When did Marx become a Marxist?

Naturally, we trace the origin of Marxism-Leninism to the theories of Karl Marx. The science of revolution bears his name, after all, together with Lenin’s. But of course we should understand that Marx wasn’t born a Marxist. This brings us to the question, which of Marx’s theories can we say are representative of Marxism? In other words, when did Marx become a Marxist, and why? By answering this, we not only proof ourselves against the dogmatist error or thinking Marxism is “whatever Marx wrote,” but we also come to a clearer understanding of what distinguishes Marxism as such.

First, let’s agree that by the time of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, we are presented with the basic ideas of Marxism. This point is not controversial. So, let’s take a look at what Marx was writing and doing before that and see if we can discern when Marxism emerged within Marx’s work. Marx’s writings in the first volume of the Marx/Engels Collected Works begin as early as 1835 when Marx was 17 years old, but nobody thinks those earliest writings are representative of Marx’s scientific socialism. 

The question arises in earnest in his early philosophical works from 1843 and 1844, from The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. These were written before Marx began his lifelong friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels.

The Manuscripts bear little resemblance to the later Marx. They don’t concern themselves with class struggle, revolution, or exploitation. Absent are the categories of historical materialism, such as mode of production, productive forces, ideology, and so on. Instead, the 1844 Manuscripts base their critique of capitalism on the concept of “alienation.” This is an idea drawn from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Feuerebach’s The Essence of Christianity. Hegel argues that God alienates himself in man, and Feuerbach argues that man alienates himself in God. Marx then argues that the worker is alienated in capitalism – from what the workers produce, from the act of production, from nature, and from themselves and others. The work is full of idealist philosophical jargon like “species-being” and “life-essence.” Nevertheless, the solution, Marx says, is communism. But it is an idealized and abstract communism. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, 

“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.”

This is very abstract! There’s no real program, no way to get there, beyond the call for the reclamation of the human essence. Marx has not yet made the leap from “interpreting the world” to changing it. 

Meanwhile, Engels, also prior to his collaboration with Marx, wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in 1845. This book, examining in meticulous detail the facts of working class life at the heart of the industrial revolution, is entirely concrete, and it had a tremendous impact on Marx, who read it later in 1844 prior to its publication. After reading Engels’s book, Marx abandoned his The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts altogether.

Shortly after that, Marx and Engels began their partnership in Paris to work on the book The Holy Family. In 1845 Karl Marx was expelled from France and moved to Brussels, Belgium.

While in Brussels, he produced, together with Engels, one of the most important works in the history of the international communist movement, The German Ideology, written from 1845 to 1846. This was followed not long after by Marx’s book The Poverty of Philosophy. These texts, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy, play an important role for Marx and Engels, in that their goal is to challenge the Young Hegelians, the so-called “True Socialists,” and Proudhon and his followers. This served to clear the way, ideologically, for Marxism to take its place in the workers’ movement. By 1846 Marx and Engels formed the Communist Correspondence Committee, with the goal of organizing a proletarian socialist party. The Committee was a precursor of the Communist League, for which the Manifesto was written on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848.

In all of this work prior to 1848 The German Ideology stands out. Interestingly, it was never published during Marx’s lifetime. And yet, today, it is widely recognized as the principal text in which Marx and Engels developed historical materialism. It wasn’t published until 1932 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin institute in the Soviet Union. Understanding the role The German Ideology played in the development of Marx’s thought is crucial. We can see a number of important differences between Marx’s thought prior to his partnership with Engels and after. 

Prior to 1845, Marx was himself a Young Hegelian. The Young Hegelians were a group of left-leaning philosophers strongly influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and his student, Ludwig Feuerbach. The ideas of the Young Hegelians were still thoroughly liberal and idealist. After reading The Condition of the Working Class in England and beginning his work with Engels, Marx’s entire outlook shifted profoundly to emphasize class struggle at its very core. Almost immediately, his focus in 1845 became the critique of idealist and metaphysical philosophical trends in the socialist movement – trends to which Marx himself was previously sympathetic. 

