THE MAN BEHIND THE THEORY

...When Charles Dana asked Marx to become' a correspondent on German affairs for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx readily accepted the offer despite the fact that his command of English was quite atrocious...

...McLellan can hardly be accused of ignoring Engels' contribution to Marx's life and thought...

...Hegel's Geist-as well as the God of Judaeo-Christian theology-merely represented the speculative extrapolation of natural human characteristics into a transcendent, and therefore alien, being...

...Considering the overwhelming influence of Marx's thinking in this century, it is astonishing to realize that until now the English-speaking world has for all practical purposes been deprived of a full-scale Marx biography...

...By this time Marx had secured his doctorate in philosophy, but his association with the radical Young Hegelians made it politically impossible for him to secure an academic position...

...Thus it would have been helpful in shedding light on the current ideological rift within Marxism had McLellan devoted more attention to the fact that it was Engels, not Marx, who bequeathed to Marxism the philosophical world-view of Dialectical Materialism...

...Between the time of Marx's death and the Bolshevik takeover in Russia an entire cosmological vision of reality, decked in dialectical trappings, had made its appearance through the agency of such theorists as Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin...

...McLellan's omission of Marx "the philosopher" may not help us to understand the contemporary situation within Marxism, but it certainly gives us a more accurate portrait of the revolutionary thinker who thought that "ideas can accomplish absolutely nothing...

...Within that movement was another young man named Ludwig Feuerbach...

...The impact of Feuerbach's critique was devastating...

...In a series of short works Feuerbach managed to abolish the imposing edifice of Hegelianism by showing that Hegel's idealistic philosophy of Geist was a metaphysical distortion of the simple fact of human consciousness...

...Hegel's influence upon Marx has become a commonplace in the history of modern thought, but Hegel's greater influence upon Engels is too often ignored...

...Marx's scorn for all speculative constructions was summed up in his charge that "Philosophy has the same relationship to real life as masturbation has to sexual love...

...McLellan details the financial support provided by Engels for the perpetually "embarrassed" Marx family during their exile life in London from 1849 onwards, and it is also revealed that Engels rescued Marx from another kind of embarrassment altogether when he accepted the paternity of Marx's illegitimate son by Helene Demuth, the companion-servant to the Marx family...

...For McLellan this indicates that Marx's thought developed organically throughout his lifetime and that there is no essential discontinuity between his earlier and later writings...

...Until his death in 1883, however, Marx remained essentially a formulator of ideas: the men who would "apply practical force" to realize his ideas would come later, applying that force with a vengeance that would transform the shape of the twentieth century...

...McLellan, who teaches at the University of Kent in England, has previously made important contributions to the understanding of Marx in his Marx Before Marxism, The Young Hegelians And Karl Marx and The Thought of Karl Marx: all remarkable for their clarity and objectivity...

...The relentless preacher of proletarian revolution was born into a comfortable middle-class family at Trier in the Catholic Rhineland in 1818...

...These Manuscripts remained unpublished until 1932 and their appearance at that time provoked a reassessment of Marx's thought which continues up to the present...

...The romance was passionate but brief...

...The present biography exhibits these same characteristics, but there is a difference between critical studies and a biography: what is a virtue in the former may become a vice in the latter...

...Trier had been under the political and intellectual sway of France until 1814 when it was incorporated into Prussia, so that the young Marx grew up in an atmosphere charged by the revolutionary enthusiasm of the eighteenth century and inspired by the writings of the French Enlightenment...

...Since Mehring's time, however, the un-expurgated Marx-Engels correspondence has become available along with some important, but previously unpublished, works by Marx-particularly the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse of 1858-rendering Mehring's work outdated...

...To become real, ideas require men who apply practical force...

...Witty and straightforward...

...Rather, it is the speculative legacy of Engels, which McLellan chooses to mention only in passing...

...His father, a respected lawyer, was descended from an ancient line of rabbis but had converted to Protestantism so that he could continue to practice his profession under the Prussian regime...

...Socialist ideas also crackled in the air and the young Marx was introduced quite early to the works of Saint-Simon by his mentor and future father-in-law Baron von Westphalen...

...What McLellan fails to recognize is that the serious problem which separates the followers of the "early Marx" from classical Marxists is not a question of historical continuity but the logical question of contradiction...

...Paul, and although some might suggest that both movements would have been better off for the omission, the historical facts must nonetheless be recognized...

...It is this doctrine which causes great difficulties for those committed to the vision of man set forth in Marx's early Manuscripts...

...Since these developments occurred after Marx's death the biographer is no doubt justified in his procedure...

...Contemporary Marxists tend to divide themselves between those who accept the "young Marx" as the real Marx and those who continue to insist that it is only in the "older Marx" of Kapital that the true revolutionary thinker can be found...

...In other words, virtus in medio stat...

...Their joint-authorship of such important documents as The Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology is examined in skillful detail and their collaboration in other theoretical projects-as well as in practical revolutionary activities-is dutifully recorded...

