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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

DISCARDED •"ROM THE BOB JONEb UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

SERGEI BULGAKOV ii

KARL MARX as A Religious Type His Relation to the Religion of Anthropotheism of L. Feuerbach Introduction by

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DONALD W. TREADGOLD Edited with a Preface by

VIRGIL R. LANG Translated by

LUBA BARNA

& unwersiw GREENVILLE, S.C. NORDLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS 02178

1979

18487!

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-78117 ISBN 0-913124-34-6

© Copyright 1977 by Virgil R. Lang and Luba Barna © Copyright 1979 by Nordland Publishing Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Nordland Publishing Co.

(First published in 1907 in St. Petersburg, Russia by D. E. Zhukovskii Editions)

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA BY ATHENS PRINTING COMPANY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rt. Rev. Fr. Alexander Schmemann, S.T.D., L.L.D., D.D., Dean, St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, Crestwood, New York. Rev. Fr. James Forgac, O.S.R., S.T.D., St. Andrew’s Abbey, Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Marlene C. Carlson, typist, Cleveland, Ohio. Professor Richard S. Haugh, Rice University, Hous¬ ton, Texas. Professor Lyman E. Legters, School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

“I have the highest opinion of S. Bulgakov’s Karl Marx as a Religious Type. I consider it as one of the deepest analyses of the heart of Marxism and Marx himself.’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “Bulgakov’s essay is... seldom if ever [men¬ tioned] in any current bibliography of works on Marx and Marxism. It is thus time to give to Bulgakov’s Karl Marx as a Religious Type its due ...” Donald W. Treadgold

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

DONALD W. TREADGOLD is Chairman of the De¬ partment of History at the University of Wahington, Seattle. A Rhodes scholar, he received his D. Phil, from Oxford. Among his publications is a two volume study titled The West in Russia and China: Religious and Secular Thought in Modern Times (Cambridge University Press, 1973) ; volume l—Russia 11*72-1917; volume ll-China: 1582-191*9 and a work titled A His¬ tory of Christianity (Nordland Publishing Company, 1979). Editor of Slavic Review for many years, Pro¬ fessor Treadgold has contributed to academic as well as more popular journals such as The New Republic and the New Leader. He is a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review. LUBA BARN A, translator of this work, is of Russian descent. Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, she re¬ ceived her “Promovany Filolog” degree for language studies in Russian from the Russian Institute of Charles University in Prague and, in German, at Commenius University in Bratislava. Having taught Russian and German at the Technical University in Kosice, Slovakia, she came to the United States in 1965. Professor Barna is on the faculty at Youngstown State University (Youngstown, Ohio) where she teaches Russian and German. VIRGIL R. LANG obtained his Ph.D. degree in Soci¬ ology from St. John’s University, New York. He is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program for senior executives. For more than twenty years, he has been an advertising and public relations consultant in Cleveland, Ohio. His forthcoming book on types of men, Bankers, Business¬ men and Intellectuals, is based on his extensive sociopsychological research work of more than a decade. Professor Lang is on the faculty at the School of Busi¬ ness, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

11

EDITOR’S PREFACE

35

I THE SOURCE OF THE RELIGIOUS NATURE OF MODERN SOCIALISM

41

II THE CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY OF KARL MARX

45

III MARX AND HUMAN PERSONHOOD

51

IV MARX AND NON-INDIVIDUALITY

57

V MARX AND THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT

61

VI MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

63

VII MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

79

VIII MARX AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

91

IX MARX, ANTI-SEMITISM AND ATHEISM

95

X MARX’S FEUERBACHIANISM

99

XI MARX’S PECULIAR IMPRINT ON SOCIALISM

107

INDEX

115

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FROM THE AUTHOR

In presenting to the reader an essay, written one and one-half years ago (first published in 1906 in the “Moscow Weekly”), and reviewing it now for a separate edition, I feel that the outward appearance does not quite meet my present-day sentiments. I would express now the very same basic thoughts very differently, but not less decidedly, and without essential changes—perhaps without the passionate over¬ tone which still remains in this edition. How¬ ever, it now would be quite difficult to make alterations without changing the article anew. Therefore, I have to publish the essay in the original form except for some touches, hoping that someone might find in Marx’s spiritual cast of mind the real nature of Marxism.

Moscow October 1907

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INTRODUCTION

by DONALD W. TREADGOLD

Karl Marx was the son of Jewish parents who lived in Trier in the Rhineland. Trier was the oldest city of Germany, founded by the Romans, Christian from the time of Constan¬ tine, 93% Roman Catholic. The armies of the French Revolution occupied it in 1794; in 1815 it was incorporated into Prussia, as part of the Allied attempt to erect buffers against a possi¬ ble renewal of French expansion, and thus the official religion of the area became Lutheran. Marx’s paternal ancestors had been rabbis in Trier since the seventeenth century. His mother’s family came from Bratislava to Hol¬ land in the sixteenth century; she was also of rabbinical stock. Being a Dutch Jew was to be almost free from discrimination. Such was not the case for a German Jew. Nevertheless, Marx’s father succeeded in becoming a bar¬ rister before the Prussian annexation and managed to retain his status (and subsequently advance to the honored title of Justizrat) by converting in 1816 to Lutheran Christianity, the religion of the Prussian state and of a small minority of the inhabitants of Trier. Karl was born in 1818, the eldest son who lived in a fa¬ mily of eight children. He was baptized at the

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

age of six along with his brothers and sisters; his mother was baptized a year later, after her father died. Karl was confirmed at sixteen in the same Trier church where the children had all become Christians. From 1830 to 1835 Karl attended gymna¬ sium in Trier; in the fall of 1835 he entered Bonn University but left a year later to ma¬ triculate at Berlin University. By his second year he had become captivated by Hegel and frequented the meetings of the “Doctors’ Club,” a Young Hegelian circle whose chief figure was Bruno Bauer. His dissertation, on Democritus and Epicurus, was finished in 1841. Bauer had left to teach at Bonn and wished Marx to join him on the faculty there. How¬ ever, in order to “root out the dragon-seed of Hegelianism,” the Prussian government had just shaken up the administration of Berlin University. Bauer advised Marx to submit his dissertation to Jena University (located not in Prussia but in Saxe-Weimar) instead to avoid likely trouble. He mailed it on April 6; on April 15 Jena gave him a doctorate. Things moved faster in those days. But Bauer himself was shortly dismissed by order of the Prussian king, and Marx’s own hopes for a university career disappeared at the same moment. Bauer’s dismissal was a consequence of his Critique of the Synoptic Gospels, which he and

INTRODUCTION

Marx planned to follow with a new journal to be called Atheistic Archives. But Marx was not to be a professor and collaborate with Bauer, with whom he was soon to break, on questions of religion; he was to be a journalist and col¬ laborate with Friedrich Engels, whom he first met in November 1842 and with whom he formed a permanent friendship in August 1844, on questions of social science. Their first joint work was, in fact, The Holy Family, directed against — Bruno Bauer. Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in June 1843 and had six children, but their domestic happiness was often marred by pover¬ ty and Marx himself suffered from endless ail¬ ments, mainly minor but often disabling. They lived in Paris, were expelled to Brussels and then from Brussels. As the revolutions of 1848 swept the continent, he traveled to several places and in August 1849 settled in London, where the Marxes would live until Jenny died in 1881 and Karl in 1883. He took part in com¬ munist organizations from 1843, and made his contribution to the turmoil of 1848, not only through the Communist Manifesto. But his best-known activist role was played in the First International Workingmen’s Association (1864-72, formally dissolved 1876). He alter¬ nated spells of illness with bouts of research and writing, often in the British Museum.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

His magnum opus was Capital (Vol. 1, 1867; the second and third volumes were completed and published by Engels after Marx’s death). Marx’s and Engel’s collected writings are now projected to fill fifty volumes in a new (Eng¬ lish) edition. Marx was an immensely complex man, writer, and thinker, and no phrase or two can sum him up. Nevertheless we may note his own attempts to do just that in his Bekenntnisse of 1865, entered in a guest book belonging to rel¬ atives : for “your idea of happiness,” he wrote, “to fight.” (For the same question, Engels in 1868 wrote “Chateau Margaux 1848,” to be sure in a more relaxed mood.) For “your idea of misery,” Marx responded, “to submit.” For “your chief characteristic,” he entered “sin¬ gleness of purpose.” *

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Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was born in 1871, the son of a Russian priest and the off¬ spring of seven generations of priests. Until 12 or 13, he writes, he was a faithful son of the Orthodox church. In his native town of Livny he studied in the four-year ecclesiastical school, then three years in the seminary of Orel. In the seminary he lost his faith (like Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov before him —those priests’ sons who read Feuerbach in the 1850’s

INTRODUCTION

and went from the atheism he provoked them to espouse to lay the foundations for the entire Russian revolutionary movement). Leaving the seminary in 1888, after two years in the Eletsk gymnasium, Bulgakov entered the law faculty of Moscow University. Following his new radical obligations as he conceived them instead of his own genuine interests in the humanities, he studied political economy. In 1898-1900 he was on leave to study in Ger¬ many, “the land of Social Democracy and Mar¬ xism.’’ 1 His master’s thesis, published as Capi¬ talism and Agriculture (2 vols., 1900), ended not in the confirmation he expected of the ap¬ plicability of Marxist principles to agriculture but the opposite. As professor at Kiev, 1901-06, and Moscow, 1906-10, when he resigned in con¬ nection with the affair of Minister of Educa¬ tion Kasso, he experienced self-questioning and uncertainty, but did complete a doctoral dissertation in 1912 entitled The Philosophy of Economics, Part 1. In 1917 he was named professor of Moscow University; he was also ordained deacon and then priest. From 1919 to 1921, having fled to the Crimea, he was pro¬ fessor at Simferopol University; the Bolshe¬ viks removed him from his post and exiled him 1 Sergii Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskiia zamietki, Paris, 1946, p. 36. Extracts from this and other writings have recently been published in English translation by James Pain and Nicolas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology, Philadelphia, 1976.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

at the beginning of 1923. He would never return to Russia, and spent from 1925 to his death in 1944 as dean of the (Russian) Orthodox The¬ ological Institute in Paris.2 In the latter decades he made his mark as a theologian whose doc¬ trines sometimes evoked sharp criticism, es¬ pecially of his writings on the Holy Wisdom, though he professed full adherence to orthodox Christianity. *

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Bulgakov’s essay, “Karl Marx as a Reli¬ gious Type,” originally appeared in the journal Moscow Weekly [Moskovskii EzhenedeVnik] in 1906, and was reproduced in the two-volume collection of his articles entitled Two Cities [Dva grada] in 1911. It also appeared as a separate publication, St. Petersburg, 1907, and Paris and Warsaw, 1929. As the text of the essay indicates, it developed out of his essay in Questions of Life [Voprosy zhizni] in 1905 entitled “The Religion of Anthropotheism in L. Feuerbach” [“Religiia cheloviekobozhiia u L. Feierbakha”], which is almost twice as long as the essay here translated. Therein Bulgakov mentions the influence of Feuerbach on Marx, paying tribute to the way in which Thomas G. Masaryk had already called attention to the 2 See chronology in back of Vol. 2 of L. A. Zander, Bog i mir [Mirosozertsanie ottsa Sergiia Bulgakova], Paris, 1948.

INTRODUCTION

issue, and Bulgakov concluded that “the atheist humanism of Feuerbach constitutes the spirit of Marxist socialism and is no less character¬ istic of it than the political and economic teachings of Marx, which may be compatible with a completely opposite world view.” But most of the essay deals with Feuerbach, along with references to the relation of his doctrines to those of Comte, Stirner, and Nietzsche. In the essay on Marx which appears below, Bulgakov begins by declaring that what de¬ termines man’s spiritual life is to be identified as religion. The assertion is close to the way in which Paul Tillich and others have defined religion, and postulates as they do that every man has a religion no matter how much he may believe himself to be agnostic or atheistic. Bulgakov next asserts, or assumes, that modern socialism has a “religious nature.” He then identifies Marx as one of the “spiritual fathers” of the modem socialist movement and poses the problem of his essay: in what way was Marx religious? (He actually puts forth four ques¬ tions, but this is one that he is investigating.) Bulgakov makes clear that he has a personal aim, having fallen under the spell of Marx and then having freed himself therefrom. He now wishes to assess that experience and turn his back on it, “leaving my former abode forever.” The simple answer to the question of Marx’s

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

religion is, Bulgakov declares, that he loved the workers and hated the capitalists and believed in the happy socialist future. But the simple answer Bulgakov finds to be misleading. First, did Marx love? Evidence is scant about his personality as contrasted with his views and actions, but nevertheless Marx’s writings are full of anger, sometimes justified, but often he is simply venomous. Bulgakov cites three books: Herr Vogt (which Marx wanted to call Da-Da Vogt, and was dissuaded by Engels), so vituperative a piece that it alone of all Marx’s works was never reissued separately; The Holy Family, blasphemously titled and directed against the man who was formerly his closest friend and mentor, Bruno Bauer3; and The Poverty of Philosophy, attacking Proud¬ hon. Herr Vogt was published in 1860, The Holy Family in 1845, The Poverty of Philoso¬ phy in 1847. It is not clear why Bulgakov mentions the last-published book first, or indeed whether he was unwisely simply trusting his memory for details. But the ad hominem attacks 3 Here Bulgakov is wrong; he writes that the removal of Bauer from the University of Berlin caused Marx “to refuse to think about” a professorship there. In fact, as pointed out above, Bauer was dismissed from Bonn, not Berlin, in March 1842, and Marx did not reject any proposal for a professorship out of sympathy for his then friend or out of high principle. It had been planned that Bauer would secure for Marx an appoint¬ ment at Bonn, but his own dismissal left his protege without either a position or prospects in any Prussian or other German university.

