Page:Zelda Kahan - Karl Marx His Life And Teaching (1918).pdf/8

 his dogmatic idealistic superstructure. The Hegelian philosophy, like all other idealistic schools of philosophy took it for granted that ideas are not images of real conditions, but that they exist independently, and that their development forms a foundation for the development of things. This Marx and Engels repudiated. They substituted as the foundation materialism, the world of real things, nature and history for ideology or the independent idea developing apart from things. They gave expression to this new dialectical materialsimmaterialism [sic], as well as a refutation of the use to which the small bourgeois Hegelians had put Hegel's philosophy, in a book entitled The Holy Family, published in 1845. Later they wrote another book together on the same subject, which, although not published, served to clear their own ideas and to give them a thorough grasp of their materialist conceptions.

In the meantime, Marx had been studying political economy in Paris, and also carrying on a vigorous polemic against the Prussian Government. The latter took its revenge by securing his expulsion from Paris. Marx then went to Brussels, where he wrote occasionally for the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung.

At the Free Trade Congress in 1846 he delivered a speech on Free Trade which was later published in pamphlet form, and in 1847 he wrote "Poverty of Philosophy" in French as a reply to Proudhon's book, The Philosophy of Poverty. In this work Marx, using the Hegelian dialectic in the materialist revolutionary form adopted by himself and Engels, lays bare the laws of society and develops the fundamentals of modern scientific socialism.

In Brussels Marx and Engels entered the "League of the Just," which, assuming different forms in different countries, finally developed into the Communist League, an open legal propaganda association. In November, 1847, they were commissioned to draw up its complete, practical and theoretical party programme. This they did in the "Communist Manifesto." A historical product of its time, this manifesto still forms the ground work of the modern international social democracy. The "Communist Mani-