Marxism: Chapter 3 from Historiagraphy: Secular and Religious, Part 1

Gordon H. Clark

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Editor’s note: The following article is taken from Dr. Gordon H. Clark’s Historiography: Secular and Religious, The Trinity Foundation, [1971] 1994 second edition. With the rise of Marxism of various sorts among the young, having been “preached” from the colleges, universities, and even seminaries and among the political class with candidates that openly espouse Marxism, this article is pertinent to today’s situation. This article will run in consecutive Trinity Reviews until the chapter is completed. A few punctuation changes have been made.

 

The preceding discussions concerned non-historical explanations of history. Geographical determinism and physical determinism depend completely on non-human factors to account for the events commonly called history. Statistical explanation also, even though the murders and marriages it counts are human actions, cannot very plausibly be called an historical explanation. In its exclusive attention to frequencies the theory is more mathematical than historical, and Buckle said that the volition of the agent was immaterial and irrelevant.

 

In addition to the objections outlined in the preceding chapter, the implausibility of explaining history without reference to human volition is obvious. We therefore turn to historical theories of history; that is, to theories that assign to the decisions of men some large or small, but in any case necessary role in their explanations. Some of these theories are deterministic. They regard the course of history as inevitable. Nevertheless, particular decisions are integral parts of the process. Some later theories are more “historical” than the earlier ones. They are not deterministic; they are still further removed from naturalism. These will be considered in a later chapter. Here, however, after a brief account of economic determinism, the remainder of this chapter will discuss Marxism.

 

Economic Determinism

Economic determinism, while it purports to be as scientific as any of the preceding, may be called an historical theory because the factors on which it relies are the choices and actions of human beings. Economic developments are events, human events, just as truly as were the Crusades and the destruction of the Spanish Armada. The point at issue is whether or not the latter, and all history, can be explained as economically determined.

 

In its simplest form economic determinism is the theory that men are motivated by their economic interests, and that appeals to principles, to morality, to religion, are pretty much hypocrisy. Fortunately, a well-known example of the theory disdains to rely on vague generalities and makes a very specific application susceptible of being tested by methods of research. This example is Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). The willingness to offer such a detailed study is most praiseworthy.

 

Beard’s general idea is that the Declaration of Independence was a truly democratic document, while the Constitution was a conservative reaction by bondholders to protect their financial interests. Beard professes to justify this interpretation of the Constitution by an examination of the holdings of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

 

Now, while such a specific study is most praiseworthy in its aim, it seems that in the later edition of 1935, Beard himself, political reformer though he was, had to modify, virtually retract, his earlier thesis. Here economic determinism makes way for the motivations of the “political man.” Yet the impression remains that the Constitution was pushed through by the wealthy creditors in their opposition to the poor, the farmers, and the debtors.

 

In 1956 Robert E. Brown in Charles Beard and the Constitution challenged the research on which Beard’s conclusions were founded. Brown showed that Beard’s methods were poor, his evidence not only fragmentary but misleading, and that his conclusions are without basis in the evidence. Two years later Forrest McDonald in We the People completed the demolition of this economic interpretation of the Constitution.

 

Both authors show that there was no significant difference of type or amount of property separating Federalists from their opponents in several states. In the case of North Carolina, which at first rejected the Constitution, there is even some ground for belief that the “biggest money” resisted the Constitution, while smaller men supported it. Anti-democratic spokesmen who, for the Beardians, ought to have been Federalists, were in alliance with wealthy and well-born interest groups who vigorously opposed ratification. “Democratic” frontier farmers in places like Georgia voted for, not against, the Constitution. The five biggest bond owners of 1787 either refused to sign the Constitution or left the Philadelphia Convention before its works was finished.

 

After listing such financial interests of the delegates and their states, and after examining a tabulation of the voting in the Convention, McDonald concludes, “In short, the voting patterns of the state delegations in the Convention by no means followed the lines of basic economic cleavage into realty and personality interests” (97).

 

In addition to an analysis of the Convention, McDonald in Part III, which occupies more than half the volume, studies the economic alignments in the process of ratification. Here too no economic pattern can be found. In all, the two authors have given a massive detailed refutation of Beard’s economic thesis.

