Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

io 6 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

labour and the development of nature for man, he has the observable and

irrefutable proof of his self-creation and the process of his origin.'^166

Thus for socialist man the question of an alien being beyond man and

nature whose existence would imply their unreality had become imposs-

ible. For him the mutual interdependence of man and nature was what

was essential and anything else seemed unreal. 'Atheism, as a denial of

this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a denial of God

and tries to assert through this negation the existence of man; but social-

ism as such no longer needs this mediation; it starts from the theoretical

and practical sense-perception of man and nature as the true reality.'^167

This perception, once established, no longer required the abolition of

private property, no longer needed communism. Marx finished with a

very Hegelian remark on the transitoriness of the communist phase:

Communism represents the positive in the form of the negation of the

negation and thus a phase in human emancipation and rehabilitation,

both real and necessary at this juncture of human development. Com-

munism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate

future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development,

the form of human society.^168

Here communism seems to be viewed as merely a stage in the dialectical
evolution, a stage that at a given moment would have served its purpose
and be superseded. The picture, in the first part of the manuscript, of
'true communism' as 'the solution of the riddle of history'^169 was much
more static and unhistorical.
In the third and final section of the Manuscripts, Marx tried to come
to grips definitively with the thought of the Master. He began by discuss-
ing the various attitudes of the young Hegelians to Hegel and singled
out Feuerbach as the only constructive thinker; he then used Hegel to
show up the weaknesses in Feuerbach's approach. Finally he settled down
to a long analysis of Hegel's fundamental error, evident generally in the
Phenomenology and particularly in the last chapter. Marx's style is here
often obscure, involved and extremely repetitive, as he was constantly
working over and reformulating his attitude to Hegel. In his doctoral
thesis he had rejected the idea that Hegel was guilty of 'accommodation'
and demanded that apparent contradictions be resolved by appeal to
Hegel's 'essential consciousness'.^170 In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right, he showed by reference to particular examples that Hegel's prin-
ciples inevitably involved accommodation. But it was not until he trans-
ferred his attention from Hegel's Philosophy of Right to his Phenomenology
that he was able to formulate a general criticism of Hegel's dialectic. Here
it was clear that Marx, although still at home with Hegel's concepts and