Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

DEEDS

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Futurism

The railway’s conquest of the earth was one of the earliest dreams motivating Count Henri de Saint-Simon. At the end of the 1840s, only its modest beginnings were visible outside of England and America. Yet ever since the Congress of Vienna, the increasing speed of travel had begun to open up the landscape with a vengeance. Ex- press postal routes along new highways soon reduced the travel time from Berlin to Munich by way of Cologne from 130 to 78 hours. In 1825, horse-drawn omnibuses were introduced to inner-city traffic in Berlin. By 1847, Prussia boasted 3,200 kilometers of railway lines. Tunnels penetrated mountains, bridges spanned valleys and rivers, and railway embankments were soon an intrinsic part of landscape imagery, classically captured by Adolph Menzel’s 1847 oil painting Die Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn. Whereas Menzel’s steaming colossus still came across as an irritating disruption in a mortally wounded landscape, William Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, the Great West- ern Railway of 1844 represented the full-blown apotheosis of the new era in which everything was bathed in the glowing reddish light of the new fires of industry. “The shining steel glides to and fro / And, driving other parts, all show / A striving to one goal,” wrote the harp maker J. A. Stumpf, living in London: “The great machine / Obeys the master’s mind, it may be seen.”¹ The atmosphere of the time was futuristic.

Even the Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote in Brussels in 1847, breathed this futuristic spirit. “The bourgeoisie,” it states, “has disclosed what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aq- ueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.” This revolution, the likes of which the world had never seen, was occur- ring before the very eyes of contemporaries who had just recently learned to cultivate the niches and favorite everyday things of the domesticated Biedermeier period. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations to- gether,” the Manifesto continues:

Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, ca- nalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground— what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?²

As Marx had already written in his doctoral dissertation, it was in fact a time that recalled Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods in heaven.³ There was something almost frightening about the speed and extent of the human world’s accumulation of powers that seemed to transport the entire earthly sphere into a state of perma- nent industrial, economic, and communicative revolution.

Marx believed this sudden and ultra-pharaonic violence and strength of capitalism was too fragile to last very long. “Modern bour- geois society,” the Communist Manifesto states, “with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” For decades already, the history of industry and trade had been a history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, which came to light especially in the periodic commercial crises that put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. The entire paradox of capitalistic modernity re- vealed itself in these societal epidemics, which the old world, always suffering from scarcity, had not known. They were indeed epidemics

of over-production that were leading to a universal war of devastation, for unregulated overabundance due to the sudden stagnation of the markets created dramatic shortages of goods, whereupon human- ity unexpectedly found itself thrown back into a state of momentary barbarism during the economic crisis.⁴ Only the regulated, rational world of communism was in a position to lead humanity out of this chaos and really consummate the work of Prometheus.

Marx had meanwhile become a member of the Communist League. A failed attempt to assassinate Friedrich Wilhelm IV had abruptly ended his first stay in Paris. On the morning of 26 July 1844, as the Prussian king and queen set out from the busy Berlin Schlosshof for their usual summer vacation in Silesia, the former Storkow Bürger- meister Heinrich Ludwig Tschech approached them with a double- barreled pistol; Tschech got off two shots, but they narrowly missed their target. The Parisian Vorwärts reported on the event—not par- ticularly reverentially—and thereafter the government of His Maj- esty in Berlin had, with increasing anger, demanded that measures be taken against the radical German emigrants in Paris, among them Marx. In mid August, Marx again disrespectfully issued solemn re- marks about Friedrich Wilhelm in Vorwärts, saying that the hand of God had providentially deflected the bullets, and now, while looking upward to the divine Savior and with the certainty of victory, he was applying a firm hand to the work of combating evil.⁵ French scruples kept Guizot from expelling Heinrich Heine, whose mocking politi- cal poetry made him hated in Berlin above all others. Guizot paid respect to Heine’s international renown as a European author—and, as was common knowledge at the time in France, “one does not ar- rest Voltaire.” But Marx had to go.