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that the Young Hegelians are “sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves,” and “their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class.” 

“Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men,” write Marx and Engels “… it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness.” How does Marx, who until only recently considered himself a Young Hegelian, break from this? He writes that “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.” So, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels do exactly that. They then set out to outline their materialist conception of history, how ideas arise from real material processes, and how class struggle functions as the motor of social change. 

Thus Marx broke firmly with the Young Hegelians and established the theory of historical materialism. Furthermore, he came to see historical change as a law-governed process that could be understood scientifically. The French Marxist-Leninist philosopher, Louis Althusser, beginning in the early 1960s, makes the point that The German Ideology represents the key work of what he refers to as Marx’s “epistemological break.” 

As Althusser puts it in For Marx, “There is an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology.” Althusser goes on to say that “This ‘epistemological break’ divides Marx’s thought into two long essential periods: the ‘ideological’ period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845.” In other words, this is the point where Marx’s epistemology matures.

Epistemology in philosophy refers to how we know what we know. In this way, it was a conscious and intentional break from bourgeois ideology, which had until then permeated Marx’s thinking. As Althusser later puts it in his 1974 book, Essays in Self-Criticism, “Theoretically, he wrote these manuscripts on the basis of petty-bourgeois philosophical positions, making the impossible political gamble of introducing Hegel into Feuerbach, so as to be able to speak of labor in alienation, and of History in Man.” 

On the other side of this break, we have the development of dialectical and historical materialism, the critique of political economy, and the elaboration of scientific socialism. Even after the break, “long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project,” Althusser explains. In other words, after the break from bourgeois ideology, Marxism didn’t immediately burst upon the scene complete but was elaborated and developed over a period of time. 

To think of this break as a purely theoretical exercise, producing immediate theoretical results, would itself be idealism. The break was driven by the practical demands of the growing revolutionary movement. As Engels says in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, “the Revolution of 1848 thrust the whole of philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process, Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.” By philosophy here, Engels means idealist philosophy. In any case, the most important takeaway here is that Marx’s works prior 1845 are working within the framework of bourgeois ideology, not Marxism. 

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were translated into English for the first time in 1959 and immediately caused quite a stir among the revisionists as well as among academic “Marxists” in the West. The timing here is significant. These two groups, the revisionists and their academic fellow-travelers, were interested in rebranding socialism as a kind of “humanism” in the wake of Khrushchev’s “destalinization.”

At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev set out to “revise” Marxism, stripping away its revolutionary essence and its fundamentally proletarian class character. With the notable exception of Albania and China, most parties followed along. This revisionist rebranding of socialism as humanism would later find expression in the 1989 counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe. There, as history has shown, the slogan “socialism with a human face” truly meant bourgeois liberalization and the embrace of individualism. It is to Althusser’s credit that he immediately saw this trend for what it was and struggled against it. In this context, there is a very clear reason that these revisionists and academics were so taken with the work of the early Marx: it isn’t Marxist. 

As Marxist-Leninists today, this helps us clarify a few essential points. First, Marxism isn’t just whatever Marx said. That’s dogmatism. And that kind of dogmatism can also be put into the service of Marxism’s enemies. On the contrary, Marxism is the proletarian revolutionary science of social change, founded on a fundamental break from bourgeois ideology, idealism, and metaphysical thinking of all sorts. Marx’s ideas developed and changed over the course of his career. The important thing is to master Marxism-Leninism as a science. 

Second, Marxism’s purpose is not simply to understand the world, but to change it. Theory and practice are inextricably linked. Revolutionary practice depends on Marxism to be successful, and Marxism, as a science, is enriched and developed through practice. It was through building the socialist movement, organizing the Communist Correspondence Committee and the Communist League, and then through participating in the upheavals of the 1848 revolutions, that Marxism grew out of abstraction to an engagement with the real world in concrete terms. As revolutionaries today, always faced with the modern challenges of dogmatism, revisionism, and all kinds of bourgeois academic ideas masquerading as some kind of Marxism, these lessons are as important as ever. 

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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