Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  All of Marx’s efforts were directed toward the planned international democratic congress, whose realization was ever more likely in the climate of rapid political change. But the change came even more rapidly and drastically than Marx expected. The initial sign was in Switzerland, today the very epitome of conservatism and tranquility, but in the mid-nineteenth century a turbulent and troubled land, also Europe’s most left-wing country. The victory of the radicals in the Swiss Civil War of 1847, a result of the inability of the great powers, especially the Austrian Empire, to intervene on behalf of the outnumbered Swiss conservatives, was the first portent of looming revolution in Europe. There followed uprisings in southern Italy at the beginning of 1848 and then the decisive stroke: the overthrow of the monarchy in France and the proclamation of the republic in Paris at the end of February. Waves of insurrection rolled out of Paris across the Continent, reaching the German states in mid-March.

  Using his influential position within the newly reorganized Communist League and his long-term contacts in Cologne, Marx took scant time to join the revolutionary fray. For a little over a year, from the spring of 1848 through the spring of 1849, Marx was, for the first and last time in his life, an insurgent revolutionary: editing in brash, subversive style the New Rhineland News; becoming a leader of the radical democrats of the city of Cologne and of the Prussian Rhineland; trying to organize the working class in Cologne and across Germany; and repeatedly encouraging and fomenting insurrection. In all of these activities, Marx persistently promoted the revolutionary strategy he had first envisaged in his essay on the Jewish Question, and would present in scintillating language in the Communist Manifesto. He pressed for a democratic revolution to destroy the authoritarian Prussian monarchy. At the same time he aspired to organize the working class to carry out a communist uprising against a capitalist regime he expected such a democratic revolution to establish. In effect, Marx was proposing a double recurrence of the French Revolution: a repetition of its 1789–94 phase in mid-nineteenth-century Prussia, and also a workers’ seizure of power at the end of the 1840s modeled on the bourgeois seizure of power at the end of the 1780s. These two efforts, as Marx would discover in his interactions with the workers, democratic radicals, and True Socialists of Cologne, would prove noticeably more difficult to implement simultaneously in practice than in theory.

  IN FEBRUARY 1847, THE London communists dispatched Joseph Moll to Brussels, to negotiate with Marx and Engels about a reorganization of the League of the Just. The latter agreed to support these plans, and, at a congress held in London in June of that year, the group was renamed the Communist League. Marx himself did not attend; his interests were represented by Engels, as delegate of the Paris branch, and Wilhelm Wolff, his Silesian supporter, as the Brussels delegate. Marx claimed that he was too short of funds to go himself. Since he had found the money for other projects at that time, such as the publication of The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx may have assigned a lower priority to developing a closer connection with the London communists, or was waiting to see how the planned reorganization turned out.1

  Despite his absence, he approved the results. The League’s emphasis was shifted from revolutionary conspiracy to open propaganda; the organization prepared to bring out its own journal. The former slogan, “All Men are Brothers,” was replaced with a new one, devised by Karl Schapper: “Proletarians of all countries [or “Workers of the world,” as it is usually translated into English] unite!”—a sentence that has become indissolubly linked to Marx. New statutes announced the community of goods as the organization’s aim. A “Communist Confession of Faith,” written by Engels, a very distant first draft of the Communist Manifesto, became the group’s political program. The League even took Marx’s side in his dispute with Karl Grün, denouncing the latter as “a literary knight of industry and exploiter of the workers.”2

  Marx formally joined the League, probably after the congress, and became president of the Brussels “Congregation,” as the new statutes called the League’s local affiliates. Following the practice of the London communists, their Brussels counterparts founded a Workers’ Educational Association, which enrolled roughly seventy to one hundred German artisans in the Belgian capital by the fall of 1847. At about the same time as Marx was firming up his associations with the London communists, he was obtaining a publishing outlet for his views. This was a small German-language newspaper, the German-Brussels News, much like the Parisian Forwards! and in fact published by Adalbert von Bornstedt, one of the publishers of Forwards! Bornstedt was a controversial choice, since he had previously been a Prussian spy, as was well known in émigré and radical circles. But Marx felt the opportunity of access—finally—to an uncensored German-language newspaper outweighed any reservations radicals had about Bornstedt’s past. As he wrote to Georg Herwegh, “The opposition in all its nuances found it more pleasant to take offense at Bornstedt’s name. . . . Will these people ever lack for excuses not to do anything?” It is hard to miss the desire for action in that statement.3

  Neither Bornstedt nor the newspaper he published were completely on Marx’s side. The anti-communist German democrat Karl Heinzen, for instance, denounced Marx and Engels in the pages of the German-Brussels News. Their responses would flow into the Communist Manifesto. At the end of September, Bornstedt and other German radicals living in Brussels joined with Belgian democrats and émigrés to plan a public meeting that would found an international democratic society, along the lines of the London Fraternal Democrats. When the meeting was announced, Marx was out of town, negotiating with his mother’s Dutch relatives about the possibility of receiving an advance on his inheritance. Engels, holding the fort in his absence, was convinced that the entire plan was a plot by Bornstedt and his sympathizers to undermine Marx’s leadership of the German Workers’ Educational Association.

