A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  In fact, his situation in France was more awkward than he made out here. He was, however, not depressed. Yet on 17 August 1849, he wrote a long letter to Engels; in the energetic final point (written in French) he asked his friend what they both should do now. They needed a new writing project, he said, and wondered what ideas Engels had.

  Six days later, the final judgement came: he was to be banished to the malarial districts in Brittany. It was the same as a death sentence, he wrote in a new letter to Engels. ‘So I am leaving France.’ He received no passport to Switzerland, ‘hence I must go to London’. Engels also had to set out for there immediately, he stressed. In Switzerland he could do nothing, and the Prussians would have a double reason to shoot him. He would be safe in London.

  And even more triumphantly: ‘Besides, in London there is a positive prospect of my being able to start a German newspaper.’ And finally, pleading: ‘I confidently count on you not to leave me in the lurch.’

  Engels did not. In a letter to George Julian Harney – the Chartist we have already met – he announced that he was leaving Geneva on board the schooner Cornish Diamond and counted on being in London by mid-November.72

  The years that followed in London were the hardest in the life of the Marx family. We must now describe them. But first, a summary of the years of revolution.

  With Words as Weapons

  In Brussels, Marx had developed a kind of cheerless aggressiveness. Contacts with his fellow thinkers in London put him in lighter spirits. The best pages of the Communist Manifesto – which, in its final version, is his own work – breathes a magnificent energy and delight in language; never has the dynamic of capitalism been better depicted.

  On the other hand, the Manifesto contains nothing new as regards a view of history and society. The author’s relationship to the various radial tendencies of the time is also unchanged, as is the strategy in the face of future upheavals. It is the linguistic force and the direct, inspirational popular address that distinguishes the Manifesto from the polemical pamphlet against Proudhon. The only thing that could surprise a person who let themselves be hypnotized by the label ‘utopian socialism’ is the appreciation shown to Fourier and Saint-Simon: they had their day, to be sure, but they were pioneers of a careful critical analysis of society.

  The actual tense of the text is consciously doubled. The present is being depicted, but also a future in which capitalism has developed even further, in which the proletarianization of an increasing number of groups in society has gone even deeper and in which the class struggle has thereby sharpened. The journeyman craftsmen, which constituted the majority of those immediately greeted by the message of the Manifesto, could not only recognize their own current situation there, but also see how their path implacably led to industrial work – as long as a revolution did not intercede. Doctors, teachers, and other intellectual groups would also realize that their futures are dark, and that it was a question of their siding with communism. Even capitalists who were less successful in constantly stiffening competition with other capitalists would be proletarianized. Better, then, to anticipate the development!

  It is easy to read a far-reaching historical determinism from these statements. The development is predetermined, and moves inexorably towards revolution and a new classless society.

  But this conclusion – constantly drawn anew by readers of Marx – is a hasty one. First, the principle that Marx and Engels developed in The German Ideology and later repeated many times should be remembered: namely that general guidelines for how society ought to be studied cannot be used as a diagram according to which history can be put in order. What is actually occurring emerges out of a swarm of details that are not on a timetable. This principle also applies, of course, to the present and to the future.

  Second, the Manifesto is propaganda that simultaneously is to convince the reader and urge them to action. In texts of this type, it is not possible to introduce reservations or to get wrapped up in historical and philosophical arguments. The Manifesto meets the requirements that apply to all party programmes. A picture of societal development is provided and a number of assessments of what a life fit for human beings entails lie encapsulated in the text. For those who are overcome by the argumentation, the path to the concluding standards of action lies open. In the Manifesto, these standards are summarized in the exhortation of the final words: ‘Workers of all countries…’ This is the most important message of the work. The thesis that the proletarians of tomorrow will be many more than those of today broadens the circle of direct recipients.

  The Manifesto would gradually become the most important gateway into Marx’s world of ideas. This was of great importance for its dissemination, but also for its simplification and vulgarization. For readers of the Manifesto, development seemed bound by fate and the final words were perceived less as a call to action than as a promise that would be fulfilled on its own.

  When this little pamphlet first met the world, it ended up overshadowed by the revolution that broke out at roughly the same time. Marx did not grieve over it. Quite the opposite; the dramatic events filled him with an appetite for action, putting him in a good fighting mood. It was as if the life he had been forced to leave a few years earlier had opened up to him again. First, he got to return to Paris, the city he so bitterly missed; then he took a further few steps into his past and got the opportunity to again manage a newspaper in Cologne. It again turned out that he could be brilliantly productive when he was writing short pieces. The succession of newspaper articles that he produced during this brief period as editor-in-chief for Neue Rheinische Zeitung is impressive, and despite his productivity most are stylistically sparkling – and bitingly venomous towards everyone in power.

