Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 09: Clarification

'After we had passed a night in Brussels, almost the first thing Marx said to me [H. Bürgers] in the morning was: "We must go and see Freiligrath to-day. He is here, and I must make good the wrong the Rheinische Zeitung did him before he stood 'on the party battlements.' His confession of faith has wiped out everything."'

Ferdinand Freiligrath stood out by a head from the teeming multitude of German poets. His exotic poems, of equal rank to their prototype, Victor Hugo's Les Orientales, glowed with passion, luxuriated in wild visions, and were technically flawless. The young people of Germany received them with enthusiasm. The effect they had on the young Engels has already been noted. About the year 1840 Freiligrath was the most popular poet in Germany. Devoted to the ideal of 'pure art,' he held it to be unworthy of the poet to descend into the contemporary arena. His verses:

The poet stands on a high watch-tower
As on the party battlements--1

were later quoted to satiety. He had no objection to accepting the pension of three hundred thalers which Frederick William IV granted him in 1842 at the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt. He wrote an open letter attacking Herwegh for wishing to bring poetry down to the level of the handmaiden of politics. His ambition seemed to be to become the court poet of Berlin.

This brought the Rheinische Zeitung down on him with a vengeance. It mercilessly derided the 'pensioned poet.' In Marx's opinion Freiligrath was 'an enemy of Herwegh's and of freedom.'

A year later Freiligrath was in the revolutionary camp. The cry for freedom that swept across Germany like a wave awakened the dreamer. In 1844 the censor forbade the publication of his Patriotic Fantasies. Freiligrath, without troubling about the censor, published them under another title, Confession of Faith, and renounced his much-talked of 'pension' in the preface. The book was banned. Freiligrath escaped arrest by fleeing to Belgium.

He remained in Belgium for a few months only. They sufficed for him to form a friendship with Marx, 'that nice, interesting, unassuming, resolute fellow,' as he called him. Freiligrath's poetic powers reached their zenith in the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849 and he was one of Marx's closest collaborators on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Their friendship defied all the vicissitudes of life and survived a number of temporary estrangements during the hard years of exile in London. Freiligrath was one of the few men whom Marx 'loved as friends in the highest sense of the word.'

Marx met only a few German exiles in Brussels. In this 'disagreeable mongrel country' as Freiligrath called Belgium, the Germans did not feel at home, and in Brussels they were not liked. Three years later, when Marx was expelled by the anti-revolutionary government, his expulsion, to quote Engels, 'helped to mitigate Belgian hatred of the Germans.'

There were not many exiles from other countries either. But small as the colony of exiles was, it was an important one. During those years a political refugee could lead a more secure life in Belgium than in any other European country, not even excluding Switzerland. When Buonarotti, the fellow-conspirator of Babeuf, had to flee from Geneva at the beginning of the Restoration, Belgium was the only country to offer him a refuge. He lived there until the revolution of 1830 and wrote his famous work on the Conspiracy of the Equals, the bold attempt of Babeuf and his comrades to plant the banner of Socialism in Paris when the great Revolution ended. The book had an influence far wider than the borders of Belgium and France. It had a strong influence on the 'physical force' Chartists. Exile set its seal upon men of Buonarotti's type. In Belgium were refugees to whom the rest of Europe was shut--French Blanquists, Polish Democrats, German Republicans, émigrés of the second and third generation.

Belgium received them all and suffered them to remain upon her soil, as long as they refrained from direct political activity. The small country had fought for and gained its independence only a few years before; it was not yet firmly in the saddle and it very intelligibly fought shy of diplomatic conflicts with its powerful neighbours. These would have been inevitable if the exiles had been allowed to carry out propaganda from Belgium, and the attempt would have cost the refugees their sanctuary. Thus, although the Press was freer than in France, there was no 'emigrant' paper or organisation. This state of affairs survived until the outbreak of the February revolution, when the atmosphere changed throughout the whole of Europe, and the Liberals came into power in Belgium--and then not for long.

