Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 138 ; and MEW, 1 : 340.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 139 ; and MEW, 1 : 340.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 140 ; and MEW, 1 : 342.
Cornu’s reading of this letter as Marx’s first, if clumsy [unbeholfen], articulation of
his “Auffasung vom Kommunismus” exemplifies this sort of retrospective smoothing out of
Marx’s development (Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1 : 448 – 49 ).
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 141 ; and MEW, 1 : 342.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 141 (translation modified); and MEW, 1 : 342 – 43.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 187 ; and MEW, 1 : 391.
Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 186 ; and MEW, 1 : 390.
The destitute wood collectors in Marx’s “Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlsgesetz”
anticipate the structural position of the proletariat of “Einleitung” but also highlight how the
latter work breaks with Marx’s conceptual model of 1842. Marx locates the wood collectors’
social position outside German civil society structured in terms of particular interests—that
is, they belong to a class that has no interests. In keeping with his privileging of the agency
of human reason in 1842 , however, he concentrates on the relationship the destitute have
with human rationality and justice. The almost umbilical link that the destitute maintain
to cosmic justice—Marx’s rather mystical view of how they understand nature to provide a
measure of cosmic justice where human justice has failed—is valid, in Marx’s view, because
it asserts, obscurely, the legitimacy of true human justice waiting to be fulfilled. Thus when
the privileged appeal to customary rights, they reason within—appeal to—the animal logic
of the reigning system of privilege; when the destitute appeal to their customary rights, in
contrast, they glimpse, however instinctually, a truly human justice beyond it. In his em-
pathetic defense of the vulnerable wood collectors, in other words, Marx argues that they
obscurely intimate a truer form of human reason and justice than the arbitrary and brutal
logic that defines the civil society from which they are excluded. In this, the wood collectors
remain squarely within Marx’s idealist model of the state as the realization of human reason.
On Bauer’s contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung in the first half of 1842 , see Hans-
Martin Sass,“Bruno Bauers Idee der ‘Rheinischen Zeitung’”; and Douglas Moggach, The
Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (hereafter PP), 126 – 28. Moggach notes how Bauer
sought to “crystallize the oppositional consciousness and to undercut the possibility of com-
promise,” and how his stance led to a conflict with Marx in late 1842 over the direction of the
Rheinische Zeitung (ibid., 127 – 28 ). McLellan (YHKM, 74 – 75 ) downplays the break between
Marx and Bauer at this time. Although Marx continued to read Bauer with interest through-
out 1842 and 1843 , he took issue with Bauer’s intellectual posture beginning in late 1842.
Marx and Engels, MEW 27 : 409 – 10.
Ibid., 27 : 410.
Ibid., 27 : 412.
Ibid.
In his letter to Ruge of November 30 , 1842 , Marx alludes only in passing to Bruno
Bauer and does not single him out as an exception to his harsh criticism. Bauer’s essay “Die
Judenfrage” had just appeared in Ruge’s Deutsche Jahbücher (November 17 – 26 , 1842 ).
Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Early Texts, 60 (translation modified); Marx and Engels,
M E W, 27 : 418.
A Notiz in the Rheinische Zeitung of November 29 , 1842 (three days after the last
