When the government censor closed the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843, Marx accepted an offer to edit another radical paper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and moved to Paris with his new wife.
In the 1840s Paris was the center of both revolutionary politics and socialist thought. Marx met a number of critical socialist thinkers there, many of whom he would later quarrel with. He also began two new scholarly projects: a historical account of the French Revolution and an extended critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law and the state. By the end of 1843 he had combined Hegel’s dialectic with the historical model of the French Revolution to create a new concept of history as a process of transformation fueled by the struggle between two classes. In a capitalist society the wage-dependent proletariat would be the catalyst for change.
Marx didn’t stay in Paris for long. In 1844 the Prussian government issued a warrant for his arrest as well as for other editors of the radical paper. Expelled from Paris, the Marx family moved to Brussels, where they lived until 1848.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
Unlike Marx, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) had personal experience with both capitalism and the effects of industrialization on the lives of the working class. The son and grandson of successful German textile manufacturers, Engels was born in the industrial town of Barmen, home to the first spinning machines in Germany. Friedrich Sr. was determined that his son would learn the textile business and join the family firm.
Furthering His Education
In 1838 Friedrich Sr. pulled Engels out of school and sent him to Bremen to work as a clerk in an export office, the nineteenth-century equivalent of getting an MBA. Away from his father’s Protestant fundamentalism, Engels spread his wings and set out to educate himself. He read voraciously: philosophy, history, science, and the novels that were a forbidden frivolity at home. He wrote poetry, wrote theater and opera reviews, and did travel sketches. He joined a singing society, composed some music, and attended concerts by Franz Liszt. He also visited a ship that was sailing for America and was appalled by the difference between the first-class cabin and steerage. The first-class cabin was “elegant and comfortably furnished, like an aristocratic salon, in mahogany ornamented with gold.” In steerage people were “packed in like the paving-stones in the streets.”
In 1841 Engels left Bremen to complete his year of military service in Berlin. Still eager to educate himself, he chose Berlin because he hoped to attend lectures at the university while fulfilling his service requirements. Like Marx before him, he soon fell in with the Young Hegelians. He also met Moses Hess, who convinced him that communism was the logical outcome of the Hegelian dialectic.
Manchester, England
The following year Engels was sent to Manchester, where his father had a financial interest in a large textile factory. He worked in the factory as a clerk for almost two years, but he devoted his evenings to his own interests. Shocked by the conditions under which the English working classes lived and worked, he began to explore the city. He soon became involved with a young Irishwoman who worked in the Ermen & Engels factory, Mary Burns. (They married two years later.) With her sister, Mary became his guide to the parts of the city that a German manufacturer’s son would never have found on his own. Together, they met with trade unionists, socialists, and other radicals. In what was left of his days he studied the English political economists, including David Ricardo.
Engels used the material he gathered to write two articles on social and economic conditions in Manchester that appeared in Marx’s Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. (He later returned to the subject in his classic study of urban conditions during the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England.) The articles included an early version of the Marxist critique of classical economics that stands at the heart of Capital.
Classical Economics
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Karl Marx dubbed the British school of political economics that began with Adam Smith and reached its maturity in the writing of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill “classical economics.” Marx’s critique of capitalism builds on their ideas about economic growth, free trade, and the labor theory of value, and uses many of the same model-building tools.
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A Friendship with Marx
On his way home to Barmen in 1844 Engels stopped in Paris to see Marx, whom he had met earlier in Cologne. The brief stop stretched into ten days of continuous conversation. Engels later wrote, “When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844 we found ourselves in complete agreement on questions of theory and our collaboration began at that time.”
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
The Philosophy of Scientific Socialism
Marx and Engels had been intellectually moving in the same direction before they met one another in 1844. Their first major collaboration was a series of essays later published as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Both were greatly influenced in their philosophic approach by the philosophy of Georg Hegel.
Hegelian philosophy was the dominant philosophical system in Germany in the 1830s and 1840s. The central idea in Hegelian thought is the dialectic, which is often summed up in three words: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Put simply, the conflict between two opposing views (thesis and antithesis) results in change (synthesis). The dialectic is a dynamic process: once a synthesis is produced, it becomes a thesis, which inevitably brings forth its own antithesis.
