Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The second, rather shorter essay Marx wrote for the Rhineland News was couched in a more defensive tone, and dealt with the touchy issue of the atheism of the Young Hegelians.31 The occasion was a lead article in the Cologne News that had denounced its competitor for publishing such material and had called on the censors to prohibit these offenses to religious sensibility. Cleverly, the Cologne News presented its advocacy of censorship as a defense of freedom of the press, asserting that the anti-religious excesses of the Young Hegelians were discrediting the cause of press freedom. This assertion made a reply trickier than in the essay on freedom of the press. Marx could not just attack a Prussian government unpopular among Cologne’s and the Rhineland’s Catholics; he also had to mollify those Catholics’ religious sensibilities. He himself was keenly aware of this problem. Right after finishing his article, he wrote to Arnold Ruge, “On the Rhine, the religious element is the most dangerous. The opposition has in recent times become too accustomed to carrying out its opposition in the church.”32

  Marx asserted that “hatred of Protestant theology against philosophers” was the reason Prussian authorities opposed Strauss and Feuerbach for daring to “regard Catholic dogmas as Christian ones.” In other words, not atheism, but a pro-Catholic attitude was the problem the Prussian government and its theological spokesmen had with the Young Hegelians. After appealing to St. Augustine, and pointing out that the Pope had refused to join the Holy Alliance, the counterrevolutionary league of European states emerging following the defeat of Napoleon—and so suggesting that Catholics were by no means required to support conservative governments for religious reasons—Marx went on to describe the “Christian state,” a favorite phrase of conservatives in Germany, as one favoring a particular Christian confession, like in Ireland. He was portraying the Catholics of the Rhineland as being oppressed by a Protestant Prussian government, just as the Irish Catholics were oppressed by the Protestant government of England, a popular analogy among Rhenish Catholics of the time. As soon as a state granted different religious confessions equal rights, Marx suggested, it was no longer Christian but philosophical, a “realization of reasoned freedom . . . a work that philosophy completes.”33

  Marx was attempting to rework and redefine his political and philosophical principles to appeal to a potentially hostile audience. Downplaying the atheism of the Young Hegelians, he emphasized instead their opposition to a conservative—and also Protestant—Prussia for his audience of Rhenish Catholics, and impugned the motives of the Young Hegelians’ opponents for that audience as well. It was an eminently political performance implying a change of course for the Young Hegelian radicals. Another way to put it would be that the essay reflected the thinking of someone in charge of a larger political enterprise—a newspaper editor, for example.

  IT WAS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear by the summer of 1842 that the Rhineland News was going to need a better editor. The venture in oppositional publishing was running into steadily mounting hostility from the Prussian government. The news that Rutenberg, a notorious Young Hegelian already under police surveillance in Berlin, was to become the new editor, infuriated the minister of the interior, and he insisted that under no circumstances could Rutenberg be allowed to work for the paper. So, officially, the editor remained the newspaper’s publisher, but Rutenberg worked informally. By May 1842, the interior minister was demanding the immediate suppression of the Rhineland News for “propagating French-liberal ideas” and for being a “decisive organ of Young Hegelian propaganda . . . [that] professes the non-belief of the Halle Yearbooks and the opinion that contemporary philosophy will replace Christianity.” The Cologne district governor and the Rhenish provincial governor both spoke out against such a drastic measure, fearing it would make a bad impression on the educated public, even those members who did not share the paper’s views. They suggested that the affluent investors would moderate the editorial policy, or perhaps grow tired of funding the deficit and let the Rhineland News go out of existence. Eventually, the Prussian central government agreed to wait until December to see if the editorial tone would change or if the newspaper would cease altogether.34

