III Years of Agitation and Varying Fortunes
I. The Revolutionary Spirit of the Forties
Marx was a revolutionary not only in the sense that he was the representative of a new conception of society and the founder of a theory of a new economic order, but also in the popular sense of advocating the use of force, in which connection he looked to the first years of the French Revolution as a model. He had a keen ear for the revolutionary rumblings in the depths of the populace. The years during which the elements of his new conception of society were accumulating in his mind and shaping themselves into a system were involved in a revolutionary atmosphere. In 1842 England witnessed the first strike on a large scale, which threatened to extend into a general strike and bore a political revolutionary character. In 1843 and 1844 the idea of the impending revolution was widely spread in England. Insurrections broke out among the Silesian weavers in 1844. In 1845 and 1846 Socialism spread rapidly on all sides in Germany, and Socialist periodicals appeared in the industrial centres. France swarmed with Socialist systems, Socialist novels and newspaper articles. The spectre of Communism was abroad in Europe. The convention of the United Assembly by Frederick William IV. at the beginning of February, 1847, was looked upon as the harbinger of the German Revolution. The connection between these phenomena could not escape acute intellects. Hand in hand with the extension of industry and the rapid construction of railways and telegraphs came alternations of economic prosperity and crisis, poverty grew, and the workers fought with ever-increasing bitterness against the iron law of wages and against the scanty pay, which hardly allowed the proletariat to eke out a bare subsistence. The cry in England was: “More factories, more poverty,” but at the same time: “The greater the political rights of the masses, the surer becomes emancipation.” Whoever lived in England and France during these years and had dealings with Socialism could not help feeling that political and social revolutions were on the march.
Already in his first letter to Ruge, written from Holland in March, 1843, Marx deals with the coming revolution, and foresees, to the astonishment of Ruge, who refused to believe it, that the Government of Frederick William IV. was drifting towards a revolution. At that time Marx had hardly begun his studies in Socialism; and the further he advanced in these studies, elaborating his social dialectics and evolving the ideas of the class struggle, the more inevitably was he driven to the conclusion that the proletarian revolution, the seizure of political power by the proletariat, was the indispensable preliminary to the triumph of Communism.
Utopian Socialism stood outside the State and attempted to set up a Socialist Commonwealth apart from the State and behind the back of the State. Utopianism, with its moral and religious motives and mediæval Communist traditions, was pervaded with that spirit of contempt for the State which was characteristic of the Catholic Church during the period of its splendour. Moreover Marx, who recognised all practical forms of power, even if he did not always estimate them at their true value, saw in the State an executive power which it was a question of overturning and using as an extremely powerful instrument in the social revolution. As a result of his excursions into politics and French and English Socialism, Marx gave up Hegel’s overstrained idea of the State and accepted the view current in Western European thought of the time; but he interpreted the State in the sense of the doctrine of the class struggle as the executive council of the ruling and possessing classes.
The impressions, the ideas, the experiences and the modes of thinking which took root in the mind of Marx during the evolution of the fundamental principles of his sociological and historical system dominated the whole of his life’s work.
Marxism is quite a natural growth of the revolutionary soil of the first half of the nineteenth century. Marx completes the social revolutionary doctrines of that time, of which he is, as it were, the executor. All his thoughts and sentiments are deeply rooted in it; they have nothing specifically Jewish about them. I know of no Jewish philosopher, sociologist, or poet who had so little of the Jewish character as had Marx.
II. The Communist Manifesto
As in Paris, so too in Brussels, Marx frequented the society of German working men in order to instruct them by lectures and by conversation. He was loyally seconded by Engels, who had more time and more money to devote to this task, and who worked for the new doctrine in Paris, Cologne, Elberfeld and other towns. Since 1836 the German working men living abroad had been organised in the League of the Just, which from 1840 had its head-quarters in London. The individual groups were kept in touch with one another by means of Communist correspondence committees. The Paris and Brussels groups drew the attention of the London Committee to Marx, and in January, 1847, Joseph Moll, one of its members, was commissioned to go to Brussels and obtain information about Marx.—(“Mehring’s Introduction to the Reprint of the Cologne Communist Proceedings,” published by Vorwärts, Berlin, 1914, pp. 10-11.) The result was the transformation of the League of the Just into the League of Communists, which held its first Congress in London in the summer of 1847, Engels and Wilhelm Wolff (Lupus) being among those present as delegates. At the second Congress, held in London towards the end of November and beginning of December, 1847, Marx also appeared, and together with Engels was commissioned to prepare a new program. The new program is the Communist Manifesto. Engels had come from Paris, Marx from Brussels. Before leaving Paris, Engels wrote a letter to Marx, dated November 24, in which he speaks as follows on the subject of the Manifesto:
“Just think over the confession of faith a little. I believe it will be best if we leave out the form of catechism and entitle the thing ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ And then, as more or less of it will consist in historical narrative, the present form is quite unsuitable. I am bringing along the manuscript which I have written; it is a plain narrative, but is badly put together, and has been done in a frightful hurry. I begin, ‘What is Communism?’ and then straight away with the proletariat—the history of its origin, difference from earlier workers, development of the antagonism of the proletariat and the middle class, crises, conclusions, with all kinds of secondary considerations thrown in, and lastly party politics of the Communists, as much as is good for the public to know.”—(“Correspondence of Marx and Engels,” Vol. I., p. 84.)
