August 5, 2002

 

 

Book Review: Marx Before Marxism

In his preface to this book, author David McLellan, who has written several popular books on Marx and has taught and lectured on Marx and the history of ideas throughout the United States, gives his purpose: “Marx’s early writings have suffered, in the few detailed studies [before 1970] devoted to them in English, from being discussed in books concerned to argue a particular interpretation. The aim of this book is to present Marx’s early writings, as neutrally as possible, in their historical context.” This is really superfluous reading, because McLellan plainly maintains this goal in his presentation throughout the rest of the work. His rhetoric is efficient in its task.

McLellan successfully uses the first chapter to deeply embroil the reader in the controversies of the day, but here he is thorough in examining each popular mode of thought, and careful to class each mode by its cause, not necessarily its expression. He introduces the significant causes of conflict at that dynamic time in the German states: the growing bourgeoisie’s conflict of interest between wealth and the welfare of their workers; the effective economic slavery of the newly freed serfs in Prussia; the aftershock of Napoleon’s legislation, blockade, ideology, and actions on business and thought; etc.

McLellan is careful not to interpret vague statements where unjustified, and provides context to clear up questions of interpretation, especially important when trying to identify the chronological order of interrelated epiphanies that led to mature Marxism as philosophy’s new total system. For instance, McLellan shows that Marx maintained his dialectical approach from his earliest preserved essays—written when he was seventeen—as his thoughts moved through romanticism to a sort of Hegelianism to historical materialism, but notes that in these earliest writings “It would be a mistake to … think that Marx was producing questions to which he would later produce answers … Marx is ‘not yet’ this and only shows ‘anticipations’ of that” (McLellan 37). Eduard Gans is quoted—“…[Slavery] exists in a most absolute manner. The view that the state should provide for the needs of the most numerous and poorest class is one of the most profound of our time. … Future history will speak more than once of the struggle of the proletarians against the middle classes” (McLellan 51)—while the author points out that, “Although many of these ideas were to reappear in Marx’s writings, they had little influence upon him for the moment” (McLellan 51).

McLellan remains specific to the time and place, and does not bend to accommodate interests from later Marx or recent times, but covers only those overtly present in the threads of thought intersecting Marx’s early life. Instead, the reader can draw implications from the more generalized theories. For example, one can see the many forms of alienation now common in Marxist criticism in Marx’s refutation of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, where Marx says the family and civil society determine the will of the State; the Hegelian Idea, in its ideal form and existing apart from the reality, does not create the reality. This is in keeping with Marx’s attitude of pure democracy, and his belief that “The bureaucrats are the Jesuits and theologians of the state …. The actual purpose of the state … appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to the state. … The bureaucracy … turns the ‘formal state spirit’ or the actual spiritlessness of the state into a categorical imperative” (Tucker 23-24). Thus the mystification that deprives things of their true nature must be destroyed in all forms.

McLellan mentions Die Freien—a group of radical intellectuals consisting of Max Stirner, Edgar Bauer, Engels, and others—who threatened popular opinion of Marx’s efforts for liberal reform, but does not give a full sense of Marx’s reaction to them. McLellan shows the perception that the anarchists in this group only meant to destroy civilization and Marx’s view that the Freien voice did not have a place in the newspaper, which was meant to report responsibly and on matters directly related to the state for the purpose of educating the public. I would have preferred more discussion of this theme. One sees that in defending his views against the anarchism of the time, Marx had to define what constituted the actual state, and how this was to exist without creating a separate, imposing spiritual Idea, but one that instead produced Marx’s homogenous spirit through natural law. For instance, in a true democracy, does the majority constitute for Marx the will of a population in all cases or can it become a tyrannical Idea? And how exactly does Marx consider anything outside the individual that the individual does not recognize as himself to be the spirit of his nation?

In chapters five through seven, McLellan dispassionately surveys the ideas contained in some of Marx’s most recognized and debated works. Here Marx examines philosophy as determined by history, revolution through consciousness, government’s appearance as religion (and thus the futility of religious debate), the Jewish question, etc., and McLellan makes certain he does not overlook any particularly important development.

The concluding chapter is very contextualizing, as it gives the reader opinions on the early works of Marx by Marx and Engels themselves, in light of changing interests in Hegel, Feuerbach, and the many other thinkers that contributed to Marxism, and of developments in Russia. One sees here that Marx is not the figure of popular imagination that he appears to many later communists and the world at large, and that his spirit has often itself been transformed into a sort of alienated dogma in fashionable thought.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1979.

 

McLellan, David. Marx Before Marxism. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.