Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

consequence of circumstances thoroughly independent of the will and leadership of individuals and entire classes’ (MEW 4:372).

Marx, now vice-president of the Association democratique, was enthusiastic about the activity developing in Brussels. In little Belgium, he wrote to Georg Herwegh, ‘there is more to be done in the way of immediate propaganda than in France.’ Although the country was small, public activity proved to be ‘an endlessly refreshing stimulus for everyone’ (Oct. 26-27*




IISH). Marx was commissioned to represent the Brussels section of the League at the 2nd Congress in London (Nov. 29-Dec. 10), while Engels attended as the delegate of the Paris group. During the Congress the League's statutes were adopted and Engels and Marx appointed to compose a manifesto. The working of the new statutes attests to the influence which the two friends exercised over the other delegates: whereas the League’s purpose had previously been conceived of as ‘the diffusion and the most rapid realisation of the theory of communal property’, the statutes now read:

The purpose of the League is to bring about the fall of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the proletariat, to abolish the old society based on class differences and to found a new society without classes and without private property (MEW 4:596).

In London Marx attended a banquet held by the Fraternal Democrats in memory of the Polish rebellion of 1830 (Nov. 29). In the name of the Association dcmocratique he invited those present to participate in an international democratic congress for the coming year. In his address Marx exhorted the triumph of the working class as the basis for real unity between the peoples of Poland, England, Germany and France. England, as the most developed industrial country and the most fraught with crises, was destined to be the battlefield where the decisive triumph of the proletariat would be achieved:

Thus it is not in Poland that Poland will be liberated but rather in England. And you, Chartists, it is not your task to pronounce pious wishes for the liberation of nations. Destroy the enemies within your own country and you may then enjoy the glory of having destroyed all of previous society (MEW 4:417).

Before leaving England, Marx also spoke privately with the Chartist leaders Harney and Ernest Jones. Harney subsequently informed Marx that the Chartists and the German Working Men’s Association had accepted the invitation to participate in an international democratic congress.

At the end of the year Marx held a series of lectures for the members of the German Working Men’s Society in Brussels on ‘Wages’. He later developed the thoughts expounded there into an article published in instalments in the NRhZ beginning in




April 1849. Among Marx’s posthumous manuscripts a paper was found which is assumed to be a preparatory draft for one of these lectures. Here Marx exposes the fundamental relation between capital and labour which has both a negative and a positive aspect. On the one hand, capital engenders the misery of the working class; on the other, it brings material progress, developing the productive forces to a point at which rebellion against the existing property relations will be inevitable. Capital demands a maximum available labour force in order to keep wages down. Overpopulation is therefore favourable to the development of capital. At the same time the proletariat in its misery can hardly avoid excessive reproduction, ‘for its situation makes the sexual instinct its principal source of pleasure and favourises the one-sided development of this instinct’ (MEW 4:553). The bourgeoisie, which sees this excessive population growth as a ‘natural phenomenon’, is able to ignore its own role in creating the misery of the proletariat and ‘can observe the proletariat reduced by famine just as it observes other natural phenomena, without being moved, and considers the misery of the proletariat as its own doing, to be punished as such’ (ibid.). Marx reduced his investigations on capital to the general statements that: ‘As the productive forces grow, that part of productive capital which is transformed into machines and raw materials, i.e. into capital as such, grows in infinitely greater proportion than the part allocated to wage-labour’ (MEW 4:551). The growing number of working men consequently has to share a proportionately smaller part of the capital available to the whole working class for its sustenance and reproduction. The purpose of the working men’s organisations is to prevent the bitter competition which would naturally result from such circumstances and, moreover, to organise the proletariat in the struggle to overthrow the rule of capital: Marx described the revolutionary activity of these working men’s groups:

... the best-paid workers form the most coalitions and spend all they can spare from their wages in order to establish political associations in industry and cover the costs of this movement ... from their revolutionary activity they derive a maximum of delight in life (MEW 4:555).