  Given his chronic hostility toward fellow leftists, Engels may have been exaggerating the planners’ motives, but the success of his response to political dangers, real and imagined, showed the effectiveness of the Brussels branch of the Communist League and its affiliated Workers’ Educational Association. With only twenty-four hours notice, he and other leaders of the group mobilized thirty members of the workers’ association to attend the meeting. As agreed beforehand, they proposed that Engels should be one of the vice presidents of the newly founded democratic association—an honor Engels had at first rejected, “because I look so dreadfully young,” but finally agreed to accept. On Marx’s return to Brussels, Engels, moving back to Paris to continue his campaign against Karl Grün, resigned his position in favor of Marx.4

  The newly founded organization’s ponderous name, “Democratic Association Having as Goal the Union and Fraternity of All Peoples,” belied its suppleness and energy. With at least two hundred members, the association sponsored large, regular public meetings, both on domestic themes, such as the need for a more democratic franchise in Belgium, and on international ones, like the recreation of an independent Poland. By late 1847 and early 1848, as political tensions in Europe ratcheted steadily higher, these meetings attracted as many as 1,000 attendees. Marx was the principal speaker at a meeting in January 1848 devoted to free trade and protectionism. His hour-long talk, in French, was greeted (as the minutes record) with “lively applause,” and with the decision to fund its publication as a pamphlet, which appeared a few weeks later.5

  Marx’s dual position in Brussels, presiding over the German Workers’ Educational Association, and as vice president of the international Democratic Assocation, proved advantageous in his dealing with the German communists and English radicals in London. The London-based Central Authority of the new Communist League, not entirely happy about the echo of its reorganizational congress among its European affiliates, decided to hold a second congress in November 1847. The German communists in Brussels, the one Continental congregation to support unreservedly the new course of the League, were crucial to the plans, and the League’s leadership insisted that
Marx personally attend this meeting. He made the trip, although his finances were more desperate than ever. Jenny and the children, left behind in Brussels, were all ill; Jenny was “truly harassed by creditors and finds herself in a totally wretched financial embarrassment.” Marx’s attempt to deal with the situation revealed his own embarrassment. From London, he sent a letter asking his Russian acquaintance Pavel Annenkov for a loan of 200 francs to help out his family. Annenkov should send the money to Jenny without informing her of Marx’s involvement, and Marx would pay the loan back when he received the advance on his inheritance.

  The political situation in London and Brussels had developed noticeably more favorably than the family finances since the First Congress of the League the previous June. Marx seized the opportunity, and the outcome of the League’s Second Congress marked another step in his growing influence over its program and policy. Newly adopted statutes redefined the League’s purposes as the overthrow of the bourgeoisie; the rule of the proletariat; and the end to class society and to private property—explicitly communist goals articulated in Marx’s own terms. The congress commissioned Marx to write a programmatic document for the League, which would become the Communist Manifesto. While in London, Marx, in his capacity as representative of the Brussels Democratic Association, negotiated with the Fraternal Democrats about the planned international left-wing congress. Definitive arrangements were made to summon such a congress to Brussels at the end of September 1848, with a follow-up meeting scheduled for London in 1849.6

  In contrast to the previous year, 1847 had proven very successful for Marx’s political activity. He had overcome his previous isolation and failures, and was now affiliated with groups that offered multiple possibilities for political action, and in which he held key positions. Brussels and London were well covered, between the Central Authority of the Communist League, the Fraternal Democrats, and the Brussels Democratic Association and German Workers’ Association. In Paris, Engels was a leading figure in the local Communist League, and in Cologne two congregations of the League existed, one led by Marx’s long-term confidants Roland Daniels and Heinrich Bürgers, the other by friends and associates of Moses Hess, who was now reaffiliated with Marx. The German-Brussels News provided an outlet for Marx’s writings; plans for a journal of political economy were moving ahead; and the Communist League itself was planning to bring out its own journal, starting at the beginning of 1848 with Wilhelm Wolff as its editor.7

  The International Democratic Congress, well on its way to fruition, would be the culmination of all these political efforts, and set the stage for future, revolutionary political actions, just as the initiatives of the “party of movement” were shaking the European political order. These multifaceted affiliations offered Marx the opportunity to set down in print the ideas on economic development, social conflict, and political strategies he had been developing since he moved to Brussels, and the entrancing prospects of revolutionary action provided the context in which he formulated these ideas.

  In February 1848, as the revolutionary wave in Europe was gathering force but still far from its peak, two pamphlets written by Marx appeared in print, published by the Brussels Democratic Association and the Communist League, respectively. Both reflected his years of study and the formulation and reformulation of his ideas, but also the imperative demands of a rapidly radicalizing political situation. One of the pamphlets, the printed version of his speech on free trade, is quite obscure; the other, the Communist Manifesto, has become the most renowned of Marx’s writings. A consideration of their content reveals Marx’s thinking and planning on the eve of a continentwide revolution in which he would be a determined participant.