Marx became acquainted with the peculiarities of Belgium during the first days after his arrival. The Prussian Government soon reconciled itself to the withdrawal of the expulsion of Ruge, Börnstein and the others who were to have left France with Marx, but it continued to persecute Marx. Scarcely had he arrived in Brussels when the Prussian ambassador demanded his expulsion. Marx applied for a permit soon after his arrival. He did not obtain it. Only after many inquiries did he find out that such an application did not suffice. He had to give a written undertaking to the sûreté publique to print nothing in Belgium about contemporary politics. After that he obtained his permit. Infuriated by the renewed persecution, tired of the struggle with 'his' officials, who wasted time he could have employed profitably, full of contempt for his reactionary Fatherland, 'the backward colony of Russia,' in December, 1845, he renounced his Prussian nationality.

He did not find the renunciation of journalistic activity hard to bear. He had other activities in mind. In the foreword to The Holy Family, written in September, 1844, he and Engels had announced that after completing their demolition of Bruno Bauer they would state their own constructive position to the new philosophical and social doctrines in independent works.

Marx planned to write a two-volume Critique of Politics and Political Economy, for which he had arranged a contract with Leske, the Darmstadt publisher, before he left Paris. As soon as he had settled down in Brussels he flung all his energy into the task. In January Engels was urging him to complete the book quickly, even if he should be dissatisfied with it himself. Engels declared that it was essential that the work be finished before April. Men's minds were ripe for it, and they must strike while the iron was hot. This formula was to be frequently repeated during the next twenty years. Again and again Engels was to urge his friend to write 'finis' to the work in hand, stop his everlasting ploughing through books and collecting of material, and actually get down to the work of writing. Engels later confessed that while they were in Brussels together Marx taught him for the first time what hard work really meant. Marx's thoroughness, the vigour with which he grappled with a subject, not letting it go till he had mastered it in all its details, the conscientiousness with which he would read through everything that had ever been written about it, were alien to Engels's temperament. The Critique of Politics and Political Economy was meant to appear in the summer of 1845. The first volume, The Critique of Political Economy, appeared in the summer of 1859, and the first volume of Capital in the autumn of 1867.

Once more Marx plunged into a sea of books. He read and made excerpts from the economists Buret, Sismondi, Senior, A. Blanqui, Ure, Rossi and Pecchio, to name the most important only. In the summer of 1845 he went to Manchester with Engels to study the English economists, Petty, Tooke, Thompson, Cobbett and others, who were not available in Brussels. In addition to all this he planned to collaborate with Engels in publishing a whole series of important Socialist books in German translations--the principal works of Fourier, Owen and others. Marx was to write introductions for the French authors and Engels for the English ones.

But in the summer of 1845 a new task intervened. Marx informed his publisher that he had to break off work on the Critique of Politics and Political Economy. It appeared to him to be of vital immediate importance to attack German philosophy and state his positive attitude to the present and past position of German Socialism. This was necessary in order to prepare the public for a system of economics which was diametrically opposed to German preconceptions of the time.

During the lifetime of Marx and Engels this work never appeared. Excerpts from the manuscript were only published in various places years after their death. When, thanks to the tireless researches of D. B. Riazanov, it finally appeared in its complete form in 1932, it was found that German Ideology was Marx's and Engels's first exposition of their interpretation of history--historical materialism--carried out in a detail for which they never found time or opportunity again. When Marx published his Critique of Political Economy in 1859, he contented himself with preparing the public for the new viewpoint with a few sentences in the foreword. A decade and a half had passed since he had arrived at it, jointly with Engels, and he had used it as a guiding thread through all his works and could well believe that it was intelligible to all who could read and only required a final and definite formulation. But if one looks back now at the endless controversies that have centred round the correct interpretation of historical materialism, one cannot help deploring that German Ideology found no publisher in 1846.

In his reminiscences of the origins of the Communist League Engels states that Marx had developed the main outlines of his materialist interpretation of history by the time he joined him in Brussels in spring, 1845. The two friends decided to elaborate jointly the antithesis between their views and the ideological background of German philosophy. This purpose was to be carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. It was impossible to carry it out otherwise at the time, not only because it was the only way in which Marx and Engels could come to terms with their previous philosophic conscience, but because in the intellectual and historical conditions of the forties the quintessence of their case, namely the proposition that it is not man's mind that conditions his being but, on the contrary, his social being that conditions his mind, could be stated most effectively and with the most far-reaching consequences in the field of political action in the form of a controversy with idealism and in that form only.