184⁸ Oⁿ January 9 Marx spoke to the Association democratique on the question of free trade. His speech, published by the Association in February as a separate pamphlet, was reported in the DBrZ to have made that meeting one of the most interesting held. Marx defined free trade as ‘the freedom for capital to crush the working man’ (MEGA 6:446). Protectionism, however, was no better. While furthering the development of particular industries in one country and promoting free competition, protectionism still left the country dependent on universal trade and therefore on the free exchange system. For capital to grow and produce the class conflicts which would lead ultimately to social revolution, there must be free exchange on the widest possible basis: ‘If capital remains stationary, industry will not simply remain at a standstill, it will decline and its first victim in this case will be the working man’ (MEGA 6:441). As it grows capital becomes more and more concentrated, creating a greater usage of machines and division of labour. The worker’s craftsmanship and special qualifications become superfluous and he is left performing a simple task which requires a minimum of training. The worker exists therefore only in his function as a primitive productive force, and he may be easily replaced. Marx showed that, unless conventional economic policies be renounced entirely, the working class will ultimately be hit at full force by the economic laws governing the prevailing free exchange system. The results of such a collision must necessarily be the destruction of wage-labour and capital.

On March 4, the London Northern Star published a resume of a February meeting held by the Association democratique, at which members unanimously adopted the proposal for an international democratic congress in Brussels during September. The Star noted that the association was creating considerable interest among the working men of Ghent, Belgium’s chief manufacturing city, and in the provinces as well.

In memory of the Cracow uprising of 1846, a meeting was held in Brussels on February 22, at which Marx and Engels were invited to speak. Marx underlined the social nature of the questions which led to open rebellion in Poland. The special significance of the Cracow uprising was that it ‘identified the national cause with the cause of democracy and the emancipation of the oppressed class' (MEW 4:521). Because Poland had taken the initiative in fighting for this triple cause, its emancipation


74 Karl Marx, 1844-1849

was ‘the point of honour for all European democrats’ (MEW

After Engels’s return to Paris towards the end of 1847, Marx continued to work on the manifesto commissioned by the London Central Committee of the Communist League, which sent him a reminder on January 24 demanding delivery of the manuscript by February 1. The text was finished in the first days of February and was published the same month in London by the Working Men’s Educational Association. Although Engels’s assistant Is indisputable, the final version was the work of Marx alonJlln expressing his scientific arguments and moral postulates for the revolutionary action of the working class, Marx achievedln this pamphlet a terseness of language which is unique in his writing. Despite the sharp observations on the state of modern industrial society, the Manifesto is by no means a dispassionate scientific discourse. In every line of this call of action can be read Marx’s passionate adherence to the cause of the oppressed classes. As in The German Ideology, we find here the same? elemenfHof empirical sociological study mingled with his views of the future conduct of society. A slight echo of the League’s old ‘catechism’ is heard here in the use of the question-and-ansv^l|. foMite expose the communist standpoint on the essential issuesljH Marx defined the bourgeois, propertied dass in industrial society, as being itself ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that it ‘can not exist without continually revolutionising the instruments!of production, consequently the production relations and finally all social relations whatsoever’ (MEW 4:456). Its advent signal^ a more sober view of life and of human relations; men eafra to realise the material-pecuniary basis of their existence tnfl

The bourgeoisie has profaned every occupation hithertsj honoured and respected with reverend awe. It has converted the physicfm, the lawyer, the priest, the poet and the scientist into wage labourers (MEW 4:465).

Henceforth human relations are calculated in terms of blatant self-interest and financial gain. The family is affected as welljj the bourgeois sees in his wife a ‘mere instrument of production and in his children potential wage-earaers (MEW 4:478f$B By contrast, the proletarian has nothing in common with the ruling dass—neither property, nor social power, nor national identity, and ‘for him law, religion, morality are just Si many




bourgeois prejudices hiding bourgeois interests behind them’ (MEW 4:472). The proletarian lives at a mechanistic level of existence, since the work demanded of him requires only the simplest and most monotonous of efforts. Deprived of the opportunity of expressing himself as a human being in his entirety, the working man is deprived of his individuality.

