The Young Marx Enigma

A 1-day conference convened by Ali Alizadeh and Charles Barbour

Was the young Karl Marx distinctly different to the white-bearded author of the three Capitals? Or is 'the young Marx' a dubious myth, or a confection of Cold War politics, as Marcello Musto has recently told us? This workshop focuses on Marx's work prior to his departure from continental Europe in 1849. Join us for presentations on the historical and intellectual context of Marx's development as a Young Hegelian philosopher, the connections between his early and late works, and the surprising rapport between the formative writings during his first thirty years and the works of other important philosophers.  Where: Balam Balam Place, Room 201, 15 Phoenix Street, Brunswick. When:  10am - 4pm Thursday 24th April 2025 Registration includes a light lunch and refreshments. The conference is in-person only.   Register Here

August Diehl in Le jeune Karl Marx (2017)

Program

Abstracts (In order of appearance) 

The Tale of Two Theses: Marx, Badiou and their Eleven Aphorisms

Ali Alizadeh and Caitlyn Lesiuk

Karl Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach' (1845), despite comprising only eleven short fragments or aphorisms, is one of his most important and most iconoclastic writings. There are significant echoes of this piece in Alain Badiou's eleven 'Theses on Theatre' (1995) though he makes no explicit reference to Marx. We argue that Badiou restages Marx's text as a polemical discourse on the art of theatre. In this session, we present a parallel reading of the two works and explore their resonances and discordances on the topics of truth, action, and society. While Badiou’s eleven theses are enriched by placing them into dialogue with the 'Theses on Feuerbach', so too is Marx’s intervention recontextualised by reading him after Badiou. 

Marx, Spinoza, and "True Democracy"

Sandra Leonie Field

It is common to assimilate Marx’s and Spinoza’s conceptions of democracy. In this paper, I assess the relation between Marx’s early idea of “true democracy” and Spinozist democracy. Drawing on Marx’s student notebooks on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, I show there was a historical influence. However, at the theoretical level, I argue that a sharp distinction must be drawn. Spinoza’s commitment to understanding politics through real concrete powers does not support with Marx’s anti-institutional conception of true democracy.

A Politics of the Clinamen?: Spinoza, Marx, Deleuze

Dimitris Vardoulakis

If we compare Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus to Deleuze’s essay “Lucretius and the Simulacrum” a stark difference immediately emerges: Whereas Deleuze locates the centre of the politics of Epicureanism in the atomic theory of the clinamen, Marx places no political importance whatsoever on the clinamen. What is at stake in this difference? What does it entail for the divergent materialisms of Marx and Deleuze? To answer these questions, I will refer to Spinoza’s appropriation of the Epicurean tradition, and especially the Epicurean notion of phronesis, or the “calculation of utility.”

The Shrieking of Nothing: Notes on Marx and Logic

Charles Barbour

This paper is intended, less as a robust set of arguments and demonstrations, then as an experiment in reading. It begins with the claim that our understanding of the young Marx has been heavily conditioned if not completely distorted by the strong misinterpretation laid down in Engels’s 1888 pamphlet Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy – a piece that Engels wrote shortly after Marx’s death in 1883, and that includes the first treatment of the manuscripts now known as The German Ideology and the first publication of the notes now known as the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. It proposes that Engels exaggerated at least two things: Marx’s relationship with Feuerbach, on the one hand, and his concern with the opposition between idealism and materialism, on the other. Through an analysis of Marx’s writings from 1839-1843, it shows that the more influential figure was not Feuerbach but Marx’s academic mentor Bruno Bauer, and that Marx’s central intellectual preoccupation was not materialism but logic, provided we understand the latter term in the expansive sense that it had during the first half of the nineteenth century. To draw out the second, admittedly somewhat perverse claim, I use the Marx archive to reconstruct his relationship with a handful of generally overlooked figures, notably the great anti-Hegelian logician and Aristotle scholar Adolf Trendelenburg and the radical Hegelian philosopher and University of Berlin lecturer Karl Werder. I conclude by indicating how Marx’s early struggles with Hegelian logic continued to inform his later writings, notably and most famously in the Grundriss.