INTRODUCTION

Marx made on a host of persons, often former friends and cohorts, are well enough known, including the imputation of crimes such as espionage on the basis of insufficient evidence. Trekhov’s long comment quoted by Bulgakov on Marx’s lack of the milk of human kindness is damaging, but scarcely surprising. Not only is love wanting in Marx, but also any sensitivity to the problem of the individual. Nietzsche, whose individualism had such a great impact on the Russian generation of Bulgakov’s youth, is poles apart from him; Shakespeare is alien to him, despite his citations of the Bard. To be sure, Bulgakov finds in Marx a “sacred egoism which commands one to de¬ stroy his own spirit in order to save it,” a pre¬ occupation with himself of a peculiar sort, but not with the problem of the individual, or his soul. Marx’s Praxis is an invitation to deaden the pain of the soul by getting “dead drunk” with action. Nevertheless Marx was not indifferent to¬ ward religion. He was filled with passion in his assault on theism and Christianity. Bulgakov sees in Marx’s atheism “the central nerve of his entire life work.” The “inner bond” between his atheism and his socialism, pointed out by Thomas G. Masaryk, is not widely perceived. At this point Bulgakov turns to his main theme, the sources of Marx’s philosophical

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

views. He is at pains first to deny the funda¬ mental influence of Hegel which Marx and En¬ gels themselves acknowledged and other writers have alleged. Masaryk, just praised, is at this point sharply attacked; Hegel and Feuerbach, whom he links together, are said to be as far apart as Marx and Tolstoy (an exaggeration, if not simply an error). Mehring’s publication (in 1902) of writings of Marx in the early 1840’s seems to have prompted these sallies of Bulgakov’s. How many times has the repeated rediscovery of the “young [pre-Marxist] Marx” shaken the intellectual world, or at any rate the intellectual world of the left? Bulgakov’s evidence that Hegel had no sig¬ nificant influence on Marx is odd. It is said that the two thinkers are linked by the dialectic; the evidence to the contrary? Marx declared it to be true. Marx said he was a disciple of Hegel; it is Bulgakov’s “intuition” that proves he wasn’t.4 4 Bulgakov seems to misunderstand the passage he quotes from Marx’s preface to the second edition of Volume I of Capital: “I openly declared myself to be a disciple of [He¬ gel]. ...” However, in the preceding lines Marx has been trying to show that he challenges the philosophical fashions of the day. Thirty years earlier Hegelian dialectic was, Marx writes, the fashion; he boasts of criticizing it then. But later, when he was working on the first volume of Capital (evidently in the early 1860’s), some unidentified “peevish, arrogant mediocre epigons” were treating Hegel with scorn; “I therefore openly declared myself to be a disciple...(my italics). But one need not pursue this point, since sometimes Bulgakov accepts Marx’s statements about his own evolution and some¬ times does not.

INTRODUCTION

But his remarks about Marx and Hegel precede, often by decades, the publication of a volumi¬ nous literature on the subject and do not merit intensive analysis or criticism. They are in any case intended only as an introduction to his real subject, which is Marx’s debt to Feuerbach. In this connection Bulgakov was close to breaking new ground, and what is worth most attention in the essay is to be found here. The crucial passage from the Critique of the Hegelian Phi¬ losophy of Right which contains the famous dictum that religion is the opium of the people, is quoted at length and labeled “an account of Feuerbach’s fundamental tenets, stated nearly in his very own words.” In a letter to Feuerbach in August 1844 Marx promised to send him this same article (which actually had a complex history we need not explore here), and, in the words of a recent commentator, “[interpreted] Feuerbach’s concept of man as identical with his own concept of society.”5 Van Leeuwen goes on to deny the identity which Marx admits and to stress the difference between Marx and Feuerbach; “it was Feuerbach’s inability real¬ ly to overcome abstraction which in the end made him opposed to Feuerbach.” 6 But was Marx “opposed” to Feuerbach? Bulgakov knows that there is a difference between the 5 Arend Th. van Leeuwen, Critique of Heaven, New York, 1972, p. 186. 6 Ibid., p. 189.

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

statements of Feuerbach and Marx. He simply regards Feuerbach’s “theoretical liberation of mankind from religion” as fundamental to Marx’s conclusion that that task is to be en¬ trusted to the proletariat. The process will involve man’s transition to Gattungswesen, the state of being a truly independent species — that is, Bulgakov writes, “a Sparta or an ant¬ hill or a beehive.” Bulgakov argues that the atheistic human¬ ist “runs from one extreme to the other” in confronting the complementary values of per¬ sonality and community; Stimer and Nietzsche lose their perspective in elevating the former, Marx in apotheosizing the latter. Only Chris¬ tianity, he declares, manages to affirm both in their proper relationship. Not only personality but national (or ethnic) self-consciousness disappears from Marx’s vision of the future. As a telling ex¬ ample, Bulgakov cites Marx’s own attack on “his own people,” the Jews. The Jew is a Geldmensch; that is Marx’s description, in which he makes no distinction between religion and nationality or between Jewish usurers and Jewish persons who follow other pursuits. In such apparently anti-Semitic utterances (not the only ones Marx made) Bulgakov perceives a consequence of Marx’s determination to main¬ tain “a consistent anti-religious standpoint.”

INTRODUCTION

The same desire prompts the attack, in his cri¬ tique of the Gotha program (1875) of the Ger¬ man Social Democrats, on “freedom of con¬ science,” which Marx takes to be freedom of religious conscience. Once again Marxism ap¬ pears as an extension of the “religious-philo¬ sophical side” of Feuerbach’s teachings. In regard to that side, Bulgakov declares, none of Marx’s writings deviate from his articles in the sole issue (double-number) of the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbiicher, published in 1844. The Russian discusses Marx’s subsequent relegation of religion to be merely a part of the “superstructure” and thus not needing exten¬ sive separate treatment. In Capital Christianity “with its cultus of abstract man” is said to be the form of religion “most fitting” to capital¬ ism. In these and other comments Bulgakov finds reflections of Feuerbachian notions. Bul¬ gakov might have developed this point further. Marx cannot drop the subject of Christianity. In the text of Capital pre-bourgeois production is treated by “the bourgeoisie” much as “the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.” Footnote: Economists resemble theologians; for economists feudal institutions are artificial, bourgeois ones are natural, as for theologians all religions but their own are human inventions, their own comes from God. (Here Marx quotes himself from The Poverty

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

of Philosophy.) A few pages later Marx under¬ takes to “accompany to the market” the owner of a commodity, linen, which he sells for £2 and then purchases what? “Another commo¬ dity, the Bible.” (Marx’s choice of the second commodity speaks for itself.) All this is to il¬ lustrate the famed sequence C-M-C, which has seemed illuminating to a host of voluntary or involuntary students reading Marx. Several pages later the apparently complex transaction “linen-money-Bible” is still being analyzed. Marx is enjoying himself; one could adduce other examples. Bulgakov then arrives at this conclusion. The decisive impact of Marx on the German socialist movement and ultimately on the inter¬ national movement was, the author asserts, not so much in his political and economic program as in the “religious-phjlosophical area.” The German party was the creation of Lassalle; its program-minimum was not specifically Marxian, except in the agrarian plank, which came to be ignored (in Germany). Militant atheism is Marx’s gift. The ethics of socialism may contain truth, justice, and love; they may also be “overwhelmed” by hatred, envy, and egoism, “the very same bourgeois qualities turned upside down,” which emerge as domi¬ nant in the propagation of Marxism. From Marx’s basic religious motive, his militant

INTRODUCTION

atheism, comes the rest. Here Bulgakov intro¬ duces a qualification which nearly contradicts what he has just said; the “spiritual tempta¬ tion” of hatred existed in the socialist move¬ ment and indeed in “our whole culture,” and Marx was not alone responsible for it. He was rather the “powerful tool” of the “temptation” mentioned. Vladimir Soloviev perceptively depicts the Antichrist (the reference is to his Three Conversations) as a socialist. In a sort of epilogue Bulgakov warns against final evaluation of anyone, including Marx, but affirms our “responsibility” to scru¬ tinize the struggle of good with evil in life. The goals of Marx and socialism included those consonant with divine purposes; the aim of Marx to destroy the “sacred in man,” replacing the sacred “with his own self (the goal which guided him in all his activities)” is by impli¬ cation demonic, diabolical. Bulgakov knows how this will sound to his former fellow socialists, even without the last two words, and his final sentence is: “we had to say it.” *

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Bulgakov’s title doubtlessly shocked many of his contemporaries, both those who admired Marx and those who combated his views. His essay raised a number of important questions: the relation between Hegel and Marx; that

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

between Feuerbach and Marx; Marx’s attitude toward religion and its sources; and the hidden, allegedly religious substance behind the overtly anti-religious form of his doctrine, especially his combination of prophecy of a proletarian revolution which would inaugurate socialism (and then communism) with exhortation to carry out the forecast. Bulgakov’s was a pioneer effort, and does not deserve to be subjected to comparison with the scholarship on Marx of the late 1970’s, after seven decades of searching archives, publishing new sources and new stud¬ ies, and debating interpretations. To be sure, relatively few scholars have wished to probe the difficult question of Marx’s religion or alleged religiousness under the stoutly atheist exterior. Marxists have usually been inclined to take Marx’s atheism at face value; Soviet Marxists (several times the most numerous of all Marxist writers) have almost always been required to do so; other secular writers are apt to be un¬ comfortable with assertions that Marx was in some sense religious. Take, for example, David McLellan, probably the foremost intellectual historian of Marx and Marxism currently writing in English: Attempts to characterize Marxism as a religion, although plausible within their own terms, confuse the issue, as do at-

INTRODUCTION

tempts to claim that Marx was not really an atheist. This is the usual ap¬ proach of writers who stress the parallel between Marxism and the JudaeoChristian history of salvation [footnote to Robert Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx] — though some say that Marx took over this tradition when al¬ ready secularised by Schelling or Hegel into an aesthetic or philosophical reve¬ lation [footnote to H. Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch, Basel, 1953]. It is true that Marx had in mind the religion of contemporary Germany dominated by a dogmatic and over-spiritual Lutheran¬ ism, but he wrote about “religion” in general and his rejection was absolute. Unlike so many early socialists (Weitling, Saint-Simon, Fourier), he would brook no compromise. Atheism was in¬ separable from humanism, he main¬ tained ; indeed, given the terms in which he posed the problem, this was undeni¬ able. It is, of course, legitimate to change the meaning of “atheism” in order to make Marx a believer malgre lui, but this tends to make the question sense¬ less by blurring too many distinctions.7 7 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York, 1973, p. 89.

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

On the other hand, not many orthodox Christians have been eager to probe the ques¬ tion; some non-orthodox Christians (whether they are to be termed “creative” by their ad¬ mirers or “heretics” by their critics) have re¬ cently seemed to take pleasure in simply “blurring the distinction,” as McLellan sug¬ gests.8 Serious Christians may, like serious Marxists, reject the suggestion that Marx is somehow after all religious or close to Chris¬ tianity, and serious Christians may contem¬ plate with distaste or worse their “trendy” colleagues who advance it. Hegel has enjoyed a renewed amount of attention from scholars, much of which may be attributed to the growing importance of Marx¬ ism in the world. The enthusiasm for the “young Marx” which attended the rise of the New Left in the 1960’s also served to strength¬ en interest in the relation between Hegel and Marx. Within the Marxist and indeed Communist camp Georg Lukacs in his Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein [History and Class Consciousness, trans., Cambridge, 1971] reas8 See the interesting pages on Harvey Cox and Jurgen Moltmann in Dale Vree, On Synthesizing Marxism and Chris¬ tianity, New York, 1976. A number of Roman Catholic and especially Jesuit writers have made a comparison between Marxian history and Christian history; for example, see Gustav Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, trans., New York 1958 pp. 559-60. The comparison, however, still requires explanation’ which demands a different sort of inquiry.

