Karl Marx Read online

  KARL MARX

  Karl Marx

  Philosophy and Revolution

  SHLOMO AVINERI

  Frontispiece: Karl Marx, around 1860

  Copyright © 2019 by Shlomo Avineri.

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Jew? Of Jewish Origin? A Converted Jew?

  A Daughter’s Testimony

  Paradise Lost

  The Father: Tribulations of a Jewish Advocate

  Beginnings: From Law Student to Philosophical Radical

  2. Transcending Hegel

  Eduard Gans and the Young Hegelians

  The Rheinische Zeitung and the Beginnings of Social Critique

  A Hegelian Retrospective

  The Proletariat—The New Universal Class

  Religion and Opium

  3. “Zur Judenfrage,”

  Support for Jewish Emancipation and Critique of Judaism

  Another Defense of Jewish Emancipation

  4. Paris and Brussels: Formative Years

  Homo Faber and Alienation: The Foundations of Philosophical Anthropology

  Visions of Communism

  Against One-Dimensional Materialism

  Toward The Communist Manifesto

  5. The Communist Manifesto and the Revolutions of 1848

  Historical Analysis and Revolutionary Program

  The Ten Regulations: A Program for Revolutionary Transformation

  1848 and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

  6. London: From Abject Penury to Middle-Class Existence

  Private Travails and Public Setbacks

  Rethinking the Revolution

  Shifting Views on Nationalism

  On India and the “Asiatic Mode of Production”

  7. The First International and Das Kapital

  Between Family Concerns and Lassalle

  On Political Economy

  The International Workingmen’s Association

  Das Kapital, Volume 1

  Darwin—and Promoting Das Kapital

  8. The Paris Commune and the Gotha Program: Debacle and Hope

  “The Most Vilified Man in London”

  A Nascent Social Democrat?

  An Incongruous Encounter: Marx and Graetz

  9. Toward the Sunset

  On Russia: Against Historical Inevitability

  The Last Years

  10. A Historical Perspective: Impact and Legacy

  Epilogue: Distant Echoes?

  A Note on Sources and Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  BECAUSE OF HIS DARK COMPLEXION, Karl Marx was nicknamed by his friends and colleagues Der Mohr (“The Moor”), as in Othello. This is how Friedrich Engels always addressed him in their voluminous correspondence—Lieber Mohr. This was also how Marx himself occasionally signed his own letters.

  Nobody, of course, thought Marx was of Moorish or Arab descent; the playful orientalist nickname was, however, a constant, even if surreptitious, reminder of his family’s Jewish background. As far as we know, it never became a subject of public discussion, yet its presence is undeniable.

  In his magisterial essay “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity,” Isaiah Berlin eloquently argued that Marx’s passionate advocacy for the proletariat has to be ascribed to his Jewish ancestry: “It is the oppression of centuries of a people of pariahs, not of a recently risen class, that is speaking in him.” Others have claimed that it was the tradition of Old Testament prophecy that found expression in Marx’s messianic vision. Perhaps; but in the cauldron of nineteenth-century revolutionary movements, many who had no Jewish background also shared this political messianism, which could as easily have its roots in the Christian as in the Judaic tradition.

  Marx cannot be seen as a “Jewish thinker,” and his knowledge of matters Jewish was minimal. Nor did his biography follow any pattern of Jewish life. Yet his Jewish origins and background did leave significant fingerprints in his work, some of them obvious and others less so. One of the aims of this book is to put this background in its proper and balanced perspective.

  Marx was a revolutionary thinker—philosopher, historian, sociologist, economist, current affairs journalist, and editor—not a revolutionary activist. With the exception of less than two years during the revolutions of 1848–49, he was not involved in revolutionary activities, and even that was mainly as a newspaper editor. Any biography that would try to divorce the flesh-and-blood Karl Marx from the iconic “Karl Marx” will have to focus mainly on his writings, which document his intellectual development, with all its nuances, in a much more fascinating way than the canonical image in which he is mostly presented.

  This may not be an easy task. Marx’s canonization and the codification of his thoughts into a doctrine called “Marxism” began quite soon after his death, led by Engels, who became the official executor of his literary legacy. Attuned to the political needs of the ascending German Social Democratic Party in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Engels was responsible for making many of Marx’s works known to a wider public. This included republishing long forgotten writings, as well as deciding which of Marx’s numerous manuscripts should be published. This editorial work also involved decisions about which of Marx’s manuscripts would not be published. Consequently, many of these manuscripts were first published only half a century later, in the 1920s and 1930s; and because of the turmoil of European history at that time they did not become widely known until after World War II.

  Engels also provided prefaces to Marx’s writings edited and published by him, and they helped to present Marx’s thoughts as a closed theoretical system, sometimes elevating occasional comments on current affairs into ex cathedra doctrines, as if enunciating eternal verities. Most of Marx’s seminal writings have reached twentieth-century readers through these editorial efforts of Engels, and it can be easily shown that in many cases political writers, both socialists and anti-socialists, as well as scholars, attribute to Marx views and positions that originate in prefaces by Engels rather than in Marx’s own texts. What is usually called “Marxism” is what Engels decided to include in the corpus and the way he interpreted it. The post-1917 schism between Social Democrats and Communists further exacerbated these intellectual gladiatorial fights over interpretation of what has sometimes become an ossified set of dogmas.

