We do not know how Marx reacted to letters like this. He could at least have been happy that his campaigns were received with satisfaction in one direction: London. That support would turn out to be important, even crucial, for Marx’s (and Engels’s) most-read text: the Communist Manifesto.
Right after the dramatic break with Weitling on 6 June 1846, Marx received a long letter from friends in London. It was signed by a long series of names, but the pen had been wielded by the verbally most driven of them – Carl (or Karl; the spelling varies, but he himself signed with a C) Schapper. Alongside Joseph Moll – another of the letter’s signers – he was the one who would also play the most important role in preparing the way for the Manifesto. Let us linger on him and Moll a moment.
Carl Schapper was the son of a priest from Alsace. As a young student, he became involved in a democratic movement – something that was strictly illegal. He was arrested, and spent a part of his youth in different prisons. Constantly involved in revolutionary movements, he was deported from country after country and finally took refuge in the most tolerant one at the time: Great Britain. In London, he became involved with the League of the Just, with Weitling.
Joseph Moll came from impoverished circumstances, was apprenticed to a watchmaker, and like many others set out on his journeyman’s travels across Europe. He also devoted himself to political activities that the authorities in various countries found punishable; he too ended up in London and there got involved in the same way as Schapper.
In the letter to Marx, Schapper told him about Weitling’s reactions to the heated meeting in Brussels. Schapper had been frightened at first. He thought that Marx and Engels wanted to establish a kind of ‘aristocracy of the learned’ (Gelehrten-Aristocratie) that would govern the people from a divinely elevated position. But after the performance, Marx must have written a letter to Schapper in which he gave his version of what had been dealt with. The letter no longer exists, but it must have convinced Schapper that Weitling’s account was misleading. Schapper called his friends and fellow thinkers together, who were unanimous that they should establish a correspondence committee of the same kind that Marx had taken the initiative on in Brussels.3
It turned out to be an important step. While Moll and Schapper were pushing Weitling aside as a quarrelsome dictator of opinions who loathed all scientific literature, the path towards lively contact with Marx and the small group in Brussels was opening up.
The letter is interesting because it also provides a quite vivid picture of the activities being conducted in London. Schapper said that he and his friends had started an association for educating workers. It had approximately 250 members, and met three times a week. Certain Tuesday evenings were devoted in part to a book by Friedrich Feuerbach (Ludwig’s younger brother) on the religion of the future, which was being discussed and scrutinized paragraph by paragraph.4 The other Tuesdays were devoted to lectures and discussions, for example on raising children in a future society. On Saturday evenings they contented themselves with lighter activities such as song, music, and readings, as well as lectures on good newspaper articles. On Sundays, subjects such as ancient and recent history were treated; lately ancient history – that is, antiquity and the Middle Ages – had covered Lycurgus, the more or less mythical lawgiver in Greece, while recent history dealt with the Reformation of the sixteenth century. But geography, astronomy, and other educational subjects were also part of the Sunday diversions. Another theme that had been up for discussion was the relationship between workers and bourgeoisie, for example the relation between workers and bosses.
Besides these three evenings, there were also meetings with the city’s radical French minority to get acquainted with their ideas about communism (which were a little too republican in Schapper’s eyes). Every two weeks, they got to know their English fellow thinkers – among them George Julian Harney, one of the most famous Chartists, was held in particular esteem.
But that was not all. On Wednesdays there was singing instruction, on Thursdays they practised linguistic proficiency and drawing, and on Fridays there was dancing. That is, they had programmes throughout the week. In addition to that, there was a library of approximately 500 volumes, and there were hopes of soon being able to move into larger premises. The association did not have only German members. Apart from the 140 Germans there were forty Scandinavians, twenty Hungarians, and even Russians and Italians.
In a new letter, which again is a response to a letter from Marx that has been lost, Schapper and two other signers emphasized that the association’s activities were seasonal. In the spring, there were plenty of job opportunities, and many people came to London from the rest of Europe; in July, they left the city to seek their fortune in other quarters. For the tailors, the situation was miserable; they had no place else to go and were forced to remain in London without work. That was why the educational society had helped them and rented a few cheap apartments where those who were hard up could stay for a minimal sum of money. Their need for education was not forgotten despite all their distress: they were given a book that one of them could read from aloud, and which then would be the starting point for discussions in the entire group.
Other members with better prospects for occupations had travelled home – a number of places, including Gothenburg, are mentioned in the letter. The association had also received additional outside contributions: a professor had come from Paris and a student from Heidelberg, and moreover a certain Baron Ribbentrop. The professor was especially useful; he knew a lot about Feuerbach.5 The account concluded in an appeal to infuse more life into the League of the Just. ‘We must have a conference this very year, in 1846!’ he wrote. Only in London could it be held undisturbed. More well-to-do communists could help poorer ones with travel money.