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INTRODUCTION

serted the importance of Hegel for Marxism to a degree that embroiled him in difficulties with the party. Lukacs’s work was developed, especially in regard to the idea of “alienation” [Entfremdung], by Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London, 1970); see also Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (2d ed.; Cam¬ bridge, Eng., 1976). Useful and stimulating in this connection are Georg Lichtheim’s Marx¬ ism: An Historical and Critical Survey (Lon¬ don, 1961) and From Marx to Hegel (London, 1971). Shlomo Avineri, who has also written on Hegel as such, argues the connection of Hegel with Marx in The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1970). Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (Lon¬ don, 1965), discusses Marx as one of a number of thinkers who follow in Hegel’s footsteps. David McLellan’s The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969) treats the influence of Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Stirner, and Moses Hess individually, but not Hegel himself. That is done by Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (trans., New York, 1969) and Gun¬ ther Hillman, Marx undHegel: Vonder Spekulation zur Dialektik (Frankfurt a/M., 1966), the latter perhaps the best integrated single in¬ quiry into the relationship between the two thinkers, but the author limits himself to a

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

study of Marx's philosophical development from 1835 to 1841. Louis Dupre’s The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York, 1966) is an analysis of Hegel’s, Feuerbach’s and Marx’s particular works crucial to the problem. Feuerbach, the crucial figure of Bulgakov’s essay, has also enjoyed heightened attention. Recent studies include Max W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), which focuses on Feuerbach’s debt to Hegel but ends with some discussion of Marx, and Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (New York, 1970), which refers to both inflluences on him and his influences on his suc¬ cessors. Marcel Xhaufflaire, in Feuerbach et la theologie de la secularisation (Paris, 1970), writes “as a theologian for theologians”; the connection with Marx is for him an event in Feuerbach’s life and not a problem of the origins of Marxism. The literature on Marx and Marxism grows rapidly year by year. Since the subject of Bul¬ gakov’s essay is much narrower, there is no occasion to try to deal with the whole of that literature, but mention will be made of a few recent general works. For many years the clas¬ sical biography was Franz Mehring, Karl Marx (London, 1936); it has become outdated in certain scholarly respects and in its attitude of veneration of its subject. A recent work is in

INTRODUCTION

many ways admirable: David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York, 1973), containing a 20-page “ select critical bibliography.” Saul K. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (New York, 1978), is accurately described by its subtitle; it deals with Marx’s life, not his thought, but does so well. Two shorter works deserve mention: Michael Evans, Karl Marx (Bloomington, 1975), and Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Marx Without Myth (Oxford, 1975). Regarding Marx and religion, the massive literature of the “Marxist-Christian dialogue” contains innumerable discussions of the topic, either too brief or too superficial, or both, to warrant a selection here. Two fairly recent works have their interest: Charles Wackenheim, La faillite de la religion d’apres Karl Marx (Paris, 1963), and Werner Post, Kritik der Religion bei Karl Marx (Munchen, 1969). Both present an analysis of Marx’s views on religion rather than an argument that the es¬ sence of Marxism is religious. Marxism is con¬ ceived of as having a “religious essence” in Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (2d ed., Cambridge, Eng., 1972), but such an interpretation underlies rather than characterizes much of the book. Bulga¬ kov’s essay is not mentioned in the index or bibliography of any of the last three works

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

mentioned, and seldom if ever in any current bibliography of works on Marx or Marxism. It is thus time to give to Bulgakov’s Karl Marx as a Religious Type its due as modest pathfinder in the study of the linked issues it raises without exhausting. In the introduction to Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Tucker writes: In the non-Communist part of the world, widespread abandonment of the supposition that Marxism is essentially scientific in character has helped to re¬ orient the study of Marx.... If it is not the scientific theory that it claimed to be, may it not be comprehended as basi¬ cally an ethical or religious system? As already indicated, this is the question that increasingly determines the direc¬ tion of present-day non-Communist in¬ quiry into the thought of Marx. The search for understanding of the deeper springs of his world-view increasingly becomes a search for its moral or reli¬ gious meaning. However, the work of systematic analysis of Marxism from this point of view still remains in its early stages.® 9 Tucker, p. 14. Tucker goes on to examine and reject the “hypothesis that Marxism is fundamentally an ethical system” but affirms its religious character.

INTRODUCTION

Probably Tucker exaggerates in suggesting that non-Communist study of Marx is coming to center on this problem or nexus of problems, but the last statement in the paragraph quoted, first published in 1961, remains true. In the pursuit of such studies, Bulgakov’s perspective may have its uses.

EDITOR’S PREFACE by

VIRGIL R. LANG This translation is the first from Russian to English of Sergei Bulgakov’s work, Karl Marx as a Religious Type (1906). It will en¬ able scholars and other readers in the West, who are interested in the life of Karl Marx, to investigate further or compare some of Marx’s thoughts and ideas not previously known. At the outset, it is important to know also that this short and insightful work by Bulgakov was suppressed in Russia (after the Revolution of 1917), primarily because the personal and in¬ tellectual accomplishments of Marx were shown to be far less than what has been proclaimed by Marxists. Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) had a varied career—secular and ecclesiastical. In his early intellectual endeavors, he was an avid and able Marxist scholar. After he became disillusioned and abandoned Marxism, Bulgakov became involved with those Russian intelligentsia who, at the turn of the century, wrote certain illumi¬ nating essays (Landmarks [Vekhi]) that were related to issues and problems of the intellec¬ tual and social ferment in Russia. At one time he was also a professor of political economy at the University of Moscow. Eventually he was

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

to take up his life’s work as a Russian Orthodox priest and theologian. Ordained a priest in 1918 and exiled from Russia in 1923, Fr. Bul¬ gakov eventually settled in Paris, along with other Russian emigres (notably, Nicholas Ber¬ dyaev), to continue his intellectual and spirit¬ ual pursuits and writings about Christianity and related theological topics. What is the importance of this particular work by Bulgakov today ? While there are many aspects of his thought upon which one can re¬ flect, two can be discerned that bear comment on here, if only briefly. First, the essentially atheistic doctrine of Marx is, for Bulgakov and for others, the critical issue—a point emphasized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who stated: Sergei Bulgakov showed in Karl Marx as a Religious Type (1906) that atheism is the chief inspirational and emotional hub of Marxism and that all the rest of the doctrine has simply been tacked on. Ferocious hostility to religion is Marx¬ ism’s most persistent feature.1 Second, it should be noted (in Karl Marx as a Religious Type) that Fr. Bulgakov was re¬ pelled and repulsed by the anti-Semitism pres1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 44.

editor’s preface

ented in Marx’s work “On the Jewish Ques¬ tion”—a virulent anti-Semitism that is con¬ sistent with and followed from Marx’s position on religion. Fr. Bulgakov points out that in a mysterious way, the Jews are the axis of history upon which the world turns. Further relevant aspects of Bulgakov’s work focus on Marx’s militant atheism, a dogmatic atheism which, when examined, can be put in terms of a total confrontation (in the Dostoevskian sense) that without God, man can only organize the world against himself.2 On a reader’s evidence, one might expand on these ideas. Reinterpretation of the “world without God” requires a totally new concept about the nature and future of man, his in¬ stitutions and society. In great part, this chal¬ lenge constitutes the present-day world-wide appeal of Marxism; it is a virtual re-writing of history to fit the theory of the “new man”— the man-become-god. This facet of atheistic theory can also be noted in our era in some of the veiled or direct premises of the humanities. It is also in some of the behavioral socio-scientific assumptions about man. It is axiomatic to the literature that stresses the “alienated man” syndrome and to some of the humanistic “God is dead” themes of contemporary man. It is, in 2 Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950), p. vii.

37

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

short, the theme of the “autonomous man.” Thus, such variants of atheism manifest themselves as a type of belief. Such beliefs must be seen as a living lie with respect to man, his nature, and the existence of society without God. To eliminate God, the author of the moral universe, as the primary Reality of Realities, is the first step in a definition of reality that puts into practice the living-lie social life with¬ out God. From this “absence of God” premise or from a complacent position (that is to say, a conventional rather than an eschatological acceptance of God), there is but a series of descending steps into the moral abyss of our time. It is a confrontation, perhaps not of an apocalyptic or final polarity, of good and evil but, certainly, of a sufficient magnitude to force one to question the most basic convictions of man’s existence. For example, the holocaust (a monstrous evil) is but one of a series of tragic, unresolved confrontations in our century. As a result, a major challenge (perhaps the major challenge) is a theological one, name¬ ly, overcoming a diabolic spirit of covetous pride and power (the works of darkness) and exposing all of those self-deceptive conditions or sins, half-truths or lies, that support such pride and power. One can find such a spirit especially in those statements of Marx with respect to religious faith, belief in God, and,

editor's preface

ultimately, in the proposition that “religion is the opium of the people.” Man is the only animal capable of deceiving himself. Wherever there is such basic deception, as in atheism, it is there (as noted in Scripture) that one may find per¬ sonified the deceiver, the spirit of negation, the living lie. Such deception is as possible in the West as it is wherever Marxism exists through¬ out the world, whether it exists in the form of intellectual fabrications in the catechism of Marx, or in contemporary totalitarian entities such as “Eurocommunism,” or in any other euphemisms conjured up by false prophets or parroted by epigones.3 It is suggested that with these thoughts one can begin to understand and reflect on Karl Marx as a Religious Type, by Sergei Bulgakov— a work written more than seventy years ago but even more significant today.4 Virgil R. Lang

3 Imre Madach, The Tragedy of Man (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1935). 4 Robert G. Wesson, Why Marxism? The Continuing Success of a Failed Theory (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976).

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I THE SOURCE OF THE RELIGIOUS NATURE OF MODERN SOCIALISM

The theme of this study may provoke bewilderment and, therefore, it needs some ex¬ planation. I often have had to express my con¬ viction that the determining power in the spirit¬ ual life of a man is his religion—not only in the narrow sense of the word, but in a wider sense as well, i.e., the highest and ultimate values which one admits as being beyond him and higher than himself and also his practical re¬ lation to these values. To determine the real religious center in a person, to discover his genuine spiritual core, is to find out the most intimate and important things about him, and then everything external and derivative will be comprehensible. In this sense, one may speak of every man’s religion, whether he be religious¬ ly naive or he who consciously denies any specific form of religiousness. Furthermore, within the Christian concept of life and history, there is no doubt that real mystical principles, being polar and irreconcilable, struggle with each other to govern the spirit and move history. In this sense, there can be no religiously neutral persons and, in fact, the struggle between Christ and the “Prince of this World” goes on within every human being. We know people who

41

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

do not know Christ but who serve Him and do His will; and, on the other hand, we know peo¬ ple who call themselves Christians but are in fact alien to Him. Finally, even among unbe¬ lievers and religious hypocrites, there are men whose spirit foreshadows a deceiver who is sup¬ posed to come “in Christ’s name” and will find many adherents. Whose spirit dominates this or that historical figure? Whose “seal” is stamped on this or that historical movement? Those are the usual questions which one must ask while reflecting upon the complex phe¬ nomena of an ever more complicated life. Such questions must be pondered time and again in ever new ways when applied to as complex, contradictory, and, at the same time, as significant a phenomenon of contemporary spiritual life as socialism, in particular as a phenomenon of our spiritual life. The basic eco¬ nomic aims of socialism need not give rise to any doubts or controversy on points of principle. The silent and passive “historical flesh” of so¬ cialism, i.e., the socialist movement, may have different sources of inspiration and, while belonging primarily to the kingdom of light, may also have the ability to fall prey to dark¬ ness. There is a mysterious dividing line be¬ tween light and darkness which merge into coexistence but, even so, cannot integrate. In reflecting upon the religious nature of

THE SOURCE OF MODERN SOCIALISM

modem socialism, one’s thoughts inevitably turn to the man whose spirit put such a deep imprint on the modern socialist movement that he has to be regarded as one of its spiritual fathers—Karl Marx. Who was he? What was his religious nature? Which god did he serve in life? What kinds of love and hate kindled his soul? The uncovering of an answer to this basic and decisive question for Marxism in as definite and final a manner as possible became a per¬ sonal goal for the author. First of all, for several years he had been under the strong influence of Marx and had devoted himself entirely to the mastering and development of Marx’s ideas. Secondly, because he subsequently managed with trials and tribulations to free himself from the hypnosis of this influence. I wish to make both ends meet, to examine myself for the last time and, leaving my former abode forever, to look over the subject of my passionate young enthusiasm with a cool, critical view. The reader should not expect, of course, to get a simple textbook answer to such a question. The answer that Marx’s whole soul was made up of socialist sentiments, that he loved and pitied the oppressed workers and hated the capitalist exploiters, and, furthermore, that he wholeheartedly believed in the coming bright era of socialism-such an answer would be able

43

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

to satisfy perhaps only zealous beginners Marxism.

