Routledge Library Editions karl marx

In the end Marx did not publish his doctoral dissertation. Its immediate aim was no longer a matter of urgency and according to a later indication of its author it was put on one side to await its resurrection as part of a larger work on Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy as a whole, but as it turned out, “ political and philosophic affairs of quite another kind ” did not permit Marx to carry out his original intention.

One of the most important of these affairs was to prove that not only Epicurus but also Hegel were thorough-going atheists. In November 1841 Wigand published an “ Ultimatum ” entitled The Last Trump of Judgment against Hegel, the Atheists and the AntiChrists. Under the mask of an orthodox believer the anonymous pamphleteer bemoaned Hegel’s atheism in the accents of biblical




prophecy and proved hij point in the most convincing fashion from Hegel’s own works. The pamphlet created a great sensation, particularly as in the beginning the orthodox mask actually deceived the public, and even Ruge was taken in by it. In reality the author of The Last Trump was Bruno Bauer and he intended to continue the work together with Marx and to prove on the basis of Hegel’s resthetics, his philosophy of law, etc., that the Young Hegelians and not the Old Hegelians had inherited the real spirit of the master.

In the meantime, however, The Last Trump was prohibited, and Wigand made difficulties about publishing any more of it. In addition Marx fell ill, as also did his father-in-law, who was bedridden for three months until he died on the 3rd of March 1842. Under the circumstances Marx found it “ impossible to do anything worth while ”, but he did send in “ a minor contribution ” on the loth of February and at the same time promised Ruge that he would place himselfat the disposal of the publication to the full extent of his powers. The “ minor contribution ” referred to was an article on the latest censorship instructions issued at the instance of the King with a view to securing a mitigated application of the censorship, and it represents the beginning of Marx’s political career. Point by point his trenchant criticism laid bare the logical absurdities hidden beneath a cloak of hazy romanticism. His attitude was in uncompromising contradiction to the joy of the “ pseudo-liberal ” Philistines and even of some of the Young Hegelians who thought to descry “ the sun already high in the heavens ” because of“ the royal spirit ” which pervaded the instructions.

In his accompanying letter Marx requests that the article be put into print as quickly as possible “ unless the censor censors my censure ”. His foreboding did not deceive him and on the 25th of February Ruge wrote informing him that the Deutsche Jahrhiicher was having the greatest difficulties with the censorship and that “ your contribution has become impossible ”. Ruge also informed Marx that he had chosen “ an elite of pungent and excellent things ” from amongst the material rejected by the censorship and that he intended to publish them in Switzerland as “ Anekdota Philosophica ”. On the 5th of March Marx wrote expressing great enthusiasm for the proposal. “ Owing to the sudden resurrection ” of the censorship in Saxony the publication of his essay on Christian art, which was to have appeared as the second part of The Last Trump, was made quite impossible. Marx then went through it again and offered it to Ruge for the Anekdota, together with a criticism of Hegelian natural law as far as it referred to the inner constitution. This latter criticism




showed a tendency to attack col1ltitutional monarchy as a thoroughly self-contradictory and self-neutralizing hybrid. Ruge accepted both, but apart from the article on the censorship instructions he received nothing.

On the 20th of March Marx announced that he intended to free his essay on Christian art from the style of The Last Trump and from the irksome limitations of the Hegelian phraseology, at the same time giving it a freer and more thorough treatment. This he promised to have finished by the middle of April. On the 27th ofApril it was “ almost finished ” and Ruge was requested to “ excuse him for another few days ” and informed that he would receive only 'a summary of the essay on Christian art because during the course of the work it had grown into a book. But by the 9th ofJuly Marx was prepared to abandon all attempts to find an excuse, unless “ unpleasant external matters ” were sufficient excuse. In the meantime he promised to touch nothing else until his contributions to the Anekdota were finished. On the 21st of October Ruge reported that the Anekdota was ready and that it would be published'by the Literarisches Kontor in Zurich. He was stili holding a place open for Marx’s contributions though up to the moment the latter had been more generous in promise than in performance, still, he, Ruge, knew very well what Marx could do in the way of performance once he settled down to it.

Ruge was sixteen years older than Marx, but like Bruno Bauer and Koppen he had the greatest respect for the capacities of the younger man, though Marx had severely strained his editorial patience. Marx was never an accommodating author either for his collaborators or his publishers, but none of them ever thought of ascribing to neglect or laziness what was caused only by an overbrimming richness of ideas and a self-criticism which was never satisfied.

