The State of Karl Marx, Part II: Avoiding Anarchy

'It’s imperative that we ... understand Marx’s account of history ..., given that it continues to possess so much of the public debate on who we are and what our future may look like.'

From The European Conservative

By Harrison Pitt

It’s imperative that we strive to understand Marx’s account of history and justice, given that it continues to possess so much of the public debate on who we are and what our future may look like.

It was when Marx felt most doubtful about his political goals, during the conflicted years of his youth explored in Part I of this series, that the profound influence of Ludwig Feuerbach became so important. With his anthropological focus on revealing the truly human “species-being” at the fount of all our religious and philosophical creations, Feuerbach provided the young Marx with a solid and apparently scientific foundation upon which a new communist theory of the state might be developed. 

As a result, Marx’s earlier complaint about the “theatrical” way in which ideas about “communist and socialist doctrines” were being inserted into the debate in 1842 no longer applied. The “thorough discussion” of communism for which he had called in that letter to Arnold Ruge had not only been started by Feuerbach, but definitively solved by his philosophy. Certainly it seemed so to Marx, who lavished praise on Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843) in an 1844 letter to the man himself: “In these writings, you have provided—I don’t know whether intentionally—a philosophical basis for socialism.” Feuerbach had been a key influence within the Young Hegelian network ever since Ruge invited him to contribute pieces for the Hallische Jahrbücher in 1838.

In terms of overt and unambiguous political doctrines, Feuerbach’s philosophy is at best suggestive. He is highly critical of Protestantism for encouraging an attitude of profound insularity, indeed radical egotism, through its dogmatic insistence on the lone individual’s relationship to God—a situation in which the community suffers as a consequence of the enthronement of what Feuerbach calls “each person in himself and his own interior reality.” 

Like Hegel, he believed this distinguished modernity from the ancient polis, where the individual and the community into which he was born were not regarded as bitter rivals, but as mutually reinforcing aspects of the same ethical life. But unlike Hegel, who sought to preserve this individualism—the motor of civil society’s economic life, after all—while trusting that a rational state would check its more harmful manifestations, Feuerbach saw every reason to supersede the ethos altogether. He critiqued it in an 1828 letter to Hegel himself, decrying Protestant Christianity as, in this key respect, “contrary to the antique world.” The “all-negating nakedness” produced by modern individualism, he further argued, can only be overcome once the Christian’s inwardly cultivated love of God is transformed into an outpouring of love for one’s fellow man. Indeed, on Feuerbach’s understanding, religious devotion involves the worship of a God who, unbeknownst to believers, is “in reality the exteriorized self of man.” Far worse to remain blind to this fact than recognize the true essence of Christianity and unpack its human implications, whether in the field of anthropology or in the political life of the state.

Despite admiring Feuerbach, Marx did once rebuke his aphorisms in a letter to Ruge for referring “too much to nature and too little to politics.” This was written as early as March 1843, less than a few weeks after the state-ordered closure of the Rheinische Zeitung. In fact, there is evidence that Marx had been integrating Feuerbach’s philosophy into his worldview the previous autumn (“religion … owes its being not to heaven but to the earth,” contained in a letter Marx wrote to Ruge in 1842, is distinctly Feuerbachian) and well before his celebration of Feuerbach in August 1844 for laying foundations for the socialism Marx embraced during the previous winter. Apart from anything else, this qualifies David McLellan’s statement that Marx’s 1842 articles for the Rheinische Zeitung “show no trace of Feuerbach’s influence.” Perhaps not, but his letters certainly do. 

However, more important than the chronology is the extent to which Feuerbach, if unspecific on detail, supplied the basic framework for a humanistic political philosophy. A true society, he believed, must be a republic based on equality and fellowship, where the people’s right to “active participation in the affairs of the state” is recognized and the proper acknowledgement of our shared “species-being” leads to “the abolition of political hierarchy.” “For Feuerbach,” according to political historian Warren Breckman, the state becomes simply “the universal term to describe the totality of social relations.”

