Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS 115

of real interest in the book were Marx's replies to Bauer's attacks on

Proudhon, on the role of the masses in history, and on materialism.

Marx praised Proudhon as the first thinker to have questioned the

existence of private property and to have demonstrated the inhuman

effects it had on society. He then summarised his own view of the relation-

ship between private property and the proletariat:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same

human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self-alienation

its confirmation and its good, its own power: it has in it a semblance

of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its

self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an

inhuman existence. The proletariat executes the sentence that private

property pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat, just as it

carries out the sentence that wage-labour pronounced on itself by

bringing forth wealth for others and misery for itself. When the prole-

tariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society,

for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. The then

proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it,

private property.^198

In answer to the criticism that socialist writers, by attributing this historic

role to the proletariat, seemed to consider it a god, Marx continued:

The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of

the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is

what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be

compelled to do. Its aim and historical action are irrevocably and

obviously demonstrated in its own life-situation as well as in the whole

organisation of bourgeois society today.^199

Bauer wished to dissociate his philosophy from the mass of the people
and considered the operative force in society to be the idea of even a
personalised history. Marx's view was the opposite: 'History... does not
use man to achieve its own ends, as though it were a particular person:
it is merely the activity of man pursuing his own objectives.'^200 Or again:
'Ideas never lead beyond the established situation, they only lead beyond
the ideas of the established situation. Ideas can accomplish absolutely
nothing. To become real, ideas require men who apply practical force.'^201
For Bauer, the ideas of an intellectual elite were threatened by popular
contact and he believed that the ideas of the French Revolution had been
contaminated by the enthusiasm of the masses. For Marx, on the other
hand, these ideas had not sufficently penetrated the masses, and the
bourgeoisie had consequently been able to turn the French Revolution
to its own profit. Bauer made much of the 'human rights' embodied in