 

To be sure, economic motives have had great effect on the course of history, and if the existence of economic forces were sufficient to prove economic determinism, the latter could be proved a hundred times over. But this is just the difficulty. Economic determinism is the theory that there are no other motives operative in human decisions. Economic terms are the only terms in which historical developments are explicable. If religious or strictly political terms are used, particularly by the historical agents, the theory dismisses them as mere disguises for economic interests. Beard’s attempt was most fortunate precisely because it allowed for a detailed check.

 

Consider a second example. Louis M. Hacker and Benjamin B. Kendrick in their The United States Since 1865 emphasize, indeed their left-wing prejudices compel them to overemphasize, the control economic forces have over history. Among other things they represent American policy in Cuba and the Philippines as determined by economics. For example, in October 1929 Senator King of Utah, the leading beet-growing state, and Senator Broussard of Louisiana, the leading cane-growing state, introduced a proposal for the immediate independence of the Philippines. No one doubts that the domestic sugar industry was a part of these Senators’ motivation. And yet the authors can state on the next page (third edition, 367), “American rule over the islands has been distinguished for its humanity in a portion of the earth where the white man’s burden is lightly held. When the United States occupied the islands, the proportion of illiteracy was 85 percent; in 1921 the Wood-Forbes Commission found it reduced to 37 percent…. Deaths from cholera and smallpox have been practically eliminated; order is maintained and justice honestly dispensed.”

 

It is to the credit of Hacker and Kendrick that they state these facts; but the theory of economic determinism with its attempt to explain the granting of independence to the Philippines as a device to enrich domestic producers of sugar, can hardly account for the “humanity” of American rule. Other motivations must also have been operative; and if so, events are not determined by economics pure and simple.

 

Historical Materialism

The theory of Karl Marx and the Communists is not economic determinism but historical materialism. In a letter to the present writer, Dr. Herbert Aptheker, chief theoretician of the Communist Party in America and National Director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies, said, “Identifying economic determinism with historical materialism is common and has been done for almost one hundred years. It is nevertheless an error, and the error has been pointed out and contested by Marxists, ever since Engels himself specifically did so.”

 

It may immediately be admitted that there is at least a verbal difference, and perhaps a difference of some importance. Communism admits, as economic determinism is not supposed to, that economic motives are the only ones operative in history. There are even religious motivations, as well as atheistic, military, ethical, intellectual or philosophical motivations, and any others one can name. However, these are subsidiary; though really operative, they are derivative. Further, the difference between economic determinism and historical materialism can be accentuated by noting that these motivations do not derive from economics in the narrowest financial sense, but rather from the technological level of the epoch’s methods of manufacture.

 

The basic Marxist position is succinctly phrased by Friedrich Engels in the Preface to The Communist Manifesto: “In every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch.” In another work he repeats the principle in a slightly expanded form:

 

The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in the modes of production and exchange…[and conversely] the growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust…is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have taken place.[1]

 

Marx’s own words are,

 

The sum total relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life.[2]

 

Neither Marx nor Engels seems so averse to the mention of economics as Dr. Aptheker. They both stress economics. It may not be a matter of bondholders versus landholders; but modes of production, division of labor, methods of exchange are economics nonetheless.

 

Dialectical Materialism

Communism is more than a theory of history in the ordinary sense. It is a theory of economics, politics, even of physics and zoology—a complete philosophy in fact. Karl Marx, as is well known, started out as an Hegelian. He developed his views by inverting or materializing Hegelianism, and not by studying sociology empirically. A certain minimum of this philosophy is needed to put the matter of history in proper perspective.

