Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

Firstly, Prussia, the key to Germany, still had a social structure much more akin to that of Eastern Europe and Russia than to the states of Western Europe.28 T h e land-owning aristocracy - the Junkers - still held the decisive power based on largely unemancipated serfs. T h e second reason lay in the nature of the opposition to the Government: once an all-German Assembly had been promised (it did not meet until mid-May), the opposition spent its time preparing for the elections, sending in petitions and indulging its hopes. This opposition was itself extremely diverse, and the various liberals, radicals and socialists of which it was composed could have very little common programme. N o r could working-class organisations make much impact: although now legalised and spreading very fast, they were mainly interested in improving wages and working conditions.

Faced with this situation the programme of Neue Rheinische Zeitung contained, as Engels said later, two main points: 'a single, indivisible, democratic German Republic, and war with Russia which would bring the restoration of Poland'.29 In Prussia the events of March had forced Frederick William to form a ministry headed by Rudolf Camphausen, a prominent liberal businessman from the Rhineland. A new Prussian Assembly was elected to work out a constitution. This Assembly was far from radical: it summoned the King's brother-in-law, the Prince of Prussia, back from England where he had fled in March; and agreed that its task was to elaborate a constitution - the panacea of those times - 'in agreement with the King'. T h e re was an abortive rising in Berlin in midJune and Camphausen was replaced by the slightly less liberal Hansemann who stayed in office until September. It was to sarcastic attacks on the vacillations and essential impotence of the Camphausen ministry that Marx devoted most of the few articles that he wrote on German politics in the first few months of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's existence.

According to Marx, 'the provisional political circumstances that follow a revolution always require a dictatorship and an energetic one at that. From the beginning we reproached Camphausen with not acting dictatorially, with not immediately breaking and abolishing the remains of the old institutions."0 One particular field in which Marx felt compelled to attack the Prussian Assembly was their decision that peasants could buy their freedom, but at a prohibitively high price. This was a serious mistake:

The French bourgeoisie of 1789 did not for a moment forsake its allies, the peasants. It knew that the basis of its rule was the destruction of rural feudalism, and the creation of a free, landowning peasant class. The German bourgeoisie of 1848 without any hesitation betrays its peasants who are its most natural allies, flesh of its flesh, without whom it is powerless against the nobility.31

In an article on the Frankfurt Assembly published in the first issue of the paper Engels attacked the Assembly for not defending the sovereignty of the people and a corresponding constitution. This immediately cost the paper half its shareholders. And a week later Marx gave the Left in Frankfurt the following advice:

We do not make the Utopian demand that a single indivisible German Republic be proclaimed a priori, but we do demand of the so-called Radical Democratic party that it should not confuse the beginning of the struggle and revolutionary movement with its final aim. German unity and a German constitution can only be the end results of a movement in which both internal conflicts and war with the East can be pushed to a decisive point.32

But the paper in general paid very little attention to the Frankfurt Parliament which it rightly considered increasingly irrelevant to the evolution of German affairs. Although it contained many highly gifted men, the method of election yielded a narrowly middle-class parliament and, bereft of any executive authority, it found itself discussing in a void. As the months went by, it also became aware of irreconcilable divisions between the 'big Germans' who wanted a united Germany to include Austria and the 'little Germans' who looked exclusively to Prussia for hegemony. And with the decline of the workers' movements from June onwards, the middle class found itself increasingly isolated and vulnerable in face of the Government.

With the Berlin and Frankfurt Assemblies so weak, where could the Neue Rheinische Zeitung look for support? Engels was quite clear:

When we founded a wide-circulation paper in Germany, our slogan presented itself automatically. It could only be the slogan of democracy but one that emphasised everywhere and in detail its specifically proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe on its banner once and for all. If one refused this, if we were unwilling to join the movement on its most progressive and proletarian wing, there was nothing left for us but to preach Communism in a small corner magazine and found a small sect instead of a large party of action. But we were no good at crying in the wilderness; we had studied the Utopians too well for that.33

T h e subtitle of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was 'An Organ of Democracy' and it supported a 'united front' of all democratic forces. A mark of this was Marx's support for the Democratic Society in Cologne in spite of the fact that its newspaper condemned the June uprising of the Paris proletariat. Following the principles of the Communist Manifesto Marx considered it the workers' main task to aid the bourgeois revolution to achieve its aims by supporting the radical wing of the bourgeoisie. T h e

Neue Rheinische Zeitung did not preach a socialist republic nor exclusively a workers' one. T h e programme was universal suffrage, direct elections, the abolition of all feudal dues and charges, the establishment of a state banking system, and the admission of state responsibility for unemployment. Capitalism (even state capitalism), private property and class antagonism would still exist and, indeed, expand. T h e essence of the programme was the emancipation of the bourgeoisie with some concessions to workers and peasants. This position implied a certain standing apart from the efforts of workers' organisations for self-improvement, and lay behind Marx's criticism of Gottschalk's policies in Cologne and his lack of enthusiasm for Born's success in Berlin in founding an all-German workers' movement and various mutual-aid funds and co-operatives. Marx declared that, in this context, 'the proletariat has not the right to isolate itself; however hard it may seem, it must reject anything that could separate it from its allies'.34 This policy was so carefully carried out in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that, with one exception and notwithstanding the declaration of Engels above, neither Marx nor Engels published anything during 1848 that dealt with the situation or interests of the working class as such.