II THE CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY OF KARL MARX

If everything were as simple as that, there would be, of course, nothing more to talk about. However, things are not so simple, though at times they may be; but, in any case, they are immensely more complicated and difficult. To begin with, in my view of Marx’s psychology and personal sentiments, it seems doubtful whether such feelings as love, spontaneous com¬ passion, and warm sympathy for human suf¬ fering in general really played the most im¬ portant role within him. It was not without reason that his own father mentioned in a letter to Marx in his student days: “Is your head, are your talents, true to your heart?” In all likelihood he (the father) must have been in doubt about it. Unfortunately, as far as Marx’s personality and life are concerned, we are faced with a nearly complete lack of any written testimony. Practically no descriptions of his personality were made by sensitive and compe¬ tent observers, unconcerned with giving a strictly social-democratic account of his life (cf. Lafargue’s and Liebknecht’s memoirs [Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law; Wilhelm Liebknecht, collaborator of Marx and Engels]). That is why descriptions of Marx’s character

45

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

inevitably are found to be subjective. If we judge Marx by his published works, his heart was far more open to hatred and vengeance than to the opposite kind of feelings. Of course, sometimes his anger was righteous but more often it was completely unjust. When Marx thunders against the cruelty of capitalists and capitalism and the heartlessness of the social system of his day, his anger deserves every sympathy and respect. Somehow, however, one reacts differently, when alongside this thunder one meets haughty and vindictive slurs directed against all who think differently, whoever they may be—Lassalle1 or MacCullough,2 Herzen3 or Malthus, Proudhon or Senior. It was unusually easy to draw Marx into personal polemics and one must confess that generally his arguments were highly unconvincing, much as there have 1 On the very first page of the first volume of Das Kapital, observe Marx’s vindictive attack against his own co-worker and friend, long since deceased. Rather than rendering Las¬ salle his due, Marx accuses him of plagiarism in muddled expressions. This is one of the most striking examples of Marx’s personality. s Here is a model example: “One of the virtuosos in this pretentious idiocy, MacCullough ... speaks with the pretentious cretinism of an eight-year-old child” (Das Kapital, vol. 1, p. 363, footnote 216). Generally, in the footnotes of Das Kapi¬ tal, epithets like “vulgar,” “absurd,” etc., are found every¬ where. Unfortunately, this bad form was also adopted by Marx’s followers, particularly in our literature. A rude and tasteless slur was directed against Herzen in the first volume of Das Kapital, first edition. It was removed by the author himself from later editions.

THE CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY OF KARL MARX

been efforts to deny this. Marx wrote three po¬ lemical books, to say nothing of his short writ¬ ings, which make burdensome reading (and not because polemics generally are of greater inter¬ est to writers than to readers). The first of these books [Herr Vogt—1860] attacks Vogt and is filled with emigre bickerings and with mutual accusations of vilest actions, particularly of spying. The second book [The Holy Family— 1845] is directed against Marx’s former friend, Bruno Bauer, whose removal from the Univer¬ sity of Berlin caused Marx to refuse to think about a professorship there. This second book is packed with mockery and, for no reason, was given a blasphemous title, The Holy Family. Finally, the third book [The Poverty of Philoso¬ phy-1847], his best-known and most valuable book, is directed against Proudhon. Its tone is also inconsistent with either the theme or with Marx’s recent relationship to Proudhon. How many of these polemic “gems” (which are hard to tolerate even in the time of greatest enthusiasm for Marx) are there in the bibli¬ ographical footnotes of the first volume of Das Kapital! How many gunshots at sparrows, un¬ necessary sarcasms, and just plain rude re¬ marks are there! (For example, how otherwise can one define the comments on Malthus and the Protestant clergy and their disregard for birth control, pp. 516-18, in the version translated and

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

edited by Struve.) Memoirs of some of his con¬ temporaries from impartial circles agree with the spontaneous impression and they depict Marx as having a self-confident and imperious nature, intolerant of any objections. (We ought to recollect Marx’s fight with Bakunin at the International [the First International, i.e., In¬ ternational Workingmen’s Association, found¬ ed 1864] and, in general, the story of its disintegration.) Herzen’s sharp description of Marx, based on a number of verified facts, is well known, although he personally did not know Marx. (See My Past and Thoughts, Vol. Ill, chapter “Germans in Emigration” in the new legal publication of Herzen’s works, where he tells how Bakunin, imprisoned and thus unable to defend himself, was accused by Marx of espionage, as well as how Marx made a number of attempts to throw the shadow of guilt upon Herzen himself, whom Marx did not even know.) Thus Annenkov, in his well-known memoirs, defined Marx as the “democratic dictator.” It seems to us that this description correctly expresses the general opinion about Marx,4 about that impatient and imperious self4 George Adler, in his book Die Grundlagen der Karl MarxKritik der bestehendend Volkswirtschaft, Tubingen, 1887, quotes an interesting passage of a letter from the demo¬ crat Trekhov who visited Marx in London. Here, incidentally, Trekhov formulates his personal impressions: schen

“Marx impressed me as one gifted not only with rare

THE CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY OF KARL MARX

affirmation of his which penetrates everything which bears the imprint of his personality.

intellectual superiority, but also considerable personality. If he possessed as much heart as brain, as much love as hate, I would be ready to go through fire for him, in spite of the fact that he has expressed for me absolute disdain, not only in different ways, but finally, quite openly. He is the only and the first among us to whom I would entrust the right to rule and who, faced with great events, would not get lost in trivia. I regret only for the sake of our general goal that this man, along with his excellent intellect, does not have a noble heart. He laughs at fools who devoutly repeat after him his proletarian catechism, as well as at communists a la Willich, and at the bourgeoisie. The only ones he respects with full awareness are the aristocrats, the true aristocrats. In order to remove them from power, he is in need of a force which can be found only in the proletarians, therefore he fits his system to them. In spite of all assurances to the contrary, perhaps even thanks to them, I received the impression that his personal supremacy is the goal of all his activities.” (283-3 footnotes) We do not intend, of course, to accept all of the above literally, but the general tone agrees with every¬ thing both Annenkov and Herzen have stated.

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Ill MARX AND HUMAN PERSONHOOD Persons of the dictatorial type have a dis¬ tinctive peculiarity: they have a straightfor¬ ward and rather unceremonious attitude to¬ ward human individuality. For such persons, people appear as algebraic signs, destined to serve as a means for achieving one or another, even if lofty, goal. On the other hand, they ap¬ pear as subjects for a more or less energeticeven if extremely benevolent—influence. In theory, this feature is expressed by lack of attention to the concrete, living, human person; in other words, by ignoring the problems of [the] person as [an] individual. This theoretical disregard for the person, the elimination of that which is individual under the pretense of a sociological interpretation of history, is very characteristic for Marx, too. For him the prob¬ lem of [the] person as [an] individual-the in¬ destructible core of human personality, its integral nature — does not exist. Here, Marx the thinker involuntarily surrendered himself to Marx the man and completely dissolved that which is [person as] individual in sociology, dissolved not only that which is indeed “dis¬ soluble” but that also which is absolutely “in¬ dissoluble.” This, incidentally, facilitated his elaboration of bold and general ideas of an

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

“economic concept of history” in which a funer¬ al dirge is sung for the person and personal creativity. Marx was neither disturbed nor even noticeably impressed by the rebellion of his contemporary, Stirner, who gave such a hard time to Marx’s teacher Feuerbach.5 Marx also safely ignored, without apparent consequences for himself, the powerful ethical individualism of Kant and Fichte, whose in¬ fluence had suffused the air of Germany in the 1830’s (how much one can feel this influence, even in Lassalle!). Moreover, Marx would never accept the acid critique of Dostoevsky’s “underground man” who defends, among other rights, the natural right to ... foolishness and caprice, if only “to live according to one’s own foolish will.” Marx, when he was squeezing life and history into a rib-breaking sociological corset, had not the slightest anticipation of Nietzsche’s rebellious individualism. In Marx’s eyes, people form sociological groups which smoothly and naturally meld into regular ge¬ ometric figures, as if nothing happens in histo¬ ry except the slow and regular movement of so¬ ciological elements. The discarding of the prob¬ lem of the person and of all concern for it, the excessive abstraction—such are the basic fea51 related this episode of the clash between Feuerbach and Stirner in my work on Feuerbach, L. Feuerbach’s Reli¬ gion of Anthropotheism, published by Free Conscience. M. 1906.

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MARX AND HUMAN PERSONHOOD

tures of Marxism. It agrees with the volitional, domineering mentality of the founder of this system. Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, wrote of him in her memoirs that he loved Shakespeare’s poetry, which he often reread. We would not question those statements, for any capricious taste is possible. However, in looking for the evidence of that enthusiasm or for any impact of Shakespeare on Marx’s works, we have found none. That is not surprising, for it is simply impossible to imagine a world more alien and more contrasting to all of Marxism than the world of Shakespeare’s poetry, whose center is the tragedy and the fate of an individual soul. It seems that the only trace of Shake¬ speare in Marx is his quotation from Timon of Athens about gold and, subsequently, the reference to Shylock, so suitable to his eco¬ nomic treatise. The superficial character of these references only confirms our opinion that Marx did not have any inner contact with Shakespeare and that the music of their hearts did not blend but produced a monstrous discord. Marx is one of those people who are alien to any tragedy, who are inwardly highly cold and, least of all, related to Shakespeare’s passionate heart. As we mentioned before, this basic quality of Marx’s personality and ideology, his disregard for the problems of the individual and the con¬ crete, considerably predetermined his general

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

religious outlook, his relative insensitivity to the sharp focus of the religious problem, for, indeed, this is first of all a problem of the in¬ dividual as a person. This is a question about the value of my life, my personality, my suf¬ ferings, about the attitude of man’s individual and human spirit towards God, about the soul’s personal—not only sociological—redemptions. This single, irreplaceable, and absolutely unique personality (which, for only a single moment, flashes in history) lays claims upon eternity, on absolute totality, on an insurmountable sig¬ nificance, all of which can be promised only by religion—a vital “God of the living” religion— and not by a “god of the dead” sociology. For, this problem, which is unresolvable and even quite meaningless apart from and outside of religion, lends to religious consciousness, to religious doubt, and to religious experiences in general, a particular sharpness, vitality, and torment. There is here, if you wish, an individu¬ alistic egoism, but of the highest degree; not a sinful empirical selfishness, but the highest spiritual thirst; the highest assertion of the “I”; the sacred egoism which commands one to destroy one’s own spirit in order to save it—to destroy the empirical, mortal, and tangible in order to save the spiritual, invisible, and im¬ mortal. Yes, there is no problem here, merely the suffering of the individual as a person, that

MARX AND HUMAN PERSONHOOD

enigma about man and mankind, about that which is truly realistic and incomprehensible in them, about the living spirit. This enigma accompanies one’s thought in all its reflections, preventing man from falling asleep religiously. From this enigma, as a seed becomes a plant, religious teachings and philosophical systems begin to develop. Is not this need and ability to “search for the Transcendent” an obvious testi¬ mony to the supernatural [Heavenly] origin of man!

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IV

MARX AND NON-INDIVIDUALITY

As we said, Marx remains quite aloof from the religious problem; he is not disturbed by the fate of an individual but is totally obsessed by what appears to be common to all individu¬ als, consequently, by what is wow-individual in them. This wow-individuality, though not be¬ yond the individual, is generalized by Marx in an abstract formula. At the same time, he re¬ jects with relative ease what is left in a per¬ sonality after the non-individuality has been deducted from it or, with a light heart, he com¬ pares this remainder to zero. In this analysis lies the notorious “objectivism” in Marxism: persons are converted into social categories, just as the personality of a soldier is erased by the regiment and company in which he serves. Vladimir Soloviev once commented that Chicherin had chiefly an “administrative” brain which, in the real sense of the word, means a “doctrinaire” brain. And Marx possessed such an “administrative” brain. Therefore, the real fragrance of religion remains beyond his spirit¬ ual sense of smell, and his atheism remains cold, emotionless, and doctrinaire. It does not occur to him that the sociological salvation of man¬ kind, the prospects for a socialistic “ZuJcunftstaat” [future state, i.e., Utopia] may turn out

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

to be insufficient for man’s salvation and cannot replace the hope for religious salvation. Thus, Ivan Karamazov’s torments about the hopeless¬ ness of the historical tragedy, his searching into the values of historical progress, into the cost of future harmony, into the “tears of a child”— searchings so dangerous for the beliefs in so¬ ciological salvation—were incomprehensible and alien to Marx. To solve all problems, Marx recommends one universal remedy: “prac¬ tice” (die Praxis), i.e., to deafen oneself wholly with the hubbub and noise of the street, for here, in this everyday hustle, one finds the solution to all doubts. Such an invitation to cure all philosophical and religious doubts through the “practice” in which there would be no time to breathe and think, as a solution just to these doubts (and not for the sake of the inde¬ pendent value of this “practice” in itself, which I intend neither to deny or underestimate), seems to me very similar to an invitation to get dead drunk and in this way to be¬ come insensitive to the pain of one’s own soul. A similar thing sometimes occurred in connection with the feeding of famine-strick¬ en people; there is no more noble deed than the one which is done for the sake of suffering, starving people. There is no bigger cynicism if the attack on hunger is used as a remedy for any kind of illness, and people’s torments are

MARX AND NON-INDIVIDUALITY

compared to a poultice for drawing a boil. The invitation to drag oneself down to the “dregs of life,” which nowadays has become fashion¬ able in vulgar philosophy as a prescription for the solution to all philosophical problems and doubts, has a prominent place also in Marx’s ultima ratio philosophy [the philosophy of “final conclusion”], although not in such a bare and vulgar form. Marx’s guiding principle, both practical and philosophical, is: “The world was sufficiently interpreted by philosophers; now is the time to begin its practical reconstruction.”

