Marx meets the working class by Todd Chretien

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by Todd Chretien
SocialistWorker.org
April 7, 2011

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In Paris, Marx finally encountered the social force capable of achieving liberation.

“I AM referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results…and being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

Marx was in a fighting mood in the months after the German authorities banned the Rheinische Zeitung, the newspaper he had edited in 1842-43. This is not to say that he was unhappy, far from it. After years of courtship, he and Jenny Westphalen were finally married and soon expecting their first child. As Howard Zinn put it in his play Marx in Soho, the two “were powerfully in love.”

The muckraking Marx by Todd Chretien

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by Todd Chretien
SocialistWorker.org
March 9, 2011

The owners of the Rheinische Zeitung hired a “devil of a revolutionary” as editor.

In 1841, things were looking good for Karl Marx. After completing his dissertation in philosophy, his mentor, the radical critic and philosopher Bruno Bauer, prepared Marx’s way to land a prestigious academic appointment. Only 23 years old and widely recognized as a rising intellectual star, Marx shot to the top of the most influential liberal circles in Germany.

Hegel’s hard work by Todd Chretien

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by Todd Chretien
SocialistWorker.org
February 23, 2011

Marx looked to Hegel’s original method for thinking about society’s problems.

“IF THERE should ever be time for such a work again,” said Marx to Engels amid a flurry of letters in January of 1858, “I should greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer’s sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism.” (From The Selected Correspondence of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: 1846-1895, New York: International Publishers, 1942, p. 102.)