Zionism and anti semitism
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This has just been published on the Areo website https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/02/is-anti-zionism-a-form-of-anti-semitism/
I am replying to ALB’s #184610, the speculative last sentence of which is: ‘I think Marx would have been influenced by Moritz Hess (as he then was) who, the following year, published an article advocating communism as a moneyless society’
Ok, today in the forum Almamater wrote:
‘The SPGB said this about Kautsky in 2002 : Marx learned his socialist ideas from the communist workers he met when he lived in Paris in 1843 and 1844.’
It was very likely this in 2002 (but what issue/what article of SS?) that gave me the idea that — as I said in my https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/zionism-and-anti-semitism/page/5/#post-184594 — that ‘The fact of the matter is that Marx got his initial communism from Frenchmen […].
But what what is the textual or biographical etc evidence or proof for it?
The article you are looking for appeared in the November 2002 issue on the centenary of the publication of Lenin’s What is to be done?.
Here is the context of the passage. To back up his view that, left to themselves, the working class could only develop a trade union consciousness Lenin quoted from an article Kautsky had written in 1900 in which he stated:
“socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously”.
The Socialist Standard commented:
“Kautsky, however, had got his history wrong. Marx certainly added to socialist theory and made a major contribution to its elaboration, but he did not invent it and then bring it to the workers. It was rather the other way round. Marx learned his socialist ideas from the communist workers he met when he lived in Paris in 1843 and 1844. They taught him both what communism – an already existing current – was and the view that it should be achieved by the political action of the “proletariat”, a view derived from the experience of the most radical plebeian elements during the French bourgeois revolution.”
The evidence for this follows in a separate post.
In Paris Marx learned and adopted several Anarchists conceptions
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm
This is what I have been able to find, from David McLellan’s Karl Marx.His Life and Thought.
Before he moved to Paris in October 1843 Marx was of course familiar with the idea of communism, but it was only after he moved there that he came into personal contact with “communists” and concluded that “the proletariat” would be the agent to establish a communist society.
“The second of Marx’s articles in the Deutsch-franzsösishe Jahrbücher was written after his arrival in Paris : it revealed the immense impact on him by his discovery there of the class to whose emancipatiom he was to devote the rest of his life. Paris, the cultural capital of Europe had a large population of German immigrant workers – 10,000. Some had come to perfect the techniques of their various trades; some simply because they could find no work in Germany. Marx was immediately impressed:
‘When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need – the need for society – and what appeared to be a means has become an end. The most striking results of this practical development are to be seen when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and drinking are no longer simply means of bringing peope together. Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn bodies.’
Marx attended the meetings of most of the French workers’ associations, but was naturally closer to the Germans – particularly to the League of the Just, the most radical of thé German secret societies and artisans whose aim was to introduce a ‘social republic’ in Germany. He knew intimately both its leaders : Ewerbeck, a doctor, and Maurer who had been a member of Ruge’s short-lived phalanstery: he did not actually join any of the societies.” (McLellanpp., 86-7)
[The source of the quote from Marx can be found here: Marx and Engels, CW4 [1844]: 313.]
“Marx’s sudden espousal of the proletarian cause [at the end of 1843] can be directly attributed (as can that of other early Germany communists such as Weitling and Hess) to his first-hand contacts with socialist intellectuals in France. Instead of editing a paper for the Rhineland bourgeoisie or sitting in his study in Kreuznach, he was now at the heart of socialist thought and action. He was living in the same house as Germain Maurer, one of the leaders of the League of the Just whose meetings he frequented. From October 1843 Marx was breathing a socialist tmosphere. It is not surprising that his surroundings made a swift impact on him.” (McLennan, p.97)
Frank Mehring one of Marx biographer also indicated that Marx was not seating in a library all the time, he participated in several movement in England, Germany and France, and before he died he was working on several projects at the same times, but he was more influenced by communists in France than in other places
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