Engels’ draft of the Communist Manifesto has been edited by Eduard Bernstein.—(“Grundsätze des Kommunismus,” published by Vorwärts, 1914.) A comparison of this draft with the actual “Communist Manifesto” makes evident the full extent of Marx’s intellectual superiority to Engels. The Communist Manifesto contains four main groups of ideas: (1) The history of the evolution of the middle class, its character, its positive and negative achievement—modern capitalism and the rise of the proletariat. (2) Theoretical conceptions and conclusions—the doctrine of the class struggle and the rôle of the proletariat. (3) Practical application—revolutionary action by the Communists. (4) Criticism of other Socialist schools. The last section has long ago lost all practical interest, so that we need only deal with the first three sections.
(1) The middle class developed in the bosom of feudal society, in the mediæval industrial towns. With the geographical discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its sphere of activity was extended; it revolutionised the methods of industry, agriculture and communication; it broke through the mediæval economic and political bonds; it overthrew feudalism, the guilds, the little self-governing regions, absolute monarchy, and established modern industry with its accelerated and concentrated production, middle-class franchise, the national State, and, at the same time, international trade. It was the middle class which first showed what human activity can accomplish. “It has achieved greater miracles than the construction of Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, or Gothic cathedrals, it has carried out greater movements than the migration of peoples or the crusades.... Although it is scarcely a century since it came to be the dominating class, the middle class has created more powerful and more gigantic forces of production than all past generations put together.” The subjugation of natural forces, machinery, the application of chemistry to industry and to agriculture, steamships, railways, electric telegraphs, the clearing of whole continents, making the rivers navigable, the conjuring forth of whole peoples out of the ground: that is the positive achievement of the middle class. Now for the negative: it created the proletariat, immeasurable, uncontrollable, anarchical economic conditions, periodical crises—poverty and famine in consequence of over-production and a glut of wealth, over-driving and reckless exploitation of the workers, whose labour is bought in exchange for the minimum quantity of the necessaries of life. These facts show that the forces of production are more extensive and more powerful than is demanded by the conditions under which they are operative: the economic system can produce and deliver more goods than society can use under the existing laws concerning property, i.e., the distribution and the effective demand fall short of the manufacture and the supply. The material forces of production press upon the limits imposed upon them by the laws of private property. This happens, too, because the working class must reduce its consumption of goods to a minimum in consequence of the existing laws of property, which give to capital the right of distribution. All these conditions taken together, the positive as well as the negative ones, make possible and give rise to the struggles of the workers against the middle class—and so the productive agents rise in rebellion. These struggles lead to the organisation of the workers in trade unions, to the awakening of class consciousness, and, as a result, to the formation of the political labour party.
(2) The movements within middle-class society, as well as in feudal and ancient society, where freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman, capitalist and working man stood and stand in constant antagonism to one another, prove that the whole history of mankind since the rise of private ownership is the history of class struggles, and that in these class struggles, carried on now openly, now under the surface, either new forms of society and of ownership, new economic systems arise or else end with the common destruction of the two classes. The antagonistic classes are supporters of conflicting economic interests, systems of ownership and ideals of culture. The craftsman and tradesman of the towns, the burgher, fought against the feudal lord and knight for individual property, for freedom of industry and trade, for freedom to dispose of personal property and for the national State. With the triumphal progress of the middle class private property fell into fewer and fewer hands. The proletarians are without property, they have no share in the wealth of their country; on the other hand, the production of capital becomes more and more a matter of common co-operation, and capital becomes a joint product. The proletariat can, accordingly, no longer fight for individual ownership but for the socially conducted utilisation of the means of production belonging to the community and of the goods produced. The middle class has therefore created in the proletariat a social class which must have as its object to do away with the middle class system of ownership and to set up the proletarian system of common ownership.
(3) In this struggle of the working classes the Communists are therefore the pioneers of the movement. They are at once the philosophers and the self-sacrificing champions of the proletariat awakened into class consciousness. “The Communists are not a special party in contradistinction to the other Labour parties. They have no interests apart from the interests of the whole proletariat. They set up no special principles according to which they wish to mould the proletarian movement.” The Communists lay stress on the common interests of the whole proletariat and of the collective movement. Their aim is the organisation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of middle-class domination, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat. They support everywhere “any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions. In all these movements they emphasise the question of property, in whatever state of evolution it may appear, as the foundation of the movement. And finally the Communists work everywhere for the union and agreement of democratic parties6 of all nationalities. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and intentions. They declare openly that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of every obtaining order of society. Let the ruling classes tremble before a Communist revolution; the workers have nothing to lose by it but their chains. They have the world to win. Workers of every land, unite!”