  Two themes dominated his journalism. One is the same as in the old Rheinische Zeitung: the freedom of the press. Back then, he defied censorship daily; now he was defying the press laws, and almost all persons in authority.

  The other main theme concerned the hope, cherished by many, that the new parliament would reach a fair agreement with royal power and its state apparatus, thereby achieving a constitutional monarchy. Like Engels, Marx from the very start was critical of this idea – hostile, in fact. The word ‘dictatorship’ turns up in Marx’s vocabulary for the first time here, and its content is crystal clear: the parliament had to seize all power and dictate the conditions for the future Germany. If the king and his ministers were to be part of the deliberations, they would soon seize the entire initiative.

  In his struggle against this political development, Marx did not hold back. He encourages his readers to evade taxes, and he charged the Brandenburg government with high treason. In contrast to Engels, Marx was not the kind to set out on military adventures. Words were his weapon, and he hurled them fearlessly at whoever he chose. His struggle was impossible in the long run, but even in defeat he still saw opportunities for future victories. When he was forced to leave not just Germany, but France as well, he was still hopeful.

  This may seem paradoxical. He had hoped for a broad alliance against kings and princes, but the liberals’ mistrust towards communists and socialists was greater than their reluctance towards the men of the old system. The choice was not entirely surprising: Marx made no secret of the fact that he saw such a coalition only as a stage on the road towards a communist seizure of power. The German liberals cherished great hopes of being able to influence royal power in their own direction. Those hopes came to naught, and Marx’s reaction was not discouragement but rather a new passion for struggle. Now he knew the lie of the land!

  He took this optimism with him to London. He could not imagine that Europe was facing a thorough ideological change after the revolutions – a change that would not be to his advantage, or to the advantage of his political programme.

  8

  Difficult Times, Difficult Losses

  Ideological Change

  Marx grew to manhood in the shadow of the Great French Revolution, which lasted fr
om 1789 to 1794. The revolution did not only entail political upheavals, it paved the way for Napoleon and the violent reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo, and gave us the metre and the kilogramme. The French Revolution also became the background against which nearly all European thinking on society, all political ideals, and most ideas about development, progress, or degeneration took place for more than a half-century.

  With a few exceptions, the political ideologies we talk about today are reactions to the French Revolution. Conservatism is usually derived from the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke’s 1790 book Reflections on the Revolution in France,1 and the name itself was fixed in the French newspaper Le Conservateur. The paper began publication in 1818, and its best-known contributor was the French poet and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand. ‘Liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ made their debut as designations of a political ideology in Spain in 1812, where a grouping that called themselves los liberales played a crucial role for the constitution in Cadiz. Their success was brief, but the term spread quickly.

  Socialism and communism became political ideologies a few decades later, still with the French Revolution as the most important historical reference. It is scarcely different with anarchism, to which Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave the name in 1840. Even this took its colours from what happened in 1789 and the years after.

  The purely reactionary ideology, which wanted to recreate the society that was shattered during the years going forward from 1789, also belongs to this group. Reactionaries – those people pushing purely backwards – were strong in France after the fall of Napoleon; they have of course turned up again and again in later periods and other countries, even if it was not precisely the pre-revolutionary French state but some other imagined paradise from the past that they were dreaming about.

  Only fascism and Nazism are children of a later period – to be precise, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when nationalist mass movements began to take shape. Marx did not live to see their first great demonstration, which took place in France in 1889. At the time, a coup d’état was very close at hand. Its figurehead was general Boulanger, a pathetic figure who wanted revenge for the defeat in the Franco-German war of 1870–71. The ideology only emerged fully with Mussolini and Hitler.

  The French Revolution also determined a great deal of Marx’s political horizon. Through his father, Heinrich Marx, he had got a positive image of what it meant early on, especially for the personal liberation that Heinrich himself had experienced. When Karl’s own political interests had been awakened, the French Revolution was one of the areas he studied the most assiduously. For him as well, it provided a paradigm for future revolutions. He applied its various forms – and especially its party designations – to the current course of events. Marx took the inspiration for his idea on the divided revolution – bourgeois and political first, then proletarian and social – from it.

  The revolutions in Europe during 1848 and 1849, in his eyes, were continuations of the upheavals sixty years earlier. Europe had developed, technology had made new conquests, and industrialism was establishing itself more and more firmly with two new, rapidly expanding social classes: industrial capitalists and industrial workers. When a relatively calm situation once again settled upon Europe at the end of 1849, Marx – like many others – thought it was only the calm before the real storm.