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822–1823) Hegel applied the concept of the dialectic to the development of history, demonstrating how conflicting intellectual forces turn old societies into new ones. In his view history was the story of the progressive development of humanity from a state of savagery toward the ultimate goals of reason and freedom through the action of what Hegel called the “world spirit.” The great men of history were those whose personal aims coincided with the dialectical movement of their times.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Marx agreed with Hegel that history is a dialectical process and that change is consequently inevitable, but he didn’t believe that the motive force for change was Hegel’s abstract “world spirit.” According to Marx, the history of civilization is the history of class conflicts, and the end result will be communism.
Marx identifies five stages of economic development in history: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism, which transitions into communism. In each of these stages, except for socialism/communism, there are inherent contradictions that make revolution inevitable. At some point in each stage of development the dominant mode of production (thesis) in a society comes into conflict with the society’s existing relationships (antithesis), which are in themselves a product of the mode of production. What was once productive turns into shackles. Social revolution follows, creating a social system based on a different mode of production (synthesis).
This succession of conflicts will end with the arrival of socialism. Since there will no longer be private ownership of the means of production, there will no longer be the tension and contradictions of class divisions to fuel the dialectical movement of history. After capitalism falls there will be a period of transition to this new society, called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” followed by socialism, the first stage of communism.
THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848
Europe Aflame
On January 12, 1848, the people of Palermo, Sicily, rose up against their ruler, Ferdinand II. It was the first of almost fifty revolutions that rocked Europe in the first four months of 1848. Armed rebellions occurred in France, Austria, Prussia, and most of the smaller German and Italian states. There was no single revolutionary organization or movement; no concerted effort across state lines. But the revolutions shared a strong resemblance as middle classes, proletariat, and peasantry united against absolutism and the remains of feudal privilege.
THE “HUNGRY FORTIES”
Economic conditions in Europe deteriorated throughout the 1840s. The wi
despread failure of grain crops created food shortages across Europe, made worse by the potato blight that lasted from 1845 to 1849. Grain prices increased by 100 to 150 percent over the course of two years, drastically affecting the standard of living for both peasants and workers in the cities, who typically spent 70 percent of their income on food. Food riots were common, escalating into violence directed at local landlords, tax collectors, and mill owners.
The crisis in agriculture was accompanied by industrial and financial collapse. Overproduction led to falling prices for manufactured goods, business failures among shopkeepers and wholesale merchants, and widespread unemployment. Bankruptcies and bank closings increased.
Irish Potato Famine
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Ireland wasn’t the only country hit by the potato blight in 1845, but it was the hardest hit. In the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers had pushed the native Irish into western Ireland. The land was too wet to grow grain, so they lived almost entirely on potatoes. When the crop failed in 1845, they had no food reserves.
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Europe in Upheaval
A month after the revolt in Palermo the Paris mob overthrew Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy. The February Revolution in France triggered rebellions across Central Europe. In the German states uprisings appeared first in the Austrian Empire, then in many of the lesser German states, and finally in Prussia. At the same time revolutions spread through the Italian peninsula, from Palermo into Sardinia, Tuscany, the Papal States, and finally those parts of Italy that were under Austrian control.
Although the rebellions had their roots in the economic disasters of the “Hungry Forties,” they quickly escalated into reaction against the suppression of liberalism, constitutionalism, and nationalism that marked European politics in the post–Napoleonic era. Socialists flocked to the German states in particular to take part in what is sometimes described as the “revolution of the intellectuals.”
Frightened monarchs learned from Louis-Philippe’s mistakes and gave in to revolutionary demands for constitutions, representative assemblies, and an expansion of personal freedoms. Only the unlucky Louis-Philippe lost his throne, though some of the more unpopular ministers were sent into exile.
By the end of April 1848 Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, writing to Queen Victoria, could say with only slight exaggeration, “What remains standing in Europe? Great Britain and Russia.” For a brief time it appeared that the revolutionaries had won.
Areas the Revolution Missed
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Tsar Nicholas wasn’t entirely accurate in his assessment. Spain and the Scandinavian countries went untouched, while Great Britain suffered its own mild version of revolution in the form of a Chartist revival. The People’s Charter, a six-point petition for many of the freedoms demanded by European revolutionaries in 1848, had been presented to Parliament unsuccessfully twice before, in 1838 and 1842.
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THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
In 1848 Louis-Philippe, the “citizen king” who took the throne following the revolution of 1830, still ruled France. The first years of his reign, known as the July Monarchy, were a clear victory of popular sovereignty over absolute monarchy. Social and political power shifted from the traditional aristocracy to the wealthy bourgeoisie, whom Louis-Philippe resembled in tastes and habits. Censorship was abolished and the National Guard restored. Catholicism was no longer the official religion. The voting age was reduced and the property qualification lowered, effectively doubling the electorate.
