Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Denouncing the True Socialists as lackeys of Germany’s conservative governments was a new theme in Marx’s contest with other central European communist intellectuals that had not appeared previously in his published or unpublished writings. The accusation had first been raised by the anti-communist democrat Karl Heinzen. He had applied it to all of Germany’s communists, including Marx and Engels, whose differences with other communists were only known to a small group of insiders. Both Marx and Engels, outraged by Heinzen’s comments, had responded vigorously in the fall of 1847 in the pages of the German-Brussels News.25 While Marx evidently felt that Heinzen’s contentions did not apply to him, he was willing to make use of them against the other German socialists, once again demonstrating the anti-communist roots of his communism, or at least the way that Marx appropriated anti-communist themes to attack other versions of communism.

  As Marx’s first biographer, Franz Mehring, pointed out a century ago, this accusation was profoundly unfair: the True Socialists were not counterrevolutionary supporters of the Prussian government, and during the Revolution of 1848 they were strong proponents of a democratic Germany.26 The Communist Manifesto’s newly invented reason to condemn the True Socialists reveals Marx’s political stance on the eve of the 1848 Revolution. Following the reasoning he had first propounded in his essay on the Jewish Question, Marx wanted to have both an anti-Prussian and a communist revolution, a double recurrence, as it were, of the French Revolution of 1789. The result of the anti-Prussian revolution was to be a liberal constitutional state, with the full panoply of civil liberties and the rule of law.

  This was, as Marx had made clear in the Manifesto, precisely the sort of capitalist regime whose pernicious character he was exposing and whose overthrow he was advocating. Why bother, then, fighting for such a regime—or, to pose the question in terms of political strategy—was the organization of a nascent working class in central Europe for a communist future compatible with the organization of an anti-Prussian, democratic revolution? At the time he was writing the Manifesto, Marx saw the forthcoming revolution as occurring in a close but not immediate future. First, there would be an international democratic congress to bring together radicals from Europe and North America, to draft a political program and outline a political strategy, all of which would have helped to deal with this question. Instead, no sooner had the Communist Manifesto left the printers, in February 1848, than Marx found the revolution he had foreseen breaking out all around him.

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO appreciate today the electrifying impact of the barricade fighting that gripped Paris for three days at the end of February 1848, ending with the overthrow of the monarchy and the proclamation of the republic. Republics are the default form of governmental organization at the beginning of the twenty-first century; in the United States, the conservative political party even calls itself Republican. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, republics were new and daring kinds of government; in Europe, at least, the political aspiration of adherents of the extreme left. The last time a French Republic had been proclaimed in Paris was in 1792: the results were the Reign of Terror and a decades-long, European-wide war. Whether there would be a new revolutionary war, or a wave of revolutionary repercussions across Europe, was unclear, but the proclamation of the republic made all previous political plans obsolete, and for the adherents of radical revolution, such as Marx, the result was an enormous acceleration of political activity.

  It is possible that Marx dashed off to London to discuss the new situation with the leaders of the Communist League. Arguing in favor of such a trip was the decision of the League’s Central Authority to move its seat from London to Brussels. League leaders in London, including the troika of Schapper, Bauer, and Moll, prepared to head for the Continent where the revolutionary action was taking place; in the meantime, the central direction of the League was placed in Marx’s hands. But neither Marx nor the League leadership could remain in Brussels.

  The proclamation of the republic in Paris was perceived as a threat to the status quo in Belgium, bringing up the prospect of an invasion by a French revolutionary army, an uprising by Belgian radicals imitating their French counterparts, or both at once. The Belgian government viewed with extreme suspicion the rapidly growing Brussels Democratic Association, which had already created a large and active affiliated group in Ghent, and was threatening to become the nucleus of a republican insurrection. As a vice president of the association, a politically active foreigner who would provide a good scapegoat for unrest, Marx was already in the authorities’ sights. His mother’s unpolitical decision at this point to grant him an advance on his inheritance in the amount of 6,000 French francs (about 1,250 Prussian talers) only magnified the authorities’ suspicions. The money arrived in Brussels just at the end of February, and the Belgian police were convinced that it was actually sent for the purpose of purchasing weapons for an insurrection.27

