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biicher met with little success in France; there were no French contributors and it attracted virtually no comment in the French Press. Froebel withdrew from the enterprise, both because he was unwilling to risk losing more money and because he disliked the revolutionary tone of the first number. But the fate of the Jahrbiicher was finally sealed by the increasing divergence in the views of the two co-editors. Ruge had been ill during the weeks immediately preceding publication, and most of the crucial editorial work had fallen on Marx. Ruge was rather dismayed to see that the general impression left by the body of the Jahrbiicher was considerably different from his own vaguely humanist Preface; he appreciated the articles by Marx but thought them too stylish and epigrammatic. There were also problems of finance: Ruge had paid Hess an advance for articles he in fact failed to write, and wanted it back immediately - which annoyed Hess who had no money (and knew anyway that Ruge had just made a considerable amount through lucky speculation in railway shares). Marx urged Ruge to continue publication: Ruge refused and by way of payment for Marx's contributions gave him copies of the single issue of the Jahrbiicher. Marx's finances were, however, re-established by the receipt in mid-March 1844 of 1000 thalers (about twice his annual salary as coeditor), sent on the initiative of Jung by the former shareholders of the
Rheinische Zeitung.9''
During the spring of 1844 Marx and Ruge were still in close contact. What led to the final break between them was Marx's overt adoption of communism and his rather bohemian life-style. He had not used the term 'communism' in the Jahrbiicher but by the spring of 1844 Marx had definitely adopted the term as a brief description of his views.98 Ruge could not stand communists. 'They wish to liberate people', he wrote to his mother with the bitterness of one whose financial resources had been called on just once too often, 'by turning them into artisans and abolishing private property by a fair and communal repartition of goods; but for the moment they attach the utmost importance to property and in particular to money .... '" Their ideas, he wrote further, 'lead to a police state and slavery. To free the proletariat intellectually and physically from the weight of its misery, they dream of an organisation that would generalise this misery and make all men bear its weight.'100 Ruge had a strong puritan streak and was also exasperated by the sybaritic company Marx was keeping. The poet Herwegh had recently married a rich banker's daughter and was leading the life of a playboy: according to Ruge,
One evening our conversation turned to the relations of Herwegh with the Countess d'Agoult.101 I was just at that time occupied in trying to restart the Jahrbiicher and was outraged by Herwegh's style of life and
88 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y
laziness. I referred to him several times as a wanton and said that when someone got married he ought to know what he was doing.. .. Marx said nothing and took friendly leave of me. But the next day he wrote to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future in front of him and that he had been angry to hear me treat him as a wanton, adding that I had a narrow-minded outlook lacking in humanity.... He could
no longer work with me as I was only interested in politics, whereas he was a communist.102
Thereafter the break between the two men was complete. Marx publicised these disagreements later that summer by means of a sharp attack on an article Ruge had written concerning a weavers' revolt in Silesia. Several thousand weavers had smashed the newly introduced machinery that had driven down their wages, and had been repressed with great brutality. Ruge's article criticising the paternalistic attitude of Frederick William IV to social problems appeared in Vorwiirts, a new twice-weekly publication that had become (largely owing to the flair of its editor, F. C. Bernays) the main forum for radical discussion among German emigres. Bernays, who had recently fled from Baden, was a journalist of some resource: in order to make the conservative Press in Germany appear ridiculous he had once wagered that in one week he could get them to print fifty items of manifest stupidity; he won his bet and republished the items in bookform. In his article Ruge rightly denied that the weavers' rebellion was of any immediate importance: no social revolt, he said, could succeed in Germany since political consciousness was extremely underdeveloped and social reform sprang from political revolution.
Marx published his reply in Vorwiirts at the end of July 1844. Pie attached a quite unrealistic weight to the weavers' actions and favourably contrasted the scale of their revolt with workers' revolts in England. A political consciousness was not sufficient to deal with social poverty: England had a very developed political consciousness, yet it was the country with the most extensive pauperism. The British Government had an enormous amount of information at its disposal but, after two centuries of legislation on pauperism, could find nothing better than the workhouse. In France, too, the Convention and Napoleon had unsuccessfully tried to suppress beggary. Thus the fault was not in this or that form of the state - as Ruge believed - and the solution could not be found in this or that political programme. The fault lay in the very nature of political power:
From the political point of view the state and any organisation of society are not two distinct things. The state is the organisation of society. In so far as the state admits the existence of social abuses, it seeks their origin either in natural laws that no human power can control or in the private sector which is independent of it or in the
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inadequacy of the administration that depends on the state. Thus, Britain sees misery as founded in the natural law according to which population must always outstrip the means of subsistence; on the other hand, it explains pauperism by the cussedness of the poor; whereas the King of Prussia explains it by the un-Christian spirit of the rich, and the Convention by the counter-revolutionary and suspicious attitude of the property-owners. Therefore, Britain punishes the poor, the King of Prussia exhorts the rich and the Convention beheads the property owners.10'
Thus if the state wanted to transcend the impotence of its administration it would have to abolish itself, for the more powerful the state and the more developed the political consciousness of a nation, the less it was disposed to seek the cause of social ills in the state itself. Marx once again substantiated his point by reference to the French Revolution, whose heroes 'far from seeing the source of social defects in the state, see in social defects the source of political misfortunes'.104