The primary goal of this lively educational association was to get more people politically active. Schapper and his friends were convinced that knowledge was the best path towards meaningful political action. Aufklärung – enlightenment – was his watchword. ‘When the intellectual revolution – which has now begun – is completed, the physical one will come by itself,’ he wrote optimistically in the first of the two letters.
It was a standpoint that Marx at the time must have seen as entirely too idealistic. But neither difference of opinion nor the association members’ intensive study of Friedrich Feuerbach – who, in all essentials, was following in his brother’s footsteps – influenced his attitude towards the activities in London. He must have realized that this was the big chance for him to achieve the influence he had been seeking. On the whole, Great Britain in general – and London in particular – began to take up greater space in his consciousness. In that spirit, he also contacted one of the leading Chartists – the previously mentioned George Julian Harney. Marx’s letter has been lost, but not Harney’s response. Harney took Marx’s side completely in the conflict with Weitling, and it was also clear that he saw himself as a communist.6
But it was Schapper and the other German communists who would play the crucial role. For their part, they realized that Marx would be able to promote their cause better than anyone else. How eager they were is shown by the fact that in January 1847, Joseph Moll travelled to Brussels with authorization from his comrades to negotiate linking Marx and Engels even more closely to the League of the Just.7 We know nothing of the meeting itself, but from the continued developments we can infer that it must have been successful.
In June 1847, a conference in London for the League of the Just was actually arranged.8 Marx did not participate, of course, but Engels – who also represented his friend – did. It was decided that the organization would change its name to Bund der Kommunisten (The Communist League) and – after Schapper’s suggestion – adopted the slogan ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ More important was the idea that they had to gather around a joint, fairly detailed programme. It ripened over the year, and in October the London circle – which could now title itself Zentralbehörde de
s Bundes der Kommunisten (Central Committee of the Communist League) – sent a letter to Brussels in which the Correspondence Committee was encouraged to send a delegate to the second congress, which was to be held in London a few months later. They also explained that there was a special wish that Marx would come – they would try to subsidise the costs for his trip and subsistence.9
There is an important little comment. It was Marx, and no one else – not even Engels – who could put the Communist League into order. There was no doubt that Marx was the leading theoretician, and moreover he was considered to have greater ability to gather people around his line than Engels, who – in words from sympathizers in Cologne – easily caused problems through his ‘arrogance and vanity’.10
According to the group in London, confusion prevailed in the Communist League. Weitling’s followers continued to cause difficulties, many members in Paris had been expelled, and in Switzerland (according to Schapper) ‘all hell had broken loose’. The section there was led by a ‘horribly confused and narrow-minded person, a Swede by the name of Oebom’ who was distinguished by ‘his limitless hate for all men of learning’. This person had, moreover, the audacity to propose himself as the editor of the league’s new newspaper although he could not write a single sentence correctly in German.11
Briefly put, the business of the London communists was to convince Marx to travel to the congress for the purpose of creating order in the League. And Marx was convinced. Both he and Engels came to London and participated in the deliberations that were held between 29 November and 8 December 1847. It was there they were tasked with working out what would become the Manifesto.
We will remember that earlier that same year, Engels had explained to Louis Blanc that The Poverty of Philosophy was to be regarded as the programme for the most radical German social democracy. This is not a surprising statement. The severely polemical tone that distinguished what Marx and Engels had written and said during their time in Brussels was part of the attempt to mark off a definite political understanding. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx summarized his theory of society in a sharp and explanatory fashion, and a political programme of action can also be glimpsed there.
But something more easily accessible and cogent was needed. Members and sympathizers had to be assembled under a few clear slogans. Scatterbrained people like Oebom and pious swindlers like Weitling had to be made to toe the line, and the boundaries with ‘true socialists’, Proudhonists, Weitlingians and their followers had to be clearly drawn.
Before we go into greater detail on how the Manifesto developed and what it gradually became, we must get a clearer picture of what kind of people the Manifesto would convince, assemble, and keep at a distance all at the same time. Where did they belong, in the class society of the 1840s?
Wandering Journeymen, Intellectuals,
and a Few Industrial Workers
Industrial workers were the greatest social innovation of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, they were still found primarily in only a few areas, the most important being in Great Britain but their population was growing in Belgium and France. In the many large and small German states, on the other hand, they were few and far between. Schleswig was an early exception, and industrial development was at least underway in the Rhine provinces.
