Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

European nations, as determined according to language and congeniality, while the ‘splinter nations’, incapable of unity, would be incorporated into the larger ones (ibid., p.

The publication of this pamphlet and of one by Lassalle on the same topic entitled Der italienische Krieg und die Aufgabe Prenssens (May) delayed the appearance of Marx’s ‘Economics’ until early June. Meanwhile, Lassalle sent Marx copies of his Franz von Sickingen, a drama about the tragic end of the knightly revolutionary Sickingen, and of the pamphlet on the Italian war. Marx found fault with Lassalle’s portrayal of the peasant movements and the revolutionary elements in the cities, which, Marx held, should have provided the protagonist Sickingen with a meaningful, vivid background: ‘Haven’t you’, he asked Lassalle, ‘fallen into the same diplomatic error as your Franz von Sickingen by ranking the Lutherian-knightly opposition above the plebian-Miinzerian?’ (April 19)- Marx most vigorously opposed Lassalle's views as presented in The War in Italy, where he defended the cause of Italian unity with Prussian support against the Austrians. He held that this pamphlet entirely failed to recognise the Russian hand pushing Napoleon into supporting the patriotic cause of Italy. Lassalle defended a cause which would lead only to disorganisation among the German armies and benefit the Czar and Napoleon. It also generated Marx’s criticism that Lassalle had presumed to speak in the name of the ‘party’ on this issue, for he felt that party discipline should be maintained in critical times, if the cause was not to be lost. He proposed therefore to Engels that they compose a party manifesto in order to dispel some of the confusion among the divers revolutionary groups (May 18).

Apropos the impending war, Marx read in May a study by Karl Vogt on the present situation in Europe and became convinced of the author's strong Bonapartist leanings. At this time he also attended as a representative of the Daily Tribune a Public meeting on the Italian war organised by David Urquhart. Approached by Karl Blind, Marx was informed that Karl Vogt received subsidies from the French government in order to carry °ut pro-Bonaparte propaganda and that Blind was in possession °f material proof that Vogt had betrayed his country (May 9).

Meanwhile Marx met with members of the German Working Men's Association in London to discuss participation on the




German-language newspaper Die Ncue Zeit, an ineffective organ presently under the editorship of Edgar Bauer. The group decided not to collaborate on any paper which they did not edit themselves and would therefore support the rival organ Das Volk, which the Association as a whole planned to found in opposition to the Bauer publication. At this meeting Marx declared that Engels and he were self-appointed representatives of the proletarian party and that their appointment was ‘countersigned by the hatred, unqualified and universal, which all old-world factions and parties devote to us’ (letter to Engels, May 18).

In the second issue of Das Volk on May 14 an article appeared which revealed the true nature of Karl Vogt’s activities and was written, without Marx’s consultation, by Elard Biscamp. Vogt, who attributed the article to Marx, wrote an open letter to the Swiss Handels-Courier (June 2), in which he characterised Marx as the head of a ‘band of hooligans’, intriguers and extortioners and warned the working class to beware of this unscrupulous agitator.

Even before the first booklet of the ‘Economics’ appeared by Duncker in Berlin, the journal Das Volk published a large part of the Preface, which contained interesting biographical notes on Marx’s activities and studies prior to his research in political economy. It began with an exposition of the complete plan for the ‘Economics’ in six parts, or two triads, constructed according to the methodological principles set down in the 1857 Introduction and the Grundrisse themselves, whereby the influence of Hegel’s Logic had been decisive. Apart from the plan, the Preface summarised briefly the theoretical views which he had developed in Paris and Brussels, departing from the standpoint that ‘the anatomy of bourgeois society is to be sought in political economy’ (MEW 13 :8). These views are four:

1. 
   The social, political and intellectual life process depends in general on the production mode of material life. ‘It is not men s consciousness which determines their existence, but the contrary: their social existence determines their consciousness (MEW 13: 8f.).
   
