ass struggle in history”.16 As a sign of gratitude, Marx sent Darwin the second German edition of Capital. On the title page he inscribed, “Mr. Charles Darwin/On the part of his sincere admirer/[signed] Karl Marx, London 16 June 1873.”17
Curiously, Marx adopted Darwinism not just to support his own racist theories, including his undeniable anti-Semitism (although he was ethnically Jewish himself). For instance, Marx argued that it was not so difficult to establish unions in barbarous Russia, a country where, as he put it, anybody could easily “build up successful unions with stupid young men and apostles”.18 Marx quite often resorted to phrases like “dirty Jew” and “Jewish Nigger” in order to describe his political enemies. About the famous German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle he wrote:
“It is not perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.”19
In his work On the Jewish Questions, Marx shared and endorsed the anti-Semitism of Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left who had published an essay demanding that the Jews abandon Judaism completely. In Marx’s opinion, the “money-Jew” had become “the universal anti-social element of the present time”. To make the Jew impossible, he argued, it was necessary to abolish the preconditions, the very possibility of the kind of money activities which produced him.20 Thus, he concluded that both the Jew and his religion should disappear if the world were finally able to abolish “the Jewish attitude to money”. As Marx put it, “in emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.”21
Marxism and Hegelianism
No one can deny the historical influence of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) upon the formation of Marx’s methodology. The connection lies not in their conceptions of the state, but rather in the dialectical method used by Marx to construct his own political theories of dialectical and historical materialism.22
Hegel saw the world as an evolving living organism. As such, he argued that scientific and political progress was not smooth but rather moved dialectically and in accordance with a conflicting philosophical dialogue. According to this theory, person A states some partial truth, then person B advocates the very opposite (which is also partly true), and then the combining elements of both ideas finally comes about. In applying this dialectical premise to history, Hegel contended that truth is subjective and that it is impossible to judge cultural norms by any objective standard. Furthermore, Hegel’s theory also maintains that the historical process is affected by an ongoing conflict and evolution of human ideas.
Marx agreed with Hegel about the inevitable progress of history. However, Marx rejected the Hegelian belief that anything intellectual is the driving force in human history. “Hegel’s dialectics”, he said, “is the fundamental principle of all dialectic only after its mystical form has been sloughed off. And that is precisely what distinguishes my method.”23 Believing that material or physical forces were the real forces behind human progress,24 Marx replaced Hegelian dialecticism with his own dialectical materialism, in which the forces in conflict are not ideas or principles but solely the interests of social classes in their struggle over the ownership and control of material resources.25
When history is understood in accordance with that dialectical materialism, socio-political institutions appear to always correspond to the interests of the dominant class. The legal system is therefore interpreted as a superstructure that must suit the practical needs of this dominant class.22 Accordingly, the rule of law is merely another ideological mechanism through which that class is able to e