The revolutionary aspect of the proletarian situation lies in the fact that the uniformity of their tasks and their remuneration makes the oppression and the interests of working men everywhere the same. Moreover, die bourgeoisie, which is dependent on the masses for support in the struggle against the vestiges of feudalism, or against rival ruling classes in other nations, grants it certain political freedoms and a general education, important aids for its struggle against the bourgeoisie.

The industrial development process leads inevitably to crises of overproduction!! which the bourgeoisie overcomes only by recourse to the opening of new markets or the destruction of productive forces. The final crisis will come, however, when markets can no longer be extended and new territories discovered.

It will then be the proletariat which takes into its hands the reorganisation of society: ‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all else, is its own gravediggers’ (MEW 4:474).

Basing himself on Engels's ‘Principles of Communism', Marx enumerated ten measures which the proletariat would employ during the transitory period of reorganising social and property relations with the ultimate goal of eliminating class distinctions, the first step towards a communist society:

In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free develop ment of each' individual is the condition for the free development of all (MEW 4:482).

The measures which Marx set down included: expropriation of landed property and abolition of inheritance rights; state monopoly of credit, means of transport, and communication; heavy progressive income tax; equal obligation to work for all and the combination of education with industrial production; cultivation of wastelands and the abolition of the distinctions between town and country* The fundamental issue in the actual proletarian struggle it one of property understood as bourgeois property, i.e. of capital.




When capital therefore is converted into common property, into the property of all the members of society, this does not mean that personal property is transformed into social property. It is merely the social nature of property that is changed. It loses its class character (MEW 4:476).

The agent of this revolutionary change will be the entire proletariat, not the communists for or in the name of the proletariat. The communists are distinguished by their international orientation in contrast to the individual proletarian who fights a national battle against a particular bourgeoisie. The communist, moreover, possesses theoretical understanding of the historical development and of the ultimate course of the movement (cf. MEW 4:474). The ranks of the communists contain defectors from other classes, persons who have come to espouse the proletarian cause, knowing that their interests will also be furthered by a radical social transformation. The theoretical tenets of communism are not inventions of ideologists or of utopian reformers. Rather,

They simply express in general terms the real relationships of the existing class struggle. Property is the key to the social and production reform which the proletariat wishes to accomplish. The key to the future communist society will be labour, not labour as a means of increasing accumulated labour, which is capital, but accumulated labour as a means of expanding, enriching and advancing the life process of working men (MEW 4:476).

A fortnight before the Manifesto appeared in London, Marx collaborated on a reply of the Association to the Fraternal Democrats, congratulating the English Chartists ‘for the steps taken ... to arrive at last at a close alliance between the Irish people and that of Great Britain’, an important advance of the democratic cause (Feb. 13; MEGA 6:652L).

At the end of February preparations were under way jft Brussels to stage an armed republican uprising. The immigrants added moral and material assistance to the movement and Marx, who had recently come into part of his paternal inheritance, was able to help financially. The Association, enthused by the revolutionary events in France, addressed a letter to George Harney of the Northern Star and to the Fraternal Democrats, declaring that in Belgium efforts were being made for ‘peaceful


but energetic agitation in order to obtain through the channels proper to the political institutions of Belgium the advantages which the French people have just conquered’ (MEGA 6:655). On the same day (Feb. 28) they also sent an address to the newly installed provisional government in Paris with congratulations for the unexpected progress made, in the name of all humanity, towards true democracy.

At the beginning of March Marx received an invitation, signed by Ferdinand Flocon of the provisional French government, to return to live in Paris:

Stout-hearted, loyal Marx! The soil of the French Republic is a refuge for all friends of freedom. The power of tyrants sent you into exile; free France opens her gates to you. To you and to all who are fighting for the sacred cause of brotherhood among all peoples (MEW 14:676).

