The many faces of Karl Marx. There are many we all know about; the prophet, the revolutionary, philosopher, but there is another less known: the romantic idealist exhorting man to triumph over the things he manufactures…
…Instead of productive labour being used by humanity, human beings were used to produce products. The workers, the proletariat, were not free in practice, whatever the law said. The state was not their state, nor was it impartial, because it upheld the domination of the property owners. Man could only be free if labour was an assertion of man’s own wills and creative power, rather than a commodity that they were forced to barter for wages, and this could only happen by the proletariat overthrowing the existing property relations and creating a slate of real, as distinct from merely abstract, legal, freedoms As Marx wrote at this time: “Philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons.”
Marx the philosopher had become Marx the revolutionary politician and this became crystal clear with the Communist Manifesto where the idealistic philosopher of freedom, lover of Berlioz and Paganinni, reader of Heine was transforming into the social scientist we know today.
—Paul-Jacques-Aime Baudry, Charlotte Corday, 1860—click image for source…
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