In this particular case there was another circumstance which excused him even in the eyes of Ruge, for an incomparably more powerful interest than philosophy had begun to occupy his attention. With his article on the censorship instructions he had entered the political arena, and he continued this activity in the columns of the Rheinische Zeitung instead of spinning on the philosophical thread in the Anekdota.

The Rheinische Zeitung was founded in Cologne on the 1st of January 1842 and originally it was not an opposition paper at all, but rather pro-governmental. Since the trouble with the bishops in the ’thirties the Kolnische Zeitung with its eight thousand subscribers had become the mouthpiece of the ultramontane party which held undisputed sway in the Rhineland and caused the jack-boot policy of the government much trouble. The attitude

of the Kolnische Zeitung spIjng less from any righteous enthusiasm for the Catholic cause than from purely business considerations, for it was well aware that its readers were far from being enamoured of the blessings of the Berlin dispensation. The monopoly of the Kolnische Zeitung was so powerful that its owners invariably succeeded in buying out any competitive newspapers even when the latter enjoyed support from Berlin. In December 1839 the necessary concession for publication had been granted to the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung in the hope that it would succeed in breaking the monopoly of the Kolnische Zeitung, but it was not long before the former was threatened with the fate which had overtaken all its predecessors. At the last moment, however, a group of well-to-do citizens clubbed together to raise new share- capital and place the paper on a new basis. The government favoured the plan and gave provisional permission for the reorganized paper, which was to be known as the Rheinische Zeitung, to use the concession which had been granted to its predecessor.

The bourgeoisie of Cologne had no intention of making difficulties for the Prussian regime, although it was hated by the mass of the people in the Rhineland as an alien yoke. Business was proceeding satisfactorily and the bourgeoisie in the Rhineland had therefore abandoned its pro-French sympathies, and after the creation of the Zollverein it practically demanded Prussian hegemony throughout Germany. The political demands of the bourgeoisie in the Rhineland were extremely moderate and not so far-reaching as its economic demands, which aimed at furthering the capitalist mode of production in the Rhineland, where it had already made great progress. The demands put forward were : economical administration of the State finances, extension of the railway services, reduction of court fees and stamp duties, a common flag and common consuls for the Zollverein, and in short, all those items which invariably appear on a list of bourgeois desiderata.

However, the two young people who were entrusted with the reorganization of the editorial board, Georg Jung, a young barrister, and Dagobert Oppenheim, a young assessor, turned out to be enthusiastic Young Hegelians and very much under the influence of Moses Hess, who was also the son ofa Rhenish business man and had not only studied the Hegelian philosophy, but also made himself familiar with French socialism. These two recruited the new contributors from amongst their own intellectual circle and above all from amongst the Young Hegelians in Berlin, and, at the recommendation of Marx, Rutenberg even took over the editorship of the regular German article although this recommendation was not, as it turned out, oneofMarx’s happiest notions.

Marx himself must have been closely connected with the venture from the beginning. He had intended to move from Trier to Cologne at the end of March, but he found life in the latter town too noisy for him and instead he provisionally pitched his tent in Bonn, from which Bruno Bauer had in the meantime disappeared, observing, “ It would be a pity if no one remained to annoy the orthodox.” In Bonn he began those contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung which were to carry him far above the heads of all the other contributors.

Although the personal connections of Jung and Oppenheim were the first means of turning the paper into a rendezvous of the Young Hegelians it is difficult to believe that this change in its character could have taken place without the approval or without the knowledge of the actual shareholders. The latter were in all probability acute enough to realize that they could not have found more capable intellects anywhere in Germany. The Young Hegelians were pro-Prussian, even exuberantly so, and whatever else they did which the good bourgeois ofCologne were unable to understand or found suspicious was probably regarded as harmless idiosyncrasies. Whatever the explanation may have been, the shareholders did not in fact interfere, although in the very first weeks of its existence complaints about the “ subversive tendency ” of the paper began to come in from Berlin and there was even a threat to suppress it altogether at the end of the first quarter. The thing which chiefly shocked the Berlin dispensation was the appointment of Rutenberg, who was regarded as a terrible revolutionary and kept under strict political surveillance. Even in the March days of 1848 Frederick William IV trembled before him believing him to be the real instigator of the revolution. Despite the dissatisfaction felt in Berlin the deadly bolt was not discharged and this was due chiefly to the Minister ofCulture Eichhorn who, although he was thoroughly reactionary, felt the necessity for some counter-weight to the ultramontane tendencies of the Kolnische Zeitung. Although the tendency of the Rheinische Zeitung was “ almost more dangerous ”, nevertheless it played with ideas which could not possibly have any attraction for the solid and reliable elements of society.