 

The first point, which seems to be a matter of physics or maybe metaphysics, is Marxist materialism. Ludwig Feuerbach, who had studied under Hegel, revolted against his master and rejected idealism in favor of materialism. Marx followed him in denying the reality of the spirit. If anything, later Communism stresses materialism more than Marx did. Stalin is very clear that the world is not an Absolute Idea. It is matter in motion. Matter is independent of mind, mind is derivative; matter is the source of sensation, and thought is a product of the brain. True, Communists reject an older form of materialism because it is too static. Heraclitean flux is more to their liking. Or, in modern language, instead of metaphysical materialism, their theory is dialectical materialism. With a dictator’s disregard of what metaphysics has meant in philosophy, Josef Stalin sketches the Communist view in Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

 

For Stalin, metaphysics is a bad word: It regards nature as an accidental agglomeration of independent things. But dialectics regards nature as an integral whole, each part determined by each other. Nor is nature static; it is in a state of continuous change. Contrary to the metaphysical view, the change is not simple growth, in which quantitative changes never lead to qualitative changes; but rather after the accumulation of imperceptible quantitative changes, there explodes a fundamental qualitative change. This dialectical law of nature explains why gradualism, compromise, and reform are to be rejected in politics, and dependence placed on violent revolution.

 

That nature and therefore human nature is in this way dialectical is explained by the fact that, contrary to metaphysics, internal contradictions are inherent in all things. The flux of matter and society is a struggle of opposites. There are no eternal and immutable principles of justice or private property. Revolution is natural and class struggle inevitable.

 

Clearly it is the revolutionary application of the idea of the dialectic that controls Stalin’s theory. Even if “metaphysics” had been tied to the view that quantitative changes never lead to qualitative changes—and this is not strictly true even of Aristotle—and even if Communism could be credited with a new insight that the qualitative change is abrupt, there is a great gap between this natural flux and the program of political revolution. After all, the change from feudalism to capitalism, on which Communism stakes so much of its claim, was neither so sudden nor so violent as Stalin requires. More of this history later. At the moment there is another remark appropriate to this dialecticism. A theory of continuous natural change is a poor basis on which to erect a permanent social system. Hegel has been unfairly ridiculed because he was supposed to have thought that the Prussian state was the culmination of universal history. His dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was also criticized as preventing any completion at all. However, Hegel’s all-inclusive Absolute is a pretty fair answer to these criticisms. But when the Communists retain Heraclitus’ flux while discarding his Logos, when they turn Hegel’s intellectual dialectic into a natural, materialistic process, it is not so clear that there can be a culmination, despite their asseverations that classes and class warfare will cease. At any rate, Communist metaphysics, philosophy, dialecticism, and its epistemology, as will be mentioned in a moment, are not impressive. Violent revolution is the important idea.

 

Since violence and the events of history prove what is true and eliminate what is false, Stalin’s success in finally murdering Trotsky demonstrates that Stalin’s Communism is orthodox. But Trotsky too placed great emphasis on dialectic. In a letter to one James Burnham, who wanted to work out a political solution of the concrete problem of Finland and who thought that the introduction of dialectics into the argument was a red herring, Trotsky wrote, “If it is possible to give a correct definition of the state without utilizing the method of dialectical materialism; if it is possible correctly to determine politics without giving a class analysis of the state, then the question arises, Is there any need whatsoever for Marxism?”[3]

 

Both Stalin and Trotsky are to be congratulated on one point, if on nothing else. They insist on an integrated view. History is not to be divorced from physics, nor zoology from politics. But for this very reason, when Stalin and all other Marxists declare that matter is independent of our mind, and that thought is a product of the brain, we may legitimately raise the question of epistemology.

 

Strangely enough, the epistemological difficulties of materialistic behaviorism do not seem to trouble these people. Feuerbach in early life had been an idealist and had pressed the epistemological difficulties against materialism; later he turned completely around and repudiated Hegelianism, but how he then explained knowledge is not clear. Marx, in the same light-handed fashion, dismissed solipsism as an insult to the proletariat.

 

Now there are many difficulties in behaviorism.[4] One only will be mentioned here. If thought is a function of the brain, and if the brain functions according to scientific laws, then the thought of one brain is entirely on a level with that of any other. Everything is strictly physiological, and the chemistry in one case is no “truer” than in a second. A few chemicals and collisions produce the “idea,” or rather the motions we call Communism, while in another brain a few chemicals produce the idea of capitalism. Both are equally good chemistry and there is no ground for a preference. Chemical reactions do not prefer.[5]

 

Yet Communists prefer Communism. Like professional historians and ordinary citizens Communists too pass judgment on great men and historical events. Indeed, they are severe in their condemnation of capitalistic politics and economics. Can Communism provide any criteria for such judgments? Can ethical norms have a materialistic basis?

