Karl Marx

KARL MARX

An Intellectual Biography

Rolf Hosfeld

Translated by

Bernard Heise

Berghahn Books

New York • Oxford

Published by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

English-language edition

©2013 Berghahn Books

German-language edition

© Piper Verlag GmbH, München, 2009

Die Geister, die er rief. Eine neue Karl-Marx-Biografi e By Rolf Hosfeld

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and
review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system
now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hosfeld, Rolf.

[Geister, die er rief. English]

Karl Marx: an intellectual biography/Rolf Hosfeld; translated from the German by Bernard
Heise.

p.

cm.

Translation

of:

Die Geister, die er rief.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-85745-742-4 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Communists—

Germany—Biography. I. Title.

HX39.5.H634713

2012

335.4092—dc23

[B]

2012001693

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-742-
4 (hardback)

Failed prophecies

often make invaluable inspirational

reading.

RICHARD

RORTY

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii
IDEAS 1

World Spirit 1

Liberalism 13

The Riddle of Modernity 18

Predestination 31

Phenomenology of Communism 36

The Discovery of Simplicity 43

New Species 47

DEEDS 57

Futurism 57

World War 65

The Trauma of Exile 81

Lost Illusions 105

DISCOVERIES 131

The Terrible Missile 131

Crisis and End Times 144

CONSEQUENCES 157

To the Sun, to Freedom 157

Salvation from the East 168

Bibliography 181

Index of Names

187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sometimes one has one’s own ideas; sometimes they are provided by others. In this case it was
Ulrich Wank of the Piper publishing house who suggested during a conversation in Munich that I
contemplate a short, essayistic intellectual biography of Marx from a new perspective. Like
many of my generation, I had read Marx’s writings fairly extensively during my university
studies, but more than three decades had passed since then; thus I agreed only after some hesita-
tion. Having completed the manuscript, I am very thankful to Ulrich Wank, for without him I
would certainly never have devoted myself again so fully to this subject. Gerd Koenen, Michael
Jäger, and Jutta Lukas took upon themselves the friendly effort to critically review the text and
thereby very much helped me to avoid un-sustainable theses and obvious mistakes. My readers
Renate Dörner and Kristen Rotter accompanied the product through all its stages with a watchful
eye and constructive understanding, as did my wife Elke, who at appropriate and inappropriate
times was always a patient listener.

Note on the Text

The author has used italics in the text to denote a quote from Marx’s writings. These quotes may
be only one word or a short phrase. It is the author’s intention to infuse the text with Marx’s
voice and perspective in a seamless manner. Longer quotes from Marx and other outside sources
appear in quotation marks or as indented text. The source for the italic quotes may be found in
the attributed note, or in the case where several quotes appear in the paragraph, the attributed
note will appear at the end of the paragraph.

IDEAS

World Spirit

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons,” Karl Marx wrote
from Parisian exile in 1844.1 Apart from any broader meaning, this was also a summary of his
personal experience. This sentence by the then 26-year-old can thus be regarded as primarily an
autobiographical statement.

Conditions of censorship had prompted Marx to resign as the editor in chief of the liberal
Rheinische Zeitung on 18 March 1843.2

The year had started under gloomy prospects, 3 and now the weapon of criticism was also
knocked out of his hands. Quite a few people were frustrated with Prussian censorship, which
had radicalized many.

This experience played no small part in turning Marx into the radical remembered by posterity.
He, too, was a child of his times.

Czar Nicholas I was to some extent personally responsible for this turn of events, for the decision
against the Cologne paper came about under pressure from Russia. Anti-Russian articles criticiz-
ing Berlin’s dependency on St. Petersburg displeased the czar, who lodged a determined protest
against them. The Prussian ambassador was taken to task at a court ball, and a sharply
formulated letter was subsequently sent from the Winter Palace to Potsdam. The Rheinische
Zeitung was banned. Marx had to go. “I can do nothing more in Germany,” he wrote at the
beginning of 1843. “Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself.”4 A right life amidst the wrong?
No, that
2 • Karl Marx

was impossible. He went to Paris, the cosmopolitan European city that years earlier had also
attracted the poet Heinrich Heine, for the same reasons.

Back then Heine had been pursuing the promises of the July Revolution in Paris. “Sunbeams
wrapped up in printing paper” was what he called the fi rst newspaper reports of the struggles for
freedom in the French capital when they reached him.5 For him the experience was like a
journey from Hades into life. Indeed, July 1830 marked a caesura for the entire century. “These
combats in the streets of Paris,” wrote Benedetto Croce in the History of Europe in the
Nineteenth Century, “attained to the signifi cance of a world-battle; it seemed to the anxious
watchers that the thick black clouds which were lowering at the horizon of European political life
had suddenly been scattered by the ‘July sun.’”6 And Hegel laconically told his students in 1831
that after the downfall of Napoleon, the reestablishment of Bourbon government at the Congress
of Vienna was not much more than the staging of a fi fteen-year farce.7

A creature of the Holy Alliance had suddenly collapsed and provided contemporaries with a
theatrical spectacle of a shattered eternity. It did not make world history, yet as Hegel’s student
Eduard Gans reported, the long-awaited defeat of the French Restoration was a great European
event.8 It revealed that the principle of revolution, not that of restoration, would determine the
further course of the nineteenth century. The fi rst consequence was the independence of
Belgium. England underwent electoral reform in 1832; in 1834 Spain obtained a constitutional
charter. In Germany in 1832, Liberals and Democrats gathered at the Hambach Palace for a
celebration of brotherhood among nations. In the same year, Giuseppe Mazzini founded the
freedom movement La Giovine Italia and made it receptive to European ideals.

The July victory in Paris, however, had already foreshadowed the beginning of a new division
between the bourgeoisie and the people.

Eugène Delacroix captured it with an image in his famous painting Freedom at the Barricades,
which was the surprise of the 1831 annual Parisian Art Salon. An allegory of freedom? Yes—but
only with diffi culty could it maintain a balance between the bourgeoisie and the proletarian fi
gures from the Faubourgs surging forward to the barricades. “All being leads to sorrow,” the
painter noted in a brief note entitled “Metaphysics.”9 Something uncertain and almost mel-
ancholic hung over this bare-breasted apotheosis of freedom from

Ideas • 3

the heroic days of July. In the same year, Karl Marx entered his third year at Trier’s Friedrich-
Wilhelm-Gymnasium.

In certain respects, Marx belonged to his century’s generation marked by revolution. In Lyon in
1831 and 1834, the silk weavers staged an uprising with the battle cry “Vivre en travaillant ou
mourir en combattant” (Live working or die fi ghting). In 1835, three years after the Hambach
celebration, Marx became a university student.

During the Rhine crisis in 1840 he experienced a highly emotional upsurge of Germanic feeling
and hatred of the French, but this left no traces upon him. In any event, as a baptized Jew from
Trier, he could hardly comprehend the nationalism that, having arisen in the wake of the Wars of
Liberation against Napoleon, was receiving fresh impetus from the French call for the annexation
of the territories on the left bank of the Rhine. That was not his world. He had problems with the
Prussians, but his memories of the French were marked more by nostalgia. Those were the good
years when the Civil Code was introduced to the Mosel region and the emancipation of the Jews
was proclaimed. Also in 1840, Justus Liebig published his Organic Chemistry in Its Application
to Agriculture and Physiology, a milestone on the way to rational agricultural practice and the
modern world.

For his fi rst semester, Marx completed the journey from Koblenz to Bonn by steamship. Since
1827 there had been a regular link between Mainz and Cologne, and it abruptly changed all
conceptions of space and time. “The Rhine steamers go too fast,” the heroine Wally complains in
an 1835 novel by Karl Gutzkow.10 The break from the Age of Slowness occurred at a new
tempo and provoked irritation. Progress, the magic word of the eighteenth century, became
manifest in the landscape. The fi rst industrial settlements were created, steamships suddenly
became a part of the romantic Rhine’s sil-houette, and soon the railway would slice through
arcadian Nature like a sickle. The upheaval was tremendous. The future became the new slogan
in a world that for hundreds of years had been based on tradition. This, too, shaped the
“revolutionary generation.”

In October 1836, Marx still had to use a mail coach to make his way to Berlin, his second place
of study. The fi rst railway—between Berlin and Potsdam—would not exist until two years later.
Thus the journey from the Mosel to the Spree was familiarly slow, taking just over a week.
Industrialization was then only taking its fi rst tentative steps in the Prussian capital, which,
despite gas lighting, still largely

4 • Karl Marx

preserved its rural character. At the time of Marx’s arrival, the future railway magnate August
Borsig employed barely fi fty workers.

The transfer to Berlin was his father’s wish. The university there had a reputation as a
demanding school far more conducive to a son’s advancement than the university in Bonn,
which was dominated by rakish fraternities. Marx himself, however, may have been more
attracted by its reputation for academic freedom. Minister of Culture Stein zum Altenstein was
still in charge there, and he cultivated Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideal—an academic space
predominantly free from the state—as a political program. The university “Unter den Linden”
was considered the only public space in Prussia that was more or less free of censorship, and the
atmosphere in Berlin was characterized by an almost feverish intellectual curiosity. Here over the
next few years Marx would be introduced to the weapons of criticism.

His fi rst idea developed out of an intense engagement with Hegel’s philosophy during a
convalescent stay on the peninsula between the Spree and Lake Rummelsburger. At the
beginning of 1837, the student attracted the attention of the doctor because of a weakness in his
chest and the periodic spitting up of blood, and a little later he was declared an invalid because
of an irritability of the lungs. That summer Marx began the fi rst of the many spa treatments he
would undergo throughout life. Illness was almost fashionable during the overly sensitive
Biedermeier period in which he grew up. With his dispositions, he could easily have dedicated
himself to the widespread cult of world-weariness—as the novelist Karl Immermann said in
1836, the curse of the current generation was to “feel unfortunate even without any particular affl
ictions.” Marx did not do so, but he struggled with weak health throughout his entire life; time
and again his letters were replete with reports about the condition of his lungs and bronchial
tubes, gall bladder, liver, and his furunculosis.

For now, though, the fresh country air in the fi shing village of Stralau at the gates of the
Prussian capital was supposed to reinvigorate the anaemic weakling.

Marx had just completed his second semester in Berlin. Initially the grotesque craggy melody of
Hegelian philosophy remained somewhat foreign to him, but eventually it thoroughly suited his
need for rest. By moonlight on the shore of Lake Rummelsburger, the patient delved deeply into
Hegel from beginning to end, ran around madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, and
in the end fell into the

Ideas • 5

arms of the enemy and became a Hegelian. The nineteen-year-old concluded that

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant
and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had
dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.

The world was inherently reasonable, even though it was also inherently contradictory. A second
conclusion formed during the summer weeks in Stralau:

In the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, as exemplifi ed by law, the state, nature,
and philosophy as a whole, the object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary
divisions must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself must develop as
something imbued with contradictions in itself and fi nd its unity in itself.11

Science, Marx learned from Hegel, meant “surrender to the life of the object,”12 and from this
life of the object itself, by means of intellectual abstraction, distilling the concepts and categories
that classify and order it. This claim for the potential to obtain absolute knowledge would
accompany him throughout his life. Soon Marx would maintain that he himself, not Hegel, had fi
rst found the real 13—because it was material—key to this.

For the time being, however, he found in Hegel the key to what his future terminology would
call criticism. For Marx and his generation of young Hegelians, viewing the present “critically”
meant not accepting it as a given but rather working out from its internal contradictions those
principles and tendencies that pointed beyond the present toward the future. A beer garden on the
banks of the Spree in Stralau became a laboratory for such thought experiments. In the summer
of 1837, this was the meeting place for the Berlin Doctor Club, an eccentric circle of critical
students of Hegel that now also included the young student Marx. In this somewhat bohemian
atmosphere many confl icting views were expressed, 14 presumably quite boisterously and loudly
on occasion. The theologian Bruno Bauer, who was to have an especially strong infl uence on
Marx, was initially not among them, being still an orthodox Hegelian at the time. The origins of
the Left Hegelians, without whom Marx’s further develop-

6 • Karl Marx

ment can scarcely be imagined, lay not in academic seminar rooms or lecture halls but rather in
the Stralau tavern and at regular literati meetings in a café in the Französische Straße. They
claimed—treating Hegel somewhat one-sidedly—not that reality was necessarily inherently
reasonable, but rather that reason was the actual reality.

And reason was essentially negating, that is, “critical.”

If pursued with reference to the Prussian state, this abstract inquiry could become directly
political. Was this state already a reasonable entity for Hegel, or did reason still need to develop
into reality within this state? Did not the Hegelian embodiment of the idea, the embodiment of
freedom, Marx asked a little later, also and necessarily require the freedom of unlimited public
expression of opinion?15

Was Prussia thus still inherently a highly unreasonable state?

Hegel would presumably have answered: in principle, no; in its details, yes. In any case, this was
how he formulated matters in a letter to State Chancellor Hardenberg when sending him a copy
of his Philosophy of Right. 16 But Hegel had been dead for six years when Marx delved into his
works. Marx essentially became familiar with Hegel’s philosophy through his most gifted
student, Eduard Gans—

which meant Hegel as seen from a liberal perspective. At the time Gans was a celebrated man at
the university in Berlin. In the winter semester of 1838/39—Marx’s fi fth semester in Berlin—
Gans resumed his “contemporary historical” lectures about politics and social issues in modern
Europe, which he had discontinued fi ve years earlier under pressure from the authorities. A
captivating and almost hyp-notic speaker whose meetings often attracted hundreds of listeners,
he was considered, like his role model Mirabeau, a herald of new liberal confi dence during a
time of Prussian agony. The students arrived in enthusiastic torchlight processions, and the
lecture halls could barely cope with the congestion.

Hegel had taught that the state was the “march of God in the world,” the reality of the ethical
idea.17 To be sure, Gans believed this as well, but in contrast to Hegel he held the view that in
modern times this “reality” could only be produced through the public and free competition of
ideas—through “opposition.” “If the state will have nothing to do with opposition,” he
announced, “then it lapses into laziness.” And if in the process an agreement between civil
society and the state was not possible—for example, due to the repression of the opposition—
then at some point there would inevitably be a revolution,18 one that by rights would be
welcomed

Ideas • 7

by “every better and progressive person.”19 It was the Vormärz: Old Europe found itself at the
“beginning of its end,” and even Prince Metternich, the architect of the restoration, knew it.
There were no prospects for “honorable capitulations.”20
After 1840, the idea that it might be possible in Prussia to strike a balance between the regime
and a rapidly modernizing society slipped ever further away. That year Friedrich Wilhelm IV
became king in Prussia. At fi rst it looked as if the new king would, in the words of the Russian
envoy Peter von Meyendorff, provide for “une certain couleur libérale,”21 a certain liberal
coloring. He issued an amnesty for political prisoners and courted a number of well-known
heroes of the Wars of Liberation and opponents of Metternich’s system. The parliaments and
press became freer, and a wave of enthusiasm accompanied the change in rulers. However, it
very quickly became clear that Friedrich Wilhelm was by no means a liberal.

Marx was among the few who recognized this early on. “Already when the oath of allegiance
was taken in Königsberg, he justifi ed my supposition that the question would now become a
purely personal one,” he noted in retrospect. “He declared that his heart and his turn of mind
would be the future fundamental law of the realm of Prussia, of his state.”22 The immense and
elaborate spectacle Friedrich Wilhelm had staged in Königsberg was born of his desire to invent
the sacred tradition of the Prussian monarchy—one that did not exist.

He was a Romantic obsessed with the past who wanted to surprise Metternich’s cold world of
power with something extravagant. 23

This extravagance was Friedrich Wilhelm’s “Christian state,” the fantastical product of a late-
Romantic art-religion that raved about Christian regeneration through the spirit of an ancient
Christianity, understood more aesthetically than religiously, and the divine origins of royal
dignity. He had his “lords” and “cavaliers” and dreamed of a sacred mystical union as hollow as
the fi gure of Christ adorning the courtyard of his Church of Peace in Potsdam, arms outspread to
offer protection and blessings. But what he initially promised with respect to a certain
liberalization of the press was nothing more than

“respectable publicity” inserted into the privilege-based order of his personal rule.24 He was the
living denial of the Fredrickian rational state in which Hegel and, to a lesser extent, his students
had placed all their hopes for the potential for reform from within.

In Prussia, Marx noted laconically, in reality the King is the system, and it was only a matter of
time before the ludicrous historical

8 • Karl Marx

comedy of this new cavalier would end in tragedy. For while the court wove fantasies in the old
German manner, elsewhere, people had long ago started to philosophise in the new German
manner. In other words, Marx and others had possessed the audacity of wanting to turn men into
human beings 25 and had stripped away from them the supposedly divinely willed corset of the
Estates and subjects.

It was a radical break in thought, and not only with respect to royal romanticism. The fact that
this break had theological origins was very signifi cant for Marx’s further development. Around
1840

in the Berlin Doctor Club, a veritable “scientifi c terrorism”26 had dawned, led by Bruno Bauer,
whom a friend at the time called the
“Robespierre of theology.”27 As a consequence, the New Hegelians had announced the
“dissolution” of the idea of religion and in the same breath that of the Christian state as well.
“Zeitgeist” had been a fashionable word for years, and in 1840 the poet Georg Herwegh noted
that the “sword of revolution” is always felt fi rst in literature.

In this respect, language too had changed, becoming impetuous

“like the pace of the times, cutting like a sword and beautiful like freedom and spring.”28
Among the young Hegelians, the idea spread that they stood on the threshold of a new era of
Enlightenment that was unique in history, and they actually began to search within their own
ranks for the future German Robespierre and Marat. As Marx confi ded in his handwritten notes
while working on his dissertation, one felt like Prometheus, who having stolen fi re from heaven
begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth. 29 It was quite an intense atmosphere, in
which everything fl ourished.

As Marx began his studies in Berlin, the debate among Hegelian students was completely
dominated by the polemic The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, written by the Tübingen
theologian David Friedrich Strauß and perceived as a provocation. The Hegelian Strauß, a
researcher of myths, assumed that all Christology had been imputed to the historical fi gure of
Jesus of Nazareth. In contrast to the atheists of the French Enlightenment, however, he did not
consider this to be a deliberate fraud or a clever invention but rather a myth that expressed a
profound truth30—namely, the incarnation of God—in the form of an unconscious idea. This
truth, however, could not be reduced to whether Jesus was actually born, lived, and was
resurrected in the manner described by the Evangelists. The real message was rather that the
person “in his immediate consciousness knew himself to be one with God.”31 This view could
with some

Ideas • 9

justifi cation call upon Hegel, who likewise polemicized against what he held to be the
eighteenth century’s abstract theory of priestly fraud and asserted by contrast that even religion
possessed truth, albeit “in the form of picture-thoughts. ”32 Additionally, writing in the era of
the Grimm brothers’ research into legends and fairy tales and Niebuhr’s source criticism,33
Strauß could not treat historical sources as naively and unself-consciously as Hegel and Goethe
had done—

a realization that came to Marx as well. Especially when moving into the individual scientifi c
and scholarly disciplines, speculative philosophy needed to meet the challenge of the factual and
empirically demonstrable.

For the time being, however, it confronted the internal contradictions of theory. For several
years, the theologian Bruno Bauer was in this respect the dominant fi gure in the Berlin Doctor
Club. He began teaching at the university “Unter den Linden” in 1834 and fi rst drew attention to
himself in 1835 when, on the instigation of the orthodox pietist theologian Ernst Wilhelm
Hengstenberg, he published a scathing review of Strauß’s Life of Jesus. In 1840, however, he did
a complete about-face, now describing Strauß’s text as an event that struck the realm of
theological bliss like a contemplative lightning bolt. Shortly thereafter he published his Critique
of the Synoptics, whose thorough exegesis, as the theologically learned Marx pointed out, proved
that the contradictions alone in the reports of the evangelists disqualifi ed them as reliable
records of historical fact.34 It was indeed a solid critical work, and Albert Schweitzer wrote in
The Quest of the Historical Jesus that Bauer’s criticism of the evangelical histories of the
synoptists was worth a dozen good Lives of Jesus. To date, Schweitzer insisted, it was the most
ingenious and complete index of the problems with the historicity of Jesus’s life.35

In the 1840s, however, Bauer and his views hit a roadblock, given the radical conclusions he
drew from his criticism. He maintained that the Evangelists were the product of a zeitgeist that
included not only the stories of the life of Jesus but also set pieces from Jewish, Alexandrian,
Greek, and Roman myths and philosophies. In other words, the Evangelists represented nothing
more than a late-antique interim stage of human self-consciousness that assumed institution-
alized forms in the Christian religion, thereby taking on a life of its own and preserving itself.

Marx, who as a student of Bauer in the late 1830s attended his seminars at the university, was
considered a veritable arsenal of ideas

10 • Karl Marx

among friends in the Doctor Club. Bauer invited him to collaborate on a new edition of the
Hegelian lectures on the philosophy of religion, awakening in Marx the desire to write something
comparable, although he never realized this goal. The theologian was deeply impressed by the
younger man’s exuberant intellectual spirit; likewise, Bruno Bauer’s infl uence on Marx can
hardly be overestimated.

“The ego was everything and yet it was empty,” Bauer wrote about early Christianity in the third
volume of his Critique of the Synoptics.

“It did not dare to conceive of itself as everything and the universal power, that is it remained a
religious conception and completed its alienation in that it placed its own universal power over
itself and worked in the sight of this power in fear and trembling for its preservation and
holiness.”36 Thus in religion the object of the fantasy of human consciousness had assumed
independence as its own being.

A calcifi ed product of the human spirit began to rule the living. In religion, according to Bauer,
the person was bereft of himself, and the being stolen from him was transferred to heaven and
thus made into a non-being, a nonhuman.37

Marx would never escape from the infl uence exerted by this intellectual concept of an inverted
theology. For him, capital in the modern economic process would remain a general, self-created
de-miurge that confronts and rules over the person as an alien force. It was a grandiose vision of
a world without gods, in which the person was the true source of every society, all politics, the
world of ideas, and history; the person was its actual but also dispossessed and alienated “causa
sui,”38 the truth of which, however, could only be recognized once criticism had opened the
person’s eyes.

When Bauer wrote the work Christianity Exposed in 1842, he already saw himself entirely in the
role of a radical Enlightenment philosopher, as was supposed to be clear from the allusion to the
title of Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach’s atheistic polemic Le christianisme dévoilé, written eighty
years earlier. Through the critique of religion, Bauer wanted to dispel the “delirium of humanity”
and thereby lead humanity to an understanding of itself again.39 The fi rst political target was
Friedrich Wilhelm’s Christian state, for a state that according to Bauer would be a creation of
self-consciousness could no longer be a Christian state. At the very least, it required the legal
acceptance of an enlightened and critical opposition.40 In political terms, this was a liberal
position.

Ideas • 11

But conditions in Prussia drove Bauer toward increased radicalism. In 1839, following a literary
feud with the mighty Hengstenberg, he was transferred as a precaution to Bonn, initially as a
Privatdozent, albeit with the prospect of soon becoming a professor.

He wanted Marx to join him as quickly as possible and pressured him to fi nally take his
“wretched exam,” suggesting that the following summer Marx would already be delivering
lectures in Bonn.41

But then Altenstein, the last proponent of liberal academic policy in Prussia, died. His successor,
Friedrich von Eichhorn, ensured a fundamental change of course after 1840.

In that year Friedrich Julius Stahl, who considered the state a necessary consequence of
humanity’s sinful nature, became the successor of the liberal Eduard Gans, who had died young,
and in 1841 the elderly Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin to use his authority to smoke
out the entire troublesome hive of Hegelianism—the “dragon spawn of Hegelian pantheism, the
shallow know-it-allness, and the legal dissolution of domestic discipline,”

as Friedrich Wilhelm informed him through a confi dant.42 Also in 1841, the police investigated
students at Halle University who had petitioned for David Friedrich Strauß’s appointment as a
professor.

Only a theologian, Marx noted shortly thereafter, could believe that this period’s confrontations
concerned religion as religion.43 In reality, they were about the ideological pillars of the
Christian state.

Even for Bruno Bauer, it was not chiefl y his critical theology that sealed his doom but rather his
invocation of Hegel when, during a visit by the South German liberal Carl Theodor Welcker, he
publicly proposed a toast to Hegel and in particular his conception of a constitutional state
governed by laws.44 After this performance, the king himself promptly directed Eichhorn to
dismiss Bauer as a Privatdozent in Bonn and scuttle his academic career by blocking any further
opportunities.

The campaign against Hegel had intensifi ed in the late 1830s.

Not only was Hegel’s theory of the constitutional state an attack on the personality principle of
the pure monarchy, the Silesian monarchist Karl Ernst Schubarth observed in 1839, but it was
tantamount to a call for insurrection and rebellion, and the whole speculative dialectic with its
so-called specifi c negations was in reality nothing other than a disguised black mass in which
God must humbly request of the Devil “that he help him—as the negation to be sub-

12 • Karl Marx

lated—attain his supreme existence.”45 Quite right, replied Bruno Bauer, who had been denied
all bourgeois career opportunities.

Playing the picaresque role of a strict orthodox pietist, Bauer announced that Hegel was in fact
an atheist; he knew how to disguise himself well, but actually, with his message that God as a
person was dead, he represented the “root of evil.” Strictly speaking, his theory was “Revolution
itself.”46 This was to be demonstrated in a public provocation—a satirical “ultimatum”
comprised of citations from Hegel’s collected works entitled the Trumpet of the Last Judgment
against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: an Ultimatum, published anonymously in October
1841. Marx presumably also participated in this intellectual carnival; at any rate, he was
supposed to collaborate on a continuation with a second Ultimatum. 47

At the time, Marx was living in Bonn. Even after Berlin, Bauer joked to Marx that pietists had
sensitive noses, a “premonition of a crisis, like animals prior to a change in the life of nature.”
But the planned response of the left Hegelians would become a catastrophe for the pietists,
“terrible and drastic” and “greater and more enormous” than the catastrophe by which
Christianity had entered the world.48 This rhetoric revealed an unintentional theatricality, which
the two young “critics,” Bauer and Marx, also displayed by riding donkeys through Godesberg
on holidays, thereby deeply disturbing Bonn’s decent society and greatly amusing themselves by
poking fun at the philistines of this offi cious Prussian administrative town on the Rhine. Were
they trying to emulate the eccentric Prince Pückler, whose favorite public appearances included
driving a team of deer along Unter den Linden in Berlin? Or did Marx, as a Rhinelander, have in
mind the carnivalesque tradition of the Eselsmesse (Mass of Asses)? At times they lived (and
caroused) in an overstimulated, early-adolescent mood of superiority and boundlessness.

Then the Trumpet of the Last Judgment was banned. The carnival of philosophy that Marx had
discussed in the handwritten notes for his dissertation was no longer a viable option. On 15 April
1841, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the difference between democritical and
epicurean natural philosophy, but the removal of his mentor Bauer from Bonn University
suddenly dashed all hopes for a future academic career. Needed now were no longer the
intellectual games of half-hearted minds in ivory towers, but rather the judgments of whole-
hearted generals. 49

Ideas • 13

Liberalism

One could be forced, like Themistocles when Athens was threatened with destruction, to leave
one’s home completely and to found a new Athens at sea, in another different element, Marx
wrote while still working on his doctorate.50 In other words, he had to dedicate himself to the
liberal political opposition that, as the party of the concept, was the only party in a position to
make real progress. 51

Marx was twenty-two years old when he put these words to paper.
At twenty-four, well on his way to becoming a familiar personality in Germany, he became a
political journalist.

The reason that the Prussian government not only allowed but even encouraged the publication
of the Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe (Rhenish newspaper for politics,
trade, and industry) on 1 January 1842 was due to confessional disputes in the Rhineland. Since
1837, when a confl ict over mixed marriages ended with the imprisonment of the refractory
Archbishop Droste zu Vischering of Cologne , Berlin’s relationship with its Catholic subjects
along the Rhine had been exceptionally tense. Admittedly, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had attempted
reconciliation by staging the 1842 festival for the construction of the Cologne cathedral as a kind
of ecumenical event in the spirit of pan-German Christianity. Yet the Rhineland’s independent
will continued to make itself felt. In particular, the Prussians wanted to set up an effective coun-
terpoise to the Kölnische Zeitung published by DuMont-Schauberg, which with eight thousand
subscribers counted among the leading newspapers in Germany and in Berlin was regarded as a
disruptive mouthpiece for Catholic ultramontanism. Thus the concession for the Rheinische
Zeitung was approved with relative ease.

