Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The newspaper would be Marx’s chief venue for political action during the 1848 Revolution; he and his followers were often known to contemporaries as the “party of the New Rhineland News.” Supplementing his journalism, at the beginning of July, Marx began attending the meetings of the Democratic Society, Cologne’s radical political club, which Gottschalk had denounced as bourgeois. Marx and his associates quickly came to dominate the meetings in the summer and fall, and played an important role in setting its policy; Marx’s long-term Cologne supporter Heinrich Bürgers, a member of the editorial board of the New Rhineland News, was elected the club’s vice president. Like their fellow radicals across central Europe, Cologne’s democrats sought to strengthen their movement by creating regional and national federations of political clubs. Marx and Engels were leading figures at a congress of democratic clubs from the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia, held in Cologne in August 1848. After some contention with potential rivals, particularly the Bonn professor Gottfried Kinkel (at one point verging on fisticuffs), the delegates to the congress chose Marx and his associates for a majority of the positions on the directory of the district federation of democratic political clubs.39

  By the fall of 1848, Marx was an influential revolutionary, editing a newspaper with a rapidly growing circulation, and playing a significant role in local and provincial radical politics. He aspired to be a national political figure, and the New Rhineland News increasingly obtained a national readership, as can be seen from the letters to its editors, which poured in from the Bavarian provinces in the southeast, from Greifswald in Pomerania in the north, on to Königsberg in the far northeast of Prussia, and from all central European points in between. The correspondents reported on political struggles in their hometowns, asked Marx for political advice, and requested work or job recommendations. The actress wife of the newspaper’s Vienna correspondent even asked Marx to arrange a position for her in the repertory company of a German theater.40 In spite of the growing reach of his newspaper, Marx remained primarily a provincial figure, a revolutionary leader of the second rank, not quite at the level of the most prominent and influential politicians, the front-benchers in the German National Assembly meeting in Frankfurt (among whom were Marx’s onetime classmate Ludwig Simon from Trier, and his former patron Arnold Ruge) and the Prussian Constituent Assembly in Berlin. Although incapable of directly shaping events at the national level, the dynamics of the revolution ensured that Marx had ample opportunity to carry out his insurrectionary aspirations.

  In fact, the New Rhineland News was very much Marx’s newspaper. He was employed as “editor-in-chief,” with a three-year contract guaranteeing him editorial autonomy and a yearly salary of 1,500 talers—the most lucrative post he ever held, although it is unclear if he was ever paid in full, due to the newspaper’s financial difficulties. Besides his editorial contract Marx was also a powerful stockholder, so that he had created a secure and autonomous position for himself, quite unlike his unacknowledged, precarious status at the newspaper’s predecessor, at the mercy of its investors.41 The editorial offices of the New Rhineland News, one flight up at No. 17 Unter Hutmacher in the maze of narrow streets of Cologne’s old city (typesetting and printing were on the ground floor), became Marx’s political headquarters. From there, he would pursue a policy of attacking the same enemies and pursuing many of the same goals he had in 1842–43, only doing so this time in more open, vehement, and radical form.

  The New Rhineland News fired off one salvo after another denouncing the Prussian royal house, its officials and soldiers. As the Cologne police commissioner put it, Marx “allows himself each and every libel of our constitution, our king, and our highest state officials in his ever more widely read newspaper.” Just to give one example of what was inflaming the good policeman, consider a lead article from the August 9, 1848, issue. Almost parenthetically, in writing about the need for cooperation between Polish and German nationalists, Marx took on Prussian officialdom: “Where is the Rhinelander, who has not had business with a freshly imported Old Prussian state official, who has not had the opportunity to admire this incomparable, pretentious know-it-all attitude, this union of narrowness and infallibility, this crudeness that tolerates no contradiction! Among us, of course, these Old Prussian gentlemen have no . . . stick at their disposal to beat us, and, from the lack of the latter, some have died of sorrow.”42

  The 1848 Revolution was supposed to have brought Germany’s authoritarian monarchies under parliamentary control, by the Prussian Constituent Assembly in Berlin and the German National Assembly in Frankfurt. Much of the invective of the New Rhineland News focused on these revolutionary parliaments: for not being revolutionary, for not exercising popular sovereignty and bringing the pre-revolutionary authorities to heel. The Prussian Assembly, whose liberal majority declared that its purpose was “reaching agreement” with the king on a constitution, as opposed to the radical demand for writing a constitution on its own authority, was constantly mocked as the “reaching agreement assembly” or the “agreement reachers.” As for the Frankfurt Assembly, Marx wrote in November 1848, “The strictest verdict has already been issued on it—the ignoring of its decisions and—its being forgotten.” This denunciation was written at a moment of revolutionary crisis in Prussia, but in the more peaceful atmosphere of June 1848, less than two weeks after the newspaper had started publishing, Marx had already written a lead article denouncing both assemblies as Inkompetent—the German phrase meaning both incompetent but also lacking in authority and jurisdiction. Marx had nothing better to say about the new liberal governments of the individual German states, including the Prussian prime minister, Marx’s former patron, Ludolf Camphausen.43

