Marx using many of Hess’s own ideas and writings, rather than the other way round, especially for the Communist Manifesto. It had been Hess, not Marx, who had first articulated the idea that money was the religion of the modern age, one which doomed its millions of devotees to lives of barren alienation. ‘Money is human value expressed in numbers, the mark of our slavery.’ A revolutionary Exodus was needed. Given his background, Hess truly meant it when he described capitalism as a kind of fetishistic cult, a Golden Calf – in effect the opposite of the Judaism in which he had seen a code of
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