With steamships and the beginnings of railway construction, Cologne was experiencing a
noticeable rejuvenation after a long period of economic agony. Industrialists and bankers like
Gustav Mevissen, Ludolf Camphausen, David Hansemann, and Salomon Oppenheim represented
a self-confi dent stratum of the new Rhenish Großbürgertum that was striving for political infl
uence. Industry had gained enough strength to become an independent force, noted Mevissen in
1840, and where industry was a strong force, political power and freedom ensued. Even in
political terms, a new era was inevitably approaching. Mevissen was among other things a
member of the directorate of the Rhenish Railway Society and, in the judgment of

14 • Karl Marx

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, an early social liberal.52 He was undoubtedly the most interesting fi gure
of this affi liated circle of Cologne liberals.

Another member, Moses Hess, a scion of a wealthy Jewish family, is credited alongside the
conservative Hegelian Lorenz von Stein with introducing France’s communist ideas to Germany.

Hess was the fi rst communist Marx personally encountered. Both were from the Rhineland,
came from bourgeois families, and were under the infl uence of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx made
an “imposing impression” on Hess upon their fi rst acquaintance in September 1841, when Marx
was still in Bonn with Bruno Bauer. After their initial encounter Hess had the sense of having
met the “greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now living,” one who would soon — Hess
was referring here to the lecture halls of Bonn University —“draw upon him the eyes of
Germany.”53

Hess played a leading role in the negotiations over the founding of the Rheinische Zeitung. He
was actually the spirit of the whole operation, also chairing a socialist club that included
Mevissen and the well-to-do solicitor Gustav Jung, a former member of the Berlin Doctor Club.

At this point, the perspectives of socialism and liberalism were still very similar. In contrast to
Friedrich Wilhelm’s Christian state, liberalism and socialism stood philosophically on the ground
of immanentism—happiness on earth. Bound more to Kant’s ideas in East Prussia, and in the
West more to the traditions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, liberalism was
essentially a postrevolutionary movement, just as Hegel’s philosophy was a postrevolutionary
philosophy of the French Revolution. At fi rst glance, it must come as a surprise that even people
from the upper bourgeois circles around the Rheinische Zeitung therefore felt close to the radical
intellectuals of the Hegelian school. Included among their fundamental demands were the rights
to freedom of opinion and the press, whereas conservatives advocated the view that there could
only be freedom for the truth as they themselves defi ned it. The liberals also demanded actual
representative bodies, understanding them in the decidedly Hegelian sense as institutions of
realized reason. Overall, as Thomas Nipperdey has noted, a kind of crypto-politics in vogue at
the time was turning into actual politics. Standing behind all of the parties was basically a
metapolitical philosophy, a secularized theology.54

The coalition of the Rheinische Zeitung was also metapolitical when the newspaper was
summoned to life with share capital

Ideas • 15

amounting to 20,000 Taler. One of its most important members was Dagobert Oppenheim, who
had fallen in with the young Hegelians in Berlin and now lived in Cologne as a co-owner of the
banking house Salomon Oppenheim Jr. & Cie. He had arranged the fi nanc-ing in 1841 with a
prospectus for a limited partnership in the founding of a new newspaper.

Marx’s fi rst article in the Rheinische Zeitung, on the Rhineland Landtag’s debate over freedom
of the press, appeared on 5 May 1842.

Remarkable in a time of argumentative feuilletons, it reported well-researched, concrete details.

One could say that it clearly indicated that its author was moving from philosophical speculation
toward solid ground. Citing individual speakers and imparting a view of the narrow interests of
the different estates, it concluded by persuading readers that a censorship law was not a law but
rather a police measure, and that in contrast, only a law granting freedom of the press could be a
real law because it is the positive existence of freedom. 55 Thus was Hegelian legal philosophy
applied to concrete daily events, and on this issue the Rhenish liberals around Mevissen and
Camphausen were largely of one mind. They could feel themselves understood even in Marx’s
sharp polemic against the historical school of law, for in reality its target was the king himself,
whom Marx was accusing of representing the right of arbitrary power. 56 If there had ever been
a Christian state, Marx insisted, it would have been Byzantium, for only in this caesaropapist
entity were the dogmas of religion simultaneously matters of state.57 All of this thought still
followed Hegelian paths.

Yet the historical experience of Marx’s generation was already completely different from that of
Hegel’s. When the latter published his Philosophy of Right, the Prussian provincial Landtäge did
not yet exist. But increasingly parties began to form out of the Estates, something Freiherr von
Stein noted as a positive development shortly before his death in 1831.58 And although Hegel
had imagined otherwise, the Estates themselves were less and less capable of representing
bourgeois society. Basically, the Estates were “natural”—or, as Marx would say, zoology—
whereas parties represented the principle—appropriately suited for modernity—of the
reasonable, or at least informed, spirit. “Without parties there is no development,” wrote Marx in
the Rheinische Zeitung on 14 July 1842, the anniversary of the French Revolution, adding,
“without demarca-tion there is no progress.”59 In this too he could rest assured that he

16 • Karl Marx

was in agreement with Rhenish liberals, so much so that, even after the March Revolution in
1848, Prussian Minister of Finance David Hansemann toyed with the idea of bringing the
talented young man to Berlin for the business of politics.

Marx was twenty-eight years old when, on 15 October 1842, he was appointed editor in chief of
the Rheinische Zeitung. Since summer he had found himself increasingly involved in editorial
work, especially since Adolf Rutenberg, the chief editor at the time and Marx’s best friend from
the days of the Doctor Club in Stralau, was increasingly discrediting himself with alcoholic
excesses. In practical terms, Marx had already replaced Rutenberg in July. Rutenberg was
absolutely incapable, he wrote at the time to Arnold Ruge, publisher of the young Hegelian
Deutsche Jahrbücher (German yearbooks) in Dresden, and sooner or later he will be shown the
door. 60 These words clearly anticipated the parlance of the “Dictatorship of Marx,” as the
Prussian censorship authorities called the period when he was editor in chief. Mevissen described
him as “domineering, impetuous, pas-sionate” and “full of boundless self-confi dence,” but also
“deeply ear-nest and learned.”61 But above all Marx was often internally restless and
occasionally somewhat driven, as his contemporary, the journalist Karl Heinzen, described him,
and at the same time he enjoyed exercising his power over others. “I will destroy you,” he once
hissed at Heinzen on the occasion of a controversy about the Prussian bureaucracy.62 But the
dispute with Rutenberg also involved objective reasons.

Rutenberg had given his Berlin friends—“The Free” from the former Doctor Club, whose
behaviors were increasingly bohemian—

too much free rein. In June in the Rheinische Zeitung, Edgar Bauer, for example, railed against
the “juste milieu” of the upper bourgeoisie, the exact opposite of those who, like him, wanted
radically and critically to push “principles to their extremes.”63 The rhetoric was not very
effective, but articles like this very much displeased the publishers, leading Marx to announce a
corrective realignment of editorial policy in a letter to Dagobert Oppenheim. Under no
circumstances did he want to challenge the censors with senseless provocations. Above all,
though, he was fundamentally opposed to this kind of light, provocative feuilleton.

“The concrete theory,” he informed Oppenheim, “must be made clear and developed within the
concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things.”64 He demanded the
demonstration

Ideas • 17

of more expert knowledge and not, for example, en passant and inappropriately smuggling
communist and socialist doctrine into theater reviews and similar edifying articles.65 Briefl y
put, he wanted journalism that was well grounded and empirically detailed, in contrast to the
style of his old friends, whom he soon mocked as the inspired congregation of a new holy
family. “As you already know, every day the censorship mutilates us mercilessly, so that
frequently the newspaper is hardly able to appear,” he reported at the end of November to Ruge:

Because of this, a mass of articles by “The Free” have perished. But I have allowed myself to
throw out as many articles as the censor, for Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scribbling, pregnant
with revolutionizing the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and sea-soned with
a little atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied). Because of
Rutenberg’s complete lack of critical sense, independence and ability, Meyen and Co. had
become accustomed to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their own, docile organ, but I believed I
could not any longer permit this watery torrent of words in the old manner. This loss of a few
worthless creations of “freedom,”

a freedom which strives primarily “to be free from all thought,” was therefore the fi rst reason for
a darkening of the Berlin sky.66

Ruge replied: such “absurdities of student shallowness,” carelessly bandied about with
buzzwords like “atheism, communism, decapita-tion, and guillotining,” must at all costs be kept
at arm’s length.67 The last report in the Rheinische Zeitung from the pen of one of Berlin’s

“The Free” ran on 8 December 1842.68 It was Marx’s fi rst great political divorce for reasons of
principle, though many more would follow.

Once the Rheinische Zeitung had departed from the form of the zeitgeist’s argumentative Berlin
feuilleton and increasingly turned to questions of the real state, practical questions, 69 and the
specifi c problems of the Rhineland, the newspaper’s circulation noticeably increased—from
under a thousand copies in October to over three and half thousand prior to Christmas in 1842.
From its very inception, interference and prohibitions would threaten the newspaper time and
again, but for the moment its basic pro-Prussian, North-German–oriented spirit,70 directed
against the ultramontanism of the Kölnische Zeitung, gave it special status, even for Eichhorn.

While working there, Marx grew familiar with concrete politics: the Landtag with its Estates —
distinguished by virtue of sta-

18 • Karl Marx

tus and property — and its narrow-minded interests, whose reality completely contradicted the
ideal condition of Hegelian political philosophy. One subject he chose to address, as the Landtag
debated laws regarding the theft of wood, was a preindustrial problem that incidentally also
preoccupied Mevissen: the hardship of pauperism, which, alongside child labor and poorly paid
women’s labor, was widespread. Indeed, since 1830 poverty had become a massive problem in
Germany, and by the mid 1840s the Cologne Poor Roll listed around 25,000 persons—out of a
city population of 95,000.71 But Marx chiefl y provoked irritation by justifying a Mosel
correspondent’s report on the misery of the peasants in the Mosel region, caused by the open
borders of the German Customs Union.

He began by stating that given a lively press movement, the entire truth would become apparent
bit by bit.72 The details, facts, and statistics he provided penetrated all the way to Berlin and
even embar-rassed the king’s uninformed advisors, who rambled on somewhat helplessly about
unavoidable transitional phenomena. The fact that these matters were even made public was in
itself scandalous, for Friedrich Wilhelm IV had made it known that Prussia was to be regarded as
a blessed and fortunate country. As a rule, the censors energetically suppressed reports of social
distress, including the fam-ine in Upper Silesia.

Thus the modest freedoms of the liberal Cologne press came to an end in the wake of the
investigative reports from the Mosel, which stultifi ed censors and the state’s highest offi cials;
the sharp criticism of censorship itself; and not least the pressure the czar brought to bear
personally. Dr. Marx, with his “extraordinary talents” and

“admirable dialectic,” noted the Mannheimer Abendzeitung, had undoubtedly been the guiding
spirit of the Rheinische Zeitung and endowed it with its fi rst historical signifi cance.73 But the
banning of the “Hurenschwester” (sister-of-a-whore),74 as Friedrich Wilhelm put it, meant the
end of Marx’s exclusive weapons of criticism for the time being.

The Riddle of Modernity

The Rheinische Zeitung, Marx observed after the crackdown, had only ever asserted claims that
according to its conviction were reasonable, whether they proceeded from one side or the other.
In contrast,

Ideas • 19

he saw the monarchy’s reaction as resembling a reprise performance by those obscurantists who
at one time, in defi ance of all reason, had put the Copernican world system on the Index,
declaring it invalid.75

The banning of the Rheinische Zeitung had clearly shown that the use of force would assure that
the ideas prevailing in Prussia would be those of the current ruling class, regardless of how
unreasonable and outdated they were. Marx’s fi rst idea—that of reasonable freedom—had failed
because of the Prussian circumstances of his time.

It was this failure that led him toward the path of revolution.

As Jenny von Westphalen, his wife of many years, wrote to him when he became an editor for
the Rheinische Zeitung, he had gotten mixed up in the most dangerous ( Halsbrechendste
mengelirt) thing imaginable, namely, politics. His hopes of fi nally attaining the respectable
position of a good match as a husband had suddenly vanished. He rejected an offer, presumably
made through Jenny’s half brother, Ferdinand (later the Prussian interior minister), to enter the
state service in Berlin, refusing to allow himself to be bought by Prussia.76 As the Cologne
censor Saint-Paul wrote with covert admiration in his fi nal evaluation to Berlin, Marx was
someone who might be accused of “anything, but not a lack of principles.”77 Meanwhile, Arnold
Ruge had a plan: now that his Deutsche Jahrbücher was also suppressed, he would continue his
project abroad “as long as this police fury lasts”78 in order to thereby escape the “self-castration
of the German spirit.” “Could you get by with a fi xed income of 550 or 600 Taler?” he inquired
of the still editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung. 79 Including the honorariums he could
expect to receive as a writer, Marx could count on an annual income of 850 Taler as copublisher
of Ruge’s new project. Once the contract was fi nalized, this would provide an acceptable basis
for his long-desired marriage.
“I have been engaged for more than seven years,” he informed Ruge in mid March, “and for my
sake my fi ancée has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly
against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom ‘the Lord in heaven’ and the ‘lord in Berlin’
are equally objects of religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and
other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves.”80

To escape the pressure against this liaison from Jenny’s half brother Ferdinand, Jenny’s
sympathetic mother, Caroline von Westphalen, promptly brought her daughter along for a long
stay at the spa in Kreuznach, whose fashionable new bathhouse had just been

20 • Karl Marx

completed that year. Without family—and without the Civil Code ceremony that was common
on the left side of the Rhine — the marriage took place on 19 June 1843 in Kreuznach’s St.
Paul’s Church on the bank of the Nahe. After a honeymoon of several weeks in Switzerland and
Baden, the couple returned to Kreuznach and remained there for another quarter of a year in the
house of Jenny’s mother.

Now that the Rheinische Zeitung was no more, Marx seized this opportunity to withdraw from
the public stage to my study, which meant fl ooding his mother-in-law’s salon with books,
excerpts, and manuscripts so that, in the wake of his recent Prussian experiences, he could
grapple more intensely with Hegelian legal philosophy. Sum-marizing the laboratory of his
thoughts at the time, he later wrote: My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal
relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a
so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the
material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and
French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term

“civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political
economy.81

In other words, he found himself on the way to his second idea—

historical materialism.

But the steps taken in his studies in Kreuznach initially led him from liberalism toward a
systematic theory of democracy. For a certain period, this position brought him into proximity
with Arnold Ruge. The latter’s demand to elevate “in all spheres the free person to a principle
and the people to a purpose”—in short, a “dissolution of liberalism into democratism”82—had
led to the prohibition of his Deutsche Jahrbücher in early 1843. The fronts of the Vormärz began
increasingly to radicalize. Even Marx concluded from his Kreuznach engagement with Hegel’s
constitutional law that only in a democracy could a constitution be what it essentially needed to
be, namely, a free product of man. “Hegel proceeds from the state,” he noted in the fi rst of what
would later become his famous philosophical inversions, “and makes man into the subjectifi ed
state; democracy starts with man and makes the state objectifi ed man; just as it is not religion
that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people
but the people which
Ideas • 21

creates the constitution.”83 But the issue here was something other than pure philosophy: it was
about establishing parties. Until 1848, Prussia did not have a constitution at all, not even a
Hegelian one.

At this particular time it was thus crucial to know what the world should look like after the
foreseeable fall of the Ancien Régime.

Liberalism wanted constitutional limitations, the containment of state power by means of

constitutional law, and, in the best-case scenario, selective suffrage for the representative organs.
By contrast, the movement for radical democracy taking shape in Germany wanted unlimited
sovereignty of the people and majority rule.

Marx, newly married to his secretary in the Kreuznach salon, saw the outcome of his critique of
Hegel as the conception of a political system without mediation. The entire construction of
Hegelian constitutional law was obsolete—but not because it rested on the antiquated
construction of the representation of Estates and the presumption of a leading role for the state
bureaucracy. Rather, its obsolescence lay much more in the claim that the modest plural-ism in
these institutions was able to produce a balance between the interests of the state and civil
society, a task that today falls to the system of parties and associations. Basically, Marx wanted a
political system without any differentiation because he had come to see that mediating entities
were unable to reconcile the interests of the state and civil society. This is one of the earliest
examples of his mode of thought, which Georges Gurvitch once called an “infl ation of
antinomies.”84 “Real extremes,” Marx wrote, “cannot be mediated precisely because they are
real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for they are opposed in essence.” He wanted to
resolve this ostensibly irreconcilable opposition between state and society into a democracy, or
in any event into what he considered as such, for in a true democracy the political state was in
actuality nothing more than a particular form of existence of the people.

Hegel admittedly demonstrated a certain depth by perceiving the division between civil and
political society as a contradiction, but by recommending a mediating entity he had wrongly
declared the appearance of a resolution to be the resolution itself. With the mediating entities of
the three-step dialectical approach of the universal, particular, and individual, Marx declared in
the spirit of a modern proponent of Enlightenment, speculative philosophy admittedly gave
political body to his logic, but it did not develop—as would be appropriate— the logic of the
body politic. 85 But what was the logic spe-

22 • Karl Marx

cifi c to a body politic supposed to be? An emanation, or the particular form of being of a
people? Presumably Marx had something similar in mind with these dark words. But then his
criticism did not strike at Hegelian constitutional law alone; more forcefully, it called into
question any structured constitutional law whatsoever.

Above all, however, the Hegelian demand for differentiation cannot, as Marx suggests, simply be
dismissed as the voluntarism of forcing logical categories onto empirical circumstances. This
demand was largely the result of experiences during the French Revolution and the dead end of
the Jacobin phase of absolute freedom, whose unstructured nature Hegel regarded as having led
inevitably to the Terror. Indeed, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel devoted a chapter to the
dialectic of the Enlightenment. Here he described Jacobin rule as one where “all social groups or
classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished,”

as the “corpse of the vanished independence of real being or the being of faith,” and as a mere
“fury of destruction.”86 But Marx’s generation had evidently already forgotten this chapter. The
call for differentiation and mediating entities between state and society had much more to do
with this historical experience than with the arbitrary application of philosophical ontology to
political circumstances. Even if the details of Hegel’s institutional doctrine were open to critique,
it nonetheless clearly represented an attempt to conceptualize anew, in a modern and more
complex world, what he saw as the world-historical impulse of the French Revolution so that this
impulse could be preserved.

But for Marx’s generation, the French Revolution was considered an unfi nished event for other
reasons. It appeared not to have solved the modern riddle of the world’s duplication into state
and society. In Kreuznach, Marx held that an unlimited direct democracy along Rousseauian
lines—where all wish individually to share in the legislature—could overcome this problem and
sublate the division of state and society through the movement of a dialectical treatment.
Namely, once everyone operated without difference as parts of the same political body, then its
abstraction would be carried so far to the extreme that it would directly bring about the
transcendence

[Aufhebung] of the abstraction. 87 Was this dynamic perhaps supposed to comprise the “real”
logic of the body politic Hegel had called for? For a young man who had just set out to devastate
philosophical speculation, these were highly speculative thoughts. Shortly thereafter

Ideas • 23

Marx would radicalize his conception so that the riddle would only be solved when the real,
individual man reabsorbed in himself the abstract citizen and as an individual human being
became the species-being in his empirical life, individual work, and individual condition.88

When dealing with the future, Marx’s conceptions always remained vague and philosophically
undefi ned. They sustained themselves, in Jürgen Habermas’s formulation, on the illusion that in
principle all objectifi ed, systematically autonomized social relationships could be led back to the
horizon of the world of lived experience.89 Basically, these were surprisingly simple answers to
extremely complicated questions.

But the questions had been raised, and they had something to do with the new problems and
contradictions of a rising industrial society. As early as 1831, the French socialist Pierre Leroux
wrote in the Revue encyclopédique: “For forty years, one state form follows the next and one
after the other collapses similarly into an abyss.

All the while the Sphinx of the Revolution still wears its mysteri-ous headband upon which is
written the formulation of the task assigned to us by our fathers: liberty, equality, fraternity.”90
Basically, Eugène Dela croix’s “Freedom at the Barricades” was the fi rst icon of this sphinx, a
“strange blending of Phryne, poissarde, and goddess of liberty,” as Heinrich Heine described
it.91 During the 1830s and 1840s, French socialists and communists labored on this sphinx with
a variety of plans for the future; now, from the same angle, Marx approached the question about
the riddle of modernity. He became a communist shortly thereafter, moving with Jenny from
Kreuznach to Parisian exile.

There were real communists in the French capital, and although they initially formed, in Heine’s
words, a small “ecclesia pressa” (suppressed church), they played a signifi cant role in the city.
They were the only party in France, Heine noted in mid 1843, that deserved resolute attention92
in the early capitalist society of “Enrichissez-vous,” which otherwise was mainly characterized
by the eternal confl ict of a present addicted to enrichment and lacking any moral footing in its
heroic revolutionary past—by the “anger of a madman at a ghost.”93 On this ship of fools, Heine
added, the communists were the only force driven by “dæmonic necessity.” They were the
“predestined servants by whom the supreme will sets forth its vast intentions,” and Pierre
Leroux, the publisher of the Revue independence, had already taken on a role as one of their
“Church

24 • Karl Marx

Fathers.”94 Incidentally, Marx, who came to know Heine personally in December 1843 in Paris,
would soon make his—Hegelian—idea of the predestined servants his own, albeit without
sharing the cultural pessimism that Heine associated with such prognoses.

Pierre Leroux was among the French whom Marx and Ruge wanted to win over to their
yearbook project in Paris, especially since Ruge, looking at the range of authors of Leroux’s
Revue, saw the Revue as a model for the new project. Heine described Leroux, who was around
fi fty years old at the time, as a typical “child of the people” whose external appearance itself
already revealed “the indignations of the proletary. ”95 A close friend of the author George
Sands, Leroux was in fact a proletarian only in the sense of romantically aspiring to be one.
Disgusted with Mammon, he had quit his job as a stockbroker and become a typographer, a
typesetter, and above all an infl uential journalist.96 He represented the typical French engagé of
his time, for whom philosophy, as Heine put it, consisted primarily of engaging in “general
researches on social questions”—which greatly appealed to Marx. Leroux was certainly one of
the most interesting of the socialist theorists of his time, notwithstanding Heine’s mockery of his
utopian plans as pathways into a “visioned moonshine of the future” or a “yet undiscovered star
in the Milky Way.”97 As a social theorist who, even prior to Marx, had traced the class
differences of the new industrial society back to economic conditions, Leroux could be taken
very seriously.98

However, because Leroux had a deeply religious—though pantheistic—streak, he was highly

suspicious of the offers made by the radically democratic atheists who had arrived from
Germany. For the same reason, Marx and Ruge fared no better with the likes of Alphonse de
Lamartine, Felicité de Lamennais, Louis Blanc, or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Ultimately, the
challenging project heralded as the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French
yearbooks) did not include a single French contributor, even though in his introduction Ruge
attested that the French represented a “cosmopolitan mission” in its true sense. Any national
hatred toward France was nothing but a “blind aversion to political freedom.”99 In this period of
renewed rampant German hatred of the French after the 1840 Rhine crisis, this was a respectable
European program for democracy.

The Bureau des Annales—the editorial offi ce of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher—resided

in the ground fl oor of Rue Vaneau

Ideas • 25

22 in the seventh arrondissement, in a house with a small front garden. The printing was done at
Worms & Cie on the Boulevard Pigalle, an enterprise that was part of the Paris community of
German guest workers and emigrants, which then numbered at least eighty thousand people.
Through painstaking archival research, Jacques Grandjonc has remarkably identifi ed by name
seventy-four emigrant periodicals for the period between 1830 and 1848 that had to be published
abroad because of censorship in Germany.100

Yet the Jahrbücher attained an extraordinary status among the many emigrant organs and in fact
managed to announce an acquisition in Paris—namely, Heinrich Heine. As early as fall 1842,
Heine identifi ed a need to harmonize with Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbücher and Marx’s Rheinische
Zeitung and “call the bad by its proper name and defend the good without regard for the
world.”101 In the fi rst and only edition of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he contributed
a satirical hymn in praise of King Ludwig of Bavaria.

A different kind of German contribution would have been almost completely in vain, even
though in the end it characterized the entire spirit of the Jahrbücher. The independent scholar
and philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was represented with what amounted to a single page.
Basically, this was not even an article but rather only the printing of a letter Feuerbach had
written to Ruge in June 1843, in which he opined that the prohibition of Ruge’s Deutsche
Jahrbücher was as disastrous for Germany’s freedom as the demise of Poland.102 At the
moment, however, Feuerbach himself — sitting at his desk in his castle in Bruckberg — would
rather leave matters to “quiet workings.”103 It was Marx, with his sharp pen, who saw to it that
there would be more to the Jahrbücher than simply these

“quiet workings.” In the course of Marx’s studies during his months in Kreuznach, Feuerbach
had been a veritable revelation. As Engels wrote in retrospect, Marx absorbed Feuerbach’s
criticism of Hegel quite “enthusiastically.”104 As Engels noted, Feuerbach taught Marx to upend
Hegel, that is, to turn philosophical speculation on its head,105 which he had attempted for the fi
rst time in his Kreuznach critique of Hegelian constitutional law.

1842 witnessed the publication of Feuerbach’s Vorläufi gen Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie (
Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy) and summer 1843 the publication of Ruge’s
Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik (Anecdotes on the most recent
German philosophy and journalism) in Zurich and

26 • Karl Marx

Win ter thur. The Preliminary Theses argued that one need only “invert” speculative philosophy
to grasp the unveiled truth. “Thought arises from being,” wrote Feuerbach, “but being does not
arise from thought.”106 Marx would later say that being determines consciousness. As novel as
this might have appeared to a generation under the spell of Hegelian speculation, the situation
was otherwise for those who had at one point glanced at, for instance, John Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding or the writings of Locke’s students. Locke’s act of liberation
in 1690 was a rebellion against Aristotelian speculation, which at the time in Oxford was treated
as a codifi ed holy ritual. After Locke, philosophy was to be based on facts.

John Locke was the actual founder of modern thought, although his claim resounded far more
modestly than the euphoria celebrating Feuerbach that took hold in Kreuznach and Paris. Locke
taught that thought and all social life arise from sensation—from being. This simple idea opened
all doors to unbiased science in a single blow.

All historical knowledge, which in his tradition was understood as empirical thought, was thus
always a kind of historical materialism as well. However, Locke was aware that precisely this
turn toward researching facts established certain limits with respect to knowledge. “Our business
here,” he wrote, “is not to know all things.”107

Feuerbach’s break with Hegelian speculation, by contrast, was not principally directed toward
the world of facts. He wanted to reveal a secret. “The secret of theology is anthropology,” he
announced in the Preliminary Theses, “but the secret of speculative philosophy is theology.”108
Feuerbach’s critique of religion not only called into question God as an absolute subject but also,
along with God, the absolute Idea of speculative philosophy. He saw these as illusory
duplications of the human person who had been robbed of his natural foundations and whose
consciousness of species had therefore developed within these ideological alienations instead of
his natural reality. God and the Idea were nothing more than false mirrored re-fl ections of a
complete “real” human person. Feuerbach’s effect was like an inspiration. The real henceforth
became an almost magical phrase for Marx.

“Dear Sir,” Marx wrote on 11 September 1844 from the Rue Vaneau to Feuerbach in Bruckberg,
“I am glad to have the opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and—if I may use the
word—love, which I feel for you.” Despite their limited scope, Marx

Ideas • 27

continued, Feuerbach’s more thesis-like articles of recent times were nonetheless more important
than all of contemporary German literature put together. With his writings, Feuerbach had
namely fi nally provided a philosophical basis for socialism. And further: “The unity of man
with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species
brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of
society?”109 Hiding behind these sentences was an entire program holding far more than the
announcement of a future sociology. Marx meant that the concept of society held the key to
understanding the entire riddle of history.

In a certain way, Hegel had already argued in sociological terms.

Well aware of the signifi cance of John Locke’s act of liberation, he had also always been in
favor of empirical research. But he felt that the facts needed to be ordered systematically and
situated in their appropriate place in the Spirit’s history of the world and being.

