[Karl Marx started out in a liberal milieu where the primary
concern was abolishing religious authoritarianism. In time, he came to
believe that abolishing capitalism was necessary for true freedom —
and that only the working class could do it.]
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HOW YOUNG KARL MARX GOT RADICALIZED  
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Ryan Moore
December 26, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Karl Marx started out in a liberal milieu where the primary concern
was abolishing religious authoritarianism. In time, he came to believe
that abolishing capitalism was necessary for true freedom — and that
only the working class could do it. _

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No one is born a Marxist -- not even Karl Marx.

Before he formulated his famous ideas about the centrality of class
struggle to social change, young Marx surrounded himself with liberals
who sought to abolish the religious authoritarianism of the old regime
and bring about a new state that guaranteed greater liberty. His
political evolution occurred in two stages: the first took him beyond
liberalism to social democracy, and the second gave him faith in the
self-emancipation of the working class.

Today, many young people are marching leftward in his footsteps, from
a passion for freedom to a critique of capitalism. But unlike Marx,
they have the whole tradition of Marxism to guide them.

After writing some mediocre poetry in his teenage years and then
delving into philosophy (along with drinking and dueling) as a
university student, twenty-four-year-old Marx found himself employed
as an editor at the _Rheinische Zeitung _newspaper. The paper was a
joint project of wealthy liberals and the Young Hegelians, the
energetic philosophical current that included Marx and many of his
friends. It was here that Marx was thrust out of the realm of abstract
philosophy and into the work of practical journalism, which would open
his eyes to the reality of class conflict.

Marx started his journalistic career by taking up the cause most dear
to the hearts of generations of liberals: freedom from censorship.
His first articles
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Zeitung_ were about press freedom, arguing that censorship threatened
the entire ensemble of social relations. He wrote:

The absence of freedom of the press makes all other freedoms illusory.
One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does
another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in
general is put in question.

Press freedom mattered a great deal to Marx. The _Rheinische
Zeitung_ was censored and ceased publication after a year, and later
Marx would write things that caused him to be arrested, his press shut
down, and he and his family expelled — first in Paris in 1845, then
in Cologne in 1848–49. Marx believed that the free press was an
integral part of humanity’s drive toward emancipation, writing,
“No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of
others.”

At the same time, Marx was beginning to realize the political
liberalism of bourgeois democracy could only go so far in securing
true freedom. Marx didn’t simply reject liberal ideals, but he did
begin to recognize that they only offered a limited form of freedom
— one that should be fulfilled while also transcended. He had his
eyes set on a grander vision of human emancipation.

Today, many young people are marching leftward in Marx’s footsteps,
from a passion for freedom to a critique of capitalism.

Marx had begun to see press freedom as a matter of who owns the press.
The ideal of independence was not merely constrained by state
censorship, he realized, but through private ownership and market
forces. For instance, Marx noted that although there was less
censorship in France, the press was still “not free enough”
because it was subject to a “material censorship” derived from the
competitive environment of “large-scale commercial speculation.”
Consequently, he asserted that “the first freedom of the press is
not to be a business.”

Journalism also confronted Marx with relations of property and class,
as seen in his pivotal 1842 articles
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laws against the “theft” of wood by the German peasantry. He
reported on how violent state repression was marshaled to administer a
privatization of the commons — a process later called primitive
accumulation. Marx seethed at how the property claims of forest owners
were upheld in the courts and enforced by the police, superseding
peasants’ customary rights to collect wood. For many years
afterward, Marx would point to these articles as transitional works
which began focusing his attention on economic issues.

The Prussian state had shown itself to be non-neutral, a servant of
propertied interests. These events helped push Marx’s ideas beyond
those of the influential philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who had imagined
the ideal state as an embodiment of reason representing the universal
interests of all. In his 1843 critique
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Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_, Marx began to turn the idealist
philosopher right side up: it is not the state that shapes social
relations, but social relations that shape the state. Far from any
sort of universal body, the state was exposed as an instrument of
particular class forces.

Marx’s critique of bourgeois liberalism reached its fullest
expression in 1844, when he took 
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his former mentor Bruno Bauer, a leading figure among the Young
Hegelians who yearned for a secular state and the abolition of
religion; Marx argued that such a victory for liberal rights, while
critical, was insufficient. Marx then presented his most comprehensive
analysis of bourgeois civil society to date, lamenting how “egoistic
man” had been unleashed to pursue “the right of selfishness”
under circumstances of “separation of man from man.” Under these
conditions, the promise of individual freedom tragically acquires a
new set of chains, failing to meet our “rights for equality and
security.” Looking beyond these liberal rights of man exalted by the
French Revolution, Marx concluded:

Only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’
as _social_ powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social
power from himself in the shape of _political _power, only then will
human emancipation have been accomplished.

