the bourgeois prejudice which considers materialistic
thinking to be a degradation of man seem the most
paradoxical
of stupidities? Never did religion
"sanctify" man and his work as much as atheistic
Marxism.
If now, having considered the writings of the
young Marx in relation to the philosophy of the
preceding epoch, we compare them to his future
work we can see that they are but the primitive
stage of the latter.
No doubt, many of the con-
sequences of his thinking are only contained in the
later works; many essential assertions concerning
the laws of capitalist production can be found only
in
Capital.
But there is, in return, within the work
of his youth a broadness of thought,
an abundance
of original
intuitions whose richness is far from
having been exploited.
The young Marx appears
there as the heir of all the culture of his time. He is
like a focal point where all the luminous rays of
European philosophy are concentrated.
And the
vigor of his thought has succeeded in drawing into
organic unity these heterogeneous and often con-
tradictory elements.
Formally,
the work of the
young Marx is uneven, dislocated, fragmentary (this
is the reason, no doubt, why it has been held in such
low esteem).
But it contains already all the essential
elements of his doctrine. They are to be found there,
so to speak, still in the state of an incandescent liquid
mass, like the flow issuing from a blast furnace, filled
with many impurities but also with many rich
materials which Marx will use later on in forging
the powerful
iron rails of
Capital.
The task he
undertook in
Capital
needed specialisation.
Many
problems of his youth were put aside-or
at least
put off for later periods of leisure which never came.
We know from the conversations of Marx himself
how much he felt weighed down by his purely econ-
omic studies; he dreamed of devoting himself to
philosophy once more after the completion of
Capital.
The gigantic monument
which this work
became caused this other project to run aground.
Thus we are reduced to the philosophic essays of
Marx's youth. But the more we explore the depths
of the world of ideas which they reveal, the more
surely they retain their integrated value at the side
of the later works.
For us especially,
they bear a markedly real
character.
With the advent of a socialist society in
the USSR, many of the problems of Marxist culture
have passed from the realm of theory to that of
practice. The relations between man and work, the
multiplicity of the human personality:
these are
questions of burning reality for the Soviet younger
generation.
With the absolutely new forms of work
which are being born in the USSR, the thoughts of
Marx which we have outlined take on the value of
prophetic predictions.
Socialist emulation,
the shock
brigades, testify to the fact that in the Soviet Union
PARTISAN
REVIEW
work has become free and conscious. And at the
same time, the world which the Soviet working class
is building, its factories,
its new cities, its central
electric plants, its gigantic agricultural
communities
-this world has become for the workers a part of
their social being; they are joined to it much more
closely than the Occidental worker is to his world.
Here,
nature begins to be, according to Marx's
definition, an extension of the human body. Thus the
beginnings of socialist construction confirm already
the profound historic reality of what Marx conceiv-
ed a century earlier.
Let us indicate another remarkable coincidence.
In considering the work of the young Marx as a
prolongation of the philosophy of his predecessors,
it is possible to trace
the curve of modern philosophic
thought.
This thought,
freed from the servitude to
the Church which characterised it during the entire
middle ages, rises in a slowly ascending line, strug-
gling obstinately,
until the work of Kant and the
German philosophers of the 18th· century. Hegel's
powerful thinking takes over the results of ,his pre-
decessors. But he reflects at the same time the decay
of bourgeois capitalist society which he represents:
-prolonging
vertically the line of philosophic
thought he loses himself in the clouds of mysticism.
He stiffens in a posture of sterile reaction.
This
pause in his rise is not an accident; it corresponds to
the limits of the society which sustains him. Marx
picks up the line of his thought; he inflects it sharply
and brings it down to the ground: out of mystical
idealism emerges revolutionary materialism.
Like the
giant Anteus who from contact with the sun draws
constantly new strength,
theory becomes,
at the
moment when Marx places it in contact with social
reality, a force capable of laying hold of the masses.
N ow, this curve repeats itself upon the economic
and political plane,
but with a chronological
differ-
ence of about 65 years.
Capitalism expands to its full power two genera-
tions after it has been bored through and surpassed
by Marxist
theory. The curve mounts continually
and at an ever increasing tempo; it reaches its height
in the years before the war. The world war and the
Bolshevik revolution violently break its flight. Cap-
italism enters the stage of decomposition.
To use a metaphor borrowed from music, we can
say that the two curves form together the pattern
of a fugue: the theory is the first voice, and designs,
two generations in advance, the figure which will be
repeated later by the second voice-practical
ex-
perience. And it is no accident that the writings of
the young Marx take on such an actual meaning for
us: they stand at the breaking-point
of theoretical
development,
just as we stand ourselves, in the realm
of concrete expe'rience, at the breaking-point
of cap-
italist development.
15