...The obliging Engels complied, producing eighteen articles which were warmly received in the American press-all under Marx's name...

...Sir Isaiah Berlin's lucid but short biography of Marx appeared in 1939, and for some years Franz Mehring's classic 1918 biography has been available in translation for those readers willing to wrestle with his massive- and somewhat adulatory - account...

...To resolve the crisis Marx dispatched a note to Engels instructing him to "Write a series of articles on Germany from 1848 onwards...

...These "Outlines" were written in 18S8 as Marx was rushing (once again) to get his work on economics into print...

...This was the view of Karl Marx in The Holy Family in 1845...

...Studies on Marx rarely emphasize-or even acknowledge-these early influences on Marx which account for a great deal in his later writings which is otherwise inexplicable...

...In striving to maintain "a sympathetically critical standpoint" McLellan chose to be absolutely objective, with the result that his approach to Marx's life and thought is by and large neither sympathetic nor critical: it is merely objective...

...Their Damon and Pythias relationship is carefully recorded from their Paris meeting in 1844 up until Marx's death in London forty years later...

...While the free development of the individual emphasized in the earlier humanistic period seems uncomfortable next to the deterministic engine of historical development (i.e., Historical Materialism) elaborated in the later works, it is certainly incompatible with the Dialectical Materialism which provides the Weltanschauung of classical Marxism...

...Well, not quite...

...Although the influence of Feuerbach can hardly be discerned in classical Marxism, the import of Feuerbach's thinking can be seen on every page of Marx's Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts written in 1844 in Paris while Marx was contributing to Arnold Ruge's German-French Annals...

...In directing man's attention away from the human and toward the transcendent, both philosophy and religion stood accused of perverting mankind's sense of itself by engendering a false feeling of alienation in modern man...

...Partly through the writings of Feuer-bach, Marx became convinced that the age of philosophy, epitomized by Hegel, had come to an end: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it...

...Marxism without Engels would be like Christianity without St...

...Although McLellan concentrates on the exterior succession of events, avoiding psycho-history or any attempt at interior analysis, the biographical form by its very nature allows for insights into an understanding of Marx which a knowledge of his writings alone could never provide...

...Through such works as Dialectics of Nature and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy Engels built upon the systematic view of nature and the universe which he had first elaborated in Anti-Duhring...

...The inevitable confrontation with the mighty Hegel came (reluctantly, it is interesting to note) during Marx's law studies at the University of Berlin...

...We all at once became Feuer-bachians," exclaimed Engels in an unaccustomed burst of enthusiasm some fifty years after the event...

...Thus be had no use for the kind of "philosophizing" which was posthumously attributed to him through the influence of Engels...

...He has therefore tried to write his biography "sine ira et studio . . . from a sympathetically critical standpoint that avoids the extremes of hagiog-raphy and denigration...

...Instead, he turned to journalism...

...In The German Ideology of 1845 Marx denounced all attempts at "system building" and had excoriated Feuerbach because "he only interprets the existing sensual world, has only the relationship of a theorist to it, while in reality for the practical materialist i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things...

...Indeed, Engels was conveniently available for all kinds of assignments...

...Marx's own mature theories on history, class-warfare and the inherent self-destructiveness of capitalism are not the serious stumbling-blocs which have alienated contemporary Marxist humanists...

...While the classical Marxism which became institutionalized in the Soviet Union in this century emphasized the rigidly deterministic character of Marx's theories on society and historical development, these earlier writings revealed a humanistic vision of man which stressed the integrity of the individual in society and freedom as the goal of social development...

...In his preface McLellan remarks that much of what has been written about Marx has suffered "from the grinding of political axes," which is undoubtedly both true and lamentable...

...McLellan rejects this either/or problematic, arguing that it became outmoded with the appearance of Marx's Grundrisse ("Outlines") in 1941...

...It had the effect of drawing Marx away from law and into the arms of philosophy and the Young Hegelian movement...

...And it was under the authority of Marx's name that Engels introduced Dialectical Materialism into Marxism after the death of the founder...

...It is in the Manuscripts that Marx's much-acclaimed theory of human alienation is given its fullest expression...

...Thus the appearance of David Mc-Lellan's Karl Marx, His Life And Thought is something of an event in Marxist scholarship...

...If McLellan has avoided the extremes of hagiography and denigration, he has done so at the price of maintaining the kind of ascetically objective standpoint which can render the life of a passionate thinker as dull as a recitation of the second declension neuter...

...Worse things could be said of a biography devoted to a thinker as inflammatory as Karl Marx, and McLellan's work must be acknowledged as the most trustworthy source of information on Marx's life currently available in English...

...Marx's university studies may have been dominated by Hegel, but his childhood "catechism" consisted of Voltaire and Rousseau...

...McLellan notes that the "concepts of alienation, objectification, appropriation, man's dialectical relationship to nature and his generic or social nature all recur in the Grundrisse...

...The gentlemen in the foreign department are very outspoken...