It has become the habit in Germany to regard Ferdinand Lassalle as the founder of the German workers' movement. And yet nothing could be less correct. If six or seven years ago in all the manufacturing districts, in all the major towns, the centres of the working population, the proletariat flooded to see him in vast numbers, and his journeys were triumphal processions which the reigning princes might have envied — had the ground not been quietly fertilized beforehand for it to bear fruit so rapidly? If the workers acclaimed his teachings, was this because those teachings were new to them, or because they had long been more or less familiar to the thinkers amongst them?
Life moves quickly for today's generation and they are quick to forget. The movement of the forties, which culminated in the revolution of 1848 and ended with the reaction of 1849 to 1852, has already been forgotten together with its political and socialist literature. It is therefore necessary to recall that before and during the revolution of 1848 there existed amongst the workers, precisely in western Germany, a well-organised socialist party,[83]
which broke up after the Cologne Communist trial,[84] it is true, but whose individual members continued quietly to prepare the ground of which Lassalle later took possession. One must further recall that there existed a man who, as well as organising that party, had devoted his life's work to the scientific study of what was called the social question, i. e. the critique of political economy, and even prior to 1860 had published some of the significant results of his researches.[3] Lassalle was a highly talented and well-educated fellow, a man of great energy and almost boundless versatility; he was clearly cut out to play a part in politics whatever the circumstances. But he was neither the initial founder of the German workers' movement, nor was he an original thinker. Everything he wrote was derived from elsewhere, not without some misunderstandings either; he had a forerunner and an intellectual superior, whose existence he kept a secret, of course, whilst he vulgarised his writings, and the name of that intellectual superior is Karl Marx.[85]
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, where he received a classical education. He studied jurisprudence at Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his preoccupation with philosophy soon turned him away from law. In 1841, after spending five years in the "metropolis of intellectuals", he returned to Bonn intending to habilitate. At that time the first "New Era"[86] was in vogue in Prussia. Frederick William IV had declared his love of a loyal opposition, and attempts were being made in various quarters to organise one. Thus the Rheinische Zeitung was founded at Cologne; with unprecedented daring Marx used it to criticise the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly, in articles which attracted great attention.'[1] At the end of 1842 he took over the editorship himself and was such a thorn in the side of the censors that they did him the honour of sending a censor[15] from Berlin especially to take care of the Rheinische Zeitung. When this proved of no avail either the paper was made to undergo dual censorship, since, in addition to the usual procedure, every issue was subjected to a second stage of censorship by the office of Cologne's Regierungspräsident.0 But nor was this measure of any avail against the "obdurate malevolence" of the Rheinische Zeitung, and at the beginning of 1843 the ministry issued a decree declaring that the Rheinische Zeitung must cease publication at the end of the first quarter. Marx immediately resigned as the shareholders wanted to attempt a settlement, but this also came to nothing and the newspaper ceased publication.[87]
His criticism of the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly compelled Marx to study questions of material interest. In pursuing that he found himself confronted with points of view which neither jurisprudence nor philosophy had taken account of.88 Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it was not the state, which Hegel had described as the "top of the edifice", but "civil society", which Hegel had regarded with disdain, that was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of the historical development of mankind should be looked for. However, the science of civil society is political economy, and this science could not be studied in Germany, it could only be studied thoroughly in England or France.