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V MARX AND THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT

Marx was insensitive to religious problems but this does not mean that he was indifferent towards the religious spirit and the existence of religion. On the contrary, it quite often happens that inner alienation does not lead to indifference but creates hatred for this strange and incomprehensible sphere. This was exactly Marx’s attitude towards religion, especially towards theism and Christianity, for which he felt fierce hostility. It was an attitude of a fighting and militant atheist, striving to liber¬ ate and cure people from religious insanity and spiritual slavery. In Marx’s militant atheism, one can see the central nerve of his entire lifework, one of its main stimuli. In what follows, it will turn out that the real, although concealed, practical theme of his most important, purely theoretical works, is in a sense his struggle with religion. Marx fights the God of religion with both his own science and his own socialism which, in his hands, turn into a means for atheism-a weapon for the emancipation of mankind from religion. The yearning of man¬ kind “to establish itself without God and, above all, forever and ultimately,” about which Do¬ stoevsky wrote with such prophetic fervor and which was the subject of his constant agonizing

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

thoughts, received, among others, one of the most vivid and complete expressions in Marx’s doctrine. This inner bond between atheism and socialism in Marx, the genuine spirit of his ac¬ tivity is usually either misunderstood 6 or un¬ noticed because, in general, very little interest is given to this aspect of Marx. In order to dem¬ onstrate this with all possible clarity, it will be necessary to turn to the history of his spirit¬ ual development.

6 Reference to this bond is due, by the way, to the merit of Professor Masaryk in his well-known book on Marxism, chapter 11.

62

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VI

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

What, in fact, was Marx’s general phi¬ losophical ideology; to what extent is it ap¬ propriate to call it such? On this account a whole legend was created, according to which Marx started with Hegel, being at first under his decisive influence and, consequently, was in a certain sense Hegelian—a part of the Hegelian “left-wing.” Apparently, at a much later time, Marx and Engels themselves were inclined to understand their own philosophical genealogy this way. This is well known, at least from the flattering self-characterization which Engels gave in 1891 to German socialism, i.e., to Marx¬ ism (in the mouth of Engels it is, of course, a synonym), and from the inscription on his own portrait: “We, German socialists, are proud of the fact that we descended not only from Saint Simon, Fourier, and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.” This established the first direct continuity between classical German idealism and Marxism, and the admission of such a link became commonplace in the socialphilosophical literature.7 7 For example, even a researcher who studied the literature on this problem as attentively and broadly as Professor Masaryk in his book, Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus (Wien, 1889), confirms that

63

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

Although biographical materials concerning Marx’s young years are lacking, the clarifica¬ tion of Marx’s factual philosophical develop¬ ment has now been made easier. Thanks to the works of Mehring, we have a complete edition of the old, not easily accessible writings of Marx.8 These are especially valuable because they are attributed to his early years and to the time when he was not yet a Marxist. Although he already stood on his own feet, he had not yet elaborated his own doctrines. So, while viewing Marx’s literary-scientific activity in its entirety (from the philosophical dissertation about De¬ mocritus and Epicurus to the last volume of Das Kapital), we arrive at a conclusion which is at sharp variance with the generally accepted “Marx’s socialism developed predominantly from German philosophy” and that “Marx’s philosophical foundations, rather his philosophical skeleton, is Hegel’s philosophy, for Hegel molded the spirit of Marx” and, finally, that “Marx made his debut in literature as a Hegelian, an adherent of Feuerbach” (p. 22 et passim). Even if we take into consideration that Feuerbach himself was once an adherent of Hegel, although he later became his irrevocable and fierce antagonist, we realize what sad confusion is contained in the words “a Hegelian, an adherent of Feuerbach.” Indeed, this is almost the same as saying that a Marxist is a follower of Tolstoy or the like. 8 Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle. Herausgegeben von Franz Mehring. Erster Band. Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels von Mdrz 18U. Zweiter Band. Gesam¬ melte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels von Juli 18UU bis November 181^7. Mehring provided these articles with his own commentary in which, despite their inescapable tendentiousness, there is much labor and knowledge.

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

one: there is no continuous connection between German classical idealism and Marxism. Marx¬ ism germinated in the soil of the final dissolu¬ tion of idealism, as only one of several products of this decay. If some link between socialism and idealism, though a weak one, still existed in Lassalle, then it was finally broken, especially as a result of Marx’s influence. The peak of German idealism ended in a sheer ravine. Soon after the death of Hegel, an unprecedented philosophical catastrophe, a complete break of philosophical traditions took place, threatening to return us to the age of the Enlighten¬ ment (Aufklarung) and to eighteenth-century French materialism (which Plekhanov dated as the origin of economic materialism). In any case, this is nearer to facts than is the view about Marx’s Hegelianism. We believe that the opinion about the signi¬ ficance of Marxism as a “transition form” or dissolution of classical idealism is refuted, first of all, by the fact that Marx himself re¬ mained the whole time alien to its influence. During his student years he made superficial concessions to it, but this was almost inevitable in the spiritual atmosphere of the University of Berlin at the end of the 1830’s; he gave them up very soon. There is no basis for labeling Marx a member of Hegel’s “school” in the sense in which the representatives of its “left” wing

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

(Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Strauss, and others) belong to it. They all actually grew up in HegeFs spiritual lap and forever preserved traces of this verifiable spiritual affinity. It is impossible to say the same about Marx. His Hegelianism did not go much beyond a wordy imitation of the peculiar style of Hegel, so impressive for many people, or go much beyond a few com¬ pletely casual quotations from Hegel.9 What do we find in Marx that would relate him spirit¬ ually with Hegel, beyond the limits of this su¬ perficial imitation? First of all, the chapter on the form of value (in Volume I of Das Kapital) was written “a la maniere” of Hegel to impress the neophytes. Marx himself later admitted that this imitation of Hegel was merely only “flirting”; and we add to it that he did so completely in vain. With the altogether meager intellectual content of this chapter (which, as a matter of fact, is super¬ fluous for any expose of Das Kapital’s economic system), this premeditated pomposity forces us to doubt more the literary taste of the author than to believe that the author is close to Hegel or even a serious expert on him. 9 Those wishing to check the accuracy of these words can easily accomplish this with the help of the literary index, an appendix to the translation of volume I of Das Kapital, edited by Struve. Here one can easily see how outwardly and casually Marx quotes Hegel, as if more for the sake of men¬ tioning his name than for the substance of the matter.

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

It is also said that Marx and Hegel are bound together by the notorious “dialectical method.” Marx himself wrote on this subject: “my dialectical method not only differs basically in its foundation from that of Hegel, but is its exact opposite.” We maintain that there is no relationship between them, just as the degree on a scale of a thermometer is not “an exact opposite” of the degree on a geographical map, but has nothing in common with it except the name. Hegel’s “dialectical method” is, in fact, a dialectical development of a concept; i.e., it is not really a method in the ordinary sense as a means of investigation or proof, but rather a method for the inner self-discovery of a con¬ cept. It is the very existence of this conceptexisting in motion and moving in contradic¬ tions. Marx, too, had no special dialectical method, even in the sense in which he admits to it himself (i.e., in a different sense from Hegel’s). Consequently, one may conclude that he had no dialectical method even in the sense of one of the logical methods, i.e., as a kind of investigation or discovery of scientific truths. Such a method does not exist at all in the induc¬ tive empirical sciences. That which Marx (and, after him, his school) mistakenly called his method was in reality the style in which he expressed his deductions—a writing style “a la Hegel” in which Marx’s predilection for

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

antithesis was in general a characteristic trait. The contradictory nature of contemporary eco¬ nomic development was a result of factual study and not at all its method. In any case, the special “dialectical method” is a sheer misunderstanding, regardless of whether the logic is understood in Mill’s sense (i.e., as a methodology of the empirical sci¬ ences) or in Hegel’s sense (i.e., as a metaphysi¬ cal ontology). Here is why the following tirade from the Preface to the second edition, volume I of Das Kapital, rings so strangely in Marx’s mouth: I openly declared myself to be a disciple of this great thinker and, having re¬ course to the peculiar Hegelian manner of expression, I even flirted in some parts of the chapter with the theory of value. In Hegel’s hands, dialectics undergo a mystification which does not at all elimi¬ nate the fact that Hegel was the first to reveal thoroughly and consciously the general forms of its motion. His dialec¬ tics are upside down and have to be turned over in order to find the rational grain within the mystical sheath. As the reader can see, Marx proclaims him¬ self a disciple of Hegel. In this claim, one must

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

see either a continuation of that same ‘ ‘flirta¬ tion” (as in the chapter on value), or even a direct mockery of Hegel, or simply, an utter philosophical irresponsibility. Of course, there is least of all a piety towards the “great thinker.” After declaiming everything that Hegel came to represent as “mystification” and planning “to turn his system upside down,” Marx, at the same time, proclaims himself as Hegel’s student and claims to be a defender of his memory and honor against abusers. Trust¬ ing only one’s immediate impression or, so to speak, one’s purely artistic intuition, one may say that the quoted tirade is by itself such strong proof of Marx’s complete alienation from Hegel that, after it, any additional proof becomes superfluous. Finally, traces of Hegel’s influence on Marx are seen in his evolutionism. However, the idea of evolution in its positivistic understanding is deeply different from Hegel’s dialectics of the concept; just as the external succession of events and situations, even when it obeys an inner law, differs in its “factuality” from selfdiscovery of the internal, implicit, and given content—a sequence of successive stages of the idea’s self-revelation. In spite of their external similarity, Hegel’s dialectics, on the one hand, and positivism and evolution (in the sense of the natural sciences), on the other hand, re-

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

present an utter contradiction. Of course, the concepts of historical and, in particular, of economic evolution could have occurred in Marx under Hegel’s superficial influence as well. However, it could have also developed comple¬ tely independently, especially because it was in the air and appeared almost simultaneously in Kant, Darwin, and L[udwig] Stein (albeit under Hegel’s influence ) and amongst various socialists, both French and German (Lassalle, Rodbertus). Therefore, on the basis of Marx’s evolution, a relation of origin with Hegel cannot be established with any sufficient evidence. In general, it is possible to say that a student of the University of Berlin in the 1830’s, while inwardly alien to Hegelianism, could adopt even more of its external features than we find in Marx. The total absence of intrinsic and other more important indications of affinity not only to Hegel but, in general, to classical idealism, to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and, in general, to any philosophical school, are abso¬ lutely striking. It is hard to believe that one could remain uninfluenced by the problems and teachings of classical idealism after coming into contact with them. This can be explained only by an intrinsic rejection or abhorrence of these problems. It remains only to wonder why there was a need to establish a nonexistent historical link between Marxism and classical idealism.

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

Particularly striking is the fact that Marx re¬ mained utterly alien to any kind of gnoseolog¬ ical doubts and critical stance; and that he remained untouched by Kant’s gnoseological skepticism and critique of practical reason. It turned out that he was a precritical dogmatist and, being a most primitive materialist, was able to display such a thesis as his own funda¬ mental position (in the Preface to A Contribu¬ tion to the Critique of Political Economy): “The forms of being are not determined by the consciousness of people but, on the contrary, the social being determines the forms of their consciousness”; or, another thesis (in the Pre¬ face to the second edition of Volume I of Das Kapital): “To me, the ideal principle is only the material principle having passed through the brain (sic!).” It is clear that these ob¬ scure and inarticulate propositions, full of highly polysemantic, unclear, unexplained terms as being, consciousness, ideal, material could not emerge from the pen of one influenced by Kant, whose critique is the sole entry into the edifice of classical idealism. How can one talk here about some kind of continuity! On the initial course of his scientific studies, Marx comments: “I specialized in jurispru¬ dence, however, the study of it had been sub¬ ordinated and went alongside the study of philosophy and history” (Preface to A Con-

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

tribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

In later years, in accordance with his own state¬ ments and the content of his published works, his studies concentrated solely upon political economy. (It is true that Engels, piously be¬ lieving in the universality of Marx’s genius, mentioned Marx’s intentions to write both the logic and history of philosophy and, at the same time, that he had plans for natural-scientific, mathematical and economic works.) However, this statement of a devoted friend (which has not been corroborated but, on the contrary, is refuted by the facts) does not seem to be based on anything more weighty than a casual con¬ versation or remote dream. Realizing that the time of Marx’s most intensive studies of philoso¬ phy can be attributed only to his early years, we must search here for the key to under¬ standing Marx’s real philosophical cast of mind. Unfortunately, we know very little about Marx’s student years but, even in those years one cannot ascertain any significant closeness between him and Hegel. Marx spent one year at the University of Bonn (without great effect on his own studies, judging by his father’s let¬ ters) and from October 1836 to 1841, he was a student in Berlin. A list of courses attended by him there during nine semesters (Mehring lists them in his commentaries on the edition of Marx’s early works) indicates that even at

72/.

marx’s general philosophical ideology

that time, his studies of philosophy and history did not play a paramount role. Out of twelve courses, more than half are related to jurispru¬ dence; only one to philosophy; two, to theolo¬ gy (!); one, to literature; and not a single one to history.10 Mehring wanted to weaken the testimony of this list, which contradicts Marx’s later statement about his course of studies, by referring to the fact that after the invention of the printing press attendance at lectures lost its significance altogether. Of course, Carlyle’s statement that books are the best university holds true. Even if this is not quite so now, in the 1830’s, given the quality of the departments at the University of Berlin which attracted students from all over the world, it was not so at all. In any case, the choice of lecture subjects with full academic freedom testifies to the prevailing intellectual trends. What was Marx occupied with besides lectures? About this we have only one, and even then a very early, piece of evidence, namely, a letter Marx wrote to his father at the end of his first student year (November 1837). In 10 Marx attended the following lectures: pandects under Savigny; criminal law and Prussian local law under Gans; church law under Geffeter; the criminal process with the common German process of law under Rudolph Erbrecht. Besides this, lectures on philosophy, theology, philology, and logic under Gabler; on the prophet Isaiah under Bruno Bauer; about Euripides under Gennert; about general geography under Ritter; and finally, anthropology under Steffens.