As of March 1843, Marx’s political outlook was still evolving, but he effectively shared Feuerbach’s view of the state. In fact, notwithstanding his famous rebuke of Feuerbach’s alleged neglect of politics, in the very same letter written to Ruge that month he made no criticism of the continuing role accorded to the state in Feuerbach’s Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie (1843). On the contrary, he seemed to approve, telling Ruge that “things will probably go as they did during the sixteenth century, when the nature enthusiasts were accompanied by a corresponding number of state enthusiasts.” This raises a challenging problem. If not Feuerbach’s influence, what later persuaded Marx to couple his genuine adoption of the semi-socialistic humanism espoused in Vorläufige Thesen with the belief that the state, far from remaining relevant as in Feuerbach’s levelling republic, would become superfluous and wither away once communism had fully ripened?

The answer lies in Marx’s shift to class as the main axis in modern political life and the ramifications this produced for his theory of the state. The most damaging pathologies in modern civil society, Marx came to believe, might (as Feuerbach thought) be rooted in Protestantism, but they were above all legitimized and sustained not by religion but by the political state. As Marx forcefully argued in the 1844 Manuscripts, most of which was unpublished, the capitalist system defended by Adam Smith as an outgrowth of our innate “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” was, far from being natural, in fact artificially underwritten by a state that represented only a certain phase of historical development and could therefore be altered in line with its own conflicting internal dynamics. Apart from anything else, there was an unsustainable contradiction between the religion of humanity espoused by Feuerbach (along with Marx) and capitalism’s systemic immiseration of the proletariat. Swelling in numbers, this pauperized class, as Marx put it, found itself caught “between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute, and comprehensive negation of that nature.” As for what follows from this unstable state of affairs, “the proletariat is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite private property.” 

Of course, the pattern Marx later developed as the route to this revolutionary outcome involved a so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” first seizing command of the state, then exercising coercive power to force through a workers’ agenda, before finally—now that every trace of the capitalist order, formerly upheld by the bourgeois state, has been consigned to the dustbin of history—relaxing the constraints and allowing the state to wither away, certain in the knowledge that our nature as socially co-operative creatures has been rediscovered and therefore an enduring loyalty to stateless communism secured.

More than anything else, this fully developed theory of the state set Marx against his own younger Hegelian self. Hegel, for example, had advanced an elaborate defence of private property: 

A person has as his substantial end the right of putting his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in itself and derives its determination and soul from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all ‘things.’ 

But individuals within the proletariat also have ends according to Marx, and under a state which legally guarantees a bourgeois “right of appropriation” over the means of production, these ends will languish unrecognized. In other words, the state does not preside neutrally over the differentiated rational structure defended in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but instead winds up being infiltrated by the ascendant class, and reflects those particular interests as opposed to universal reason. Undoubtedly, Hegel was grimly aware of “the dependence and distress” of a class tied to industrial work, but if this social question was to be addressed, he had little doubt that the solution would be formulated by the state. Whereas for Marx the state, politicized by bourgeois interests, was the problem. He rejected the resolution Hegel often referred to as “unity-in-difference,” if by “difference” is meant the kind of socio-economic distinctions contained within a class-based order.

This social splintering, centred around the sort of pauperization which Hegel had pessimistically recorded in The Philosophy of Right, hit a boiling point during the June 1844 Silesian revolt. In the mountainous textile districts of north-eastern Prussia, years of falling prices and plummeting demand had driven entire communities of weavers into hardship and poverty. Deploying his updated theory of the state to powerful journalistic effect, Marx argued that the motive for the uprising was not pure despair. By contrast, the revolt was praised for being “theoretical and conscious in character.” As the burning of company books and other “titles of property” demonstrated, the crowd’s revolutionary fervour was not just directionless chaos, but took aim at many of the hard manifestations of the capitalist system over which the bourgeois state presided.

