The Visible Divinity — part one
Karl Marx, (1818–1883), political economist, socialist revolutionary, forwarded the following principle ideas for our consideration:
1. The postulation of transcendent divine beings is a function of incomplete and distorted self-identification among humans.
2. Incomplete human self-identification is a function of nonegalitarian and incompletely developed modes of production.
3. The state is the ideologically legitimated power of ruling classes over labouring classes. Its disappearance under genuine egalitarian and advanced productive and social conditions is therefore necessary by definition.
4. Socially mediated production on the basis of foresight and skill distinguishes human from animal production. Blockages in the development and expression of these basic capacities, reaching a peak in capitalism, are designated alienation.
5. Human history can be represented and explained as a sequence of changes in the modes of human production, upon which are raised corresponding sociopolitical structures and modes of thought.
6. The capitalist mode of production and its corresponding social and ideological forms will predictably give way to a socialist order which expresses human capabilities and thus overcomes alienation.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!
- Shakespeare, ‘Timon of Athens’, Act 4, Scene 3.
‘Shakespeare’, said Marx, (in ‘The Power of Money’), ‘excellently depicts the real nature of money’. That is to say, he ‘stresses especially two properties of money: 1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it. 2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations’. And furthermore: ‘The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind’.
Alienation, generally speaking, occurs when two things that belong together become separated. One must look further and more deeply into how Marx is precisely using this term, and into what he means by self-identification, and productivity, in particular socially mediated productivity, and how much of it he derives from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 -1831), without whom, it is thought, there would have been no Marx, but then Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), once said (in ‘The Gay Science’): ‘Ohne Hegel, Kein Darwin’, (‘Without Hegel, no Darwin’), make of that what you will.
To begin with, however, some thoughts on necessity and contingency are necessary, which I shall deliver via a rather unlikely source, James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, (1882–1941). After all: ‘To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of perhaps an unstatable rule’, said Samuel Beckett, (1906–1989). ‘It is not a perception of order or of love, more humble than either of this, it is a perception of coincidence’. I disagree, for a coincidence is none other than a seemingly while unremarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection and that can be discerned anywhere were one to look for them and are generally meaningless and uninteresting. ‘Scientific cognition’, on the other hand, as Hegel explains, (in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’), ‘demands surrender to the life of the object, or, what amounts to the same thing, confronting and expressing its inner necessity’.
And furthermore:
‘… the specific difference of a thing is rather its limit; it is where the thing stops, or it is what the thing is not. This concern with aim or results, with differentiating and passing judgement on various thinkers is therefore an easier task than it might seem. For instead of getting involved in the real issue, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and losing itself in it, this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it’.
The real issue, (die Sache selbst), let that rather be our concern while we differentiate and pass judgement upon various thinkers, like Hegel himself, and like his wayward pupil, Marx. And always bear in mind, discoursing upon coincidences is really quite otiose.
Consider this concrete case of an actual coincidence, courtesy of Robert Anton Wilson, (1932–2007), (in ‘Coincidance’, (sic)) : ‘[Carl Jung, (1875–1961)] had a dream about Liverpool, England, that he considered so important that he analysed it and wrote about it at length. (Liverpool was a pun on pool of life, he decided, and signified rebirth). Years later, Peter O’Halligan, of the World Coincidence Centre in Berkeley, analysed the dream more carefully and decided the details fitted only one street intersection in Liverpool. At that place was the café where the Beatles first performed. And on the same spot, later, was the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, where my play Illuminatus appeared. A large part of the play takes place aboard a yellow submarine, inspired by a Beatles song. And Jung himself is a character in the play’.
Jung certainly had such a dream, and it did signify for him a kind of psychic rebirth. One has to be cautious though not to assimilate Liverpool, the city, with the pool of life. Jung understandably enough conducted a Jungian dream analysis upon his own dream whereby he went to the root of the word: liver, an essential organ, regulator of the metabolism, and one can see why it would suggest rebirth, and why it would be of interest to Joyce himself given the Wake’s theme of rebirth and resurrection. It is the only organ with cells that regenerate after disease damage like hepatitis, or after other abuses to which it is subjected to. ‘Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parriitch, his pelt nassy, his heart’s adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but apiff, his extremities extremely…’. Jung also noted that the city Liverpool was dirty and he assimilated this to his actual psychic state, being dark and gloomy. ‘… the Troia of towns and Carmen of cities, crawling with mendiants in perforated clothing, get its wellbelavered white like l’pool and m’chester?’ …
‘Holmstock unsteaden. Livpoomark lloyrge hoggs one four tupps noving. Big Butter Boost! Sorry! Thnkyou! Thatll beall fortody’.