  In place of this timorous political moderation, Marx insisted, in one of his very first articles, that the ultimate goal of the democrats would have to be the “German republic, one and indivisible,” a telling phrase from the slogan of the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The Feuilleton (the part of European newspapers devoted to serializing novels or dealing with literary and cultural matters) of the June 19, 21–22, and 26 issues of the New Rhineland News entertained its readers with a German translation of the trial of Louis XVI before the Convention: a trial ending, notoriously, in the guillotining of the monarch. Marx denounced the moderate democrats of the Frankfurt National Assembly for desiring a “republic of provincial philistines, far from all atrocities and crimes that soiled the first French Republic, free of blood and despising the red flag . . . [where] each honest burgher could lead a quiet and peaceful life in all blessedness and honorableness.” The sarcasm only underscores Marx’s own aspirations toward a rerun of 1790s revolutionary Jacobinism in 1840s Germany.44

  Marx explained that an indivisible German republic would emerge as much from “domestic conflicts as a war with the East. . . .” The war with the East, that is, with the czar, whose autocratic realm was seen by all radicals—and Marx was quite typical in this respect—as the pillar of reaction and counterrevolution in Europe, was the central element in Marx’s revolutionary strategy. Revolutionary war had made radical revolution possible in the 1790s; Marx saw a new revolutionary war as leading to the same goal. Reminiscing about the newspaper decades later after Marx’s death, Engels asserted that war with Russia and the creation of a united German republic were its two main themes. War with Russia was a constant preoccupation, from the paper’s earliest issues to its final one in May 1849, which contained a vision of an international revolutionary army marching into Eastern Europe to challenge the czar.45

  The reader might note that something seems to be missing in this account of the editorial policy of the New Rhineland News: communism. Although it was an open secret at the time that the editors were all communists, the newspaper published few denunciations of capitalists, and its lack of coverage of the nascent labor movement was striking. The language of the paper, intellectual and academic, full of foreign words and literary and historical references, ma
de it difficult for a literate but poorly educated member of the lower classes to understand. To be sure, during the 1848 Revolution newspapers were often read out loud to a crowd by someone with a better education who could explain difficult points, but the demanding style of the New Rhineland News made even that a considerable task. Unlike other left-wing newspapers in Cologne, which were designed for a popular readership, Marx’s intellectualized product aimed primarily at an educated audience.46

  It was not just lack of trying that prevented the class struggle from appearing in the New Rhineland News, as became very evident in the summer of 1848. The season began with the June Days, the fierce barricade fighting in Paris between forces of the republican government and the working-class population of the eastern part of the city. While most leftists in Germany treated the events as a tragedy, pitting a republican government against people who should have been its strongest supporters, Marx and Engels openly glorified the insurgents. They praised their failed uprising as the first step toward a future communist revolution, directed against a republican regime that was still very far from existing in Germany.

  Cologne democrats rejected Marx’s interpretation of the June Days, and after repeated criticisms from them, Marx repudiated his own writing. At the August 4, 1848, meeting of the Cologne Democratic Society, Marx gave a speech asserting that it was only through “the use of intellectual weapons” that the “interests of the individual classes” could find “a mutually agreeable compromise. . . .” Instead of class harmony, “the denial of mutual concessions, as well as perverted concepts of the relationship between the classes of the population,” had led in Paris “to a bloody outcome.” Marx went on to denounce the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship in the name of a “single class,” which his old rival Weitling had proposed in Cologne a few weeks previously, as “nonsense.” Rather, a revolutionary government would have to be made up of “heterogeneous elements” that would “reach agreement about the most appropriate form of administration through the exchange of ideas.”47

  This renunciation, even condemnation, of the class struggle, coming from the man who had just written the Communist Manifesto six months earlier, sounds, well, downright un-Marxist. The Marxist-Leninist compilers of the admirable collection of documents about the Communist League refused to believe in the authenticity of the speech, and concluded that Marx must have been misquoted.48 If he had, Marx made no attempt to correct the misapprehension. Rather, his speech fit very well with the ceaselessly anti-Prussian editorial policy of the New Rhineland News, and the newspaper’s attempts to rally all inhabitants of the Rhineland behind a policy of destroying authoritarian Prussian rule. Provoking or exploiting hostility between different social classes would only weaken such a coalition.

  This idea of temporarily renouncing anti-capitalism for anti-Prussian purposes was a point on which Marx and his True Socialist rival, Andreas Gottschalk, strongly disagreed. At the beginning of July 1848, the Prussian authorities arrested Gottschalk, on blatantly trumped-up charges, and kept him in prison until his trial and eventual acquittal in December. While Gottschalk was in jail, Marx and his followers, especially the London communists Joseph Moll and Karl Schapper, moved to take over the Cologne Workers’ Association and turn it into a vehicle for the mobilization of the workers to support such an anti-Prussian revolution. They used the meetings to educate the members on economic and political topics. How Schapper, Marx’s point man for the association, went about this can be seen from an account written by an embittered adherent of Gottschalk: “At this point citizen Schapper gave a long speech about current affairs, with historical and statistical remarks, which just about took up all the remaining time in the meeting, and added, at the conclusion, the promise, to give in the future a statistical overview of all the countries, peoples and tribes of Europe.”49