Isaiah Berlin contends that Marx underwent a final intellectual transformation in Paris, the years 1843-5 being “the most decisive in his life.” After this, Berlin continues, he found himself with a comprehensive political ideal and devoted the remainder of his life to its “development and practical realisation.” There is an important sense in which this is mistaken, for Marx still felt a need to distinguish his own philosophy from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchism, especially since both thinkers had adopted a suspicion of the state which risked being confused with complete agreement. Even in 1859, Marx was still eager to underscore his contempt for “Proudhonist socialism,” which he claims to have “demolished to its very foundations.” This was certainly the case back in 1846 when Marx, addressing Pavel Annenkov in a letter, characterized his objections to Proudhon in terms of their wildly different philosophies of history: 

he falls into the error of bourgeois economists, who regard economic categories as eternal laws, and not historical laws, which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces.

In other words, although both men envisioned the state’s eventual demise, Proudhon regarded this final outcome as desirable in principle and therefore achievable at any given moment, while Marx, retaining Hegel’s historical focus if not his deification of the state, maintained that the withering away of the state could only be accomplished by working with historical conditions and tracing their dialectical development into the future. Practical timing, in other words, mattered just as much the willpower to enact some theoretical good. On Marx’s reading, then, there had to be a transitional stage in which, as a precondition for the state’s disappearance, it must first be seized and coercively instrumentalized by a politically conscious proletariat. 

Proudhon struck him as a dreamy idealist, attached to an imagined realm of Platonic ideals and unschooled in Marx’s ostensibly ‘scientific’ brand of historical materialism. It is an exquisite irony that throughout the 1840s, Marx’s slow-motion abandonment of a Hegelian rational state in exchange for one that would eventually vanish altogether was only saved from morphing into Proudhon’s anarchism because Marx retained a life-long reverence, albeit in revised form, for Hegel’s philosophy of history.

Marx, along with his fellow Young Hegelians, spent the early years of the 1840s pondering how best to put the master’s rational state into practice, an especially tricky task in the uncongenial atmosphere of a religious revival that spread as high as Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s throne itself. As we have seen, Marx more or less toed the Bauerian line of philosophical criticism in public throughout 1842-’43, however much his private correspondence brims with thoughtful reservations. Once the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed in March 1843, he had no choice but to publicize his doubts and developed an appreciation for Feuerbach’s anthropological humanism, which he credited with laying a scientific basis for socialism. 

Contrary to his 1842 polemic against Moses Hess, the vision of a “righteous nation” was no longer imaginary but, armed with Feuerbach’s philosophy, had become politically tenable. Now, the anthropological concept of “species-being” had been “brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth,” Marx celebrated. “What is this,” he went on, “but the concept of society?” However, he remained a Hegelian in his attribution of an indispensable role to history. Hence his divergence from Proudhon, whose utopian mentality, despite the pair’s convergence in envisioning an abolished state, Marx thought blinded him to the conditions through which history must pass before reaching this ultimate goal. 

In truth, it was Marx’s retention of Hegel’s philosophy of history, albeit reformulated along economic rather than spiritual lines, which prevented his mature theory of the state from conjoining with Proudhonist anarchism. Feuerbach did more than simply “set Hegel on his feet,” in Engels’s notorious phrase. Rather, by giving an account of human nature based on love, fellowship, and solidarity, he also provided Young Hegelians with a normative direction of travel once those feet were planted. Still, what better evidence could there be of Marx’s abiding admiration for Hegel than the fact that, despite their differences at first on materialism and finally on the state, he continued to undertake this journey at a tempo dictated by Hegel’s philosophy?

It’s imperative today that we strive to understand Marx’s account of history and justice, given that it continues to possess so much of the public debate on who we are and what our future may look like. I want to suggest, as I’ve sought to present throughout the course of this two-part essay, that to understand Marx’s influence we must take his sources very seriously. There are those who want to downplay the influence of Hegelianism on his later thought. I hope I have convinced my readers that far from being on the peripheries of Marx’s preoccupations, Hegel is the key to understanding Marx throughout the course of his philosophical and journalistic career.