But Jung’s unconscious revealed to him that he was passing through a period of individuation (the process of self-realisation, finding one’s own purpose in life, self-identification in Marxian terms, the whole notion is a mare’s nest of confusion) and it was in fact at the end of a cycle. He had thus reached a new state in his psychic enlightenment centring his self into his consciousness and the whole universal consciousness. The dream shows him that he had succeeded, and his remarks concerning Liverpool are his personal interpretations about his own life and have nothing to do with the city. Wilson is barking up the wrong tree there. Pool of life, pool of light, the Sun, the oldest myth, the life provider on earth. So it goes, drowning in dream symbols. ‘You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods’, to quote Joyce.
On the matter of universal consciousness, Herb Asher, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s, (1928–1982), ‘The Divine Invasion’, postulated a theory: ‘You think James Joyce was crazy, is that what you think? Okay; then explain to me how come he mentions ‘talk-tapes’ which means audio tapes in a book he wrote starting in 1922 and which he completed in 1939. Before there were tape recorders! You call that crazy? He also has them sitting around a TV set-in a book started four years after World War I … It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned ‘talk-tapes’ in his writing… I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work’.
A very entertaining idea, and a perfect example of constructing a great deal out of a simple coincidence. Whatever expresses a truth about oneself becomes one’s identity, not country, nor birth, and what one really feels is the truth about oneself. For whatever happens in one’s life one will keep this ultimate truth up to the end of it, as is seen with with one of the great female characters in all literature, Anna Livia Plurabelle.
‘Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talk-tapes’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
The key to an understanding of the Wake is nothing to do with coincidences or contingency but with necessity (this is how an Hegelian analysis of a literary work proceeds). It was upon the tram rolling towards Dublin on the road between Williamstown and Ailesbury that Anna Livia Plurabelle (she of all beauty) recalls first seeing the love-light in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s eye when he looked at her ‘as if to pass away in a cloud’, and, in a sweat beside her, her memories of him are just as like he were wishing to be pardoned, he said he ‘daydreamsed’ she had a lovely face for a ‘pulltomine’. She can recall the moment and the look upon the visage of one so deeply affected with a feeling of attraction, and yet however this may appear to her she can re-imagine it. Perhaps his eyes have a faraway look, or one that is piercing, or the words that he spoke are eloquent and reassuring, or hesitant and ill-chosen. However, though recollection and imagination in operation together this moment becomes a critical moment.
Hegel’s Phenomenology assumes the task of transforming one’s understanding of that which in the first place seems to be merely coincidental or contingent to that of something which one recognises in its necessity, ‘the rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole’, as he puts it. That which philosophy performs in hindsight, transforming something that was contingent that now because of being actual is understood as being necessary. ‘First we feel. Then we fall’. On the tram rolling towards Dublin Anna first saw the love-light in Humphrey’s eyes, an encounter grounded in total contingency. But once the falling in love has occurred her entire past life is seen as leading up to that moment. A.L.P. waited all her life for H.C.E and that which was contingent is transformed into something that makes sense, as though the event were a logical conclusion.
Through the necessity of progression and interrelation sense can be made of events by understanding the dynamic necessity in the context of an organic whole, for the life of the whole has a certain rhythm of a certain progress like ripples spreading through a river, like the course the river itself takes. A.L.P. represents the process whereby necessity suggests a need for a crucial turnaround, like a river diverted, to resolve a critical moment, for to understand why something is necessary is to understand why something is critical in a given situation. (Hegel’s word that he uses for necessity is Notwendigkeit. Not, need. Wendig, flexible enough to react appropriately to a situation, or to turn around).
The aim is to understand how every moment of the life of the whole is critical to the whole, and thereby to reconstruct the whole history of Spirit whereby the significance of every critical moment in history is understood. For an individual this amounts to understanding the critical points in one’s own individual development that contribute to the person one now is. It was critical that A.L.P fell in love with H.C.E. at that moment, a certain need resolved itself through the encounter. (‘The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series’).
