In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking.

In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it).

Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and thus of converting all external sensuously perceptible struggles into pure struggles of thought.

This Critical transformation is the basis of the pre-established harmony between Critical Criticism and the censorship. From the Critical point of view, the writer’s fight against the censor is not a fight of “man against man”. The censor is nothing but my own tact personified for me by solicitous police, my own tact struggling against my tactlessness and un-Criticalness. The struggle of the writer with the censor is only seemingly, only in the eyes of wicked sensuousness, anything else than the inner struggle of the writer with himself. Insofar as the censor is really individually different from myself, a police executioner who mishandles the product of my mind by applying an external standard alien to the matter in question, he is a mere mass-type fantasy, an un-Critical figment of the brain. When Feuerbach’s Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie were prohibited by the censorship, it was not the official barbarity of the censorship that was to blame but the uncultured character of Feuerbach’s Thesen. “Pure” Criticism unsullied by mass or matter, too, has in the censor a purely “ethereal” form, divorced from all mass-type reality.

There’s a tendency in people like Bauer, Marx says, that is, the Young Hegelians who were on the left but had not yet discovered political economy, to attribute states of subjection to states of mind. Such people, the critical critics, see unfreedom and domination as symptoms of undeveloped, unthoughtful, uncritical, unscientific, souls. All the bad things in the world, all its retrograde features, are the result of the rubes who watch Fox News, worship in evangelical churches, and listen to Trump.

Marx takes his criticism of this view a step further. According to Marx, because they see the vice of the world as a form of error, as a sin of mind, a lack of enlightenment, the Bauer types are inclined to see censorship not as traditional liberals like Locke saw it—that is, as an act of law, pain, and punishment, quite apart from whatever ideas or beliefs the censor was acting upon. Instead, the Bauer types have a tendency to see in censorship an instance of humanity exercising its higher mind over and against its lower mind. They have a tendency to see in censorship a higher self regulating and constraining a lower self. This is what Isaiah Berlin will later accuse all theorists of positive liberty of believing in. Ironically, it is the very opposite of Marx’s position here. Marx, in fact, is accusing his opponents of believing in that kind of thing, and thus mistaking the censor for something else.

Marx is not saying that all Bauer types believe in censorship. He is saying that there is an elective affinity between the kind of idealism the Bauer types subscribe to and the censor. Someone of Bauer’s persuasion is always vulnerable to the impulse to endorse censorship on the grounds that the censor might, just might, be enacting the higher principles of humanity, elevating the lower elements of the mass, never realizing what he, the censor, is actually doing: using the violence of the state, or the law, or the state’s auxiliary forces, to shut down belief. The Bauer types, in other words, have a tendency to etherealize censorship, to spiritualize it, to run away from its ugliness and the materiality of its coerciveness.

Marx isn’t just trying to score a point about censorship and the left’s drift toward censorship. He’s also hinting at what he thinks a mature materialism might bring to the table. The materialist does not assume that “wrong” beliefs are the product of wrong thinking or immature minds. The materialist instead looks at those beliefs as in dialogue with, in conversation with, bound up with, the material world itself. That practice or discipline, Marx suggests, is the best antidote to any tendency on the left to censorship. Immersing oneself in the material conditions or background or accompaniment to beliefs makes one leery of efforts to censor beliefs, to spiritualize or idealize how people come to their ideas, and therefore be blind to the reality of what it would mean to censor those ideas.

We know from the history of the twentieth-century left that a stern materialism doesn’t immunize people from the temptations of censorship. We know from the history of the twenty-first what the absence of materialism can lead to—the return of the world of Bruno Bauer.