  As a result, Marx was summarily instructed on March 3, 1848, that he had twenty-four hours to leave the country. Not bothering to wait for the deadline to expire, the police burst into his apartment that afternoon, and carried him off to jail. When a visibly distraught Jenny, in the company of the leading Belgian members of the Brussels Democratic Association, went to speak to her husband, she was arrested as well, “locked up,” as an angered Karl explained, “in a dark room with common streetwalkers.” Both Jenny and Karl were released the next day, but they had to leave Belgium with their children immediately, abandoning all their furnishings and possessions. Their belongings, packed into six crates weighing a total of 405 kilos, only caught up with them eight months later, after a lengthy bureaucratic odyssey.28

  While personally very disruptive, the expulsion was a political opportunity for Marx to return to Paris, now more than ever the seat of a European-wide revolutionary movement. The provisional government of the French Republic was dominated by the former radical opposition, whose leaders Marx and Engels had assiduously cultivated. A few days before Marx’s expulsion, as storm clouds were gathering around him, Ferdinand Flocon, minister in the provisional government and a particular object of Engels’s attention in 1847, issued an invitation to “brave and loyal Marx” to return to the French Republic, the “field of asylum for all friends of liberty.” Marx was only too pleased to accept. By mid-March, almost all the leading figures of the Communist League were in Paris, and the Central Authority could reconstitute itself there.29 Just a week later, the revolution reached the two German great powers. Following fighting on the barricades in Berlin and Vienna, the chastened monarchs were forced to appoint liberal governments, making it possible for exiled German radicals to return to the political fray in their home country.

  A large group of the Parisian German exiles, led by Adalbert von Bornstedt, the publisher of the German-Brussels News, and Georg Herwegh, proposed to arm the German artisans residing in Paris, most of them unemployed as a result of the economic crisis in 1846–47, and march them back into Germany as a revolutionary legion, to fight for a German republic. Demonstrating a sober view of the political situation that he would maintain throughout the midcentury revolution, Marx denounced this proposal as foolish adventurism, which would culminate in disaster. He was quite right about the outcome of the march of the German Legion, whose largely unarmed and badly provisioned members barely staggered to the Franco-German border. After crossing the Rhine, they were promptly dispersed, arrested, or forced back into exile. Marx succeeded in getting the Communist League to oppose the proposal and most members of the League to stay clear of the dubious adventure.30

  In line with previous League considerations, and of one mind on this topic with Schapper, Marx proposed that the artisan members of the League should peacefully return to Germany. Marx’s friends in the provisional government of the French Republic would help with their travel expenses. Marx wanted League members, once back in Germany, to found workers’ associations in different cities, now that the new, liberal governments of the Germa
n states had guaranteed the freedom of association. Ultimately, he was aiming at a national network of such groups. The city of Mainz, second largest on the Rhine after Cologne, and home to a number of the more active artisan members of the Communist League, would be the node of the organizing efforts. League members there would proclaim themselves a provisional central committee of German workers’ associations.

  For himself and his closest political associates, including Engels, Schapper, Wilhelm Wolff, and other top members of the Communist League, Marx had something different in mind. They would all return to Cologne, the city in which he still had many sympathizers, and establish a radical newspaper, the New Rhineland News, a continuation of the journal Marx had edited with such verve in 1842–43. Once again, Marx would be what he longed to be, a crusading newspaper editor. This time, following the establishment of freedom of the press in Prussia, he could express his views openly and with all the invective he had previously tried to hold in check. By mid-April, Marx and most of his associates were in Cologne ready to put his plans into action. Marx’s ideas followed the outline he had sketched in the Communist Manifesto. The newspaper would call for the creation of a revolutionary German republic, a German version of France in 1792–94, the “bourgeois revolution,” in Marx’s terminology. The nationwide network of workers’ associations would support such a revolutionary initiative, but it would also prepare for the next stage in politics, the communist workers’ revolution.31