As Hegel explains:
‘It is in this nature of what is to be in its being its own Notion, that logical necessity in general consists. This alone is the rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole; it is as much knowledge of the content, as the content is the Notion and essence — in other words, it alone is speculative philosophy. The self-moving concrete shape makes itself into a simple determinateness; in so doing it raises itself to logical form, and exists in its essentiality; its concrete existence is just this movement, and is directly a logical existence. It is for this reason unnecessary to clothe the content in an external logical formalism; the content is in its very nature the transition into such formalism, but a formalism which ceases to be external, since the form is the innate development of the concrete content itself’.
An understanding of Marx requires an understanding of Hegel and the historical background against which Marx formulated his ideas. You will not understand Marx through the babblings of his later followers or adversaries:
‘As a Marxist, I aspire to the creation of a classless society’.
- Ash Askar, (b. 1992), British journalist and libertarian communist political activist.
‘Why, for example, is it still acceptable to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine ‘progressive’, and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union. Sixty million dead in Mao’s China… ‘
- Jordan Peterson, (b. 1962), Canadian clinical psychologist.
I am not presenting a case here either for or against Marxism, rather, I merely aspire to set the record straight, particularly with regard to what Marx takes from Hegel and how he uses it. For from Hegel Marx certainly takes a great deal. Firstly, philosophy is a systematic science. Marx considered himself primarily as a scientist. And what is science? For Marx it meant the construction of what is necessary for the dynamic or organic development (not of the human mind as it was for Hegel) but of society. Marx lends himself to the Hegelian idea that this development is by no means a merely passive process, on the contrary, experiences make experiences, so to speak, and pivotal to the whole process of social development is a subjective engagement with the objective world and with other subjects which transforms both the objects one engages with and the subject one engages with, and oneself too.
That is to say, for Marx as it was for Hegel development is first and foremost Bildung, building, production, building oneself through what one builds, through building relationships, and so on. Reality, (Wirklichkeit), is activity, it is that by which somehow or other that which one works in actuality. And for Marx the crucial thing, and this he derives from Hegel, in the context of this process is the function of negation. This is because the building or producing of something also involves the destruction of what was before, not merely objectively but subjectively also. One destroys certain objects in order to build other objects, and furthermore one builds oneself too through in some manner destroying one’s former self and building one’s future self. There is therefore a process of growth transpiring here, a process that for Marx as it was for Hegel includes an increase of productivity whereby one becomes more and more productive, and consequently one becomes more and more in tune with subjectivity, and one becomes more and more in control.
To put it in the terms of the Enlightenment, one matures:
‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’, is therefore the motto of the enlightenment…. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on — then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind — among them the entire fair sex — should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts’.
- Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), ‘What is Enlightenment?’
There is therefore a process of development, a process of growth, a process of maturation, and what in effect this amounts to is that one becomes less and less dependant and more and more independent. But there is of course a decisive shift with Marx away from Hegelian idealism towards Marxian materialism. A shift that is seemingly, on the surface, very radical, but in point of fact this is already implicated in Hegel’s own language (Hegelian philosophy is materialistic as much as idealistic but I will reserve that for a separate article). What Marx has basically done is to take Hegel at his word, so to speak, he thereby helps himself to the words he uses, and he returns to the notion of Bildung, as production.
And yet one needs to ask how much of this is metaphor? Hegel certainly seems to be speaking somewhat metaphorically of Bildung as Arbeit, as labour, as work. But for Marx the activity of the Spirit, the working of the Spirit, the labour of the Spirit that Hegel discourses upon, becomes actual physical, material labour. For Marx human activity, taking Hegel at his own words, is seen primarily as labour but no longer in the spiritual sense but in the material sense, that is to say, and putting it simply, for Marx material production, material building, is so much more foundational than spiritual productivity or spiritual building.
There are two frequently cited quotes by Marx that are relevant here:
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness’.
- ‘Preface to A critique of Political Economy’.
