A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  The revolutionaries’ activities soon became more extensive, and a larger locale was needed for their meetings. The police spy now reported that the League of the Just met every week at a wine merchant’s on Avenue de Vincennes. Sometimes thirty participants gathered; often it was between 100 and 200. The police spy took pity on all these journeymen who allowed themselves to be seduced by a few schemers. He concluded his report of 1 February 1845: ‘I write to you in great urgency so that Marx, Herwegh, A. Weill and Börnstein will not be able to continue to drag these young men down into misfortune.’15

  Only a few weeks earlier, on 16 January, Marx had been forced to leave Paris for Brussels. The report showed that he was already playing a leading role in the League of the Just. It was his name that the spy mentioned first in the string of dangerous seducers of the people. Such were the ravages of Marx in life: Wherever he turned up, he made himself known. While still very young, he became a central figure among the Young Hegelians. Within a short time, he had developed into a leading journalist. Now he stood out as a particularly dangerous revolutionary.

  In all these roles, he enjoyed these successes as a novice. When he came to Paris, communism was a movement that he had regarded unenthusiastically from a distance. In a letter to Arnold Ruge in September 1843, when he was just about to leave Germany, he claimed that it was a ‘dogmatic abstraction’.16 In Paris, he would become a central figure in that dogmatic abstraction.

  There were two persons who above all introduced him to what communism, at best, could be. One was Moses Hess, the man who admired him so tremendously back in his time as an editor in Cologne, and the other was Wilhelm Weitling, the tailor and writer who had been forced to leave Paris when Marx arrived. Hess was above all a theoretician who had adopted socialist and communist doctrines earlier than Marx. There are signs indicating that the owners of Rheinische Zeitung made Marx – and not Hess, who was six years older – editor of the newspaper because they regarded Hess as entirely too radical.17

  Like Marx, Hess had a Jewish background, but his parents did not convert, and Hess had had a strict religious upbringing. While Marx, by all appearances, remained irreligious in a rather unproblematic way, Hess preferred to describe even completely worldly events in religious terms. Inspired by seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who spoke of ‘God or the world’, Hess expressed himself during an important period of his life in purely pantheistic terms: the universe is God. In his ideal society, this divine reality would appear in all its glory. Earlier than Marx, he developed ideas on humanity’s Entfremdung – its alienation – and he would obviously inspire his friend here. But his ideas always had religious depths that were lacking in Marx. Despite the fact that Hess, like many others, spoke of religion as the opium of the people, he equally sought something holy in the social community that would replace a world dependent on religion.

  Hess called the programme for the radical change of society that he advocated both socialism and communism. His view of the relationship between them is indicated in a letter he wrote to Marx in July 1844. It is characterized by great optimism, although it starts off with a warning that Marx should be careful about setting foot on Prussian territory. According to newspaper information, an arrest order was ready for execution. Radical forces were nevertheless rapidly gaining ground in Germany, Hess assured him. The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was enjoying great success, although the censor was doing everything to stop it. New socialists were turning up everywhere. ‘Soon, all of educated Germany will be socialist – radically socialist, in fact; I mean communist.’18

  Hess thus sees chiefly a difference of degree between socialism and communism. There is nothing indicating that Marx would have thought anything else at the time. It was also in accordance with the prevalent linguistic usage. In fact, there is yet another nuance in meaning: communism was more proletarian in its orientation. It attracted workers and craftsmen rather than armchair radicals.

  As regards the other source of inspiration, Wilhelm Weitling, it was on the contrary Marx who was most impressed from the start. It was the same sort of admiration he had felt for Proudhon: both were advocates of the working people in whom Marx had begun to set such great hopes.

  Weitling had an entirely different background than Marx or Hess. His mother was a maidservant, and his father a French officer in Napoleon’s army in Germany who had soon disappeared from his mother’s life. Weitling grew up in great poverty and trained as a tailor. He just barely supported himself while becoming engrossed in his studies, and gradually began to write. It was his second book – Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, published in 1842 – that so impressed Marx. We must go into it in depth somewhat because it says a lot about the communism Marx was now definitively growing closer to.

  It is a book that contains multitudes – it could be said an entire outlook on the world and society. ‘Progress is a natural law,’ Weitling declared by way of introduction, and then paints a picture of an idyllic proto-society that had to be burst asunder by the contradictions created through ‘the origin of all evils’: property. This is Rousseau’s picture of development. But Weitling’s ideal society is not Rousseau’s; he sketched out the contours of a good, equitable, and just world that now lay within reach. The influence of both Saint-Simon and Fourier is evident here. Science and technology are given key roles, and Weitling even adopts Saint-Simon’s idea of the guide to a better world as a second Messiah, ‘greater than the first’. Fourier’s ideal that everyone should be trained in a practical occupation and, moreover, should have the opportunity to switch between various employments also became Weitling’s, though he did not conceive of any self-sustaining small societies or phalanstères as the basic political units. Even Fourier’s way of talking about highly peaceful and comradely associations such as armies is found in Weitling. School armies, for example, occupy an important place in his society. Like so many other radicals at that time – especially Fourier – Weitling was an ardent supporter of women’s liberation.