“To Be Time’s Calendar-Fool”: Natural History, Geological Time, and the Young Marx

Marilyn Stendera

The early works of Marx – including his so-called ‘early literary experiments’, such as the unfinished play Oulanem – sketch out a rich, complex picture of how time structures and is structured by the relationship between the human and the non-human. I want to suggest that these reflections resonate in generative ways with key themes in a scientific controversy that reached a new point of crisis during Marx’s youth and early career. For over a century, debate had raged about the processes of geological time, especially the question of whether it operates by means of continuity or catastrophe. The publication of Lyell’s multivolume Principles of Geology from the 1830s onwards fanned the flames and raised new questions about what all this might mean for the relationship between natural and social histories (a background that was vital for emerging discourses about evolution). In this paper, I want to draw out some of the connections between Marx’s early writings and the developments in geology and natural history of the era. I will suggest that they not only flesh out the intellectual context of the ‘young Marx’, but also shed light on important motifs in the trajectory of his developing conceptualisations of nature, time, and natural history – as well as on contemporary discourses about ‘deep time’ and geological crisis.

Young Marx and the Dialectic of Communism

John Cleary

As Engels notes at various points, the origin of Marx's thought lies in the encounter, in his youth, between the critique of the Hegelian dialectic, the science of political economy and the politics of communism. This encounter results in the conception of communism outlined in The 1844 Manuscripts according to which the emancipation of labour is established through a dialectic in which the alienation of private property is sublated. This notion of sublation distinguishes Marx's concept of communism from others, such as Proudhon's, which he sees as universalizing the relations of capitalism rather than breaking with them. In this paper I argue firstly that this dialectic of communism, which Marx maintained throughout his life, does indeed, as he notes famously much later, invert the terms of Hegel's dialectic. The key to this inversion is that, for Marx, the ideal sublation of private property does not itself necessitate its material actualisation, and this difference between the material and ideal opens up the problem of political practice. Secondly, as a real yet ideal possibility, this orientation to communism makes his later scientific analysis in Capital possible. By breaking with the notion that capitalism is the ultimate and supreme form of production, the possibility of communism allows Marx to grasp the inner dynamics of this mode of production. Inversely, his theory of capitalism establishes the material conditions of emancipation by showing what must be negated in private property's communist sublation.

Believing the Strangest Things: Loving the Alien

Lachlan Ross

There is an odd argument in Marx scholarship, in which it is debated whether it is the Young Hegelian Marx or the old materialist Marx that is more helpful to enemies of capitalism. What is frequently missed in this debate are two dissenting positions from the late 1960s that reject the basic terms of this discussion. In the first, Adorno states that one cannot logically be Hegelian and hate alienation simultaneously, so that it is the mature Marx who is Hegelian. In the second, Althusser states that it is the mature Marx who became truly Hegelian when he woke up to the fact that the human ‘subject’ is the object rather than the agent of history. Both, in different ways, argue the opposite of what everybody knows today about the Young Marx: he is Hegelian because he is interested in alienation. This paper will primarily explore Adorno’s position, that hating alienation, to be blunt, made the young Marx stupid/romantic. The paper will not argue for this position, but will rather explore what is exposed by this argument: basically, that Marx becomes more interesting when he comes to embrace, rather than object to, the basic fact that there is more humanity externally existing within the world rather than within discrete human beings.

About the speakers (alphabetical) 

Ali Alizadeh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash and the author of Marx and Art. He's currently working on class theory, horror and revolutionary subjectivity. He co-hosts, with Jason Jones, the podcast Super Fun Scary Cast. 

Charles Barbour is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a Member of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. His research interests include contemporary political theory, philosophies of technology, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth century.

John Cleary is a philosopher and has recently completed a PhD on a theory of ideas in mathematics based on the philosophy of Albert Lautman.

Sandra Leonie Field is the author of Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). She is Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University.

Caitlyn Lesiuk is a PhD candidate at Deakin University and the convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. Recent publications can be found in The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy and Angelaki.

Lachlan Ross was a lecturer in Criminology before international student caps didn’t happen in 2024, a non-happening which led to inexplicably unreversible austerity measures in 2025. He has been extensively published on Karl Marx and alienation, and has forthcoming articles on Nietzsche, Marcuse and Freud, and Adorno and Marx.

Marilyn Stendera is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wollongong; she previously taught at Deakin, Monash, Melbourne, and for the MSCP. She has degrees in philosophy, social theory, and German. Her research focuses mainly on phenomenology, the philosophy of cognition, and the history of philosophy, with a special interest in time.

Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. Some of his books include Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016); Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020); The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger’s Magical Materialism (2024); and The Agonistic Condition: Materialism and Democracy (2025). He is the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press) and the journal Philosophy, Politics and Critique. He is currently Vice President of the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) and has served as chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP).