KARL MARX

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KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Germany. 59 He knew intimately both its leaders: Ewerbeck, a doctor, and
Maurer who had been a member of Ruge's short-lived phalanstery. But
he did not actually join any of the societies. 60
Although Marx's second article ended with the forthright proclamation
of the proletariat's destiny, the first part was a reworking of old themes.
It was written as an introduction to a proposed rewriting of his Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right; in fact, several of the arguments outlined in
the Critique had already been developed in The Jewish Question. Being
only an introduction, it was in the nature of a summary, ordering its
themes in a way that reflected the different phases of Marx's own development:
religious, philosophical, political, revolutionary. Taken as a whole,
it formed a manifesto whose incisiveness and dogmatism anticipated the
Communist Manifesto of 1848.
All the elements of the article were already contained in the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, but there was now a quite new emphasis on
the proletariat as future emancipator of society. Although written in
Paris, the whole article was orientated towards Germany and the possibility
of a German revolution; accordingly it started with religion and
went on to politics - the two most pressing subjects in Germany
(according to his programmatic letter to Ruge of September 1843).
Marx began with a brilliant passage on religion summarising the whole
work of the Young Hegelian school from Strauss to Feuerbach. 'So far
as Germany is concerned,' he wrote, 'the criticism of religion is essentially
complete, and criticism of religion is the presupposition of all criticism.' 61
This latter assertion doubtless depended on two main factors: in Germany,
religion was one of the chief pillars of the Prussian state and had to
be knocked away before any fundamental political change could be
contemplated; more generally, Marx believed that religion was the most
extreme form of alienation and the point where any process of secularisation
had to start, and this supplied him with a model for criticism of
other forms of alienation. But he differed from Feuerbach in this: it was
not simply a question of reduction - of reducing religious elements to
others that were more fundamental. Religion's false consciousness of man
and the world existed as such because man and the world were radically
vitiated: 'The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes
religion, religion does not make man. But man is no abstract being
squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society.
This state and this society produce religion's inverted attitude to the
world because they are an inverted world themselves.' 62 Religion was
the necessary idealistic completion of a deficient material world and Marx
heaped metaphor on metaphor: 'Religion is the general theory of this
world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiri-