Selected Essays - The Original Classic Edition. Marx Karl

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      SELECTED ESSAYS

       BY

       KARL MARX

       TRANSLATED BY H.J. STENNING

       Essay Index Reprint Series

       BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC. FREEPORT, NEW YORK

       First Published 1926

       Reprinted 1968

       LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:

       68-16955

       PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

       PREFACE

       The present volume consists of a translation of some of Karl Marx's principal writings during the six years 1844-1850.

       1

       In 1843 Marx was twenty-five years old. He had just married, apparently on the strength of the modest salary he was to receive for editing, jointly with Arnold Ruge, a periodical called the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (Franco-German Annuals), the purpose of which was to promote the union of German philosophy with French social science. Only one double-number of this journal ap-

       peared in 1844. It contained Marx's criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right and his exposition of the social significance of the

       Jewish question, in the form of a review of two works by Bruno Bauer. Translations of both articles are given in this volume.

       They possess a special interest for the Marxian student, as they exhibit the grafting of a materialist philosophy upon the idealist philosophy of Hegel, and show the employment of the Hegelian dialectic in the investigation of political and historical questions.

       It was not long before Marx and Ruge became intellectually estranged, and the third essay, "The King of Prussia and Social Reform," which appeared in the Paris socialist journal Vorwarts, contains a severe polemic against Ruge. In the same organ Marx published an elaborate defence of Engels in particular and communists in general from the strictures of Karl Heinzen, a radical republican politician. In both essays Marx ranges over a wide field, and develops his own views upon economic, political and historical questions.

       The essay on Proudhon emphasizes the special merits of that writer as a pioneer of economic criticism, and forms a counterweight to Marx's devastating criticism of Proudhon in the "Poverty of Philosophy." This piece and the sketch of French materialism are extracted from Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family), a comprehensive work of satirical criticism, in which Marx and Engels (whose share in writing the book was a very small one), settled accounts with their philosophic conscience.

       The critique of the views of M. Guizot upon the English and French middle-class revolutions appeared in the Neue Rhenische

       Revue (New Rhenish Review), a periodical which Marx and Engels edited from London in 1850.

       H.J.S.

       CONTENTS PAGE

       A CRITICISM OF THE HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 11

       ON THE JEWISH QUESTION 40

       ON THE KING OF PRUSSIA AND SOCIAL REFORM 98

       MORALISING CRITICISM AND CRITICAL MORALITY: A POLEMIC AGAINST KARL HEINZEN 134

       PROUDHON 171

       FRENCH MATERIALISM 180

       THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 196

       SELECTED ESSAYS

       A CRITICISM OF THE HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHTToC

       As far as Germany is concerned the criticism of religion is practically completed, and the criticism of religion is the basis of all criticism.

       The profane existence of error is threatened when its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis[1] has been refuted.

       2

       He who has only found a reflexion of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven where he looked for a superman, will no longer be willing to find only the semblance of himself, only the sub-human, where he seeks and ought to find his own reality.

       The foundation of the criticism of religion is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion indeed is man's self-con- sciousness and self-estimation while he has not found his feet in the universe. But Man is no [12]abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society produces religion, which is an inverted world-con-

       sciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic Point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

       Religious misery is in one mouth the expression of real misery, and in another is a protestation against real misery. Religion is the moan of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

       The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon the illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. [13]The criticism of religion therefore contains potentially the criticism of the Vale of Tears whose aureole is religion.

       Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain, not that man should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful em-

       bellishment, but that he should throw off the chain, and break the living flower.

       The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he thinks, acts, shapes his reality like the disillusioned man come to his senses, so that he revolves around himself, and thus around his real sun. Religion is but the illusory sun which revolves around man, so long as he does not revolve around himself.

       It is therefore the task of history, once the thither side of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.

       The immediate task of philosophy, when enlisted in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy shape, now that it has been unmasked in its holy shape. Thus the criticism of heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

       [14]The following essay--a contribution to this work--is in the first place joined not to the original, but to a copy, to the German

       philosophy of politics and of right, for no other reason than because it pertains to Germany.

       If one should desire to strike a point of contact with the German status quo, albeit in the only appropriate way, which is negatively, the result would ever remain an anachronism. Even the denial of our political present is already a dust-covered fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. If I deny the powdered wig, I still have to deal with unpowdered wigs. If I deny the German conditions of 1843, I stand, according to French chronology, scarcely in the year 1789, let alone in the focus of the present.

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