This was certainly not the fault of the contributions which Marx sent in and in fact the practical fashion in which hc dealt with the affairs of the day did more to reconcile the shareholders with Young Hegelianism than even the contributions of Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner! Otherwise it would be impossible to understand how it came about that in October 1842, a few months after he had sent in his first article, he was made editor of the paper.




For the first time Marx was now given an opportunity ofshow- ing his incomparable ability to take things as they were and to make petrified conditions dance by singing them their own melody.

6. 
   The Rhenish Diet
   

In the previous year the Diet of the Rhenish province had sat for nine weeks in Dusseldorf, and in a series of five long treatises Marx now proceeded to elucidate its activities. The provincial Diets were impotent, pseudo-representative bodies instituted by the Prussian Crown to cloak the betrayal of its 1815 promise to grant a constitution. They held their sessions behind closed doors and were permitted at the utmost a little say in petty communal affairs. However, since the trouble with the Catholic Church in Cologne and in Posen in 1837 the Diets had not been convened at all. Opposition to the government, if it came at all, was to be expected only from the Rhenish and Posen Diets, but even then only an ultramontane opposition.

These precious bodies were protected very effectively from liberalist aberrations by the provision that the possession of landed property was a necessary condition of membership. The country gentry were to provide one-half of the membership, the urban landowners one-third and the peasant landowners one-sixth. However, this edifying principle could not be put into operation in all its glory everywhere, and in the newly-won Rhineland, for instance, one or two concessions had to be made to the spirit of modernism, but always the country gentry provided over one-third of the membership and in view of the fact that all the decisions of the Diets had to be adopted with a two-thirds majority nothing could be passed without their approval. Urban landowners were subjected to the further limitation that their land must have been in their uninterrupted possession for a period of at least ten years before it conferred the boon of eligibility for election to the Diet. As a further precautionary measure the government reserved the right to veto the election of any urban official.

Although the Diets were the object of general contempt Frederick William IV convened them again in 184 i after his accession to the throne, and he even extended their rights somewhat, but only in order to trick the creditors of the State, who




had been promised by the Crown in 1820 that no new loans would be floated without the consent and the guarantee of the future Reich’s Corporative Assembly. Johann Jacoby issued a famous pamphlet calling on the Diets to demand the fulfilment of the royal promise, but he preached to deaf ears.

Even the Rhenish Diet gave way ignominiously and it did so precisely on those political questions relating to the church on account of which the government had most feared it. With a two-thirds majority it rejected a demand that the illegally arrested Archbishop of Cologne should either be brought before the courts or reinstated in his office, although the justice of such a demand was beyond all discussion both from the liberal and the ultramontane standpoints. It did not even mention the question of a constitution and it dealt in the most pusillanimous fashion with a petition signed by over a thousand citizens of Cologne demanding the admission of the general public to the Diet sessions, the publication of a daily and unexpurgated report of the Diet proceedings, the right to discuss the affairs of the Diet and all other provincial affairs in the press, and the issue of a definite press law in place of the censorship. All the Diet did was to request the King for permission to publish the names of the speakers in its records, and instead of demanding a press law it asked for a censorship law designed merely to prevent arbitrariness in the application of the censorship. The well- earned consequence of its cowardice was a rebuff at the hands of the Crown even for these modest requests.

The Diet showed signs of life only when it sprang to defend the interests of the landowners. The restoration of the old feudal glories was out of the question (as even the officials sent into the Rhineland from East Prussia reported back to Berlin) for any attempt to do so would have aroused fierce opposition on the part of the Rhinelanders, who were not prepared to put up with anything of the sort. In particular they were not prepared to tolerate any interference with the right to partition landed property at will, whether in the interests of the country gentry or in the interests of the peasantry, although the unlimited carving up of landed property had already led to the downright atomization of landholdings, as the government pointed out with more than a little justification. A government proposal to place certain limits on the partitioning of landed property “ in the interests of maintaining a strong peasantry ” was therefore rejected by the Diet by 49 votes against 8, for it was in agreement with the province on this point. But after this the Diet plunged into legislation more after its own heart and it passed a number of laws put forward




by the government against stick-gathering, tresp^s and poaching on private lands and in the woods. The landowners in the Diet shamelessly and unscrupulously prostituted their legislative powers to their own private interests.

