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Chapter 5: The
beginnings of scientific
socialism

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DESTRUCTION OF MEANING OUT

NOW

BY SIMON

The beginnings of scientic socialism when Freddy met

Charlie
The year 1843 was the end of the Left Hegelians as a distinct
intellectual current. Feuerbach, Bauer and Karl Marx all diverged along
dierent paths, only Marx formally began the break with Hegelianism
as a pure philosophical tradition and moving towards a revolutionary
and entirely new system. This had to occur increasingly in debate with
his old comrades in the Left Hegelian tradition. Rosa Luxemburg
argued that this criticism was the rst step on Marxs road to
revolutionary politics a necessary clarication against the idealist
errors of his contemporaries. As Marx became more critical of the
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Destruction of Meaning by Simon Hardy,

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Ever wondered why politics seems so empty
sometimes? Why media spectacle has
replaced meaningful debate? How someone
like Obama can be called a "communist" for
passing healthcare reform? How the most
successful capitalist country in the world
today, China, is run by a Communist Party?
Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

CHAPTERS

errors of his contemporaries. As Marx became more critical of the

other young Hegelians, it became increasingly necessary to turn back
to Hegel himself to understand where the problems came from.
Between 1843 and 1844 Marx carried out this work which set the
stage for his later more developed theories.
The Young Hegelian movement were advocates of Feuerbachs
criticism of religion which he had put forward in The essence of
Christianity 1. Feuerbachs argument was that it was not God that had
made humanity but that the idea of a God was in fact the result of our
own alienation from ourselves. This power idea immediately leant
itself to humanistic and anthropological understandings of human
nature, it allows us to look back on the history books which are full of
the interventions of gods and living deities and see in them humanities
alienation from itself. We attribute to God all the things that we could
be, loving, forgiving, angry, jealous and so on, and whilst giving it a
divine sanction we strip these things from our own souls. Once we see
that the supposedly all powerful and omnipresent god is in fact simply
our own projections actually we can begin to place everything in its
right order, that our nature is intrinsic to us, and not the result of some
outside being and that we are part of a material condition which gives
rise to such ideas as religion or spirituality. Feuerbach ips Hegels
subject and predicate around, beginning the task of turning Hegel the
right way up. This contribution to the Left Hegelians thought is
perhaps one of the most inuential on the young Marx and Engels
writing in Paris, Marx uses the subject-predicate ip repeatedly in his
writings in Paris and it can be found at other key stages throughout his
work.
It was 40 years later that Engels
really claried the importance of
Feuerbach in their moves from
idealism to materialism, through
the critique of religion and
where it comes from. His book,
Ludwig Feuerbach and the end
of classical German philosophy
is an open and clear defence of
materialism
and
dialectics
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CHAPTERS
Introduction: What is being discussed?
Chapter 1: The Enlightenment
Chapter 2: The breakthrough in philosophy
Chapter 3: Hegel and the completion of
German idealist philosophy
Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists

Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic

Chapter 7: Historical Materialism
Chapter 8: The method of abstraction
Chapter 9: Alienation
Chapter 10: Social Oppression
Chapter 11: Surplus value, the working class
and ideology
Chapter 12: Boom and bust and the limits of
capitalism
Chapter 13: Revolutionary crises under
capitalism
Methodology I: Scientific Socialism as a
World-view
Methodology II: Marxism and determinism
Chapter 14: The capitalist state, workers
state, socialism and communism (the riddle
of history solved)
Chapter 15: The Second International

