Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

articles for 'he can handle language like no one else on earth'.28 The issue intended for January with a printing of 2500 eventually appeared early in March and the three ensuing numbers followed fairly quickly until midMay. However, relations with Schuberth swiftly deteriorated: he was slow in sending information about the sale of the journal; he altered the text without consultation; and did not distribute it according to instructions. The revenue from sales was very small and in May Jenny Marx wrote to Weydemeyer saying bitterly that it was impossible to tell which was the worst, 'the delays of the publisher or those of the managers and friends in Cologne or the whole general attitude of the democrats'.29 The charges against Schuberth were certainly justified, but the tone of the Revue was too intellectual to have any wide impact. One of the leading members of the Cologne group, Roland Daniels, wrote to Marx: 'Only the more intelligent from this party and the few middle-class people who have some knowledge of history will be interested in the revolution by the publication of your monthly.'

During the summer the Revue was in abeyance and the final number (a double issue) appeared in November. Marx considered Schuberth to have been so negligent that he (unsuccessfully) took steps to prosecute him. He also had plans to continue the Revue as a quarterly in Cologne or, alternatively, to publish it in Switzerland. These plans came to nothing.

It is difficult to see how the Revue - or indeed the Communist League to which it was intended to give an intellectual orientation - could have been successful in the circumstances: both depended on the enthusiasm generated by the revolutions of 1848-49 and the expectation of the imminence of a similar wave of unrest. These hopes were common to all the refugees including Marx who, before he left Paris, had told Lassalle that he expected a fresh revolutionary outbreak there early in the following year. In fact Marx's contributions to the Revue (whose declared aim was 'to provide a complete and scientific treatment of the economic relationships that form the basis of the whole political movement'50) document his progressive realisation that the economic prerequisites for his political aims were just not there.

In the original publicity for the Revue Marx had stated that: ' . . . a time of apparent truce like the present must be used to shed light on the period of revolution that we have lived through.'31 This was the intention of one of Marx's main contributions to the Revue, a series of articles entitled '1848 to 1849'. These articles were republished later by Engels under the title The Class Struggles in France and described, with justification, as 'Marx's first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history by means of his materialistic conception'.52

The Class Struggles in France was a brilliant and swift moving account

of the changing political scene in France during 1848-49 against a background of class and economic interest. Marx's general judgement on the failure of the recent revolutionary upsurge was given to the opening words:

With the exception of only a few chapters, every more important part of the annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849 carries the heading:

Defeat of the revolution!

What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms - persons, illusions, conceptions, projects from which the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free, from which it could be freed not by the victory of February, but only by a series of defeats.

In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements, but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, by the creation of an opponent in combat with whom, only, the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.33

Marx continued with an analysis of the July Monarchy, likening it to a joint-stock company with the state continually kept on the verge of bankruptcy so that the bankers and brokers could speculate on its debts to the ruin of the small investor.34 The resulting general discontent erupted into revolution with the severe effect on French industry of the 1845-46 commercial and industrial crisis in England. But the provisional government set up after the February barricades could do no more than mirror the disagreements of the various classes that had created it. It was to some extent a criticism of his own past actions in Germany when Marx declared that it was an illusion for the workers to have hoped for emancipation alongside the bourgeoise or inside the national walls of France. The inevitable result of the May elections, he continued, was a bourgeois republic against which the workers could but revolt in vain. But their very defeat only prepared a future victory:

. .. the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tri-colour become the flag of the European revolution - the red flag!

And we exclaim: The revolution is dead! - Long live the revolution!,s

Marx's second article discussed the contradictions of the new constitution promulgated in the autumn of 1848 and the opportunities this afforded Louis Napoleon, who won an overwhelming victory in the presidential elections in December. Napoleon was the only man who had

ILH K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

captured the imagination of the peasants. To the proletariat his election meant the dismissal of bourgeois republicanism and revenge for the June defeat; to the petty bourgeoisie it meant the rule of the debtor over the creditor; while to big business Napoleon presented the opportunity of ridding itself of its forced alliance with potentially progressive elements. 'Thus it happened', said Marx, 'that the most simple-minded man in France acquired the most multifarious significance. Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything save himself.'36

The third and last article, written in March about the same time as the March Address and the creation of the London alliance with the Blanquists, analysed the different elements in the opposition party. Here Marx was concerned to emphasise the difference between 'petit-bourgeois' or 'doctrinaire' socialism (he had Proudhon particularly in mind) and the revolutionary socialism of Blanqui:

While this Utopian, doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the total movement to one of its moments, which puts in place of common, social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality; while this doctrinaire socialism, which at bottom only idealises present society, takes a picture of it without shadows and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another - the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinction generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising of all the ideas that result from these social relations.37

The article ended on a characteristically optimistic note by declaring the reactionary bourgeois republic to have been merely 'the hothouse of revolution'.38

This optimism was also reflected in the extended comments on current affairs written by Marx and Engels for the Revue during the first months of 1850. In France 'the strength of the revolutionary party naturally grows in proportion to the progress of reaction' and 'a hitherto politically dead class, the peasants, has been won for the revolution'.39 As for Britain, the

tremendous development of productive forces there would soon outstrip even the markets of the Americas and Australia: a panic would ensue 'at the latest in July or August' bringing with it a crisis which, 'because it must coincide with great clashes on the Continent, will produce results quite different from all previous ones'.40 Marx was insistent, now as later, that the industrial crisis would bring revolution, not the other way round. He wrote to Weydemeyer in December 1849 that the outbreak of a revolution before the next crisis 'would in my opinion be a misfortune because just now, when business is still expanding, the working masses in France, Germany, etc., are perhaps revolutionary in word but certainly not in reality'.41

There followed far-sighted comment on the industrial potential of the United States inspired by an event 'more important than the February revolution' - the discovery of gold in California.42 The flow of population westwards and the incredible growth of the railway system showed that New York and San Francisco were usurping the place in world trade hitherto held by London and Liverpool. Marx continued:

The fulcrum of world commerce, in the Middle Ages Italy, more recently England, is now the Southern half of the North American continent. .. . Thanks to the gold of California and to the tireless energy of the Yankees both coasts of the Pacific will soon be as thickly populated, as industrialized and as open to trade as the coast from Boston to New Orleans is now. The Pacific Ocean will then play the same role the Atlantic Ocean is playing now and the role that the Mediterranean played in the days of classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages - the role of the great water highway of world commerce - and the Atlantic Ocean will sink to the level of a great lake such as the Mediterranean is today.43

The only hope for Europe of avoiding industrial, commercial and political dependence on the United States was 'a revolution which would transform the mode of production and intercourse in accordance with the needs of production arising from the nature of modern productive forces, thus making possible the development of new forces of production which would maintain the superiority of European industry and counteract the disadvantages of geographical situation.'44 Marx finished the article with a remark on the recent beginning of Chinese socialism and the social upheaval brought about by contact with the West, an upheaval that 'must have the most important results for civilization'.45

The second article on current affairs comment, written in April, dealt more specifically with the possibilities of revolution in Europe. Marx thought he saw an approaching crisis in Britain due to over-investment, particularly in the key wool industry. The interaction of this crisis with the

imminent upheavals on the Continent would give to the latter a 'pronounced socialist character'.46 In Britain the crisis would drive from power both Whigs and Tories to be replaced by the industrial bourgeoisie, who would have to open Parliament to representatives of the proletariat, thus 'dragging England into the European revolution'.47 A note added later just as the Revue was going to press admitted that there had been a slight betterment in the economic situation in the early 1850s but declared, nevertheless, that 'the coincidence of commercial crisis and revolution is becoming ever more unavoidable'.48 As the months went by, however, this short-term optimism was more and more difficult to sustain. It was to be entirely dispelled by the systematic study of the economic history of the previous ten years that Marx undertook in the summer of 1850.

In June of that year Marx obtained the ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum that he was to use so often in the years ahead. His reading there in July, August and September consisted mainly in back numbers of the London Economist. The main conclusion, as Engels put it later, was that 'the industrial prosperity, which has been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and attained foil bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of the newly-strengthened European reaction'.49 The results of this study were set down in detail in the long currentaffairs comment written in October for the last number of the Revue. Marx declared bluntly: 'The political agitation of the last six months is essentially different from that which immediately preceded it.'50 The 'real basis' for this change was the period of prosperity that had begun in Britain in 1848. The crisis of 1845-46 had been due to overproduction and the accompanying overspeculation in railways, corn, potatoes and cotton. With the economic stabilisation of 1848, additional capital tended to be invested, and speculation was less easy. The most striking evidence of this temporary prosperity was the plans for the 'Pantheon in the modern Rome'," the Great Exhibition of 1851. This prosperity was paralleled in the United States, which had profited from the European depression and the expanding market in California. Newly prosperous Britain and America had in turn influenced France and Germany, both of which were dependent on the economic situation in Britain, 'the demiurge of the bourgeois universe'.52

The conclusion of this detailed discussion was:

With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come into collision with each other. The various quarrels in which the representatives