Yet the further intrusion of empirical research into his system led to an erosion of Hegelian
metaphysics. This was exemplifi ed in the reasoning of Eduard Gans, who, on the basis of his
intensive work in legal history, came to believe that from the outset, the idea of law was just as
nonexistent as its realization in history; instead, the idea and its realization exhibited a “course
that ran parallel with history.”110 This was not so much Hegelian metaphysics but rather more a
secular intellectual history. Another example of secular intellectual history was David Friedrich
Strauß. And the importance of Lorenz von Stein, whom Moses Hess characterized as a “Hegelian
of the center,” also deserves mention.111 With Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen
Frankreich (Socialism and communism in today’s France), published in 1842, Stein was the fi
rst to draw the German public’s attention to the new political trends in the neighboring country
and also to make compelling reference to the serious social problems and irreconcilable class
differences of the new capitalistic industrial society developing in Europe, problems that largely
still lay ahead for Germany. Stein held that “the order of society dominates the constitution of
the state,” and that at the core this order was a “system of production.”112 According to Herbert
Marcuse, Stein’s work constituted the fi rst German sociology.113 But Hess reproached Stein for
believing in the possibility of a

“mediation of the contradictions in the situation of strife.” In other words, with his drastic
depiction of exploitation, immiseration, and

28 • Karl Marx

the proletarian countermovement that could be observed in France, Stein argued for decidedly
preventive state social policies instead of socialism. According to Hess, Stein was nothing more
than a cold

“political rationalist.”114

But Marx was not. For him, history had a defi nite goal and thus an inherent truth, namely, the
practical sublation of the alienation of the person, something he regarded as the necessary result
of the premises of Feuerbach’s dialectical critique of ideology. The radical change, for Marx,
came from philosophical — not empirical — research, and when he spoke of reality, he primarily
meant the earthly rather than the illusory world of human beings; seldom was this the world of
facts. The fact that this moved him beyond Feuerbach toward empirical research of the earthly
world had its own logic, and his extensive work is evidence of the dedication with which he
undertook this task. But the question is whether empiricism ever played a substantially different
role for Marx than it did for Hegel, or whether he instead founded a kind of new materialistic
pantheism of history.

That is to say, he developed a materialistic teleology, in the light of which he now also arranged
his French experiences. “You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers,”
he informed Feuerbach at his country estate, “to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which
burst forth from these toil-worn men.

The English proletarian is also advancing with giant strides but he lacks the cultural background
of the French. But I must not forget to emphasise the theoretical merits of the German artisans in
Switzerland, London and Paris.” It was in any case obvious, he informed his intellectual
inspirator of ideas, that what was being readied among these barbarians of our civilized society
was the practical element for the emancipation of mankind, 115 which Feuerbach called the
heart of philosophy: “the source of sorrow, fi nitude, need, sensualism.”116

Feuerbach would presumably have understood the allusion to the late-antique translatio imperii,
but he hardly saw matters as Marx did.

As Boëthius had done at the court of Theodoric, king of the Goths, Feuerbach preferred to take
precautionary refuge in the comfort of philosophy. New lineages, new spirits would arise,
Feuerbach wrote to his young admirer a month later, “as once before from the coarse Germanic
tribes,” but the dismal, even if unintentional, result of communism would merely consist of
turning “the top to the bottom, and the bottom to the top.”117

Ideas • 29

Marx’s essays in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were wholly permeated with the
enthusiastic spirit of his new idea, inspired by Feuerbach. They announced a downright
Copernican turning point in the historical and political view of the world. “Religion is only the
illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve round himself,” he wrote:
“The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish
the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once
the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in
its unholy forms. Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism
of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
”118 In the year 1844, this was the ambitious program of his own, individual version of
historical materialism. Through the method of the immanent critique of the world, Marx wanted
to develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles 119 and to force these
petrifi ed relations … to dance by singing their own tune to them. 120

A year later the new doctrine was complete. Let us allow Marx himself to speak in a few longer
passages. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real
premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination,” states a manuscript on
German ideology written with Friedrich Engels in 1845/46: “They are the real individuals, their
activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they fi nd already existing and
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verifi ed in a purely empirical way.”
And again: The fact is, therefore, that defi nite individuals who are productively active in a defi
nite way enter into these defi nite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in
each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystifi cation and speculation, the
connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State
are continually evolving out of the life-process of defi nite individuals, however, of these
individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they
actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under defi nite material
limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.

Continuing on:

30 • Karl Marx

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real active men, as they are
conditioned by a defi nite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness [ das Bewusstsein] can never be
anything else than conscious being [ das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-
process.

So far, so matter-of-fact. So British, one could almost say, if one takes Marx’s language about
the new empirical science seriously.

But as already mentioned, his problem was something different.

He wanted to demonstrate that the previous history was upside-down, that people were
dominated by the products of their own activities, and that this contradiction was driving toward
resolution in the present era. A few pages later, he continues: This fi xation of social activity,
this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into a material power above us, growing out of
our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief
factors in historical development up till now and out of this very contradiction between the
interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the
State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an
illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and
tribal conglomeration—such as fl esh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale,
and other interests—and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already
determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of
which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the
struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc.,
are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out
among one another.121

There was a signifi cant addendum in 1859. “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks
as it is able to solve,” Marx wrote in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy, since
closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material
conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad
outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be
designated as epochs marking progress in the economic de-

Ideas • 31

velopment of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the
social process of production.

With that, Marx continued, the prehistory of human society would reach its conclusion122 and
social evolutions cease to be political revolutions. 123 Thus history not only assigned people
tasks, but in a mysterious way it also provided them with solutions—namely, replacing the
domination of circumstances and of chance over individuals by the domination of individuals
over chance and circumstances. 124 Then all the reversals and alienations would be resolved,
and along with them the doubling of the world into state and society. As a radical democracy led
back to the species-life of the social human individual, communism would produce an
association in which there could be no more political power properly so-called. 125 By this
Marx meant the complete recovery and appropriation by human individuals of what had now
become a transparent world, which would render the state superfl uous as an illusory and
domineering doubling of society.

These were the most important hypotheses in Marx’s historical materialism, which at its core
was purely a philosophy of history and a secular narrative of an impending redemption.
Incidentally, that narrative, with its so-called progressive epochs, leaned heavily on Hegel’s
developmental stages of reason on its way from Asia to Central Europe, only Hegel’s “progress
in the consciousness of freedom”

was now regarded materialistically as the purposeful extrication of the human individual from
nature. The fact that this developmental path of humanity was paved with torpidity and
alienation could already be read in Hegel. The theory of alienation was in itself defi nitely an
important discovery, insofar as it aided understanding of the structures of power and rule
inherent in all systematic autonomizations. To be sure, these did not necessarily need to end in
eschatology. Yet Marx believed that with his conceptualization he had simultaneously both
understood and intellectually overcome the fascinating and frightening riddle of industrial
modernity, into which the Europe of these years had tumbled headlong, as if into a magical time
machine.

Predestination

The modern system of industry and trade, Marx wrote to Ruge in May 1843, of ownership and
exploitation of people, leads inevitably to a rup-

32 • Karl Marx

ture within society because it does not heal and create at all, but only exists and consumes. In
case of the impending Revolution 126 — which he also expected soon in Germany — Marx was
now in search of that universal class of which Abbé Sieyès had once said at the beginning of the
heroic October Days in 1789: it is nothing and must be everything. This was Marx’s third idea.
“Only in the name of the general rights of society can a particular class lay claim to general
domination,” he wrote in early 1844, alluding to the French Revolution. “For one estate to be par
excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of
oppression.”

But a dramatic intensifi cation like the one the opposition between the nobility and bourgeoisie
had sparked in 1789 could no longer be expected in the epic chaos of the postrevolutionary
world, especially given the philistine mediocrity of the German bourgeoisie. Now, in contrast to
1789, a revolutionary situation required a class with radical chains, one that possessed a
universal character by its universal suffering, that was the complete loss of man, that could
emancipate itself only through the complete rewinning of man—that thus was nothing and
needed to be everything. The dissolution of society as a particular Estate, according to Marx, was
the modern proletariat, which could no longer invoke a historical title but now only a human
title. 127

His prognosis referred to an impending revolution in Germany, which admittedly largely lacked
a real modern proletariat at the time, despite suffering massive poverty. Within the territory of
the German Customs Union in the mid 1840s—not including mining operations and work in the
textile industry (most of which was carried out in homes)—barely 170,000 workers were
employed in 13,600 factories.128 Industrialists like Friedrich Harkort in 1844 saw the wide-
ranging problem of pauperism as evidence that the “proper path had been missed”; for Gustav
Mevissen it was the “harbinger of a social crisis” that without timely reforms would inevitably
lead to a revolution.129 But Marx thought principally in terms of antinomies, perhaps because
his generation in particular experienced the upheavals of the 1840s, oscillating between progress
and destitution, as especially traumatic.

Apart from that, Marx’s presentation of his construction of the proletariat as a universal class
was not much more convincing than, for example, Hegel’s derivation of the monarchic principle
from Nature. Hegel thought that something “against which caprice is powerless” could be found
only in Nature, and not in civil society’s

Ideas • 33

confl ict-ridden world of interests; therefore it was imperative that the ultimate self of the state’s
will be determined “in an immediate, natural, fashion” through the monarch’s “birth in the
course of nature.”130 Marx held that the social existence of the proletariat escapes, so to speak,
just as naturally from civil society’s world of interests, a point classically summed up a little later
in his reckoning with his former young Hegelian friends entitled Die heilige Familie ( The Holy
Family). “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the
moment regards as its aim,” Marx and Engels stated in The Holy Family: “It is a question of what
the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.
Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as
well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.”131 This antithesis, which pressed
for a new synthesis, occupied him throughout his life and, as a philosophically founded
objective, would prefi gure all of his scientifi c curiosity as well as its results.

Arnold Ruge, who was ten years Marx’s senior, found all this to be pretentious and overly
epigrammatic, too much of an artifi cial

“formlessness and super-form.” Despite Marx’s indisputable critical talent, Ruge saw his theses
as fl ights of fancy, “occasionally degenerating into arrogance.”132 Unsurprisingly, their
partnership met with dissonance before long. The project of the Jahrbücher did not go as
expected. At the end of February 1844, the fi rst double issue was published, but the Prussian
police confi scated a few hundred copies during an effort to smuggle them across the border. The
French showed little interest in the journal, which declared itself to be binational but was
effectively exclusively German. In Berlin, meanwhile, arrest warrants were issued for Marx,
Heine, and Ruge.

Ruge was also increasingly disturbed by Marx’s sudden communistic euphoria and his proximity
to groups that “wish to liberate people by turning them into artisans.”133 Marx personally knew
members of these groups. — The teacher German Mäurer, for example, who lived at Rue Vaneau
43 and was a leading member in the communist League of the Just, and the doctor Hermann
Ewerbeck, a supporter of the communist utopias of Etienne Cabet.
Ruge criticized Marx for his too-vivacious carryings-on with these

“one-and-a-half artisanal blokes” and at the same time for his “syba-ritism,” his bohemian life of
dissolution, and his penchant for the elegant salons of the liberal Russian aristocracy. Ruge also
found

34 • Karl Marx

fault with Marx’s friendship with Georg Herwegh, who had just married the wealthy daughter of
a banker and, it was said, taken up shortly thereafter with the Countess d’Agoult, the former
lover of Franz Liszt. Ruge felt that when a man got married, he needed to know what he was
doing, and that Marx, somewhat arrogantly and indignantly, had wrongly judged Herwegh to be
a genius and Ruge’s views of marriage to be quite philistine. “After that,” Ruge wrote in late
May 1844, “we did not see each other again.” According to Ruge, Marx had gone mad with
arrogance and bile.134

For Marx, on the other hand, Ruge was just a Prussian, which became clear above all in light of
Ruge’s restrained evaluation of the Silesian weavers’ uprising in 1844. Cheap competition from
the mechanized textile industry in England had precipitated such a rapid drop in piecework rates
for Silesian weavers in Peterswaldau and Bielau, who still worked in cottage industry, that soon
many could no longer feed their families. On 4 June, three thousand of them formed a protest
procession in Peterswaldau, and when their demands for higher wages were mockingly rejected
by the local employer they stormed his house, tore up the account books and papers, and
smashed the machines. In Ruge’s eyes the signifi cance of this uprising was exclusively local,
and it had no political consequences worth mentioning.

In Berlin, however, the riot was perceived as an assault on the foundations of the state, and on 6
June it was quashed by the military. Four cannons and cavalry were deployed in the process, and
among the weavers eleven died, including women and children. Almost a hundred weavers were
arrested and turned over to the Breslau higher regional court. “No mercy, no refl ection
anymore,” noted Karl August Varnhagen von Ense on 16 June in his diary: “But there will be the
Court of Lord. Just wait, the outcome will be quite different!”135 The state’s overreaction,
mixed with its moral cynicism and indifference to misery, allowed the rebellion to attain national
signifi cance. Whereas previously the opposition to be feared had most likely been the liberals
from the bourgeois classes, now the order of the Christian state faced a new and potentially far
more dangerous opponent: the pauperized classes arising in insurrections due to the misery of
their condition. “We’re weaving busily night and day; /

Thy shroud, Old Germany, now weave we,” wrote Heinrich Heine:

“A threefold curse we’re weaving for thee, — / We’re weaving, we’re weaving!”136

Ideas • 35

Presumably it was Marx who led Heine to this view of the matter.

“The Silesian uprising,” Marx wrote in Vorwärts on 10 August in Paris, “begins precisely with
what the French and English workers’
uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat.

The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the
workers, are destroyed, but also led-gers, the titles to property. And while all other movements
were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this
movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy.” What he drew
here was a colossal portrait, quite in contrast to Ruge’s miniature. Nor was there a lack of
eschatological imagery. The German proletariat’s gigantic infant shoes, which he wanted to
attribute to the Silesian weavers, held something of the mythical archetype of the “puer senex” —
the grown boy — with which Vergil once proclaimed the Golden Age, and which also appeared
in the manger in Bethlehem. An industrial uprising, thought Marx, could be ever so partial, but it
fundamentally had within itself a universal soul. Only a social revolution possessed therefore the
point of view of the whole—and by this he meant, still completely in Feuerbach’s sense, the point
of view of the human being in contrast to the mere state citizen. Precisely this was what he
would have liked to see, from the distance of Paris, in the events in Peterswaldau and Bielau.

In reality, the rebellion was a preindustrial form of social protest with decidedly archaic
characteristics. It was directed not against the system of exploitation itself but rather against
individual agents whose especially cynical behavior had provoked the weavers’ anger.

Others were spared. At the house of the agent Fellmann, the rebels even allowed themselves to
be placated with a one-time payment of fi ve silver groschen each and then moved on. Ruge had
seen things far more realistically than Marx. Yet Marx found himself surprisingly in agreement
(though from the opposite viewpoint) with the hysteria that had broken out among the ruling
circles in Berlin and elsewhere. The same forces that unleashed panicky fears in Berlin led Marx
to the euphoria of an anticipated historical synthesis. Just as the French Revolution was the
classic period of political intellect, he maintained, the Silesian uprising was the fi rst visible sign
of the age of revolutionary reason. Not one of the French and English workers’ uprisings, he
insisted in all seriousness, possessed such a theoretical and conscious character as the Silesian
weavers’ rebellion.137 Setting aside

36 • Karl Marx

the completely overblown view of the events, these passages reveal a strange, unconscious
pantheistic aspect in his way of thinking. Marx did not want to say that the weavers were
theoreticians. Rather, he meant that in their actions themselves—in the real movement, the way
he interpreted it—a hidden revolutionary reason was at work.

As he formulated matters a little later in a polemical dispute with the French socialist Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon, as a theoretician Marx only had to give an account of the reality playing out
before his eyes and to become its mouthpiece. 138

Phenomenology of Communism

Compared to his view on the Silesian uprising, Marx regarded the communism he encountered in
Paris as nothing more than incomplete dogmatic abstraction. “This communism,” he wrote in the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, is itself only “a special expression of the humanistic
principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis—the private system.” It was no
coincidence, then, that other socialist doctrines arose alongside communism, “because it is itself
only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle.”

By this Marx meant above all the conceptions of Charles Fourier and Claude-Henri de Saint-
Simon, who as philosophers of history and sociologists had turned to the problems of the present
from different perspectives and with different imaginative approaches. In Paris he dealt very
intensely with both these schools and the communist groups, predicting the sublation of their
one-sidedness — according to the model of Hegel’s phenomenological stages of a consciousness
that is unintelligible to itself. 139

“The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement,” he

wrote in a quite Hegelian fashion in his posthumously published Paris Manuscripts, mentioning
Proudhon, who denounced property as theft; Fourier, who regarded standardized and divided —
and thus unfree — labor as the source of an alienated existence; and Saint-Simon, who was the fi
rst to look at industrial labor as such and from that drew formulations for improving conditions
for workers. The communist schools had fi nally reached the stage of the positive transcendence
of private property, even if still only imperfectly, Marx wrote. The fi rst positive annulment of
private property—crude communism, he stated further in his Hegelian

Ideas • 37

manner—is thus merely one form of the vileness of private property, a culmination of this envy
and an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization. Some of the forms of this
communism were still of a political nature, democratic or despotic, and others wanted to abolish
the state without dealing further with the nature of private property and thus the alienation of
man. In any form, according to Marx, communism demanded the reintegration or return of man
unto himself. But because it had not dealt with the nature of private property, with its ideas of
egalitarian distribution it was still entirely captive to and infected by it. It had admittedly grasped
its concept, but not its essence. 140

Parisian communism of the 1840s was a child of the French Revolution. For a long time it was
intellectually dominated by its over-lord, Filippo Buonarroti, who died in 1837. Buonarroti was a
de-scendant of the Italian artist Michelangelo and a former member of the Parisian Jacobin Club,
and for a while he moved within Robespierre’s intimate circle. In 1795 he got to know
“Gracchus”

Babeuf, who after the attempt to lead the poor from the suburbs in an uprising under the slogan
“bread and the constitution of 1793!”

served time in the Collège du Plessis prison until, as a republican, he was again released after a
royalist revolt. Driven underground for good by Napoleon in 1796, Babeuf had formed the
Conspiracy of Equals, a secret communist organization with a strongly centralized leadership.
With his book, Conspiration pour l’Egalité dite de Babeuf, published in 1828, Buonarroti made
the history of the organization popular again in the 1830s. Babeuf and Buonarroti represented
what Marx called “crude” communism in its despotic form.

Buonarroti in particular, a Rousseauist of the purist order, was of the view that in a morally
corrupt society, the journey to societal happiness inevitably had to be enforced by an
uncompromising educational dictatorship. This was, according to Marx, the fi rst idea of the new
world order 141 to emerge from the French Revolution. Maximilien de Robespierre was
Buonarroti’s great hero, and Buonarroti introduced to the world the myth, popular since the
1830s, that the measures of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety—the fi rst people’s republic
in history and the model for all future insurgen-cies—would ultimately have led to an egalitarian
society, had they not been violently interrupted by Robespierre’s arrest and execution.

His program was followed by a signifi cant neo-Babouvist movement, whose most important
leading fi gures included Robespierre’s admirer

38 • Karl Marx

Albert Laponneraye; Theodore Dézamy, who in Marx’s eyes was the most scientifi c of all of the
French communists; and the conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who in a certain sense would
become the legitimate heir to Gracchus Babeuf and whom Marx always regarded with a very
ambivalent love-hatred. The neo-Babouvists supported class struggle and had as their objective,
as Laponneraye put it, “the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.”142

The more democratic form of communism mentioned by Marx was represented by Etienne
Cabet. With around two hundred thousand supporters, he was by far the most infl uential
communist of his time, among other reasons because of the widely distributed periodical
Populaire and the fi ve editions of his Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in
Icaria, a description of a communist society in the form of a literary travelogue. In Icaria,
common property prevailed and a central planning commission looked after production and
distribution as justifi ed by need. The political organization of his utopian future state followed
the model of direct democracy. For the real future of France, Cabet envisioned a democratic
republic that, without an overthrow or violent expropriations, would introduce communism in a
democratic manner within a transition period of fi fty years.143 However, in the mid 1840s,
while Marx was living in Paris, Cabet became increasingly radical, ever more convinced that
communism would only be possible as the result of an organized workers’ movement.144 Later,
Marx still considered him respectable for this reason, that is, for his practical attitude towards
the French proletariat. Marx viewed the socialist Louis Blanc similarly—at least, until 1848; at
one point Blanc was supposed to be recruited to collaborate on the Jahrbücher, and his call for
the “organization du travail”—for the elimination of competition through the organization of
labor—was very popular and helped inspire Marx’s ideas about planned economies.

Marx considered Proudhon’s fi rst work, What is Property?, to be by far his best. In this text,
according to Marx, Proudhon acted with respect to Saint-Simon and Fourier much as Feuerbach
had done with respect to Hegel: he drew attention to the right problems and, by questioning the
legal basis of property, managed an act of liberation without even being a serious theoretician.
But such sensationalistic writings could play their catalytic role in the sciences just as well as
they did in fi ction. And in fact, in terms of theory Marx owed a far greater debt to Saint-Simon
and Fourier than to the communist

Ideas • 39

schools of his period, or even to Proudhon, who at the time was at height of his fame and with
whom, during the summer of 1844, Marx sat and debated throughout the night.145 Communism
offered projects, but it did not offer a real philosophy of history.

Even later, Friedrich Engels saw Saint-Simon and Fourier as the fi rst Enlightenment thinkers
who were enlightened about the Enlightenment and, next to Hegel, the most important
representatives of the dialectic of Enlightenment of their time. During the course of the French
Revolution the state of reason had gone to pieces; Rousseau’s social contract found its reality
during the Jacobin Terror.

The promise of eternal peace turned into Napoleon’s endless wars of conquest, and the society of
reason had shown itself to be unsup-portable without the poverty and misery of the working
masses.146

According to Engels, these were the problems that Saint-Simon and Fourier saw themselves
confronted with.

Marx and Engels got to know each other better during that summer of 1844. The fi rst long
conversation between just the two of them took place on 28 August as they sat at a marble table
in the Café de la Régence, a hub for chess players that was rich in tradition, having been
frequented by Voltaire and Rousseau and described by Diderot in Rameau’s Nephew. Marx and
Engels had already met in Cologne during the period of the Rheinische Zeitung, but at the time
Marx, seeing Engels as an excited envoy of the “Free Ones” in Berlin, had shown little interest in
a closer relationship. In the meantime, however, he had changed his mind, above all because of
the two articles Engels submitted to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

In particular, Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”

(long afterward, Marx still called it a brilliant essay 147) had an inspirational effect on Marx,
who was always open to impulses.

Engels had just returned from Manchester, where his father had sent him as an agent for the
Elberfeld textile company Ermen & Engels. There he was confronted with the harsh world of
labor in modern industrialized society. Soon he saw England as nothing but a vile class state
ruling over a class society. Even in the words of philan-thropic Tories like Lord Ashley and
Benjamin Disraeli, England was really composed of “two nations” that found themselves in a
state of war. From the outset, the young man from Elberfeld, strongly in-fl uenced by the
enthusiastic communist ideas of his Rhenish friend Moses Hess, viewed the irritating modern
world on the other side of the Channel through the eyes of a man awash in chiliastic ex-

40 • Karl Marx

pectations of crises. His later book on the condition of the working classes in England — in large
part an impressive achievement of early empirical sociological research — revealed these
chiliastic traits in its discussion of the consequences of industrialization for the immediate future.
During this fi rst visit to England, Engels began to write for Robert Owen’s communist New
Moral Order and the Northern Star of the radical Chartist George Julian Harney. Initially he was
completely under the infl uence of Proudhon, whom Engels called the “most important
writer”148 among the French socialists because he considered property the crux of the
explanation of the modern world’s contradictions.

Apart from dealing with the classics of English economics, however, the “Outlines of a Critique
of Political Economy” revealed clear signs that Engels had closely studied Charles Fourier,
particularly regarding the destructive effects of trade crises. Civilization, by which Fourier meant
developing industrial society, was moving in a faulty cycle. Industry was developed in order to
create workplaces, but in reality it only increased the army of the unemployed; by increasing
production, one caused crises of overproduction; by increasing abundance, one exacerbated
poverty. Civilization, “the most recent of our scientifi c illusions,”149 according to Fourier, in
reality meant nothing more than industrial anarchy. It was a topsy-turvy world.

The twenty-three-year-old Engels saw things the same way. “What are we to think of a law,” he
asked with an eye to the repeatedly recurring trade crises of the preceding years, “which can only
assert itself through periodic upheavals? It is certainly a natural law based on the
unconsciousness of the participants.” The system of free trade that had been erected on Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations, thought Engels, had in reality brought the world nothing but
“hypocrisy, inconsistency and immorality.”150 It was irrational, self-destructive, and as a
consequence, transitory. This made a strong impression on Marx, and over the next one and a
half weeks they elaborated these ideas during daily meetings in the Rue Vaneau. “When I visited
Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844,” Engels remembered, “our complete agreement in all
theoretical fi elds became evident and our joint work dates from that time.”151 It was the
beginning of a lifelong friendship between two thoroughly kindred spirits.

By the time Marx and Engels resided in Paris, the Saint-Simon school had long been defunct. Its
adherents, among them Pierre Leroux, had long ago moved elsewhere, yet its core ideas lived on.
In

Ideas • 41

its heyday in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Leroux had published the Saint-Simonian periodical
Globe 152 and Saint-Amand Bazard conducted an exposition of the systematized doctrines of
Saint-Simon in weekly Wednesday lectures on the Rue Taranne 12, the former house of the
philosophe Baron Paul Thiry d’Holbach.153 Soon the “belle formule” of the Saint-Simonists, as
Heinrich Heine called it in the early 1830s—the catchphrase about the “exploitation de l’homme
par l’homme,”154 the exploitation of man by man — was on everyone’s lips.155

In the ongoing social crisis since the French Revolution, the Saint-Simonists saw the creation of
a cycle. The Revolution could not be understood because it was still ongoing, but it was still
ongoing because it could not be understood. And the reason it was not understood, Bazard
thought, was that so few understood exploitation. In reality the modern world was not
characterized by reason but rather by the “fi nal transformation” of slavery, the “relation of the
master to the wage worker.” But property formed the “basis of the political order,” and like
everything else in the world it was subject to the law of progress. The exploitation of man by
man must end, Bazard announced before a well-read public of intellectuals and artists, and
consequently the constitution of property in which the exploitation persisted also had to
disappear. The industrial crises caused by the constitution of property were due solely to the
absence of a general plan.
Yet the future, Bazard taught with explicit reference to Leibniz’s concept of tendency, had
already begun in the “germs” of the present. A “Plan of Providence”156 was in force, and its
agenda was the continuation of the divine work of creation on earth, that is, the replacement of
the antagonisms of exploitation and competition with a rationally controlled social
administration aided by the sciences, unifi ed under a general metaphysical principle, and the
systematic organization of industry.157 The nuclei of almost all of the noneco-nomic ideas of
later socialism, thought Engels with a certain amount of justifi cation, were already present in
Saint-Simon.158

Despite the reference to providence, however, evidence of teleo-logical necessity from the so-
called real course of history was still missing. For this reason Marx, shortly after his brief
Feuerbach euphoria, found himself in Paris, compelled to return to Hegel. All the elements of
criticism were hidden in the latter’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he wrote in his Parisian
Manuscripts; they were already

42 • Karl Marx

prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The
greatness of the Phenomenology lay in the fact that Hegel grasped the self-education of man as a
process, and objectifi -

cation as loss of the object, as alienation, and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus
grasped the essence of labor and understood objective man—true man, because he was real—as
the result of man’s own labor.

Here, for Marx, also lay hidden the unresolved question Proudhon had raised about the essence
of property. “We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem,” Marx noted, by
transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of
alienated labor to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private
property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labor, one
is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its
solution.

The subjective essence of private property was nothing other than labor, just as, for Hegel, the
essence of the master was the servant.

The whole of human servitude, Marx continued, was involved in the relation of the worker to
production, and “all relations of servitude are but modifi cations and consequences of this
relation.”159 With his

“Outlines,” Engels had drawn Marx’s attention to the fact that, according to economists, capital
was “stored-up labour.” The division between capital and labor that followed from private
property, Engels thought, is thus nothing other than an “inner dichotomy of labour.”160 From
this Marx concluded that here lay a developed state of contradiction—hence a dynamic
relationship driving towards resolution.

