Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

IIO KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

find the arguments rather difficult to follow. In so far as the arguments can

be grasped, 'common sense' would tend to agree with Marx as against

Hegel - though it is, of course, a Hegel refracted through Marx himself.^183

What must be remembered, however, is the dense idealist fog (created

particularly by Hegel's disciples) that Marx had to disperse in order to

arrive at any sort of 'empirical' view.

Marx himself supplied no conclusion to the 'Paris Manuscripts' and it

is impossible to draw one from such a disjointed work which included

discussions of economics, social criticism, philosophy, history, logic, dia-

lectics and metaphysics. Although each section was dominated by a sep-

arate subject, to some extent all were approached in similar fashion. Here

for the first time there appeared together, if not yet united, what Engels

described as the three constituent elements in Marx's thought - German

idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics. It is above

all these Manuscripts which (in the West at least) reorientated many

people's interpretation of Marx - to the extent of their even being con-

sidered as his major work. They were not published until the early 1930 s

and did not attract public attention until after the Second World War;

certain facets of the Manuscripts were soon assimilated to the existential-

ism and humanism then so much in vogue and presented an altogether

more attractive basis for non-Stalinist socialism than textbooks on dialecti-

cal materialism.

Seen in their proper perspective, these Manuscripts were in fact no

more than a starting-point for Marx - an initial, exuberant outpouring of

ideas to be taken up and developed in subsequent economic writings,

particularly in the Grimdrisse and in Capital. In these later works the

themes of the '184 4 Manuscripts' would certainly be pursued more sys-

tematically, in greater detail, and against a much more solid economic

and historical background; but the central inspiration or vision was to

remain unaltered: man's alienation in capitalist society, and the possib-

ility of his emancipation - of his controlling his own destiny through

communism.

IV. LAST MONTHS IN PARIS

While Marx had been feverishly composing his Manuscripts in Paris,
Jenny was re-immersing herself in the provincial life of Trier. She was
glad to be reunited with her mother for whom she had so often wept in
France; but the genteel poverty in which the Westphalen household was
compelled to live and the sponging of her spineless brother Edgar
depressed her. The baby, now provided with a wet nurse, was soon out