materialism
and
dialectics
written by Engels towards the
end of his life. Almost as a
statement of intent in the
foreword he explains that he and
Marx have not returned to the
subject of philosophy for many
decades, but that it was a
formative part of their early
Engels often had to help Marx complete the
development into communists.
weekly Sudoku challenge
Then
came
Feuerbachs
Essence of Christianity. With one
blow,
it
pulverized
the
contradiction, in that without
circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature
exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which
we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up.
Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our
religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reection of our
own essence. The spell was broken; the system was exploded and
cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our
imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experienced the
liberating eect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was
general; we all became at once Feuerbachians.
This materialist perspective is the root of subsequent Marxist politics
and theory. Central to their understanding of their own place in the
history of ideas was that they stood at the cross roads of moderniy
with respect to the primary division in philosophy being between those
that gave spirit primacy over nature and those that put nature before
the spirit. The point of philosophy now was to analyse the world for
what it is and ght to change it for the better, to end alienation and
essense of humanity back into line with the material world. This new
perspective allowed Marx to critique the idealist philosophy of Hegel,
to escape from the Absolute and arrive back on a sensuous, moving
and socially complex Earth.
Considering the debates at the time, it is no surpruse that Marx starts
by criticising religion, the beginning of his struggle against idealism.
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Chapter 16: The debates over historical

materialism
Chapter 17: Fabianism in Britain
Chapter 18: Revisionist controversy in
Germany
Chapter 19: Reform or revolution 1914-1919
Part Four The struggle for the soul of
Marxism
Chapter 20: Ultra leftism and the Third
International
Chapter 21: Hegelian Marxism, Lukcs and
Korsch
Chapter 22: Antonio Gramsci theories of
hegemony, civil society and revolution
Chapter 23: Soviet philosophy
Chapter 24: Leon Trotsky and the fight for
the International
Part Five The post war world
Chapter 25: The Frankfurt School and critical
theory
Chapter 26: Maoism in East and West
Chapter 27: The New Left
Chapter 28: Existentialism: a philosophy of
reality
Chapter 30: Structuralist Marxism
Chapter 31: Poulantzas and Eurocommunism

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by criticising religion, the beginning of his struggle against idealism.