This required yet another reversal of Hegel, leading Marx beyond Feuerbach and then away from
him again. Marx maintained that when Hegel grasped wealth, state power, and so on as concepts
estranged from the human being, he grasped them only in their form as thoughts. “The whole
process therefore ends with absolute knowledge,”161 according to Marx—that is, with a mere
interpretation of the course of the world as a trail of human self-alienation.

Hegel’s path to consciousness had thereby completed a negation of the negation, but this only led
to the intellectual transparency of a self-made history without abolishing the real alienations and
the objectifi ed power structures of an inverted world determined by these alienations. Only at
the Copernican turning point of communism

Ideas • 43

as the truth of this world, in which man, instead of moving around an illusory sun, moves around
himself in real life,162 thought Marx, did a true—material—abolishment of alienation become
possible.

Only communism is thus the actual negation of the negation, and fi nally the riddle of history
solved 163 as the movement of material history itself. Private property, Marx and Engels argued
with an eye to their immediate present, drives itself in its economic movement toward its own
dissolution, and the proletariat only executes the sentence that private property pronounces on
itself by producing the proletariat.164 This was nothing less than the prognosis of an imminent fi
nal judgment, in which the real people—the proletariat, as Marx prophesized—might appear as
puer robustus, sed malitiosus, as a robust and angry boy. 165 Fantasies? Yes, and big ones!

Marx’s oft-misunderstood and frequently cited eleventh thesis about Feuerbach, written in 1845,
states: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change
it.”166

The entire thesis makes sense only in relation to Hegel’s construction of absolute knowledge.
But if it is put this way, the materialist philosopher who is unwilling to abandon the aim of
abolishing self-alienation is then forced to become a revolutionary politician.

Hegel ultimately reconciled himself to the world the way it was, but he interpreted this world as
a product of people and wanted to make it transparent as such. As a consequence, naturally this
could result in a demand for change, but never a demand for the abolishment of a complex
differentiation that was almost foreordained by the development of history. Was Marx aware that
this was precisely what the result of his conceptualization had to be? Or did he merely
automatically follow an idea once it had taken hold? Compared to Marx, Karl Löwith once said,
Hegel was in any case far more of a realist.167

The Discovery of Simplicity

Marx’s fourth idea also concerned a leveling of complexities. It involved his thoughts about
politics and the state as a repressive institution of the ruling class. Neither Hegel nor the French
Revolution was the ground from which these thoughts were mined. Family and civil society were
the actual components of the state;168 quite distinct and opposite from Hegel’s construction,
they were the genuinely active elements, as Marx had previously stated in his Kreuznach cri-

44 • Karl Marx
tique of Hegelian constitutional law. A little later, his criticism of German ideology would
maintain that the state issues from the real material life-process and thus does not have its own
history. Material life—the mode of production—was the real basis of the state and remained so
at every stage, which incidentally is something Thomas Hobbes had already recognized in a
certain way in Leviathan, where power represents the basis for all law. The state did not arise
through a dominant will, Marx maintained, but vice versa, the state that emerged from the
material mode of human life also took on the form of a dominant will.169

His actual problem, however, remained the modern state and how it had classically come into
being through the French Revolution and contemporary civil society. During this time Marx
delved intensively into the history of the French Revolution, in particular more recent works by a
number of liberal historians who had been infl uenced by Saint-Simon—among them François
Auguste Mignet, who described the drama of the French Revolution as a struggle between all the
classes involved that had arrived at a certain peace only under the bourgeois government of the
Directory after the fall of Robespierre. Just as the English Revolution had ushered in an era of
new forms of government, so did the age of a new society in Europe begin with the French
Revolution. Mignet also put forth the thesis that in the founding acts of history there had as yet
been “no sovereign but force,”170 ushering in a concept that would be central for Marx: that of
class struggle. “Modern Europe was born in the struggle of the different social classes,” François
Pierre Guillaume Guizot announced in 1828 before the tiered lecture hall of the Parisian Faculté
des lettres: “The struggle between them did not become the starting point of stagnation but rather
the cause of progress.”

Guizot had already described property relations as the basis of every class struggle171 in his
1826 history of the English Revolution and thereby also revised his earlier thesis that ultimately
referred back to Henri de Boulainvilliers’s Recherches sur l’ancien gouvernement de la France,
namely that the development of classes in France was based solely on the conquest of Gaul by a
caste of Frankish warriors.

Guizot, however, considered the class oppositions to be a given fact and therefore sought, like
Hegel, the mediation of those oppositions by the state as a universal third party.172 Apart from
that, he also felt that in modern Europe “national unity” would allow the class struggle to fi nd
peace.173 This was before the July Revolution.

Ideas • 45

But to every attentive observer, French society after 1830 made Guizot’s prognosis look like a fl
eeting chimera. The July Revolution, noted the conservative Hegelian Lorenz von Stein in 1850,
was nothing other than the signal for a series of fi erce new battles, and

“the condition that followed it was a permanent state of war.”174 At the time of Marx’s
residence in Paris, Guizot was the exterior minister, but in reality he was the actual strongman in
the cabinet of Louis Philippe, the “citizen king.” The catchphrase issued by this French Calvinist,
“Enrichissez-vous par le travail et par l’éspargne”—enrich yourselves through work and
frugality—signifi cantly aggravated the social climate during the July Monarchy.

In 1830 the bourgeoisie fi nally managed to fulfi ll its wishes from the year 1789, Marx noted at
the time.

with the only difference that its political enlightenment was now completed, that it no longer
considered the constitutional representative state as a means for achieving the ideal of the state,
the welfare of the world and universal human aims but, on the contrary, had acknowledged it as
the offi cial expression of its own exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special
interests.175

And in fact, with the possible exception of England, nowhere had there ever been such
unrestrained bourgeois rule as in France during the period of the July Monarchy, which made its
debut with the words of the fi nance magnate Lafi tte at the Paris Hôtel de Ville: From now on
the bankers will rule. 176

Marx made a theory out of this. Soon thereafter he wrote: By the mere fact that it is a class and
no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally,
and to give a general form to its mean average interests. Through the emancipation of private
property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil
society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily
adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and
interests.

And further:

Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common
interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised, it follows that the State
mediates in the for-

46 • Karl Marx

mation of all common institutions and that the institutions receive a political form. Hence the
illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis—on free
will.177

Naturally, it was not merely experience that spoke in these sentences but primarily the view of
the state and politics that necessarily followed from his new base/superstructure paradigm of
historical materialism.

In any case, the state by no means represented for him a neutral and positively confi gured legal
order—or even parts of it. Marx saw even the doctrine of the division of powers as merely a
dominant idea—elevated to the status of an eternal law—of a transition period during which the
monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for domination. 178 With respect to
Montesquieu this idea was perhaps somewhat correct, but as a general thesis it suffered from
sociological reductionism and a complete lack of understanding of the complex political
institutions and rules that generally remained characteristic of Marx’s historical materialism. All
political struggles were for him nothing more mere manifestations of social collisions,179

and the democratic representative state with its emancipated slavery was only a spiritualistic-
democratic illusion. “What a terrible illusion,”180 he railed indignantly in a style that was almost
reminiscent of Fourier’s satirical polemics.

Marx had diffi culty giving this theory a consistent form. Particularly when it came to supporting
his philosophical-systematic explanation with empirical details, he occasionally lapsed into
platitudes that elsewhere he would certainly have mocked as the shallowness of British utilitarian
thought. The modern state, he wrote for instance in The German Ideology, had gradually been
purchased by the taxes of private property holders. Through the national debt, the state had fallen
entirely into their hands, and through the rise and fall of state funds on the stock exchange it had
become wholly dependent on commercial credit.181 Even if that was somewhat true for the July
Monarchy—in 1832 Heine called the Parisian market price for state funds the “thermometer of
popular prosperity” and the halls of the stock market the place “where the interests are at home
which in this our time decide peace and war”182—it was neither a systematic nor profound
theoretical explanation. It also did not develop any further. Engels would repeat it almost
verbatim in 1884

in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, even the

Ideas • 47

thesis about the spiritualistic-democratic illusion. In a democratic republic, Engels maintained,

wealth exercises its power “indirectly, but all the more surely,” especially with universal
suffrage. As long as the oppressed class is “not yet ripe” for its self-liberation, argued Engels, “it
will in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible and, politically,
will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme Left wing.”183 In short, the democratic state
would remain a class state until the majority of the workers had become Marxists and abolished
it. One can hardly call this a modern theory of the state.

New Species

Marx’s fi fth idea was the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary result of the modern
class struggle. He never systematically explained this thesis, yet from early on he considered it
the most important result of his actual discoveries. Writing to a friend in New York in 1852,
Marx noted:

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern
society or the struggle between them.

Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle
between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution
was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in
the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of
the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition
of all classes and to a classless society. 184

The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat appeared for the fi rst time in the 1850 statutes
of the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists.185 It pertained to an agreement — co-
signed by Marx — between German communists, Blanquists, and revolutionary Chartists who
had been infl uenced by an English translation of Buonarroti’s book about Babeuf. The society
did not exist for very long. Nonetheless, the statutes are of historical interest because they show
that Marx appropriated the designation “dictatorship of the proletariat” from the Blanquists.
Actually, it was the concept of a purely educational dictatorship. Faced with the question from
the

48 • Karl Marx

democratic socialist Théophile Thoré: “Why do you need a dictatorship if you have the people
behind you?” the Égalitaire responded in 1840: because of the hundreds of years of being
accustomed to demoralizing tyranny.186 The neo-Babouvists and Blanquists evidently did not
see a contradiction between sovereignty of the people and an educational dictatorship. They
simply resolved it in a political

“contrat pédagogique,” an educational contract analogous to that in the fourth book of

Rousseau’s Émile. “Make me free,” Émile says to his educator, “by guarding me against the
passions which do me violence; do not let me become their slave; compel me to be my own
master and to obey, not my senses, but my reason.”187 The people were thus sovereign only
insofar as they voluntarily subjugated themselves for their own good.

In his third thesis about Feuerbach, Marx had already objected to such ideas, maintaining that
they divided society into two parts, one of which is superior to society, and that it had been
forgotten that the educator himself had to be educated. 188 In detail, the statutes of the universal
association were a political compromise. But it is revealing that Marx felt closer to the
Blanquists than to any other stream of French socialism and communism—not because he
considered them great theorists, but because they were resolute proponents of class struggle and
unconditionally affi rmed the creative role of violence in history. Beyond that, they were
proponents of a concept of permanent revolution. In his eyes, all of this gave them an
unconscious depth, for they bluntly — if also somewhat crudely — proclaimed what the
proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.
189

Thus he spoke with admiration about that revolutionary socialism for which the bourgeoisie has
itself invented the name of Blanqui.

This Blanquist socialism was the declaration of the permanence of the revolution. The class
dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary way station along the road to the abolition of class
distinctions in general, the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, the
abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, and the
overthrow of all the ideas that result from these social relations190—precisely points two and
three of Marx’s supposed actual discoveries. Basically, he had simply thrown the philosophical
mantle of his historical materialism over the legacy of the Conspiracy of Equals and inserted the
dictatorship of the proletariat into an eschatological fi gure of the negation of the

Ideas • 49

negation. Only because of this did the Blanquist project become a historical necessity, the
painfully riven but unavoidable transition period at the end of the prehistory of humanity. “O
sacred head, now wounded” — the death of an inverted and resurrection of a redeemed
modernity.

What distinguished Marx from Blanqui, however, was his idea that a determined minority could
introduce communism at any time with a deftly engineered coup d’état. “The longer the time that
events allow to thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering mankind for
mobilising its forces,” he thought,

“the more perfect on entering the world will be the product that the present time bears in its
womb.”191 Marx always held the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be
achieved by the working class itself 192 and not by a small avant-garde. But this supposedly
most important point of his political theory also remained the cloudiest, and it became the critical
Achilles’ heel in the history of communism. Regarding the task of the worker, he asked in his
text about the 1850 class struggles in France, who accomplishes that?

The Revolution was by no means a short-lived affair. And he followed with a puzzling sentence :
The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness: “It has not only
a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to
cope with a new world.”193 Thus spoke Zarathustra as well, when he proclaimed the
Übermensch to be the meaning of the earth.194 Paradoxically, the museum curators who kept the
eschatological fl ame in the secular nineteenth century were not so much the great theologians
but the worldly-pious atheists like Marx—and Nietzsche.195

Notes

1. Karl Marx, “Introduction,” Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, The Collected Works of Marx and Engels (henceforth MECW),
electronic edition (InteLex Corporation: 2003), vol. 3, 182.

2. Marx, Announcement, 17 March 1843, in MECW, vol. 1, 376.

3. Marx, “The Ban on the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung within the Prussian State,”

in MECW, vol. 1, 311.

4. Marx to Ruge, 25 January 1843, in MECW, vol. 1, 397f.

50 • Karl Marx

5. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, in Werke und Briefe in zehn Bänden, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 10
vols. (Munich, 1976), vol. 7, 50.

6. Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry Furst (New York,
1933), 102.

7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener,
Ontario, 2001), 471.

8. Hanns-Günter Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz (Tübingen, 1965), 131.
9. Günter Busch, Eugène Delacroix – Die Freiheit auf den Barrikaden (Stuttgart, 1960), 16.

10. Karl Gutzkow, Wally the Sceptic (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 39.

11. Marx to his Father, 10 November 1837, in MECW, vol. 1, 10, 18, 12. Translator note: some
of the words here are translated directly from the German version: Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Werke (hereafter MEW), 39 vols., 2

suppl. vols. (Berlin, 1956–1990), suppl. vol. 1, 9.

12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, in G.W.F.

Hegel: The Oxford University Press Translations, electronic edition (Oxford, 2000), 32.

13. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 37.

14. Marx to his Father, 10 November 1837, in MECW, vol. 1, 19.

15. Marx, “Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly
of the Estates,” in MECW, vol. 1, 154.

16. Hegel to Hardenberg, mid October 1820, in Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes
Hoffmeister, 4 vols. (Hamburg, 1954), vol. 2, 249.

17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Additions, §258, in G.W.F. Hegel: The
Oxford University Press Translations, 279.

18. Eduard Gans, Naturrecht, in Philosophische Schriften, ed. Horst Schröder (Berlin, 1971),
136, 124f.

19. Eduard Gans, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände, in Philosophische Schriften, 87.

20. Golo Mann, Friedrich von Gentz: Geschichte eines europäischen Staatsmannes (Frankfurt
am Main, 1972), 304; quotations translated by Bernard Heise.

21. Barclay, David. Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861

(Oxford, 1995), 91.

22. Marx to Ruge, May 1843, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,”

in MECW, vol. 3, 139.

23. Ibid., 139.

24. Reinhart Kosellek, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Stuttgart, 1987), 423.

25. Marx to Ruge 1843, Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in MECW, vol. 3,
139f.
26. August von Cieszkowski as quoted in David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx
(London, 1969), 52.

27. Arnold Ruge as quoted in McLellan, Young Hegelians, 52.

28. Georg Herwegh, “Die Literatur im Jahre 1840,” in Werke in einem Band (East Berlin, 1975),
320.

29. Marx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, Sixth Notebook, from the Prepara-tory
Materials, in MECW, vol. 1, 491.

Ideas • 51

30. David Friedrich Strauß, Das Leben Jesu, in Die Junghegelianer: Ausgewählte Texte, ed.
Hans Steussloff (Berlin, 1963), 30.

31. David Friedrich Strauß, Allgemeines Verhältnis der Hegelschen Philosophie zur
theologischen Kritik, in Die Hegelsche Linke, ed. Ingrid Pepperle (Berlin, 1978), 65, 61, 66;
quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

32. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 321.

33. Strauß, Allgemeines Verhältnis, 55.

34. Marx, “Yet Another Word on Bruno Bauer und die Akademische Lehrfreiheit, ” in MECW,
vol. 1, 211–214.

35. Schweitzer,

Albert,

Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen, 1933).

36. Bruno Bauer, Critique of the Synoptics, vol. 3, quoted in McLellan, Young Hegelians, 57.

37. Bruno Bauer, “Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit,”

in Bruno Bauer, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 122.

38. Bruno Bauer, Das entdeckte Christentum, quoted in David McLellan, Die Junghegelianer
und Karl Marx (Munich, 1974), 70.

39. Bauer, “Die gute Sache der Freiheit,” 122; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

40. Bruno Bauer, “Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit,” in Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, 29, 32.

41. Bauer to Marx, 11 December 1839, quoted in McLellan, Young Hegelians, 70.

42. Xavier Tiliette, Schelling: Biographie (Stuttgart, 2004), 392.

43. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 108f.

44. Bruno Bauer to Edgar Bauer, 9 December 1841, in Bruno Bauer, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik,
237.

45. Karl Ernst Schubarth, “Über die Unvereinbarkeit der Hegelschen Staatslehre mit dem
obersten Lebens- und Entwicklungsprinzip des Preußischen Staats (1839),” in Materialien zu
Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Manfred Riedel, 2 vols.

(Frankfurt am Main, 1970), vol. 1, 256, 250.

46. Bruno Bauer, Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und
Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 297, 236, 300; quotation
translated by Bernard Heise.

47. Marx to Ruge, 5 May 1842, in MEW, vol. 27, 397.

48. Bauer to Marx, 5 April 1840, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 297, 236, 300; quotations
translated by Bernard Heise.

49. Marx, Notebooks on the Epicurean Philosophy, sixth notebook, in MECW, vol.

1, 491, 492.

50. Ibid., 492.

51. Marx, Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in MECW,
vol. 1, 86.

52. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2, (Munich, 1996) 199, 426.

53. Moses Hess to Berthold Auerbach, 2 September 1841, in Erinnerungen an Karl Marx
(Berlin, 1953), 111.

54. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich,
1994), 287, 377f.

55. Marx, “Debates on Freedom of the Press,” in MECW, vol. 1, 162.

52 • Karl Marx

56. Marx, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, in MECW, vol. 1, 209.

57. Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung, ” in MECW, vol. 1, 199f.

58. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, 378.

59. Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung, ” 202.
60. Marx to Ruge, 9 July 1842, in MECW, vol. 1, 391.

61. Quoted in David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Bristol, 1973), 53.

62. Karl Heinzen, “Erlebtes,” in Der negative Marx: Marx im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen, ed.
Siegfried Weigel (Stuttgart, 1976), 57.

63. Bruno Bauer, “Das Juste-Milieu,” Rheinische Zeitung, 5 June 1842, in McLellan, Young
Hegelians, 82.

64. Marx to Dagobert Oppenheim, 25 August 1842, in MECW, vol. 1, 392.

65. Marx to Ruge, 30 November 1842, in MECW, vol. 1, 394.

66. Ibid., 393.

67. Ruge to Marx, 4 December 1842, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 856f.

68. Ruge to Moritz Fleischer, 12 December 1842, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 859.

69. Marx to Oppenheim, 25 August 1842, in MECW, vol. 1, 392.

70. Renard’s Letter to Oberpräsident von Schaper, in MECW, vol. 1, 283.

71. Heinrich Lutz, Zwischen Habsburg und Preußen: Deutschland 1815–1866 (Berlin, 1985),
114ff.

72. Marx, “Justifi cation of the Correspondent from the Mosel,” in MECW, vol. 1, 333.

73. Richard Friedenthal, Karl Marx: Sein Leben und seine Zeit (Munich, 1983), 173, 151.

74. Lutz, Zwischen Habsburg und Preußen, 222.

75. Marx, Randglossen zu den Anklagen des Ministerialreskripts, MEW, suppl.

vol. 1, 425, 420.

76. Heinz Frederick Peters, Die rote Jenny: Ein Leben mit Karl Marx (Munich, 1984), 42, 48.

77. Friedenthal, Karl Marx, 174.

78. Ruge to Prutz, 25 January 1843, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 863.

79. Ruge to Marx, 1 February 1842, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 866.

80. Marx to Ruge, 13 March 1843, in MECW, vol. 1, 399.

81. Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29,
262.
82. Arnold Ruge, foreword to Arnold Ruge, Eine Selbstkritik des Liberalismus, in Pepperle, Die
Hegelsche Linke, 573.

83. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol.

3, 29.

84. Georges Gurvitch, Dialektik und Soziologie (Berlin, 1965), 145.

85. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol.

3, 88, 30, 75, 48.

86. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 357f.

87. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol.

3, 118, 121.

Ideas • 53

88. Marx, “On the Jewish Question, ” in MECW, vol. 3, 168.

89. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 83.

90. Pierre Leroux, Die Gesellschaft liegt im Staube, in Die frühen Sozialisten, ed.

Frits Kool and Werner Krause, 2 vols. (Munich, 1972), vol. 1, 277; quotation translated by
Bernard Heise.

91. Heinrich Heine, The Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, 20 vols.
(London, 1893), vol. 4, 25.

92. Ibid., vol. 8, 449.

93. Ibid., vol. 4, 153.

94. Ibid., vol. 8, 450.

95. Ibid., vol. 8, 458.

96. Kool and Krause, Die frühen Sozialisten, vol. 1, 258ff.

97. Heine, Works, vol. 8, 457.

98. Kool and Krause, Die frühen Sozialisten, vol. 1, 261.

99. Arnold Ruge, “Plan der Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher,” in Deutsch-Französische

Jahrbücher [1844], ed. Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 90.
100. Jacques Grandjonc, “Deutsche Emigrationspresse in Europa während des Vormärz 1830–
1848,” in Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte and
Centre d’Histoire et d’Analyse des Manuscrits Modernes am Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifi que, eds., Heinrich Heine und die Zeitgenossen: Geschichtliche und literarische Befunde
(East Berlin, 1979), 229–297.

101. Heine to Laube, 7 November 1842, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 9, 99; quotation translated by
Bernard Heise.

102. Feuerbach to Ruge, June 1843, in Ruge and Marx, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 122.

103. Feuerbach to Ruge, 20 June 1843, in Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 877.

104. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol.
26, 364.

105. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Afterword to the Second German Edition, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.

106. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorläufi ge Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie, in Ludwig
Feuerbach, Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze (Leipzig, 1969), 170, 186.

107. John Locke, quoted in Paul Hazard, Die Krise des europäischen Geistes 1680–

1715 (Hamburg, 1939), 284, 281, 287.

108. Feuerbach, Vorläufi ge Thesen, 169; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

109. Marx to Feuerbach, 11 August 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 354.

110. Eduard Gans, “Über Lerminier introduction à l’histoire du droit,” in Gans, Philosophische
Schriften, 241; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

111. Moses Hess, “Socialismus und Communismus: Vom Verfasser der europä-

ischen Triarchie,” in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz [1843], ed. Georg Herwegh
(Lepizig, 1989), 175.

112. Lorenz von Stein, Die industrielle Gesellschaft: Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus
Frankreichs von 1830 bis 1848 (Munich, 1921), 1, 34.

113. Herbert Marcuse, Vernunft und Revolution: Hegel und die Entstehung der Gesell-
schaftstheorie (Berlin, 1962), 327.

54 • Karl Marx

114. Moses Hess, “Socialism and Communism,” in Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind
and Other Writings, translated and edited with an introduction by Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge,
2004), 110 and 112.
115. Marx to Feuerbach, 11 August 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 355.

116. Feuerbach, Vorläufi ge Thesen, 181.

117. Feuerbach to Friedrich Kapp, 15 October 1844, in Werner Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach und
der junge Marx (East Berlin, 1972), 125; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

118. Marx, introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosphy of Law, in MECW,
vol. 3, 176.

119. Marx , Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in MECW, vol. 3, 144 .

120. Marx, introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosphy of Law, in MECW, vol. 3, 178.

121. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 31, 35f., 47f.

122. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, 263f.

123. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 6, 212.

124. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 438.

125. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 6, 212.

126. Marx to Ruge, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” in MECW, vol. 3, 141.

127. Marx, introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in MECW, vol.

3, 184, 185, 186.

128. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, 195.

129. Kosellek, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution, 620.

130. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 281, § 280, in G.W.F. Hegel: The Oxford University Press
Translations.

131. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 37.

132. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (London, 2003), 68.

133. Ruge to his mother, 28 March 1844, quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, 99.

134. Ibid., 99; Fritz J. Raddatz, Karl Marx: Eine politische Biographie (Hamburg, 1975), 78;
quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

135. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Diary entry for 16 June 1844, in Kommentare zum
Zeitgeschehen (Leipzig, 1984), 132.
136. Heinrich Heine, “The Silesian Weavers,” in The Poems of Heine, trans. Edgar Alfred
Bowring (London, 1866), 395.

137. Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform: by a
Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 201, 201, 205, 199, 201.

138. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 6, 177.

139. Marx, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” in MECW, vol.

3, 136, 143, 144.

140. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 237, 295, 296.

141. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 119.

142. Jean Bruhat, “Französischer Sozialismus von 1815 bis 1848,” in Geschichte des
Sozialismus, ed. Jacques Droz, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 192.

Ideas • 55

143. Joachim Höppner and Waltraud Seidel-Höppner, Von Babeuf bis Blanqui: Französischer
Sozialismus vor Marx. 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1976), vol. 1, 318–327; Bruhat, “Französischer
Sozialismus von 1815 bis 1848,” 189–191.

144. Christopher H. Johnson, “Etienne Cabet und das Problem des Klassenant-agonismus,” in
Vormarxistischer Sozialismus, ed. Manfred Hahn (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 212.

145. Marx, “On Proudhon,” in MECW, vol. 20, 31, 26, 28.

146. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientifi c, in MECW, vol. 24, 289.

147. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, 264.

148. Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW, vol. 3, 399.

149. Charles Fourier, Ökonomisch-philosophische Schriften (Berlin, 1980), 57; quotation

translated by Bernard Heise.

150. Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW, vol. 3, 433f, 420

151. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 318.

152. Kool and Krause, Die frühen Sozialisten, vol. 1, 259.

153. Gottfried Salomon-Delatour, introduction to Die Lehre Saint-Simons, ed.

Gottfried Salomon-Delatour (Neuwied, 1962), 19ff.

154. Heinrich Heine, French introduction to the French edition of Reisebilder, in Heinrich Heine,
Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 20

vols. (Munich, 1976), vol. 3, 677.

155. Eliza Marian Butler, The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany (New York, 1960), 60: “The
newspaper-reading German public could no more be in ignorance of Saint-Simonism than of the
cholera.”

156. Salomon-Delatour, Lehre Saint-Simons, 117, 105, 108f., 117, 209, 225.

157. Otto Warschauer, Saint-Simon und der Saint-Simonismus (Leipzig, 1892), 62.

158. Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientifi c,” in MECW, vol. 24, 293.

159. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 332, 333, 281,
280.

160. Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” in MECW, vol. 3, 430.

161. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 294, 331.

162. Marx, introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW,
vol. 3, 176.

163. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 297.

164. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 36.

165. Marx, “The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter,” in MECW, vol. 6, 233.

166. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in MECW, vol. 5, 5.

167. Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der
Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart, 2004), 61.

168. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol.

3, 8.

56 • Karl Marx

169. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 329.

170. François Auguste Mignet , Geschichte der Französischen Revolution von 1789 bis 1814
(Leipzig, 1975), 409ff., 13, 15.

171. François Guizot, Cours d’histoire, histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe, Lecture 7,
quoted in Rudolf Herrnstadt, Die Entdeckung der Klassen (East Berlin, 1965). Quotation
translated by Bernard Heise.

172. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, Die Demokratie in Frankreich (Grimma, 1849) 49, 67,
71.

173. Francois Guizot, Cours d’histoire, Lecture 7, quoted in Herrnstadt. Quotation translated by
Bernard Heise.

174. Stein, Die industrielle Gesellschaft, 5.

175. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 124.

176. Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, in MECW, vol. 10, 48.

177. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 90.

178. Ibid., 59.

179. Marx, “Public Prosecutor Hecker and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” in MECW, vol. 7, 488.

180. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 122.

181. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 90.

182. Heine, Works, vol. 7, 126.

183. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in MECW, vol. 26, 271f.

184. Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in MECW, vol. 39, 62ff.

185. Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists, in MECW, vol. 10, 614f.

186. Höppner and Seidel-Höppner, Von Babeuf bis Blanqui, vol. 1, 373.

187. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (Teddington, 2007), 274.

188. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in MECW, vol. 5, 7.

189. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 37.

