320 } Notes to Chapter 4
alize abject groups (for example, the proletariat in “Einleitung” and the Silesian weavers
in “Critical Marginal Notes”) as showing the way out of impotent philosophical critique
toward real social transformation. Consciousness continues to play a role in Marx’s theori-
zation of this transformation only as an alternative to—indeed, as a reversal of—what in his
1844 Paris manuscripts Marx lampoons as “the spiritual idolatry of ‘self-consciousness’ and
‘mind’” of the “theological critic” (Marx and Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 , 17 ). As Hunt aptly observes, “The crucial point is that for Marx, consciousness
would come to the proletariat not only, or even necessarily, from the outside, from intellectu-
als like himself. It would emerge from the workers’ own spontaneous efforts to cope with the
conditions in which they found themselves” (The Political Ideas, 91 ). In other words, Marx
moves from affirming the need to educate and raise the consciousness of the abject animal
masses to exploiting proletarian consciousness as a corrective to the abstract consciousness
of the theoretician. The Hegelian and Young Hegelian overprivileging of the agency of con-
sciousness (and pure thought and philosophy) is a significant target of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (see, in particular, “Preface” and “Critique of the Hegelian
Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole”), and a mainstay of Marx and Engels’s polemic against
Bauer’s kritische Kritik in Die heilige Familie.
49. Marx, KMEW, 192 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 327.
50. Ruge contributed three letters to this epistolary exchange, and Feuerbach and Mikhail
Bakunin wrote one letter each.
51. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 134 ; and MEW, 1 : 338.
52. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 137 – 38 (translation modified); and MEW, 1 : 339 – 40.
53. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 140 ; and MEW, 1 : 341. It is also crucial to bear in mind
that in 1842 – 43 the authorities made continuing to publish in Germany virtually impossible
for these dissidents.
54. Thus Marx’s advocacy of politcs here should not be confused with support for the
sort of politics as a realm apart that he critiques in the Kreuznach Kritik and “Zur Juden-
frage.” The issue is not a complete reversal but rather of a rethinking of the relationship
between materiality and agency. Increasingly, Marx’s faith in the expressivist model, in which
rationality exists somewhere (for example, in the latent will of the Volk) ready to be realized,
yields to greater concern for the material agents of social revolution. Marx’s December 1842
article “On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia,” for example, demonstrates how he at
this point continues to define active agency (and the will of the Volk) as spiritual, in contrast
to the objective material world. He argues that the state must be the people’s active “self-
representation” and must permeate all aspects of life (he refers to “nature”); but he also
insists that “only spiritual forces” are universal and political, whereas matter and material
things are antithetical to the principle of the state (Marx and Engels, MECW, 1 : 305 – 6 ).
55. Marx’s contrast between the world of politics and the animal world is consistent with
his frequent use of what he termed “animal law” as a foil for true human rationality and
justice in his 1842 political journalism. Significant examples of Marx’s critique of the reign
of brutal, arbitrary “animal law” can be found in his August 1842 broadside against Gustav
Hugo as the author of the ur-text of the historical school (“Das philosophische Manifest
der historischen Rechtschule,” in Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 78 – 85 ) and his famous article
of October–November 1842 on “Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlsgesetz” in the Rhenish
parliament (ibid., 1 : 109 – 47 ), among other essays.