It was not the Rome of the Caesars, but of the Republic, that Marx had in mind when he spoke about dictatorship. Nor was it an individual dictator he spoke about, but the National Assembly in its entirety. Only the Assembly could create a new order – a democracy. With the old order, embodied by the Prussian king, there could be no compromise. Marx maintained: ‘Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.’ Neue Rheinische Zeitung had already reproached the first Minister-President, Camphausen, for not having smashed the remnants of the old institutions, losing himself instead in ‘constitutional dreaming’. During that time, their opponents – the bureaucracy and the army – strengthened their positions, and now it was they who laid down the terms. In this development, Marx saw the bourgeoisie as the great deserter. They had wished for an agreement with the crown on a peaceful path. But a popular movement had been preparing the way for a revolution. The bourgeoisie, having attained the pinnacle of society, still wanted to come to an agreement with the royal power. They felt no solidarity with the proletarians, as the English bourgeois class had in 1648 and the French in 1789. The developments underway pointed to the definitive victory of the crown – the king, the generals, and the civil servants – and the bourgeoisie had paved the way.58
Marx spoke about the ever deeper degradation of the German-speaking states in a process where the bourgeoisie believed they could ally with the traditional apparatus of power but were increasingly pushed aside. He quoted John Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost: ‘beneath the lowest deep a lower still’.59
The gradual radicalization of Neue Rheinische Zeitung was in the first place not a question of Marx and his contributors changing their understanding of the society they wished for. On the other hand, developments had clearly shown that the cautious strategy Marx had recommended from the beginning was untenable. The leading liberals of the National Assembly would rather compromise with the royal power and the state bureaucracy than with the far left. The price was that the royal power strengthened its position step by step. Neue Rheinische Zeitung radicalized concurrently, taking a more militant line.
But these developments were also accelerated by the course of events in France. On 23 June 1848, a rebellion broke out among journeymen and workers in Paris. New barricades were raised, now against the conservative-liberal government that had come to power after the parliamentary elections. Violent street battles ended in a total, bloody defeat for the men of the rebellion: 5,000 were killed, 11,000 imprisoned.
Marx and his editorial staff wrote profusely on what had happened in Paris. Engels was particularly voluble, speaking about a pure workers’ uprising. Marx was behind an authoritative article he dubbed ‘The June Revolution’. The workers in Paris were beaten but not conquered, he assured readers. But the brutal violence that triumphed had dispersed all illusions that the February Revolution had awakened. Now there was no longer the possibility of mutual understanding; a civil war threatened.60
Marx saw the developments in Paris as paradigmatic. What happened in the German-speaking areas was a pale copy of the French example. The uprising was also beaten back with the consent of the bourgeoisie. The sacrifices were just not as great; nor was the spirit of rebellion in the German states as strong.
But even in Berlin, in Vienna, in Dresden, and especially the Hungarian city of Budapest, there had been violent outbursts. In the Saxon city of Dresden, the young composer Richard Wagner was among those who raised the flag of rebellion; in the struggle, he became friends with a significantly more persistent revolutionary: Mikhail Bakunin.61
During all these events, Marx spent most of his time at the editorial offices in Cologne. But he sometimes went on trips in service of the revolution. In late August and early September 1848, he was in Berlin and then Vienna to build his network of contacts among democratic organizations. In Vienna, he held two lectures. One dealt with the role of the proletariat in the revolution, the other on wage labour and capital. He had spoken on the latter theme in Brussels, and he inserted the manuscript as a short series of articles into his newspaper.
The radicalization of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, purely from a business perspective, was a success. Circulation skyrocketed, and at last reached 4,000 copies. That may not sound like much today, but it was in 1849. In the end, the newspaper became one of the most read in the German-speaking states.
This radicalization went hand in hand with an increasingly heated defence of freedom of the press. Marx and his editorial staff made use of every occasion to stress the importance of the right of newspapers, in principle, to express any opinion whatsoever. This had also been Marx’s understanding several years earlier, when he led Rheinische Zeitung. Back then, he had state censorship to struggle against. This was abolished after the March Revolution, but it was replaced with press legislation that was gradually made more stringent. Marx – often in Engels’s company – was often compelled to defend himself in court. They were capable and successful; Marx was a splendid pettifogger who had the benefit of legal studies from his university years, and the arguments were printed in Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
The charges against the newspaper changed, but it was its outspokenness that was a thorn in the side of those monitoring observance of the press laws. Dealings with the court began almost immediately – only a month after the newspaper began publication – and they continued throughout the rest of its brief history.
The first charge entailed Neue Rheinische Zeitung having insulted a prosecutor named Zweiffel and some policemen. The case was as follows: according to the newspaper, Friedrich Anneke, a newspaper editor, and Andreas Gottschalk, the government doctor who both competed with and collaborated with Marx, had been treated particularly brutally when they were arrested. Public prosecutor Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker protested against the newspaper’s accusations, and Marx responded. The case was not taken further.62
But new charges accumulated. Hecker distinguished himself as an angry opponent and an ardent defender of the new order that had been provisionally established. He singled out Marx as a dangerous type in the press as well, writing that Marx must be constituted a traitor. The word ‘constitute’ roused Marx’s vociferous derision.