2. 
   The productive forces of a given society develop to the point where they come into conflict with the property relations which had hitherto served as the necessary form of their development.
   
3. 
   This conflict leads to social revolution and changes the basis of production. No social form ever disappears, however, before
   

159 157

having developed the productive forces to the maximum possible under the given conditions, nor before the material conditions for the existence of new and higher production relations have been created within the framework of the old society.

(4) Roughly speaking, there have been four eras in the economic development of society, consisting of the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production. ‘The bourgeois production relations are the last antagonistic form of the social production process ... With this social form the pre-history of human society comes to a close’ (MEW 13:9).

Marx’s ‘Economics’ appeared in its first instalment under the title Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie [Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy]. It is divided into two chapters, on commodities and on money, similar to the first section of Capital. But unlike Capital each of the two theoretical expositions is appended with historical material; by the time Marx was to finish the book on capital, he had accumulated so much historical material that it could not be included with the theoretical sections, and he was obliged to leave it aside for later publication.

The only serious critique of Marx’s long-awaited publication was written by Engels and appeared in Das Volk on August 4 and 20. However, Engels treated only the Preface before financial difficulties rendered further publication of the journal impossible. In the first article Engels retraced the history of economic thought in Germany, mentioning the theories Marx had developed in earlier works and outlined in the Preface. In Engels’s words the ‘materialist interpretation of history’ (MEW 13:469) was a ‘revolutionary discovery’ which provided the theoretical basis for their party (MEW 13:471). In the second critique Engels speaks of Marx as the first thinker since Hegel to 'develop a science according to its own proper inner coherence’. Moreover, Marx had applied to history ‘the core of the Hegelian Logic’, or in other words ‘the dialectical method stripped of its ideological wrappings’ (MEW 13:474). Engels considered the elaboration of the dialectic method to be Marx’s second great achievement and no less important than the materialist conception of history. History, Engels recounted, is the history of economic development and the progress of ideas is the ‘reflection, in abstract and consistently theoretical form, of the course of history’ (MEW 13:475). Engels’s glorifying interpretation of




Marx ends with a simplified outline of Zur Kritik, reserving discussion for a later article which was never written.

In Das Volk from July 23 to the last issue on August 20 Marx published documents of Russian diplomacy dated 1837 which gave proof of the Czar’s expansionist plans. The same document appeared in excerpt in the Daily Tribune on August 8 under the heading ‘The Foreign Policy of Russia. Memoir on Russia, for the instruction of the present Emperor ...'. Before being discontinued Das Volk also printed an unfinished series of four articles by Marx entitled ‘Quid pro Quo’, a critical analysis of Prussian politics during the Italian war. Prussia’s neutrality lent tacit support to Bonaparte’s foreign policy, which consisted in the conduct of wars abroad in order to divert attention from his country’s internal troubles. In his Tribune articles Marx also remarked that ‘war was the sole condition which kept Bonaparte on the throne, yet the wars which he fought were always senseless, vain, incited under false pretenses, squandering money and blood and bringing no advantages for the French people’ (Aug.

11. 
    . Marx feared that following the treaty of Villafranca, which ended hostilities in Lombardy, a Napoleonic governorship would be instituted over Italy (Aug. 4), but he did not exclude the possibility of an Italian revolution which would return Mazzini and the republicans to the forefront of a new national movement.
    

In the last few months of the year Marx treated British trade, electoral corruption and ‘Population, Crime and Pauperism’ (Sept. 16), remarking that something must be amiss in a social system where wealth increases without reducing poverty and crime rates rise more rapidly than the population. He also found a disproportion in the trade relations with China: the opium trade continually expanded, but in inverse relation to the importation of Western manufactures. The only market the British could conquer in China was the drug market, for the traditions and habits of the population were so deeply ingrained as to make them inaccessible to Western civilisation (Dec. 3). Marx maintained that, in general, British aggression in China aided Russia and was the work of Palmerston who continued to play deliberately into the hands of the Czar, while ostensibly