  These official calculations were not without justification. Readership of the Rhineland News had been growing steadily since its appearance; postal subscriptions, the chief way to purchase the newspaper, almost quadrupled from 264 in the first quarter of 1842 to 1,027 by the end of the third quarter. This was a respectable record, but badly overshadowed by the Cologne News, whose press run of 8,500 far exceeded its upstart competitor; the difference was particularly noticeable in Cologne itself, where most of the investors resided. They were beginning to wonder about their money, since within six months of the founding of the Rhineland News about three quarters of their investment had been spent, but the newspaper was still far from a breakeven point of 2,500 subscriptions.35

  The usual account of the situation puts the blame on Adolf Rutenberg, described as an incompetent alcoholic. Most of these negative opinions came from Marx himself, who, as Rutenberg’s successor, was not an entirely objective witness.36 Rutenberg did have a reputation as a heavy drinker and was said to have lost a position as geography teacher at the Royal Prussian Military Academy as a result. But he had his accomplishments. Circulation was rising; Rutenberg was going about the business of recruiting correspondents, and was an able copyeditor. What he did not provide, though, was strong intellectual guidance to the newspaper. He never wrote a single article himself, and editorial policy was set primarily by Robert Jung and Moses Hess, who had dropped his legal action and returned to the newspaper following the resignation of Höfken.37

  Both Hess and Jung were proponents of Marx. Hess’s opinion of Marx was high indeed. The two men became acquainted in Bonn in the summer of 1841, after Marx’s return to the Rhineland. After their meeting, Hess described Marx as “my idol . . . he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most cutting wit; imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel united in one person . . . then you have Dr. Marx.” Jung’s praise was less rhapsodic—how could it not be—but he passed on to Marx his endorsement of a letter he had received from Eduard Meyen, one of the Berlin Young Hegelians, encouraging Marx to work for the Rhineland News: “Will not Marx soon come forth and show what he really has in him?”38

  It seems likely that Hess and Jung were behind Marx’s hiring by the Rhineland News in mid-October 1842. Marx did not replace Rutenberg as the editor, as biographies often assert. While he did receive an employment contract—which must have been personally very welcome, in view of his need to find work in order to marry Jenny—Engelbert Renard remained the official editor, and Rutenberg continued to work for the paper as copyeditor and translator of articles from the French press. Hess and Jung brought Marx on board to reinforce their editorial role; he would use the talents he had shown in his articles on freedom of the press to present a more vigorous and active editorial policy, to help continue the circulation increase and to convince the investors to refinance the newspaper.

  Marx certainly did take energetic action when he joined the editorial staff, but not what Jung or especially Hess, had in mind. His editorial plans were already expressed in a letter, reading very much like a job application, sent to Dagobert Oppenheim in August or September 1842. Marx planned to tone down the newspaper. Young Hegelian “general theoretical considerations on the constitution of the state” would be eliminated, since Young Hegelian political radicalism, and the atheistic ideas to which it was integrally linked, were alienating “the largest portion of free-thinking practical men, who have undertaken the laborious task of fighting for freedom step by step, within constitutional limits”—in other words, Cologne’s and the Rhineland’s bourgeois liberals who were financing the newspaper, and whose further support would be needed to keep it in business. A moderation of tone would be necessary for the Prussian authorities as well, to avoid the danger of “a tightening of the censorship or even the suppression of the newspaper,” a
fate, Marx noted, that had befallen earlier radical opposition journals. To enforce these tasks, a strong editorial hand would be needed that would direct the journalists working for the newspaper, and not leave the tone of articles up to their authors.39

  Once appointed to the editorial staff, Marx moved to implement his plan. He assiduously courted liberal members of the bourgeoisie, getting chamber of commerce president Ludolf Camphausen to produce articles criticizing the Prussian government’s handling of the financing of railroad construction, and the physician Heinrich Claessen, a prominent Cologne liberal, to write a series on the reform of municipal government. Marx worked closely with one of the journalists Rutenberg had recruited, Karl Heinrich Brüggemann, a onetime student radical, who was tending toward more moderate politics. In collaboration with Marx, Brüggemann wrote a number of pieces strongly advocating free trade and denouncing protectionism, producing a clear position for the Rhineland News on this point in contrast to the vacillation and temporization that had characterized its past stances. This support for free trade was the most important social and economic cause that the Rhineland News advocated while Marx was involved in its editorial work, and it left a strong impression on Marx.40 Even after he became a communist, he would continue to be an adherent of free trade.