  Cologne in the spring of 1848 was deep in the whirlwind of revolution. Everywhere in the Rhenish metropolis, the previously prohibited black-red-gold German national flags were flying, even from Prussian government buildings. The Café Royal, gathering center of the city’s left-wing intellectuals, had hastily dropped its monarchical self-designation and renamed itself Stollwerck’s German Coffeehouse. The few pro-Prussian conservatives in this Catholic Rhineland city, whose inhabitants were now free to express their hatred of Prussian colonial rule, kept out of sight. But liberal supporters of a constitutional monarchy, pro-republican democrats, and anti-Prussian Catholic conservatives were all vigorously present in public life. This was a political scene, much like other large German cities at the height of revolutionary enthusiasm, in the “springtime of the peoples.” But Cologne had one distinct difference: the presence of a large and active communist movement. Members of the city’s Communist League Congregation had mobilized thousands of the city’s artisans and laborers to invade City Hall (leading terrified city councilmen to dive out of windows to evade them) and demand jobs for the unemployed, lower taxes for the workers, and lawmaking in the hands of the people.

  In Cologne and its vicinity, workers, artisans, and laborers, inspired by the outbreak of revolution, were busy taking action on their own without any specific communist direction. They were holding public meetings, formulating their grievances and demands. More angrily, they were mobbing and threatening their employers, calling for better wages and more favorable terms of employment. Occasionally, these demands spilled over into violent uprisings. One widely reported riot had seen the skilled metalworking artisans of nearby Solingen attack and demolish a large industrial foundry, whose cheap products were competing with their expensive craft goods.

  Everything in and around Cologne seemed to be moving in the direction that Marx’s political strategy demanded: the recurrence of the French Revolution directed against the Prussian monarchy and the recurrence of the French Revolution by the workers directed against the bourgeoisie were both underway. But just a few weeks after Marx’s arrival, it became clear that things were not working out quite as he had hoped. The members of the Communist League in Mainz were not up to their assigned task of creating a national network of workers’ associations. A League emissary reported back to Cologne: “In Mainz I found the League at the onset of complete anarchy; Wallau was in Wiesbaden; Neubeck was in a café playing dominoes while a meeting was scheduled; Metternich [not Franz von Metternich, the deposed, reactionary Austrian chancellor, but the republican revolutionary Germain Metternich], who, admittedly has a lot to do, regards the cause with the greatest indifference. . . .”32 The planned national federation of workers’ associations, led by members of the Communist League in Mainz, never came into existence.

  By the second half of 1848, Marx had severed his ties with the Communist League. Several years later, a League member, cigarmaker Peter Roeser, interrogated by Prussian police, would tell them that Marx had dissolved the League altogether in the spring of 1848. Historians have hotly debated whether or not this dissolution actually took place, and there are good arguments against the assumption of a formal dissolution.33 It is striking, though, that there is no mention of the League in Marx’s public pronouncements or his surviving private papers during the period of his peak revolutionary activity from June 1848 until his arrival as a political refugee in London in the fall of 1849.

  Marx’s difficulties with the Communist League and with the organization of the working class for his dual revolutionary goals were painfully evident in Cologne itself. The Cologne communists, under the leadership of the municipal charity physician Andreas Gottschalk, a committed activist and enthralling public speaker, had been, in contrast to their Mainz counterparts, very active. Not only had they led a mass demonstration that stormed City Hall, but, almost to the date of Marx’s arrival, they founded an enormously popular Cologne Workers’ Association. At its peak in June 1848, it counted 8,000 members, about one third of Cologne’s adult men.34