190. Marx, Class Struggles in France, in MECW, vol. 10, 127.

191. Marx to Ruge, May 1843, in MECW, vol. 3, 141.

192. Marx, Provisional Rules of the Association, in MECW, vol. 20, 14.
193. Marx, Class Struggles in France, in MECW, vol. 10, 117.

194. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans.

Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge, 2006), 5f.

195. Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 76.

DEEDS

Futurism

The railway’s conquest of the earth was one of the earliest dreams motivating Count Henri de
Saint-Simon. At the end of the 1840s, only its modest beginnings were visible outside of
England and America. Yet ever since the Congress of Vienna, the increasing speed of travel had
begun to open up the landscape with a vengeance. Express postal routes along new highways
soon reduced the travel time from Berlin to Munich by way of Cologne from 130 to 78 hours. In
1825, horse-drawn omnibuses were introduced to inner-city traffi c in Berlin. By 1847, Prussia
boasted 3,200 kilometers of railway lines.

Tunnels penetrated mountains, bridges spanned valleys and rivers, and railway embankments
were soon an intrinsic part of landscape imagery, classically captured by Adolph Menzel’s 1847
oil painting Die Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn. Whereas Menzel’s steaming colossus still came
across as an irritating disruption in a mortally wounded landscape, William Turner’s Rain, Steam
and Speed, the Great Western Railway of 1844 represented the full-blown apotheosis of the new
era in which everything was bathed in the glowing reddish light of the new fi res of industry.
“The shining steel glides to and fro / And, driving other parts, all show / A striving to one goal,”
wrote the harp maker J. A. Stumpf, living in London: “The great machine / Obeys the master’s
mind, it may be seen.”1 The atmosphere of the time was futuristic.

58 • Karl Marx

Even the Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote in Brussels in 1847, breathed this
futuristic spirit. “The bourgeoisie,”

it states, “has disclosed what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aq-ueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.” This revolution,
the likes of which the world had never seen, was occurring before the very eyes of
contemporaries who had just recently learned to cultivate the niches and favorite everyday things
of the domesticated Biedermeier period. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred
years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together,” the Manifesto continues:

Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and

agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for
cultivation, ca-nalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—

what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of
social labour?2

As Marx had already written in his doctoral dissertation, it was in fact a time that recalled
Prometheus’s theft of fi re from the gods in heaven.3 There was something almost frightening
about the speed and extent of the human world’s accumulation of powers that seemed to
transport the entire earthly sphere into a state of permanent industrial, economic, and
communicative revolution.

Marx believed this sudden and ultra-pharaonic violence and strength of capitalism was too
fragile to last very long. “Modern bourgeois society,” the Communist Manifesto states, “with its
relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” For decades already, the
history of industry and trade had been a history of the revolt of modern productive forces against
modern conditions of production, which came to light especially in the periodic commercial
crises that put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more
threateningly. The entire paradox of capitalistic modernity revealed itself in these societal
epidemics, which the old world, always suffering from scarcity, had not known. They were
indeed epidemics

Deeds • 59

of over-production that were leading to a universal war of devastation, for unregulated

overabundance due to the sudden stagnation of the markets created dramatic shortages of goods,
whereupon humanity unexpectedly found itself thrown back into a state of momentary barbarism
during the economic crisis.4 Only the regulated, rational world of communism was in a position
to lead humanity out of this chaos and really consummate the work of Prometheus.

Marx had meanwhile become a member of the Communist League.

A failed attempt to assassinate Friedrich Wilhelm IV had abruptly ended his fi rst stay in Paris.
On the morning of 26 July 1844, as the Prussian king and queen set out from the busy Berlin
Schlosshof for their usual summer vacation in Silesia, the former Storkow Bürgermeister
Heinrich Ludwig Tschech approached them with a double-barreled pistol; Tschech got off two
shots, but they narrowly missed their target. The Parisian Vorwärts reported on the event—not
particularly reverentially—and thereafter the government of His Majesty in Berlin had, with
increasing anger, demanded that measures be taken against the radical German emigrants in
Paris, among them Marx. In mid August, Marx again disrespectfully issued solemn remarks
about Friedrich Wilhelm in Vorwärts, saying that the hand of God had providentially defl ected
the bullets, and now, while looking upward to the divine Savior and with the certainty of victory,
he was applying a fi rm hand to the work of combating evil. 5 French scruples kept Guizot from
expelling Heinrich Heine, whose mocking political poetry made him hated in Berlin above all
others. Guizot paid respect to Heine’s international renown as a European author—and, as was
common knowledge at the time in France, “one does not arrest Voltaire.” But Marx had to go.

He received his deportation order on 1 January 1845. On 3 February he left with the mail coach
for Brussels, where he would remain until the outbreak of the European Revolution in February
1848. Jenny followed him ten days later. For a month they lived in the Hotel Bois Sauvage, and
in May 1845 they moved into a row house on the eastern edge of the town on Verbondsstraat,
which at the time was still called Rue de l’Alliance in French. Shortly thereafter Caroline von
Westphalen, Jenny’s mother, sent them Helene Demuth, the daughter of a Trier baker, as a
housemaid. “Lenchen”

would henceforth manage the household until Marx’s death.

“In those days Brussels teemed with all sorts of refugees and emigrants,” wrote the author Alfred
Meißner in his memoirs: “There

60 • Karl Marx

was no shortage of troubled creatures who had avoided the police of Louis Philippe.”6 Marx was
now among those who, expelled by the police of Louis Philippe, had gathered in the capital city
of this the most liberal constitutional monarchy on the continent. In early 1847 he became a
member of the Communist League. The league had originally been founded in Paris in 1836
under a different name.

“During my fi rst stay in Paris,” Marx recalled later, “I established personal contact with the
leaders of the League living there as well as with the leaders of the majority of the secret French
workers’ associations, without however becoming a member of any of them.”

But in Brussels, where Guizot’s expulsion order had sent me, he joined the league after receiving
the offer, together with Engels, to formulate anew the league’s program on the basis of his own
views. Marx had, in the time since his arrival, become an authority among German communists
abroad.

This fact was due substantially to the many different activities that he undertook in Brussels,
usually with Engels. He later recalled: We published a series of pamphlets, partly printed, partly
litho-graphed, in which we mercilessly criticized the hotchpotch of Franco-English socialism or
communism and German philosophy, which formed the secret doctrine of the League at that
time. In its place we proposed the scientifi c study of the economic structure of bourgeois society
as the only tenable theoretical foundation. Furthermore, we argued in popular form that it was
not a matter of putting some utopian system into effect, but of conscious participation in the
historical process revolutionizing society before our very eyes. 7

Thus, as Engels wrote in retrospect, Marx was convinced that the materialistic conception of
history he had formed through the reversal of Hegel was “of immediate importance for the
contemporary workers’ movement.”8 This, his fi rst and most important political paradigm, was
basically the paradigm of a new kind of absolute knowledge. Underlying it was nothing less than
the claim of being the only self-conscious and authentic mouthpiece of the historical will of the
ostensibly real historical objective of Marx’s own present.
Increasingly, his sense of superiority also set the tone of his debates. The fi rst to experience this
was the theorizing communist tailor Wilhelm Weitling, whose brilliant writings, Marx had
attested in 1844, marked the vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers. 9
Since 1836, Weitling had played an important role in the

Deeds • 61

precursor organizations of the Communist League, and for a long time his writings—among
them Humanity as It Is and Ought to Be, The Poor Sinner’s Gospel, and Guarantees of Harmony
and Freedom—

were considered authoritative catechisms for the conspiratorial secret organization. He moved to
Brussels in February 1846 upon his release from a year in prison.10 “But,” as Engels described
him after his arrival,

he was no longer the naive young journeyman-tailor who, astonished at his own talents, was
trying to clarify in his own mind just what a communist society would look like. He was now the
great man, per-secuted by the environs on account of his superiority, who scented rivals, secret
enemies and traps everywhere—the prophet, driven from country to country, who carried a
recipe for the realisation of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who was possessed
with the idea that everybody intended to steal it from him.11

In late March 1846, during a longer debate about communist future perspectives in which the
liberal Russian landowner Pavel Annenkov—a friend of Marx—also participated, things came to
a head with Marx. Assigning himself the role of mouthpiece of historical truth, Marx could react
quite sharply and arrogantly in such debates. Weitling was circuitously presenting his future
projects when Marx impatiently interrupted him by saying that it was simply a fraud against the
people to incite them without providing a solid, well thought-out basis for their activities, as
fantastic hopes never lead to the salvation of the sufferers but rather to their demise. As
Annenkov reports, Marx concluded with a quotation from Spinoza:

“Ignorance is not an argument,”12 ( ignorantia non est argumentum).

As Weitling noted afterward, Marx was evidently insisting on a critical examination of the
Communist Party.13 And in fact this got to the heart of the matter, for the priority now,
according to Engels, was “to win over the European, and in the fi rst place the German proletariat
to our conviction.”14

The second rebuff—Annenkov was the fi rst to hear of this case as well—concerned Pierre
Joseph Proudhon. Marx and Engels planned to set up an international Communist
Correspondence Committee in Brussels, an archetype for every subsequent International. It was
supposed to help prepare for the coming European revolution. Of every conceivable contact
person, Proudhon was originally one of the most important to Marx, for whom only the crowing
of the Gallic

62 • Karl Marx

rooster could assure the beginning of a new revolutionary Spring of Nations in Europe.
Connections must be established between German, French, and English socialists, he wrote to
Proudhon in May 1846, to settle existing differences of opinion through impartial criticism, and
he could not imagine a better correspondent in France.15

This attempt was Marx’s fi rst foray into practical politics. What he meant by impartial criticism
would soon become apparent.

Proudhon cautiously declined the request for collaboration with the Communist Correspondence
Committee. “Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society,” wrote Proudhon, “but, for
God’s sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream
of indoctrinating the people.”16 France was diffi cult terrain, as the vain search for French
collaborators for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had already demonstrated.

Marx did not respond. “Mr. Proudhon confuses ideas and things,”

he wrote to Annenkov that December after reading from Proudhon’s new book The System of
Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Misery, using the occasion to once again lay out
the central basic theses of his own historical materialism.17 As a response to the failure to set up
a collaborative correspondence, he produced Misère de la Philosophie— The Poverty of
Philosophy. Written in French, it was an intellectual execution of Proudhon, with the fi nal
chapter spelling out their core political differences. The book got out of hand, like The Holy
Family, which had been published a year earlier as a polemic against his former young Hegelian
friends; both volumes betrayed a personal overexcitement that could by no means be blamed
solely on the subject at hand.

Revealing his seemingly near-manic compulsion to repeat himself, Marx’s anti-Proudhon text
awkwardly zeroed in on an invisible enemy: Hegel, whom Proudhon, incidentally, had not even
invoked and knew only rudimentarily at best from lectures the German emigrant Heinrich
Ahrens had given at the Collège de France.18 Page after page, Marx depicted Proudhon as
philosophically foolish instead of coming to the point. Much of it reads like a theological dispute
akin to those at the Berlin Doctor Club, including the constantly repeated allegation that Hegel—
and with him, Proudhon—was reducing everything to logical categories instead of proceeding
from real conditions. After the book appeared, Proudhon called Marx the

“tapeworm of socialism,” thereby quite accurately striking a nerve, and referred to his opponent
ironically as “my dear philosopher.”19

Deeds • 63

The leaders of the Communist League had already written Weitling off when Marx suggested in
mid May that they collaborate with his international Correspondence Committee. Many of them
had fl ed to London after the suppression of the 1839 uprising organized by Auguste Blanqui, in
which they had participated. Among them in particular was Karl Schapper, who after the Parisian
uprisings had been imprisoned for a considerable period and then expelled from France by Louis
Philippe’s police. Schapper, a former member of Georg Büchner’s conspiratorial Society for
Human Rights in Hesse, had been among the armed assailants who stormed the constabulary
watch in Frankfurt in early April 1833; in 1834 he joined Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe
movement. Now home to Schapper, the cobbler Heinrich Bauer, and the watchmaker Joseph
Moll, London in the early 1840s had become a new center for the league.20

After the unsuccessful Blanquist uprising, Schapper came to understand that it was just “as easy
to compel a tree to grow as to incul-cate new ideas into mankind by force.”21 This change
increasingly distanced him from Weitling’s revolutionary voluntarism and drew his curiosity to
the work of Marx and Engels in Brussels, where they were running a workers’ association
through which Marx, for example, held lectures about the irreconcilable opposition between
wage labor and capitalism. There, to an audience of around a hundred, he explained among other
things that capital’s modern relations of production were at heart characterized by the
exploitative dominion of accumulated, past, materialised labour over direct, living labour that
turns accumulated labour into capital. 22 Marx and Engels also presided over the Deutsche
Brüsseler Zeitung, a forum for their opinions. Their writings were well known—at least to the
initiated—especially Engels’s text about the “the condition of the working class in England,”

which appeared in 1845 and opened with the statement that the world-historical signifi cance of
the industrial revolution was only now gaining recognition. It ended with the words “I think the
people will not endure more than one more crisis.”23

In spring 1847, Joseph Moll showed up at Marx’s in Brussels and shortly thereafter at Engels’s
in Paris, requesting on behalf of his London comrades that they join the Communist League.
Moll and his comrades had dissociated themselves from the old conspiratorial tradition and now
wanted to give Marx and Engels the opportunity to present their critical communism as a new
league doctrine at a league congress. But to do so they had to become members.24 In the

64 • Karl Marx

rooms of the communist Workers’ Educational Society in London’s Drury Lane 191, after weeks
of debate in which communists from a variety of nations participated, the Communist Manifesto
was fi nally unanimously accepted as the offi cial program of the Communist League at the
beginning of December 1847.25 The program had an international orientation from the outset
and was supposed to be translated into Europe’s most important languages26—and it was the fi
rst sign of the deep suggestion that proceeded from Marx and his view of history to the damned
of the earth.

In his text about Proudhon, Marx had written: “For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate
itself it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations
should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the
greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. ”27 Transformed according to the
spirit of Marx’s defi nition, the Communist League members were now supposed to elevate the
self-consciousness of this revolutionary productive power—the working class—so that it became
aware of its own mission. The Communist Manifesto formulated it this way: “The Communists
… theoretically

… have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of
march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” On the one
hand, they were not a particular party vis-à-vis other workers’ parties; but on the other hand they
always kept the interests of the movement as a whole in sight and thus considered themselves
practically as the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every
country. In the movement of the present, according to Marx and Engels, the communists also
represent and take care of the future of that movement, 28 and this maxim would also determine
their options for forming coalitions in a future revolution. For only if all the conditions are at
hand, according to the assumptions of Hegelian logic shared by the authors of the manifesto,
could something actually come into being.29 Basically, Marx and Engels were developing the
dynamic concept of permanent revolution. Especially with respect to Germany, which would
play a major role in the coming European Revolution, they predicted that the imminent
bourgeois revolution would be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
revolution.

Marx and Engels anticipated a revolution in Germany along the lines of what had occurred in
France between 1789 and 1794, among other reasons because, according to their conceptions,
bourgeois society as a system lacked a stabilizing dynamic; therefore, once a

Deeds • 65

revolution was underway it would inevitably become more radical.

Theoretically, this conception relied on the prognosis of the inevitable immiseration of the
worker in the modern world of capital.

“The modern labourer,” states the Communist Manifesto, “instead of rising with the progress of
industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.

And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfi t any longer to be the ruling class in
society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.”30 It was
an end-times prognosis. Unlike the situation after the fall of Robespierre, at this point no new
bourgeois Directory could halt the dynamic of a revolution against the system of the Holy
Alliance.

The social-democratic theoretician Franz Mehring, Marx’s fi rst biographer, thought that the
Manifesto was still informed by the law of wages as it had been developed by the British
economist David Ricardo with the help of Malthusian population theory. Therefore, according to
Mehring, it too one-sidedly envisioned the possible reaction to the trend of immiseration in terms
of a political revolution. For precisely this reason, Marx and Engels saw the near future taking
shape according to the model of the French Revolution. Only during Marx’s work on Capital
was this model called into question, upon the discovery of the “elasticity” of the law of wages,
which acknowledged that wage levels were infl uenced by factors that were culturally acquired
or gained through the struggles of unions. This opened up perspectives with political
consequences that Marx, however, never really managed to clarify. In any case, in 1848
Jacobinism was for him still materially anchored in the theory of immiseration. Incidentally, the
Communist Manifesto, written during a period marked by constitutional struggles, contained not
a single word about the future constitution. Dolf Sternberger once quite rightly observed: “But
how the class will begin to govern, administer, and dispense justice is not considered, or in any
event explained.”31 The real movement would come up with something and create the
corresponding institutions.

World War

At the time, Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that after the outbreak of the revolution, the
German bourgeoisie’s transitory rule

66 • Karl Marx

would last a few years at most. “So just fi ght bravely on,” wrote Engels at the end of January,
1848, “[i]n recompense whereof you shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be
allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your
banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife—but do not forget that
the hangman stands at the door!”32 Shortly thereafter Engels himself sat at a dining table in the
royal chambers of the Tuileries in Paris with a friend who was a former French refugee from
Brussels. On 24 February the people of Paris had risen up, declaring the Republic. Those
wounded in the street fi ghting were now recovering and smoking their pipes in the apartments of
the overthrown Citizen King Louis Philippe, who had fl ed to England. Outside, to the sound of
the Marseillaise, the National Guard and armed people were saluting the funeral procession of a
revolutionary worker who had died of his wounds.33 At the same time, the author Fanny Lewald
observed huge piles of torn-up cobblestones in the Parisian streets, as well as broken bread
wagons and overturned omnibuses that had been used to build barricades in February. At the
Palais Royal, now called the Palais National, she saw that all the windows and many of the
window frames and scaffolds were broken, and the royal guardhouse lay in ruins, black-ened by
smoke. The trees along the boulevards had been felled, well pipes and pillars had been torn
down, and the tricolor fl ew everywhere—on the theaters, over the church entries, and on all
public buildings.34

The year had begun with an uprising in Palermo, after which King Ferdinand of the two Sicilies
had had to agree to a constitution on 29 January. The storm unleashed in the French capital in
late February had completely different dimensions, however. With lightning speed it engulfed all
Europe, for the fi rst time demonstrating to the world the great drama of the historical unity of
European life. As Benedetto Croce once wrote, it was as if all the great impediments against
which one had vainly struggled for half a century had suddenly, with the sound of trumpets, lost
all of their frightening magic, almost like the walls of Jericho.35 The revolt against the coercive
system of Europe’s Holy Alliance and the police state it entailed had already been heralded in the
Communist Manifesto. Marx had predicted as early as 1844 that the revolution would begin with
the crowing of the Gallic rooster. Since July 1847 the republican opposition in France had been
campaigning for the introduction of uni-

Deeds • 67

versal suffrage, a goal the Guizot regime strictly opposed. Then, with the prohibition of a voting-
rights assembly on 22 February 1848, the situation escalated. The fi rst street battles erupted on
23 February.

In Paris, barricades were erected and the military’s advance on the Boulevard des Capucines
resulted in over fi fty fatalities and many wounded. An angry crowd laid the dead on wagons and
paraded them through the city by torchlight, and the next day the uprising spread to all of Paris.
On the evening of 24 February the Republic was proclaimed.

The news reached Brussels on 26 February. Thereupon King Leopold allowed the spread of a
rumor that he was prepared to abdicate, should the people wish it. In reality, thought Marx, this
was just a feint to get the Belgian democrats to refrain from any undertakings against such a
benevolent monarch. And in fact, the Belgian authorities began compiling lists of persons who
were to be arrested as potential disturbers of the public order. The fi rst arrests took place in a
hail of beating fi sts, kicks, and slashing sabers. The foreigners among those arrested were
squeezed into prison wagons and brought to the French border.36 The Belgian government,
Marx noted, suddenly positioned itself entirely on the side of the Holy Alliance. On 3 March, at
fi ve o’clock in the evening, Marx received the order to leave the kingdom within twenty-four
hours. That night, after a meeting of the central authority of the Communist League, ten po-
licemen arrested him at the Hotel Bois Sauvage, and the next morning he and his wife Jenny
found themselves in a dark cell of the city prison in the Rue de l’Amigo, not far from the Grand
Place.37 Es-corted to the border by the police, they arrived in Paris a short time later. Ferdinand
Flocon, a democratic socialist and now a member of the provisional regime, had already sent
news to the “brave and loyal Marx” on 3 March: “Tyranny has banished you, free France opens
her doors to you.”38 Marx felt that the martial reaction of the Belgian government would spark
enthusiasm on Metternich’s part.39

But his days, too, were numbered.

On 9 March, Engels’s report of tremendous news from Germany reached Marx in Paris—full-
blown revolution in Nassau, an uprising in Munich because of the king’s mistress Lola Montez,
freedom of the press and a National Guard in western Germany. The People’s Assembly of
Mannheim had given the signal on 27 February, issuing demands for the arming of the people
and the free election of offi cers, freedom of the press, jury courts based on the English

68 • Karl Marx

model, and the immediate convocation of a German parliament.

These then circulated throughout Germany as the so-called March Demands, to be once again
presented in Karlsruhe to thousands of people who had come by train from Mannheim and
Heidelberg, and likewise, on 4 March, in Wiesbaden. Again it was the railway—

which the Communist Manifesto had already predicted would play the role of a future
revolutionary locomotive40—that allowed ten thousand people to gather in front of the ducal
palace. Liberal so-called March regimes, mostly led by bourgeois persons, sprang up overnight
throughout Germany. “If only Frederick William IV digs his heels in!” Engels wrote to Marx,
referencing the all-important Prussian king. “Then all will be won and in a few months’ time
we’ll have the German Revolution. If he only sticks to his feudal forms!

But the devil only knows what this capricious and crazy individual will do.”41

First, however, the spark ignited a fi re at the center of the Habsburg monarchy—shown over the
last decade to be hardly capable of reform—where the Metternich system had been exercised
most rigorously. On 13 March, the Parisian virus gripped its fi rst German metropolis, Vienna,
initiating a whole year of democratic revolutions in every state of the German Confederation and
the bordering European countries. “The Paris Revolution struck the darkness of our situation like
a lightning bolt,” Saxony’s legation councilor in Vienna, Carl Friedrich Graf Vitzthum von
Eckstädt, wrote to his mother as early as 5 March: “The malaise is universal, und I only fear that
it will not be perceived as such from above, as is necessary.”42 Eight days later, open
insurrection prevailed in Vienna. “The gates are closed,” wrote Vitzthum von Eckstädt on 13
March: “Cannons are positioned at the court, in front of the castle, in front of the state
chancellery. Heavy patrols are moving through the streets.

In some alleyways barricades are being erected. One hears shouted: Hurray! The constitution!”43
At around four in the afternoon, a few thousand demonstrators gathered under the windows of
the state chancellery and demanded the resignation of Klemens von Metternich, whom they
loudly called Austria’s fox. That morning in the Ministerial Council, the chancellor had still
opposed all concessions to the rebels and categorically denied the possibility of a revolution in
Austria, even as shots were fi red outside his window. All that, he insisted, was “only Jews,
Poles, Italians, and the Swiss who are stir-ring up the people.”44 But by evening, the once
supremely powerful

Deeds • 69

police dictator of the European Restoration had to surrender all of his offi ces and leave in
disguise through the back door of the Hof-burg, fl eeing to London by way of Prague.

On this same evening of 13 March, initial disturbances were also reported from Berlin. Under
tents in the Tiergarten, a people’s assembly demanded that the king establish a Ministry of
Labor, for the people were being “oppressed by capitalists and usurers.”45 The crown, however,
summoned the military to the city, prompting initial skirmishes and a few isolated fatalities. On
15 March the news of Metternich’s fall reached Berlin, sending the court into a panic, according
to the young doctor Rudolf Virchow in the Berlin Charité. Friedrich Wilhelm reacted as Engels
had feared: he made concessions, agreeing to the abolition of censorship and the convocation of
a unifi ed Landtag on 2 April. “A proclamation was made in a grandiloquent style,” Virchow
commented on this half-hearted royal act.46 But as news of the proclamation spread, thousands
of Berliners streamed enthusiastically to the city palace. Actually they were celebrating the onset
of a new era in Prussia and wanted to thank the king for conceding; a loud hurrah initially
greeted the king as he appeared on the palace balcony. But the mood among the demonstrators
changed suddenly when they noticed the concentrated power of the dragoons assembled in the
palace square to protect the king. Demands were made for the military to withdraw, and the
atmosphere increasingly became so hostile that the uncertain king, suddenly feeling threatened
by the change in the mood of the crowd, gave General von Moellendorff an ill-considered order
to clear the square. The people who had in fact gathered to pay tribute to the king were violently
driven from the square by saber-swinging dragoons. But this was not a crowd that could be
dissolved in the usual manner. It was—as Friedrich Wilhelm should have known, in light of the
disturbances in recent days and the events in Paris and Vienna—the beginning of a state crisis.

“From this moment the revolution began,” according to Rudolf Virchow, who actively
participated: “Everything screamed betrayal and revenge. In a matter of hours all of Berlin was
barricaded, and anyone who could get weapons armed himself.”47 The big battles that would
change Prussia for the foreseeable future broke out just before noon on 18 March 1848. Late in
the evening at Alexanderplatz, after a heated battle that lasted many hours, the royal troops were
forced to fl ee. It was a bright moonlit night, as the painter Adolph

70 • Karl Marx

Menzel reported, on which the lathe-turned rifl es of the citizens’

marksman guilds often proved to be much more accurate than the simple commissioned rifl es of
the royal infantry.48 A citizens’ brigade led by the veterinarian Urban captured General von
Moellendorff and brought him to the marksman guild’s house, where he was compelled to sign
an order to the Kaiser Franz and Alexander regiments to cease fi re immediately and retreat to
the barracks. A message sent to the king stated that if another shot was fi red, the general would
be shot dead immediately. Friedrich Wilhelm signed an appeal to his

“dear Berliners” and promised to withdraw all troops. From this moment forward, all shooting
ceased.

On 22 March, the coffi ns of the fallen insurrectionists were laid out on a large scaffold in the
Neue Kirche at the Gendarmenmarkt.

Male choirs sang funeral marches and spiritual songs. Around ten o’clock a funeral procession
moved toward the palace. On the balcony stood an adjutant with a black funeral fl ag, and across
from him an offi cer of the citizens’ militia held the black-red-gold fl ag high. Each time a new
procession of coffi ns passed, the king appeared, bareheaded, and remained standing until the
procession had gone by. “His head shone from afar like a white spot,” noted Adolph Menzel,
observing the almost surreal staffage with a painter’s keen eye for unreal aesthetic effects.49
According to Menzel, it could well have been the most dreadful day of the king’s life. On the
streets people fi led by with black ribbons and black-red-gold cockades. The fl ag waved black-
red-gold from the homes of citizens. A black-red-gold fl ag had even been affi xed at the palace
of the prince of Prussia, with an inscription reading “Property of the Entire Nation.”

The day before, the king had undertaken his fi rst ride through Berlin since the revolution,
accompanied by the prince, a few generals, and the ministers of his short-lived transitional
government. Everyone, including the king himself, wore black-red-gold armbands.

A royal proclamation of the day announced that he had adopted

“the old German colors,” establishing the legend that black, red, and gold were actually the
colors of the Holy Roman Empire and its now-mythical Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. In other
words, during this period of critical emergency, the political romantic on the royal throne deftly
tried to associate his backward-looking imperial idea, bound to the divine right of kings, with the
symbols of the revolution and thereby tacitly appropriate them for himself. As Engels had
shrewdly guessed, it was almost impossible to anticipate the chess

Deeds • 71
moves the founder of the Christian state and the sacred Hohenzollern tradition—“this capricious
and crazy individual”—could still manage to make.

At this point Marx, who was living in a side street to the Boulevard Beaumarchais in the vicinity
of the Bastille, was initially completely occupied with keeping the German communists in Paris
together. On 16 March, he wrote to Engels, the bourgeoisie there were again becoming
atrociously uppish and reactionary, mais elle vera. 50

In his view a second armed confl ict was imminent, this time between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, and would decide the fate of the revolutionary movement across Europe; thus he
called on the communists to remain in Paris and prepare for the coming battle.

The central authority of the Communist League was reorganized, and on 10 March Marx became
its formal president. Then came the news on 19 March from Vienna and on 20 March from
Berlin.

The fi rst thousand printed copies of the Communist Manifesto had just been sent from London to
Paris, and now four hundred German communists set off toward their old homeland, carrying
these copies as well as the demands of the Communist Party in Germany.