Social Democracy and Beyond

Thus Marx had advanced beyond liberal notions of freedom to the
“social question” encompassing a deeper layer of economic
relationships. But there would be a second step, taking him further
into a commitment to class struggle. Like many of his generation, Marx
looked toward socialism and communism for solutions to the social
question. In this second step, he made a unique move that identified
the proletariat as the revolutionary agent of human emancipation. It
is this idea that we most associate with Marxism.

Marx was certainly not the first to encounter the limits of liberalism
and explore more cooperative alternatives to bourgeois society. His
predecessors — thinkers like Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier,
and other proponents of “utopian socialism” — created planned
communities as remedies for industrialization and individualism. Some
of Marx’s contemporaries, like Étienne Cabet and Wilhelm Weitling,
had begun promoting communism based on the abolition of private
property. Nevertheless, these socialist and communist models of social
organization were to be implemented from above by intellectuals and
scientific experts. Their founders conceived of them as apolitical
collective experiments that would be realized by escaping rather than
confronting class antagonisms.

Marx initially came to communism by way of philosophy, as an answer to
the problem of alienation. In his _Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts_
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1844_
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he asserted that overcoming private property was the condition for
“the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human)
being.” Communism would enable the free and full development of
individuals in their relationships with people and nature; Marx
maintained that it was “the riddle of history solved, and it knows
itself to be this solution.”

Marx initially came to communism by way of philosophy, as an answer to
the problem of alienation.

Early that same year, Marx made his first reference
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the proletariat’s revolutionary role in making communist ideals a
reality. He had begun moving beyond the utopian socialists by
identifying the working class as a collective subject of emancipation,
a class whose “radical chains” allowed it to act as a universal
force. The proletariat was the class whose struggles would abolish
class once and for all. Marx had concluded his search for social
forces that could lead humanity’s overcoming of alienation: “The
head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.”

However, as Michael Löwy has shown
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Marx’s distinction between the head and heart of revolution still
preserved a privileged position for philosophy. He attributed the
leading role to theory and a supporting part for the working class, as
evident in his assertion that “theory will become a material force
as soon as it seizes the masses.” Marx saw the proletariat as an
instrument of theoretical ideas, not yet as an active agent of
self-emancipation.

A mass rebellion of the weavers in Silesia during the summer of 1844
shifted Marx’s thinking. He had already observed the rising
militance of French workers after arriving in Paris, but the Silesian
uprising was the first great revolt of the Prussian proletariat. These
weavers were rural domestic workers who were fast becoming deskilled
and dispossessed. On June 4, 1844, thousands of them marched to the
mansion owned by their contractors; some broke in and tore it apart,
breaking windows and smashing furniture. The military was called in
and promptly fired into the crowd, killing eleven of the insurgents.

In response, Marx’s coeditor of
the _Deutsch–Französische_ _Jahrbücher_, Arnold Ruge, dismissed
the weavers’ revolt as an immature “social revolution without a
political soul.” Marx quickly composed a furious reply
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finalized his break with Ruge and, for the first time, affirmed the
revolutionary agency of the working class. He conceived of socialism
as a matter of praxis, not just theory, insisting that “only in
the _proletariat_ can it discover the active agent of its
emancipation.” Reversing Ruge’s words, Marx called for a political
revolution with a social soul. Whereas a liberal revolution
“conceals a narrow spirit” despite its claims to universality, he
wrote, the Silesian weavers’ revolt contains the universal soul of
“a human protest against a dehumanized life.”

Marx would go on to take several more intellectual leaps to develop a
method of historical materialism and his critique of political
economy. Yet by late 1844 his revolutionary dialectic of theory and
praxis was firmly in place, to be concisely formulated in his _Theses
on Feuerbach
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following year. Starting with a love of freedom
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confronting the limits of liberalism in a class-divided society,
Marx’s life course is a model of how young people become
radicalized, one which many continue to follow today.

_Ryan Moore is lecturer faculty in sociology at San Francisco State
University and the author of Sells like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth
Culture, and Social Crisis._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

* Karl Marx
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* Philosophy
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