T h e one exception was Marx's impassioned article on the 'June days' in Paris. Finding conditions worse than they had been before the February revolution, the workers in Paris rose spontaneously only to be killed in their thousands by the troops of General Cavaignac in six days of bitter street fighting; those who survived were transported. Marx finished the article by saying:

They will ask us whether we have no tears, no sighs and no words of regret for the victims in the ranks of the National Guard, the Mobile Guard, the Republican Guard and the Regiments of the Line who fell before the anger of the people. The State will look after their widows and orphans, pompous decrees will glorify them and solemn processions will bear their remains to the grave. The official press will declare them immortal and the European reaction from East to West will sing their praises. On the other hand, it is the privilege and right of the democratic press to place the laurel wreaths on the lowering brows of the plebeians tortured with the pangs of hunger, despised by the official press, abandoned by the doctors, abused as thieves, vandals and galleyslaves by all respectable citizens, their wives and children plunged into still greater misery and the best of their survivors deported overseas.35

T h e second plank in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's platform was a revolutionary war against Russia.36 On the model of the French offensive against feudal Germany after 1789, it seemed to Marx that only an attack on Russia could enable the revolution to survive. Russia was Germany's

most dangerous enemy who, as the backbone of the Holy Alliance, would eventually crush any revolutionary movement unless crushed by it. Such a war would also achieve the otherwise impossible task of uniting Germany's democratic forces. A secondary consequence of a war against Russia would be the liberation of Poland which was at that time partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria. On the occasion of a debate in the Frankfurt Assembly on the situation in Poland, Engels published the longest series of articles ever to appear in the paper. Their message was: 'The division that the three powers have effected in Poland is the band that holds them together; their common plunder has created their common solidarity. ..

the creation of a democratic Poland is the first condition for the creation of a democratic Germany.'37

The remaining important issue of Prussian foreign policy was the notoriously complicated question of Schleswig-Holstein, two duchies whose loyalties were divided between Prussia and Denmark. The Danish King, largely supported by the bourgeoisie of Schleswig-Holstein, was making strenuous efforts to imbue them with a Scandinavian spirit, while the nobles felt more sympathetic to Germany. The Prussian military forces were, of course, vastly superior, but Denmark was supported diplomatically by Britain and Russia, and Prussia was forced to sign the armistice of Malmo at the end of August. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, through the pen of Engels, was quite clear about the issue. Scandinavianism was merely 'enthusiasm for a brutal, dirty, piratical Old-Nordic nationality which is incapable of expressing its profound thoughts and feelings in words, but certainly can in deeds, namely, in brutality towards women, perpetual drunkenness and alternate tear-sodden sentimentality and berserk fury'.38

In addition to editing the newspaper, Marx also found time to be active in local politics. In mid-June a large congress with delegates from almost a hundred democratic organisations met in Frankfurt; it urged a national organisation of democratic unions and created a central committee in Berlin, of which Kriege, Ruge and Weitling were members. The national organisation never got off the ground, but the congress bore fruit in the Rhineland where the three main Cologne organisations - the Workers' Association, the Democratic Society and the Union of Employees and F.mployers - decided to co-operate. The delegate of the Workers' Association at the Frankfurt Congress had been Gottschalk who had created the impression of a man 'made to be dictator, with an energy of iron and an intelligence as sharp as any guillotine: a living portrait of Robespierre'.39 Gottschalk wanted a fusion of the three bodies which would have made his Workers' Association dominant; the Democratic Society suggested a steering committee. But before anything was decided the

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situation was drastically altered on 3 July by the arrest, on charges of incitement to violence, of Gottschalk and Anneke who were to remain in prison for the next six months. Moll became President of the Workers' Association with Schapper as Vice-President. The Association immediately began to devote more time to the discussion of social and political questions and less to practical economic demands, thereby losing a lot of its momentum during July and August. Moll also became editor of the Association's newspaper.

The collaboration of the three democratic organisations was now no problem: a Committee of Cologne Democratic Unions was formed with Moll and Schapper representing the Workers' Association, Marx and Schneider (a lawyer) representing the Democratic Society, and the young barrister Hermann Becker from the Union of Employees and Employers. This committee summoned a congress of Rhineland Democrats which met in Cologne in mid-August. At this congress, whose main conclusion was to increase agitation among factory workers and peasants, Marx emerged as one of the leading figures. Carl Schurz, a student at Bonn at the time who soon afterwards emigrated and made for himself a distinguished career as a United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior, wrote many years later in his memoirs of Marx's being 'already the recognised head of the advanced socialistic school' and 'attracting general attention', though what struck him most of all was Marx's sarcasm and extreme intolerance.40 Albert Brisbane, an editor of the New York Daily Tribune for which Marx was later to write extensively, has left a slightly different picture of the Marx he met in the autumn of 1848:

There I found Karl Marx, the leader in the popular movement... He was just then rising into prominence: a man of some thirty years, short, solidly built, with a fine face and bushy black hair. His expression was that of great energy, and behind his self-contained reserve of manner were visible the fire and passion of a resolute soul.41

Meanwhile Marx had also had to defend his orthodoxy against the renewed intervention of Weitling who had returned from America to establish himself in Berlin on the outbreak of the revolution. At the same meeting which elected Marx to the six-man committee of the Cologne Democrats, Weitling gave a speech in favour of the separation of the political and social movements: in his view a democracy at the present time could only lead to chaos and he proposed a 'dictatorship of those with most insight'.42 Marx replied in a plenary session two weeks later that only the interaction of social and political elements could achieve success for either, and that the solution to political problems was not to be found in a dictatorship but in a 'democratic government composed of