Marx himself left Paris at the beginning of April; traveling by way of Mainz, he arrived in
Cologne on 10 March. Jenny followed with their two children, going fi rst to Trier and three
months later to the Rhine.

The demands of the Communist Party exceeded the March Demands—discussed widely at the
time throughout the land—in only a few points. Feudal estates, mines, and all means of
transportation were to be nationalized; inheritance rights restricted; high progressive taxes
introduced; nationalized work sites established; and the existence of all workers secured.51
Entirely in keeping with the ideas of Marx and Engels, the events in Germany, of course, did not
pertain to an imminent socialist revolution but rather a bourgeois revolution in which it was
nonetheless desirable from the outset to embed certain demands that would necessarily develop a
dynamic extending beyond the demands themselves. This was the only way, in their view, to
foster the desired radicalization and ultimately the shift into a proletarian revolution. Thus they
decisively rejected independent political actions by German workers for the time being. But such
actions did exist. “The workers are beginning to bestir themselves a little, still in a very crude
way, but as a mass. They at once formed coalitions,” Engels informed Marx from Wuppertal in

72 • Karl Marx

mid April, “But to us that can only be a hindrance.”52 Such actions took place in Cologne as
well.

On 3 March, long before the street battles in Berlin, a few thousand people had gathered at
Cologne’s Rathausplatz and a delegation forced its way into the town hall meeting room to
present the March Demands. Its leaders were communists named Andreas Gottschalk (a doctor
for the poor), August von Willich, and Friedrich Anneke (both former Prussian lieutenants). The
main points were the right to work and free child education, demands that were decidedly
popular among the masses of paupers in the city. A battalion of the 16th Cologne Regiment
dispersed the crowd around nine o’clock that evening, killing a few people and wounding others
with bayonets. Gottschalk, Willich, and Anneke wound up in prison,53

although two weeks later they would again be free because of the Berlin revolution. After these
events, a certain balance of power prevailed in Cologne between the city militia—subject to the
local democrats—and the Prussian garrison. Gottschalk founded a workers’ association that soon
included eight thousand members, and in mid May he left the Communist League, having fallen
out with Marx over the question, in particular, of the elections to the Prussian parliament and the
Frankfurt National Assembly. He was also disturbed by Marx’s short-lived efforts—entirely in
keeping with his concept of a dynamic revolution—to get involved in the founding of a
democratic association.

At fi rst Marx even entertained certain hopes that left-leaning circles of the wealthy bourgeoisie
would support his new newspaper project, which would be called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
He even had Engels approach his old man in Barmen, but Engels responded that there was
“damned little prospect” for the newspaper’s shares in those circles. Basically, he informed
Marx, “even these radical bourgeois here see us as their future main enemies and have no
intention of putting into our hands weapons which we would very shortly turn against
themselves”54—which was indeed the case. Otto Camphausen, the brother of one of Marx’s
former supporters from the days of the Rheinische Zeitung, had warned early on of the “danger
of complete mob rule”;55 Gustav Mevissen thought that one must

“seize the moment” and agree to a “constitution with the crown.”56

In March 1848 they felt that they had achieved the aim that, fi ve years earlier, had spurred them
to create the Rheinische Zeitung as a liberal oppositional newspaper with Marx as the chief
editor. On

Deeds • 73

29 March, Ludolf Camphausen became the minister president and David Hansemann the fi nance
minister in Prussia. No contribution to the project could be expected from them now—or from
anyone else. Marx had reckoned on amassing thirty thousand Taler in share capital but barely
managed to raise thirteen thousand.

He had to fi nance his new paper largely through an advance on his inheritance.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung conceived of itself as an “organ of democracy.” But at no time did
it see itself as a newspaper for Frankfurt’s parliamentary Left; rather, it considered its primary
task to be to journalistically monitor these democrats from its own political viewpoint. In certain
respects, this viewpoint was a provisional Girondism from a self-enlightened Montagne
perspective that had learned above all that striking too soon could be a ruinous mistake—as
could retreating too soon. Entirely in accordance with the dynamic principles of the Communist
Manifesto, it attempted in the movement of the present to represent and take care of the future.
57

As understood by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, for reasons of the historical sequence of events
the current movement happened to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the countries of the
German Confederation. This was also why the newspaper ran so little report-age on the
concurrent developments of the workers’ movement in Germany, which in 1848 were in fact
quite signifi cant.58

Schapper and Moll stretched a web of communist workers’ associations across the Rhineland
and Westphalia. Stefan Born, a former typesetter for the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung and an old
member of the Communist League, found himself in Berlin shortly after the outbreak of the
revolution. There he founded the Workers’ Brotherhood, which soon boasted a substantial
membership of twelve thousand workers in the large cities of Prussia and Saxony as well as in
Franken and Wurttemberg; it was thus the most important workers’

association on the continent.59 The Berlin proletariat was revolutionary through and through,
Born reported to Marx in early May, and he was doing his best to keep it from engaging in
“useless riots.”

Marx would have agreed, but he was bothered by Born’s penchant for strike movements, state-
assisted reforms, and projects involving unions and production cooperatives when what really
mattered was using political victories to further the breakthrough of the dynamic revolutionary
process in Germany and Europe. In Marx’s conception, the downfall of the monarchies and a
bourgeois transition

74 • Karl Marx

period would by necessity end with the rule of the proletariat.60 At that point, the minor
everyday problems the Workers’ Brotherhood bandied about would no longer play a role
anyway. With respect to the Communist League as such, wrote Born in the same letter, he had
nothing to report: it seemed to have dissolved.61 Indeed, as Marx later wrote, the league’s
activities had almost ceased completely because, as he saw it, there were more effective ways
available to pursue his goals62—above all, editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, as he wanted to
drive the European revolution forward through its journalistic stance.

But Cologne was not Paris. From there it was hardly possible to have a national effect. Although
the paper was later celebrated as by far the best political newspaper of the 1840s, it was only
regionally signifi cant. What had worked to the advantage of its predecessor—namely, its
concentration on the Rhineland—very much limited the newspaper’s effective radius in real
revolutionary times.

In all likelihood Marx was orienting himself along the lines of large Parisian publications like
Réforme and others, which were backed by actual groups that played real roles in the National
Assembly and government. Marx, however, did not have any connections with the radical Left in
the Palatinate and Baden, or even with the leftwing representative Ludwig Simon in his
hometown of Trier, and he viewed Stefan Born’s activities, as already mentioned, with
considerable suspicion.

To be sure, he had correspondents and emissaries from the Communist League milieu, such as
the loyal Wilhelm Wolff in Breslau.63

But in principle, during the revolution the Neue Rheinische Zeitung remained an agent of
political philosophy that provided critical commentary on contemporary events along the lines of
the principles of the Communist Manifesto. It appeared fourteen days after the fi rst meeting of
the parliaments convened for constitutional deliberations in Frankfurt and Berlin, and they were
the subject of its fi rst critique. For example: “The Assembly at Frankfurt is engaged in
parliamentary school exercises and leaves it to the governments to act.” But a constituent
National Assembly, according to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, must above all be “an active,
revolutionarily active assembly.”64 A left-wing minority led by the South Germans Hecker and
Struve had already made such demands in the Frankfurt preliminary parliament; when they
failed, Hecker—in a decidedly putsch-like fashion—proclaimed the German Republic in

Deeds • 75

Constance in mid April. The whole thing ended in a debacle. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung
criticized the democratic party for abandon-ing itself to the intoxicating delirium of its fi rst
victory, noting that a proclamation was not a realization. What really mattered now was that it
should understand its position. 65 Germany was diffi cult. After a revolution, the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung announced, every provisional state would require a dictatorship, and an
energetic dictatorship at that. 66 With this kind of reminder of the comité du salut public,
however, Marx remained a lonely voice in the German territories.

Therefore he initially placed all his hopes on a revival of the revolution in France.

By 22 June, this point had been reached. In a matter of hours, workers in the east of Paris erected
over fi fteen hundred barricades, generally along the axis stretching from Rue Saint-Denis to Rue
Saint-Jacques. This was a response to the brutal dissolution of the National Workshops, through
which February’s provisional regime had attempted to solve the problem of unemployment.
After the bourgeois republicans prevailed in the late-April elections to the National Assembly,
this coalition ceased to exist. On 22 June, the National Guard in the east joined the insurgents,
while the National Guard in the west, together with the army, opposed them.

The second armed confl ict, which Marx had expected in March, was imminent. Reporting “the
latest news received from Paris,” on 27 June the Neue Rheinische Zeitung wrote: Paris bathed in
blood; the insurrection growing into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place, into a
revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Three days which suffi ced for the July
revolution and the February revolution are insuffi cient for the colossal contours of this June
revolution, but the victory of the people is more certain than ever. The French bourgeoisie has
dared to do what the French kings never dared—it has itself cast the die. This second act of the
French revolution is only the beginning of the European tragedy.67

Never again in his entire life would Marx fi nd himself in such a state of revolutionary euphoria
as on this day.

Marx saw the June revolution as the fi rst that actually “divided all society into two large hostile
armed camps”68—exactly as the Communist Manifesto had predicted. Yet, contrary to Marx’s
hopes that day, the uprising failed to bring about the defeat of the bourgeoisie.

76 • Karl Marx
The republican general and appointed military dictator Cavaignac declared a state of emergency
and had artillery brought to Notre Dame; he even entertained the idea of setting the entire quarter
ablaze. Five thousand insurgents were killed during the battles; fi fteen hundred were summarily
executed; twenty-two thousand were arrested and in large part deported to Algeria. With extreme
severity, the “fraternité” of the February Days was drowned in blood.

Looking back, Marx came to understand that these days had decided the fate of the European
Revolution of 1848. “If the June insurrection raised the self-assurance of the bourgeoisie all over
the Continent, and caused it to league itself openly with the feudal monarchy against the people,”
he wrote in 1850, “who was the fi rst victim of this alliances? [ sic] The continental bourgeoisie
itself.”69

This diagnosis rings true, if one takes into account that in the German states and Habsburg
monarchy almost all of the structures of monarchic-military domination survived the commotion
of the revolution intact. Later, in 1852, Marx maintained that the June uprising had revealed to
everyone that the bourgeois republic in reality only meant the unlimited despotism of one class
over other classes; in any case, he continued, the republic was only the political form of the
revolutionising of bourgeois society and by no means its conservative form of life. 70

During the June Days of 1848, Cavaignac moved against the Parisian workers with greater
brutality that even Windisch-Graetz would dare use against the insurgents in Prague or Radetsky
against the rebels in northern Italy. Marx believed only two alternatives remained: radical
revolution or complete counterrevolution. Prior to 1848, he noted, revolution had meant the
overthrow of the form of government; now, after the events of June, it could only mean the
overthrow of bourgeois society. 71 After a battle like that of June 1848, wrote the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, “only terrorism is still possible,”

conducted by one side or the other.72 Marx now came under pressure to radicalize, something
that Saint-Just had referred to during the French Revolutionary Wars as the consequence of the
“force des choses, ” a force arising from the circumstances themselves in the struggle of life and
death.

Marx developed an affi nity for actionism. This included the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s constant
propagandistic call for a world war against Russia, the bulwark of the European reaction,
modeled on the French “levée en masse” of 1792. Eric Hobsbawm once described

Deeds • 77

this revolutionary war as the fi rst total war in history, for even then it had been a question of
either the revolution’s total victory, or its utter defeat and the victory of the counterrevolution.73
Revolutionary Germany’s war could only be a war against Russia, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
declared on 12 July 1848—a war in which Germany could “cleanse herself of her past sins” and
muster the courage to also defeat her own autocrats.74 By “past sins,” Marx meant the combined
effort with Russia and Britain to eliminate Napoleon, for had French legislation and
administration been employed back then to provide the Germans with a solid basis for their
national unifi cation, they would have been spared thirty-three years of humiliation and
tyranny.75
On New Year’s Eve 1848 in Cologne, Marx and the author Ferdinand Freiligrath were invited to
have dinner with Mr. Keene from Britain’s Daily News. They discussed the past year’s events
and raised their glasses to the revolution in Vienna; to the October uprising, with its marked
proletarian characteristics and its suppression by Prince Windisch-Graetz and the Croatian
General von Jellachich; and to the Hungarian insurrection led by Lajos Kossuth. After the events
in Vienna, Marx had remarked on the cannibalism of the counterrevolution in the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, expressing the conviction that the only way to shorten, simplify, and
concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society was revolutionary terror. 76

On this New Year’s Eve they still felt that the bloody suppression of the Viennese was only a
partial defeat within the grand European drama.77

On the next day, 1 January 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung articulated for its readers the
scenario of an entire world of enemies: The defeat of the working class in France and the victory
of the French bourgeoisie was at the same time a victory of East over West, the defeat of
civilisation by barbarism. The suppression of the Ruma-nians by the Russians and their tools, the
Turks, began in Wallachia; Croats, Pandours, Czechs, Serezhans and similar rabble throttled
German liberty in Vienna, and the Tsar is now omnipresent in Europe. The overthrow of the
bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class, and the liberation of the working
class in general is therefore the rallying-cry of European liberation. But England, the country that
turns whole nations into her proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace,
that has already once defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which

78 • Karl Marx

class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form—England seems to be the
rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifl ed
even in the womb.78

Precisely in England, where more than anywhere else all the necessary conditions obtained,
realizing the revolutionary cause was the most diffi cult. Therefore the revolution had to be
induced through violence from the outside. Old England could be overthrown only through
world war, the sole path to creating the conditions in which the Chartists—the party of the
organized English workers—could effectively rise up against their powerful oppressors.
According to Marx, this war would be waged in Canada and Italy, in India and Prussia, in Africa
and along the Danube. Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war—thus read
the table of contents for the year 1849.79

World war against Russia and England was indeed much more than an unrestrained “puer
robustus, sed malitiosus.” This was not to involve hanging aristocrats from streetlights or
decapitating kings.

Rather, the revolutionary terrorism of the old revolutionary wars was to be reintroduced on a
more modern, globally expanded level.

What kind of Super-Napoleon would bring this about?

From the perspective of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the war against Denmark in the fall of
1848 over Schleswig and Holstein was “the fi rst revolutionary war waged by Germany,” and it
had the newspaper’s explicit support. Marx and Engels thought anyway that Scandinavianism
was a “brutal, sordid, piratical” business, so they also perceived this war as an armed confl ict
waged with the “right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability,”

and to that extent legitimated by the fi nal judgment of history.80 As part of the German
Confederation subject to the Danish monarchy, Schleswig-Holstein was governed by a
revolutionary provisional territorial regime when on 21 March 1848, after an annexation
resolution in Copenhagen, Danish troops marched into the region. On 12 April, the German
states declared a confederate war led by Prussia against Denmark, which turned out, however, to
be incredibly complicated and ended on 26 August with a cease-fi re in Malmö, negotiated
unilaterally by Prussia. The Frankfurt National Assembly rejected the cease-fi re on 5 September,
and only after protracted negotiations and two votes was the assembly narrowly convinced to
accept the agreement. Had it not, the war Marx and Engels so

Deeds • 79

fervently desired with Russia and England (without any realistic appreciation of the comparative
strengths) might presumably have come to pass. Imperialistic undertones colored the debates
over Schleswig-Holstein in the National Assembly; especially the speakers on the Left were
explicitly nationalistic. Jakob Venedey from Cologne spoke of the “humiliation” that would be
imposed upon Germany, as had occurred with the Peace of Westphalia; it could be avoided only
if one did not fear “going to war with the entire world to become a unifi ed Germany.” Carl
Vogt, later a close friend of Marx, reminded the delegates of the French Revolution and the
national war declared by the Convention.81

Meanwhile, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung struck a completely new chord in the debate by
addressing the topic of peoples with and without history. Marx and Engels appropriated this
distinction from Hegel, who had claimed, with respect to so-called peoples without history, that
they had “no movement or development to exhibit.”82

The real capital of Denmark, Engels insisted for example, was not Copenhagen but rather
Hamburg, for within the realm of the Danish crown the German cultural element that would
otherwise be missing from the “primitive” Scandinavian nation could only be found in Altona.83
Later, when “Croatian freedom and order” under the command of General Jellachich raged in
Vienna with “arson, rape, [and] looting,”84 judgment was pronounced collectively against
Croatia and Slovenia, nations that had “long ago degenerated and were devoid of all historical
power of action,” unable to accomplish anything apart from supporting the Austrian reaction.85
In the next world war, according to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, not only reactionary classes
and dynasties would vanish from the earth but also

“entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”86

Engels especially held the view that the Slavs—and here he always explicitly excluded the Poles,
even wanting to grant their republic the Baltic coastline all the way to Riga—were everywhere
the major tools of the counterrevolution, born “oppressors of all revolutionary nations.”87
Ultimately, he called for an “inexorable life-and-death struggle” against the “Slavs who betray
the revolution; an annihilat-ing fi ght and ruthless terror—not in the interests of Germany, but in
the interests of the revolution!”88 These were more than simply alarming words, even if they are
not over-interpreted in light of the experiences of the twentieth century. By annihilation Engels
largely meant cultural assimilation, though certainly he could well imag-

80 • Karl Marx

ine deploying drastic, violent measures to execute this cultural enterprise. Incidentally, power-
political considerations doubtless also played an important role. Croatia and Slovenia, thought
the Pan-German Engels and Marx along with him, must by all means be kept from cutting off
German and Hungarian access to the Adriatic.89

Such was the minimum tribute that “people without history” had to pay to the historical
revolutionary nations.

This was the almost inevitable verdict of what Hegel in a Christian tradition called the World
Court, one that could also be rendered elsewhere. “Or is it perhaps unfortunate,” asked Friedrich
Engels, “that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans who could not do
anything with it?”90 Later the theme of peoples without history even helped Marx justify
colonialism. The question, he wrote in 1853 in the New York Tribune, is “not whether the
English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk,
by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton. England has to fulfi ll a double
mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society,
and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”91 This strange
revolutionary variant of the dogma of “the white man’s burden” was understandable only from
the perspective of the conception of history in Marx’s historical materialism, in which only the
titanic efforts of the British bourgeoisie could one day include a country like India in the process
of the proletarian world revolution.

In any case, the confl ict between “advanced” and “reactionary”

nations contributed in no small way to the failure of the European revolution. The “defection
from God,” as Friedrich Wilhelm IV described the events beginning in March 1848 in a letter to
a confi dant, was almost over by the spring of 1849. That same letter featured what would soon
become a common phrase: “The only thing that helps against democrats are soldiers.”92 The
German Revolution ended with the capitulation of the Rastatt fortress on 23

July 1849. So began the long years of systematic reactionary politics and repressive police
measures that—classically represented by the main character Diederich Hessling in Heinrich
Mann’s Der Unter-tan—left deep traces in the German mentality. And in France, Louis
Napoléon’s coup ended the brief years of the Republic in 1851.

This provided Marx with occasion to draw a preliminary conclusion about the revolutionary
years. Bourgeois revolutions like those

Deeds • 81

of the eighteenth century, he maintained, moved dramatically— set in sparking diamonds—but

were short-lived and inevitably ended with a hangover of prosaic circumstances. In contrast, the
proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth century, which created their poetry out of the future,
constantly criticized themselves until they attained their objectives. By this Marx meant the real
crises of the revolutionary courses of action, not just theoretical criticism. Against the backdrop
of recent events, this also applied to the bloody criticism wrought by weapons—and the defeats
that followed, like the rout Cavaignac’s troops delivered to the insurgent Parisian proletariat in
June 1848. Proletarian revolutions derided with cruel thoroughness all the half-measures of their
fi rst attempts, until at some point there arose a situation that made all turning back impossible,
and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 93 It was an epic scenario of a
devouring and purifying purgatory, almost Shakespearian, with the masses as heroes and villains.
The French Revolution of 1789

seemed in contrast like a sober tragedy by Racine.

The Trauma of Exile

The Revolution was a feverish dream; the subsequent renewed exile, a trauma. “A more signal
defeat,” noted Engels in retrospect, “than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party
—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined.”94

Engels had participated in the fi ghting almost to the very end in the South German uprising. The
remains of the revolutionary army from Baden and the Palatinate fl ed over the border into
Switzerland on 12 July 1849. Engels remained in Switzerland until September, met Stefan Born
in Bern, and in Geneva got to know the former revolutionary fi ghter Wilhelm Liebknecht, who
would later play a leading role in the history of social democracy in Germany. At the end of
August, Marx informed Engels that he intended to go to London and found a new journal—a
political-economic review in the spirit of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He had already secured
part of the funding. “So you must leave for London at once,” Marx wrote.

“In any case your safety demands it. The Prussians would shoot you twice over.”95

Marx had left Cologne on 19 May, expelled from the country as a non-Prussian. In Frankfurt, he
and Engels unsuccessfully urged the

82 • Karl Marx

left-wing representatives of the National Assembly to put themselves at the fore of the South
German uprising, which did not stand a chance from the outset; in Baden, likewise
unsuccessfully, they tried to convince the South German rebels to march against Frankfurt.
Engels, who as a young man in Berlin had completed military training, joined the revolutionary
army of Baden; and on 2 June Marx moved on to Paris. The stay was brief: only six weeks later a
deportation order he received from the French government offered him the seclusion of a lonely
spot in Brittany. He would not consent to such a veiled attempt on his life, he wrote Engels, “So I
am leav-ing France.”96 He headed for the docks of Dover aboard the City of Boulogne, and
subsequently the railway brought him to London. On 17 September, Jenny arrived there as well
with what were now three small children. On 5 October, Engels reported to his old Chartist
friend George Julian Harney from Genoa that, wind and weather permitting, he would board the
schooner Cornish Diamond and arrive in London in mid November.97
Marx had come to know Harney during a trip to England with Engels in summer 1845. Harney
edited the Northern Star, at the time a mass-circulation socialist newspaper with a press run of fi
fty thousand, to which Engels regularly contributed. The years of continental revolution had
radicalized Harney as had the experience of the large Chartist rally in April 1848. Ten thousand
people had marched on Westminster to present more than fi ve million signatures to Parliament
in support of universal suffrage. But the strong hand of the elderly Wellington arranged for
hundreds of mounted police, cavalry, and artillery to take up positions on the Thames Bridge and
in the side streets. The Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor called off the undertaking for fear of a
bloodbath. The disappointment was great, but the decision left Chartism with its spine intact, and
it became more radical. Throughout the spring of 1848 in the industrial regions of north England,
assemblies and demonstrations trumpeted revolutionary slogans. In 1850 Harney’s new journal,
the Red Republican, announced that the working classes had taken leave of the hope for political
reform and now advocated the idea of social revolution. It also published an English translation
of the Communist Manifesto. 98

At this time Marx was residing with his family on Dean Street in Soho. A Prussian spy reported
to Berlin that they occupied two rooms in what was virtually the worst, tawdriest quarter of
London.

Deeds • 83

At fi rst Marx believed that his exile would be brief and it was only a matter of time before
another revolutionary wave would break out in Europe, especially in France. To the degree that
the reaction had advanced, he noted at the beginning of the year, the power of the revolutionary
party was naturally also growing as well.99

And in March he prophesized an imminent commercial crisis with consequences far more signifi
cant than those of all earlier crises.

Above all, it would inevitably expand from England to the continent, where it would unleash
revolutionary crises of an incomparably more pronounced socialist character—especially in
Germany.100

Therefore in April, with Harney and a few Blanquists, Marx founded the previously mentioned
Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists, which expressly committed itself to the
overthrow of all privileged classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the permanent
revolution.101 As Marx informed the members of the now reorganized Communist League in
June 1850, the actual proletarian party of France, whose leader Louis-Auguste Blanqui was
imprisoned on Belle-Île, had joined them to prepare for the next French revolution, as had
revolutionary leaders of the Chartist party,102 including Julian Harney. The Chartists, Marx
maintained, had resumed their own party activity against the bourgeoisie with increased vigour
and therefore could be an important ally of the revolutionary Continent during a future
revolution.103 During his fi rst months of exile, Marx simply did not want to recognize the
realities of the era of the European Reaction, which was accompanied by a phase of economic
growth. His opinions were rarely as radical and fanciful as during this short period of his
stubborn denial of defeat.
For the impending revolution, a “secret and indissoluble” cadre organization was to arise from
the Communist League until the proletarian revolution had attained its fi nal objective. All
members had to “abide unconditionally” by the resolutions and subordinate themselves to the
Central Committee as the executive organ. Anyone expelled for violating the rules was to be
brought under surveillance

“just like any suspect individual.”104 As the leading organization, the reorganized league was
supposed to guarantee the political “independence of the workers” that Marx and Engels had
valued so little in the years 1848/49. Now they expected that the democratic petty bourgeoisie
would have to be drawn against its will into the ongoing dynamic process of permanent
revolution, as had happened

84 • Karl Marx

two years earlier with respect to the liberal bourgeoisie. “Above all things” decreed the Central
Committee (i.e., Marx and Engels), the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible,
during the confl ict and immediately after the struggle, the bourgeois endeav-ours to allay the
storm, and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. They must
work to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately
after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing
so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings
that are associated only with hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but
the lead in them must be taken.105

It was an almost desperate revival of revolutionary fi re—perhaps also a result of the trauma of
exile—lacking traction and fl aunting a fi nal unhesitating recollection of the purifying
apocalyptic terror modeled by the French Revolution and the unleashed “puer robustus, sed
malitiosus.” The Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists would not have a very long
life. In part because of the continuing phase of prosperity in England, Julian Harney increasingly
lost his faith in revolutionary solutions,106 and the alliance with the Blanquists eventually
became a casualty of the division of the Communist League.

In June 1850, Marx resumed his intensive study of economics and to that end was known to
frequent the reading room of the British Museum. In that same summer of 1850, when he was
closest to Blanquism, his prognoses of an imminent revolution became increasingly cautious.
Marx was not a political romantic but rather chose to focus on the causes of the 1848/49
revolution. His studies showed that the world economic crisis of 1847 had been the real mother
of the February and March revolution, and the subsequent prosperity—which entirely failed to
lead to the crisis-laden panic Marx and Engels had predicted for July or August—was the real
vitalizing force of the European Restoration.107 The revolutionary party, Marx and Engels
declared in the fall of 1850, had everywhere been forced from the stage. “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.” A new
revolution was only possible as the re-

Deeds • 85
sult of a new crisis. But the former would come just as surely as the latter.108

One of the reasons for the shift in opinion and mood was the California gold rush. It signaled not
only a tremendous infl ux of money into international capital markets but also the prospect of an
intensifi ed globalization that the Communist Manifesto had only dreamed about in broad strokes.
As the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue noted: In a few years we shall have a regular steam-packet
service from England to Chagres and from Chagres and San Francisco to Sydney, Canton and
Singapore. Thanks to Californian gold and the tireless energy of the Yankees, both coasts of the
Pacifi c Ocean will soon be as populous, as open to trade and as industrialised as the coast from
Boston to New Orleans is now. And then the Pacifi c Ocean will have the same role as the
Atlantic has now and the Mediterranean had in antiquity and in the Middle Ages—that of the
great water highway of world commerce; and the Atlantic will decline to the status of an inland
sea, like the Mediterranean.109

Thus the bourgeoisie’s titanic predestination was still very much slated for a great future in the
screenplay of history. Marx and Engels sometimes spoke about this class, which they
simultaneously deeply admired and despised, with a surprising degree of pathos. Contrary to the
prophecies of the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie was evidently far from being fi nished.

According to a certain logic, however, the analysis above led Marx and Engels to adopt a wait-
and-see attitude for the time being to avoid falling back into the futuristic tinkering and
voluntarism of the movements they had energetically criticized prior to 1848 as incomplete or
misguided stages of history’s self-consciousness. On 15 September 1850, this issue resulted in a
split in the Communist League. A number of members, Willich and Schapper among them,
accused Marx and Engels of being well on their way to betraying the revolution. Thereupon the
Central Committee they controlled, responding in the same tone used in the earlier disagreement
with Weitling, stated that it could no longer work with people who held the view that one need
have “only the right intentions” to obtain

“power immediately during the next revolution.” Such people also revealed a tendency to return
to the “universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form” that had long been
overcome.110 The

86 • Karl Marx

accusation also pertained to the Blanquists, who had joined them in founding a revolutionary
Universal Society that April but now were taking sides with Willich and Schapper. Instead of
babbling about coups in the manner of those “London hotspurs,”111 in the coming period of
economic prosperity Marx and Engels would focus primarily on the education of the workers
closest to them and the scientifi c development of their theory.

