Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/21

Rh participate in the struggle for the Socialist Commonwealth. He desired to know, so he could act, and he wanted to be well equipped for the task meted out to him and his class-conscious comrades by the unrelenting course of historic events. To him philosophical clarity implied philosophical clarity to the workers; the same as we see all his activity radiating from a class-conscious premise and inaugurated solely for the purpose of abolishing class-rule. He well appreciated, with the aid of the Materialist Conception of History, the great role the proletariat had to play in the advancement of society to a higher stage in civilization; he knew that social evolution had formulated this position of the workers in the social struggle, but he also knew that the workers had first to become conscious of their historic mission in order to fulfill the same successfully—in order to desire to perform the same.

Writing on the relation of philosophy to working-class activity in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), he gives the following piece of advice to his erstwhile friends, the Young-Hegelians: "You can not realize a philosophy without abolishing it." However, he did not forget what he had learned from them, and addressing the bourgeoisie says: "You can not abolish a philosophy without realizing it. Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons. The head of emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. The philosophy can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of philosophy." If the readers will substitute Socialism for the word philosophy, then the last sentence will read: Socialism can not be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can not abolish itself without the realization of Socialism.

Before entering upon an examination of the details in Marx's life, details which are as interesting as they are plentiful and