The Red Flag: A History of Communism (8 page)

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland town of Trier. During the French occupation after the Revolution, Trier was governed according to the relatively liberal Napoleonic laws, which had benefited Marx’s father, Heinrich, a respected lawyer and the son of the rabbi. However, the absorption of the town into the more hierarchical and conservative state of Prussia was a disaster for Heinrich; under Prussian law Jews were denied all positions in state service, unless they had a special dispensation. Heinrich was forced to convert to Protestantism, and was baptized in 1817, the year before his son Karl was born.

Marx, therefore, grew up in a region resting on a historical and political fault-line: between modern, revolutionary France, with its principles of equality of all citizens before the law, and
ancien régime
Prussia, founded on autocracy, hierarchy and aristocratic privilege. Unsurprisingly Marx,
whose own family had briefly bathed in the rays of Enlightenment before being cast back into
ancien régime
darkness, was keenly interested in how the forces of history might be accelerated to bring ‘progressive’ politics to a ‘backward’ country. In his youth Marx, like the French revolutionary generation of the 1770s and 1780s, was obsessed with his country’s backwardness. The German middle class, he complained, was weak and in thrall to the aristocracy, and, unlike its French counterpart, could not be relied on to challenge the old order.

The Rhineland in the early nineteenth century did not lie only on a political fault-line between French liberalism and German conservatism, but also on an intellectual one: between French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Marx’s father, according to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, was a man of reason and the Enlightenment, ‘a real Frenchman of the eighteenth century who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart’.
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Yet Marx also came under the influence of a rival mentor, Baron von Westphalen, father of his future wife, Jenny, who introduced him to the Romantic worldview. As Eleanor wrote, the baron ‘filled Karl Marx with enthusiasm for the Romantic school, and whereas his father read Voltaire and Racine with him, the Baron read him Homer and Shakespeare – who remained his favourite authors all his life.’
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The tension between the Enlightenment devotion to reason, order and science, and a Romantic disdain for routine and passion for heroic struggle, was a fissure within Marx’s own thinking. His personality certainly had more in common with the brilliant and extraordinary Romantic genius than the worldly and sociable Voltairean man of science. One of his father’s letters to him at university captures the tension between the civilized, Enlightened father and the Romantic son:

As a student in Bonn in the mid-1830s, Marx attended courses on the philosophy of art, some delivered by the famous Romantic theorist August von Schlegel. He also planned to publish a work on Romanticism, and penned poetry infused with Romantic themes. Nevertheless,
his worldview was far from the early Romanticism of Rousseau, with its elevated regard for virtue. Marx’s was a high Romanticism, with the hero figured as the artist-as-rebel. In one poem, ‘Human Life’, he wrote of the dreary self-interestedness, or ‘philistinism’ as he often called it, of everyday life: ‘Life is death / An eternal death; / Distress dominates / Human striving. /… / Greedy striving / And miserable goal / That is its life, / The play of breezes.’
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Marx, however, was determined not to succumb to conventional life. He would rebel. As he explained in his poem ‘Feelings’:

And as has been seen, he identified with that great rebel of ancient myth – Prometheus, struggling against the tyrant Zeus.

Marx’s sentiments did not change markedly as an adult. Intense, pugnacious and sensitive, he declared that his idea of happiness was ‘to fight’, and his idea of misery was ‘submission’. He described his main characteristic as ‘singleness of purpose’, and this quality certainly put him at an advantage over his contemporaries. Although he was less original than many other socialist thinkers of the time, he was infinitely more energetic and painstaking in synthesizing ideas and forging them into a coherent whole, and he put this rigour at the service of rebellion rather than the forces of order.

Given Marx’s self-image as a rebel, challenging authority to bring Enlightenment to humanity, it is not surprising that he became interested in radical ideas. Initially this radicalism emerged in debates on philosophy, when he was a member of the ‘Young Hegelian’ group of thinkers. Georg Hegel, the German philosopher, had developed a theory of world history by which history was seen as the unfolding story of the progress of mankind’s spirit towards increasing freedom. The process was ‘dialectical’, that is, it moved forward through struggles between competing ideas and social systems, in which the clash between a principle (‘thesis’) and its opposite (‘antithesis’) resulted in ‘synthesis’, incorporating the positive aspects of both. Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern constitutional monarchy were all syntheses, stages in the movement of humanity towards the ideal society. After Hegel’s death,
Hegelians disagreed over what constituted that ideal society. The establishment saw it as the contemporary Prussian Protestant monarchy, arguing that the existing order represented the ‘end of history’. The Young Hegelians, however, condemned the monarchy as reactionary and saw the ideal as a parliamentary system, which allowed freedom of the press and religion, though they decried the economic liberalism which, they argued, gave excessive power to private property.

On becoming editor of the Cologne-based liberal newspaper
Rhenische Zeitung
in 1842, Marx espoused these causes with energy. He showed a particular interest in social issues, protesting on behalf of peasants who were losing their old communal rights (to forest land) to individual ownership in the name of liberal ideas of private property. In 1843 the
Rhenische Zeitung
was closed down by the authorities, and this setback encouraged Marx to adopt an even more radical position. His hopes that a free press would be a force for reform now dashed, he argued instead that political change was not enough; a fundamental social and economic transformation was needed. Moreover he had also lost faith in the German middle classes, who had been cowardly in the face of the monarchy’s assault on press liberties. Unlike the French bourgeoisie, which had led the French revolution of 1789 and had defended liberal freedoms in the 1830 revolution, the German bourgeoisie, he argued, was hopelessly backward.