 

The Communist answer is a particularly intricate tangle. A few paragraphs below Marx’s use of the concept of self-alienation will be mentioned, and under this concept Communism could be taken as a prescription for the cure of neurotic personality. This does not solve the question of morality, but it helps to explain its position in Marxism. Because the idea of self-alienation was swallowed up by another concept and became less and less prominent, only the more obvious contradictions in Communism’s ethics will be mentioned here.

 

In his effort to be scientific and empirical Marx rejected ethics as a normative science, yet his description of feudalism as a bondage is made with ethical fervor and his attacks on capitalism are highly denunciatory. The language is far removed from pure empirical description. Engels was even more obviously self-contradictory. Within the limits of a few pages of his Anti-Dühring he asserts that all morality is relative, yet morality has progressed and will progress until there is a truly human morality. On occasion Marxism claims to be a value-free science, construing moral opinions as class demands, and then sets itself up as the most ethical of all worldviews. Lenin insisted that Marxism contains no shred of ethics and then spoke of the fundamental rules of everyday life and the revolutionary consciousness of justice.

 

A. F. Shiskin, a contemporary Soviet moral philosopher, defends the derivation of ethical principles from social reality. Marx himself, let it be noted as we continue, did no such thing. But, in any case, if moral norms are derivatives of social reality, then morality must differ in different societies. Yet Shiskin speaks of the objective rigorous norms of Marxism in contrast with the ethical relativism of Goebbels.

 

Shiskin could obtain some show of consistency by eliminating the rejection of ethics and placing hope in the establishment of norms on a scientific descriptive basis. This consistency, however, would be purchased at the price of logical impossibility. Descriptive details, no matter how detailed, cannot imply normative principles. Communists therefore have no reason for their untiring hatred of other people. Materialism, whether dialectical or otherwise, makes knowledge impossible and fails to justify ethical distinctions. If now these basic flaws are disregarded, does the remainder of Marxism fare much better?

 

Labor Theory

Labor theory is more closely related to economics, politics, and the Communistic view of history. As an introduction to this labor theory Friedrich Engels’ Principles of Communism is most effective. This small work was written in question-and-answer form, and the references will be to the question number.

 

Q 1. “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.” This statement clearly presupposes that there is a “proletariat”; that it needs to be liberated from something, and, as will be seen, that Communism is the only possible method of liberation.

 

Q 2. “The proletariat is that class of society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital.” This explicitly excludes from the proletariat all persons who own a savings account, a few shares of stock, or a war bond. It also excludes farmers. Since there are, however, people who own none of these, the proletariat is not an empty class. What proportion of the total population the proletariat forms, and whether this proportion is increasing or decreasing, are questions to be considered in evaluating Communist theory.

 

Q 4. “The proletariat organized in the industrial revolution which took place in England in the last half of the [eighteenth] century.” Poverty and proletarianism, Engels explains, are not to be equated. There have always been poor people, but proletarians first came into existence with factories. When machinery became so expensive that only capitalists could own it, when therefore a man had to sell his labor for wages, then the worker became a proletarian.[6]

 

Since poverty and proletarianism are not synonymous, it is interesting to consider the case of a wealthy proletarian. He owns no stocks and bonds; he may even have revolutionary ideas; but his wages are high; he owns two cars; he works a forty-hour week. Does he need “liberation”? Marx and Engels, of course, do not consider this case. They argue that this case cannot occur.

 

For Engels, competition between capitalists themselves and among workers, reduces the pay of the workers to a bare subsistence level. Q 5. “The price of labor is also equal to the costs of production of labor. But the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker therefore will get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor or the wage will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.”