When news came of the revolution on the Continent, the Central Office of the Communist League in London transferred its authority to Brussels. The Belgian police, however, began hunting down political refugees and activists and on March 3 Marx received a command signed by the royal powers to leave the country within 24 hours. The Brussels section of the League was dissolved and Marx empowered to reconstitute the group in Paris. During the night of March 3-4, while preparing to flee to France, Marx was taken into custody for questioning, held for several hours and then expelled over the Belgian frontier into France. He arrived in Paris on March 5. Jenny Marx was arrested the same night upon presenting herself at police headquarters in search of her husband. After several hours in a cell with three prostitutes, she was led before a judge for questioning and finally released in the early afternoon.

In Paris Marx immediately set to work reestablishing the Central Office of the Communist League and was elected to its presidency on March 10. The League decided to found a German Working Men’s Club whose task would be to educate and prepare the exiled Germans for the return to the homeland. The 300-400 Germans whom the club attracted were ‘armed’ for their return with propaganda material on the communist movement, taking with them the Manifesto and a fly-sheet entitled ‘Requisitions of the Communist Party in Germany', which was restricted to that country’s specific and immediate problems. The list of requisitions was headed by the most compelling need of the


39 German Lander: unity. For the rest it followed the points set down in the Manifesto as regards state appropriation of privately-owned farm lands, of the means of transport and credit institutions, while omitting industrial property (Grunberg, p. 91), At Mainz on the Rhine local members of the League founded a Workers’ Educational Society in order to co-ordinate the functioning of a larger number of dubs whose founding they anticipated after the return of the numerous refugees abroad. Early in April Marx also left Paris, returning to Cologne via Mainz where he conferred with his associates of the League on immediate organisational questions.

In Cologne plans were already afoot to publish a new daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Support was volunteered by both communists and democrats, who turned the organisation over to Marx immediately after his arrival and appointed him editor-in-chief (April 10-11). Engels joined Marx in Cologne on May 21 with the intention of settling there and collaborating on the paper. In its first issue, dated June 1, the NRbZ published a sharp critique by Engels of the Frankfurt National Assembly which caused a great number of the paper’s democratic shareholders to withdraw their financial support. Marx continued the critique of the Frankfurt liberals with a leading article on June 7, opposing both the liberal programme and the manifesto of the radical democrats. Marx held that Germany could not achieve unification simply by issuing decrees or proclamations but that ‘German unity and the German constitution as well can result only from a movement whose decisive elements will be, in equal measure, the internal conflicts and the war with the East’ (MEW 5:4).

The war with the East—Russia being understood as the ‘East’ —became one of the pet topics of the NRHZ along with the liberalism of the Frankfurt parliamentarians and the conservative fears of the German bourgeoisie. Marx viewed the March Revolution as ‘only a semi-revolution', the beginning of a long revolutionary movement (June 14). However, he recognised the value of the democratic freedoms, such as that of the press, which had been won and had made the clandestine activities of the League superfluous. The League was therefore disbanded in June.

For the most part Marx’s 1848 articles in the NRbZ were written on topics related to the recent revolutionary insurgencies


1848 79

and to the currents of democratic endeavours everywhere in Europe. Marx was particularly aggressive in attacking the German bourgeoisie, as, for instance, in the article ‘The Prague Uprising’ (June 18). Here he took the Germans to task for allowing themselves to be used as an instrument for oppressing other nations and peoples, for their indecisiveness, their cowardice and lack of unity.

