the longing to push him rudely, smiled at him instead
pitying his lonely desire. "Tomorrow then," she said
gently.
"Tomorrow,"
he said, excited and tense.
His
longing for some small human gift kept him linger-
ing. She tried to lean toward :him but stiffened
miserably and dug some cold cream out of the jar
instead automatically rubbing it over her cheeks and
lips. "Goodnight,"
she said, "And be careful of
yourself."
Grateful
at her concern he waved happily and
went out. Alone she turned out the lights and gave
in to exhaustion.
She lay down in the darkness and
tried hard to focus on the questions for the next day.
Tom was alive somewhere but he was not Tom
anymore. All the clues to understanding him seemed
lost and broken. Something that he called love had
changed him so that the little baby picture she car-
ried with her showing him with chubby hands staring
solemnly at her was more like Tom than this new
being who pushed her away without any need of
her anymore. Her uselessness broke in sudden cryIng,
she grasped frantically at the memory of the ques-
tions trying to focus on what she must say, the
probable answers.
The Spanish words slid away
from her as if she were no longer to be trusted. Her
plans for the next day deserted her as aloneness
settled upon her like some doom.
The shooting had stopped and the early morning
light came over the building opposite with a chilly
freshness.
Tom would be asleep now, his arms
around this other woman as they used to lie listening
to the early birds. The cardinal had been ruby red
against the snow. In the morning they went out hand
in hand to look at the garden. The peas grew an
inch in the night. The tiger lily was opening with
an orange heart. And sadly the eyes of the mother
of the dead boy looked at her reproachfully.
She
kept her inner sight on those eyes, quieting gradually,
lying still, her eyes looking down steadily at the
'mangled clothes of the dead boy. He had walked
around and had laughed and it was he who had led
the little band of high school boys on strike for more
books, for water, for freedom and
more light.
Now
she quit sobbing, ashamed of her tears and tried to
think only of the dead boy who suddenly seemed to
her alive and fresh and strangely familiar. Holding
tightly to his young bruised hand, she clung to him
desperately,
as the sick and the injured cling to the
well and the strong, and at last her breath came
evenly as she shut her eyes and went to sleep.
The accumulation of accepted material
during the summer made it necessary to
eliminate the book-review section from' this
issue. Important fall books will be reviewed
in the November number.
The Philosophic
Thought of the
Young Marx
MAX
BRAUNSCHWEIG
It is not merely as an introduction to Marx's
major work that the works of his youth are impor-
tant. There is no doubt that a deep comprehension
of
Capital
is impossible without discovering through
the earlier works the road traversed by Marx in his
manner of conceiving the social problem, the evolu-
tion of his terminology,
and the development
of his
polemics. But the youthful works have an import
which surpasses by far their value as preliminary
studies:
they mark the passage between the old
philosophy and the new,
they assign to Marxism its
position in the history of ideas. Nowhere is seen
more clearly that Marxism was not an "invention,"
but rather an organic and historically necessary
development
of European 'Culture. Marx rests upon
the great thinkers of the preceding epoch, and was
but the continuator-a
masterful continuator,
more-
over-of
their work. It is very important
to raise
this point again. To consider Marxism as a specifical-
ly economic doctrine is to narrow it down and to
falsify it. It is more than that: a method of think-
ing, a new aspect of culture in the largest sense, even
if its practical consequences do make themselves felt
primarily in the economic realm. The tangible proof
of this extended meaning of Marxism is to be found
precisely in the work of the young Marx. And the
manuscripts of the year 1844, recently discovered,
show perhaps most appropriately all the fullness of
Marx's thinking.
Let us try to set in relief the principal ideas ex-
pressed in these
AI
anuscripts.
The center of young Marx's reflections was
neither economy nor social morality, but
man:
more
precisely,
his unnatural
situation in actual society.
Basically, it is the philosophic problem of the 18th
century, and Marx can indeed be considered as the
great continuator of French philosophy.
But while
the latter could only seek to resolve problems with
the insufficient means of an idealistic philosophy,
Marx, scarcely a century later, could find the solu-
tion, thanks to the powerful instrument of material-
ist dialectic.
Two great currents transmitted to Marx the im-
pulsion given to thought by the 18th century philo-
sophers: that of the French socialist writers of the
I<ith century (Saint-Simon,
Fourier,
and above all
Sismondi),
and that of the German philosophers of
12
OCTOBER,
!936