Therefore, in the summer of 1843, after marrying the daughter of Privy Councillor von Westphalen in Trier (sister of the von Westphalen who later became Prussian Minister of the Interior), Marx moved to Paris, where he devoted himself primarily to studying political economy and the history of the great French Revolution. At the same time he collaborated with Ruge in publishing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, of which, however, only one issue was to appear. Expelled from France by Guizot in 1845, he went to Brussels and stayed there, pursuing the same studies, until the outbreak of the February revolution. Just how little he agreed with the commonly accepted version of socialism there, even in its most erudite-sounding form, was shown in his critique of Proudhon's major work Philosophie de la misère,[3] which appeared in 1847 in Brussels and Paris under the title of The Poverty of Philosophy. In that work can already be found many essential points of the theory which he has now presented in full detail. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, London, 1848, written before the February revolution and adopted by a workers' congress in London, is also substantially his work.b
Expelled once again, this time by the Belgian government under the influence of the panic caused by the February revolution, Marx returned to Paris at the invitation of the French provisional government. The tidal wave of the revolution pushed all scientific pursuits into the background; what mattered now was to become involved in the movement. After having worked during those first turbulent days against the absurd notions of the agitators, who wanted to organise German workers from France as volunteers to fight for a republic in Germany,[89] Marx went to Cologne with his friends and founded there the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which appeared until June 1849 and which people on the Rhine still remember well today. The freedom of the press of 1848 was probably nowhere so successfully exploited as it was at that time, in the midst of a Prussian fortress, by that newspaper. After the government had tried in vain to silence the newspaper by persecuting it through the courts — Marx was twice brought before the assizes for an offence against the press laws and for inciting people to refuse to pay their taxes, and was acquitted on both occasions — it had to close at the time of the May revolts of 1849 when Marx was expelled on the pretext that he was no longer a Prussian subject, similar pretexts being used to expel the other editors. Marx had therefore to return to Paris, from where he was once again expelled and from where, in the summer of 1849,a he went to his present domicile in London.
In London at that time was assembled the entire fine fleurb of the refugees from all the nations of the continent. Revolutionary committees of every kind were formed, combinations, provisional governments in partibus infidelium,c there were quarrels and wrangles of every kind, and the gentlemen concerned no doubt now look back on that period as the most unsuccessful of their lives. Marx remained aloof from all of those intrigues. For a while he continued to produce his Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the form of a monthly review (Hamburg, 1850), later he withdrew into the British Museum and worked through the immense and as yet for the most part unexamined library there for all that it contained on political economy. At the same time he was a regular contributor to the New-York Tribune, acting, until the outbreak of the American Civil War, so to speak, as the editor for European politics of this, the leading Anglo-American newspaper.
The coup d'état of December 2 induced him to write a pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York, 1852, which is just now being reprinted (Meissner, Hamburg),0
and will make no small contribution to an understanding of the untenable position into which that same Bonaparte has just got himself. The hero of the coup d'état is presented here as he really is, stripped of the glory with which his momentary success surrounded him. The philistine who considers his Napoleon III to be the greatest man of the century and is unable now to explain to himself how this miraculous genius suddenly comes to be making bloomer after bloomer and one political error after the other— that same philistine can consult the aforementioned work of Marx for his edification.
Although during his whole stay in London Marx chose not to thrust himself to the fore, he was forced by Karl Vogt, after the Italian campaign of 1859, to enter into a polemic, which was brought to an end with Marx's Herr Vogt (London, 1860). At about the same time his study of political economy bore its first fruit: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, Berlin, 1859. This instalment contains only the theory of money, presented from completely new aspects. The continuation was some time in coming, since the author discovered so much new material in the meantime that he considered it necessary to undertake further studies.
At last, in 1867, there appeared in Hamburg: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. This work contains the results of studies to which a whole life was devoted. It is the political economy of the working class, reduced to its scientific formulation. This work is concerned' not with rabble-rousing phrasemongering, but swith strictly scientific deductions. Whatever one's attitude to socialism, one will at any rate have to acknowledge that in this work it is presented for the first time in a scientific manner, and that it was precisely Germany that accomplished this. Anyone still wishing to do battle with socialism, will have to deal with Marx, and if he succeeds in that then he really does not need to mention the dei minorum gentium}"
But there is another point of view from which Marx's book is of interest. It is the first work in which the actual relations existing between capital and labour, in their classical form such as they have reached in England, are described in their entirety and in a clear and graphic fashion. The parliamentary inquiries provided ample material for this, spanning a period of almost forty years and practically unknown even in England, material dealing with the conditions of the workers in almost every branch of industry, women's and children's work, night work, etc.[90]; all this is here made available for the first time. Then there is the history of factory legislation in England which, from its modest beginnings with the first acts of 1802,[91] has now reached the point of limiting working hours in nearly all manufacturing or cottage industries to 60 hours per week for women and young people under the age of 18, and to 39 hours per week for children under 13.[92] From this point of view the book is of the greatest interest for every industrialist.