In a brief editorial note on the June Revolution in Paris, Marx announced that events in France had ‘developed into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place, the revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie’ (June 27). The following day an article appeared by Marx which compared the battle of the Parisians with that of the Roman slaves against their masters and with the 1834 insurrection in Lyon. This standpoint again aroused the displeasure of a large segment of the paper’s financial backers, who quickly withdrew their support. In an article, written jointly with Engels and entitled ‘Arrests’, the Frankfurt liberals were exhorted to act energetically and decisively on the problem of German unity and democracy (July 5), and on July 12 Marx urged them to make use of extra-parliamentary measures, i.e. a revolutionary war against Russia, in order to 'cleanse itself of the sins of the past'. In an article on August 1 Marx defined the source of conflict between the bourgeoisie and the other social classes as the ‘monopoly of capital': ‘It is precisely this monopoly which is specifically modern and produces modern class antagonisms; and it is the specific task of the 19th century to find a solution to these antagonisms’.

At a general meeting of the Democratic Society on July 21 Wilhelm Weitling spoke in favour of separating the political movement for democracy from the social. He also advocated a personal dictatorship, within the movement, of the ‘most insightful’ members. Marx was given the opportunity to reply to Weitling’s suggestions at the next meeting on August 4. Defending the founding principles of the society, Marx underlined the importance of a political struggle led by the masses and explained that the intermingling of the political with the social aspects would facilitate victory. Marx wished to see at the head of the movement, not Weitling’s corps of elite, but ‘heterogenous elements whose task it would be to elaborate a line of efficient direction through the exchange of ideas’(quoted according to H. Meyer, ‘Karl Marx und die Revolution von


1848', Historische Zcitschrift, Munich, Dec. 1951, p. 524.

Having been without nationality since he renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1845, Marx applied for the citizenship of the city of Cologne. The request was immediately granted by the city council (April), but vetoed by the Royal Prussian Government in Berlin. Marx wrote a letter of protest to the Minister of the Interior on August 12 without, however, effecting a change in the government’s decision. A commentary on this affair was published in the NRhZ on September 5.

August and September were months of major political crisis in Germany due first to the ministerial affair in Prussia and to popular uprising against the Malmo Armistice at Frankfurt- am-Main. During this period Marx travelled to Vienna and to Berlin on a double mission (Aug. 23-Sept. 12). While establishing contacts among left-wing German democrats and the Vienna working men’s organisations, he also made efforts to raise financial support for the NRhZ. In Berlin he spoke with Karl Ludwig d’Ester, Gustav Julius and Jung, met with his friend of university days C. F. Koppen and with Bakunin. In Vienna he conversed privately with leading radicals of the revolutionary movement and addressed the working men’s organisations and democratic societies. He lectured on ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ to the First Vienna Working Men’s Club on September 2.

Following his return to Cologne Marx wrote in the NRhZ that in Prussia a potentially revolutionary crisis was building which would lead to the ‘unavoidable war with Russia' (Sept. 14). When news of the street battles in Frankfurt reached Cologne, the paper published a proclamation in favour of the rebels and solicited subscriptions to support them and their families. (Sept. 20). Fear of similar battles led the authorities in Cologne to declare the city in a state of siege on September 27; all democratic institutions and organs were suspended indefinitely, including the NRhZ; and other measures were taken by the military in order to repress popular democratic sentiment. Four of the paper’s editors, among them Engels, fled Cologne in face of threatened police prosecution and sought asylum either in Switzerland or Paris. The state of siege persisted until October 3, but financial difficulties kept the NRhZ from reappearing before the 12th.

The paper continued its energetic support of revolutionary activity. On November 1 it published a call for volunteers to




constitute a corps which would be sent to aid the revolution in Vienna. Marx followed closely in his articles the events in the Austrian capital and, when defeat was imminent, concluded that the German bourgeoisie was incapable of emancipating itself from feudal-aristocratic domination and that democracy would triumph only in a struggle against the bourgeoisie. He saw but one way left to achieve a social revolution:

There is but one means for shortening, simplifying, concentrating the murderous death pangs of the old society and the bloody labour pains of the new, only one means: revolutionary terrorism (Nov. 7).

