Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx’s first detailed encounter with communist ideas left a decidedly negative impression. He perceived advocacy of communism as part of the Berlin Young Hegelians’ lifestyle-based radicalism that he rejected. Marx’s acid description of the articles they published in the Rhineland News before he became editor makes the point: “beer suds pregnant with global upheaval but empty of thought in a slovenly style, permeated with some atheism and communism (which the gentlemen have never studied). . . .” Once he became editor, he made it clear that he would no longer accept such pieces:

  I declared [to the Berlin Young Hegelians] that I regarded the smuggling of communist and socialist dogmas, a new world view, into occasional pieces of theatrical criticism as inappropriate, even as immoral and demanded a completely different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it has to be discussed. I desired then that religion be criticized more in the criticism of political conditions than political conditions be criticized in religion . . . that when philosophy was discussed there be less peddling of products produced by the firm of “atheism” . . . than that the content of philosophy be brought to the people.52

  This skeptical attitude, a rebuke to Marx’s ally Moses Hess, who had also been trying to smuggle communist ideas into the newspaper, characterized Marx’s initial public appraisal of these ideas in an article in the Rhineland News of October 16, 1842. It was his very first piece to appear after taking his editorial position.53 The piece was a polemic, denouncing the Augsburg General News, Germany’s leading newspaper, which had accused the Rhineland News of publishing two articles advocating communism. One of those articles dealt with the poverty of workers living in large apartment houses (still an unusual feature in the 1840s social landscape) in Berlin, and called for an end to private property as a way to deal with their plight. The other reported on a scholarly conference in Strasbourg, at which one speaker had asserted: “Today the middle class is where the nobility was in 1789; then the middle class laid claim to the privileges of the nobility and obtained them; today the social order that possesses nothing demands to participate in the riches of the middle class, which is now at the helm.”

  The themes of both these pieces—that the workers’ condition could only be improved by abolishing private property and that a workers’ revolution against the bourgeoisie would be a logical successor to the bourgeois revolution against the nobility—were central to Marx’s future theories. At the time, he had a different response, or more precisely, a triple response, all of which reveals a certain embarrassment in having to defend the results of a past editorial policy he was in the process of revising. One response was to focus on the conditions revealed in the two articles, and to drop any discussion of their remedies. Marx pointed out that the middle class was in charge in most Western European countries, as even Prussian conservatives admitted, and that workers in England and France were making demands on that middle class. He also noted that economic conditions in Germany were difficult, although the examples used to make that point—“that Germany is poor in people who are economically independent, that of educated young men must beg the state for bread for their future, that our rivers are neglected, that shipping is in wretched condition, that our once blossoming commercial cities are no longer flourishing . . . that the surplus of our population helplessly wanders around, going under as Germans in foreign nationalities”—were from the arsenal of liberal criticism of conditions in Germany during the 1840s, rather than expressing communist or radical ideas.

  A second response was to turn the accusations back on the accuser. The Augsburg General News’s Paris correspondent, Marx asserted, had proposed socialist ideas. Reactionaries—unfairly comparing the moderate Bavarian newspaper to the extreme right—supported the restoration of the guilds, a communistic notion. They also opposed the division of landed property, endorsing the ideas of the French communist Charles Fourier. This tu quoque argument seems by far the least convincing of Marx’s assertions.

  Most interesting and unexpected is the third argument. The Rhineland News, Marx argued, would not concede communism any “theoretical reality,” much less any effort at “practical realization.” He found the theory much more ominous than the practice. The “intellectual implementation” of communist ideas would be the “genuine danger,” for such ideas could “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments. . . .” To meet that danger, he proposed a careful study of the works of prominent communists, for the purpose of engaging in a “fundamental criticism” of their ideas. By contrast, “practical attempts [to introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be answered with cannons. . . .” The man who would write the Communist Manifesto just five years later was advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising!

  Marx’s 1842 rejection of communism emerges into clearer focus when we consider the approach he took to social and economic questions at the time: a Hegelian diagnosis of the problems coupled with an anti-Prussian prescription of the solution. Marx’s diagnosis appeared, above all, in the two articles he wrote on the Rhenish Provincial Diet’s debate on a new law directed against wood theft.54

  Concerns about the theft of wood, and the appropriation of forest products by non-owners of forest lands, were very widespread in Germany during the 1840s. One, more conservative response to the situation was to understand it as a crime wave, an indication of the moral decay of the lower classes and their increasingly criminal tendencies. Another, less common but distinctly more left-wing response was to blame the problem on the cruel and inhumane attitude of the state forest administration. Ludwig Simon, a fellow student of Marx’s at the Trier Gymnasium, by the mid-1840s a practicing attorney in Trier, made a name for himself and launched a dramatic political career by fervently advancing this line of argument in court, defending violators of the forest laws.55