  Gottschalk’s group was seemingly exactly what Marx wanted, but his workers’ organization presented more problems than benefits. There was the matter of personal rivalry: Gottschalk, who was every bit as jealous of potential rivals as Marx, wanted such rivals far away from the largest city in western Germany. He thought that Marx should return from exile to his native Trier and Engels to his native Wupper Valley, where they could stand for election to the newly summoned German National Assembly. The arrival in Cologne of Marx and his close associates, who made up the Central Authority of the Communist League, was precisely what Gottschalk did not want to see happen. In May 1848, he resigned from the League, making it clear that he would not take directions from Marx.35

  Closely related to the personal problem was a political one: Gottschalk was a True Socialist, a friend, pupil, and close confidant of Moses Hess.36 His mentor had evaded a confrontation with Marx by leaving Cologne and going to Paris shortly after Marx’s arrival, but Gottschalk, as the influential leader of the Workers’ Association, was in a position to carry out Hess’s policies. Marx’s assertion in the Communist Manifesto that the True Socialists were working for the Prussian conservatives by attacking the liberal opposition now met its test in real life. Gottschalk’s refusal to support the campaigns against the Prussian monarchy led by Cologne’s democrats did fit that picture. Mostly, Gottschalk’s opposition to the liberals and the democrats came from the left, denouncing them as not radical or revolutionary enough. He refused to cooperate with the democrats in the elections to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt, and the Prussian Constituent Assembly in Berlin, both held on the same day in May 1848. The enormously popular Gottschalk would not even stand as a communist candidate in these elections, instead denouncing them as a bourgeois farce and appealing to members of the Workers’ Association to boycott them. The main beneficiary of his successful appeal was Cologne’s devout and generally conservative pro-Austrian Catholics (a group Marx had seen as the chief threat to the leftists in the Rhineland), who were dominant at the polls, choosing the city’s archbishop to represent them in Berlin.

  In June 1848, Gottschalk escalated his radicalism, calling for the establishment of a workers’ republic in Germany. However, he also insisted that any action taken to bring such a republic about would be counterproductive. Most Germans, he asserted, favored such a regime and it would appear in the near future largely without the need for much effort. These were ideas of his mentor Moses Hess. As early as 1843, Hess had told Arno
ld Ruge that the vast majority of the population was for communism, and that a communist society would largely emerge of its own accord.37 Marx, who saw communism as the outcome of a long process of organization, agitation, and political struggle, culminating in insurrection, civil war, and international warfare, regarded such visions of the peaceful and effortless onset of a communist regime as nothing short of delusional.

  Marx had much more success in founding a radical political newspaper than in organizing the working class. The idea of reviving the Rhineland News had been circulating in Cologne as soon as a liberal government in Prussia abolished press censorship, and it was Moses Hess who moved first to do it. By early April 1848, Hess was negotiating with potential financial backers, publishers, and foreign correspondents, but after a decisive organizational meeting held on April 12, the day after Marx’s arrival in Cologne, Marx and his supporters were in charge of the enterprise. Hess left shortly thereafter for Paris, and played little part in the politics of the 1848 Revolution. (Marx’s defeat of his mentor cannot have helped Andreas Gottschalk’s relationship with him.) It seems likely that Marx’s followers packed the meeting, but the outcome also reflected Marx’s position in the city, in particular the memories of his very energetic role as editor of the Rhineland News five years earlier.

  The plan was to fund the newspaper, like the Rhineland News, by selling shares of stock. Over the next six weeks, Marx and his associates worked frantically to gather funds to get the enterprise underway. They hoped to receive a big piece of the funding from Engels’s wealthy father. But the devout and conservative Friedrich Engels, Sr., as his son told Marx, “rather than giving us a thousand talers, would like to fire a thousand rounds of grapeshot at us.” In the end, the money was raised: 13,000 talers. Marx contributed part of the advance on his inheritance he had received from his mother. Engels added a smaller sum, what must have been a substantial portion of his very modest personal assets. Most of the funds came from Marx’s fans in Cologne and the vicinity—a number of well-off smaller businessmen and professionals, by no means all of them radical leftists, impressed by the vigorous editor of the Rhineland News, and willing to give him another try. The first issue of the New Rhineland News duly appeared at the beginning of June.38