  Since Marx’s fame has been mostly posthumous, this biography will try to present him in the actual historical contexts, intellectual and political, in which he lived and acted. Liberating the real-life Marx from the canonization in which his thought has been wrapped helps to discover a much more exciting and compelling thinker who grew with his time and learned from the history he was living through.

&
nbsp; When taken off his pedestal, Marx appears to grow in stature. Despite his sober assessments and setbacks, he never lost his belief in a redemptive future, anchored in the internal dialectics of historical development, regardless of how long it will take to arrive and how differing and ever-changing its form might be. And in this belief he was proven both right and wrong.

  KARL MARX

  1

  Jew? Of Jewish Origin? A Converted Jew?

  A DAUGHTER’S TESTIMONY

  LESS THAN TWO MONTHS after Karl Marx’s death in London in March 1883, his youngest daughter, Eleanor (“Tussy”) Marx-Aveling, published in the socialist journal Progress an obituary of her father. In the second paragraph she wrote: “Karl Marx was born at Trier on May 5, 1818, of Jewish parents. His father—a man of great talent—was a lawyer, strongly imbued with the French eighteenth-century ideas of religion, society, and the arts; his mother was the descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the seventeenth century settled in Holland.”

  Marx’s Jewish background was of course common knowledge, but he never referred to it publicly himself, certainly not in the way described here. Yet explicitly bringing up her father’s Jewish origin in such a prominent way should not come as a surprise from Eleanor. Of Marx’s three daughters, she was the best educated and the most active politically. She was also an essayist and a prolific translator of both literary and political works: she translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into English, as well as Ibsen’s plays The Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and The Pillars of Society, George Plekhanov’s Anarchy and Socialism, and Eduard Bernstein’s biography of Ferdinand Lassalle. Among her own writings was a study of the working-class movement in America and a feminist tract, The Woman Question. As part of her activities among working-class people in London’s East End, many of them recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, she learned Yiddish. On one memorable occasion she declared, in Yiddish, “I am one of you,” and on another she accepted an invitation to address a rally protesting Russian anti-Jewish policies and pogroms, adding “I shall be more glad as my father was a Jew.”

  Yet for all this, and despite writing with warmth and pride about her father’s Jewishness, her description in the obituary overlooks most of the defining moments of her family history.

  Even as Eleanor stated that both of her father’s parents were Jewish and praised Karl Marx’s father for being imbued with French Enlightenment ideas about religion, she refrained from mentioning that he had converted to Christianity, and she also did not address the circumstances of his conversion. By prominently referring to her father’s Jewish background, she made an important point, but she totally missed—or perhaps intentionally avoided—the personal drama, historical significance, and possible traumatic memories of the odyssey that turned Karl Marx, the grandson of two rabbis, into one of the most influential revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century. And therein lies a story, the historical significance of which transcends Marx’s personal biography.

  PARADISE LOST

  Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5th May 1818, in Trier in the Rhineland, then part of the kingdom of Prussia. Founded by the Romans as Augusta Treverorum and considered the oldest town in Germany, Trier is deeply steeped in history, displaying some famous Roman monuments, among them the exquisite Porta Nigra, the largest Roman edifice north of the Alps.

  For almost two thousand years the Rhineland has also been the center of the Jewish presence in the German lands. In the wake of the Roman legions, Jewish merchants crossed the Alps and established themselves along the Rhine, the main regional artery of commerce and communications. In documents written mostly in Hebrew, these thriving Jewish communities retained the echoes of the Latin names of their cities—Magenza (Mogontiacum/Mainz), Shpeira (Spira/Speyer), Vermaiza (Augusta Vangionum/Worms). In the twelfth century, an assembly of rabbis and scholars from the Rhineland set down a compendium of internal decrees regulating the structures, institutional arrangements, and functions of Jewish communities. This set of regulations, known as Takanot SHUM (the Hebrew acronym for the names of the three leading Rhenish communities) was over time adopted by many other communities and became the template for the way Jewish self-governing institutions fitted into the feudal and corporate life of medieval Europe.

  In 1096, the First Crusade brutally interrupted Jewish life in the Rhineland. While the gentry-led crusaders, headed by Geoffrey of Bouillon, set out for the Holy Land from northern France and Flanders, hordes of what became known as the People’s Crusade assembled in the region of the lower Rhine, and set on their road to the East, marching up the river. Egged on by populist preachers, like the legendary Peter the Hermit, they visited violence and destruction on the Jewish communities along their route, including on the Jews of Trier. The papal call to liberate the holy sites of Christendom in Jerusalem from Muslim rule was transformed into horrendous massacres of the Jewish population of the Rhineland—the first massive anti-Jewish riots in western Europe. The official church hierarchy was so shocked by this anti-Jewish violence that some bishops and archbishops opened their compounds to protect the local Jewish community from the wrath of the fanatical Christian rabble, and in some cases themselves became victims of the religious demon unleashed by the call to protect Christianity’s holy sites in the Orient.