He wrote in 1844 that the criticism of religion is the premise of all
criticism, a distinctly Feuerbachian and Hegelian phrase. But by this
point Marx was not simply a Feuerbachian, any more than he was
simply a Hegelian. His real breakthrough was to combine materialist
ideas with the dialectical notion of contradiction and change in the
real world. The next step was to synthesis Feuerbach with Hegel and
transcend both, that is overcome the limitations of both.
As the previous chapters make clear at this point Europe was brewing
with new ideas and social changes. The continent existed in a strange
half-way house between thoroughly bourgeois salons and factories in
some cities and the agrarian, feudal statelets of places like Prussia.
The Hapsburg monarchy still ruled in many countries, an increasingly
anarchronistic aristocracy living in palaces side by side with nouveauriche industrialists in their mansions. The liberal middle classes were
straining at the bit with ideas of individual freedom and economic
autonomy, publishing radical newspapers and pamphlets, agitating for
revolutions and freedom. The year 1848 looms large in this time, a
series of bourgeois revolutions which shook the Europe to its core,
with barricades and street battles from Paris to Vienna and the
people came out against the old monarchies. The cutting edge of
debate was not whether there would be a revolution, but who would
lead it and where would it end up. For many liberals the question of
civil society and increasing the public space against the old regimes
was essential for their political and economic futures. For others the
newly emerged working classes and poor, disenfranchised, physically
and spiritually crushed by their lives oered hope for a more radical
change. But this it was not just the working class as victims of
capitalism, but as agents of their own emancipation which was such
an important aspect of this new world view. The insurrection by
French workers in Lyons in 1831 marked the start of the French
workers movement. Likewise the Silesian weavers strike in 1844 saw
the arrival onto the scene of the German working class as a social
force for struggle in its own right no longer waiting for philanthropists
and paternal rich men to lift them out of suffering.
It is in this context that Engels travelled to Paris to meet with Marx in
1844 2. Over the course of several days Marx read Engels newly
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1844 2. Over the course of several days Marx read Engels newly
published work The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Marx
later claimed that this was what won him to the working class as the
revolutionary force capable of overthrowing the old order, although he
had clearly been inuenced by his engagement with various workers
organisation in Paris as well.
As a newspaper editor Marx had been a thorn in the side of the local
authorities, who closed down his paper and forced him out of the
country. It was sitting in the cafs of Paris in exile in the years 1843-44
that Marx developed the rough outlines of a theory to which he would
dedicate his life to explaining. He starts with critique of Hegel, a
critique of philosophy in general, an analysis of political economy and
the actors of social change. This corresponds to the project of
establishing a clear methodological basis, then an analysis of the
social economic relations and a exposition of how the working class is
the revolutionary class under those particular relations. On a more
concrete level this meant clarifying a method, the theory of historical
materialism, the actual epoch that humanity found itself in and nally,
a programme for revolutionary change.
As he later wrote in his Preface to an Critique of Political Economy:
My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor
political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on
the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but
that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life,
the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and
French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term
civil society; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to
be sought in political economy.
It is from this point that Marx develops a system which will provide
the theoretical perspective for the overthrow of capitalism and the
creation of a socialist society. As against the utopian socialists, Marxs
main contribution was to identify the basis of exploitation under
capitalism and subsequently the people who had the agency to
change the system from top to bottom the working class. He also
outlined a specic theory of society and its functioning which provided
necessary illumination into the actions not only of classes but also
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necessary illumination into the actions not only of classes but also
individuals, not just an industrialist or landlord but also nations and
armies.
Lets take these earliest building blocks of scientic socialism around
this time.
He spent much of 1843 reading Hegels Philosophy of Right and
undertook a forensic analysis of key sections of it. He systematically
poured through sections 261 to 313 of Hegels book and draws out
some of the essential features of how Marxism would be dierentiated
from the other left Hegelian views, and of course from Hegel himself.
Crucially some of the concepts developed by Marx in this work
remained consistent throughout his political life, undermining the 20th
century claim that there is a young and a mature Marx, or some kind
of epistemological break (as Louis Althusser later argued). Indeed
nearly all of Marxs fundamental ideas are contained in the 1844
works in essence, though in an undeveloped form and sometimes
idealist form. What connects the Marx the younger with Marx the
elder is that he is concerned throughout his life with the question of
human relations and the nature of social being. Writing in 1843 he
says To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the
root is man himself. 3 Uncovering the real nature of our social being,
free from false consciousness, ideology and fetishism is that drives the
young Marx and Engels, they see the structures of class society as the
cause of this alienation, and then proceed to spend the remainder of
their years expanding these insights into the realm of economics.
This early work stands out from a historical point of view as it is the
rst time that Marx articulates Communism as the solution to the
social ills brought about by capitalism. Only a few years as editor of
Rheische Zeitung Marx had resolutely denied the relevance of
communism, but in the intervening years he had been radicalised
beyond being merely a radical democrat. The growth of an
independent working class movement across France and Germany
between 1831-1844 was crucial to his recruitment to socialism, the
sight of a dynamic, new class going into struggle against the
capitalists showed how a society without private property could
potentially emerge. But the idea of communism as a movement was
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potentially emerge. But the idea of communism as a movement was

still very new at the time and was under developed as a serious
theoretical standpoint, although traces of it could be found in the
philosophies of the Ancients (Pythagoras and Plato). So, dealing with
the practical questions at hand, the issue that had most perplexed the
Left Hegelians, he sought to understand why Germany could produce
such radical philosophy and yet be so backward compared to the
nation states of France and Britain. The bulk of his initial theoretical
writings is focussed on applying a Hegelian methods to the problems
of historical development of Germany at that time.
The Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were written over
the course of several months, a writing process that ended just before
Marx was expelled from France and went to Belgium in early 1845. At
the beginning of their collaboration, Marx and Engels understood their
immediate tasks as settling accounts with their youthful ideas. They
wrote devastating but largely unpublished polemics against their peers
in the Young Hegelian movement, clarifying their materialist views
and calling for a break with philosophy and a turn towards politics and
action.
What Marx develops in these Paris fragments and notes is a
continuation of the political economic studying that he had begun the
summer before when he read James Mill, David Ricardo and Adam
Smith. Here he integrates the concepts of alienation, through a
Hegelian critique, and crucially for all his subsequent work the
notion of labour and the transformative eects of humanities
interaction with nature.
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Notes:
1. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm
2. In fact this was their second meeting, the young Fredrich had popped into Marxs editorial
office two years previously with a draft article for publication
3. Marx K, 1994, p34
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Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists

Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic

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