Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

      The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

      Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians. Although (or perhaps because) Bauer was an ostentatious atheist, he thought Christianity a more advanced phase of civilisation than Judaism, and therefore one step closer to the joyful deliverance which would follow the inevitable destruction of all religion – just as a gravedigger might regard a doddery dowager as a more promising potential customer than the local Queen of the May.

      This perverse justification for official bigotry, which allied Bauer with the most reactionary boobies in Prussia, was demolished with characteristic brutality. True, Marx seemed to accept the caricature of Jews as inveterate moneylenders – but then so did almost everyone else. (The German word ‘Judentum’ was commonly used at the time as a synonym for ‘commerce’.) More significantly, he didn’t blame or accuse them: if they were forbidden to participate in political institutions, was it any wonder that they exercised the one power permitted to them, that of making money? Cash and religion both estranged humanity from itself, and so ‘the emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’.

      From Judaism, nota bene, not from the Jews. Ultimately, mankind must be freed from the tyranny of all religions, Christianity included, but in the meantime it was absurd and cruel to deny Jews the same status as any other citizen. Marx’s commitment to equal rights is confirmed by a letter he sent from Cologne in March 1843 to Arnold Ruge: ‘I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer’s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational.’ It is also borne out by the other major work on which he started during the post-honeymoon summer of 1843, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction’, which was completed in Paris a few months later and published in the spring of 1844.

      Though its title may be familiar only to the initiated, the essay itself is as famous as the article on Judaism is obscure. Many of those who have never read a word of Marx still quote the epigram about religion being the opium of the people. It is one of his most potent metaphors – inspired, one guesses, by the ‘Opium War’ between the British and Chinese, fought from 1839 to 1842. But do those who parrot the words actually understand them? Thanks to his self-appointed interpreters in the Soviet Union, who hijacked the phrase to justify their persecution of old believers, it is usually taken to mean that religion is a drug dispensed by wicked rulers to keep the masses in a state of dopey, bubble-brained quiescence.

      Marx’s point was rather more subtle and sympathetic. Though he insisted that ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’, he understood the spiritual impulse. The poor and wretched who expect no joy in this world may well choose to console themselves with the promise of a better life in the next; and if the state cannot hear their cries and supplications, why not appeal to an even mightier authority who promised that no prayer would go unanswered? Religion was a justification for oppression – but also a refuge from it. ‘Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

      Most eloquent. Elsewhere in the essay, however, his verbal facility occasionally degenerates into mere word-juggling for its own sake – or, to be blunt, showing off. Here he is on Martin Luther and the German Reformation:

      He destroyed faith in authority, but only by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into laymen, but only by transforming the laymen into priests. He freed mankind from external religiosity, but only by making religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from the chains, but only by putting the heart in chains.

      Or on the difference between France and Germany:

      In France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything. In Germany no one may be anything unless he renounces everything. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation.

      After a few paragraphs of this pyrotechnic flamboyance, one suspects that the display itself has become an end rather than a means.

      To wish away Marx’s stylistic excess is, however, to miss the point. His vices were also his virtues, manifestations of a mind addicted to paradox and inversion, antithesis and chiasmus. Sometimes this dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but more often it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down – including society itself. How could the mighty be put down from their seat, and the humble exalted? In the critique of Hegel he set out his answer for the first time: what was required was ‘a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes … This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.’ That last word resounds like a clap of thunder over a parched landscape. Never mind that neither Germany nor France yet had a proletariat worth the name: a storm was coming.

      Marx’s theory of class struggle was to be refined and embellished over the next few years – most memorably in the Communist Manifesto – but its outline was already clear enough: ‘Every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneath it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureaucrats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ The role of emancipator therefore passes from one class to the next until universal liberation is finally achieved. In France, the bourgeoisie had already toppled the nobility and the clergy, and another upheaval seemed imminent. Even in stolid old Prussia, medieval government could not prolong its reign indefinitely. With a parting jibe at Teutonic efficiency – ‘Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one’ – he set off for Paris. It was, he sensed, the only place to be at this moment in history. ‘When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.’

       3 The Grass-eating King

      ‘And so – to Paris, to the old university of philosophy and the new capital of the new world!’ Marx wrote to Ruge in September 1843. ‘Whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month, since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.’ The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had made the French capital a natural rallying point. It was a city of plotters and poets and pamphleteers, sects and salons and secret societies – ‘the nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at intervals which galvanised the whole world’. All the best-known political thinkers of the age were Frenchmen: the mystical Christian socialist Pierre Leroux, the utopian communists Victor Considérant and Etienne Cabet, the liberal orator and poet Alphonse de Lamartine (or, to give him his full glorious appellation, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine). Above all there was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, libertarian anarchist, who had won instant fame in 1840 with his book What Is Property? – a question he answered on page one with the simple formulation ‘property is theft’. All these political picadors would eventually