More than half of the two solid octavo volumes that Marx and Engels wrote between September, 1845, and August, 1846, is taken up with a refutation of Max Stirner, the theorist of individual anarchism. Marx took up the cudgels with Stirner with real delight. He took 'the schoolmaster' sentence by sentence and harried him until nothing was left of the atheistic 'egoist' but a beer-swilling Berlin philistine. He was no less pitiless in his exposure of the 'true' Socialism which had recently become fashionable in Germany and deemed itself superior to 'crude' Communism. He revealed it as an insipid brew of German philosophical phrases blended with half-understood propositions borrowed from French Socialist and Communist systems by philanthropic littérateurs who failed to understand the movement of which these systems were the expression. The fight against this kind of idealistic rubbish in all its forms was all the more necessary because in Germany social contradictions were not yet as developed as they were in France and England, and in that phrase-intoxicated land phrases were correspondingly dangerous. The only philosopher who deserved respect was Ludwig Feuerbach.

Marx's pithiest condensation of his theory of history made at that time was in a letter to a Russian friend, Paul Annenkov. His criticism of Proudhon was in reality a criticism of historical idealism. Marx wrote:

'What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of the inter-actions of men. Are men free to choose this or that social form? Not in the least. Take any particular stage in the development of the productive forces of man and you will find a corresponding form of trade and consumption. Take definite stages in the development of production, trade, consumption, and you have a corresponding form of social constitution, a definite organisation of family, rank or classes, in a word a corresponding form of civil society. Take such a civil society and you have a definite political situation, which is only the official expression of civil society.

'It remains to add that men are not free masters of their forces of production--the foundation of their whole history--because these forces are acquired, are the product of previous activity. Thus the forces of production are the result of man's practical energy, but this energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men are placed by the forces of production already acquired by them, by the social forms existing before them, which they themselves have not created but are the product of the previous generation. From the simple fact that each generation finds itself confronted with forces of production acquired by the preceding one, which serves it as the raw material for new forces of production, it follows that there is a continuity in the history of mankind, and a history of mankind which is all the more his history because his forces of production and consequently his social relationships have grown in the meantime. The necessary consequence is that the social history of men is always only the history of their individual development, alike whether they are conscious of it or not. Their material relationships form the foundation of all their relationships. These material relationships are only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is fulfilled. ... The economic forms under which men produce, consume, exchange, are transient and historical. With newly acquired forces of production men alter their methods of production, and with their methods of production they alter their economic conditions, which were purely and simply the necessary conditions of these definite methods of production. ... Proudhon has understood very well that men make cloth, linen, silk. What Proudhon has not understood is that men produce the social relationships in which they produce the cloth and the linen in conformity with their capacity. Still less has Proudhon understood that men, who produce social relationships in conformity with their material productivity, also produce ideas and categories, that is to say, the ideal, abstract expressions of these same social relationships. Accordingly categories are just as little eternal as the conditions the expression of which they are. For Proudhon, on the contrary, it is categories and abstractions that are the primary facts. In his opinion it is these and not men who make history. ... As for him the driving forces are categories, there is no need to alter practical life to alter the categories. On the contrary, if one alters the categories, alterations in real life will follow.'

The last of the Theses on Feuerbach, which Marx wrote in his notebook, says:

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently. The task is now to change it.'

At the beginning of May, 1846, Marx and Engels sent the greater part of the manuscript to Germany. They had found some prosperous adherents of 'true' Socialism in Westphalia who had thought of publishing the work. But 'business difficulties, whether real or alleged can no longer be determined, intervened. Marx tried in vain to find another publisher. In spite of all his efforts and those of Joseph Weydemeyer, a former Prussian artillery lieutenant who had become a Communist and visited Marx in Brussels in 1846, the book remained unpublished. In retrospect it seemed to Marx that the impossibility of publishing a work to which he had devoted a year of his life had not extraordinarily disturbed him. At the time, however, he bore the blow heavily. But it all lay a long time behind him when he wrote: 'We left the manuscript to the nibbling criticism of mice all the more willingly as we had attained our chief aim--clarification.'

Chapter 09 notes

1: Der Dichter steht auf einer höh'ren Warte

Als auf den Zinnen der Partei
.