 

This paragraph, so basic to Communism, is a major blunder in economic theory. First of all, there is the factual blunder in that wages are not held down to a bare subsistence level. Reference has just been made to proletarians who own two cars and work a forty-hour week. Wages on a subsistence level may have been the cause in the early nineteenth century. But two considerations deprive this fact of all Communistic value. The first, of lesser importance, is that under the conditions of that time the factory workers could not have done better in a different occupation. They would have fared worse; and subsistence is better than starvation. The second point is that Engels mistook the historical accident of subsistence wages for a necessary element of capitalism. This is a stark mistake in analysis.

 

Another blunder, one that has permeated Communism, is also found in the same paragraph. When Engels says that the price of labor is equal to the cost of producing labor, he depends on the principle that the price of anything is determined by the costs of production. In other words, the value of a commodity is fixed by the amount of labor that goes into it.

 

This is not true. The price of an article is fixed by supply and demand. One could expend months of labor in producing a surrey with a fringe on the top; but the price it would bring would be below the subsistence level. In Russia and China today the price of an article may not depend on supply and demand; but neither does it depend on the amount of labor necessary to its production. Under Communism the price is fixed by the government. In the United States where left-wing liberals are trying to undermine the capitalism that made the nation great, price is still largely determined by supply and demand. Only the most repulsive and repressive methods of a socialistic state can modify this equation to any great extent.

 

To pause a moment for a side glance, one can see that equating the exchange value of a product with the labor time expended in its production equates the man hours of an expert with those of an unskilled laborer.

 

That the value or price of a commodity is equal to the labor, the factory labor, required to produce it is tied into a theory of surplus value. Marx had the incredibly stupid idea that “constant capital,” i. e. the land, buildings, machinery, and raw materials, are not factors in production. Production depends on labor power alone. Therefore, capital and capitalists, that do not contribute labor power, do not contribute to the value of a commodity. Therefore, also the profits of capitalism are theft, and those who own land and machinery are social parasites. They exploit the workers. Similarly, brokers, distributors, middlemen, lenders, add nothing to the commodity’s value. Consequently, they are not entitled to receive any part of its price. They are thieves.

 

One would suppose that Marx recognized the need of buildings and machinery. But this theory presents some difficulties. In a moment his attack on the division of labor will be discussed, a consequence of which might be the abolition of factories. The final utopian state of mature Communism is so devoid of organization that one naturally wonders how the material level of even the nineteenth century could be maintained. There is, however, an intermediate stage of “raw” Communism, more frequently called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This occupied the attention of the Soviets, and their solution to the problem of buildings and machinery is not hard to discern. Ownership resides in the state; there is no private property. How the state gets this constant capital is a question socialism can easily answer. It simply confiscates private property. It appropriates the wealth that intelligent and industrious capitalists have built up. Then the laboring man will get the wages he deserves. Socialistic management will be so much more rational and efficient that every worker can have two cars and color television. That an army of bureaucrats would eat up more of the profits than capitalists ever did never occurred to Marx’s one-track mind. That commissars, whose pay comes from the state, whose business operations face no free competition, who are judged by their political reliability and not by their production of commodities, would never be as efficient as private businessmen is another such absent idea. These ideas also seem to be absent from a large section of the contemporary American mind, too.

 

Marx wrote so much on labor theory that only a fraction can be considered here. Just one further item, on the alienation of labor, will close this subsection.

 

How the concept of alienation originated in Kant’s ethics, how Hegel transformed it into cognitive alienation to be overcome by the System, how Feuerbach inverted idealism so that it became materialism, and how Karl Marx developed violent revolution as the method of healing man’s mind is sketched most interestingly in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx by Robert Tucker (Cambridge, 1961).

 

Marx had “discovered” that Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind was actually a treatise on economics, and that his thought processes were to be understood as material production. Alienated or forced labor produces private property. The compulsion that transforms free creative self-activity into alienated labor is not the necessity of self-preservation, but rather the compulsion to amass wealth. Money is power. It commands men. Says Marx, “the less you eat, drink, and read books, … the less you think, love, theorize, … the more you save—the greater becomes…your capital. The less you are, the more you have…. Everything that the political economist takes from you in life and

 

humanity, he replaces for you in money…. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in greed.”[7]

 

But whereas Hegel’s acquisitive greed for knowledge overcame alienation and restored one’s right mind, Marx’s greed for money depersonalizes man. What Hegel took for good, Marx took for evil.

