Routledge Library Editions karl marx

The treachery of the Berlin Assembly paralysed the district committee in the Rhineland, which was flooded with troops. On the 22nd of November Lassalle, who had enthusiastically welcomed the appeal, was arrested in DUsseldorf, whilst in Cologne the Public Prosecutor took action against those who had signed it, although he did not dare to arrest them. On the 8th of February the signatories to the appeal appeared before a jury in Cologne on a l,harge of having incited the people to armed resistance against the authorities and against the military forces of the Crown.

The attempt of the Public Prosecutor to use the laws of the 6th and 8th of April, the same laws which the government had trodden underfoot with its coup, against the Assembly and against the accused was demolished by Marx in a powerful speech : those who had carried out a successful revolution might logically hang their opponents, but not sit in judgment upon them ; they nught get rid of their defeated enemies, but not try them as criminals. It was cowardly hypocrisy to use the laws which a successful revolution or counter-revolution had just overthrown against those who had upheld them. The question of whether the Assembly was in the right or the Crown was an historical one and could be determined only by history and not by a jury.

But Marx went still further, he refused to recognize the laws of the 6th and 8th of April at al, declaring them to Kave been manufactured by the United Diet in order to save the Crown from having to admit its defeat in the March struggles. An assembly representing modern bourgeois society could not be judged according to the laws of a feudal body. The principle that society was based on law was a legal fiction. On the contrary, in reality law was based on society: “In my hand is the Cotk Napoleon. It did not produce bourgeois society. On the




contrary, it was produced by bourgeois society, which, arising in the eighteenth century and continuing its development in the nineteenth, found no more than its legal expression in the Code. The moment the Code failed to reflect social relations faithfully, it would be no more than a scrap of paper. You cannot make the old laws the basis of the new society any more than the old laws made the old society"’

The Berlin Assembly had failed to understand the historic role which had developed for it out of the March Revolution. The reproach of the Public Prosecutor that the Assembly had refused all mediation was baseless because the misfortune and the mistake of the Assembly lay precisely in the fact that it had degraded itself from a revolutionary convention into an ambiguous association ofconciliants : “What we have witnessed was not a political conflict between two fractions on the basis of one society, but a conflict between two societies, a social conflict in a political form. It was the struggle of the old feudal-bureaucratic society against modern bourgeois society, the struggle between the society of free competition and the society of the guilds and corporations, between the society of landownership and the society of industry, between the society of authoritarian belief and the society of knowledge.” There could be no peace between these two societies, but only a struggle in which one of them must go under. The refusal to pay taxes did not shake the foundations of society, as the Public Prosecutor had amusingly contended. It was an act of self-defence on the part of society against a government which threatened the foundations of society.

The Assembly had not acted illegally with regard to its refusal to pay taxes, but not legally with its announcement of passive resistance : “If the collection of taxes is declared illegal it is my duty to oppose, by force if necessary, any attempt to carry out an illegal act.” Although those who had proclaimed the refusal to pay taxes had refused to take the revolutionary path for fear of their own skins, the masses of the people were nevertheless compelled to do so when carrying out this proclamation. The attitude of the Assembly was not decisive for the people: “ The Assembly has no rights of its own; the people has merely transferred to the Assembly the task of defending its rights. When the Assembly fails to perform this task its rights expire, and the people then appears in the arena in person to act in its own right. When the Crown organizes a counter-revolution the people justly answers with a new revolution”’ Marx concluded his speech with the statement that only the first act in the drama had been played out. The final denouement would be the complete victory of the counter-revolution or a new and victorious revolution




though perhaps the latter would be possible only after the completed victory of the counter-revolution.

After this proud revolutionary speech the jury acquitted all the accused and the foremen of the jury thanked Marx for his instructive explanation.

2. 
   An Act of Perfidy
   

With the victory of the counter-revolution in Vienna and in Berlin the decisive word had been spoken in Germany. All that was left of the achievements of the revolution was the Frankfort Assembly, which had long ago lost all its political credit and which frittered away its energies in endless torrents of discussion about a paper constitution. In reality the only question still outstanding was whether the Assembly would be dismissed at the point of Prussian or Austrian bayonets.

In December the Neue Rheinische Zeitung described the development of the Prussian revolution and counter-revolution in a series of brilliant articles, and then turned a hopeful eye to the rise of the French working class, from which it expected a world war. “The country which has turned whole nations into its proletarians, which holds the whole world in its gigantic tentacles, which has already paid the expenses of a European restoration once, and in whose own lap the class contradictions have developed in their clearest and most shameless form—England, appears to be the rock against which the waves of revolution will break. England will starve the new society before it is born. England dominates the world market, and a transformation of economic relations in every country of Europe, on the whole Continent, would be a storm in a tea-cup without England. The relations of industry and commerce within each country are determined by their relations with other countries, by their relations with the world market. But England dominates the world market and England is dominated by the bourgeoisie”

Thus any social upheaval in France would be crushed by the English bourgeoisie, by the industrial and commercial world power of Great Britain . Any partial social reform in France or anywhere else on the European Continent would remain, in so far as it was intended to be definitive, a pious and empty wish. Old England could be overthrown'only by a world war, which alone could offer the Chartists, the organized party of the English proletariat, the conditions necessary for a successful




insurrection against its powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists were at the head of the English government would the social revolution advance from the world of utopia into the world of reality.

