KARL MARX

IIO KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
find the arguments rather difficult to follow. In so far as the arguments can
be grasped, 'common sense' would tend to agree with Marx as against
Hegel - though it is, of course, a Hegel refracted through Marx himself. 183
What must be remembered, however, is the dense idealist fog (created
particularly by Hegel's disciples) that Marx had to disperse in order to
arrive at any sort of 'empirical' view.
Marx himself supplied no conclusion to the 'Paris Manuscripts' and it
is impossible to draw one from such a disjointed work which included
discussions of economics, social criticism, philosophy, history, logic, dialectics
and metaphysics. Although each section was dominated by a separate
subject, to some extent all were approached in similar fashion. Here
for the first time there appeared together, if not yet united, what Engels
described as the three constituent elements in Marx's thought - German
idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics. It is above
all these Manuscripts which (in the West at least) reorientated many
people's interpretation of Marx - to the extent of their even being considered
as his major work. They were not published until the early 1930s
and did not attract public attention until after the Second World War;
certain facets of the Manuscripts were soon assimilated to the existentialism
and humanism then so much in vogue and presented an altogether
more attractive basis for non-Stalinist socialism than textbooks on dialectical
materialism.
Seen in their proper perspective, these Manuscripts were in fact no
more than a starting-point for Marx - an initial, exuberant outpouring of
ideas to be taken up and developed in subsequent economic writings,
particularly in the Grimdrisse and in Capital. In these later works the
themes of the '1844 Manuscripts' would certainly be pursued more systematically,
in greater detail, and against a much more solid economic
and historical background; but the central inspiration or vision was to
remain unaltered: man's alienation in capitalist society, and the possibility
of his emancipation - of his controlling his own destiny through
communism.
IV. LAST MONTHS IN PARIS
While Marx had been feverishly composing his Manuscripts in Paris,
Jenny was re-immersing herself in the provincial life of Trier. She was
glad to be reunited with her mother for whom she had so often wept in
France; but the genteel poverty in which the Westphalen household was
compelled to live and the sponging of her spineless brother Edgar
depressed her. The baby, now provided with a wet nurse, was soon out