  Marx’s efforts to tone down the Young Hegelianism of the Rhineland News led to a clash with his university friends and his patron Bruno Bauer over the existence—or reputed existence—in Berlin of a “Society of Free Men,” a Young Hegelian group advocating atheism and calling on supporters to leave the Christian churches. The group’s attitudes, and their practice of demonstrating them in alcoholic fashion in Berlin’s taverns, had already been an embarrassment for the Rhineland News in the summer of 1842, and in November of that year the Young Hegelians’ chief organizer, Arnold Ruge, accused the Free Men of being dilettantes and lacking the moral seriousness needed to bring about political change in Germany. Marx, who thoroughly agreed, proceeded to publish a letter attacking, in similar vein, the Berlin Young Hegelians’ “revolutionary romanticism, their addiction to their own genius, their dubious seeking of fame. . . .”41 Both Marx and Ruge had hoped that their criticisms would spare Bruno Bauer, whom they regarded as too sensible to take part in such antics; but Bauer identified with the Free Men and wrote a sharp and offended reply to Marx. Future attempts by Marx and Ruge to work with Bauer proved ultimately unsuccessful, and less than two years after the blowup, Marx would refer to Bauer as “my long-term friend, who is now estranged. . . .”42

  Certainly, issues of individual personalities were involved in this break: Bauer, Ruge, and Marx were all touchy and easily offended. But controversy over the Free Men pointed to a broader, fundamental difference of opinion within the ranks of the Young Hegelians over the question of what it meant to be a radical. For the Free Men, radicalism was about lifestyles and the rejection of social conventions, both exemplified by their public avowal of atheism. For Marx and Ruge, on the other hand, radicalism was about political change; and without denying the Young Hegelians’ criticism of religious orthodoxy, they sought to downplay it in public, and to move toward a criticism of the social and political circumstances that encouraged and enforced this orthodoxy. The differences were not insurmountable and it was clearly possible to move between the two camps—Marx’s future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels was one of the Free Men—but the development of two separate and distinct paths of radicalism was clear.43

  The trickiest editorial task for Marx, at which he was least successful, was dealing with the Prussian government. Even the moderate course he was trying to take offended the authorities. As part of the new pro–free trade editorial policy, the newspaper published an attack on Russia’s economic protectionism, pointing out how it harmed Prussian interests. The government perceived the articles as an attack on the czar, the king of Prussia’s friend and ally.44 This official unwillingness to meet the Rhineland News halfway only encouraged Marx’s tendency not to restrain himself. His two articles on the debates in the Provincial Diet concerning a law against wood theft were so hostile to the institution of the Diet that the infuriated provincial governor demanded the subversive editor be fired; only, unaware of Marx’s new editorial position, he blamed Rutenberg, who duly lost his job.45

  Marx also made it a practice to bait the official Prussian censors, often midlevel bureaucrats without a university education, who had a hard time understanding the articles in the Rhineland News. They would strike quite innocent pieces and allow more subversive ones to appear in print, putting the government in the odd position of denouncing the newspaper for publishing material that had passed its own censorship. Well aware of this problem, Marx worked captiously to emphasize it. With feigned innocence he asked the resident censor at the paper, Police Councilor Laurenz Dolleschall, a man whose intellectual capacities were not remotely in Marx’s league, who could conceivably have written the article attacking the Provincial Diet—a snarky remark that was quickly retailed around in Cologne. In a more public move, he refused to submit the page proofs to Dolleschall one day, forcing the latter to leave the Provincial Governor’s Ball late in the evening and come to Marx’s apartment asking for them. Marx bellowed out the window that there were no proofs, because the newspaper was not publishing the next day, publicly humiliating the censor.46