But, on the whole, the industrial worker was rare in comparison with agricultural workers and smallholders. Among those that did exist, the largest group originally came from the countryside. The lands simply could not provide for the growing population there. The alternatives became emigration to America or work in some factory. The typical industrial worker was a starving ex-agricultural proletarian, forced into the darkness and noise of the factories and housed in the cramped, unsanitary slums that were springing up in the shadow of the factories. It is not odd that faced with their new existence, industrial workers – both women and men – were gripped by a violent longing for the earth, light, and air. Their utopia was not a future high-tech just society, but their own bit of land on which they could just sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. In early documents, above all from Chartism in Britain, the most common dream of the future is of one’s own little patch to cultivate.
But there was another, numerically smaller but still influential group among industrial workers – former journeyman craftsmen. Both the former journeymen and those craftsmen who were still working constituted a crucial element in the movement that Marx was now on his way to gaining great influence over. There are several reasons for their central position. One was that many of them risked losing their jobs through industrialization. The skill of craftsmen was making a poor showing against new machines that could perform the same tasks more quickly and more cheaply.
At the beginning of this process, many textile workers in England responded by smashing knitting machines and automatic looms which could be run without a long apprenticeship, and thereby for lower wages. Their activity was particularly widespread during the 1810s; those involved were called Luddites, after a more-or-less mythical figure called General (or King) Ludd, who like Robin Hood was said to live in Sherwood Forest.
There was symbolic power in smashing machines, but as a method of struggle the venture was futile. Individual companies and their owners were affected, but the machines could be found in other quarters and new ones were being made in an ever-steadier stream. Technology that made production cheaper could not be stopped with sledgehammers.
More important was the fact that many journeyman craftsmen began to see the development from a broader perspective, realizing that long-term cooperation could better improve their own situation, as well as that of others being oppressed, than could actions aimed only at restoring a system that had been altered forever.
In the mid-nineteenth century, many of Europe’s journeymen were both worldly and hungry for knowledge. They had no schools of learning or universities under their belts, but they had something else that only few students at the time possessed: great international experience. They made themselves at home in the great metropolises of Europe, with Paris and London at the head; they learned foreign languages (as we have seen, lectures were held in German, English, and French in London’s workers’ educational association) and they constituted the great majority of radical, more or less revolutionary clubs founded chiefly in the 1840s. Both lectures and the reading of books and newspapers played a crucial role there.
Journeymen came wandering from all corners of Europe; we have already seen how great the international diffusion in London had been. Often it was pure necessity that drove them, but not even in London could most of them get anything but seasonal work. It is easy to understand that their situation, which was gradually worsening, made them receptive to revolutionary ideas. But they were no longer tempted to actions where they could spontaneously give vent to their fury, instead choosing the longer and more arduous path through joint deliberation and study.
Considering the diversity of journeymen, is it not curious that it was the industrial worker who was the focus for Marx and many others of his kind? No; we have to understand that first of all, Marx was not talking about the present but about the future that awaited with rapid industrialization. Dimensions of this industrialization could be anticipated in Great Britain, but with greater difficulty in France and even less so in the German states. The journeymen flocking into the seditious clubs were convinced – and with good reason – that the hard, monotonous life at the machines was their own future, or at least that of their children.
But it was not only journeymen who participated in the many radical deliberations in the 1840s on the world that had just begun to take shape. Quite a few of them had university degrees. Perhaps, like Schapper, they had early on joined forbidden clubs and not only been expelled from university but thrown into prison as well. Several of them worked as journalists in radical newspapers that were constantly threatened by censorship. For them, writing was natural, and that qualification made them important
for the dissemination of ideas.
One large group participating in the discussions was doctors. We have already had glimpses of some of them: Roland Daniels and Heinrich Otto Lüning. But there were countless others, and their presence is not as surprising as it may seem today. On the one hand, doctors did not yet have their social status to safeguard – they would obtain that in the twentieth century. On the other hand, and above all, many of them who stood far to the left were active among the people who were the worst off in society. Government doctors were already playing an important role in charting the special misery that industrialism created. We have already met James Philips Kay in Manchester; others followed after him, writing reports on the underside of society. A great many of them were not satisfied with analyses, but wanted to fundamentally change the society of the time.12
Marx was an odd character in this company, with his doctoral degree and his erudition. It cannot be said that he ever blended in among his new fellow thinkers. He remained for them the one who would say what everyone had been waiting to hear, and provide the final theory. It was a role he gladly took on.
Engels, in his way, was even more odd in the context – the son of a factory owner with his own experiences of what it meant to run a company and act as a capitalist. While Marx could always be affected by the antipathy of the self-taught manual labourers for the well read, Engels’s position was even more uncomfortable. He was a member of the upper class who sided with the workers – but how far could the unemployed journeyman or the impoverished factory worker trust him?
A World to Win Page 27