Marx had drawn up a comprehensive plan for taking the Diet to task. In the first treatise, which was composed of six long articles, he dealt with the debates of the Diet on the freedom of the press and on the publication of the Diet proceedings. Permission to publish a report of the proceedings without publishing the names of the speakers was one of the reforms with which the King had tried to encourage the Diets, but he met with violent opposition from the Diets themselves. The Rhenish Diet did not go so far as the Pomeranian and the Brandenburg Diets, which flatly refused to publish any reports of their proceedings, but that stupid arrogance which would make elected representatives into higher beings secure from the criticism of the electors gave itself airs enough. “ The Diet cannot stand the light of day. The privacy of its own circle is better suited to it. If the province has sufficient confidence in a body of individuals to entrust them with the representation of its rights, then it is only natural that these individuals should be condescending enough to accept the honour, but it would really be going too far to demand that they should give a Roland for an Oliver and submit themselves, their modes of living and their characters to the judgment of the province which has just given them such a vote of confidence.” With delicious humour Marx derides the first appearance of that phenomenon which he was later to dub “ parliamentary cretinism ”, a thing he hated all his life.

And for the freedom of the press his rapier play has never been equalled in brilliance and trenchancy. Without envy Ruge admitted : “ It would be impossible to say anything more deep or more thorough in favour of the freedom of the press. We may congratulate ourselves that this maturity, genius and sovereign mastery over the vulgar confusion of ideas have made their debut in our press.” In one passage Marx refers to the free and happy climate of his homeland, and in these articles there is, even to-day, still something of the brightness and warmth of the summer sun playing on the vineyards along the banks of the Rhine. Hegel once spoke of “ the miserable subjectivity of a bad press which would liquidate everything ”, but Marx reached back to the bourgeois enlightenment movement, and in the Rheinische Zeitung he recognized Kantism as the German theory of the French Revolution. However, he reached back to it with all the breadth of political and social




horizon which the historical dialectics of Hegel had opened up to him. One has only to compare the articles of Mara in the Rheinische Zeitung with Jacoby’s “ Four Questions ” in order to realize what an advance the former were. Jacoby appealed again and again to the royal promise of a constitution as the alpha and omega of the whole question, whilst Marx did not consider it worthy of even a casual mention.

With all his praise of a free press as the watchful eye of the people as against a censored press with its fundamental vice of hypocrisy, a vice which gave rise to all its other imperfections including the evil of passivity, revolting even from an resthetic standpoint, Marx did not overlook the dangers which threatened the former. One of the representatives of the urban property owners had demanded the freedom of the press as part and parcel of the freedom of trade whereupon Marx demanded : “ Is a press which degrades itself to a trade free ? A writer must certainly earn money in order to exist and write, but he should not exist and write in order to earn money. . . . The first freedom of the press must consist in its emancipation from commerce. The writer who degrades the press to a material means deserves as a punishment for this inner slavery that outer slavery which is the censorship, or perhaps his very existence is his punishment.” All his life Marx lived up to these principles and to that standard which he demanded from others : a man’s writings must always be an end in themselves. They must be so little a means for himself and others that if necessary he must sacrifice his own existence to his writings.

The second treatise on the proceedings of the Rhenish Diet dealt with “ The Archbishop Affair ” as Marx wrote to Jung. This treatise was blue-pencilled by the censor and it was never published, although Ruge offered to include it in his Anekdota. Writing to the latter on the 9th of July 1842 Marx declared : “ Don’t think we are living in a political Dorado here in the Rhineland. It needs the most determined persistence to conduct a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung. My second article on the Diet dealing with the church troubles has been rejected by the censor. I pointed out in it that the defenders of the State had taken up a religious attitude and the defenders of the church a political attitude. The rejection of my article is all the more disagreeable because the foolish Catholics of Cologne would have fallen into the trap and the defence of the Archbishop would have attracted new subscribers. You can hardly imagine, by the way, how disgustingly and at the same time how stupidly the despots have treated the orthodox blockhead. But success has crowned the affair. Prussia has kissed the




Pope’s toe before the eyes of the whole world but our governmental automatons still appear in public without blushing.” The last passage refers to the fact that in accordance with his romanticist leanings Frederick William IV had ventured into negotiations with the Papal Curia whereupon the latter had shown its gratitude by overreaching him right and left in the best traditions of the Vatican.