Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

Marx's closest friend in the Circle, whose other members included individuals such as the financiers Camphausen and Hansemann, both future Prime Ministers of Prussia, the industrialists Mevissen and Malinckrodt, and a large number of young intellectuals such as Moses Hess, who had perhaps the best claim to have introduced communist ideas into Germany. It was natural that the Circle should welcome the idea of a newspaper to propagate their doctrines. Already in 1840 a paper with the title Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung had been founded by a group who considered that the Kolnische Zeitung did not adequately defend their social and economic interests. When it was evident that this paper would soon become bankrupt, Georg Jung and Moses Hess persuaded leading rich liberals of the Rhineland, including Camphausen, Mevissen and Oppenheim, to form a company which bought out the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung (in order to avoid having to renegotiate a concession) and republished it from 1 January 1842 under the title Rheinische Zeitung.148 The sub-heading of the paper was 'For Politics, Commerce and Industry', and its declared object was to defend the interests of the numerous Rhineland middle class whose aims were to safeguard the Napoleonic Code Civil and the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, and ultimately to bring about the political and economic unification of all Germany - aspirations that necessarily led them to oppose Prussia's religious policies and semifeudal absolutism.

The holding company of the Rheinische Zeitung had no lack of money and started with a share capital of over 30,000 thalers. They were, however, unlucky in their initial choice of editors. Moses Hess had taken the leading part in founding the paper and had consequently expected to be appointed editor; but the financial backers did not want a revolutionary in the editorial chair. Their chief aim was to campaign for measures that would help the expansion of industry and commerce, such as an extension of the customs unions, accelerated railway construction and reduced postal charges. So the shareholders offered the editorship first to the protectionist economist Friedrich List and then (when he was forced to decline for health reasons) to Hoeffken, editor of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and a follower of List. Swallowing his pride, Hess accepted a post as subeditor with special reference to France. Renard, Oppenheim and Jung were appointed directors. Since Oppenheim and particularly Jung had been converted by Hess to Young Hegelian radicalism, friction soon developed between them and Hoeffken. He refused to accept articles from the Berlin Young Hegelians and was obliged to resign (on 18 January 1842) - declaring himself 'no adept of neo-Hegelianism'.149

Hoeffken was replaced by Rutenberg, brother-in-law of Bruno Bauer. He was supported by Marx, who had taken part in discussions on the

organisation of the paper since September of the previous year. The new appointment made the authorities so anxious as to the tendency of the paper that suppression was suggested by the central Government; but the President of the Rhineland province, fearing that this would create popular unrest, only promised closer supervision.

From the start Marx enjoyed a great reputation in the Cologne Circle. Jung said of him that 'Although a devil of a revolutionary, Dr Marx is one of the most penetrating minds I know.'150 And Moses Hess, a man of generous enthusiasm, introduced him to his friend Auerbach as follows:

You will be pleased to make the acquaintance of a man who is now one of our friends, although he lives in Bonn where he will soon be lecturing. He made a considerable impression on me although our fields are very close; in brief, prepare to meet the greatest - perhaps the only genuine - philosopher now alive, who will soon . . . attract the eyes of all Germany . . . Dr Marx . . . will give medieval religion and politics their coup de grace. He combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing,

Heine, and Hegel fused into one person - I say fused not juxtaposed - and you have Dr Marx.151

Marx had already been asked in January by Bauer why he did not write for the Rheinische Zeitung; and in March, pressed by Jung, he began to transfer his major effort from Ruge's journal to that newspaper.152 One of his first contributions, though it was not published until August, was a criticism of the Historical School of Law. Written in April 1842, this article was occasioned by the appointment of Karl von Savigny as Minister of Justice, who was expected to introduce into the legal system the romantic and reactionary ideas of the new king. Thus it was indirectly an attack on the institutions of the Prussian 'Christian state'. The Historical School of Law had just published a manifesto in honour of their founder Gustav Hugo (1764-1844), who held that historical existence was the prime justification of any law. Marx's main point was that this position forced Hugo to adopt an absolute scepticism which deprived him of any criterion of judgement. Against this position Marx employed a rationalism based on Spinoza and Kant, both of whom refused to equate the positive with the rational: 'Hugo desecrates everything that is sacred to lawful, moral, political man. He smashes what is sacred so that he can revere it as an historical relic; he violates it before the eyes of reason so that he can later honour it before the eyes of history; at the same time he also wants to honour historical eyes.'15' In short, the Historical School of Law had only one principle - 'the law of arbitrary power'.154

AT the same time as writing the attack on Hugo, Marx decided to

devote a series of articles to the debates of the Rhineland Parliament that had held a long session in Dtlsseldorf in mid-1841. He originally proposed

the Press and on the Publication of the Parliamentary Proceedings': the other four were to deal with the Cologne Affair, the laws on theft of wood, on poaching and 'the really earthy question in all its vital extent, the division of land'.155 But the only articles to be published were those on the freedom of the Press and the theft of wood. In the parliamentary debates on the freedom of the Press, Marx found that the 'characteristic outlook of each class' was 'nowhere more clearly expressed than in these debates'. The speakers did not regard freedom as a natural gift to all rational men; for them it was 'an individual characteristic of certain persons and classes'.156 Such an attitude was incapable of drawing up any laws to govern the Press. Marx went on to criticise in particular the feudal romanticism of the Prussian regime, and developed ideas on evasion and projection that later turned into a full theory of ideology:

because the real situation of these gentlemen in the modern state bears no relation at all to the conception that they have of their situation; because they live in a world situated beyond the real world and because in consequence their imagination holds the place of their head and their heart, they necessarily turn towards theory, being unsatisfied with practice, but it is towards the theory of the transcendent, i.e. religion. However, in their hands religion acquires a polemical bitterness impregnated with political tendencies and becomes, in a more or less conscious manner, simply a sacred cloak to hide desires that are both very secular and at the same time very imaginary.

