History and Nature in Karl Marx: Marx's Debt to German Idealism

Since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991 and the subsequent hollowing out of Marxist beliefs elsewhere in the world, interest in the history of Marxism has all but disappeared. Unlike the activists of the 1960s and 1970s, who formed Capital reading groups and argued out rival political positions with appeals to canonical texts, today's radical movements, even when explicitly anti-capitalist or imperialist in intent, no longer refer to Marx or, if they do, pay scant attention to the provenance of his thought.

There is no reason to lament the decline of these sectarian traditions. But that should not kill off other ways in which Marx's thinking might still be of interest. A clearer idea of Marx's continuing relevance can be gained if Marx is separated from 'Marxism'. 'Marxism' was a tradition which came into being at the end of the 1870s and dominated debate about the significance of Marx's work through to the 1990s and the end of the Cold War.¹

If we wish to point to those aspects of Marx's thought which remain valuable today, three points might be highlighted. First, there remains his characterization of the capitalist mode of production, most famously evoked at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto. There had been no lack of pictures of commercial society or the emerging landscape of factory industry before Marx wrote. But no account was as powerful in evoking the energy driving capitalism forward. What was emphasized in the Manifesto was the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless, and unfinished character of capitalism as a historical phenomenon, its endless invention of new needs and its subversion of all inherited hierarchies, cultures and beliefs. The Manifesto was written in 1848, but its picture of capitalist dynamism still resonates today.

A second aspect of Marx's thinking which remains less well known is that its starting point was the criticism of religion. Marx was initially part of the Young Hegelians, a radical philosophical movement between the 1830s and 1848, which included David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and Ludwig Feuerbach. This had started as a critical examination of Hegel's optimistic reason-based reconciliation between Christianity, the modern state and the modern economy ('civil society'). Hegel's optimism had been a product of the 'Reform Era' in Prussia (1807–19) – a series of fundamental reforms, of both the army and of the state, following the disastrous defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena in 1806.

But in 1819, four years after the Battle of Waterloo, Prussia once more turned its back on reform, and remained resistant to liberal change throughout the pre-1848 period. In 1840, this reactionary turn had been further intensified by the accession of a new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who was keen to emphasize Prussia's identity as a 'Christian State'. In response, the radical followers of Hegel, the so-called 'Young Hegelians', engaged in a process of fundamental historical and philosophical criticism of the Biblical narrative, and beyond that, of religion itself. Their most important conclusion – associated with Ludwig Feuerbach – was that man projected his own power and creativity into God and represented himself as the creation of God. Feuerbach's procedure was to reverse the equation: God did not create Man; Man created God. Once this truth was recognized, the emancipation of Man could proceed.²

As a student in Berlin, Marx initially worked with one of the most radical of the Young Hegelian Biblical critics, Bruno Bauer, but from 1843 he shifted his intellectual allegiance to Feuerbach. Marx's own innovation was to maintain that the critique which Feuerbach had developed in relation to God could be applied to other 'Abstractions' – to the state, to economic exchange, and to human labour. At the same time, however, he rejected Feuerbach's conception of man as a passive creature of nature. He attempted instead to combine Feuerbach's criticism of religion with the conception of the self-making of man through his labour found in Hegel.

When this approach was applied to the economy, it became...