He received his deportation order on 1 January 1845. On 3 Feb- ruary he left with the mail coach for Brussels, where he would re- main until the outbreak of the European Revolution in February 1848. Jenny followed him ten days later. For a month they lived in the Hotel Bois Sauvage, and in May 1845 they moved into a row house on the eastern edge of the town on Verbondsstraat, which at the time was still called Rue de l’Alliance in French. Shortly there- after Caroline von Westphalen, Jenny’s mother, sent them Helene Demuth, the daughter of a Trier baker, as a housemaid. “Lenchen” would henceforth manage the household until Marx’s death.

“In those days Brussels teemed with all sorts of refugees and emi- grants,” wrote the author Alfred Meißner in his memoirs: “There

was no shortage of troubled creatures who had avoided the police of Louis Philippe.”⁶ Marx was now among those who, expelled by the police of Louis Philippe, had gathered in the capital city of this the most liberal constitutional monarchy on the continent. In early 1847 he became a member of the Communist League. The league had originally been founded in Paris in 1836 under a different name. “During my first stay in Paris,” Marx recalled later, “I established personal contact with the leaders of the League living there as well as with the leaders of the majority of the secret French workers’ as- sociations, without however becoming a member of any of them.” But in Brussels, where Guizot’s expulsion order had sent me, he joined the league after receiving the offer, together with Engels, to formu- late anew the league’s program on the basis of his own views. Marx had, in the time since his arrival, become an authority among Ger- man communists abroad.

This fact was due substantially to the many different activities that he undertook in Brussels, usually with Engels. He later recalled:

We published a series of pamphlets, partly printed, partly litho- graphed, in which we mercilessly criticized the hotchpotch of Fran- co-English socialism or communism and German philosophy, which formed the secret doctrine of the League at that time. In its place we proposed the scientific study of the economic structure of bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical foundation. Furthermore, we argued in popular form that it was not a matter of putting some uto- pian system into effect, but of conscious participation in the historical process revolutionizing society before our very eyes.⁷
Thus, as Engels wrote in retrospect, Marx was convinced that the materialistic conception of history he had formed through the re- versal of Hegel was “of immediate importance for the contemporary workers’ movement.”⁸ This, his first and most important political par- adigm, was basically the paradigm of a new kind of absolute knowl- edge. Underlying it was nothing less than the claim of being the only self-conscious and authentic mouthpiece of the historical will of the ostensibly real historical objective of Marx’s own present.

Increasingly, his sense of superiority also set the tone of his de- bates. The first to experience this was the theorizing communist tai- lor Wilhelm Weitling, whose brilliant writings, Marx had attested in 1844, marked the vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers.⁹ Since 1836, Weitling had played an important role in the

precursor organizations of the Communist League, and for a long time his writings—among them Humanity as It Is and Ought to Be, The Poor Sinner’s Gospel, and Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom— were considered authoritative catechisms for the conspiratorial se- cret organization. He moved to Brussels in February 1846 upon his release from a year in prison.¹⁰ “But,” as Engels described him after his arrival,
he was no longer the naive young journeyman-tailor who, astonished at his own talents, was trying to clarify in his own mind just what a communist society would look like. He was now the great man, per- secuted by the environs on account of his superiority, who scented ri- vals, secret enemies and traps everywhere—the prophet, driven from country to country, who carried a recipe for the realisation of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who was possessed with the idea that everybody intended to steal it from him.¹¹
In late March 1846, during a longer debate about communist future perspectives in which the liberal Russian landowner Pavel Annen- kov—a friend of Marx—also participated, things came to a head with Marx. Assigning himself the role of mouthpiece of historical truth, Marx could react quite sharply and arrogantly in such de- bates. Weitling was circuitously presenting his future projects when Marx impatiently interrupted him by saying that it was simply a fraud against the people to incite them without providing a solid, well thought-out basis for their activities, as fantastic hopes never lead to the salvation of the sufferers but rather to their demise. As Annenkov reports, Marx concluded with a quotation from Spinoza: “Ignorance is not an argument,”¹² (ignorantia non est argumentum). As Weitling noted afterward, Marx was evidently insisting on a critical examination of the Communist Party.¹³ And in fact this got to the heart of the matter, for the priority now, according to Engels, was “to win over the European, and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction.”¹⁴