Thus we shall find in our Speaker that he opposes a mystical/ religious theory of his imagination to practical demands . . . and that to what is reasonable from the human point of view he opposes superhuman sacred entities.157

Marx finished by outlining the part laws should play in the state: 'A Press law is a true law because it is the positive existence of freedom. It

rules that repress freedom any more than the law of gravity is a law that represses movement... laws are rather positive lights, general norms, in which freedom has obtained an impersonal, theoretical existence that is independent of any arbitrary individual. Its law book is a people's bible of freedom.'159 In this case it was nonsense to speak of preventive laws, for true laws could not prevent the activities of man, but were 'the inner, vital laws of human activity, the conscious mirror of human life'.160 This

article, the first Marx ever published, was greeted enthusiastically by his friends: Jung wrote to him that 'your article on the freedom of the Press is superb',161 and Ruge wrote in similar vein: 'your commentary in the paper on the freedom of the Press is marvellous. It is certainly the best that has been written on the subject.'162

Marx was all the more eager to earn a living through journalism as he quarrelled definitively with his mother at the end of June 1842 and was deprived of all financial help from his family. 'For six weeks', he wrote, 'I had to stay in Trier because of a new death and the rest of the time was wasted and upset through the most disagreeable of family controversies. My family has put difficulties in my way which, despite their own prosperity, subject me to the most straitened circumstances.'163 This quarrel was so violent that Marx left the family house in the Simeonstrasse and put up in a nearby guest house. He remained in Trier until the wedding of his sister Sophie and in mid-July left for Bonn where he could devote himself uninterruptedly to journalism.

In spite of the tense atmosphere in Trier, Marx had found time while there to compose another major contribution to the Rheinische Zeitung. By June 1842 the paper's radical tone provoked its large rival, the Kolnische Zeitung, into launching an attack on its 'dissemination of philosophical and religious views by means of newspapers',164 and claiming in a leading article that religious decadence involved political decadence. Marx believed the reverse to be true:

If the fall of the states of antiquity entails the disappearance of the religions of these states, it is not necessary to go and look for another explanation, for the 'true religion' of the ancients was the cult of 'their nationality', of their 'State'. It is not the ruin of the ancient religions that entailed the fall of the states of antiquity, but the fall of the states of antiquity that entailed the ruin of the ancient religions.165

Marx went on to defend the right of philosophy - 'the spiritual quintessence of its time' - to comment freely on all questions, and finished his article with an outline of the ideal state according to modern philosophy, that is, Hegel and after.

But if the previous professors of constitutional law have constructed the state from instincts either of ambition or sociability or even from reason, but from the individual's reason and not social reason, the profounder conception of modern philosophy deduces the state from the idea of the all. It considers the state as the great organism in which juridical, moral and political liberties must be realised and in which each citizen, by obeying the laws of the state, only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, human reason. Sapienti sat.'66

Finally, Marx welcomed the idea of the clash of parties, another favourite Young Hegelian topic: 'Without parties there is no development, without division, no progress.'167

On his return to Bonn in July 1842, Marx began to be drawn more and more into the organisation of the Rheinische Zeitung, owing mainly to the incompetence of the alcoholic Rutenberg, whom Marx declared himself ashamed to have suggested for the job. Simultaneously with his closer involvement with the paper came signs of increasing disagreement with his former Berlin colleagues. They had formed themselves into a club known as the Freien, which was the successor to the old Doctors' Club. The Freien were a group of young writers who, disgusted with the servile attitude of the Berliners, lived a style of life whose aim was in many respects simply epater les bourgeois. They spent a lot of their time in cafes and even begged in the streets when short of money. The intransigence of their opposition to established doctrines, and particularly to religion, was causing public concern. Their members included Max Stirner, who had published atheist articles in the Rheinische Zeitung as a prelude to his supremely anarcho-individualistic book The Ego and His Own\ Edgar Bauer (Bruno's brother), whose fervent attacks on any sort of liberal political compromise were taken up by Bakunin; and Friedrich Fngels, who was the author of several polemics against Schelling and liberalism.

Marx, however, was against these public declarations of emancipation, which seemed to him to be mere exhibitionism. In view of the Young Hegelians' association with the Rheinische Zeitung he also feared that the articles from Berlin might give his rival editor Hermes a further opportunity of attacking the paper. Marx was writing for a business paper in the Rhineland where industry was relatively developed, whereas the Freien were philosophising in Berlin where there was little industry and the atmosphere was dominated by the government bureaucracy. He was therefore in favour of supporting the bourgeoisie in the struggle for liberal reform, and was against indiscriminate criticism. It was indeed on his own advice that the publisher of the Rheinische Zeitung, Renard, had promised the President of the Rhineland that the paper would moderate its tone - particularly on religious subjects.168

The attitude of the Freien raised the question of what the editorial principles of the Rheinische Zeitung ought to be. Accordingly at the end of August, Marx wrote to Oppenheim, whose voice was decisive in determining policy, virtually spelling out his own proposals for the paper, should the editorship be entrusted to him. He wrote:

If you agree, send me the article [by Edgar Bauer] on the juste-milieu