  These traumas remained deeply etched in the collective Jewish memory over generations: some of the laments written under the impact of these harrowing events are still being recited on the High Holidays; and the year 1096 (4856 according to the Hebrew calendar) is seen as a watershed in European Jewish history, heralding later anti-Jewish legislation and persecution.

  But the Jewish communities in the Rhineland largely survived and continued to flourish. The rise of the Christian burgher class in the late Middle Ages brought about municipal anti-Jewish legislation, when many so-called Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire adopted the Magdeburg Statutes, which included the Privilegium de non tolerandis Iudaeis, or right to exclude Jews. This caused many cities in the German lands to expel Jews, although in the Rhineland these expulsions were mostly temporary, and the historical communities continued their existence. Many Jews, however, moved farther east, to the more tolerant Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, which eventually became the largest region of Jewish presence in Europe.

  It was the French Revolution and its consequences that dramatically changed the fortunes of the Jews in the Rhineland. On the eve of the revolution, the Rhineland was a patchwork of petty jurisdictions: principalities and duchies, markgraviates and landgraviates, counts palatine and imperial free cities, archiepiscopal sees exercising secular jurisdiction, independent knights and minor baronies—the region was a kaleidoscope, signifying the ultimate decrepitude of the medieval idea of a universal empire.

  The French Revolution and later the Napoleonic wars brought major changes to the region. French armies occupied the Rhineland, did away with the multitude of local jurisdictions, annexed most of the region to France, and later, under Napoleon, set up the kingdom of Westphalia farther east, with Napoleon’s brother Jérome on its throne.

  Like most of the Rhineland, Trier was thus annexed to the French Republic and later became part of the Napoleonic empire, with political, social, and intellectual consequences that are still visible in the area today. One of the immediate and far-reaching results had to do with the status of the Jews.

  Revolutionary France was the first European country to emancipate its Jews, granting them equal political and civic rights. When it annexed the Rhineland, this emancipation was extended to Jews there as well, and the Jewish population was transformed from a tolerated but not equal community into full and equal citizenship. Limits on Jewish professional activity and landowning were lifted, as were restrictions on residence rights; schools and universities were opened to Jewish students, as was the civil service. For the first time Jews could serve as lawyers, judges, doctors, military officers, and civil servants. As evidenced in Jewish prayers, sermons, and poems of the time, many Jew
s saw this as an almost messianic redemption, and republican France—and later Napoleon—were praised as a modern, secular incarnation of the messianic vision. The twenty years between the mid-1790s and 1814 witnessed the appearance for the first time—in France as well as in the annexed Rhineland—of Jewish persons as equal citizens, active in the professions and in general social and political life. France, in its extended borders, was viewed as the new, modern Promised Land, a secular paradise in the here and now, established on the hallowed grounds of Enlightenment and Emancipation.

  This came to a cruel end in 1814–15 following the defeat of Napoleon, and the Congress of Vienna, which set up the borders and contours of post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic Europe: the Restoration, identified with the politics of the leading Austrian statesman Prince Metternich. France was set back more or less to its pre-1789 borders and lost the territories it had annexed, including the Rhineland.

  It was obvious that the patchwork of pre-revolutionary political systems in the Rhineland could not be revived. Instead, most of this territory was annexed to Prussia, as a reward for its role in the anti-Napoleonic coalition. This changed Prussia in many respects: from a marginal, middle-sized eastern kingdom it became a much bigger country controlling large expanses of territory bordering on France; from a mainly agricultural land, dominated by its Junker class, it gained regions with a traditional commercial culture, also rich in the mineral resources of the Ruhr; and from a predominantly Protestant country, with a Lutheran state church, it gained a large Catholic population. Last, and not least, significant numbers of Jews, in the historical Rhenish communities, were added to it, outnumbering the small Jewish population in the traditional Prussian and Brandenburg lands of the east.

  But the Jewish population of the new Rhenish territories differed fundamentally from the Jews then residing in the original Prussian provinces, and this presented the Prussian authorities with some tricky problems in their new domains. In Prussia proper, the Jewish religion was tolerated and Jews were protected, but they were not equal under the law. Despite some liberal legislation introduced by the Prussian reforms associated with Baron Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg in the early 1800s, there were still restrictions on where Jews could live as well as limitations on land ownership, and they were not allowed to join the free professions. Prussia was faced with a novel dilemma, as with the territory came people: emancipated Jews in the Rhineland, who enjoyed equal rights with their Christian neighbors, served as lawyers, judges, and civil servants. People still remembered how the first well-known Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, needed a special royal dispensation to reside in Berlin in the late 1700s. True, there were some moneyed, privileged Court Jews and financiers in Prussia, like the Ephraim family, who owned palatial residences—but Jews as such did not enjoy equal rights in what was considered a Christian state.