Bewusstsein, social being, determines consciousness. And perhaps even more well known is the passage in the afterword to ‘Das Kapital’ where Marx basically and supposedly claims to have turned Hegel on his head, although it is worth reading the actual passage:
‘My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. … The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of ‘Das Kapital’, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones — Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a ‘dead dog’. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’.
Head, that is to say, Spirit, consciousness, whereas feet are the material foundations. Hegel, according to Marx, is forever discoursing upon the head of consciousness, whereas he, Marx, is basing everything upon the earthly ground, upon actual physical activity. Marx regards himself as transforming Hegelian idealism into materialism, and he regards human productivity and the dialectical process that structures human productivity as consisting primarily in material and not in spiritual practice. In labour, in the economy, in how we labour, in how the economy operates, all this by some means determines how we think and how Spirit evolves. Therefore, basically what Marx is doing is replacing the phenomenology of spirit with the phenomenology of labour, with economics. Marx regards himself as an economic scientist and not as a scientist of Spirit.
Ash Askar and Jordan Peterson and similar intellectual lightweights and I use the word intellectual wrongly are misreading Marx by seeing him as presenting some kind of moralistic position. Peterson reformulates positions that have been brought up by others prior to him that Marx is all about making a distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. We see it in philosophers of good standing too:
‘The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived from Marx. My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred’.
- Bertrand Russell, (1872–1970), Why I am not a Communist’.
And upon this reading of Marx what then is to be done? To liberate the oppressed, because being oppressed is morally a bad thing. It is a moral obligation upon us for those that are oppressed to be liberated. However, for Marx merely being oppressed, or in some way or other being placed at the bottom rung of society’s ladder, that does not make anyone or any group or any class progressive or productive. Indeed, below the proletariat there is what Marx terms the Lumpenproletariat, the low lives, the tramps, the dossers, people living on the very edge of criminality, the jobless, the beggars, and welfare spongers as we may belittle them today though welfare was not something known in Marx’s day other than in the form of charity or workhouses. There is certainly a general contempt for such, however we may pretend otherwise, or not:
‘One day while I was eating lobster at a sidewalk restaurant and a beggar bothered me, I called the proprietor to drive him away and loudly approved the words of that administrator of justice: ‘You are embarrassing people’, he said. ‘Just put yourself in the place of these ladies and gents, after all!’ Finally, I used to express, to whoever would listen, my regret that it was no longer possible to act like a certain Russian landowner whose character I admired. He would have a beating administered both to his peasants who bowed to him and to those who didn’t bow to him in order to punish a boldness he considered equally impudent in both cases’.
- Albert Camus, ‘ The Fall’
Lumpenproletariat, the word has a double meaning, lumpen meaning rags, these are people without even proper clothing, and lump meaning villain, generally a morally bad person. But in any case Lumpenproletariat is most certainly not a progressive class, nor has it any revolutionary potential, and hence Marx is scornful for that reason rather than whether or not we find them embarrassing. Lumpenproletariat is very much an all negative term, and Marx is not concerned with liberating anyone who happens to be in one way or another low or oppressed. What class struggle means is the actual building class, the working class, the productive class, this is the class that needs to gain agency, to gain control, to mature.
And through this process it needs to gain self-consciousness of its labour, of its progressive function in society. For Marx, and now we return to the concept of necessity, it is a necessary event to move history forward, necessary and at the same time critical, a critical moment as much as two lovers meeting is a critical moment, though I do not know if he thought of it in those terms, I doubt if he was as much of a romantic as Hegel. But for Marx a necessary and critical function is not ascribed to just anyone or just any class that is being oppressed however we think of oppression, but only to that class that is only the building or the productive class. And the consequence of this productive class gaining power is supposed to be an increase in productivity, this is not just a moralist liberation but it is that which moves history forward, that which brings the process of social evolution to a higher stage, and therefore necessarily results in increased productivity, in increased subjectivity, in increased maturity, in increased independence. And of course all this derives from Hegel and is based upon the labour of the negative:
‘Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative. In itself, that life is indeed one of untroubled equality and unity with itself, for which otherness and alienation, and the overcoming of alienation, are not serious matters. But this in-itself is abstract universality, in which the nature of the divine life to he for itself, and so too the self-movement of the form, are altogether left out of account’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
I hesitate to accuse Marx of not appreciating metaphor. I hesitate even more to suggest my understanding of Hegel is deeper than Marx’s because of my highly developed poetic sense, if I do say so myself. But there is necessarily a moment of revolution involved in this because that which has been has to be sublated, has to be aufhebungen, (Hegelian terminology for preserving and changing, and eventually advancement), into something that represents a higher stage in the development. Marx emphasises the development productivity progress and it has even been suggested that he and some of his followers make no ethical judgements against capitalism or capitalists:
‘Marxian societal critique managed without morally judging capitalists — thus landing itself with the problems of a polycontextural description of society. Its characterization of other societal descriptions as ‘ideologies’ boomeranged. And this shows that the form of a center/periphery-based description on the lines of ‘we and the others’ no longer worked’.
