientific language, Engels characterises production as subject to ‘inherent laws” that reveal themselves through social relations and ‘affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition.’[29] Competition and its ascription to inexorable laws are the very political economic concepts Marx derides as the intellectual gamesmanship of the capitalist. To add universality to his argument, and so edge further into the ruling class academic territory Marx saw as essentially capitalist, Engels chalks up the extra competition from global markets to ‘the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from Nature to society.’[30] Engels’ theoretical synthesis is peculiar in light of evidence that Marx saw comparisons of himself to Darwin unfavourably. Marx disagreed with Darwin’s portrayal of progress as resulting from environmental contingency, claiming that history is driven by man’s conscious life activity and a manipulation of nature for human ends, effectively inverting the direction of influence chosen by Darwin.[31]


As if to accentuate his own misunderstanding of history’s developmental nature and the effect these developments have on man’s thinking, Engels manages to grant the workers a prescience that Marx never could. For as long as the capitalist mode of production has existed, Engels says, ‘the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of…as the ideal future.’[32] Yet one of the very reasons for which the capitalist system has had staying power is that the labourer, because of the extent of his physical exertions, has hitherto been a passively received bourgeoise ideas about the fortuity of capitalism. Revolutionary sentiment has not been pent up, at least not in the form Engels describes, replete with the will to appropriate the means of production, an oddly specific remedy for an ill that cannot be so immediately understood.


Marx and Engels’ divergence is not so surprising when contextualised by the two authors’ differing reflections on Ideology. As noted above, Marx regarded the manuscript somewhat favourably as late as 1859, mentioning it along with The Poverty of Philosophy as an early theoretical presentation relevant to his more strictly economic work.[33] Engels, on the other hand, in 1886, referred to it as ‘incomplete,’ ‘unusable,’ and exemplary of ‘how incomplete our knowledge of economic history was at the time.’[34] Though rare, disagreements between Marx and Engels did occur during their lifetimes, for instance the latter’s initial, commendatory reaction to Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. In a letter to Marx, Engels extolled Stirner’s egoism, going so far as to say that ‘we are communists out of egoism,’ ultimately reining in his position to agree with Marx’s more unfavourable reception.[35] The exchange, if anything, exemplifies the possibility for theoretical differences, and unfortunately for us any middle ground that could have been reached between the two about Ideology is precluded by Engels’ having written his obloquy on it three years after Marx’s death.


Considering Engels’ enthusiastic appraisal of Theses on Feuerbach illuminates further contradictions. For Engels, the Theses was not just a more useful than Ideology as a differentiator between his and Marx’s materialism and that of Feuerbach’s (both were written in the same year), but ‘the brilliant germ of a new world outlook.’[36] Theses VII and VIII are particularly relevant, the former criticising Feuerbach for failing to see that religion is a ‘social product,’ the latter claiming ‘all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice.’[37] There is a cruel irony in Engels’ adhering so confidently to his materialism that he deprives the proletariat of their role in bringing about revolution and practically ratifies a passive attitude to economic law, in effect a mystical resignation. Furthermore, thesis VII merely suggests that the ideal (in this example, religion) is no causa sine qua non and that any reference to the ideal needs to be materially substantiated, but the extra step of dispensing with the ideal altogether, which step Engels takes by neglecting the ‘mind’ of the proletariat, is never taken here by Marx.


IV. Conclusion

As divine justice would have it, the year of Karl Marx’s death, 1883, was also the year that birthed the Emancipation of Labour Group in Geneva, Switzerland, the first ‘Marxist’ movement in Russia and an important precursor to the Social-Democratic Labour party that would later split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. The Bolsheviks eventually formed the Communist Party that founded the Soviet Union in 1917, the most significant movement to ever champion Marxist ideals.[38]


The two greatest conduits between Marx and early Marxism, says Carver, are the Ideology, noted for its ‘scientific’ value, and Friedrich Engels’ staunch dissociation between materialism and idealism.[39] Closer examination of the Ideology, as it was published, reveals subtle inconsistencies with Engels’ late work that mystifies the relative influence of the two. While it is true, given Carver’s indictment of Ideology as only the specious word of Marx, that it is a stretch to interpret the work ‘as an integral whole,’[40] real value can be gleaned from a cross-examination with Marx’s alienation theory, which he formulated early on and which stayed with him later in manuscript form. Cross-examination reveals not a split, but a synthesis of material and ideal, an outlook veiled perhaps by the Ideology’s unfortunately sardonic style.


Isaiah Berlin best captures the difference between Marx and Marxism and how Marx’s nuance was the key casualty in the intellectual transferral between the two. Per Berlin, Marx did not set out to create ‘a new philosophical system so much as a practical method of social and historical analysis.’[41] Much that Marx wrote is thus a base methodology that he could later draw from when confronted with practical issues. But the point is to fit the method to the problem, not to write up an irrefutable, facile system that can conveniently address any issue before it even materialises. There is no such subtlety in ‘Marxism,’ which glosses its passivity over with the moniker of ‘science’ and hangs its hat on providential inevitability.



 

Leandro Vargas Llosa has just completed an MA in European History at University College London (this essay was written during his time at the university).


Notes: [1] Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, 1st edition (London: Penguin Random House, 2017) p. 191. [2] Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, ed. by Henry Hardy, 5th edition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 114. [3] Karl A. Wittfogel, ‘The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution,’ World Politics, 12 (1960), pp. 487-508 (p. 487). [4] Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold, Karl Marx (2021), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy < https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/> [accessed 2 January 2021]. [5] Douglas Moggach, ‘German Idealism and Marx,’ in The Impact of Idealism, ed. by Nicholas Boyle, Christoph Jamme, Liz Disley and Ian Cooper (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), pp. 82-107 (p. 83-84). [6] Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 87. [7] Ibid., pp. 88-89. [8] Ibid., pp. 89-91. [9] Ibid., p. 91. [10] Ibid., pp. 93-94. [11] Ibid., pp. 85-86 [12] Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 2005), p. 34-35. [13] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Nahuum Isaac Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1904), Author’s Preface. [14] As cited in Gareth Stedman Jones, p. 377. [15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I & III, trans. by Roy Pascal (Connecticut: Martino Publishing, 2011), p. 7. [16] Ibid., pp. 8-11. [17] As cited in Terrell Carver, ‘“The German Ideology” Never Took Place,’ History of Political Thought, 31 (2010), pp. 107-127 (p. 118). [18] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology, pp. 15-16. [19] Ibid., p. 14. [20] Ibid., p. 28. [21] Ibid., p. 28. [22] Ibid., pp. 39-40. [23] Terrell Carver, p. 109. [24] Gareth Stedman Jones, p. 192. [25] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. by Edward Aveling (The Leftist Public Domain Project, 2020), p. 44. [26] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology, pp. 29-30. [27] Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 148. [28] Ibid., pp.148-149. [29] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 51. [30] Ibid., p. 54. [31] As cited in Gareth Stedman Jones, p. 167. [32] Friederich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 69. [33] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Author’s Preface. [34] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, trans. by Progress Publishers (Marx Engels Internet Archive, 1994), Foreword. [35] As cited in Gareth Stedman Jones, pp. 189-190. [36] Friederich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Foreword. [37] Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 173. [38] Samuel H. Baron, ‘Plekhanov and the Origins of Russian Marxism,’ The Russian Review, 13 (1954), p. 38. [39] Terrell Carver, p. 122. [40] Gary K. Browning., ‘The German Ideology: The Theory of History and the History of Theory,’ History of Political Thought, 14 (1993), pp. 455-473 (p.455). [41] Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 112.



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