Nonetheless, there was plenty of warning that trouble was on the way. Food shortages, a rising cost of living, and widespread unemployment led to an increasing number of working-class demonstrations during the winter of 1847–1848.
In 1847, frustrated in their efforts to pass changes through normal legislative means and forbidden by law from holding political meetings, opposition leaders organized dinner parties to promote the cause of reform. Seventy banquets were held over the course of the winter, attended by members of the parliamentary opposition and republicans who accepted the institution of the constitutional monarchy. The campaign was scheduled to end with a bang: a procession followed by a large banquet on February 22 in Paris. The evening before the banquet, fearing violence, François Guizot’s government banned both the dinner and the procession.
The Revolt
The following day, crowds of students and workers gathered in the streets. At first the police were able to disperse the crowds without difficulty. As the day went on, though, the crowds began to push back.
The revolt lasted only four days. At first Louis-Philippe refused to take the demonstrations seriously. On the second day members of the National Guard joined the demonstrators, and the crowd erected barricades in the streets. By the end of the day things had escalated too much for the king to ignore. He had two choices: bloodshed or appeasement. Louis-Philippe had seen the mob in action during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830. He chose appeasement and dismissed his chief minister. The gesture was a classic example of too little, too late. By February 24 things had gotten so bad in the capital that the king abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson, the Count of Paris, and fled to England.
A New Government
With the revolutionaries in control of Paris and the king in flight, the Chamber of Deputies set aside an attempt by the king’s daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d’Orléans, to have herself named regent for the Count of Paris. Instead, the Chamber selected a provisional government of moderate republicans for the newly born Second French Republic. At the same time the radical republicans chose their own provisional government. After more negotiations the two bodies reached a compromise and added three members of the radical faction to the moderate government, including socialist political philosopher Louis Blanc (1811–1882).
The Organization of Labor
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Louis Blanc believed workers had a basic right to work and earn a decent living. He suggested the formation of “social workshops” as a step toward a fully cooperative society. His work The Organization of Labor (1839) influenced the demands of Paris laborers in the Revolutions of 1848.
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Over the course of four months the division between the moderate and radical factions of the provisional government deepened. The moderates, supported by a majority of the French people, were primarily concerned with the questions of political reform that Louis-Philippe and his ministers refused to consider. The radicals, backed by working-class Paris, wanted social reforms, particularly improved conditions for workers.
The Right to Work
One of the primary demands of the Paris mob during the February Revolution was the right to work. Having helped to establish a new government, they expected it to provide work for everyone who wanted it.
The provisional government announced the establishment of “National Workshops” based on Blanc’s proposal in The Organization of Labor. Blanc proposed autonomous cooperative workshops, controlled by the workers themselves, as the first step in a socialist transformation of society. Under the direction of the conservative minister of public works, Alexandre-François Vivien, the National Workshops became a relief project designed to keep the Paris mob from rising in revolt again. Enrollment in the National Workshops grew from 10,000 in March to roughly 120,000 in June. Many of the unemployed were put to work on road construction projects. Since there were more unemployed than there were roads to build, the surplus laborers were paid a small stipend.
National Elections
The split between Paris and the rest of France was demonstrated clearly on April 23, when the new republic went to the polls to elect representatives to the National Assembly, which would draw up the constitution. Out of nine hundred seats, five hundred went to moderate republicans and only one hundred to the radicals. To everyone’s surprise the remaining three hundred seats went to avowed monarchists. Alarmed by radical threats to personal property, the peasants and the bourgeoisi
e had united against the radical republicans and the Paris proletariat.
June Days
The workers of Paris took to the streets once more on May 15. At first it looked like a repetition of the February Revolution. The crowd stormed the hall where the delegates were meeting, listened to speeches by the leaders of two of the revolutionary clubs, moved on to the Hôtel de Ville, and elected a provisional government.
Unlike Louis-Philippe, the newly elected executive committee of the Second Republic acted decisively. The National Guard cleared the assembly hall and reoccupied the Hôtel de Ville. Several of the leaders were jailed, and the revolutionary clubs were closed down.
On June 22, hoping to forestall further violence from the left, the government closed the National Workshops, which were essentially a proletarian army waiting for a leader. The decision backfired. Suddenly cut off from the payroll, thousands of workers took up arms.
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