In early February 1849, both Marx and Engels were forced to defend themselves before the court against charges of slandering the authorities in their newspaper. Their pleas were reproduced word for word in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx’s contribution in particular is brilliant, supported in equal parts by humour, irony, and legal quibbles. Engels’s contribution is in his usual style: straightforward, bordering on blunt. The result was as desired: the newspaper and its editors were acquitted. Marx was equally fortunate a few days later, when he appeared again before the bar – now for the call to tax evasion.63
But developments in the German states, above all in Prussia, moved inexorably towards an editorial line such as Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s becoming impossible. The attacks against Marx were increasing, and becoming more serious. On 19 May, he defended himself against charges of having attempted to rouse contempt of the government, to encourage subversive activity, and finally to inaugurate ‘the social republic’. The assertions, as we have seen, were not unfounded, but Marx emphatically repudiated them. The reader could easily suspect that he was poking fun at the authorities: what other than contempt did he show for Brandenburg, and did he not embrace the rebellions that flared up during the years of revolution? And was not ‘the social republic’ his goal – a republic in which not only political, but also social and economic relations were transformed? A few months earlier, he had declared that Neue Rheinische Zeitung would not celebrate the anniversary of the March Revolution, but it would celebrate 25 June. He probably meant 23 June; it was then one year since the more left-oriented and proletarian rebellion had broken out in Paris.64
On 19 May the editors had nonetheless given up; Marx’s objections to the charges would come out in the paper’s very last issue,
printed on red paper. In the same issue, there is a notice in which the editors warned the workers in Cologne against rebelling. The events in Elberfeld showed that the bourgeoisie was prepared to send them to their deaths.65
One of the members of the editorial staff, Friedrich Engels, had direct experience of what had happened in Elberfeld, having been there.66 Marx followed the many phases of the revolution, chiefly from the editorial offices in Cologne. Engels, with his military education and his eagerness to fight, was not satisfied with that. He participated in various more or less military demonstrations that forced him to flee from Germany, first to Belgium (where he was not welcome) and then to Switzerland. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he set off again for Prussia – more specifically, his childhood haunts: Elberfeld, the sister city of Wuppertal and Barmen (both Barmen and Elberfeld are now districts in Wuppertal). There, the rebels had turned against the increasingly reactionary superior Prussian forces. He reported himself from the barricades in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. With a box of bullets, he had gone from Cologne to Elberfeld, where the rebels immediately entrusted him with the task of leading the work on fortifying the barricades. He also organized companies of combat engineers, and explained when asked directly that he would only devote himself to military actions and not to any form of political activity. But Elberfeld’s bourgeoisie was not reassured by that. They feared that Engels would declare a red republic at any time, and encouraged him to leave the city. Those who had hoped for battle protested, but Engels found that he might as well return to Cologne – by all appearances, without any of his bullets having been put to use against the enemy.
It was these experiences that lay behind the call to the workers of Cologne to keep calm. The bourgeoisie would side with Prussian military power in the event of war.
During the years of revolution, Engels’s parents had followed their son’s actions with alarm. In October 1848, his mother wrote him a resigned letter. Engels was in Geneva just then, and was in sore need of money from home. Reluctantly, his father supported him with a tidy sum, furious over his son’s errors that brought shame to him and his company. His mother was deeply distressed. Her son had horrible opinions, and he was doing poorly. Worst of all: she had found out from her husband, who had been to Cologne, that ‘your good friends, Marx etc. are all sitting in peace and quiet in Cologne, writing Neue Rheinische Zeitung’ and that they ‘now did not want you back as a contributor’. In my honest opinion, Mrs Engels said, they were ‘all villains who used you as long as they could make use of your money, and then terminate their acquaintance’.
Engels must have responded that this was a complete mistake, that Marx and the others supported him wholeheartedly, and that he was staying in Geneva on the newspaper’s behalf. (All Engels’s letters home have been lost, in all probability destroyed so that his transgressions would not be known to posterity.) His mother replied that if it were as her son asserted, then on the contrary she would like to thank Marx.67
It got even worse, of course, when in the final stages of the revolution, Engels prepared himself to organize street battles in his own hometown. No letters are preserved that could describe his parents’ dismay; on the other hand, there is a great variety of anecdotes, one of which has father and son meeting on either side of the barricades. It is not particularly likely, and even without this story the drama is still quite real. The elder Engels was part of the ruling class in the Wuppertal area that ordered Friedrich Engels the younger to leave the city immediately.
Marx experienced no similar family drama. His father was long dead, and his mother seems not to have asked much about his political activity.
Above all, Marx wrote about topical issues. But at least from time to time, he enlightened his circle of readers on the relations beyond and below the current of violent events. In the midst of the stream of news, he printed parts of a lecture titled ‘Wage-Labour and Capital’ that he had held in 1847 for the German Workers’ Association in Brussels. The account would be elementary so that it would be comprehensible to workers, he promised.