  Marx’s take was different, and reflected his personal experiences and intellectual influences. Following closely in the footsteps of his Berlin teacher, Eduard Gans, he understood the theft of wood as a result of the transformation of the legal nature of property. In the era of the society of orders, the privileged orders had their particular written rights, but the poor exercised their unwritten “customary right” to gather certain kinds of wood, particularly windfall—branches and limbs that had fallen from trees and were lying in the forest. This was possible because in that society property had a “vacillating character,” partly private, partly communal, partly governed by civil laws, partly by public law, “as we encounter in all institutions of the middle ages.” The French Revolution had changed the nature of law. It was now written, codified, and universally applicable. Individuals’ property rights were therefore unitary and fully guaranteed. But unwritten, customary rights, such as the right of the poor to gather windfall on other people’s forest property, were no longer valid. This understanding of changes in property rights probably also reflected Marx’s knowledge of his father’s legal efforts. Among Heinrich Marx’s clients were the villagers of Thalfang, near Trier, whom he represented in an unsuccessful attempt to retain their customary usage rights.56

  Marx portrayed these changes through Hegel’s representation of human history as the progressive realization of reason. The old regime’s law was based on “understanding,” a conceptually inferior form of categorization, stemming from the empirical perception of individual objects, conceived in isolation from each other. By contrast, the new legal system was based on “reason,” Hegel’s totalizing system of cognition. “Rights no longer depend on the coincidence of custom being according to reason, but custom itself is now based on reason, because rights are based on the [written and codified] law, because custom has become the custom of the state.”57

  But such a positive development left the poor out in the cold (literally, since the wood gathered was often used for winter heating). Marx offered a useful analogy, pointing out that in the process of the revolution the property of the monasteries had been seized and sold off, transformed into pri
vate property—and the revolutionaries “were right to do so.” The monks received compensation for the loss of their property; but the poor, who had the customary right to receive charity from the monks, received no such compensation. “A new boundary line was drawn up and they were cut off from their old rights.”58

  How were the poor to be helped in this situation? Marx’s essay actually provided no clear answer. He waxed sarcastic about suggestions in the Diet to turn this unauthorized gathering of windfall into a felony, and had scathing remarks about how forest owners were becoming “monopolists,” who would prohibit poor children from gathering and selling berries. His proposal that the owners of forest lands could sue the peasants gathering wood on their property was only slightly less sarcastic, since, as he admitted, the wood gatherers were very poor, and would not be able to pay any civil judgment. Marx’s Hegelian analysis of the plight of the poor was separated from any solution to their problems.

  Insofar as Marx had an answer to the question of poverty during the time he was editing the Rhineland News, it appeared in the article series he wrote at the beginning of 1843 on the poverty of the winegrowers in the Moselle Valley. This was Marx’s native region, where his family owned a small vineyard, so he was personally well informed about the topic. The winegrowers were facing a very steep decline in the price of their wines, a result that both contemporaries and later historians attribute to Prussia’s creation of the Zollverein, or all-German tariff union of 1834, which opened the Prussian wine market to competition from vintners in southern Germany.59

  Marx in his first article certainly accepted this view, but he noted how differently the government and the population presented the causes. For the government, it was the result of the winegrowers enjoying a pre-1834 protected market, where unprecedentedly high prices had made it possible for them to live in a “luxury they had never known before.” With declining wine prices, there would have to a market shakeout, and the poorer vintners would lose their previous luxury as well as their land. By contrast, the Association for the Encouragement of Viticulture along the Moselle and Saar rivers, whose members were mostly Trier notables, presented the situation as the result of the energy and initiative of the winegrowers, who had invested in their lands and increased their output, only to be done in by the policies of the Prussian government that exposed them to foreign competition and did not decrease the high tax burden weighing on them when market conditions became less favorable. It was not just the small vintners who were suffering, the association’s members asserted, but all growers of wine, large and small.

  Marx’s commentary on this situation was to note that government officials saw themselves as representing the general good, the common interest of the inhabitants of the Prussian state. They rejected the contrary opinions of the winegrowers, because the latter were just asserting their special, private interests. Marx was following Hegel here, in the latter’s observation that state officials were the “universal order,” the group that understood the needs of all of society. Marx did not entirely disagree with this viewpoint, but he did modify it by observing that the officials identified themselves with the public good they claimed to represent. Criticism of their judgments about the public good became personal criticism. The official “believes the question of whether his area is in good condition, is a question of whether he is administering it well.” Not only would officials react with considerable hostility to criticism; they would see their critics as being in the wrong: their administrative measures were correct, and the problem lay with the inhabitants of the region, who were unable to change. In these observations lay the seeds of Marx’s future concept of ideology: that social conditions shaped individuals’ ideas so as to further the interest of the social group to which they belonged.