  This hostile and amusing description, which does correspond to Schapper’s oratorical style, pointed out the problem with trying to use the Workers’ Association as an educational auxiliary to the democrats. The workers themselves were not interested; under the direction of Marx and his associates, membership in the Cologne Workers’ Association dropped by over 90 percent from the level it had reached under Gottschalk’s leadership.50 Either prong of Marx’s strategy of a double recurrence of the French Revolution—a democratic revolution against Prussia, or a workers’ revolution against the bourgeoisie—had its possibilities. Combining the two proved impossible. Attacking Prussian rule meant neglecting class antagonisms; cultivating the workers’ hostility of the bourgeoisie meant ceasing to work with other democrats in Cologne and the Rhineland. The revolutionary crises of September and November 1848 offered Marx an opportunity to implement the anti-Prussian side of his revolutionary plans. By the time of the third and final crisis of the revolution, in May 1849, he had increasingly abandoned these attempts and returned to the organization of the working class that he had neglected for much of the previous year, a decision that tended to limit his insurrectionary enthusiasm.

  The crisis of September 1848 involved, as did so many other aspects of the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions, a nationalist issue: the uprising of the German inhabitants of the two northern duchies of Schleswig and Holstein against Danish rule, in which they demanded the duchies’ accession to a united German nation-state. The liberal government of Prussia had supported the insurrection with its troops; but under heavy pressure from the czar, and ignoring the protests of the German National Assembly, the Prussian government concluded an armistice with the Danes in September 1848, and dropped the cause of the insurgents. This was an issue tailor-made for Germany’s leftists, combining nationalist sentiments, opposition to the czar, and hostility to a return of the conservatives to power in Prussia. What made this situation particularly explosive in Cologne was that it coincided with a drunken brawl between civilians and soldiers of the Prussian garrison, in which the soldiers had gotten out of hand and marched through the streets assaulting passersby and smashing shop windows. Prussian soldiers would not fight the nation’s enemies but would attack their monarch’s Rhenish subjects.

  Marx, back from a combined fund-raising and agitation trip to Berlin and Vienna, moved quickly to exploit the situation. He and his friends in the Democratic Society summoned a public mass meeting to create a Committee of Public Safety in Cologne, the very name a reference to the revolutionary experience in France during the rule of the Jacobins in the 1790s. They followed up this urban meeting with one held on Fühlingen Heath in the village of Worringen, to the north of the city, where a large crowd of 7,000 to 10,000 rustics heard speakers, including Friedrich Engels (Marx, the poor public speaker, was not present), call for a Red Republic and demand that the peasants hurry to the city, when the moment came for a showdown with the Prussian soldiers.

  The moment did finally come on September 25, when the police tried to arrest a number of the radicals in Cologne, including Engels and Joseph Moll, then president of the Workers’ Association, resulting in rioting and the building of barricades. The city was briefly in a state of insurrection, but by that evening the barricades had been abandoned and the Prussian authorities instituted martial law. The Democratic Society and the Workers’ Association were shut down, and the New Rhineland News suppressed for twelve days. It had been a genuinely revolutionary moment, coinciding with uprisings in southern Germany. The strongly anti-Prussian and anti-Russian tome of events certainly fit Marx’s plans, although the nationalist undertones hardly corresponded to the contention in the Communist Manifesto that nationalism was on the way out.51

  As a result of this confrontation, both Moll and Engels had to flee the country to avoid arrest. Engels spent the subsequent months wandering through France and Switzerland, largely out of touch with Marx, definitely out of money, and at times questioning his own future. Engels’s parents bombarded their absent son with letters telling him that Marx and his fellow godless communists had dropped him, and no longer cared for him. These missives, carefully crafted
by Friedrich’s mother Elise, with whom he was on far better terms than his father, were not without effect. Nor were they entirely untrue. Both the newspaper’s investors and several of Marx’s left-wing associates, including Hermann Ewerbeck and the Cologne communist physician Karl d’Ester, wanted Marx to break with Engels, because Engels’s difficult personality had led to constant conflicts with the editorial staff. Marx went out of his way to assure his colleague that whatever other leftists may have thought, “That I could have left you in the lurch even for a minute is pure fantasy. You always remain my intimus, as I am, hopefully yours.” As for the accusations from Engels’s family, Marx ascribed them to Engels’s father, a Schweinehund. Marx even sent Engels money to support him, a reminder that the future flow of funds in their relationship, in the opposite direction, was by no means preordained.52

  Martial law in Cologne was lifted on October 3; the Democratic Society and the Workers’ Association resumed meeting and the New Rhineland News began publishing again a week later. If he was lacking two of his close associates, Marx nonetheless had the institutional resources to meet the next major political crisis in November, when Friedrich Wilhelm IV sent the army to dissolve the Prussian Constituent Assembly in Berlin. Before the soldiers could carry out his royal will, the deputies voted to call on Prussian citizens to boycott paying taxes, until their elected representatives could freely carry out their deliberations.