- Niklas Luhmann, (1927–1998), German philosopher of social science.
Jordan Peterson and others of course disagree, they imply that Marxism and the ‘Communist Manifesto’ is all about the violent promotion of something like social justice, of equality, of eliminating the oppressor and the oppressed, taking such a distinction regardless of how disconnected from class struggle, disconnected from this kind of increase in productivity and the building of the productive class which includes its self-building. Notions such as social justice and equality do not make sense for Marx, albeit he is not against justice and equality, but such moral categories on their own are quite meaningless for him if they are not understood in a social, economic and historical context. In brief Marx was not a social justice warrior, nor a Christian evangelist, nor a fighter for American independence, nor a trade unionist (trade unions act as a safety valve releasing the pressure, forestalling revolution), nor a feminist, nor an anarchist, for Marxism is not primarily about sympathy with just anyone who is somehow weak or oppressed or lacks independence.
With understanding the necessary rise of the productive forces in society there is also a sort of existential necessity in Marx in that for Marx it is very important to understand the critical significance of actual historical events. He commented much and in very great detail upon the historical events of his time, the uprisings in 1848 and so forth, in order to identify in which way these events represent necessary critical turning points in history. Marx wished to understand and to reconstruct such seemingly contingent events for the purposes of knowing what they meant within the context of the necessary development of society and productivity that would move history forward. Marx, like Hegel, aimed at transforming contingency into necessity, and in virtue of that fact he also declared himself a scientist, not a scientist of Spirit but a social scientist. If and in what way this science was successful is of course a completely different matter
It may be objected that a number of historical circumstances have resulted in an underestimation of the philosophical dimensions and interest of Marx’s work. First, the general disrepute of speculative as opposed to empirical thought in the later nineteenth century led Friedrich Engels, (1820–1895), and his collaborators to stress the hardheaded empiricism, scientism, and even positivism of Marx’s work when they undertook to turn it into the ideology of a mass movement during the 1880’s. Marx himself was very likely involved in this effort. However that may be, its success was ensured by consolidation of power in Russia by a group of Marxists schooled exclusively in this view. Second, the manuscripts of Marx which could shed a different light upon the origins and foundations of Marx’s thinking were not published until the twentieth century. Such a detail is quite clearly not unconnected with the first. And here Marx’s complicity derives from his habit of keeping his philosophical way of thinking out of view in the works that he prepared or authorized for publication, largely in order to preclude any intimation of idealism, which he felt would undermine the urgency of his message to the working class. The later publication in the twentieth century of four groups of Marx’s manuscripts has nonetheless thrown much new light upon his deeper philosophical roots, his commitments, his habits, from which has emerged a scholarly engagement within which the expertise of philosophers has been notably to the fore and effective.
These manuscript collections are Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, (written 1843, published 1927 wherein he states: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’), together with the ‘Introduction’ to it which Marx did publish shortly after completing the larger manuscript. The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ of 1844 (published in 1932) together with some related papers, in particular the essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, which appeared in 1844, and the ‘Notes on James Mill’, which did not. The complete text of ‘The German Ideology’ (written 1846, published in full 1932), which Marx wrote along with Engels, and along with the short but important ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which Engels found and published in 1886. And the Grundrisse or ‘Rough Draft of Capital’, a rich but unwieldly group of notebooks (written in 1857, published ineffectively in 1939 and more effectively in 1953, and translated in full by 1973).
It is upon these works that the following series will primarily be based.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! …
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
… Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.
- Shakespeare, ‘Timon of Athens’, Act 4, Scene 3.
