Karl marx and frederick engels an Introduction to Their Lives and Work

 
 
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differentiated between the working class and the people as a whole. He insisted on 
revolutionary measures, but being a republican he demanded a federation of all the 
German republics. This was one of the essential points of disagreement between him 
and Marx. The society founded by him in Cologne, the Workingmen's Union of 
Cologne, soon embraced almost all the proletarian elements of the city. It counted 
about seven thousand members. For a city with a population of eighty thousand this 
was an imposing number.  
 The Workingmen's Society led by Gotschalk soon entered into a conflict with 
the organisation to which Marx and Engels belonged. We should note, however, that 
there were elements within this vast workingmen's organisation that differed with 
Gotschalk. Moll and Schapper, for instance, though members of the Workingmen's 
Union, were closely connected with Marx and Engels. Thus within the Union there 
were soon formed two factions. But the fact remains that alongside the 
Workingmen's Union of Cologne, there existed a democratic society which counted 
Marx, Engels and others among its members.  
 All this resulted from Marx's plan. Everything converged to one point. Marx 
and Engels had hoped to make the central organ, which was first published on June 
1, 1818, the axis around which all the future communist organisations which would 
be formed in the process of revolutionary conflict, would assemble. We must not 
think that Marx and Engels entered this democratic organ as democrats. They did 
not; they entered as communists who regarded themselves as the most extreme left 
wing of the entire democratic organisation. Not for a moment did they cease 
vehemently to denounce the errors not only of the German liberal party, but above 
all, the errors of the democrats. They did it so well that they lost their shareholders 
within the first few months. In his very first editorial, Marx attacked the democrats 
most severely. And when the news of the June defeat of the Paris proletariat arrived, 
when Cavagniac, supported by all the bourgeois parties, swept down upon the 
workers, effected a massacre in which several thousands of Paris workers perished, 
the democratic organ, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published an article which till 
now remains unexcelled in power and passion with which it lashes the bourgeois 
hangmen and their democratic apologists.  
"The workers of Paris were crushed by the superior forces of 
their enemies -- they were annihilated. They are beaten, but their 
enemies are defeated. The momentary triumph of brute force is 

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purchased with the destruction of all the seductions and illusions 
of the February Revolution, with the complete disintegration of 
the old Republican Party, with the splitting of the French nation 
into two parts -- a nation of owners, and a nation of workers. 
The Republic of the tricolour will henceforth be of one hue only 
-- the colour of the vanquished, the colour of blood. It has 
become a Red Republic.  
 "The February Revolution was splendid. It was a revolution of 
universal sympathies, for the contradictions which flared up 
within it against the royal power as yet lay in latent harmony, 
slumbering undeveloped side by side, since the social conflict 
which was their background had attained merely a phantom 
existence, the existence of a phrase, a word. The June 
Revolution, on the contrary, is disgusting, repulsive, for instead 
of the word emerged the deed, because the Republic itself bared 
the head of the monster, having dashed from it its protecting and 
concealing crown.  
 "Are we democrats to be misled by the deep abyss that gapes 
before us? Are we to conclude that the struggle for new forms of 
the State is devoid of meaning, is illusory -- a phantasm?  
 "Only weak, timid minds would ask this question. The conflicts 
arising from the very conditions of bourgeois society, have to be 
fought to the end; they cannot be reasoned away. The best form 
of state is one in which the social contradictions are not 
overcome by force, in other words, only by artificial and 
specious means. The best form of state is one in which the 
contradictions collide in open struggle and thus attain a solution.  
 "We shall be asked, is it possible that we shall reserve not a 
single tear, not a sigh, not a word, for the victims of popular 
frenzy, for the National Guards, for the guardes mobiles, for the 
Republican Guards, for the soldiers of the line?  
 "The State will take care of their widows and orphans, decrees 
will glorify them, solemn funeral processions will place their 
remains in their last resting places, the official press will 
proclaim them immortal, the European reaction will do homage 
to them from East to West.  
 "But the plebeians, ravished by hunger, spat upon by the press, 
deserted by the physicians, denounced by respectable thieves as incendiaries 

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and jailbirds; their wives and children hurled into still more fathomless 
poverty, their best representatives, who have survived the slaughter, deported 
to foreign parts -- to crown their menacing and gloomy brows with laurel -- 
this is the privilege, the right and duty, of the democratic press."  
  
This article was written on June 28, 1848. Such an article could not 
have been written by a democrat; only a communist could have 
written it. Marx and Engels deceived no one with their tactics. The 
paper ceased to receive financial support from the democratic 
bourgeoisie. It had in reality become the organ of the Cologne 
workers and of the German workers. Other members of the 
Communist League, Spread all over Germany, continued their work. 
One of them, Stefan Born, a compositor, is worth mentioning. Engels 
does not speak favourably of him; Born adopted different tactics. 
Having found himself from the very beginning in Berlin, in the 
proletarian centre, he put before himself, as his objective, the creation 
of a large workingmen's organisation. With the aid of some comrades 
he established a small journal, The Brotherhood of Workers, and 
conducted a systematic agitation among various types of workers. 
Unlike Gotschalk and Willich, he did not confine himself merely to 
organising a workers' political party. Born undertook to organise craft 
unions and other societies which were to protect the economic 
interests of the workers. He forged ahead so energetically that he soon 
attempted to carry over this organisation into a number of 
neighbouring cities, and to spread it into other parts of Germany. 
There was one flaw in this organisation -- it emphasised the purely 
economic demands of the workers to the exclusion of other demands. 
Thus, while some members of the Communist League were forming 
purely workingmen's organisations all over Germany, in the South 
there were others who, headed by Marx, used all their strength to 
reorganise the democratic elements, and to make the working class 
into a nucleus of an even more democratic party. It was in this spirit 
that Marx carried on his work.  
 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung reacted upon all fundamental questions. We 
must admit that up to the present the paper remains the unattainable ideal of 
revolutionary journalism. Its acuteness of analysis, its freshness, its revolutionary 
ardour, its breadth and profundity have never been parallelled.  

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