  Freedom of the press, and even freedom of choice – which are impossible as long as money rules – prevail in this future society.

  Weitling spoke relatively little about the revolution he nevertheless saw as necessary in order to be able to create this good society. Most important here is the distinction he made between a political and a social revolution – a distinction that became crucial for Marx. In Germany, Weitling said, it was more difficult to carry out a political revolution than a social one. Both, however, were wholly possible. He said nothing about whether or not he imagined the upheavals to be violent.

  What is surprising is that he was open to the possibility of a people’s monarch at the head of this good society of the future. A contemporary reader could also wonder at the fact that he mentions Louis von Hessberg among his models. Hessberg is entirely forgotten today, but a moment’s research shows that he was a high-ranking officer and nobleman who, despite his position, proposed the establishment of ‘God’s kingdom on earth’ with such things as community of property. This scandal forced him to leave his posts. It is only thanks to Weitling’s appreciation that posterity still remembers him.19

  But was this appreciation not odd? Hessberg’s inspiration was obviously Christian, and his dream was to re-establish a primitive Christian community. He inserted himself into a tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages, culminating in the German Peasant Wars of the sixteenth century and the most far-reaching radicals of the seventeenth-century English Revolution. Swedish literary historian Kurt Aspelin called this tradition utopian mysticism. In it, the future appears in the chiaroscuro of dreams, and prim calculations are united with ecstasy.20

  Was it not odd that Weitling could appreciate a present-day advocate of this tradition? No, it was not. Even at that time, the inspiration of primitive Christianity was strong among revolutionaries. Marx was a newcomer to the group, and through his unhesitating atheism he belonged to a minority among them. Obviously, this circumstance did
not alter his enthusiasm for Weitling. He expressed this above all in an article in a German-language newspaper in Paris called Vorwärts (Forward).

  Vorwärts, the Weavers’ Uprising, and Ruge

  The original task of Vorwärts was to provide news about the arts, the sciences, and social life in Paris. The successful Franco-German opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was responsible for the funding, and its editor-in-chief was fairly reactionary. It was thus no left-wing organ – quite the contrary – but the left had the initiative among German emigrants, and with it pulled the newspaper in their direction with their delight in debate.

  A weavers’ uprising in Silesia in 1844 became the subject of lively attention in the newspaper. Heinrich Heine published a magnificent poem on the subject. It has the refrain ‘We weave, we weave’ and deals with how weavers wove a triple curse into the burial shroud they were working on: a curse on God, who proved himself deaf and blind to their prayers; a curse on the king, who protected the rich and squeezed out the last penny from the poor only to have them shot like dogs; and a curse over the fraudulent fatherland where lies and atrocities reigned and the stench of corpses had begun to spread. It is for this fatherland that the shroud is intended!

  Heine sent the poem to Marx, requesting publication. He also attached another poem touching on a theme that had belonged to the repertoire of social criticism ever since the carnivals of the Middle Ages and had a special place in Marx’s critical disputes: the world turned upside down. His poem begins: ‘The world is topsy-turvy turn’d,/We walk feet upwards in it’.21 Fifty thousand copies of the poem about the weavers were also distributed as flyers in Silesia. It is not surprising that it was forbidden by the Prussian authorities. An agitator in Berlin, who nevertheless recited it, was thrown into prison.

  The revolt in Silesia was not the first of its kind, but it attracted greater attention than earlier similar incidents. The 1840s were a period crisscrossed by new revolutionary ideas, and at the same time by increasing repression, particularly in Prussia. As far as the weavers were concerned, their wages had been drastically reduced. Competition with incipient industrial production in Great Britain was beginning to be felt. Textile products became cheaper, but the necessities of life did not. Many factory owners, moreover, acted ruthlessly towards people living at or under the limits of starvation. The revolt became even more pointed through socialist and communist ideas having begun to spread among German workers. The revolt itself, which brought many weavers with it and led to a number of violent conflicts, came to a quick end when the authorities in Breslau called in the military, who struck down all resistance with great brutality. Eleven people, including a woman, were shot and killed; twenty-four were seriously wounded. Many were put into prisons or fortresses. Others were sentenced to flogging.

  The weavers’ uprising remained an important reference point in German workers’ history. In 1893, Gerhart Hauptman’s great drama Die Weber (The Weavers) premièred in Berlin. It represented something completely new in German theatre. Here, the common people took the stage and were not, as otherwise was the case, relegated to the peripheral role of servants. Hauptmann’s drama, for its part, provided immediate inspiration to a long series of magnificent, gripping lithographs by Käthe Kollwitz.22

  In the 1840s, the period of the revolt, the bloody days in Silesia led to a heated debate within and outside Prussia about what these disturbances were due to. The most common explanation was summarized in the word ‘pauperism’ (from the Latin pauper, ‘poor’). Pauperism was talked about around Europe; both high-born and low, left and right, took part in the conversation – which easily became heated. One conviction that most shared was based on the fact that the age – with its ever more intense trade, its growing industry, and its more rapid communications – was creating a new type of poverty, more dangerous than the traditional kind because it gave rise to continuing impoverishment in large groups of the population. A smouldering dissatisfaction that could turn into open revolt followed on its heels.23

  Conservative forces in Prussia, with King Friedrich Wilhelm IV at their head, asserted that old-fashioned Christian charity would reduce the tensions and make it so that the Silesian weavers’ revolt would be the last of its kind. Liberal forces in the country imagined some form of social reforms that could counteract pauperism.