As a gesture of opposition to the despotic measures taken by the Brandenburg ministry Marx proposed that the Prussian citizens refuse payment of taxes. On November 15 the Berlin National Assembly actually issued a proclamation to withhold all further payment. The NRhZ urged its readers to support this measure and to form local militias paid for by the communities or by donations. In ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-revolution’, which appeared during December, Marx reviewed the stages of the revolutionary movement in Prussia. Again he stigmatised the cowardice and indecision of the German bourgeoisie which had caused it to betray both its own revolution and its allies in the other classes who were all struggling to overthrow feudal rule. The choice was now clear: either a feudal-absolutist counterrevolution or the social-republican revolution. There could be no reckoning with a ‘purely bourgeois revolution’. For the coming year Marx predicted: ‘revolutionary insurgency of the French working class, world war’ (Jan. 1).

1849 Under Marx’s editorship, the NRhZ continued its sharp attacks on the bourgeoisie, denouncing in particular the latest measure of the local authorities to control the employees on municipal projects in Cologne through the introduction of ‘work Passports’. Marx termed this a ‘historical document of the cynicism of the German bourgeoisie’, evidence that the Germans were ® no way inferior to the British in their ‘brazen mistreatment of the working class’ (Jan. 5). Seized by an irrational fear of the revolution which it had itself prepared through industrial development, the bourgeoisie now permitted a constitution to be Passed which ignored the demands of democracy entirely and drove ‘the entire nation back into medieval barbarism’ (Jan. 22).




The March Revolution had produced, in Marx’s view, only counter-revolution, ‘the most extensive, most decisive, the bloodiest and the most violent’ of all history (Jan. 28). However, it was soon to produce a reaction as well: ‘a new universal and victorious counter-blow’ to be struck by the ‘three most radical and most democratic classes’, the petit-bourgeoisie, the peasantry and ‘the specifically red dass’, the proletariat, in concert (Feb. 1). While Marx was assailing the German bourgeoisie, Engels wrote an article against the ‘slavic barbarians’, in which he sanctioned the use of ‘red terror’ to avenge the oppression of the Magyars by the Slavs (Jan. 13).

On January 15 at the committee meeting of the Working Men’s Club, Marx attempted to persuade the members to participate in the coming parliamentary elections. From a practical standpoint, he argued, it was important that members of the democratic opposition should win seats in parliament in order to carry on the political fight against feudalism, ‘to prevent the victory of our common enemy, the absolute monarch’ (Jan. 21).

The NRhZ went to court twice in February. As one of the accused parties, Marx spoke for the defence on February 7 against charges of libelling a public servant and the following day against charges of inciting to open rebellion. In the first speech Marx pointed out that freedom of the press in Prussia was in grave danger if the government could prevent news organs from openly and accurately reporting events which might in some way detract from its self-image. He closed his speech with an analysis of the abortive March Revolution which had failed because:

It merely reformed the highest political echelons and left untouched the lower strata supporting them ... The first duty of the press, therefore, is to undermine the entire foundation of the existing political structure (NRhZ, Feb. 14).

The charges of inciting to rebellion were based on the papers appeal, dated Nov. 18, 1848, urging the citizenry to refuse to pay taxes and to offer armed resistance to the government. Marx took the stand that it was the state and not the people which had broken the laws; the people were being called upon to defend the laws. Moreover, the people possessed the right of resisting certain laws which maintained the social interests of an era that was now past and of classes that were in decline:


I849 83

Law must be based on society; it must be the expression of common interests and needs which arise from the particular means of production and must therefore be opposed to the particular will of each individual (NRhZ, Feb. 25).

As soon as law ceases to reflect the existing social relations, it loses its validity: ‘it is no more than a wad of paper’. The accused were cleared of charges in both instances.

Provoked by the apologetics of the Kolnische Zeitung in defence of Germany’s liberal bourgeoisie, Marx wrote an article in which he categorically rejected the notion that any revolution, present or future, would be based on the struggle between bourgeoisie and feudal-absolutist monarchy. The bourgeoisie was clearly not on the side of democracy and therefore the revolutionary combat would result from the opposition of republicans and absolutists (Feb. 1 1).