Marx, along with several of his radical friends, decided to emigrate from a repressive Germany to the more open atmosphere of Paris, and it was here in 1843 and 1844 that he developed what was to be the core of his future ideas. Marx had always been interested in French socialism and in this period he increasingly fell under the influence of French socialist writers, their hostility to constitutional democracy becoming more evident in his own writings. Marx also became more aware of English intellectual currents through his life-long collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Engels, the son of a prosperous, Calvinist lace manufacturer from Barmen, Westphalia, had, like Marx, been a radical in his youth, dabbled in Romantic versification, and was a member of the Young Hegelians. But there were also significant differences between the two. Most marked was the contrast between their temperaments. Engels, more sociable and less combative than Marx, fitted well into conventional bourgeois society. He fenced and rode, enjoying music and the company of women, and drinking fine wines. Yet he was also
well-organized and business-like, unlike the chaotic Marx, which was fortunate for Marx as Engels was able to bankroll his frequently impoverished friend. But most importantly, Engels brought an English perspective to Marx’s thought. He had been sent by his father to work in the Manchester branch of the family firm, and it was here, in the city at the frontier of the modern economy, that Engels became aware of the nature and mechanisms of capitalism, and its socialist critics. Engels was close to the Owenite movement, and despite his later criticisms of its ‘utopianism’, he remained highly sympathetic to its goals. At this crucial time in the development of Marx’s thought, therefore, Engels encouraged his interest in ‘utopian’ socialism, whilst also providing Marx with a more detailed, practical knowledge of how modern capitalism worked.
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In the next few years, on the basis of this fruitful partnership, the foundations of Marxism were built – in the
Paris Manuscripts
and a number of other works. It may seem strange, given later developments, that Marx’s primary interest was freedom. But this was ‘freedom’ in a Rousseauian sense – the end of dependence on other people and material things.
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In modern societies, Marx argued, man was losing his autonomy, his ability to express himself and the opportunities to develop his creative capabilities. In Marx’s Hegelian philosophical language, man was being controlled by ‘alienated’ forces outside himself. Autocracies deprived the individual of freedom, but liberal democracy was no solution, because it merely allowed people to vote periodically for a government over which they then had little influence. Only when all citizens took part in running the state all the time – as had been the case in ancient Athens – would they end this political ‘alienation’. The same was true in the economic sphere. Man was a naturally creative being who, collaborating with others, realized his full potential through labour, whilst also changing the world around him. But in modern, capitalist societies, men had become slaves to ‘alien’ forces, money, the market and the material things they themselves produced.
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They worked not to express their creativity, but merely to eat, drink and acquire material things; they frequently worked for other people; they were cogs in a machine, forced to perform particular, narrow tasks, according to the modern division of labour; moreover, they were increasingly ‘alienated’ from other people, unable to establish true human relationships.

For Marx, the solution to this grim state of affairs was the abolition
of the market and private property, that is, the establishment of ‘Communism’. All men would govern the state directly, participating in government rather than electing parliamentary representatives. This, then, was not modern liberal democracy, which is based on the assumption that there will always be conflicts of interest between citizens. Marx’s vision of Communism assumed that once class division was overcome, complete consensus could be achieved. Liberal rights and freedoms, which protect the minority against the majority, would be wholly unnecessary. This critique of liberalism was to become central to the ideologies of Communist regimes.

Under Communism, economic life would also be transformed: people would not work for money, the market would be abolished, work would become a creative activity, and people would express themselves through their labour. As Marx put it, ‘our products would be like so many mirrors, each one reflecting our essence… My work would be a free expression of my life, and therefore a free enjoyment of my life.’
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And economic well-being would not suffer, because if men worked for enjoyment they would be much more energetic and enthusiastic than if they were downtrodden and exploited. The division of labour would end, and men would be ‘whole’. In an extraordinarily utopian vision of Communist society, each person would be able to ‘do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’
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In these early political writings, therefore, Marx’s ‘Communism’ bore little resemblance to Babouvian equality, the ‘crude Communism’ which was merely ‘universal envy setting itself up as a power’.
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It was much closer to Fourier’s vision, founded on a Romantic, fundamentally artistic view of life, which identified the philistinism and materialism of modern culture as the main evil. The German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, with whom Marx spent a good deal of time in Paris, may have been an influence here. He strongly defended a ‘sensualist’ vision of a future society in which all could fulfil themselves, whatever their rank in society; his enemies were the socialist puritans, who would ‘mercilessly smash the marble statues of beauty’.
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Yet Marx’s Communism was also founded to some degree on his view of pre-capitalist societies, and a Rousseauian love of ancient ‘wholeness’.
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Marx explained that amongst primitive peoples there had been
very little division of labour, except within the family; men produced for themselves or relatives, rather than employers or the market. Therefore they were not ‘alienated’ but had full control over their economic lives, in contrast to those who lived under capitalism, in which people were producing for a larger market. They also had power over their political lives, running their own affairs in small-scale communities.