  That is not at all what was to come. Politics stabilized, a new kingdom took shape in France, and reaction prevailed in the German states. Marx’s brother-in-law in Prussia, Ferdinand von Westphalen, became minister of the interior and thereby had a hand in the country’s domestic order. Consistent and unyielding, he made life difficult for anyone with anything to do with communists and socialists. The revolutionaries who succeeded in fleeing to London were closely monitored by Prussian police spies, and von Westphalen also tried to persuade the British government to deport at least a few of them. Marx and Engels protested in a few brief articles in English, one of them in The Spectator, a magazine with a long-established conservative tradition. They passionately repudiated the charges that they and their fellow thinkers were taking part in a conspiracy against Friedrich Wilhelm IV. There had actually been an attempt on the king’s life shortly before, but the guilty party was not only mentally disturbed but additionally a man on the extreme right.2

  But enough about that. By and large, the revolutions had ended in fiasco. It was only in Denmark that something new materialized for good. Royal absolutism came to an end there, and the country gained a constitution.

  During the early 1850s, Marx became much more alone in his thinking than he had been in the 1840s. The circle closest to him had already been thinning out. Engels remained, of course, and Wilhelm Wolff joined the London group in 1851 after a period in Switzerland. Joseph Moll, another of Marx’s closest friends, had – like Engels – taken part in the battles in Baden. On 28 June 1849, he was killed during an action in Rosenfels, not far from Freiburg. It was a hard blow for his friends. Carl Schapper, who had been of such great importance for Marx’s position in the Communist League, soon openly rebelled against him.

  Others among those closest to Marx ended up in Prussian prisons in 1851 and stayed there for a year and a half before any sentence was pronounced. Their crime consisted of trying to continue their activities within the Bund der Kommunisten even after the defeat of the revolution. The two among them whom Marx knew best were the inseparable friends Heinrich Bürgers and Roland Daniels. Bürgers was sentenced to six years in a military fortress. When he was finally released in 1858, he had given up his sympathies for the workers’ movement and instead became active in the liberal Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (the German Progress Party), ending his days as a member of parliament. Daniels did not recover from his time in prison, dying only a few years after his release.

  Marx wrote a pamphlet about the trials. It was called Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and was published anonymously in 1853. The German edition, printed in Switzerland, fell into the hands of the police; the work enjoyed greater success in the United States. In his usual way, Marx took the part of a skilled lawyer, although he himself was not permitted to appear before the bar. He showed how the charges were based to a great extent on falsified documents, misconceptions, and misinterpretations. He dwelt on the fact that an unsigned letter had been ascribed to him. ‘No one who has ever read a single line by Marx could possibly attribute to him the authorship of this melodramatic accompanying line,’ he wrote. In other regards, he pinned a number of lies to Wilhelm Stieber, the head of Prussia’s ‘political police’; the biggest was that he had done more favours for the democratic movement in Prussia than anyone else.

  The accused were all declared by the prosecutor to have belonged to ‘Marx’s party’. This in itself was considered criminal. If nothing else, the documents show the heights of dread that the the figure of Marx had assumed in Prussia.3

  It was not only the trial in Cologne that depleted the group around Marx. As we have seen, Georg Weerth – one of his most esteemed friends – emigrated to Cuba, where he gave up both political agitation and writing. Another American emigrant who on the other hand continued his political activity was Joseph Weydemeyer. Weydemeyer was born the same year as Marx, and had military training. He did not retreat an inch from his earlier ideals, but established himself as a radical journalist in the United States. Over the years, he became deeply rooted in his new homeland, taking part as a lieutenant colonel in the American Civil War before succumbing a few years later during one of the many cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, he remained an important correspondent for both Jenny and Karl. But the distance between Europe and America was difficult to bridge.

  The change that made Marx even more alone in his thoughts and actions was more extensive than these names suggest. It concerned not only the group of sympathizers who died, gave up, or emigrated to faraway lands, but ideological changes of a dimension that can b
e compared with those of the French Revolution of 1789 (or the years around 1980 in our own time).

  After 1789, violent social upheavals stood out as a fairly natural result of modern social development. It was an outlook that filled many with hope, and others with fear or aversion. The July Revolution of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848 seemed to confirm this tendency. The latter in particular – anticipated in the thoughts of so many, and which spread over Europe so quickly – strengthened these convictions.

  But the rebellion resulted in the opposite of what the revolutionaries intended. A new emperor came to power in France, insignificant in comparison to the first, and a man who only safeguarded his own power and honour. In Prussia, the king and his government came out of the battle strengthened, and the same applied to other German-dominated states. Reactionary Russia, with its despotic tsar, Nicholas I, strengthened its position on the continent, and Great Britain – the last refuge in Europe for revolutionaries – became even more vigilant against its own threats. In the revolutionary year of 1848, Chartism had experienced its last great period of growth. The activists – who again quickly increased in number – were optimistic, but the keepers of order were on their guard and every attempt at rebellion was smothered in its cradle. In addition, many Chartists were hesitant with regard to the more downright socialist slogans.4