ABSTRACT
The author's first encounters with Karl Marx’s writings occurred in his youth. It so happened that in the midst of the author's “struggle” with understanding Marx’s argument in the first volume of Capital, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were published in Berlin in 1932. It is both plausible and paradoxical that at sixteen and seventeen the author turned in his anguish to Marx for guidance. This early interest in Marx was paradoxical as well. As a young Jew in the first years of the Nazi dictatorship, the author began to question the very promise of Marxian theory, in which his urgent emotional needs made him want to believe. From Marx’s standpoint of looking at the evolution of economic formations of society as a process of natural history “the individual [cannot be held] responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains.”.
