Marx and Conservatism

I want to argue that one reason for some of the common misunderstandings of Marx’s political philosophy is that he is compared and contrasted with liberal political philosophy rather than with conservative political philosophy1 It is thought that he is asking the same questions as liberals and giving different answers, whereas I will argue that it is closer to the truth to say that he is asking the same questions as conservatives and giving different answers. It is easy to make this mistake, since Marx was quite obviously closer politically to liberals than to conservatives: he was himself active in liberal politics before he became a socialist, and during the German revolution of 1848, when he was already a socialist, the journal he edited was not a socialist journal, but represented a coalition of socialists and liberals, united around the proposal of a democratic republic. Later in his life, part of what separated him and Engels from both Lassalle among the German socialists and Hyndman among the English socialists was that Lassalle and Hyndman favoured a deal with the conservatives against the liberals, while Marx would doubtless have preferred that, if a deal was going to be made at all, it be one with the liberals to defeat the conservatives. But the political distance between two positions and the philosophical distance are two different things.