Thus for Marx it was not 'political consciousness' that was important. The Silesian revolt was even more important than revolts in England and France because it showed a more developed class-consciousness. After favourably comparing Weitling's works with those of Proudhon and the German bourgeoisie, Marx repeated his prediction made in the DeutschFranzosische Jahrbiicher of the role of the proletariat and the chances of a radical revolution:
The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician. It must be admitted that Germany has a vocation for social revolution that is all the more classic in that it is incapable of political revolution. It is only in socialism that a philosophical people can find a corresponding
activity, and thus only in the proletariat that it finds the active element of its ffeedom.10S
Marx finished his article with a passage that gave a concise summary of his studies of social change:
A social revolution, even though it be limited to a single industrial district, affects the totality, because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it starts from the standpoint of the single, real individual, because the collectivity against whose separation from himself the individual reacts is the true collectivity of man, the human essence. The political soul of revolution consists on the contrary in a tendency of the classes without political influence to end their isolation from the top positions in the state. Their standpoint is that of the state - an abstract whole, that only exists through a separation from real life. Thus a revolution with a political soul also organizes, in conformity
g o |
K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y |
with its limited and double nature, a ruling group in society to society's detriment.106
Thus Ruge's idea that social revolution necessarily had a political soul was the opposite of the truth:
Every revolution is social insofar as it destroys the old society. Every revolution is political insofar as it destroys the old power.... Revolution in general - the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of previous relationships - is a political act. Socialism cannot be realized without a revolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its particular aims are formulated, when its soul comes forward, then socialism casts aside its political cloak.107
This controversy marked the end of all contact with Ruge. Although Marx continued his friendship with Herwegh, this also did not last long, and Marx soon admitted that there was something after all in Ruge's strictures. Herwegh's sybaritic character and his sentimental version of communism could never harmonise with the temperament and ideas of Marx of whom Herwegh wrote at the time that 'he would have been the perfect incarnation of the last scholastic. A tireless worker and great savant, he knew the world more in theory than in practice. He was fully conscious of his own value.... The sarcasms with which he assailed his adversaries had the cold penetration of the executioner's axe.'108 Disillusioned with Herwegh, Marx spent more and more time with Heine, the only person he declared himself sorry to leave behind on his expulsion from Paris.
Heine had made Paris his base immediately after the 1830 revolution there. As well as flourishing as a poet in a city which could boast Musset, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Ingres and Chopin among many other famous cultural figures, Heine was much attracted to the doctrines of Saint-Simon and the later French socialists. Embittered by the banning of his books in Prussia, he regarded the success of communism as inevitable, but feared the triumph of the masses and 'the time when these sombre iconoclasts will destroy my laurel groves and plant potatoes'.109 His friendship with Marx coincided with much of his best satirical verse in which Marx is said to have encouraged him with the words: 'Leave your everlasting complaints of love and show the satiric poets the real way of going about it - with a whip!"10 According to Eleanor:
There was a period when Heine came daily to see Marx and his wife to read them his verse and hear their opinion of it. Marx and Heine could endlessly revise a little ten-line poem - weighing every word, correcting and polishing it until everything was perfect and every trace of their working-over had disappeared. Much patience was necessary as
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Heine was extremely sensitive to any sort of criticism. Sometimes he arrived at the Marxes literally in tears because an obscure writer had attacked him in a journal. Marx's best tactic then was to address him
to his wife whose kindness and wit soon brought the despairing poet to reason.111
Heine also had the distinction of saving the life of the Marxes' first baby: he arrived one day to find the child having convulsions and both parents at their wits' end; he immediately prescribed a hot bath, prepared it himself, and bathed the baby, who at once recovered.
Marx also spent a lot of his time in the company of Russian aristocratic emigres who, he said later, 'feted' him throughout his stay.112 These included his later adversary Bakunin with whom Marx seems to have been on friendly terms. The same cannot be said of the Polish Count Cieszkowski, author of a seminal book at the beginning of the Young Hegelian movement, of whom Marx later recalled that 'he so bored me that I wouldn't and couldn't look at anything that he later perpetrated'.113 Marx naturally passed much of his time with French socialists - such as Louis Blanc, and particularly Proudhon (also a subsequent adversary) whose unique brand of anarcho-socialism had already made him the most prominent left-wing thinker in Paris. Marx later claimed that he was responsible for teaching Proudhon about German idealism: 'In long discussions that often last the whole night, I injected him with large doses of Hegelianism;
this was, moreover, to his great disadvantage as he did not know German and could not study the matter in depth.'114 The most that can be said is
that Marx shared this distinction with Bakunin.115
III. T H E 'PARIS M A N U S C R I P T S '
Marx thrived in this perfervid intellectual atmosphere. However much Ruge might disapprove of what he considered Marx's disorderly life, cynicism and arrogance, he could not but admire his capacity for hard work.
He reads a lot. He works in an extrordinarily intense way. He has a critical talent that degenerates sometimes into something which is simply a dialectical game, but he never finishes anything - he interrupts every bit of research to plunge into a fresh ocean of books. . .. He is more excited and violent than ever, especially when his work has made
him ill and he has not been to bed for three or even four nights on end.116
Marx intended to continue his critique of Hegel's politics, then he