The second rebuff—Annenkov was the first to hear of this case as well—concerned Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Marx and Engels planned to set up an international Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels, an archetype for every subsequent International. It was supposed to help prepare for the coming European revolution. Of ev- ery conceivable contact person, Proudhon was originally one of the most important to Marx, for whom only the crowing of the Gallic

rooster could assure the beginning of a new revolutionary Spring of Nations in Europe. Connections must be established between Ger- man, French, and English socialists, he wrote to Proudhon in May 1846, to settle existing differences of opinion through impartial crit- icism, and he could not imagine a better correspondent in France.¹⁵ This attempt was Marx’s first foray into practical politics. What he meant by impartial criticism would soon become apparent.

Proudhon cautiously declined the request for collaboration with the Communist Correspondence Committee. “Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society,” wrote Proudhon, “but, for God’s sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating the people.”¹⁶ France was difficult terrain, as the vain search for French collaborators for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had already demonstrated.

Marx did not respond. “Mr. Proudhon confuses ideas and things,” he wrote to Annenkov that December after reading from Proud- hon’s new book The System of Economic Contradictions or the Philoso- phy of Misery, using the occasion to once again lay out the central basic theses of his own historical materialism.¹⁷ As a response to the failure to set up a collaborative correspondence, he produced Misère de la Philosophie—The Poverty of Philosophy. Written in French, it was an intellectual execution of Proudhon, with the final chapter spelling out their core political differences. The book got out of hand, like The Holy Family, which had been published a year earlier as a polemic against his former young Hegelian friends; both vol- umes betrayed a personal overexcitement that could by no means be blamed solely on the subject at hand.

Revealing his seemingly near-manic compulsion to repeat him- self, Marx’s anti-Proudhon text awkwardly zeroed in on an invisible enemy: Hegel, whom Proudhon, incidentally, had not even invoked and knew only rudimentarily at best from lectures the German emi- grant Heinrich Ahrens had given at the Collège de France.¹⁸ Page af- ter page, Marx depicted Proudhon as philosophically foolish instead of coming to the point. Much of it reads like a theological dispute akin to those at the Berlin Doctor Club, including the constantly repeated allegation that Hegel—and with him, Proudhon—was re- ducing everything to logical categories instead of proceeding from real conditions. After the book appeared, Proudhon called Marx the “tapeworm of socialism,” thereby quite accurately striking a nerve, and referred to his opponent ironically as “my dear philosopher.”¹⁹

The leaders of the Communist League had already written Weit- ling off when Marx suggested in mid May that they collaborate with his international Correspondence Committee. Many of them had fled to London after the suppression of the 1839 uprising organized by Auguste Blanqui, in which they had participated. Among them in particular was Karl Schapper, who after the Parisian uprisings had been imprisoned for a considerable period and then expelled from France by Louis Philippe’s police. Schapper, a former member of Georg Büchner’s conspiratorial Society for Human Rights in Hesse, had been among the armed assailants who stormed the constabulary watch in Frankfurt in early April 1833; in 1834 he joined Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe movement. Now home to Schapper, the cobbler Heinrich Bauer, and the watchmaker Joseph Moll, London in the early 1840s had become a new center for the league.²⁰

After the unsuccessful Blanquist uprising, Schapper came to un- derstand that it was just “as easy to compel a tree to grow as to incul- cate new ideas into mankind by force.”²¹ This change increasingly distanced him from Weitling’s revolutionary voluntarism and drew his curiosity to the work of Marx and Engels in Brussels, where they were running a workers’ association through which Marx, for exam- ple, held lectures about the irreconcilable opposition between wage labor and capitalism. There, to an audience of around a hundred, he explained among other things that capital’s modern relations of production were at heart characterized by the exploitative dominion of accumulated, past, materialised labour over direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital.²² Marx and Engels also presided over the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung, a forum for their opinions. Their writings were well known—at least to the initiated—especially En- gels’s text about the “the condition of the working class in England,” which appeared in 1845 and opened with the statement that the world-historical significance of the industrial revolution was only now gaining recognition. It ended with the words “I think the peo- ple will not endure more than one more crisis.”²³