  Of course, the Germans in Paris followed the revolt and its consequences with boundless excitement. Arnold Ruge, with whom Marx had recently collaborated, quickly published an article in Vorwärts in which he played down what happened in Silesia to some extent. He justified it with the fact that the king had declared himself not very alarmed and instead aimed his fulminations at the country’s zealous supporters of reform. Ruge signed the article ‘A Prussian’, which could have given rise to the misperception that it was Marx – a Prussian subject – and not Ruge, a native of Saxony, who wrote it. But Marx was of an entirely different opinion than Ruge and thought that what had happened in Silesia was a magnificent event that would have consequences in the future.

  It is not at all strange that the king was more worried about the liberals than the workers, Marx wrote in his response. It was not the king the workers had turned against, but the bourgeoisie. An aristocrat like the king could not but abhor the bourgeoisie. The workers were far too distant to worry him.

  In the same way, an orthodox Catholic is more hostile towards an orthodox Protestant than an atheist, Marx continued. For a legitimist like the Prussian king, the liberals were a worse enemy than the communists.

  He thus uncovered an important aspect of the dynamic in various kinds of differences of opinion. It is the close neighbour who is the most hated opponent, while those on the other end of the scale of opinion were not perceived as competitors.24 The idea of la petite différence – the small difference between opinions and orientations that, seen from outside, lie very close to each other – most recently goes back to Sigmund Freud’s 1932 book Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), and is used more often in psychology and religious research than as regards political ideologies.25

  Now there is no one who runs the risk of confusing the ideals of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the German liberals. But the differences are, if anything, relative. King and liberals were on the same political field, whereas the communists were hopelessly outside the discussion. Marx himself would soon become a tireless and unrelenting guard concerning the social theory he had worked out. But as a novice, he was still open to many variants of communism and socialism. On the other hand, Ruge’s standpoint – which must be characterized as liberal populist – was entirely foreign to him. He and Ruge would never be able to publish a joint periodical again. There would be only one issue of Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

  Marx developed his polemic in his customary way, which took up quite a lot of space. He followed his opponent’s text, argument for argument, and often offered up detailed quotations. He then tore these arguments to bits, one by one. Ruge took up pauperism, the subject of the day in Prussia. Marx reminded him that England was ‘the country of pauperism’: the word ‘pauperism’ had come from there. Impoverishment was universal among workers in England, and not only partial as it was in Germany. It played a central role in English political economy, and impoverishment there appeared as an unfortunate but inevitable result of modern industrial development.

  Marx’s article makes its way through the polemical thicket to its crucial point: that pauperism cannot be remedied only with political measures; a social upheaval is additionally required. In his article, Ruge asserted that the weavers who revolted had a limited horizon. Marx indignantly responded that this was completely wrong. The weavers’ revolt had a more ‘theoretical and conscious character’ than similar events in France and England. He referred to the popular Weberlied (‘song of the weavers’, not to be confused with Heine’s poem), the text of which clearly expresses the contradiction between the proletariat and private property.

  Marx pointed to Wi
lhelm Weitling as the most striking example of German consciousness. His writings are genius, Marx wrote. In their theoretical aspects, they often exceed even Proudhon, however inferior they were in their execution. The bourgeoisie had nothing to put up against a book like Garantien. Marx spoke about ‘this vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers’. He continued by repeating Weitling’s assertion that there were good possibilities in Germany for a social revolution, but worse for a political one. The latter was namely the affair of the bourgeoisie, the former that of the proletariat. It was not abnormal for Germany to be equally as politically backward as it was philosophically advanced. On the contrary, it was a necessity. ‘A philosophical people can find its corresponding practice only in socialism, hence it is only in the proletariat that it can find the dynamic element of its emancipation.’26

  That last sentence is noteworthy for several reasons. On the one hand, it is clear that Marx had not yet distinguished between socialism and communism. Perhaps, like Hess, he saw communism as a pure cultivation of socialism, but here nothing of that interpretation is discernible. He speaks simply of ‘socialism’. On the other, he expressed an idea that had been common among German intellectuals all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and still was among the Young Hegelians: namely that the Germans were a particularly philosophical people. He would not express himself in this manner later on.

  Weitling was among the readers of Vorwärts and wrote a cheerful letter from London in which he repaid Marx’s appreciation. ‘We are friends,’ he declared optimistically, and hoped that their correspondence would continue.27 It is unknown whether Marx ever responded; no other letters between the two have been preserved. There was much else taking up Marx’s time when he received the letter. The most important of them was already discernible in his articles in Vorwärts: economic theories had entered into his sphere of interests. Previously, they had been below his horizon. Soon, they would dominate his field of view.