From the standpoint of social philosophy, the Manifesto, a document reflecting its time, is almost perfect. Strong emotion and extraordinary intellectual power are united in it. Years of study of one of the boldest and most fertile minds are here welded together in the glowing heat of one of the most active of intellectual workshops. But the work is not free from logical flaws. In the passages we have quoted the part played in history by the middle class is extolled by Marx; yet in the last few lines of the very same section he declares that “the middle class is the unwitting and inert instrument of industrial progress,” and still more scathing is his criticism in the second section, where the middle class is accused of indolence. “It has been objected that, if private property were done away with, all activity would cease and a general laziness set in. According to that, middle-class society would have been ruined by idleness long ago; for those of its members who work gain nothing, and those who gain do not work.” That is as much as to say that the middle class is lazy and does not work, and yet the Manifesto says that the middle class has achieved more marvellous works than Egypt, Rome, and the Middle Ages, and that, in its reign of power of scarcely a hundred years, it has created more powerful and more gigantic forces of production than all past generations put together. How can a class which does not work produce more marvellous works than the whole ancient and mediæval world?
Marx frees himself later from this inconsistency by ascribing surplus value solely to the operation of the variable part of capital (wage-labour)—a doctrine which he develops with iron logic in his principal work, “Capital.”
III. The Revolution of 1848
The ink had hardly dried on the Communist Manifesto when the February Revolution broke out. The crowing of the Gallic cock soon awoke an echo in the various German States, whilst in Brussels the democrats were attacked and ill-treated by the mob. One of the victims of this attack was Karl Marx, who was, moreover, banished shortly afterwards by the Belgian Government. This action, however, did not cause him any embarrassment, as he was ready in any case to proceed to Paris, whither the Provisional Government of the French Republic had already invited him in the following terms:
“Paris, March 1, 1848.
“Brave and Faithful Marx,
“The soil of the French Republic is a place of refuge for all friends of freedom. Tyranny has banished you; France, the free, opens to you her gates—to you and to all who fight for the holy cause, the fraternal cause of every people. In this sense shall every officer of the French Government understand his duty. Salut et Fraternité.
Ferdinand Flocon,
Member of the Provisional Government.”
The stay in Paris was, however, of short duration. Marx and Engels gathered together the members of the League of Communists and procured them the means for returning to Germany to take part in the German revolution. They themselves travelled to the Rhineland and succeeded in getting the establishment of the newspaper planned in Cologne into their hands. On the first of June, 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared for the first time. It goes without saying that the editor was Karl Marx, and among his collaborators were Engels, Freiligrath, Wilhelm Wolff, and Georg Weerth. Occasionally, too, Lassalle sent contributions. It is but rarely given to a daily paper to have such an editorial staff. In the third volume of his “Collected Papers of Marx and Engels,” Franz Mehring gives a selection of the articles which appeared in this journal. They are still worth reading. Here are a few examples. After the fall of Vienna he wrote an article concluding with the following words: “With the victory of the ‘Red Republic’ in Paris the armies from the inmost recesses of every land will be vomited forth upon the boundaries and over them, and the real strength of the combatants will clearly appear. Then we shall remember June and October, and we too shall cry, ‘Woe to the vanquished!’ The fruitless butcheries which have occurred since those June and October days... will convince the peoples that there is only one means of shortening, simplifying, and concentrating the torturing death agonies of society—only one means—revolutionary terrorism.”—(Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 6, 1848.)
Or take, for example, this passage from the last article of the paper, when on May 18, 1849, it succumbed to the “craft and cunning of the dirty West Kalmucks” (i.e., the Prussians).
“In taking leave of our readers we remind them of the words in our first January number: ‘Revolutionary upheaval of the French working class, general war—that is the index for the year 1849. And already in the east a revolutionary army comprised of warriors of all nationalities stands confronting the old Europe represented by and in league with the Russian army, already from Paris looms the Red Republic.’”
In reading these extracts one has only to substitute Russia for France and Moscow for Paris and we get at one of the sources of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s revolutionary policy. The articles written by Marx in 1848 and 1849 have supplied the Bolsheviks their tactics.
The censorship, Press lawsuits, and the decline of the revolution severed the life threads of the paper after scarcely a year of its existence. Marx sacrificed everything he had in money and valuables—in all, 7,000 thalers—in order to satisfy creditors and to pay the contributors and printers. Then he travelled to Paris, where he witnessed not the triumph of the Red Republic but that of the counter-revolution. In July, 1849, he was banished by the French Government to the boggy country of Morbihan, in Brittany; he preferred, however, to go over to London, where he remained to the end of his life.