The German Genius

proletariat was “only beginning to form itself in Germany.” “Only if the bourgeoisie would play its assigned supporting role, be a proper villain, would the new heroic class develop…For one class to be the liberating class par excellence , it is necessary that another class should be openly the oppressing class.” 35 These sentiments are crucial to understanding Marx.
    It was while he was in Paris in 1844 that Marx finally came to grips with English classical economic theory and began to use a material basis for his critique of Hegel, though we should never forget that it was Engels who exposed the dismal actuality of the factory system in Manchester, also in 1844, in the Condition of the Working Class in England (published 1845). While Engels concentrated on the grime of Manchester, Marx spent his time analyzing Adam Smith. Marx’s key section is where he sets out to show that the increased wealth of society means inevitable poverty and degradation for the individual. (Smith himself wasn’t deaf to this threat, though on balance he thought that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.) Marx, however, thought that the pursuit of self-interest by employers would always win out and would distort the market. 36
    Marx was always a philosopher as much as an economist. His basic contention was that the worker becomes “all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” Marx insists that the worker is poorer “even if better paid,” because of an increase in alienation. The worker has become impoverished as a human being . And so he developed the concept of alienation, arguing that it originated in labor and had four defining aspects: (1) labor is no longer the worker’s own under capitalism, it is an alien entity, dominating him; (2) the very act of production alienates the worker from his own nature—he becomes less than a man; (3) the needs of the market—and of the factory—estrange men from other men; and (4) from his surrounding culture. Marx believed these forces of alienation were producing a new psychology. 37
    In 1845 Karl and Jenny were living in Brussels, Jenny pregnant with Laura. Engels moved next door and the two men made a six-week visit to England, mostly in Manchester, observing and reading. Back in Brussels they embarked on Die deutsche Ideologie ( The German Ideology ), a book that never found a publisher in their lifetime and was abandoned in 1846 (it finally appeared in 1932). Though disappointed, Marx later felt that the book had served its purpose—helping the two of them achieve a measure of self-clarification. “He was too modest,” says Bruce Mazlish, “the theses of The German Ideology were to gnaw away at the foundations of capitalism.” 38
    Marx’s first achievement was to write as if he had discovered a new science, one that revealed a new stage in mankind’s development, a new level of Hegelian self-consciousness. To “make history,” Marx argued, men must live, and that meant they must satisfy their needs. In the industrial stage, a certain mode of cooperation is required, a certain set of social arrangements, and this mode of cooperation has consequences. He gives credit to the French and English for first grasping that history is the history of industry and exchange, making economic history central. He dismissed political history, there was no social contract as such, à la Rousseau: only economic relations “tie man to man.” “Such a view marks a profound revolution in political science.” 39
    Marx also argued that this financial division of labor underlies “the emergence” of the state. The state offers what is in effect an illusory communal life. 40 Families and classes exist, offering some identity, but “it follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.” Political life is but “a veil” for the “real struggles” based on the division of labor and private property, and this is a further cause of estrangement. This leads Marx to a famous passage addressing the ruling ideas in a society: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Because of this, the alteration of men “on a mass