Marx’s correspondence with Engels during this period was full of questions about the economic
problems that occupied him during his studies in the British Museum. The lengthy article in the
Revue Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s 1 November 1850 “Revue” presented itself as an analysis
replete with comprehensive statistical material of the most recent economic developments; much
of it could just as easily have appeared in The Economist. The article maintained that a crisis
generally erupts fi rst in the area of speculation, leading then to a collapse of the banking system
and a breakdown of the credits system before taking hold of production itself. The Economist was
in fact quoted approvingly with words to the effect that the current prosperity distinguished itself
in a very crucial way from all earlier periods: the cause of growth was no longer speculation;
rather, it was based far more solidly on the production of immediately useful things that were
directly entering the consumer market.112

On the basis of such insights, Marx and Engels carried out a full-fl edged castling maneuver. In
mid February 1851, Engels wrote to his friend:

A revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws rather than to the
rules that determine the development of society in ordinary times. Or rather, in revolution these
rules assume a much more physical character, the material force of necessity makes itself more
strongly felt. And as soon as one steps forward as the representative of a party, one is dragged
into this whirlpool of irresistible natural necessity. By the mere fact of keeping oneself
independent, being in the nature of things more revolutionary than the others, one is able at least
for a time to maintain one’s independence from this whirlpool, although one does, of course, end
up by being dragged into it. This is the position we can and must adopt on the next occasion. Not
only no offi cial government appointments but also, and for as long as possible, no offi cial party
appointments, no seat on committees, etc., no responsibility for jackasses, merciless

Deeds • 87

criticism of everyone, and, besides, that serenity of which all the conspiracies of blockheads
cannot deprive us. And this much we are able to do. We can always, in the nature of things, be
more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have
not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for
at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in
the business. 113

Upon a motion by Marx at the Rose and Crown Tavern in Soho114

on 12 November 1852, the Communist League was dissolved for the reason that, even on the
continent, its perpetuation was no longer expedient. 115

For the next twelve years Marx no longer belonged to any political organization. The period after
the defeat of the revolution witnessed the advent of realism in the arts, Realpolitik, positivism,
and—for Marx—so-called scientifi c socialism. Even the mythos of the French Revolution lost
some of its sheen for a while. Self-critically retrospective shortly before his death in 1895,
Engels noted that back then they had been completely blinded by the “memories of the
prototypes of 1789 and 1830,” convincing themselves that the “great decisive battle” had
commenced, that it had to be waged in a single and eventful revolutionary period, and that it
could only end with the fi nal victory of the proletariat. History had not only revealed their point
of view to be an illusion but also completely transformed the conditions under which the
proletariat had to fi ght.

The mode of struggle was today obsolete in every respect. He now also subjected the 1848/49
fantasies of world war to harsh criticism.
Especially given the modern industrial transformation of weapons technology, a future world
war, if it occurred, would be of “unprec-edented cruelty and absolutely incalculable
outcome.”116 Now, in 1895, Engels was promoting a new style of politics, namely, social
democracy, which—as demonstrated by the SPD’s victories in the Reichstag elections—indeed
evidently promised more success.

He now saw that the Jacobins’ legacy of terror had sided more with the man who had fought
against the revolution in 1848, subsequently achieving German imperial unity by force—with
blood and iron, through the deliberate, armed implementation of Jacobin methods. “If there is to
be a revolution, we would rather make it than suffer it,” Bismarck telegraphed to General
Manteuffel in mid August 1866.117 During the war with Austria, Bismarck even toyed

88 • Karl Marx

with the idea of “releasing all the dogs that can bark” and inciting guerillas under Lajos Kossuth
in Hungary and Giuseppe Garibaldi in Dalmatia against the Habsburg monarchy.118 He went so
far as to make advances to Marx, hoping to exploit his great talents in the interests of the
German people. 119 “Have we perchance evoked the civil war of 1866?” Engels asked his
readers. Or was it Bismarck—“Have we driven the King of Hanover, the Elector of Hessia, and
the Duke of Nassau from their hereditary lawful domains and annexed these hereditary domains?
And these overthrowers of the German Confederation and three crowns by the grace of God
complain of overthrow! Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?”120—who would allow
the Gracchi to complain about an insurrection?

But there was a long way to go before reaching that point. During Marx’s fi rst years in London,
the trauma of the unsuccessful revolution and exile prevailed. Lajos Kossuth was one of the most
promi-nent continental revolutionary refugees there at the time. He was celebrated as a romantic
hero, yet Marx and Engels’s attitude to Kossuth had noticeably cooled. “Like the Apostle Paul,”
Engels wrote to Marx, “Mr. Kossuth is all things to all men,” shouting Vive la République in
Marseilles and God save the Queen in Southampton.121

A few weeks later, Marx found himself amused by Kossuth’s hanky-panky with the Bavarian
courtesan Lola Montez in London.122 Even Mr. Mazzini fared little better in their judgment, as
was also the case for the more noteworthy German jackasses who populated the community of
exiles on the Thames—the democrats Kinkel, Hecker, Struve, Vogt, and Mr. Ruge, or the
communist warhorse August von Willich,123 who later, as a Union general, would participate in
William Tecumseh Sherman’s march on Atlanta, living long enough to see this redeem him in
Marx’s eyes. Together with Engels, Marx wrote a pamphlet—one just as misshapen as The Holy
Family had been—that dealt exclusively with the shattered existences of the Great Men of the
Exile.

Was this, considered psychologically, a defense? “The great men of the Germany of 1848,” it
said, “had been on the point of coming to a sticky end when the victory of ‘tyrants’ rescued
them, swept them out of the country and made saints and martyrs of them. They were saved by
the counter-revolution. The course of continental politics brought most of them to London which
thus became their European centre.”124 But Marx and Engels wanted nothing to do with their
spurious activity, their imagined parties and imagined struggles.
Deeds • 89

Then came the great industrial exhibition in London in 1851, with Joseph Paxton’s architectonic
miracle of the Crystal Palace of iron and glass. It attracted many tourists, even from Germany,
who gladly met with the great men of exile on the exhibition grounds, hosted either by the
publicans Schärttner at the Hanau or Göhringer at the Star. Having talked shop about German
and Prussian politics over their beer, all parties wound up heading home unsteadily but
strengthened in the knowledge that they had made their contribution to the salvation of the
fatherland. The emigration, Marx and Engels noted caustically, was staging a self-satisfying
comedy, a history of its own, lying outside world history. 125

Engels had for some time been living in Manchester as an employee of his father’s branch offi ce
and in any event had very little to do with the activity in London. But Marx deliberately
distanced himself from the circle of exiles, insofar as it did not affect his closest friends. He
valued his authentic isolation and was glad that the system of reciprocal concessions, half-
measures tolerated for the sake of decorum, and the obligation to make oneself look ridiculous in
public in the party along with all these jackasses had come to an end.126 The research he was
conducting was his own, far more important, contribution to world history. On occasion he was
visited by scholars like John Stuart Mill, author of the Principles of Political Economy, which
had appeared in 1848; and he preferred to receive Mill, as an acquaintance reported, not with
compliments but rather with economic categories. After all, they shared common interests in this
fi eld.

In the year of London’s Great Exhibition, Louis Bonaparte staged a coup in Paris, making
himself a de facto dictator. In doing so, he deliberately chose the symbolic date of 2 December,
the day on which his uncle had been crowned emperor in 1804 and, one year later, won the
Battle of Austerlitz. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages
appear, as it were, twice,” commented Marx with respect to the event. “He forgot to add: the fi
rst time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This pert formulation masks how hard put Marx and
most of his contemporaries were to explain what appeared to be a completely irrational event.

The constitution of 1848, he wrote, collapsed when it was touched by a hat—a three-cornered
Napoleon hat, as Marx said. It was a seizure of power. But who was it that seized power, and in
whose name?

90 • Karl Marx

On 10 December 1848, Bonaparte had been elected president of the Republic by an

overwhelming majority consisting above all of the rural population but including, as Marx knew,
many proletarians and petty bourgeoisie who by electing him sought to punish the bloodstained
opposing candidate, Cavaignac. As far the bourgeoisie was concerned, Marx maintained, the
revolution had shown that its own interests were best served by making sure that its bourgeois
parliament was laid to rest. That was one of the foundations for Bonaparte’s success; the other
was his bohemian and corrupt populism. He had always dreamed of a state coup, yet when he fi
nally carried it out one of his fi rst measures was the reinstitution of universal voting rights,
which the bourgeoisie-dominated National Assembly had abolished in the summer of 1850.
“This is the complete and fi nal triumph of socialism!” Guizot declared after 2 December. In
actuality it was the defi nitive victory of Bonaparte’s populist despotism, which remained in
power by means of new plebiscitary instruments.

According to Marx, Bonaparte’s rule was based on three idées napoléoniennes: the interests of
the conservative smallholding peasants, the clergy, and the army. Basically, it was executive
authority which has made itself independent; by no means was it pure class rule by the
bourgeoisie but rather a dictatorship with populist traits that nonetheless understood its task as
that of securing bourgeois order.127 Engels, meanwhile, held that the entire secret of modern
Bonapartism lay in the fact that the traditions associated with his name put Louis Napoléon in a
position to safeguard the “the balance of the contending classes of French society.”128 Later he
would make the claim that the bourgeoisie “is not cut out to rule directly”

and that therefore the “Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form” of its class rule.129
These were not very convincing theories.

In any case, the peculiar entity at the Seine—which, following a plebiscite approving a new
empire, crowned Louis Napoléon in November 1852—was evidently not a class state in the
strictest sense of the theory of historical materialism. Almost eight million French citizens voted
for the new emperor; only two hundred fi fty thousand voted against. On 2 December 1852—
again, a symbolic date for historical Bonapartism—he moved as the emperor to Paris and into the
Tuileries.

Marx’s treatment of the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte nonetheless constitutes an

impressive piece of contemporary historical writing that reveals the talent of a great
historiographer. Pre-

Deeds • 91

cisely crafted linguistically and dramaturgically, his narrative of the revolution’s course to the
point of this coup d’état is replete with accurately researched details and offers decidedly
nuanced descriptions of the acting parties and factions. Among the frustrating results of his
investigation was the fi nding that, in contrast to the 1789 revolution, the revolution of 1848 had
found itself on a declining slope right from the outset.130 Thus more than ever, the time was ripe
to investigate the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat, causes that were
not to be sought in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of certain leaders,
but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations.131
Thus it was all the more necessary to turn to researching the anatomy of bourgeois society, from
which all political activity ultimately proceeded.

Marx sat in the reading room of the British Museum almost every day from nine o’clock in the
morning to seven o’clock at night. He delved deeply into the writings of John Locke and David
Hume, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Henry Charles Carey, Thomas Robert Malthus, and
other authors of the classical economic and political sciences. He acquired mountains of
literature about precious metals, money, credit, banking, ground rent, factory systems,
agriculture, colonial history, and technology. He worked through entire years of publications of
The Economist, the blue books of the British factory inspectors (which he was the fi rst to subject
to scholarly analysis), the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly, the Westminster Review, and a
plethora of other sources, recording everything that appeared to be important in growing masses
of notebooks. Yet his critique of the political economy, which at the time he thought he could
quickly fi nish, did not progress. “The material I am working on is so damnably involved,” he
wrote to his friend Weydemeyer in mid 1851, and in addition there were always the interruptions
of a practical kind that were “inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are
vegetating here.”132

Interruptions of a practical kind. That June, in the restricted confi nes of Dean Street, “Lenchen”
Demuth gave birth to a son whose father most certainly was the paterfamilias Marx. For the sake
of familial peace, Engels chivalrously assumed offi cial responsibility for the paternity. Yet when
Frederick Demuth’s birth was registered in the civil registry at Somerset House, the name of the
father was left blank. Admittedly, Jenny sensed a few things, but

92 • Karl Marx

she was certain of nothing. The child was immediately given to foster parents. During these days,
Marx’s situation looked, in his rather euphemistic formulation, quite dismal.133 Constant fi
nancial worries plagued him as well. The Politisch-Ökonomische Revue was such a complete fi
nancial failure that he often had to bring the silverware of Jenny’s noble Scottish forebears to a
pawnbroker to bridge his household’s regular fi nancial crises. But there were still other reasons
why his political economics did not make any progress. For one, he could not fi nd a publisher.
Moreover, he often delved so deeply into details that he came away having found nothing but
excuses for not fi nishing.

As Wilhelm Liebknecht described him, Marx “always worked intensely, thoroughly.”134 And
scrupulously, one might add, which meant that writings he actually wanted to use to belligerently
challenge the bourgeois world and deal a fatal blow to its futuristic op-timism could, for personal
reasons, drag on almost incessantly. His Contribution to the Critique of Politica1 Economy did
not appear until 1859; the fi rst volume of Capital was published in 1867. Apologiz-ing for the
delay, he wrote: “The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy
assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the
observation of bourgeois society, and fi nally the new stage of development which this society
seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to
start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material.” His time
had also been considerably curtailed by the imperative necessity of earning a living. 135

Marx was referring to his work as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. He had come
to know its editor in chief, Charles Anderson Dana, during the revolution in 1849 through
Freiligrath in Cologne. At the time, the Tribune was the most infl uential newspaper in the
United States, presumably with the widest circulation of any newspaper in the world, and Dana
was a successful American businessman touched by socialist ideas. In 1841 he had become a
member of the Brook Farm communal settlement near Boston, whose sympathizers included
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, noteworthy
intellectuals whose infl uence on American culture and mentality can hardly be overestimated.
Brook Farm practiced alternative educational models and turned increasingly to experimentation
inspired by Fourier.
Deeds • 93

After an effort to build a large phalanstery ended in a confl agra-tion, the settlement was
dissolved in 1847.136 Since then Dana had worked for the Tribune. Fourier’s ideas haunted its
pages, but the newspaper campaigned above all against slavery, the death penalty, and the
autocratic regimes in Europe.

In August 1851 Dana asked Marx to become one of the newspaper’s eighteen foreign
correspondents.137 He was to receive one pound sterling for each weekly report. In 1853, the
editor in chief raised this honorarium to two pounds sterling after learning that his London
correspondent’s contributions were very popular among his readers. In April 1857, Dana also
asked Marx to compose articles for the planned New American Cyclopedia. The arrangement
resulted in almost fi ve hundred articles, some of which, however, stemmed from the pen of the
ghostwriter Engels, who was always prepared to help. But then Marx raised his fees,138 the
orders from overseas subsided because of the Civil War, and the Tribune gradually lost its
monopoly to the New York Times. 139 Still, during these years Marx kept American readers
decidedly well informed, not only about conditions in Europe but also about social problems—
for example, the enclosure movement in England and Scotland, the suffering in Ireland, the
Chartist movement, and the movement for the ten hours bill. And they could feel that they were
understood when he assured them that those damned in Europe had, to the extent possible,
always found sanctuary in the United States of America.140

Many of the articles in 1853 dealt with issues in the East—more precisely, with the crisis that
would ultimately lead to the Crimean War, giving Marx the opportunity to once again take aim at
his archenemy, Russia. When the czar announced his claims to the Ottoman Danube
principalities—and thus also to the Dardanelles—Marx warned in a severe tone about the
timidity of Western statesmen 141

faced with the Russian threat. “To sum up the Eastern question in a few words,” he wrote,
explaining his view of the problem to the American readers,

The Czar, vexed and dissatisfi ed at seeing his immense Empire confi ned to one sole port of
export, and that even situated in a sea in-navigable through one half of the year, and assailable by
Englishmen through the other half, is pushing the design of his ancestors, to get access to the
Mediterranean; he is separating, one after another, the remotest members of the Ottoman Empire
from its main body, till at last Constantinople, the heart, must cease to beat.142

94 • Karl Marx

But Constantinople was the golden bridge between East and West, and Western civilization
could not keep this bridge open without a struggle with Russia. 143

Russian troops had occupied the Danube principalities in July 1853, and in October Sultan
Abdülmecid I declared war against St.

Petersburg. In early January 1854, after the Russian Black Sea fl eet annihilated the Turkish navy
at Sinop, England and France intervened in the war on the side of the Turks, bombarding the
Russian coast, conducting landing operations, and laying siege to the Sevas-topol fortress in the
Crimea for almost a year. The war resulted in half a million dead. In the end, Russia had to fall in
line and refrain from its ambition. Under the Peace of Paris, concluded on 30 March 1856, the
czar lost his hegemonic position on the European continent forever. The Holy Alliance had shot
itself in the head, which was actually good news for Marx: now Prussia and Austria might fi
nally “be relieved from the control of Russia.”144

The second piece of good news was the outbreak of the economic crisis of 1857. The revolution
is marching forward, Marx reported to Engels in Manchester in mid July, as shown by the march
of the Crédit mobilier. 145 And the onset of the American crisis in late October— its outbreak in
New York was forecast by us in the November 1850

Revue—was downright beautiful. 146 As diffi cult as the frustrations of his fi nances were,
never, since 1849, have I felt so cosy as during this outbreak. 147 Engels responded with almost
identical euphoria, saying that since the swindle in New York had collapsed, he could hardly fi
nd any peace. He felt “tremendously cheerful” and noted that “in 1848 we were saying now our
time is coming, and so in a certain sense it was, but this time it is coming properly; now it’s a
case of do or die.”148 In fact, the crisis of 1857 was the fi rst to affect the entire world. In line
with Marx’s early diagnosis, it had dimensions such as have never been seen before, 149 and
even King Friedrich Wilhelm IV

feared that now “the revolution is stalking the world once more.

May God have mercy!”150 The worldwide crisis, caused by a stock market crash on New York’s
Wall Street after the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Company, suddenly led to
panicked sell-offs. Worldwide, it gripped the fi nancial system, industry, trade, and fi nally the
agricultural sector, one after another. Marx was once again working enormously 151 on the
elaboration of his economic principles. In light of the latest developments, he and Engels would

Deeds • 95

need to report to the German public no later than the following spring to show that we are still
there as always, and always the same. 152

The enormous work was that of bringing the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy to the
page, and the reason for the feverish haste was that Marx defi nitely wanted to have it written
prior to the déluge, the great fl ood of the expected worldwide crisis. He worked like mad all
night 153 so that the details of the related aspects of what the world now faced would be clear, at
least to him. The result was a preliminary rough draft of what he had taken on as his great life
work—and what in the end he was able to realize only in part. Ultimately, the entire work was
supposed to consist of six books: “1. On Capital. 2. Landed Property. 3. Wage Labour. 4. State.
5. International Trade. 6. World Market.”154 The Outlines, fi rst published from his estate in
1939 and 1941 by the Moscow publisher for foreign-language literature, was essentially limited,
however, to book one of the planned series—the analysis of capital in general. The subjects of
landed property and wage labor were later included in the three volumes of Capital and the
subsequent Theories of Surplus Value. The books on the state, international trade, and the world
market would never exist, despite the fact that Marx never for a moment relin-quished the
intention of returning to these subjects. How the results would have looked remains a matter of
speculation, but in terms of its basic assumptions the book about the state would presumably not
have looked much different from the general theses on the subject that Marx had already
formulated in the 1840s.

The books about the world market and international trade, however, would have given his theory
about industrial cycles the unity that later would also be missing from the more comprehensive
representations in the three volumes of Capital. 155 During the sleepless and smoke-fi lled
nights when he put the Outlines on paper, he addressed this subject only sketchily, at various
points in the manuscript. Marx saw the fundamental cause of modern cyclical crises in the
development of the credit system. On the one hand, the credit system followed with a certain
necessity from businesses’ need to remain liquid even though investments had not yet been
amortized through the sale of produced goods in the market. Capital, Marx maintained in the
Outlines, thus developed the unavoidable need to achieve circulation without circulation time.
Credit met this need. But on the other hand, out of intrinsic necessity the credit system itself

96 • Karl Marx

developed a dangerous tendency toward over-trading and over-speculation because the real
market conditions could fi rst be determined only in retrospect. Briefl y put, credit suspended the
barriers to the valorisation of capital only by giving them their most general form and thus
produced, in oscillation, the period of overproduction and under-production as two periods. 156
It was a pure possibility theory.

Marx evidently intended to examine in detail the law of cyclical change between prosperity and
crisis in his book about the world market.157 It is impossible to know how his theory would
have developed and whether it could even have existed, in a strict sense, as a scientifi c
explanation of a complex phenomenon. In any case, this phenomenon became globally apparent
for the fi rst time in summer 1857, but—in defi ance of Marx’s and Engel’s impatient
expectations, and of what they had long wanted to believe—by the end of December 1857, the
markets had noticeably calmed again. Even the second wave they had predicted failed to
materialize. Evidently it was not a do or die situation.

Marx had originally planned to quickly establish the form of the Outlines as well as the plan for
the entire six-book series, and to have the whole project appear in successive installments. But
the work proceeded very slowly, above all because during his course of study continually
revealed new aspects that needed to be thought out further. 158 When, after intense labor pains,
it was actually published in 1859 by Franz Duncker in Berlin as a Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, the half-fi nished text was not much more than a fragment. “Don’t be bowled
over by this,” wrote Marx to Engels shortly before sending the manuscript to Duncker: “although
entitled Capital in General, these instalments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital, but
only the two chapters: 1. The Commodity, 2. Money or Simple Circulation. ” If things went well,
he thought, he could quickly follow up with the chapter on capital.159 But things did not go well
at all.

Wilhelm Liebknecht declared that no book had disappointed him more than this one. The
decisive chapter about capital was in fact missing, so the book remained only an academic
treatment of goods and money; it said nothing about Marx’s central thesis about the basis of class
antagonisms in modern relations of production.

Despite a long and complicated foreword about historical materialism, it remained a scholarly
and ultimately apolitical book, even if Engels maintained that it clearly revealed that “economics
is not

Deeds • 97

concerned with things but with relations between persons, and in the fi nal analysis between
classes.”160 Johannes Miquel, an old member of the Communist League, reported that he found
“very little actually new” in the text.161 As a future Berlin Oberbürgermeister, Prussian fi nance
minister, and the architect of the principles of the German tax system that is still in force today,
Miquel was someone who clearly understood something about the subject. By that time he had
already become a liberal and a cofounder of the German National Association, but he was very
familiar with the Communist Manifesto from their time together during the struggles. Miquel
presumably expected more from his old friend Marx, especially with respect to information
about the political core of his economic theory. The book went practically unnoticed by the
public. There were other issues in Germany that Marx could hardly understand from the
loneliness of his exile in London. The economy was fl ourishing again, and the so-called “New
Era” in Prussia brought a phase of liberalization in public life that began overnight upon the
incurably mentally ill Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s departure from the throne at the end of 1858.

Marx was extremely frustrated. After all, the text contained the result of fi fteen years of
research, that is, the best years of my life. 162 In Germany, he told Liebknecht, he had expected
everything, attacks or criticism, but not complete ignoring. 163 Engels’s review—dictated in
large parts by Marx himself—in the short-lived emigrant journal Das Volk did not change the
book’s reception at all. Marx, Engels disclosed to his readers, was the fi rst since Hegel to
attempt “to develop any branch of science in its specifi c inner coherence,” but his

“logical method” fundamentally distinguished him from the idealistic assumptions of speculative
philosophy. To wit, Marx’s science was based on a materialistic conception of history, and thus
for him the logical method was nothing but “the historical method, only stripped of the historical
form and of interfering contingencies.” Engels concluded his review by stating that he would
address the actual economic content of the book in a subsequent article164—which, however,
never saw the light of day. Neither was there a continuation of the work itself.

Yet Marx had a faithful and reliable friend in Germany at this time: Ferdinand Lassalle.
Lassalle’s far-reaching connections and tireless string-pulling were also to thank for Marx’s
contact with Duncker and the fact that he ultimately received a book contract

98 • Karl Marx

in which the publisher quoted a much higher honorarium than usual. In the early 1850s, next to
Miquel, Lassalle was one of the few political thinkers in Germany who considered themselves
Marx’s party comrades. Miquel fell still farther under the infl uence of the zeitgeist’s new liberal
“Realpolitik,” the principles of which were fi rst formulated in 1853 by Ludwig August von
Rochau, a former radical and participant in the charge on the Frankfurt guardhouse.
The Revolution of 1848, according to Rochau, had failed because of insuffi cient insight into real
power relations; therefore in the future one needed to learn to deal with realities rather than
political fi ctions. In particular, the idea of a social revolution was nothing but a

“fi gment of the imagination,” at best a “violent act of politics” that unwittingly only played into
the hands of incorrigible conservatives.165 This was increasingly also the opinion of Miquel,
who in his last letter to Marx observed that his hope of a revolution occurring soon in Germany
had noticeably diminished in recent years.166

But ever since their fi rst meeting in the fall of 1848, Lassalle had remained loyal to Marx. He
had become a socialist very early and quite independently through his own interpretation of
Hegel, Lorenz von Stein’s writings on the history of the social movement in France, and a
personal encounter with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Paris. On 17 September 1848, at the time of
the Malmö cease-fi re, he appeared together with Marx as a speaker at a mass rally under red fl
ags on the Rhine meadow near Worringen.167 He was rhetori-cally an extremely gifted speaker,
and the infl uence he was able to exercise over the masses and the public would with time
become one of the perhaps most diffi cult psychological problems that Marx faced during his
life. Writing to Marx in June 1852, Lassalle noted that after the failed revolution he, like Marx,
felt that in the future “no struggle would be successful in Europe anymore” if it was not “from
the outset a pronounced purely socialist” struggle. He continued:

“thus precisely during this apparently deathly quiet the real German workers’ party is being
born.”168 Marx was less certain. But in the correspondence of the early 1850s, Lassalle, who
was years younger, was always someone who sought advice and forthrightly recognized Marx’s
authority in theoretical questions, even if he never developed into a real Marxist. For a time the
correspondence ceased.

Lassalle resumed it again in 1857, when a book he published on the philosophy of Heraclitus the
Obscure from Ephesus took the educated world of Berlin by storm. Suddenly celebrated as a

Deeds • 99

wunderkind, he was honored at a banquet, in the presence of the Prussian minister president, by
being granted membership in the Philosophical Society of Berlin. Varnhagen von Ense,
Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Lepsius, and August Boeckh praised the work
enthusiastically.169 A copy was sent to Marx in London. He found the reconstruction of
Heraclitus’s system brilliant, he fl attered Lassalle.170 But in reality he felt that the worthy
Lassalle was only poaching on the domain of others—all the more so since Marx himself had
made a much more signifi cant contribution with his own dissertation. For the rest, Marx felt that
Lassalle was a sensationalist for whom being the talk of the town in Berlin was all that mattered:
This is the man who has written Heraclit. Perhaps, noted Marx to Engels, the laddie might be of
some service to us in fi nding a publisher. 171

Indeed, Lassalle arranged for his own publisher, namely Duncker, to take on Marx’s Critique of
Politica1 Economy and shortly thereafter Engels’s anonymously published Po and Rhine. Engels
thanked him politely for his “bons offi ces”—his good services.172

This was not completely fair, nor did it mark the nadir of the relationship between the two exiled
Church Fathers and their German admirer, whom they alternately mocked in their
correspondence as Baron Itzig, Ephraim Gescheit, Jüdel Braun, Polish Schmuhl, and with other
anti-Semitic invective. Jealousy played a signifi cant role here.

Lassalle’s Heraclitus was the talk of the day; nobody wanted to hear anything about Marx’s
Critique of Political Economy. Lassalle moved in the best circles of Berlin society and
simultaneously called out to his audience in the tradesman association of the Oranienburg
suburbs that soon, when the workers too claimed their civil rights, the bourgeoisie would be
crying “murder and death.”173 Meanwhile, Marx was researching and thinking on his own in
London, in great isolation, 174 as he wrote to Lassalle.

