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the head of a gang of expropriators and counterfeiters who stopped at nothing.
Everything that the imagination of a "sincere" democrat could conjure up was let
loose against the communists. A man notorious for his penchant for the comforts of
life, Herr Vogt was accusing Marx of living in luxury at the expense of the workers.
Vogt's pamphlet, thanks to the name of the author as well as the name of the
man he attacked (Marx had just published his Critique of Political Economy), created
a sensation and, as was to be expected, met with the most favour able reception from
the bourgeois press. The bourgeois journals, and chief of all, the renegade bourgeois
scribes who had once known Marx personally, were delighted at the opportunity to
spill a pailful of slops upon the head of their old foe.
Personally, Marx was of the opinion that the press had a right to criticise any
public man it pleased. It is the privilege, he claimed, of every one who appears
publicly, to bear praise or condemnation. You are received with stones and rotten
apples? It matters little. Ordinary abuse -- and it was flung without end -- he
absolutely ignored. Only when the interests of the cause demanded it, did he deign to
reply. And then he was merciless.
When Vogt's pamphlet appeared, the question of whether or not to answer
arose. Lassalle and some other German friends of his circle maintained that the
pamphlet ought to be ignored. They saw what a tremendous impression in favour of
Vogt was created by the trial he had won. The great democrat, they felt, was
inadvertently injured by Liebknecht, and in defending his honour he lost his head a
bit. Another trial would only bring him another triumph, for there were no proofs
against him. The most advisable thing it seemed, was to ignore him, and to let public
opinion become pacified.
Such philistine arguments could not, of course, affect Marx. One could
disdain answering personal attacks, but the honour of the party had to be defended.
Though Marx and his most intimate friends were convinced that Vogt had really been
bribed, they found themselves in a quandary, for both Blind and another emigrant
renounced now what they had said, and Liebknecht was placed in a position of a
slanderer.
Finally it was decided to answer. An attempt to get Vogt before a court of
justice proved futile because of the partiality of the Prussian courts. The only way out
was a literary attack. Marx took upon himself the execution of the difficult task. We
are now approaching a point where we are again forced to strongly disagree with the
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late Franz Mehring. In his opinion, Marx could easily have spared himself a great
deal of endless worry and effort, and the waste of precious time without any use to
the great task of his life, had he simply refused to take any part in the quarrel
between Liebknecht and Vogt. But such a course would have been entirely at
variance with Marx's actions.
Mehring overlooked completely the fundamental controversy that had been
going on among the emigrants. He did not discern that behind this, what appeared to
be a personal incident, there were concealed profound tactical disagreements which
had sprung up between the proletarian party and all bourgeois parties, that even
within the proletarian party itself, as the case of Lassalle indicated, there were
revealed dangerous oscillations. Nor did Mehring notice that the book against Vogt
contained a criticism of all the arguments of Lassalle and his confreres.
Let us turn to the book Herr Vogt itself. From the literary point of view it
belongs to the best of Marx's polemical writings. We should add that in all literature
there is no equal to this book. There was Pascal's famous pamphlet against the
Jesuits. In the literature of the eighteenth century there were Lessing's pamphlets
directed against his literary adversaries. But all these, as well as other known
pamphlets, pursued only literary aims.
In Herr Vogt, Marx's objective was not merely the political and moral
annihilation of a man greatly respected by the bourgeois world for his scholarly and
political attainments. True, this job, too, Marx fulfilled most brilliantly. All that Marx
had were the printed works of Vogt. The star witnesses retracted their statements.
Marx, therefore, took all the political writings of Vogt and proved that he was a
Bonapartist and that he had been literally reiterating all the arguments that were
developed in the writings of agents bought by Napoleon. And when Marx came to the
conclusion that Vogt was either a self-satisfied parrot idiotically repeating the
Bonapartists' arguments or possibly a bought agent like the rest of the Bonapartist
publicists, one is ready to believe that by and by history will bring to light Vogt's
receipt for the money he received.
But Marx did not confine himself to political scourging. His pamphlet was not
mere abuse interspersed with strong words. Marx also directed at Vogt another
weapon of which he was a past master -- sarcasm, irony, ridicule. With each chapter,
the comical figure of Herr Vogt was brought into greater relief. We see how the great
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savant and the great political worker is converted into a boastful, garrulous Falstaff,
prone to have a gay time on some one else's money.
But behind Vogt there loomed the most influential part of the German
bourgeois democracy. Marx, therefore, also exposed the political miserliness of this
"flower" of the German nation, bearing down upon the heads of those who, in spite of
their proximity to the communist camp, could not free themselves of obsequiousness
before the "learned ones."
Vogt's base attempt to pour filth upon the neediest and most radical faction of
the revolutionary emigrants afforded Marx the opportunity of drawing the picture of
the "moral" and "proper" bourgeois parties, those who were in power as well as those
in opposition, and particularly, of characterising the prostituted press of the
bourgeois world, which had become a capitalist enterprise deriving a profit from the
sale of words, as some enterprises derive it from the sale of manure.
Even in Marx's lifetime, students of the decade between 1849-1859
acknowledged that there was no other work that had such an insight into the parties
of this epoch as did this work of Marx. A present-day reader, no doubt, would need
many commentaries to grasp all the details, but anyone would easily understand the
political significance that Marx's pamphlet had at the time.
Lassalle himself had to admit that Marx wrote a masterpiece, that all fears
had been idle, that Vogt was forever compromised as a political leader.
In the late fifties and the early sixties, when a new movement had started
among the petty-bourgeoisie and the working class, when the struggle for influence
upon the urban poor was becoming more intensified, it became important to
establish that not only were the representatives of the proletarian democracy
intellectually not inferior to the most outstanding figures of the bourgeois
democracy, but that they were infinitely superior. In the person of Vogt, the
bourgeois democrats received a mortal blow to the prestige of one of its
acknowledged leaders. It remained for Lassalle to be thankful to Marx for the latter's
making it easier for him to carry on the fight against the progressives for the
influence upon the German workers.
We shall now pass to an examination of a most interesting question -- the
attitude of Marx and Engels toward Lassalle's revolutionary agitation. We have
already indicated that Lassalle began his agitation in 1862, when the conflict
pertaining to the method of fighting the government became very sharp within the
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