For many years Marx has been the "best-maligned" of the German writers, and no one will deny that he was unflinching in his retaliation and that all the blows he aimed struck home with a vengeance. But polemics, which he "dealt in" so much, was basically only a means of self-defence for him. In the final analysis his real interest lay with his science, which he has studied and reflected on for twenty-five years with unrivalled conscientious-ness, a conscientiousness which has prevented him from presenting his findings to the public in a systematic form until they satisfied him as to their form and content, until he was convinced that he had left no book unread, no objection unconsidered, and that he had examined every point from all its aspects. Original thinkers are very rare in this age of epigones; if, however, a man is not only an original thinker but also disposes over learning unequalled in his subject, then he deserves to be doubly acknowledged.
As one would expect, in addition to his studies Marx is busy with the workers' movement; he is one of the founders of the International Working Men's Association, which has been the centre of so much attention recently and has already shown in more than one place in Europe that it is a force to be reckoned with. We believe that we are not mistaken in saying that in this, at least as far as the workers' movement is concerned, epoch-making organisation the German element — thanks precisely to Marx— holds the influential position which is its due.
Endnotes
[82] This short biography of Karl Marx is based on Engels' original version written at the end of July 1868 for the German literary newspaper Die Gartenlaube (see Engels' letter to Marx of July 20 and Marx's letter to Kugelmann of October 26, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43), but not printed by the editors. In July 1869 Engels rewrote it for the newspaper Die Zukunft, No. .185, August 11, 1869. This first biography of Marx, written by Engels, was also printed in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, No. 34 (supplement), August 21, 1869, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, who omitted a most important passage stating that Lassalle was not an original thinker but borrowed the content of his writings from Marx and vulgarised his works.
[83] A reference to the Communist League, the first German and international communist organisation of the proletariat, formed under the leadership of Marx and Engels in London early in June 1847, as a result of the reorganisation of the League of the Just (a secret association of refugee workers and artisans that appeared in the 1830s and had communities in Germany, France, Switzerland and England). The programme and organisational principles of the Communist League were drawn up with the direct participation of Marx and Engels. The League's members took an active part in the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany of 1848-49. Though the defeat of the revolution dealt a blow to the League, it was reorganised in 1849-50 and continued its activities. In the summer of 1850, disagreement arose in the League between the supporters of Marx and Engels and the Willich-Schapper sectarian group which tried to impose on the League its adventurist tactics of immediately unleashing a revolution without taking into account the actual situation and the practical possibilities. The discord led to a split within the League in September 1850. Owing to police persecutions and arrests of League members in May 1851, the activities of the Communist League as an organisation practically ceased in Germany. On November 17, 1852, on a motion by Marx, the League's London District announced the dissolution of the League. The Communist League played an important historical role as the first proletarian party guided by the principles of scientific communism, as a school of proletarian revolutionaries, and as the historical forerunner of the International Working Men's Association.
[84] The Cologne Communist Trial (October 4-November 12, 1852) was organised and stage-managed by the Prussian Government. The defendants were members of the Communist League arrested in the spring of 1851 on charges of "treasonable plotting". The forged documents and false evidence presented by the police authorities were not only designed to secure the conviction of the defendants but also to compromise their London comrades and the proletarian organisation as a whole. The dishonest tactics resorted to by the Prussian police state in fighting the international working-class movement were exposed by Engels in his article "The Late Trial in Cologne" and, in greater detail, by Marx in his pamphlets Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (see present edition, Vol. 11) and Herr Vogt, Chapter 3, Section 4 (see present edition, Vol. 17).
[85] This sentence was omitted by Liebknecht in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, No. 34 (supplement), August 21, 1869, which Engels noted with displeasure in his letter to Marx on September 5, 1869 (see present edition, Vol. 43).p. 60
[86] Engels refers to the beginning of the reign of Frederick William IV of Prussia (1840-57) on whom the liberal bourgeoisie pinned great hopes. But this short-lived "New Era" amounted to insignificant concessions to the liberal bourgeoisie.