73

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

this letter, Marx attempts to justify himself before his father who has reproached him for idleness. It contains a long, even colossal, enu¬ meration of everything he read, studied, and wrote during that year. The general impression from this most intimate letter (which illustra¬ tes a remarkable inquisitiveness, diligence, and efficiency of this nineteen-year-old student) is that it is written in a certain mood and thus should not be taken too literally, which would be even impossible. The letter tells of papers on two systems of legal philosophy (one of them is 300 pages long!) which the young author wrote during that year, only to become instantly disappointed in them. In addition, he writes of an entire philosophical dialogue, two dramas, and verses for his fiancee (which Marx sent more than once), etc. Besides that, the letter contains an unusually long list of books sup¬ posedly read and studied by him, for which, even with good abilities, a year would not be enough. The letter clearly reflects youthful ardor, together with youthful self-admiration and great diligence and the lack of the necessary self-discipline leading to flightiness. All this forces us to treat this letter with caution. By the way, it did not set Marx’s father at ease but alarmed him even more.11 11 Even Mehring, who tries to take each word of this letter literally, had doubts about the existence of a 300-page manu¬ script and he assumes this to be a slip of the pen or an error.

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

In any case, this letter reveals Marx as having great interests but with no settled taste during the Sturm-und-Drangperiode [Stormand-Stress period]. We know nothing of Marx’s later student years, other than an enumeration of lectures. In 1841, Marx received his doctorate for a dissertation on a philosophical subject: The Difference Between the Natural Philoso¬ phies of Democritus and Epicurus, published by Mehring. It differs little from the usual type of doctoral dissertation and, in general, pro¬ vides little material to judge the author’s philosophical individuality and philosophical ^world outlook. (The evaluation of such spe¬ cial studies we leave to the specialists in the history of Greek philosophy.) Judging from its Dedication (to his future fatherin-law), Marx appears here to be an ad¬ herent of “idealism,” although it is not clear of what particular kind. Even here, one does not see any Hegelianism (with possibly one exception-in the Preface where Marx mentions, with respect, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy). In any case, it is possible to say that those exaggerated expecta¬ tions, which could arise on the basis of this youthful letter, did not come true. Marx was dreaming, even at this time, about a chair in philosophy but soon gave up these thoughts when his friend Bruno Bauer was removed from 75

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

the university for his freethinking. However, in view of the ease with which Marx abandoned the idea, we think that Bauer’s removal was probably a pretext and that the real cause was his obvious incompatibility toward this kind of activity. The philosophical uncertainty of Marx’s cast of mind, together with his vague student “idealism,” quickly disappeared. In two or three years, Marx himself appears as a mate¬ rialistic positivist and student of Feuerbach, under whose general influence he remained all his life. Marx is a Feuerbachian who only later somewhat changed and completed his teacher’s doctrine. In order to understand Marx, we must keep in mind this basic fact. Marx did not call himself a disciple of Feuerbach, which he truly was; for some reason, he preferred to call him¬ self a disciple of Hegel, which he was not. After the 1840’s, Marx does not mention Feuerbach’s name anymore, and Engels refers to him in his works as a passion from his youth which he now sharply opposes. However, using Feuer¬ bach’s favorite expression, it may be said that Feuerbach is Marx’s untold secret, his real clue. It is easy to understand that after Marx adopted Feuerbach’s world outlook he would lose completely and forever a taste for Hegel, even if he once enjoyed it. It is well known how

MARX’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL IDEOLOGY

important for Feuerbach was his struggle with Hegel. However, this struggle is by no means symptomatic of a further development of a system by a student, even though he abandons the teacher but still continues his work. This struggle is a real revolt, a final negation of speculative philosophy in general, personified at that time by Hegel. It is a defection into the coarsest materialism in metaphysics, into sensualistic positivism in the theory of knowl¬ edge, into hedonism in ethics. Marx, too, adopted all these features by means of which he severed his previous philosophical past. Feuerbach took his place between classical idealism and Marxism and divided them forever with an im¬ penetrable wall. Therefore, Marx’s sudden announcement in 1873, of being one of Hegel’s disciples, is nothing more than a kind of caprice, perhaps flirtation or historical reminiscence.

77

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VII MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

As is well known,1* the religious question occupies the central place in Feuerbach’s phi¬ losophy. Its main theme is the rejection of the religion of theanthropism in the name of the religion of anthropotheism; it is a theomachistical, militant atheism. Especially this theme generated in Marx’s soul the most profound resonance. Out of all the abundance and varia¬ tion of philosophical schools during the time of the fragmenting of Hegelianism into all possible directions, Marx’s ear singled out the religious theme, namely, the theomachistical one. Feuerbach’s book, Das Wesen des Christenthums [The Essence of Christianity], published in 1841, made such an impression upon Marx and Engels (according to the latter’s account) that they both immediately became Feuerbachians. In 1844, Marx, together with Ruge, pub¬ lished in Paris the journal Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher [German-French Yearbooks], of which, however, only one double issue ever came out. Marx contributed two articles to it, 12 For a clear understanding of everything further, I ask you to become acquainted with my work about Feuerbach: The Religion of Anthropotheism of L. Feuerbach (“Ques¬ tions of Life,” IX-XII, 1905). It was published as a separate brochure by Free Conscience, Moscow, 1906.

79

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage [Toward the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right; and, On the Jewish Question], which had paramount im¬ portance for the nature of his ideology. In both articles and also in his work Die Heilige Familie [The Holy Family], published at the same time, Marx is an orthodox Feuerbachian. One may mention only a single possible exception: a particular nuance in his perception of Feuer¬ bach’s teachings about religion which have, so to say, two fronts. Feuerbach not only criticizes Christianity and all kinds of theism but, at the same time, he preaches the atheistic religion of mankind. He wants to be the prophet of this new religion and even displays a peculiar “piety” in that role, so mercilessly ridiculed by Stirner. It is Feuerbach’s “piety,” this pathetic yearning to worship a holy thing (even if it is the coarsest, logical idol) which is so utterly alien to the haughty, self-assured spirit of Marx. He only takes one side of Feuerbach’s teachings—the critical one, and turns the blade of his criticism against any religion without exempting the religion of his teacher. He aims toward a com¬ plete and final eradication of religion, toward a pure atheism in which no sun shines anymore, neither in the sky nor on the earth. However, we had better allow Marx himself to speak on the subject. The article, Toward the Critique

MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right,13 begins with the following decisive proclamation: For Germany, the critique of re¬ ligion is essentially finished (!!), but critique of religion is the presupposision for any other critique. The basis of non-religious critique is as fol¬ lows: it is man who makes religion and not religion which makes man. In particular, religion is the selfconsciousness and self-feeling of a man who either did not find himself or who once again lost himself. Man is not an abstract being, existing outside the world. Man is a world of people, a state, a society, which produces religion— a perverted consciousness of the world because these entities themselves reflect a perverted world. Religion is the gen¬ eral theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur [point of honor], its enthusiasm, its moral sanc¬ tion, its solemn compensation, its uni¬ versal basis for consolation and justifi¬ cation ... It is a fantastic fulfillment of human nature [“TFesen”-Feuerbach’s common term), for human nature does 13 This was also published in Russian translation.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

not possess true reality. The struggle against religion is, consequently, also a struggle against a world in which the spiritual imprint is its religion. With some people, religious impoverishment (Elend) is an expression of real impov¬ erishment; with others, it is a protest against real impoverishment. Religion is the breath of a suppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless (herzlosen) world and, consequently, the spirit of a callous epoch—it is the opium of the people. The annihilation of religion, as the illusive happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness. The demand for the elimination of illusions concerning one’s existence is the demand for the elimination of the condition which requires illusions. Thus, the cri¬ tique of illusions is essentially criticism of the vale of sorrow in which religion is the illusion of sanctity. Criticism tore imaginary flowers from the chains, not that man could bear his deprived fanta¬ sies or comforts of a goal, but that he could throw down the chains and start to tear off the living flowers. The critique of religion disappoints man. It asks of him to think, to function and to define

MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

his surrounding reality as a disappoint¬ ed man who is brought to his senses. It ask of him to move around himself and, consequently, around his own real soul as the center . All this is an account of Feuerbach’s fun¬ damental tenets, stated nearly in his very own words. Marx’s application of this “critique of religion” is much more vividly practical and revolutionary: The critique of heaven changes into a critique of the earth; the critique of religion, into a critique of the law; the critique of theology, into a critique of politics ... The weapon of critique, of course, cannot replace the critique of weapons. The material power must be overthrown by material power, but the theory also becomes a material power once it seizes the masses. The theory is capable of reaching the masses if it can demonstrate ad hominem [to the man], and the theory can demonstrate ad ho¬ minem if it is radical. To be radical means to take the matter by the roots. Root for man is man himself. The evi¬ dent proof of radicalism for German theory and, consequently, for its practic-

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

al energy is its emergence (Ausgang) from the decisive, affirmative elimina¬ tion of religion. As a result, critique of religion teaches that man is the highest creature for man; thus, to overthrow all conditions in which man is a humble, fettered, deserted, despised creature is a categorical imperative. One can sense in conclusion of this article “the music of the future,” the basic theme of Marx’s sociological doctrine: The only practically possible liberation for Germany is liberation according to the theory proclaiming man as the high¬ est being for man (i.e., Feuerbach’s teachings! Author). The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its core—the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be translated into re¬ ality without the removal (Aufhebung) of the proletariat; the proletariat cannot be removed without the elimination of philosophy. Philosophy, i.e., Feuerbach’s teachings (namely, the theoretical liberation of mankind from religion) and the cause of proletariat are

MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

united here into one whole. The proletariat is entrusted with the mission of the historical realization of atheism, i.e., of man’s practical liberation from religion. And this reveals the real Marx, the true “secret” of Marxism, its genuine nature! The text quoted above is usually used in order to confirm an imaginary connection be¬ tween Marxism and classical philosophy, which Engels had also wanted to establish. The reader can see, however, that it is impossible to find anything of the sort in it. On the contrary, any such connection is rather rejected here, since idealistic philosophy is inseparably connected with one or another religious doctrine,14 and furthermore, because Feuerbach’s teaching (meant in fact here) basically denies idealistic 14 In the same journal, in the article “Die Lage Englands” (written apropos of Carlyle’s Past and Present), Engels also reveals his Feuerbachianism. Here we read: “Until now there has always been the question, What is God? And German philosophy (i.e., once again, only Feuerbach, Author) resolved the question in this sense: God is man. Man has only to know himself; to measure according to his own self all the circumstances of his life; to judge them in conformity with his own merits; to organize his world in a really human way, according to the needs of his own nature; and then he will have solved the problem of time. Not in the supernatural, nonexistent spheres; not outside space and time; not in a “god” who lives in the world or in its opposite, one must seek truth, but much nearer-inside man him¬ self. Man’s real essence is more noble and more regal than the essence of all kinds of “gods,” who only are more or less confused and distorted essences of man.”

