Young Marx - Various Breaks

Various Breaks

Lenin claimed Marx's first mature work as The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) in his own work State and Revolution (1917). Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who was a champion of this 'young' 'mature' dichotomy in his criticisms of Marxist humanism (Praxis School, John Lewis, etc.) and Existential Marxism, claimed in the 1960s that The German Ideology (written in 1845), in which Marx criticized Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and other Young Hegelians, marked the break with this young Marx. Furthermore, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel in his "the Place of Marxism in History" (1986) also broke Marx's intellectual development into several different stages. Althusser presented, in his For Marx (1965), a number of other opinions:

For Jahn, for example, although they 'still ' contain 'a whole series of abstract elements ' the 1844 Manuscripts mark 'the birth of scientific socialism '. For Pajitnov, these manuscripts 'form the crucial pivot around which Marx reoriented the social sciences. The theoretical premises of Marxism had been laid down .' For Lapine, 'unlike the articles in the Rheinische Zeitung in which certain elements of materialism only appear spontaneously, the 1843 Manuscript witnesses to Marx's conscious passage to materialism ', and in fact 'Marx's critique of Hegel starts from materialist positions ' (it is true that this 'conscious passage ' is called 'implicit ' and 'unconscious ' in the same article). As for Schaff, he writes squarely 'We know (from later statements of Engels ) that Marx became a materialist in 1841 '. I am not trying to make an easy argument out of these contradictions (which might at little cost be set aside as signs of an 'open' investigation). But it is legitimate to ask whether this uncertainty about the moment when Marx passed on to materialism, etc., is not related to the spontaneous and implicit use of an analytico-teleological theory.