[1] In the autumn of 1867 the General Council of the International Working Men's Association launched a widespread campaign among the English workers in support of the Irish national liberation movement led by the Fenians. The memorial written by Marx was an integral part of this campaign. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Féne"— a name of the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British Government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. On September 18, 1867, the Fenians made an armed attack on a prison van in an attempt to liberate Kelly and Deasy, two of their leaders. The latter managed to escape but a policeman was killed during the clash. Five Irishmen (Maguire, Condon, Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) were charged with murder and brought to trial. Although there was no direct evidence, they were sentenced to death. Maguire was subsequently pardoned, and Condon, as an American citizen, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The others were executed. The Fenian trial in Manchester aroused a storm of protest in Ireland and England. On the insistence of Marx, the General Council of the International began, on November 19, a discussion on the Irish question during which the leaders of the international proletarian organisation expressed their solidarity with the struggle of the Irish people for independence and condemned the position of the reformist trade union leaders who, in the wake of the English bourgeois radicals, denied the right of the Fenians to resort to revolutionary methods in the struggle. The discussion was scheduled to continue on November 26 (see this volume, pp. 189-93), but when the news of the conviction was received, the General Council convened a special meeting on November 20 and addressed a memorial to the Home Secretary asking for the commutation of the death sentence. The British Government ignored the memorial. Because of opposition from the trade union leaders, the English labour press did not publish the memorial in its original wording. A report on the special meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 319, November 23, 1867, only summarised it, and named the General Council members who had signed it. The French translation was published by Le Courrier français, No. 163, November 24. In English the memorial was first published in full in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. This document is also preserved in the form of the manuscript copy made by Mrs. Marx which fully coincides with the text entered into the Minute Book. Written as an article, this copy was apparently to be sent to the press. In this volume the memorial is reproduced from this copy.
[15] Marx refers to the Memoire of the Paris Section for the Geneva Congress, containing a detailed exposition of Proudhonist views on the main issues of the workers' struggle. It was supported by the Lyons and Rouen sections and read as the report of the French delegates at the congress on September 4. The full text of the Memoire was published in Brussels in September 1866 under the title Congrès de Genève. Mémoire des délégués français.
[87] On January 19, 1843 the Prussian Government passed a decision banning the Rheinische Zeitung as from April 1, 1843 and imposing a rigorous censorship for the remaining period. The decree was promulgated on January 21 (see "Erlass der drei Zensurminister betr. Unterdrückung der Rheinischen Zeitung zum 1. April 1843", Berlin, 1843, 21. Januar). After the publication of the rescript of January 21 Marx directed his efforts to secure its repeal. At the end of January 1843 he was already thinking of resigning the editorship (see letter to Ruge of January 25, 1843, present edition, Vol. 1, p. 397), but he did not consider it possible to carry out his intention at the height of the campaign for the repeal of the ban. In March, however, he believed that changes in the editorial board might make it possible to save the newspaper, and he made up his mind to resign officially from his post (the announcement of his resignation was published on March 17, 1843). Marx was probably prompted to do so also by his unwillingness to take upon himself the responsibility for a possible change of line of the newspaper by which the liberal shareholders wished to prolong its existence. However the royal rescript vas not repealed. The last issue of the newspaper appeared on March 31, 1843.
[89] This refers to the German Democratic Society, formed in Paris after the February revolution of 1848 and headed by petty-bourgeois democrats who campaigned to raise a volunteer legion of German refugees with the intention of marching into Germany. In this way they hoped to carry out a revolution in Germany and establish a republic there. Marx and Engels resolutely condemned this adventurist plan of "exporting revolution". Late in April 1848 the volunteer legion moved to Baden where it was dispersed by government troops, p. 61
[90] Engels refers to reports of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the situation in the various branches of English industry, published in the Blue Books. Blue Books—collected documents of the British Parliament and Foreign Office published since the seventeenth century.
[91] The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 limited the working time of child-apprentices to twelve hours and prohibited their employment at night. This law applied only to the cotton and wool industries; it made no provision for control by factory inspectors and was virtually disregarded by the mill-owners.
[92] A reference to the law of August 15, 1867, which brought new industries under the factory acts (including that of 1847) on the ten-hour working day, and the law of August 21, 1867 on the labour of children, adolescents and women in workshops. The first law covered mainly large factories while the second embraced small enterprises and workshops.
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).