In spring 1847, Joseph Moll showed up at Marx’s in Brussels and shortly thereafter at Engels’s in Paris, requesting on behalf of his London comrades that they join the Communist League. Moll and his comrades had dissociated themselves from the old conspiratorial tradition and now wanted to give Marx and Engels the opportunity to present their critical communism as a new league doctrine at a league congress. But to do so they had to become members.²⁴ In the

rooms of the communist Workers’ Educational Society in London’s Drury Lane 191, after weeks of debate in which communists from a variety of nations participated, the Communist Manifesto was finally unanimously accepted as the official program of the Communist League at the beginning of December 1847.²⁵ The program had an international orientation from the outset and was supposed to be translated into Europe’s most important languages²⁶—and it was the first sign of the deep suggestion that proceeded from Marx and his view of history to the damned of the earth.

In his text about Proudhon, Marx had written: “For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the produc- tive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class it- self.”²⁷ Transformed according to the spirit of Marx’s definition, the Communist League members were now supposed to elevate the self- consciousness of this revolutionary productive power—the working class—so that it became aware of its own mission. The Communist Manifesto formulated it this way: “The Communists … theoretically

… have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” On the one hand, they were not a particular party vis-à-vis other workers’ parties; but on the other hand they always kept the interests of the movement as a whole in sight and thus considered themselves practically as the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country. In the movement of the present, according to Marx and Engels, the commu- nists also represent and take care of the future of that movement,²⁸ and this maxim would also determine their options for forming coalitions in a future revolution. For only if all the conditions are at hand, accord- ing to the assumptions of Hegelian logic shared by the authors of the manifesto, could something actually come into being.²⁹ Basically, Marx and Engels were developing the dynamic concept of perma- nent revolution. Especially with respect to Germany, which would play a major role in the coming European Revolution, they predicted that the imminent bourgeois revolution would be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

Marx and Engels anticipated a revolution in Germany along the lines of what had occurred in France between 1789 and 1794, among other reasons because, according to their conceptions, bourgeois society as a system lacked a stabilizing dynamic; therefore, once a

revolution was underway it would inevitably become more radical. Theoretically, this conception relied on the prognosis of the inevi- table immiseration of the worker in the modern world of capital. “The modern labourer,” states the Communist Manifesto, “instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any lon- ger to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.”³⁰ It was an end-times prognosis. Unlike the situation after the fall of Robespierre, at this point no new bourgeois Directory could halt the dynamic of a revo- lution against the system of the Holy Alliance.

The social-democratic theoretician Franz Mehring, Marx’s first biographer, thought that the Manifesto was still informed by the law of wages as it had been developed by the British economist David Ricardo with the help of Malthusian population theory. There- fore, according to Mehring, it too one-sidedly envisioned the pos- sible reaction to the trend of immiseration in terms of a political revolution. For precisely this reason, Marx and Engels saw the near future taking shape according to the model of the French Revo- lution. Only during Marx’s work on Capital was this model called into question, upon the discovery of the “elasticity” of the law of wages, which acknowledged that wage levels were influenced by fac- tors that were culturally acquired or gained through the struggles of unions. This opened up perspectives with political consequences that Marx, however, never really managed to clarify. In any case, in 1848 Jacobinism was for him still materially anchored in the the- ory of immiseration. Incidentally, the Communist Manifesto, writ- ten during a period marked by constitutional struggles, contained not a single word about the future constitution. Dolf Sternberger once quite rightly observed: “But how the class will begin to govern, administer, and dispense justice is not considered, or in any event explained.”³¹ The real movement would come up with something and create the corresponding institutions.