 

The alien thus being created, far from being the Absolute Self, is the capitalist. This important identification does not logically proceed from Marx’s psychiatric analysis of economics. As Robert Tucker puts it: “This position was theoretically untenable…. [There] is no justification for conceiving the alienated self-relation as a social phenomenon in its essential nature. The intra-personal situation remains the primary fact, and the alienated social relation is only a derivative fact and a result. For the theorist to ignore this is to succumb to the alienated individual’s own delusion that the alien man is someone outside himself” (148-149).

 

The purely philosophic development of Marx’s thought is most interesting, but his specific application to labor theory is more closely related to the problems of history:

 

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he provides…. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more goods he creates…the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he created in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself…. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force…. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor.[8]

 

The ideas reflected here are a curios combination, almost as neurotic as the alienated man, of ambiguities, half-truths, and falsities. It should be clear that a rise in the level of material culture—and Communism is materialistic—can occur only through increased production: increased production of food in starving nations, and increased variety of gadgets in the more affluent nations. That the worker becomes poorer by producing more is false. Increased production no doubt requires further division of labor, or, as it would be said today, automation. This may make some routine jobs rather boring. “Boring” is not Marx’s term. He so delightfully describes the process as a set of torture devices that mutilates the worker, degrades him to an appurtenance of a machine, and torments him until the essential meaning of human life is destroyed. Compare this outburst with conditions in the United States today where the diabolical capitalists must pay exorbitant over-time for minimum skills because only the unemployed cannot rise to the level of an assembly line.

 

Marx, however, regards the division of labor as actually worse than the slavery of Roman times. But does he think that undivided labor, one man all by himself, can make an airplane? Even if we restrict the idea of division to the division between labor and capital—and here is where Marx’s emphasis lies in his attempt to ignore the details of assembly lines—one may still ask, Can an airplane be built without capital? Without capital men would be reduced to the level of mere self-preservation. Division of labor also includes the division between competent engineers and incompetent workmen. A good engineer might possibly construct an airplane of the Wright brothers’ vintage, provided he had the capital; but just imagine the mass men of Hoffa and Reuther trying to manage General Motors! It is hard enough for General Motors to manage the mass men. Yet Engels in his Anti-Dühring predicts that Communism will dispense with professional architects and all other such experts and specialists. I wonder who will perform brain surgery? All in all, Marx’s attack on the division of labor is one of his most paradoxical proposals.

 

Now it may be said that Marx could not foresee automation and the twentieth century. In fact, present-day socialists who decry automation, like the early labor unions who wrecked the linotype machines at their introduction, are similarly blind. But whether such blindness in Communism is an extenuating circumstance or whether it is an aggravation may better be seen in Communism’s claim to be scientific. This claim came into prominence after Marx’s identification of the alien man with the capitalist and has remained a point of pride ever since.

 

The chapter will continue in the next Trinity Review.


[1]Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 94-95.

[2]Critique of Political Economy, 11-12, translated by N. I. Stone. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1913.

[3]In Defense of Marxism, 78, 189, 187.

[4]Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, Chapter IX. See also Gord H. Clark, Behaviorism and Christianity, The Trinity Foundation, 1982, combined in Modern Philosophy, The Trinity Foundation, 2008. – Editor.

[5]For further difficulties in epistemology, see A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism, 55-71.

[6]Karl Marx did not develop Communism through actual observation of the working classes, but through an inversion of Hegelian philosophy. Not that he was completely original; no man ever is. Feuerbach was a notable influence. Lorenz von Stein in his Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs seems to be the one who contributed the idea of the proletariat. Following Hegel, who said that poverty does not make a rabble of paupers, but that a rabble is created when poverty is joined with hatred against the wealthy, Stein defined the proletariat as a mass of proud defiant poor, and dangerous because of its consciousness of unity in rebellion against society. Stein was a conservative; but Marx adopted many of his expressions and turned them to his own purposes.

[7]Marx and Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, III, 370.

[8]Early Writings, translated by T. B. Bottomore, London: C. A. Watts, 1963.