Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

Predestination

The modern system of industry and trade, Marx wrote to Ruge in May 1843, of ownership and exploitation of people, leads inevitably to a rup-

ture within society because it does not heal and create at all, but only exists and consumes. In case of the impending Revolution¹²⁶—which he also expected soon in Germany—Marx was now in search of that universal class of which Abbé Sieyès had once said at the begin- ning of the heroic October Days in 1789: it is nothing and must be everything. This was Marx’s third idea. “Only in the name of the general rights of society can a particular class lay claim to general domination,” he wrote in early 1844, alluding to the French Revo- lution. “For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression.” But a dramatic intensification like the one the opposition between the nobility and bourgeoisie had sparked in 1789 could no longer be expected in the epic chaos of the postrevolutionary world, especially given the philistine mediocrity of the German bourgeoisie. Now, in contrast to 1789, a revolutionary situation required a class with radi- cal chains, one that possessed a universal character by its universal suf- fering, that was the complete loss of man, that could emancipate itself only through the complete rewinning of man—that thus was nothing and needed to be everything. The dissolution of society as a particular Estate, according to Marx, was the modern proletariat, which could no longer invoke a historical title but now only a human title.¹²⁷

His prognosis referred to an impending revolution in Germany, which admittedly largely lacked a real modern proletariat at the time, despite suffering massive poverty. Within the territory of the German Customs Union in the mid 1840s—not including min- ing operations and work in the textile industry (most of which was carried out in homes)—barely 170,000 workers were employed in 13,600 factories.¹²⁸ Industrialists like Friedrich Harkort in 1844 saw the wide-ranging problem of pauperism as evidence that the “proper path had been missed”; for Gustav Mevissen it was the “harbinger of a social crisis” that without timely reforms would inevitably lead to a revolution.¹²⁹ But Marx thought principally in terms of antino- mies, perhaps because his generation in particular experienced the upheavals of the 1840s, oscillating between progress and destitution, as especially traumatic.

Apart from that, Marx’s presentation of his construction of the proletariat as a universal class was not much more convincing than, for example, Hegel’s derivation of the monarchic principle from Nature. Hegel thought that something “against which caprice is powerless” could be found only in Nature, and not in civil society’s

conflict-ridden world of interests; therefore it was imperative that the ultimate self of the state’s will be determined “in an immediate, natural, fashion” through the monarch’s “birth in the course of na- ture.”¹³⁰ Marx held that the social existence of the proletariat escapes, so to speak, just as naturally from civil society’s world of interests, a point classically summed up a little later in his reckoning with his former young Hegelian friends entitled Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim,” Marx and Engels stated in The Holy Family: “It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will histori- cally be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.”¹³¹ This antithesis, which pressed for a new synthesis, occupied him throughout his life and, as a philosophically founded objective, would prefigure all of his scientific curiosity as well as its results.

Arnold Ruge, who was ten years Marx’s senior, found all this to be pretentious and overly epigrammatic, too much of an artificial “formlessness and super-form.” Despite Marx’s indisputable critical talent, Ruge saw his theses as flights of fancy, “occasionally degener- ating into arrogance.”¹³² Unsurprisingly, their partnership met with dissonance before long. The project of the Jahrbücher did not go as expected. At the end of February 1844, the first double issue was published, but the Prussian police confiscated a few hundred cop- ies during an effort to smuggle them across the border. The French showed little interest in the journal, which declared itself to be bi- national but was effectively exclusively German. In Berlin, mean- while, arrest warrants were issued for Marx, Heine, and Ruge.

Ruge was also increasingly disturbed by Marx’s sudden commu- nistic euphoria and his proximity to groups that “wish to liberate people by turning them into artisans.”¹³³ Marx personally knew members of these groups. —The teacher German Mäurer, for ex- ample, who lived at Rue Vaneau 43 and was a leading member in the communist League of the Just, and the doctor Hermann Ew- erbeck, a supporter of the communist utopias of Etienne Cabet. Ruge criticized Marx for his too-vivacious carryings-on with these “one-and-a-half artisanal blokes” and at the same time for his “syba- ritism,” his bohemian life of dissolution, and his penchant for the elegant salons of the liberal Russian aristocracy. Ruge also found