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

philosophy. In compliance with such an out¬ look, “man’s emancipation” in the language of Marx meant at that time precisely a liberation from religion. This point of view is particularly well clarified in the controversy with Bauer on the Jewish question where Marx points out the insufficiency of a purely political emanci¬ pation since, even with it, religion still re¬ mains : The question is how a complete politi¬ cal emancipation relates to religion. If we find a religion not only existing but thriving in a country with total political emancipation, this proves that the ex¬ istence of religion does not contradict the totality of the state. Since the ex¬ istence of religion is connected with the existence of some deficiency (Mangels), we must seek the cause of this deficiency within the very essence of the state. For us, religion is not anymore the cause but only a display of a secular (weltlichen) limitation. Therefore, we ex¬ plain the religious limitations of the citizens of a free state by their worldly (weltlichen) limitations. We do not assert that they have to be liberated from religious limitations in order to be emancipated from their

MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

worldly (weltlichen) limitations. We assert that they free themselves from their own religious limitations only after liberating themselves from their worldly limitations. We do not transform earth¬ ly problems into theological ones. We transform human problems into worldly ones. History has been sufficiently dis¬ solved in superstitions, but we are dis¬ solving superstitions in history. The question of the relationship between po¬ litical emancipation and religion be¬ comes for us a question of a relationship between political emancipation and mankind’s emancipation ... The limits of political emancipation especially become apparent when a state can lib¬ erate itself from a certain limitation without man becoming, in this respect, free; when the state can become a free government without man becoming free. The members of a political state are religious as a result of the dualism be¬ tween the individual and tribal life, between the life of a civic society and the political life. They are religious since man regards civic life, which is unnatu¬ ral to his real individuality, as his own real life. They are religious to the extent that religion is the spirit of a bourgeois

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

society, an expression of a separation and removal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian since, in it, a man—not man in general, but every man—is considered a sovereign, a su¬ preme being. Moreover, man in his own uncultivated, unsocial manifestation (Erscheinung), in his accidental (!) form of existence; man as he is in life; man, spoiled by the whole organization of our society, is lost, alienated from his own self, devoted to the supremacy of superhuman elements. In short, man is not yet really a generic being (Gattungswesen). Fantastic images, visions, pos¬ tulates of Christianity, the sovereignty of a man who is alien and different from real man existing in a democracy—these form sensual reality. It is not difficult to recognize here Feuer¬ bach’s idea about “Gattungswesen,” about mankind as the last highest instance of man. Marx’s “love for that which is remote” and still nonexistent is transformed into a contempt for his “fellow man” who exists as one, spoiled and lost. Christianity is to be blamed for preach¬ ing the equality of all individuals and for teaching respect for the man in every man.

MARX, FEUERBACH AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

Here again, Marx’s typical disdain for per¬ sonality emerges. The real man appears only under the following conditions: Only when the real individual man withdraws into himself (in sich zurucknimmt), the abstract official citizen and, as an individual man in his individual situation, in his individual work and empirical life, becomes a generic beingonly when man recognizes and organizes his propres forces [own strength or power] as social forces and therefore needs no longer isolate them from him¬ self as political forces-only then will man’s emancipation be accomplished. Thus, when man does away with his in¬ dividuality and human society is transformed either into a Sparta or an anthill or a beehive, only then, man’s emancipation will be accom¬ plished. With the same ease with which Marx steps over the problem of individuality, here too he is ready in the name of man’s emanci¬ pation, i.e., in the name of the destruction of religion, to dissolve this emancipating per¬ sonality in a dark and dense fog from which the “generic being” is woven, mocking the imagination of Feuerbach and dwindling into the air whenever there is any attempt to sense it. 89 /.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

In this judgment one feels the effect of the characteristic weakness of atheistic humanism which is unable to maintain simultaneously both personality and the whole and, therefore, constantly runs from one extreme to another: now personality revolts to destroy the whole and denies the form in the name of the rights of the individual (Stirner and Nietzsche); now personality is replaced by the whole, by some¬ thing like a socialist Sparta, as in Marx. Reli¬ gious grounds are the only base where the highest manifestation of an individual as a per¬ son brings together and unites all people in a super-individual love and common life. Only the union of people through Christ in God (i.e., the Church), a personal and superpersonal union, is capable of overcoming this difficulty and, while affirming individuality, is able to preserve the whole. But the idea of a church or religious community is so far away from the contempo¬ rary consciousness.

VIII MARX AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

We cannot pass in silence Marx’s judg¬ ments of the Jewish question, in which his harsh straightforwardness and peculiar spirit¬ ual blindness are manifested with particular sharpness. With that same ease with which he drowns personal individuality in the “generic being” for the glory of “man’s emancipation,” he also does away with national self-conscious¬ ness and with the people’s collective national personality. At the same time, he annihilates the strongest and most insoluble identity in the waves and hurricanes of history—this axis of all world history, his own people. The Jewish question is for Marx a question of usurer-“yid”,15 a question which will resolve itself after the abolition of monetary interest. What Marx wrote on the Jewish question makes a most repulsive impression upon me. Nowhere is such an icy, heartless, and therefore blind, one-sided reasoning displayed as nakedly as here. But we had better quote Marx’s original opinions :16 15 Bulgakov used the word “ZHID” (Anglicized: Yid) [Trans.] 16 Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question,” from DeutschFranzdsische Jahrbucher, and also the chapter on the Jewish problem from Die Heilige Familie, regrettably is not very satisfactorily translated into Russian: Karl Marx, “K evrei-

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

The question of the capability of the Jews to emancipate is transformed into the question: What kind of special so¬ cial element must one overcome in order to eliminate Jewry? For the ability of modern Jews to emancipate rests on the relationship of Jewry to the emanci¬ pation of the modern world. This rela¬ tionship is necessarily determined by the special status of Jews in the modern op¬ pressed world. Let’s have a look at the real, secular (weltlichen), non-Sabbath, but everyday Jew. What is the secular basis of Jewry? Practical demand, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jews? Profiteering (Schacher). What is his secular god? Money. Thus, emancipation from profi¬ teering and money (consequently, from the practical, realistic Jewry) would be the self-emancipation of the modern time. The organization of society, which would destroy the precondition for pro¬ fiteering, would also make Jewry im¬ possible. Its religious consciousness would disperse as a thin mist in the real, skomu voprosu,” St. Petersburg, 1906. Publishing House, “Molot” Translated by G. RadomysPskii, edited by A. Lunacharskii.

MARX AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

vital air of the society ... The emanci¬ pation of Jewry, in this sense, is an emancipation of mankind from Jewry. What was the basis of the Jewish religion in itself? Practical need, ego¬ ism. ... Money is the jealous god of Israel, side-by-side with whom no other god can exist... The god of the Jews desecrated himself; he became a secular god. The real god of the Jew is a promissory note. His god is an illusory promissory note. That which in the abstract lies in the Judaic religion—contempt for theory, art, history, for man, as an end in him¬ self—all this is the really conscious point of view, the virtue of a money man (Geldmenschen).... The chimerical na¬ tionality of a Jew is that of a merchantof a money man, in general.

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MARX, ANTI-SEMITISM AND ATHEISM

What caused this son to lift his hand against his mother, to turn coldly away from her ageold sufferings, to renounce himself spiritually from his own people? The answer is perfectly clear: this was the result of a total hostility towards religion in the name of a consistent atheism. Bruno Bauer made an assertion (with which Marx polemicizes in his article) that the Jewish question is, first of all, a reli¬ gious one—a question about the relation between Judaism and Christianity. I completely share this opinion because, from the point of view of Christian beliefs, any other concept of the fate of Judaism is impossible. The historical and religious fate of Judaism is connected with the relationship of Judaism to Christianity. We do not intend to go deeper into this question here; but for us, there is no doubt that the religious assertions and denials, in particular, as well as the attraction and repulsion, determine in prin¬ ciple the historical fate of Jewry. In spite of all the atheism of a considerable part of modern Jewry, in spite of all its mate¬ rialism (both practical and theoretical), under¬ neath all these historical stratifications, never¬ theless, there lies a religious substratum which the religious genius of Vladimir Soloviev was

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

able to sense and ultimately reveal. But Marx, of course, could not reconcile himself with a religious comprehension of the Jewish question. In order to maintain a consistent anti-religious standpoint, he had to sacrifice his own na¬ tionality, to put a curse on it and fall not only into a peculiar, practical, but also a religious anti-semitism. Thus, we can see that already from the be¬ ginning of the 1840’s, the fundamental neu¬ trality towards religion which found its own official expression in the programmatic policy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and of Austria, that “religion is a personal matter” (Privatsache) was totally alien to Marx. Of course, from the standpoint of the party, this is a conventional hypocrisy necessitated by tactical reasons, chiefly by conditions for pro¬ paganda in the village. It is sufficient to become superficially acquainted with the literature and general mood of the party of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s disciples to be convinced of the insincer¬ ity of this proclamation since, of course, this is a party not only of socialism but also of a militant atheism. Marx never made this a secret. In his famous critical commentary on the draft of the Gotha program, Marx protests against the demand for “freedom of conscien¬ ce,” calling it bourgeois and liberal, since what was meant here was the freedom of re -

MARX, ANTI-SEMITISM AND ATHEISM

ligious conscience while the labor party, on the contrary, had to emancipate conscience from religious phantoms. Someone may, however, object that we have become acquainted with the philosophical reli¬ gious world outlook of Marx in statu nascendi [in the beginning phase], in an epoch when Marx himself was still not a Marxist, since he had not worked out that particular doctrine usually connected with his name in political economics and sociology. Although we do not deny this last fact, we are of the opinion that in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher of 1844 Marx appears before us, in a religiousphilosophical respect, as definitely formed and crystallized. He did not make any fundamental changes in his philosophical beliefs at some later time. In this sense, the general spiritual theme of his life was already given; its fundamental religious-philosophical theme was fully recog¬ nized. The question could have been only about the how, not about the what, for this how was Marxism which, in our eyes, is only a particular case of Feuerbachianism—namely, its special sociological formula.

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X MARX’S FEUERBACHIANISM The peculiarity of Marxism concerns a completely different area than the philosophical area which we are interested in. Marxism is an elaboration or, if you wish, an enrichment, a further development of Feuerbachianism, but it certainly has not overcome its religiousphilosophical side. In Engels’s booklet about Feuerbach, as I have mentioned before in special articles about the latter, he exaggerates this distinction in an extreme way, turning it into a matter of principle. Apparently, Engels wanted to defend Marx’s originali¬ ty, even in an area in which he was not original at all (i.e., in philosophy), and therefore he displays “economic materialism” as some¬ thing superior to Feuerbachianism. However, this doctrine points only to the well-known so¬ ciological substratum of that historical process which has as its final result the implementation of the Feuerbach-Marxist postulate: “human emancipation,” i.e., the emancipation of hu¬ manity from religion by its practical sociali¬ zation, by its transformation into “Gattungswesen” on the basis of a socialist economy. In all of Marx’s future works, there is nothing which would abolish or limit the reli¬ gious-philosophical program developed in the

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiccher articles. One must consider these articles, being for Marx, a philosophical zenith—the ultimate stress point of his purely philosophical thought. Later on, while preserving his loyalty to all that he had accepted and adopted in his youth, Marx moves farther and farther away from philosophical problems. He never returns to them, presum¬ ably because of his full inner satisfaction which came with an awareness of his own correctness and with the absence of doubts in accepted dog¬ mas. We are left with the paradoxical con¬ clusion that in order to know Marx better and to be able to judge him from the aspect in which we are interested and which is the most essential one, the most resourceful materials can be found just in that period when Marx still was not a Marxist—when his original spiritual cast of mind was not yet hidden behind the details of the special investigations for which he became well known. Thus, in Marx’s consciousness there arose the world-wide historical problem of human self-emancipation. It was necessary to find a suitable means for its solution and such a means was “scientific socialism,” the system of which Marx began to work out in his scientific activ¬ ity. From this time, the range of his theoretical interests and studies, as much as we can deter¬ mine from his works and from his own testi100 /.

MARX’S FEUERBACHIANISM

mony about himself, narrows and concentrates mostly—if not to say, exceptionally—on political economy and current politics. However, the most interesting fact of all is that at this time, Marx’s theoretical claims were by no means limited to political economy but were expanded to the universal sphere of the philosophy of his¬ tory. At this time, he formed the “materialistic interpretation of history” which claims to give a key for understanding all historical events. No matter what we think about this famous “discovery” of Marx, we are interested here in the way it came about in reality. What was its psychology, its inner motive? We know that during this time Marx was not involved (at least, not to such an extent that would leave perceptible traces) in either history or phi¬ losophy.17 This means that the “discovery” was not a consequence of a new theoretical deepening but a new formula, dogmatically advanced and unquestionably accepted as a kind of artistic intuition. It was not the fruit of scientific re¬ search, through which, incidentally, many genuine scientific discoveries are made. It is easy to recognize the combination of elements which formed the materialistic conception of history. On the one hand, there is still the same 17 It merits attention that even in his controversial writing against Duhring, which does not represent, of course, a firstclass philosophical work, only the economic chapter was written by Marx; all the other, philosophical, chapters belong to Engels.

