The title is a joke, and it is worth pausing on before anything else, because the joke turned out to be prophetic. "The Holy Family" was the mocking nickname Marx and Engels hung on Bruno Bauer and his circle of Berlin intellectuals — a self-anointed priesthood of "Critical Criticism" who had persuaded themselves that pure thought, carried on in a little review by a handful of initiates, was the real motor of history, and that the mass of ordinary human beings were so much inert matter waiting to be enlightened. The book, written in Paris in the autumn of 1844 and published in Frankfurt in February 1845, is the two young men's first joint work and their first sustained act of demolition. It is also, though they could not have known it, an unwitting portrait of a danger their own movement would one day embody: the danger of a coterie that sets itself above the people in the name of the people, and mistakes its own doctrine for the world.
The present text is the Progress Publishers edition of 1975, translated from the German by Richard Dixon and Clemens Dutt, first issued in Moscow in 1956 and here reprinted. It is a handsome, scholarly volume, and it needs to be, because The Holy Family is a difficult book — much of it a line-by-line settling of scores with figures the twentieth century has entirely forgotten, Herr Faucher and Herr Jungnitz and Szeliga, whose names survive only because Marx thought it worth the ink to ridicule them. A reader coming to it cold should be warned: this is not the lucid Marx of the Manifesto. It is Marx and Engels in transit, still shaking off the Hegelian scaffolding, and the polemic is often buried under the rubble of the thing it demolishes.
Take first what the book does that nothing before it had done. Its whole thrust is to bring philosophy down out of the clouds and stand it on the ground of real human activity. Against Bauer's cult of the disembodied "Idea," Marx lays down a sentence that is the hinge of his entire life's work: "History does nothing … it is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights." Ideas settle nothing by themselves — "Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all." What carries things out is people, in their material circumstances; and here, for the first time, Marx names the people who will carry out the decisive thing. The proletariat, he argues, is driven to emancipation not by its ideals but by its situation: "it cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation." The point is pressed with a rigour that would define the tradition — the question is not what this or that worker imagines, but "what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do." And in the book's finest stretch, the "Critical Battle against French Materialism," Marx traces the descent of socialism from the materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment and states the programme in a line still worth carrying: "If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human." For all its clutter, the book contains in embryo the two ideas everything else would grow from — that circumstances make people and people remake circumstances, and that the working class is the agent capable of doing so.
What has worn less well is everything the youth of the authors could not yet discipline. The book is too long by half; its wit, real and often savage, is spent on targets no longer worth the effort of following; and Marx himself, looking back from 1867, remarked on how strange its residual "cult of Feuerbach" had come to sound. It is a work of transition, and it reads like one — the materialism is announced more often than it is demonstrated, and the reader must supply from later Marx the framework that would make these flashes into a system. None of that is a reproach; it is simply the honest measure of a first book. But it means The Holy Family is a text to be read for its openings, not for a finished doctrine — which makes what was later done to it all the more revealing.
For here the reflexive question — was the state that canonised this book faithful to it? — has an almost cruel exactness, because the book is about the very posture that state assumed. Bauer's "Critical Criticism" is a self-selected elite that treats itself as the active principle of history and the masses as passive material; the whole polemic is Marx's insistence that this has it exactly backwards. Now read the note the Institute of Marxism-Leninism placed at the front of this edition. It rightly foregrounds the book's great theme — "the mass, the people, is the real maker of the history of mankind" — and it adds, with evident pride, that "Lenin especially stressed the importance of this thought and described it as one of the most profound and most important theses of historical materialism." Every word is true. And every word indicts the apparatus that wrote it. For the Soviet state honoured "the masses" as a slogan on a banner while it disenfranchised the actual masses, and it did so through precisely the mechanism Marx was mocking: a bureaucratic caste, custodian of an infallible "Criticism" now called Marxism-Leninism, standing above society as the one competent judge of what the people's real interests were. Marx's proof that the proletariat "will historically be compelled" to act was turned inside out — into the doctrine that the Party, reading the laws of history, knew what the class was compelled to want better than the class did, and could therefore act in its place and, when necessary, against it. The satire on a priesthood of the Idea became the self-portrait of a priesthood of the Idea.
The irony did not stop at the argument; it reached the very form of the cult. Marx and Engels named their enemies "the Holy Family" to ridicule the pretension of turning a group of thinkers into an object of reverence. The state that reprinted this ridicule built its own Holy Family and worshipped it in earnest: the fixed quartet of Marx–Engels–Lenin–Stalin ranged along every platform, the embalmed founder in his mausoleum, the catechism recited in every school, the "classics" that could be quoted but never questioned. A book whose entire method is the refusal to let any doctrine float free of the living people who make and remake it was enrolled among the sacred texts of a religion of doctrine. There is no sharper illustration in the whole Progress catalogue of the gap between what these books say and what was done in their name.
None of this is the young Marx's failure; it is the measure of a betrayal, and the Fourth International's reading has always insisted on the distinction. The line that runs from The Holy Family is the line of self-emancipation — the conviction, which Marx would soon write into the statutes of the International, that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves and that no benefactor above the class can free it. Against the substitutionism that let a bureaucracy speak and rule in the proletariat's name, that principle is the standing indictment; it is why Trotsky could wield the founders against their embalmers, and why the humanist current that rediscovered the young Marx in the 1950s and 1960s frightened the guardians of official dialectical materialism. The materialism of The Holy Family was always a weapon that could be turned homeward, and the men who kept it under glass understood as much.
So the book is worth far more than its place on the shelf of relics. Read it for its openings and read it against its shrine. Its lasting claim is the one thing the Soviet century could not practise while it preached it: that emancipation is the self-activity of real, living people, and that every Holy Family — every self-appointed guardian of the Idea who mistakes his doctrine for the movement of the world and the masses for his raw material — is to be laughed off the stage. Marx aimed that laughter at Bruno Bauer. History aimed it, in the end, at the state that turned Marx into a saint. The book asks only to be taken at its word: not as scripture, but as a summons to the living.