fault with Marx’s friendship with Georg Herwegh, who had just married the wealthy daughter of a banker and, it was said, taken up shortly thereafter with the Countess d’Agoult, the former lover of Franz Liszt. Ruge felt that when a man got married, he needed to know what he was doing, and that Marx, somewhat arrogantly and indignantly, had wrongly judged Herwegh to be a genius and Ruge’s views of marriage to be quite philistine. “After that,” Ruge wrote in late May 1844, “we did not see each other again.” Ac- cording to Ruge, Marx had gone mad with arrogance and bile.¹³⁴ For Marx, on the other hand, Ruge was just a Prussian, which be- came clear above all in light of Ruge’s restrained evaluation of the Silesian weavers’ uprising in 1844. Cheap competition from the mechanized textile industry in England had precipitated such a rapid drop in piecework rates for Silesian weavers in Peterswaldau and Bielau, who still worked in cottage industry, that soon many could no longer feed their families. On 4 June, three thousand of them formed a protest procession in Peterswaldau, and when their demands for higher wages were mockingly rejected by the local employer they stormed his house, tore up the account books and papers, and smashed the machines. In Ruge’s eyes the significance of this uprising was exclusively local, and it had no political conse- quences worth mentioning.

In Berlin, however, the riot was perceived as an assault on the foundations of the state, and on 6 June it was quashed by the mili- tary. Four cannons and cavalry were deployed in the process, and among the weavers eleven died, including women and children. Al- most a hundred weavers were arrested and turned over to the Bre- slau higher regional court. “No mercy, no reflection anymore,” noted Karl August Varnhagen von Ense on 16 June in his diary: “But there will be the Court of Lord. Just wait, the outcome will be quite differ- ent!”¹³⁵ The state’s overreaction, mixed with its moral cynicism and indifference to misery, allowed the rebellion to attain national sig- nificance. Whereas previously the opposition to be feared had most likely been the liberals from the bourgeois classes, now the order of the Christian state faced a new and potentially far more dangerous opponent: the pauperized classes arising in insurrections due to the misery of their condition. “We’re weaving busily night and day; / Thy shroud, Old Germany, now weave we,” wrote Heinrich Heine: “A threefold curse we’re weaving for thee, — / We’re weaving, we’re weaving!”¹³⁶

Presumably it was Marx who led Heine to this view of the matter. “The Silesian uprising,” Marx wrote in Vorwärts on 10 August in Paris, “begins precisely with what the French and English workers’ uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are destroyed, but also led- gers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy.” What he drew here was a colos- sal portrait, quite in contrast to Ruge’s miniature. Nor was there a lack of eschatological imagery. The German proletariat’s gigantic in- fant shoes, which he wanted to attribute to the Silesian weavers, held something of the mythical archetype of the “puer senex”—the grown boy—with which Vergil once proclaimed the Golden Age, and which also appeared in the manger in Bethlehem. An industrial uprising, thought Marx, could be ever so partial, but it fundamen- tally had within itself a universal soul. Only a social revolution pos- sessed therefore the point of view of the whole—and by this he meant, still completely in Feuerbach’s sense, the point of view of the human being in contrast to the mere state citizen. Precisely this was what he would have liked to see, from the distance of Paris, in the events in Peterswaldau and Bielau.

In reality, the rebellion was a preindustrial form of social protest with decidedly archaic characteristics. It was directed not against the system of exploitation itself but rather against individual agents whose especially cynical behavior had provoked the weavers’ anger. Others were spared. At the house of the agent Fellmann, the rebels even allowed themselves to be placated with a one-time payment of five silver groschen each and then moved on. Ruge had seen things far more realistically than Marx. Yet Marx found himself surpris- ingly in agreement (though from the opposite viewpoint) with the hysteria that had broken out among the ruling circles in Berlin and elsewhere. The same forces that unleashed panicky fears in Berlin led Marx to the euphoria of an anticipated historical synthesis. Just as the French Revolution was the classic period of political intellect, he maintained, the Silesian uprising was the first visible sign of the age of revolutionary reason. Not one of the French and English workers’ up- risings, he insisted in all seriousness, possessed such a theoretical and conscious character as the Silesian weavers’ rebellion.¹³⁷ Setting aside

the completely overblown view of the events, these passages reveal a strange, unconscious pantheistic aspect in his way of thinking. Marx did not want to say that the weavers were theoreticians. Rather, he meant that in their actions themselves—in the real movement, the way he interpreted it—a hidden revolutionary reason was at work. As he formulated matters a little later in a polemical dispute with the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as a theoretician Marx only had to give an account of the reality playing out before his eyes and to become its mouthpiece.¹³⁸