101 /.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

Feuerbachian doctrine of militant atheism we already know; and, on the other hand, there is the strong impression which Marx obtained from the facts of economic reality due to his studies of political economy and current poli¬ tics. Consequently, the new doctrine does not grow beyond the limits of the old world out¬ look, although it does complicate it. In parti¬ cular, as regards religion, its philosophical treatment becomes even more vulgar, although in essence it does not change. Religion was de¬ clared, together with other “forms of conscious¬ ness,” to be a “superstructure” above the eco¬ nomic “base.” In the first volume of Das Kapital, we meet the following judgment about religion which, in essence, does not at all take us beyond the articles about Hegel and other wTorks from the 1840’s: For a society of commodity pro¬ ducers, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one an¬ other by treating their products as com¬ modities and values, whereby they re¬ duce their individual private labor to the standard of homogeneous human labor—for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man (more especially, in its bourgeois devolpments

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as Protestantism, Deism, etc.) is the most fitting form of religion.18 This is Feuerbach translated only into the language of political economy and, in particu¬ lar, that of Marx’s economic system. A further general opinion of religion also sounds like an echo of Feuerbach: The religious reflections of the real world can, in general, disappear only when the conditions of the people’s prac¬ tical everyday lives will offer them com¬ pletely clear and reasonable attitudes of man towards man and nature. The so¬ cial process of life, i.e., the materialistic process of production, will throw off the mystic view only when, as the product of freely united people, it comes under their conscious and systematic control.19 18 Das Kapital, Volume I, edited by Struve, p. 41. is ibid. In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx even allows not only the possibility of explaining existing religious presentations taken from life but also their deductive, a priori construction from the facts of reality. Here is the quotation: “Technology exposes the active attitude of man towards nature, the immediate process of production in his life, and at the same time, also his social life at¬ titudes ’ and spiritual ideas emerging from them. In fact, any history of religion which does not take into consideration this materialistic basis lacks a critical foundation. Of course, it is much easier by means of analysis to find the earthly essence of religious ideas

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

Taking these judgments as an example, we can see (and that is about all one can find in the Marx of this period) that Marx’s religiousphilosophical thought did not at all become more developed and enriched by the acceptance of the dogma of economic materialism. As before, it repeats positions adopted from Feuerbach. This serves as an unnecessary confirmation of the fact that economic “materialism” should not be considered a scientific “discovery,” born as the result of the objective data of research and re¬ maining beyond the author’s will and his gener¬ al opinions, but only as a new dogma of an old belief. This dogma does not force one to re¬ fute or to reexamine anything, leaving every¬ thing as it was before. It gives a special formula which, at the same time, adds the high¬ est evaluation to a special subject of new scientific studies and makes political economy the science of all sciences. It is very easy and flattering for the scientific vanity of a political economist to adopt a doctrine which converts his special discipline into such a universal science and which places it higher than phithan the other way around, i.e., to deduce their re¬ ligious forms from the actually given relations. This last method is purely materialistic and for that reason, the only scientific method.” (p. 300, note 89.) It would have been better had Marx shown this “materialistic” (but from our point of view, plainly fantastic) method in action, instead of only talking about it in a footnote—the most suitable place for such scientific “discoveries”!

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losophy and all other sciences, making it a key to all kinds of “ideologies/’ i.e., to the whole spiritual life of mankind.

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XI

MARX’S PECULIAR IMPRINT ON SOCIALISM

In conclusion, let us touch upon the peculiar imprint which socialism received from Marx. Here we must state that the most profound, formative impact Marx made on the socialist movement in Germany and later in other coun¬ tries was manifested not so much in his politi¬ cal and economic program as, in general, in the religious-philosophical area. The Social Demo¬ cratic Party, the political form of the workers’ movement in Germany in general, was not created by Marx (to whom, as a matter of fact, belongs the unsuccessful attempt to deflect the Workers’ Party to the false path of an inter¬ national organization, which was also urged in the Communist Manifesto), but was created by Lassalle, who founded and finally set a workers’ party in motion. Its subsequent de¬ velopment and destiny were formed by spe¬ cific conditions of the Prussian-German regime and by subsequent historical events, but by no means under the influence of Marx. It is true that in his own economic works, he defined the ideology of the social-democratic theorists and, through them, the official party credo. How¬ ever, this theoretical credo is by no means in¬ separably connected with the actual party

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UBRARY _ JLnmf BOB JONES UNWERSfTf GREENVILLE, S.C.

KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

program, which was not theoretical Marxism but the so-called program-minimum, more or less common to all democratic parties regardless of their attitude towards Marx. The perceptible influence of Marxism reveals itself here only in the agrarian question, where its dogma still binds the feet of the party. Even here, the press¬ ing demands of real life force one ultimately to ignore this dogma, as the Russian Social Democrats had already done. Furthermore, for any economist it must be evident how much Marx’s purely economic dogma fails to keep pace with developing life and social sciences. Betraying more and more new flaws and simply growing obsolete, the entire party dogma be¬ comes gradually a purely historical matter. It is put back on the shelf, together with the idols of history and political economy, where Marx’s name joins the ranks of such honorable men as Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, List, Rodbertus, Lassalle, Owen, and other creators of political economy. Consequently, no matter how risky such an assertion is, or how much it contradicts the prevailing opinion, we nevertheless believe that there is a high probability that even without Marx, the workers’ movement would have molded itself into its present political form. A Social Democratic Workers’ Party with ap¬ proximately the same program and tactics as

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MARX’S PECULIAR IMPRINT ON SOCIALISM

the existing one would have been formed. Marx imprinted upon it the ineffaceable mark of his own spirit (and, consequently, of that spirit of which he himself was a tool) in philosophicalreligious matters and, of course, through Marx, that of Feuerbach. The general concept of so¬ cialism worked out by Marx was, of course, permeated by this spirit and answered the re¬ quirements of militant atheism; he merely added to it that note which, as the saying goes, makes the tune, thus converting social¬ ism into a means for battling religion. No matter how clearly the general tasks of social¬ ism were presented, we know that the concrete forms of a socialist movement can differ greatly in their spiritual content and their ethical value. The movement may reflect an inspiringly high, purely religious enthusiasm, since social¬ ism seeks to implement truth, justice, and love in social relations. It can also be over¬ whelmed by other, less lofty, sentiments such as class hatred, envy, egoism—by the very same bourgeois qualities turned upside down; in short, by feelings which, in the guise of class interests and the class point of view, have such a dominant role in the propagation of Marxism. Indignation towards evil is a lofty, even sacred sentiment, without which no human being or public figure can exist. However, there is a subtle, almost imperceptible, yet at the same

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

time a very real line which, when crossed, turns this sacred sentiment into a totally profane one. We understand all the ease, naturalness, even inconspicuousness of such a transformation. We admit that the prevalence of either kind of sentiment determines the spiritual physiog¬ nomy of both men and movements, despite the fact that our practical age is not accustomed to show interest in the inward side of the soul un¬ less it has direct practical importance. Marx’s entire doctrine resulted from his basic religious motive; from his militant atheism; from his economic materialism; from the propagation of class hatred a outrance [to the utmost]; from his negation of universal values and norms com¬ pulsory for all, beyond class interest; and fi¬ nally, from the deep, unbridgeable gulf sepa¬ rating two worlds (i.e., one, the proletariat, invested with a universal mission; and two, the “general reactionary masses” of its oppres¬ sors) —all these preachings were able to function in only one direction: i.e., to vulgarize, to de¬ grade the socialist movement, to add to it a prosaic and purely economic character, to ex¬ tinguish its spirit and to make the sounds of class hatred in the movement more audible than the sounds of love for all mankind. By no means do we attribute the inclusion of this subtlety in the movement solely to Marx’s influence. On the contrary, this spiritual temptation was too

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great for the socialist movement and, of course, it found and continues to find now, as before, many paths (it is the same in Russia, too). Marx was the powerful tool of this temptation and his personal impact affected the socialist movement most of all through his aggravation of the anti-religious theomachistic element which raged within him, as well as in our whole culture, and which does not reveal its final word until it has attained a completely adequate and personal, yet ultimate, embodiment. With great wisdom and deep understanding of the true character of the anti-religious ele¬ ment, which strives for domination of the so¬ cialist movement and for its seizure, Vladimir Soloviev depicts the Antichrist in his tale as a social reformer and a socialist. In socialism, too, as in the whole course of our culture, the struggle between Christ and Antichrist con¬ tinues ... “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done!” Such is our prayer. Such also is the ulti¬ mate aim of the universal historical process. This ought to be the highest and the sole cri¬ terion for the evaluation of human actions—a criterion which determines them as plus or minus in the universe, which gives them the perfect and final (i.e., religious) factor. Did we use the strengths granted us by God for the creation of the Kingdom of God which we not

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

only anticipated but also prepared for as far as possible, even in the capacity of the lowest and most insignificant stonemasons (in this craft, there is nothing insignificant), or did we squan¬ der these powers in vain, in shameful empti¬ ness and indolence? Finally, did we use them for work “for our own sakes,” so alien and hostile to the Kingdom of God? In the lives and activities of each of us, there are elements of all three categories in different combinations and nobody dares draw up a common balance and say about his fellow man: He is an enemy of the work of God! The impossibility of a final evaluation, which belongs only to God’s right¬ eous justice, by no means frees us from the responsibility of casting a searching eye at life where evil, as we know, struggles uncompromis¬ ingly with the good and, even more peril¬ ously, sometimes crops up in the guise of good and differs from it not by any outward signs, but only by inward ones. True to this require¬ ment, though not daring to sum it all up, we have to distinguish in Marx, alongside of God’s work, an entirely different kind of energy, sinister and dangerous. Marx contradicts him¬ self so mysteriously and frightfully that we wish to overcome this duplicity, to soothe our¬ selves, although this is beyond our power. The socialist activities of Marx (one of the leaders of a movement whose activities were directed

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MARX’S PECULIAR IMPRINT ON SOCIALISM

towards the defense of the deprived in a capi¬ talist society and towards reform of the social system on the basis of justice, equality, and freedom) could be accepted as a work, in terms of their objective goals, for the creation of God’s Kingdom. But the fact that Marx wanted to use this movement as a means for destroying that which is sacred in man and as a means for replacing the sacred with his own self (the goal which guided him in all his activities), turns us from a positive religious point of view to a negative evaluation, for we are dealing here with this perilous temptation where good and evil differ not from the outside but from within. Whether plus or minus will predomi¬ nate, we will know only when our own accounts are balanced. The question must remain open. However, we consider it our moral duty and a matter of conscience to express what we have seen (and which many others still have not seen), after many years of scrutinizing Marx’s spiritual cast of mind. We had to say it, no matter how this will be accepted by those who have an affinity to this dark and obscure side of Marx’s spirit.

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INDEX Adler, George—48n. Annenkov—48, 49n. Atheism-37-39, 57, 61-62, 79, 80, 85, 95, 102, 109, 110 Bakunin—48 Bauer, Bruno-12-13, 18, 47, 66, 75, 86, 95 Bulgakov, S. N.—14-16, 35 Capital (Das Kapital)—14, 20n., 23, 46n., 47, 64, 66, 66n., 68, 71, 102-103, 103n. Chicherin—57 (A) Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 71-72 Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right—21, 80-84 Darwin—70 Democritus—64 Dostoevsky—52, 61 Diihring—lOln. Engels, F.—13-14, 20, 30, 45, 63, 72, 76, 79, 85, 99, lOln. Epicurus—64 Essence of Christianity (The)—79 Feuerbach, L.—16-17, 20-23, 30, 52, 64n., 66, 76-77, 79-80, 84-85, 88, 96-97, 99, 103-104, 109 Fichte-52, 61 Fourier—63 Hegel-20-21, 28-29, 63, 64n., 64-70, 75, 76, 77, 102 Herzen—46, 48, 49n. Holy Family (The)—IS, 18, 47, 80 Idealism—65, 70, 75 Kant-52, 63, 70, 71 Karamazov, I.—58 Lafarque—45 Lassalle—46, 52, 65, 70, 107, 108 Leeuwen, A. T.—21, 21n. Liebknecht—45 Lukacs, Georg—28-29

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KARL MARX AS A RELIGIOUS TYPE

MacCullough—46 Malthus—46, 47 Masaryk, Thomas G.—16, 19-20, 62, 63n. McLellan, David—26-27, 31 Mehring—20, 30, 64n., 73 Nietzsche—17, 19, 22, 52 On the Jewish Question—91-93 Owen—63, 108 Poverty of Philosophy (The)—18, 23, 47 Praxis—19 Proudhon—46, 47 Rodbertus—70, 108 Schelling—70 Senior—46 Shakespeare—53 Simon (Saint)—63 Socialism-25, 42-43, 57, 61-62, 64n., 99, 100, 107-111 Soloviev-25, 57, 95-96, 111 Solzhenitsyn—36 Stein, Ludwig—70 Stirner—52, 80 Tillich, Paul-17 Trekhov—19, 48n., 49 n. Tucker, Robert C.—31-33 Vogt (Herr)—18, 47 Westphalen, Jenny von—13

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