He actually kept away from terms and references that required extensive prior knowledge. The foundation stones are more or less directly taken from the introductory pages of the Manuscripts, but they now emphasize very strongly how competition between businesses pushes forward more effective machinery and greater division of labour. The consequence is that capital grows, and competition for job opportunities stiffens among workers.
Marx emphasized that not only capital and working conditions, but also needs themselves, are determined by the society we live in. What is produced must be sold, and with more and newer types of products, people’s habits must be updated, too. If a palace is built among normal houses, the houses suddenly look like cottages. Marx implies that the magnificent new house aroused desires for larger residences among those who until recently were satisfied. But he does not complete this line of argument.
The main thing for him – as it was in the Manuscripts and as it was for Adam Smith and David Ricardo – was that competition always pushes wages down. New machines are being developed all the time. The capitalist who is first with more efficient equipment gets temporary satisfaction from it. Soon, his competitors will have caught up with him, and the rat race continues.
Marx also paints a depressing image of industrial work to an audience predominated by journeymen fearful of being forced into the factories. Proficiency at work means less and less, he said, and competition for the most loathsome jobs is hardest.68
The series concludes with a ‘To be continued’. But this sequel never followed, and probably had not been written. Nor do we know anything about the relationship between the article series in Neue Rheinische Zeitung and the lecture he held once in Brussels. The newspaper text was later published separately several times, including in 1891 with a long preface by Engels. Because the text was intended just for a rather unschooled audience, it has been used regularly for propaganda purposes. Engels announced, with a certain degree of pride, that the 1891 edition had been printed in 10,000 copies.69
Nonetheless, the text on several points contradicted conclusions that Marx later came to. The thesis that workers’ wages must always tend downward was gradually abandoned, and he avoided the distinction between abstract and concrete labour, probably for pedagogical reasons. He had not yet arrived at the theory of surplus value. ‘Wage-Labour and Capital’ provides a simple summary of Marx’s standpoint in 1849, but is still a good bit away from what he arrived at when he again took hold of economic subject matter after the revolutionary years.
Retreats
When Neue Rheinische Zeitung shut down, Marx and Engels moved to Baden and Pfalz. Revolutionaries there were still offering a degree of resistance. The martial Engels fearlessly entered into the battles, while Marx stayed in the background.
In the end, the struggle was futile. In early June, Marx returned alone to Paris, where a new hope of continuing the revolution had been ignited, sending his family to live with Jenny’s mother in Trier. Jenny was full of apprehension over Karl’s fate – apprehension that intensified when the news came that an attempted rebellion had been put down on 13 June. And as if that were not enough, a cholera epidemic struck the city (an epidemic that also broke out in German cities; in Cologne, it brought Andreas Gottschalk, the government doctor and revolutionary, to an early grave). The dread Jenny expressed in a letter to Lina Schöler, a friend of the family and a teacher in Cologne, is understandable. Up to now, her ‘dear Karl’ had escaped all dangers, and however the problems accumulated, he was constantly full of good spirits and hope. But what could have happened to him during the days of violence and epidemic in Paris? On 29 June, the date of the letter, his fate was still unknown in Trier.
The uncertainty would soon be dispersed; Karl was safe and sound, and also wanted the family to come to Paris. Jenny was not slow in complying with the invitation. In a new letter to Schöler, she said that she and the children had arrived
‘cheerful, and safe and sound’. Paris was once again a shining metropolis, coaches with glittering footmen were again rolling along the streets, and the children could not get enough of all the splendour surrounding them.70
Only a few days later, Jenny received a letter from Engels, who had taken refuge in the town of Vevey in Switzerland. He spoke in detail about his military exploits, also praising his comrades’ bravery – occasionally reaching foolhardiness – but was full of concern over how it had been going for Karl. There were rumours that he had been imprisoned in Paris.
Karl himself was able to reassure his friend in a response. He had his entire family with him. But the French government wanted to banish him to the notorious swamplands of Morbihan in Brittany, a district where malaria and other plagues were still rife. He had appealed the decision and was waiting on a conclusion. If Jenny were not pregnant, he would gladly have left Paris.71
As always, he was feverishly active despite his precarious situation. He was investigating opportunities to publish pamphlets in Germany, among them one with his own text about wage labour and capital that had only partially been printed in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In the same letter, he expressed a paradoxical optimism. ‘However fatal our personal relationship may seem at the moment, I am still among the content,’ he wrote. ‘Things are developing very well, and the Waterloo that official democracy experienced is to be regarded as a victory. The governments, out of God’s mercy, are taking over the task of wreaking our vengeance upon the bourgeoisie and of punishing them.’
He also played down the defeat in an article in the newspaper Der Volksfreund (The Friend of the People) about the dramatic events in Paris of 13 June. The opportunities for the left had only been frittered away by imprudent leaders who had been entirely too sure of their victory. On the other hand, he put his own situation in focus in an open letter to the Parisian newspaper La Presse, in which he declared that the Prussian government had not, as La Presse had reported, banned Neue Rheinische Zeitung – something it lacked legal cover to do. It had, however, made further publication impossible by exiling Marx. He had now come to Paris, not as a refugee but to collect material ‘for my work on the history of political economy, which I had already begun five years earlier’.
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