The preliminary conditions for this future hope did not materialize. The French working class, still bleeding from a thousand wounds received in the June days, was not capable of any new rising. Since the counter-revolution had begun its tour of Europe in Paris in the June days, going on to Frankfort, Vienna and Berlin, to end for the moment on the loth of December with the election of the false Bonaparte as President of the French Republic, the revolution was still alive only in Hungary, and it found an eloquent and expert advocate in Engels, who had in the meantime returned to Cologne. For the rest the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was compelled to limit its activities to a guerilla war against the advancing counter-revolution, but it waged this struggle as daringly and as determinedly as it had waged the greater struggles of the previous year. A bundle of press writs loaded on it by the Reich’s government as the worst paper in a bad press, was greeted with the mocking remark that the Reich’s power was the most comic of all comic powers, and the boastful display of “ Prussianism” which the East Elbian Junkers had adopted since the Berlin coup was answered with deserved sarcasm: “We Rhinelanders have had the good fortune to win a Grand-Duke of the Lower Rhineland from the great reshuffle in Vienna, a man who has not fulfilled the conditions under which he became ‘ Grand-Duke . A King of Prussia exists for us only since the Berlin Assembly, and as there is no Assembly for our ‘ Grand-Duke of the Lower Rhineland ’, thus no King of Prussia exists for us. We fell into the hands of the ‘ Grand-Duke of the Lower Rhineland’ as a result of jugglery with the fate of the peoples, and as soon as we are in a position to reject this jugglery we shall ask the ‘ Grand-Duke ’ for his credentials.” These lines were written during the wildest orgies of the counter-revolution.

One thing is missing at first glance in the columns of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, something which one would expect to find there above all, namely, a detailed account of the activities of the German workers at the time. This movement was by no means insignificant, and it extended even into the districts of the East Elbian Junkers themselves. It had its congresses, its organizations arid its newspapers, and a capable leader in Stephan Born, who was friendly with Marx and Engels from the Paris and Brussels period and who still contributed to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Berlin and from Leipzig. Born under


stood The Communist Manifesto very well, but he was less successful in applying its principles to the undeveloped class-consciousness of the proletariat of the greater part of Germany. Later on Engels condemned Born’s activities with unjust severity, but it is quite possible that Born is right when he declares in his memoirs that during the years of revolution neither Marx nor Engels ever expressed a word of dissatisfaction with his activities, though this naturally does not exclude the possibility that they may have been dissatisfied with this or that detail. In any case, in the spring of 1849 Marx and Engels made the first move towards the working-class movement, which had developed in the meantime independent of their influence.

The fact that in the beginning the Neue Rheinische Zeitung paid very little attention to this movement can be explained in part by the fact that the Cologne Workers Association had its own special organ, which appeared twice a week under the editorship of Moll and Schapper, and in part, in greater part in fact, by the circumstance that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was above all “ an organ of democracy”, that is to say that it aimed at representing the joint interests of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat against absolutism and feudalism. At that time this task was most important because it helped to create the basis on which the proletariat could begin its own discussion with the bourgeoisie. However, the bourgeois section of the democracy demoralized rapidly, and at every more or less serious test it collapsed miserably. There were such people as Meyen and Kriege (who had in the meantime returned from America) on the Committee of Five which had been elected in June 1848 by the first Democratic Congress. Under such leadership the organization began to decline rapidly, and this was seen disastrously when it met for the second time on the eve of the Prussian coup d’etat. A new committee was elected and d’Ester, a personal friend and political supporter of Marx, was a member of it, but this was little more than a bill drawn on the future. The parliamentary left wing of the Berlin Assembly failed in the November crisis, and the left wing of the Frankfort Assembly sank deeper and deeper into the morass of miserable compromises.

In this situation Marx, Wilhelm Wolff, Schapper and Hermann Becker announced their resignation from the democratic district committee on the 15th of April, justifying their action as follows: “In our opinion the present form of organization of the democratic associations embraces too many heterogeneous elements to make possible any useful activity in furtherance of its aim. In our opinion a closer association of workers organizations will be more useful because these..organizations are composed




of more homogeneous elements.” At the same time the Cologne Workers Association resigned from the Association of Rhenish Democratic Organizations and invited all working- class and other organizations upholding the principles of social democracy to send representatives to a provincial congress on the 6th of May. This latter congress was called to decide on an organization of Rhenish-Westphalian workers associations, and whether delegates should be sent to a congress of all working- class organizations called for June in Leipzig by Born’s organization, the Leipzig Workers Brotherhood.