During February a two-part article by Engels, entitled ‘The Democratic Panslavism’, was published anonymously in the NRhZ. Engels pilloried Bakunin’s sentimental, romantic plan for an alliance of independent Slav nations and remarked that only the Russians, the Poles and perhaps the Turks could expect to have a future as independent nations. The remainder of the Slav peoples lacked an independent history and the viability needed to achieve self-sufficiency. Moreover, since political centralisation would be necessary for the growth and stability of the larger nations, the smaller Slav groups would have to be subjected to their domination. Hatred of the Slav peoples, the Russians, Czechs and Croats had always been and still was the ‘first revolutionary passion of the Germans', Engels added. Revolution must therefore be carried out by the Germans together with the Poles and the Magyars using the ‘most decisive terrorism’ against the Slavs: ‘We know now where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and in the Slav lands of Austria’ he concluded (Feb. 16).

In February Marx and about ten other communists in Cologne met with Joseph Moll, emissary of the German refugee communists in London, to discuss the possibility of reorganising the League. Marx rejected the statutes proposed by Moll on the grounds that the League’s purpose as stated there—creation of ^a unified, indivisible social republic’—was not communist and that moreover the statutes had a rather conspiratorial slant. The leftist journal Freiheit, Arbeit, organ of the Cologne Working




Men’s Club, accused Marx on February 25 of working contrary to the interests of the revolutionary, proletarian party and of ‘not being seriously concerned with the liberation of the oppressed’.

On March 18 the NRhZ announced that this year it would celebrate not the anniversary of the March Revolution but that of the bloody and unsuccessful June uprising in Paris. Marx’s orientation now shifted from the radical elements of the bourgeoisie to the proletarian groups, whose revolutionary movement he began to support in practice to the exclusion of all others. Recognising that the presence of many heterogenous elements within the various democratic groups hindered their practical action, Marx resigned from the Rhenish district council of democratic organisations but retained his membership in the Working Men’s Club.

The NRhZ published from April 5-11 Marx’s study on ‘Wage- Labour and Capital’, based on his lectures for the Brussels Working Men’s Association. As Marx remarked in the ‘Introduction’, these pages were intended for the workers themselves, for those who were ignorant of the jargon and concepts of bourgeois political economy. In contrast to the latter, Marx presented the economic relations of present society not as absolute, eternal and immutable phenomena but as relations founded at a specific level of industrial development and presupposing a class which possesses nothing but its own labour power. He explained for bourgeois society the relation between capital and wages, which are the price paid for a certain number of hours of labour power. The working man who sells this labour power to the owner of the means of production uses the time and energy which would otherwise be devoted to his self-realisation through labour to the production of mere wages. He earns in so doing the means of subsistence for a life which begins effectively after his labour has ceased and which is thus reduced to his hours of sleep, eating and recreation:

Twelve hours’ labour does not have meaning for him as weaving; spinning, drilling, etc., but as earnings which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed. If the silkworm were to spin in order to be able to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a perfect wage-eamer (MEW 6:400).

Capital is accumulated through the consumption of living labour




and grows only when its power increases in relation to the wages paid the worker. While bourgeois economists maintain that the interests of capital and those of the wage-earner are identical, Marx revealed that the very opposite is true. Any increase in the absolute value of wages in periods of rapid capital expansion is only a semblance of progress and of amelioration in the situation of the working class. In reality the only change is that the working class labours under more favourable conditions at its task of enriching the capitalist class and therefore seems ‘content with forging for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its tow’ (MEW 6:416).

On April 14 Marx set out on a propaganda trip through Westphalia and Northern Germany to solicit funds for the NRhZ. This provided him with the opportunity to gather information on the revolution planned by petit-bourgeois democratic elements for early May and to visit members of the old Communist League. Once again in Cologne, Marx wrote an article for the NRhZ which treated the history of the powerful Hohenzollern family of Prussia. Its success, Marx showed, and pre-eminence in political affairs was achieved through the use of violence, breach of treaties, inheritance swindles, treachery and its servile obedience to Russian despotism (May 10).

