I’m working my way through the early chapters of Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones’ recent biography. There’s a lot of German idealism, and these debates often seem to have been lost in the mists of history for pretty good reason. But some of the most interesting bits involve Marx’s arguments with his contemporaries, well before he became widely famous.

Arnold Ruge was a lecturer at the University of Halle and founder of journals that published some of Marx’s early writings. They were frequent collaborators and correspondents, and both were both critical of the autocratic Prussian state and traditional religion. But Ruge was more of a liberal, republican nationalist and their views drifted apart as Marx moved toward a more radical position. They eventually had a personal falling out after living in close quarters in Paris, which led to an open intellectual break:

Ruge went on to attack Karl’s communism. He argued to Feuerbach that neither the aims of the Fourierists, nor the suppression of property that the communists advocated, could be articulated with any clarity. ‘These two tendencies end up with a police state and slavery. To liberate the proletariat from the weight of physical and intellectual misery, one dreams of an organization that would generalize this very misery, that would cause all human beings to bear its weight.’

Karl Grün was a German journalist active in organizing workers around the same time as Marx, and also collaborated with Proudhon, the famous French critic of private property. Marx despised Grün, whose popularity and prominence were a challenge to his own, and devoted a section of the Communist Manifesto to criticizing his “German” socialism. In 1848, Marx and Engels followed up with the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, which called for the nationalization of industry, transport and finance.

Writing in the Trier’sche Zeitung, [Grün] criticized the emphasis on centralization and nationalization; its results, he stated, would not be the emancipation of labour, but the replacement of individual monopolies by a ‘collective monopoly’ of the state, and the undermining of individual self-determination. From today’s perspective, a full century after the Bolshevik Revolution, these criticisms sound very accurate indeed.