  His account of the Prussian bureaucracy’s worldview was also a criticism of it as only seeming to represent the general good, but being unable to do so, because of its group self-interest. What measures Marx himself would have proposed to deal with the growing impoverishment of the vintners is unknown, since his proposals were reserved for the last of a five-part series, and the Prussian authorities prohibited the series after the first two articles. The second article did explain how a solution could appear: via a free press. This, according to Marx, would be the third element between the bureaucracy and special interests, “political without being governmental and official . . . civic and bourgeois without being mixed up in private interests and their needs. . . . In the area of the press, the [state] administration and the administered can in equal measure criticize their basic assumptions and their demands . . . in equal validity as citizens, no longer as persons but as intellectual powers.”60

  Although certainly Hegelian in nature, this argument about the power of the press against a self-assured bureaucracy resistant to public criticism also came from the arsenal of 1840s liberal criticism of central European conditions. In particular, Marx cited the writings of David Hansemann, a wool wholesaler from the Rhenish city of Aachen, a prominent Rhineland liberal and a close associate of the liberal Ludolf Camphausen.61 In this respect, as in most others, Marx’s initial forays into the social question show someone skeptical of communist notions, and still thinking about social and economic questions along the lines of a pro-capitalist and pro–free market nineteenth-century liberalism, if perhaps with more sympathies for the poor than many free market liberals. There is no mistaking the animosity toward authoritarian Prussian rule that colored his accounts of social and economic issues.

  MARX’S OBSERVATION THAT PRUSSIAN bureaucrats took criticism of them personally was all too prescient. The provincial governor of the Rhineland, Justus von Schaper, the one government official willing to tolerate the Rhineland News, had previously been the district governor in Trier. He was outraged by Marx’s suggestion in his article on the Moselle winegrowers that Prussian officials were responsible for their plight. His alienation meant that there was no one left to fend off the demands that the newspaper be prohibited. In a decree published on January 21, 1843, the Prussian authorities announced that the Rhineland News would cease publication at the beginning of April.62

  Its supporters were not willing to let it go without a fight; they gathered a petition with 1,000 signatures, mostly from the upper classes of Cologne, calling on the authorities to reverse their decree. Admittedly, members of the Klüngel, the well-connected local insiders, withheld their names, as did Cologne’s most devout Catholics, unimpressed by Marx’s attempts to conciliate their religious feelings. But the substantial support from most of Cologne’s elite was a sign of their endorsement of Marx’s policies of opposition to authoritarian Prussian rule.63

  Feelings ran high at an extraordinary stockholders’ meeting held on February 12, 1843, at which the investors debated how to proceed. Debates centered on Marx himself and the opposition to Prussia he represented. The general partners, Jung and Oppenheim, supported by a few other speakers, pressed for endorsing Marx’s course: better to let the newspaper go under than to moderate its tone in the hope of conciliating the Prussian government. Most investors reluctantly followed the opposite path: dismiss the controversial editor and hope this would get the government to change its mind. Ironically, this was a strategy Marx himself had already tried, when he banished atheism and communism from the pages of the Rhineland News and sacrificed Adolf Rutenberg to the authorities. But this reiteration of Marx’s strategy was even less successful than the original effort. Neither the promised change of editors, the large petition from Cologne, a special petition of the stockholders to the king directly, nor a delegation sent by the stockholders to Berlin, had any effect, and the newspaper came to an end.64

  Marx was present at the stockholders’ meeting, but had little to say in his own defense. This meeting was the first occasion at which one of his personal weaknesses would be revealed: he was no great orator. In intimate personal conversations, he could make a powerful and positive impression—and not just on close adherents, like Jun
g and Hess. Saint Paul, the intellectually sophisticated last Prussian censor of the Rhineland News, was every bit as impressed with Marx’s ideas and personality. Speaking with a lisp and in a pronounced Rhineland accent, Marx could not generate the same favorable impressions in front of a large audience.65

  The loss of his editorial position was yet another frustration in his career and his personal life since Marx finished his studies at the University of Berlin. The Prussian government had suppressed his newspaper; his supporters among the investors in the Rhineland News had abandoned him; and he was once again, frustratingly for his relations with Jenny, unemployed. But Marx’s brief and stormy tenure as de facto editor of the Rhineland News had revealed both journalistic and editorial skills—his polemical talents, inspiring his friends and infuriating his enemies, and his capability at recruiting an impressive group of co-workers.

  To a good deal of the wider public, these abilities remained unknown, due to the peculiar legal nature of the editorial arrangements of the newspaper. The Prussian officials who decided to suppress the Rhineland News attributed its subversive nature to the Young Hegelians in general, and Adolf Rutenberg in particular. Ironically, only by reading newspaper reports of their decision did they learn that Marx had been behind the acid attacks on the Prussian authorities.66 Among Cologne’s notables, though, Marx had made a big impression. They chipped in to offer him financial support in the difficult years following the suppression of the Rhineland News. Wilhelm Weitling, a tailor and future rival of Marx for leadership of the nascent communist movement in Germany, would later derisively say of him, “He owes his influence to other people. Rich men made him a newspaper editor, that’s all.”67 We could strip Weitling’s observation of its sting and observe that it was correct: although not all precisely rich, the members of Cologne’s middle and upper classes—in short, that bourgeois stratum of society Marx would later attack—impressed by his vivid and vigorous journalism and his forthright political stance, would continue to endorse his actions throughout the decade of the 1840s.