  On September 16–18, 1847, an international congress of economists met in Brussels, at which leaders of the English Anti–Corn Law League, fresh from their victory in repealing tariffs on imported grain, joined their Continental counterparts to call for global free trade. Their views prevailed over the few adherents of protectionism who attended the congress. Marx was a registered participant, but was unable to gain the floor to give his prepared speech, which then formed the basis of his remarks in January 1848 to the Brussels Democratic Association. The speech was a striking example of Marx’s transformation of free market economic orthodoxy into a call for communist revolution.8

  Proponents of the 1846 Corn Law had argued that its abolition of tariffs on imported grain would lower food prices, thus improving the workers’ standard of living. Marx responded by citing David Ricardo, “the apostle of English free-traders, the most distinguished economist of our century,” that over the course of the business cycle such a reduction in food prices would lead to cuts in wages, wiping out any gains in purchasing power. Proponents of free trade also argued that declines in food prices would stimulate consumption and increase demand, resulting in expanded production, more employment, and higher wages. Marx retorted that industry would grow by accumulating capital, that is, by introducing machinery and extending the division of labor—which would tend to lower employment and reduce wages. This had occurred, he pointed out, over the previous quarter century in Manchester. The number of textile workers had decreased, and their wages had declined, but they produced much more cotton. Mechanized English competition had destroyed handloom weaving and spinning in India: “the muslin of Dacca, renowned in all the world for its beauty and firmness of texture, is equally eclipsed by the competition of English machines.”

  Arguing that free trade impoverishes the working class and entire underdeveloped countries, while enriching a small group of capitalists, hardly makes the policy sound very attractive. Yet Marx denounced free trade’s opposite, protectionism, as “conservative,” as a feature of the “old regime,” and praised free trade as “destructive.” “It dissolves the old nationalities and pushes to the extreme the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In a word, the system of commercial liberty hastens the social revolution. It is solely in that revolutionary sense, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” One can only imagine what an uproar this speech would have caused had Marx gained the floor at the economists’ congress.

  It is easy to imagine a socialist supporting protectionism as a rejection of the primacy of the capitalist free market. Karl Grün, for instance, had described protective tariffs as “socialism in the midst of politics.”9 Marx himself was not opposed to interference in free markets per se. He strongly supported trade unions and strikes, denouncing Proudhon for his rejection of them. Marx, though, remained loyal to free trade, a doctrine he had strongly endorsed in his pre-communist days as editor of the Rhineland News in 1842–43. Five years later his support of free trade continued, but as the path to an imminent communist, or—as Marx put it for the Brussels democrats—“social” revolution. The imminence of such a revolution was the main theme of the Communist Manifesto.

  In 1847, a number of different proposals for a new program for the Communist League were in circulation. Moses Hess, residing at the time in Paris, had submitted his own draft program, but Engels, as he wrote delightedly to Marx, “played a devilish trick on Mosi” by getting Hess’s draft discussed without the latter’s knowledge, and Engels’s revision was sent on to London with the endorsement of the Parisian communists. “Naturally, no devil may know of this, or we’ll all be kicked out and there will be a huge scandal.”10

  Engels entitled his own new draft “Fundamentals of Communism.” Like the first version, it was written as a catechism. Making use of religious forms for political agitation was a common practice at the time for documents designed to appeal to a wider audience; the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostle’s Creed were also popular for this purpose. Engels’s document had twenty-five questions, each with its distinctive answer, but already by question four the answers were very lengthy, and not at all catechismlike. As he worked on the program, Engels became dissatisfied and told Marx on the eve of their departure for the congress in London, “I think that we would do best if we abandoned th
e catechism form and entitled the thing Communist Manifesto.”11

  The November 1847 League Congress then assigned Marx the task of writing the organization’s revised political platform. As was so often the case, he had trouble meeting his deadlines, and the League’s Central Authority had to send him a threatening letter at the end of January 1848 insisting on delivery of the document within a week.12 It was just as well that Marx took his time, for the result was a literary masterpiece: compact, pithy, elegant, powerful, and sarcastically amusing all at once. Employing the structure and arguments of Engels’s “Fundamentals of Communism,” Marx reworked it in light of his own life history. The resulting manifesto, although purporting to speak in the name of an objective historical process, relentlessly leading to its revolutionary conclusion, was a deeply personal expression of Marx’s own experiences and intellectual development.13

  The piece began with the famed assertion of the specter of communism haunting Europe, and the consequent need for communists to explain their ideas. The next step was not, as one might expect, a description of communist ideas, but a sketch of human history based on the division of society into classes and the struggles between these classes. Dealing primarily with recent history, the development of capitalism and the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie, the account turned to the economic, social, political, and cultural consequences of this development, described in memorable language: “the idiocy of rural life,” the disdain for the “lumpenproletariat . . . bribed tool of reactionary intrigue,” or the assertion that the bourgeoisie “produces above all its own gravedigger. Its decline and the victory of the proletariat are both equally inevitable.” That last pronouncement provided a climactic conclusion. An increasingly crisis-ridden capitalism had created an ever larger, ever more impoverished proletariat, whose class struggles pushed it in the direction of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society, just as the bourgeoisie had previously overthrown the old regime society of orders. This entire section was a representation in dramatic and polished form of the ideas first developed in the chapter on Feuerbach in The German Ideology.