On May 16 Marx received a royal order demanding his expulsion from Prussian territory on the grounds that he had abused the government’s hospitality with articles inciting to open rebellion against the existing state (NRhZ, May 19). The last issue of the NRhZ appeared on May 18 and was printed entirely in red. The editors appealed to the working class of Cologne to resist any attempted putsch under present militarist conditions and warned them against the perfidy of the bourgeoisie. In his lead editorial Marx recounted the principles which had guided the paper since its founding. The NRhZ had worked towards undermining the foundations of the existing order; it had spoken out for the social-republican revolution and for the use of revolutionary terrorism as a means for achieving a new social-republican order. The spirit of the NRhZ had been the spirit of the June Revolution. In closing Marx recalled the motto of the paper on January 1, 1849: Revolutionary war against Russia and creation of the ‘Red Republic’ in France (NRhZ, May 19).




Their editorial duties at an end, Marx and Engels left Cologne on May 19, accompanying Marx’s family to Frankfurt, where they were received by the Weydemeyer family. From there the two men journeyed throughout the Rhineland, conferring with left-wing members of parliament. Their plan was to gather sup. port for an insurrection at Frankfurt and to have the militias of Baden and the Palatinate come to protect the Assembly, but they failed to arouse sufficient interest among the hesitant and indecisive democrats of Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Speyer, etc.

About June 1 Marx obtained a mandate from the Palatinate which enabled him to leave the Rhineland for France. Engels remained in Bingen on the Rhine where he joined in the revolutionary campaign of the Baden army. Marx arrived in Paris about June 3 and immediately contacted his former associates of the League, members of the secret working men’s societies and his friend Heine. After the defeat of a Montagnard uprising, supported by the secret societies, repressive measures were taken by the French government which affected Marx as well. On June 19 he was notified that, should he wish to remain in France, he would be required to take up residence in the department of Morbihan. At this moment Marx was ‘sans le sou’, as he wrote Weydemeyer (July 13). His wife, who had sold all their household furnishings before leaving Germany to avoid having them confiscated, was now forced to pawn all her jewellery. To the family’s great relief Ferdinand Lassalle was able to collect a larger sum for them among his Rhenish friends and associates. With this aid Marx left Paris on August 24 for London; his wife and three children followed on September 15- In a letter to Engels shortly before his departure, Marx predicted that revolutionary agitation would soon reach a climax in England, thanks to the Chartist-bourgeois coalition. With this prospect and the promise of financial support to found a new German review, Marx urged Engels to come to London as well (cf. August 17 and 23).

Upon arrival in London his first major task was to begin preparations for the aforementioned journal. He joined the Central Committee of the reconstituted Communist League and their front organisation the German Working Mens Association, both in a state of near stagnation. The Central Committee had lost contact with most of the associated groups and consequently lacked an organisation. Together with several


other German communists Marx organised an action for aid to German refugees beginning in mid-September. Jenny Marx arrived about this time in London. Six weeks later their second son Guido was born.

Theodor Hagen in Hamburg, a member of the local Communist League, informed Marx about November 21 that his efforts to find a printer and a publisher for the new review had been successful. Marx thereupon began soliciting contributions for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-okonomische Revue as it was to be called, and sought aid in publicising its forthcoming appearance. Reporting on his recent activities to Weydemeyer in Frankfurt, Marx wrote that he believed a violent crisis in industry, agriculture and commerce was approaching. Should a revolution occur on the Continent before the outbreak of this crisis, it would be an ill-timed misfortune, for the masses, momentarily content with the rising trend in trade and commerce, were not in a revolutionary mood (Dec. 19).

At the close of the year Marx and Engels attended a banquet given by the Fraternal Democrats and presided over by George Harney.


Ill 1850-1856