  Marx continued this baiting at a higher level, taking on the provincial governor. Writing in the name of Renard, the official editor of the Rhineland News, he responded to the governor’s condemnation of the newspaper’s new policy by presenting it as a pro-Prussian enterprise, “help[ing] to pave the path to progress on which Prussia is leading the rest of Germany. . . .” Far from spreading pro-French ideas, the newspaper was bringing forth a “German liberalism that can certainly not be unpleasant to the government of Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth.” Indeed, Marx continued, his newspaper was the first “to bring the north German spirit, the Protestant spirit, into the Rhineland and southern Germany. . . .” Rather than being irreligious, the Rhineland News was following in the footsteps of Martin Luther in opposing “church dogmas.” These remarks drew on ideas the Young Hegelians had espoused in the mid-1830s about the progressive role of the Prussian state and its close connections to Hegelian philosophy. By the following decade, when the born-again new monarch had denounced both progress and Hegel, and the Young Hegelians had become republicans and atheists, the remarks were a provocation—as contemporaries understood very well.47

  The new editorial policy Marx implemented proved eminently successful. The upward trend in circulation accelerated, reaching 3,300 subscribers by early 1843, well past the breakeven point. Encouraged by the good news on circulation and attracted by the new content of the paper, the investors proved willing to put in additional funds.48 Whether Marx’s sarcastic and provocative attitude would mollify the Prussian authorities—a central element of his plans for the newspaper—was another matter.

  BY MARX’S OWN TESTIMONY, it was during his editorial tenure at the Rhineland News that he first came into contact with the “social question,” the debate of the condition of the lower classes, that led to the genesis of his communist ideas.49 In some ways, it is hard to argue with Marx’s own reminiscences on that point. While Marx had some earlier exposure to the theories of Henri de Saint-Simon from Eduard Gans, and even Johann Ludwig von Westphalen, he first studied socialist ideas intensively when he was living in Cologne in the fall of 1842. It was there that he published his first observations on socialism and communism. In his two article series on the debates in the Rhineland Provincial Diet concerning a new law about wood theft and on the difficult economic conditions in his native Moselle Valley, Marx dealt publicly with economic and social issues for the first time. Drawing a straight line between these early investigations and writings and Marx’s later communist theories, though, would be quite misleading.

  While this point is lost in most biographies, Marx also mentioned in his reminiscences that the debate
s about free trade and protectionism were an important impetus for his growing concern about economics. The pro–free market stance he took on this debate as editor of the Rhineland News also colored his discussion of the travails of the Moselle Valley winegrowers and other members of the rural lower classes in western Germany. Marx largely placed the blame for their condition on the policies of the Prussian government and the actions of its officials—not on capitalists or the market economy. His initial public pronouncements on the topic of communism were hardly favorable; if anything, they were distinctly anti-communist. Indeed, the version of communism that Marx would adopt was shaped by his opposition to many of the aspects of it that he learned about in 1842.

  Moses Hess had been running a weekly discussion circle and reading group in Cologne on communism and the social question since the summer of that year. Its members were an oddly mixed bunch. There were Young Hegelians, such as Robert Jung, and future communist activists, including the physician Karl d’Ester and the Prussian artillery officer Friedrich (Fritz) Anneke, both of whom would work with Marx during the 1848 Revolution. But other participants were not so far to the left: the industrialist’s son and future liberal political leader Gustav Mevissen, a friend of Jung’s at the time, also courting Jung’s sister; the pro–free trade journalist Karl Heinrich Brüggemann (who would become editor of the Cologne News in 1845, when it switched to a liberal political stance); or the attorney Gustav Compes, another future Cologne liberal politician. Chamber of commerce president Ludolf Camphausen may have been an occasional participant.50 When Marx moved to Cologne in October 1842 to take up his editorial position on the Rhineland News, he joined the discussion group. Their precise readings are unknown, but they may have included some of the contemporary French socialists, such as Victor Considérant, Pierre Leroux, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.51