On the 20th of March, before these steps were taken, the Neue Rheiniscfo Zeitung had begun to publish Wilhelm Wolff’s articles on the Silesian milliards, which so aroused the rural proletariat, and on the 5th of April it began to publish the lectures which Marx had delivered to the workers associations in Brussels on wage-labour and capital. After showing on the basis of the tremendous mass struggles of 1848 that every revolutionary insurrection must fail, no matter how removed its aim might appear to be from the class struggle, so long as the working class had not been victorious, the paper turned its attention to the problem of economic relations, on which the existence of the bourgeoisie and the slavery of the workers were both based.

However, this promising development was interrupted by the struggles which now took place around the paper constitution which had finally been botched together by the Frankfort Assembly. In itself the precious constitution was not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood, and the hereditary imperial crown it sought to place on the head of the King of Prussia was for all the world like a fool’s cap. The King of Prussia did not accept, but he also did not definitely refuse. He wanted to negotiate with the German princes on the question of the Reich’s Constitution in the secret hope that they would agree to Prussian hegemony in return for Prussian military services in destroying what was left of the gains of the revolution in the small States and Statelets.

This was a blatant piece of body-finatching, and it fanned the spark of revolution into a flame again, causing a number of insurrections which received their name if they did not derive their content from the Reich’s Constitution. Despite its weaknesses the Constitution represented the sovereignity of the people, and the authorities sought to destroy it in order to establish the sovereignty of the princes once again. Armed insurrections in support of the Reich’s Constitution took place in the kingdom of Saxony, in the grand-duchy of Baden and in the Bavarian Palatinate. Everywhere the King of Prussia played the part of hangman,




though afterwards the other potentates cheated him of the hangman’s wage. Isolated insurrections also took place in the Rhineland, but they were crushed immediately by an overwhelming weight of numbers, thanks to the strong military forces which the government had drafted into the much-feared province.

The authorities then plucked up sufficient courage for an annihilating blow against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. As the signs of a new revolutionary rising made themselves felt everywhere so the flames of revolutionary enthusiasm rose higher and higher in its columns, and in fact the special editions it issued in April and May were nothing but appeals to the people to hold itself in readiness for the coming insurrection. The reactionary Kreu;:,-Zeitung did it the honour of declaring that its insolence was monumental and that the activities of the Moniteur of 1793 paled before it. The government was itching to lay its hands on the paper, but did not dare. Thanks to the spirit amongst the jurymen of the Rhineland, two processes against Marx had done nothing but win him new laurels, and a suggestion from Berlin that martial law should again be declared in Cologne was evaded by the nervous commandant of the garrison who instead applied to the police for the expulsion of Marx as “a dangerous individual”.

The request embarrassed the police, who turned the matter over to the provincial governor, who in his turn passed on his share of the unpleasantness to Manteuffel, the Minister of the Interior. On the loth of March the provincial government reported to Berlin that Marx was still in Cologne, though he had no police permission to stay there and that the newspaper he edited was still pursuing its destructive aims, its incitement against the existing constitution and its demand for the establishment of a social republic, whilst at the same time mocking and ridiculing everything humanity respected and held dear. The paper was becoming more and more dangerous in view of the fact that the temper and insolence with which it was written were steadily increasing the number of its readers. However, the police harboured misgivings with regard to the request of the commandant of the garrison for the expulrion of Marx, and the provincial government was compelled to support the police because an expulsion “without any particular reason other than the tendency and the dangerousness of the newspaper edited by him” might cause a demonstration on the part of the Democratic Party.

After receiving this report Manteuffel approached Eichmann, the President of the Rhine Province, to obtain his opinion. On the 29th of March Eichmann dec-lared that the expulsion of




Marx would be justifiable, but attended with difficulties unless Marx were guilty of further offences. On the 7th of April Manteuffel then informed the provincial government that he had no objection to the expulsion, but that he must leave the time and circumstances to the provincial government, and that he felt it desirable that the order of expulsion should be issued in connection with some particular offence. In the end, however, the order of expulsion was issued solely on account of the “dangerous tendency” of the paper edited by Marx and not on account of any particular offence. This was done on the 11th of May when apparently the government felt itself strong enough to deliver a blow it had been too cowardly to deliver on the 29th of March or the 7th of April.

The Prussian professor who recently unearthed the documentary record of the affair in the State archives did great honour to the poetic and prophetic vision of Freiligrath, who wrote under the immediate impression of the expulsion :

Kein offner Hieb iIi offner Schlacht—

Es fallen die Nucken und Tucken,

Es fallt mich die schleichende Niedertracht Der schmuteigen Westkalmucken.¹

g. And Another Cowardly Trick

Marx was not in Cologne when the order of expulsion arrived. Although the circulation of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was steadily increasing and it now had about 6,000 subscribers, its financial difficulties were by no means at an end. With the increasing sales the immediate expenses also increased, whereas the revenue increased only later, so that Marx was in Hamm negotiating with Rempel, one of the two capitalists who had declared themselves prepared to put up the money for a communist publishing house in 1846. However, the generous fellow still kept his purse-strings tightly drawn and referred Marx to an ex-lieutenant named Henze who in fact did advance 300 thaler for the paper, a loan for which Marx accepted personal responsibility. Although Henze was later exposed as an agent-provocateur, at that time he was also being persecuted by the police, and he

¹ “ No honest blow in an honest fight—