A controversy regarding the Italian War of 1859 grew into a serious dispute. It concerned the
question of how the German states were to behave in light of the pact for the liberation of
northern Italy concluded by Louis Bonaparte and the prime minister of Pied-mont-Sardinia
Cavour. In his text Po and Rhine, Engels presented the view that Bonaparte’s Italian ambitions
could only be the prelude to developments in which he would ultimately also demand the Rhine
border, since otherwise his coup d’état on the eighteenth Brumaire would not really be complete.
If the Po was the “pretext” for Louis Napoléon, then under all circumstances, Engels maintained,

100 • Karl Marx

the Rhine had to be his “ultimate goal.” Nobody in Germany could therefore seriously think
about giving up the Po without a fi ght, for ultimately that was the place to defend the Rhine.175

Thus it was long believed amongst high-ranking military in Berlin that the anonymously
published Po and Rhine had been written by a politicized Prussian general.176 Additionally,
Engels’s ideas came awfully close to the majority opinion in Germany, which had been gripped
by the most intense wave of anti-French nationalism since the Rhine crisis of 1840. Talk was of
the “Empire’s outside wall”

along the Po, and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung paraded before its readers the “lordly
rights of the Germanic race” that ostensibly needed to be defended in northern Italy.177 As little
as Engels shared such positions, he was conversely just as convinced that nothing was a greater
impediment to the revival of socialism in Europe than the new Bonapartism in Paris. Admittedly,
he was no friend of the Habsburg “prison of nations,” but nor was it any solution to have Austria
vacate a position of power only for it to be occupied by a usurper. Once greater Germany was
unifi ed, it could safely abstain from all plundering in Italy.

Lassalle saw things somewhat differently. Again with Duncker, he published the polemic The
Italian War and the Task of Prussia: A Voice of Democracy. As he saw it, Bonaparte was
working indirectly for German unity, if he aimed to wrest northern Italy from Austria and force
this reactionary state of many nations to step back toward its German heartlands. At such a time,
he maintained, a man like Frederick the Great would have marched into Vienna and left it to the
Habsburg monarchy to decide whether it could even assert its claims in its non-German
territories anymore. Today, though, a comparable solution would not be in the interests of the
democrats. Lassalle therefore suggested that the German states maintain neutrality in the Italian
War and, parallel to Bonaparte’s Italian intervention, liberate Schleswig-Holstein from Danish
rule. Besides, Austria was the absolute embodiment of the reactionary principle in Europe, and
thus a war against France would only strengthen the German people’s identifi cation with the
divinely ordained crown.

Moreover, he concluded, Bonaparte was in no position to think about conquests, not even in
Italy.178

The result was precisely the last one. At the end of April 1859, the Austrians initiated hostilities,
and on 20 June they suffered their fi nal disaster at Solferino. Having conquered Lombardy,
Louis Na-

Deeds • 101

poléon turned it over to Cavour in exchange for Nice and Savoy.

Lassalle had perceived matters far more realistically than Engels, who was blinded by the
caricature of Louis Bonaparte as the anti-revolutionary archenemy.

Marx, however, considered Lassalle’s pamphlet to be an enormous blunder. In the northern

Italian crisis, and also given the threat of a French-Russian alliance against Austria, Germany
could by no means remain neutral but was duty-bound to demonstrate that it was decidedly
patriotic. With his headstrong views, Lassalle would in the future have to resign himself to being
publicly disavowed by Marx and Engels. Especially now, it was necessary to maintain party
discipline, otherwise everything will be in the soup. 179 What party? Marx, Engels—and
Lassalle? Or that of the arrogated self-consciousness of history? Lassalle, however, did not
regard the dispute as a party matter at all but simply a normal confl ict of opinions.

In 1861 he proposed to Marx that they found a newspaper in Berlin. It was to be entirely in the
tradition of the old Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Wilhelm I (“beautiful Wilhelm”)—offi cially
elevated to the throne from his position as regent after his brother’s death—had announced a
general amnesty. But this amnesty had limits with respect to refugees; moreover, as a stateless
person Marx did not possess a passport. Nonetheless, he risked the trip. At the time he had just
turned forty. In Zalt-Bommel near Nijmegen he stayed for two weeks with his uncle Lion
Philips, one of the founding fathers of the Dutch Philips corporation, courting his cousin
Antoinette, who would later be number one in the Dutch section of the First International.180
When it suited him—and especially vis-à-vis this cruel little witch 181—Marx could be quite
charming.

On 17 March, he arrived in Berlin by train at approximately 7:00

A.M. and drove along the Bellevuestraße to meet with Lassalle, who lived in a very beautiful
house in one of the best parts of the city.

Everything was fully prepared for his reception; subsequently they visited Countess Hatzfeldt,
Lassalle’s eccentric life companion, for whom he had, as a lawyer, successfully conducted a
multi-year inheritance dispute. The countess, Marx informed Antoinette, appeared to him to be a
very distinguished Lady, no blue-stocking, strongly interested in the matters of the revolution,
and above all displaying a pleasant aristocratic laissez-aller, something that he, who deeply
hated all bourgeois trivialities, found especially pleasing. She also allowed herself to become
easily enthused about a campaign against

102 • Karl Marx

the brutal treatment of the French professional revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in his lonely
fortress imprisonment. Lassalle’s petition to the police president for the reinstatement of Marx’s
Prussian state citizenship, however, went nowhere.182

On occasion there was fellowship, theater, and ballet at the Royal Opera Unter den Linden, and
above all a gala dinner arranged by Lassalle in honor of Marx’s return to Germany. It was an
illustrious company. The elderly General von Pfuel, who once openly admitted his homoerotic
tendencies to Heinrich von Kleist, sat across from Marx. As governor of Berlin during the March
revolution, he had courageously prevented a bloodbath. In the fall of 1849 he became the
Prussian minister president, but he was soon dismissed because of his unmistakable
constitutional leanings. Now the old warhorse was supposedly full of hope for the liberality of
the new era. Marx sat between Countess Hatzfeldt and Ludmilla Assing, the niece of Varnhagen
von Ense, who inundated him with her goodwill. Court Councilor Förster, who had known Hegel
personally and was among the publishers of his writings, proposed a toast for the Fatherland’s
returning son.183 For a while, Marx toyed with the idea of settling in Berlin.

The current situation in Prussia, he noted, was ill-boding for the powers that be, and all of the old
parties were in a process of dissolution. This might actually be the appropriate moment to launch
a newspaper in the Prussian capital.184 So he remained for a while.

He visited his friend Köppen from the days of the Berlin Doctor Club and found that he had
hardly changed. As for Rutenberg, he learned that the former chief of the Rheinische Zeitung had
had to leave the liberal National-Zeitung because he had become too reactionary. Bruno Bauer
was collaborating on a Staatslexikon (political encyclopedia) and otherwise indulging in country
life in Rixdorf.185

For the most part, however, Marx was bored stiff.186 There was no haute politique—high
politics—here.187 But he did not want to leave Berlin until the Prussian government had
approved the reinstatement of his citizenship.188

The mood with Lassalle soured when they began speaking in binding terms about the
composition of the future editorial offi ce.

Lassalle wanted himself and Marx to be equally responsible for directing the newspaper; if
Engels were likewise to become a chief editor then by no means were both of them together to
have more votes than he did. But Marx wrote confi dentially to Engels that

Deeds • 103

even if Lassalle provided the money, in the best case scenario, if subjected to rigid discipline,
Lassalle might be of service as one of the editors. Otherwise they would make fools of
themselves.189 In the end, the project did not amount to anything. Neither did the effort to
acquire citizenship. Germany, Marx wrote to Antoinette at a station along his return route, was
such a beautiful country that it was best to live outside its borders. 190 Basically, he—the herald
of the real movement—needed the ivory tower, where one did not have to besmirch oneself with
the temptations, compromises, trivialities, and necessities of everyday political life. Perhaps he
also feared—

consciously or unconsciously—that in Prussia he might one day be caught in the maelstrom of

Realpolitik, to which Miquel had already succumbed.

During the 1862 World Exhibition in South Kensington, which drew six million visitors,
Lassalle stayed with Marx in London.

Since 1856 the family had lived at Grafton Terrace near Hampstead Heath in a seven-room house
with a small garden. An inheritance of Jenny’s had enabled the move from the restricted confi
nes on Dean Street, yet 1862 was once again a year of unmitigated fi nancial straits. Lassalle, by
contrast, was living it up. Marx could hardly bear it. Allowing his anger full rein in a letter to
Engels, Marx wrote that the baronized Jew had actually lost fi ve thousand Taler in a
speculation; he would presumably rather throw the money into the dirt than lend it to a
friend.191 This was not quite the case: Lassalle had lent Marx fi fteen pounds sterling and
offered to extend him credit in any desired amount as long as Engels would secure the loan. Yet
for Marx the matter remained an irritant. When Lassalle left London again, their correspondence
ceased for the next two years.

A long-term political collaboration between Marx and Lassalle would hardly have been possible
in any event. Lassalle was always more concerned with social issues than with socialism. In
October 1862, three months after his return from London, he announced to Countess Hatzfeldt
that he would establish a “collective labor association for all of Germany” headquartered in
Berlin and put himself

“at its head.” As a response to the liberal Progress Party’s tepid programs for solving social
problems, he wanted the “fourth Estate” to develop as an independent political force with the
prospects of civic recognition. His model consisted of state-funded productive organizations by
which members of the working class, instead of being exploited, could become independent
entrepreneurs.192

104 • Karl Marx

Lassalle never understood Marx. He always remained a Hegelian, especially with regard to the
mediating role of the state. As opposed to Marx, he also had much more than unconditional
intellectual leadership in mind; he wanted to become a real leader—in Marx’s words, a workers’
dictator. 193 On 23 May 1863, at the constituent meeting of the General German Workers’
Association in Leipzig, Lassalle was elected to a fi ve-year term as president with plenary
powers. According to Isaiah Berlin, Lassalle in fact advocated the doctrine of personal
dictatorship and—quite contrary to Marx, who once said that leadership is never a pleasant thing
194—the romantic idea of a Führer principle. But according to Berlin, this was precisely what
made Bismarck consider him capable of providing satisfaction.

In May 1863 the head of the Prussian regime summoned Lassalle to an initial secret meeting, to
be followed by others over the next ten months. Bismarck felt that Lassalle was one of the “most
clever and charming men” he had ever dealt with. After all, they had the same enemy in the
liberal bourgeoisie.195 Lassalle explained to Bismarck that the workers, despite their republican
ethos, were fully prepared to see “the crown as a natural instrument of a social dictatorship”
“rather than the egotism of the bourgeois class”—that is, if the crown changed from “a monarchy
of the privileged classes” to a “social and revolutionary people’s monarchy.”196 It was no
coincidence that the idea of arranging these secret negotiations came from Bismarck’s assistant
Hermann Wagener, an admirer of the socially conservative Hegelian Lorenz von Stein.

After Lassalle’s death in a duel in Geneva in August 1864, Marx noted that he had probably gone
astray because in reality he was, like Mr Miquel, a ‘realistic politician’, only on a larger scale
and with grander aims, a Marquis Posa of the proletariat. 197 His judgments were not always so
severe. Lassalle’s misfortune, Marx wrote to Engels in early September 1864, had damnably
preoccupied him in recent days.

It was hard to believe that such a loud and noisy person was now dead as a doornail, and he felt
truly sorry that their relationship had become so clouded in recent years. After all, in Marx’s eyes
Lassalle still remained one of the vieille souche and the foe of our foes. 198 These words sound
surprisingly noble, yet Isaiah Berlin is almost certainly correct to claim that, had he lived,
Lassalle would certainly have developed into a fi rst-rate obstacle for Marx.199 Tellingly, when
the leadership of the General German Workers’ Association was offered

Deeds • 105

to him, Marx refused it—and not only because Prussia, as before, refused to reinstate his
citizenship, but above all because he wanted nothing to do with royal Prussian governmental
socialism, 200 or with the Tory-Chartist character 201 of the Lassalle association, and because
even Wilhelm Liebknecht, sent specially to Berlin, had been unable to purge the party of the
stench left behind by Lassalle. 202

Lost Illusions

For Marx, real world history took place in another way and at other places. On 28 September
1864, four weeks after Lassalle’s death, the First International was raised from the baptismal font
in London’s St. Martin’s Hall. The old music hall in Charles Street, not far from Covent Garden,
had been reopened after a fi re two years earlier. Usually there were concerts here, and on
occasion also read-ings—for example, by Charles Dickens—and sometimes also political
meetings. Two thousand participants showed up on this evening at the concert house lit by
gaslight candelabras, which was densely occupied to the point of suffocation. Marx, too, was
there. He was overwhelmed. There is now evidently a revival of the working classes taking place,
he reported enthusiastically to Engels in Manchester.

On this evening, it was resolved to found a Workingmen’s International Association, with a

general council in London and sections in Germany, Italy, France, and England.203 The
founders of the International, Marx wrote to his fi nancially powerful but philan-thropically
inclined uncle Lion Philips, were the same people who had organized the grand reception of
Giuseppe Garibaldi in London and, through an enormous meeting in St. James’s Hall, prevented
a war between England and the northern states of America—that is, they were the real workers’
leaders in London, in particular the union leader George Odger. It was a real movement from the
moment of its birth, and that was all that mattered to him.

The mood at the time was internationalist in a way that it had seldom been before, in many
respects exceeding the euphoria of the Spring of Nations in 1830. For the fi rst time, the meeting
included transatlantic components, most clearly evident in the sympathy of the British workers’
movement for Abraham Lincoln’s war against slavery. This even gripped Marx. As he noted at
the end of November 1864, never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such

106 • Karl Marx

rapidity as in America. Only three and a half years earlier Lincoln had proclaimed that no further
concessions would be made to slaveholders, and now, his declared, and in part already
accomplished, goal was the complete abolition of slavery.204 In Abraham Lincoln, the single-
minded son of the working class, 205 Marx saw a great revolutionary who did not shy from using
armed force to bring down an entire societal system, in this case the slavery-based relations of
production of the American South. Lincoln, for Marx, embodied a type of citizen completely
different from the frightened subjects of the European monarchs. This example, Marx hoped,
would in the future have a highly benefi cial infl uence on the whole world. 206 Namely, the war
against slavery unmistakably marked the beginning of a new era of ascendancy for the working
class. 207 It was worldwide because the openly declared war against slavery could only be the
prelude to a general struggle against all slavery, thus also wage slavery.208 To the same extent
that he wanted to see czarist Russia toppled into an abyss, Marx—unlike Lassalle, who as a
Hegelian advocated the notion that the Americans were incapable of having their own ideas—

admired the American dream, which at the time was still leavened with many socialist ideas.

Lincoln’s friends on the other side of the Atlantic were not liberals like William Gladstone, who
initially predicted (and for reasons of free trade in cotton, also desired) victory for the South—
and who maintained, after the secession, that an entirely new nation had been created south of
the Potomac. Rather, they were the European and especially the British workers, who, through
large rallies in London, Manchester, and Sheffi eld against England’s entry into the war on the
side of the South, fi rst made the public aware that the American situation concerned not only
contracts for the British ship-building industry and the supply of cotton but also the question of
the abolition or retention of the system of slavery. Marx was impressed above all by the sound
attitude of the British working classes. 209

Even though supply failures of cotton caused by the war on the far side of the Atlantic led to a
substantial crisis in the textile industry and to massive layoffs,210 they took to the streets with
admirable persistence for the sake of a political principle.211

A similar situation occurred in April 1864 during the reception of Giuseppe Garibaldi in London.
The partisan leader and hero—a legend in his own lifetime—was cheered by hundreds of
thousands of people who were clearly, as the Times reported, from the working

Deeds • 107

class. The former carpenter and union leader George Potter rode picturesquely on a horse next to
Garibaldi’s wagon. Such highly romantic scenes would recur in similar fashion in other English
towns.

Marx viewed Garibaldi’s national ambitions rather critically, but the fact that the British
workers’ movement’s sympathies for the Italian freedom fi ghter were chiefl y directed against
the usurper Louis Napoléon, who still occupied Rome, might have allowed him to come to terms
with this fl aw. In an era of ascendant bourgeois national movements, the receptions for
Garibaldi were festivals of proletarian internationalism—much like the previous year’s large
rallies in sympathy for Poland.

In late January 1863, a national uprising had broken out in Russian-occupied Congress Poland.
“What do you think of the Polish business?” Marx wrote to Engels upon hearing the news. This
much was certain: the era of revolution was once again fairly opened in Europe.

In fact, Marx expected the uprising in Poland to start a revolutionary wave like that of 1848, in
which the lava will fl ow from East to West and not in the opposite direction. 212 Revolutions in
Poland, according to the dream, would be followed by the collapse of czarism and then, as an
almost necessary consequence, a new German revolution. But the Polish uprising was brutally
crushed and its leaders relentlessly punished with death penalties, forced labor, or deportation.
The western states, whence the Polish insurgents had expected support, held themselves back;
Prussia even found itself openly on the side of Russia.

Massive protests, especially on the part of the trade unions, opposed these developments. In
summer 1863, a delegation of French workers even traveled to London for a large sympathy rally
for Poland.

The International grew out of this meeting for Poland. To this day it remains unclear who seized
the initiative. The French who participated in the founding meeting in St. Martin’s Hall later
spread the version that it was a child born in France and breast-fed in London.

In any case, French and English workers’ representatives discussed the matter after the London
meeting for Poland. Freemason connections might also have played a role.213 Be that as it may.
Secretary of the London Trades Council George Odger wrote an address to the workers of
France, inviting them to an international congress slated for fall 1864 in London. Marx was
anything but the initiator, and he was invited to St. Martin’s Hall only at the last minute, but he
would very quickly become the most important and signifi cant voice of the International.

108 • Karl Marx

Marx’s invitation was delivered by Victor Le Lubez, a French emigrant living in London, with
the inquiry as to whether Marx wanted to participate in the meeting “pour les ouvriers
allemands”—for the German workers. Though he had become accustomed to turning down such
requests over the past ten years, Marx immediately agreed. This time, he informed Engels, he
had the clear feeling that for the fi rst time, real powers were in play on the sides of both London
and Paris.214 He did not say a word in St. Martin’s Hall, but he soon sat on the program
commission that developed the principles and statutes of the new association. Nobody there
could match him as a theoretician. A number of drafts were circulated and rejected, until fi nally
the commission met for further discussion at his house on 20 October; in the end the matter was
left in his hands alone.

As he informed Engels with great satisfaction, the general council adopted his Inaugural Address
of the International Working Men’s Association with great enthusiasm.215

The Inaugural Address was not a new Communist Manifesto. The composition of the
International was too heterogeneous for that.

Anyway, Marx wrote to Engels, time must pass before the revival of the movement allows the old
boldness of language to be used. 216 But the reticence he displayed tentatively also had other
reasons, which carefully tell a story of lost illusions. He had been preoccupied for some time
with the fact that the almost childish enthusiasm with which they had greeted the revolutionary
era prior to 1848 was a thing of the past and now forever gone to the devil. 217 As the crisis
invoked by the American Civil War slowly ebbed in 1864, Engels was even overcome with
doubts about their old dogma concern-ing the relationship between crisis and revolution. It was
really a shame, he wrote to Marx, that “these things do not come to a proper head.”218 Marx
tried to calm him with the unfounded argument that the crises of the future would replace what
they lost in intensity with what they now gained in frequency. 219 The Great Depression of 1873,
which marked the end of the Industrial Revolution in England, Germany, and Western Europe as
a whole, was admittedly very intense.

In the meantime, however, such uncertainties regarding prophesies of revolution and crises also
bespoke a new realism on the part of the International.

Marx did not attain his leadership position in the general council of this association as he had
done in 1847 in the Communist League, namely through his futuristic revolutionary models.
Rather,

Deeds • 109

he did so as a dignifi ed theorist of the need for union politics. In 1865 this question occasioned a
controversy on the International’s leadership committee. A member of the General Council, the
former carpenter John Weston, publicly advocated the thesis that a general wage increase was of
no use to workers and would only lead to an increase in prices. Weston, who in any event found
himself in a minority position, argued that unions were therefore somewhat harmful. Weston was
a supporter of the early socialist experimenter Robert Owen; like Lassalle, he saw the solution to
social problems in the expansion of self-administrating productive cooperatives. Marx was asked
to counter Weston. We shall do our best, 220 he said, and on 20 and 27 June 1865 he delivered a
lecture entitled “Wages, Price, and Profi t” to the General Council in London.

At heart it was about what determined the levels of wages. The starting point of the “iron law of
wages,” as put forth by Weston and Lassalle, could lead to totally different conclusions. One
existed in the communist utopias advocated by both these men; the other, in Marx’s own Jacobin
theory of revolution that he himself—back then still supporting a form of the iron law of wages
—had propounded in 1848. Now, however, he had changed his position on two decisive counts.
To be sure, then as now, he held the view that the general tendency of capitalist production was
to sink the average standard wage. But in determining the value of labor, which according to his
theory was the basis of wage levels, he now included a variable quantity, one that was subject to
historical change: namely, the traditional standard of life of a respective country. Incidentally,
the level of wages had nothing to do with other market prices. High wages only reduced the profi
ts of the capitalists, and the entire question ultimately resolved into a question of the respective
powers of the combat-ants, thus of class struggle. With these explanations, Marx became the
leading intellectual of the International. Basically, however, the controversy concerned the
theory of a political economy of trade unions, which was how the General Council understood it
as well, even if Marx closed his lecture with the remark that unions totally defeated their own
purpose if they limited themselves to waging a guerilla war against the effects of the existing
system instead of simultaneously trying to change it. 221

Like Weston, Marx gave instruction to Lassalle’s successor in the German Workers’
Association, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, who in any event already stood closer to the idea of
unions than his pre-

110 • Karl Marx

decessor. Coalitions with the unions that grew out of the working class, he wrote in a long letter
to Schweitzer, were extremely important, and not only as a means of organizing that class. In
Germany the right of association—to form coalitions—would also limit police rule and
bureaucratism and tear up the Gesindeordnung (rules governing relations between masters and
servants) in the countryside.

In short, unions were an important measure for making the subjects responsible, whereas
Lassalle’s state-supported cooperative societies extended the system of tutelage. The honor of the
workers’ party thus urgently required that it reject such delusions. He ended his letter to
Schweitzer, however, much more clearly than his lecture in London.

The working class, Marx told him somewhat dramatically, is either revolutionary or it is nothing.
222

Marx actually believed that the International would enable him to lead the European and even the
American working class along such a path. Les choses marchent—things are moving forward—
he gushed to Engels, and with the International they would have a powerful machine in their
hands during the next revolution.223 In barely over a year they had managed to draw the only
really big workers’ organization—the English trade unions that earlier had dealt only with
questions of wages— into the movement. 224 What movement? In reality, the International
Workers’ Association was never at any point revolutionary. What was real for the association
was something else—for example, the ten hours bill, which according to Marx was not only a
practical success but also the victory of a principle. For the fi rst time, through the statutory
determination of the maximum length of the workday, the political economy of the middle class
succumbed to the political economy of the working class. 225 This victory, Marx asserted in his
polemic against Weston, would never have been achieved through a private agreement between
workers and capitalists. It needed the legislative interference of the state, which, however, only
came about because of the working men’s continuous pressure from without. 226 From this
perspective, then, one might ask, did the possibility not exist for other victories of the political
economy of the proletariat, that is, victories within the existing conditions? During this period
Marx’s revolutionary prospects took on the appearance of a social democrat wearing a Jacobin
hat.

They became increasingly vague, even if he never admitted it.

The International itself was basically the product of a momentary alignment of various interests
and moods. The latter should

Deeds • 111

not be underestimated. The infl uence of the Methodist movement, for example, and its cult of
worldwide brotherhood on the English working class was considerable and contributed signifi
cantly to the emotional character of the campaign against slavery and the support for the Italian
and Polish struggles for freedom. It also promoted the readiness for international solidarity
among workers, who all saw themselves as victims of the same exploitation. In terms of
immediate interests, though, the British primarily wanted the network of the International to
prevent the importation of strikebreakers and cheap labor from the continent.

In fact, the success of the 1866 strike by London’s tailor appren-tices could be traced back to the
International Workers’ Association and its activities. Conversely, in early 1867 the British
helped the bronze workers of the French fi rm Bardedienne during their strike.

The International collected funds for the striking workers, and the General Council turned to the
trade unions, which immediately promised to provide all kinds of support and credit. The labor
confl ict ended on 24 March with the complete success of the bronze workers.227 Workers in
Basel who had been locked out, thrown out of their homes, and deprived of their credit line with
food merchants were able to weather their lengthy strike from fall 1868 to spring 1869 only with
the help of the International.228 There were many actions of mutual solidarity during this period
of confl ict, in which employers engaged in extreme brutality, often with fatal consequences and
frequently with the support of the police and state.

The more effectively the International made itself felt in these affairs, the more its prestige
increased in Europe. But, as Foreign Minister Lord Granville explained to worried foreign
governments, the International always remained an organization that was primarily concerned
with labor confl icts. Revolutionary plans, if they did exist, refl ected perhaps the views of
foreign members, but not those of the British workers.229 In fact, they played hardly any role in
the work of the International, and where they did appear Marx, as the mouthpiece of the real
movement, fought them fi ercely.

In England, the unions were the major fi eld of activity for the International, and many of the
tone-setting union leaders sat on its General Council. The Bee-Hive, the offi cial organ of the
trade unions directed by George Potter, functioned simultaneously as its mouthpiece.230 On the
continent, most of the International’s initial support was in France, Belgium, and Switzerland.
Later there

112 • Karl Marx

were also members from Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and the United States, including
the National Labor Union with a million members. But it could barely fi nd footing among the
workers in heavy industry in northern England. Germany, too, was diffi cult, above all because
of Lassalle’s continuing infl uence. Not until the fall of 1868 did the German Workers’
Association publicly commit itself to the International’s principles. The International brought
widely different currents together under its roof, welcoming British unionists, the positivist
historian Beesley, Belgian freethinkers, Genevan clockmakers, republicans, democrats, French
radicals, and even Proudhonists,231 who suffered a decisive defeat in 1867 when, totally in
keeping with Marx’s political economy of the unions, the International Congress in Brussels
declared that strikes were a legitimate weapon of the working class.232 In 1868, the Congress
recommended Marx’s Capital, which had been published the previous year,

to “the workers of all countries.”233 The Social Democratic Workers’

Party, founded in Eisenach in 1869, committed itself from the outset to the principles of the
International. Wilhelm Liebknecht ensured that its members joined the association as individuals
because collective membership was prohibited by German law.

To Marx’s dismay, in November 1868 the Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie Socialiste

under the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin also applied for membership. Marx knew Bakunin
well from his days in Parisian exile, and when he saw him again in 1864 for the fi rst time in
sixteen years—Bakunin having escaped his Siberian banishment—he found that Bakunin was
one of the few people to have moved forwards and not backwards. 234 Now, however, he feared
—

with some justifi cation—that Bakunin wanted to use his alliance as an instrument to disorganize
the International. 235 Thus Bakunin fi rst had to offi cially dissolve his alliance and divide it into
independent national sections. Even so, once the Russian, with his always impen-etrable secret
associations, began haunting the International, Marx was increasingly overcome by fears of a
Bakunin plot, a complete conspiracy 236 of the Bakunin gang. 237 And in fact, Bakunin had
made it a top priority to fi ght a merciless war against the “authoritarian communism of Marx”
and the entire German school.238

Marx grew increasingly concerned about England as well. The infl ux of cheap Irish labor to the
island, compelled by poverty, had led to a profound antagonism between the Irish and English
proletarians and in a certain sense divided the working class into two classes.239

These circumstances changed England’s political landscape, and it

Deeds • 113

was principally the “English workers’ hatred of the Irish” that led to a clear Tory majority in the
fall 1868 elections in industrialized Lan-cashire.240 But in the scenario Marx envisioned, only
England—the metropolis of capital 241—because of its high level of industrialization, organized
working class, and dominant position in the world market, could serve as the lever for a serious
economic revolution. 242 He appeared already to be seeking reasons why this act of world
theater would never be performed.

Thus the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 almost provided Marx with a sort of relief from the often
small-minded routines of the International and his increasing doubts about the British workers’
movement. Until shortly before the onset of hostilities, he adhered to his old idea from the 1840s
that German unity could be achieved only through a German revolution sweeping away the
Prussian dy-nasty. 243 But just one day after France declared war on Prussia and the South
German states joined the North German Confederation, Marx was hoping that the Prussians
would prevail. “The French deserve a good hiding,” he wrote to Engels, just as convinced as the
latter that the war could not be waged without the chauvinism of the French population at
large.244 If Prussia was victorious, then the centralization of state power would also ultimately
lead to the centralization of the German working class, and the center of gravity of the western
European workers’ movement would shift from France to Germany. Marx put these thoughts to
paper two weeks before the war actually entered its fi ghting phase with the storming of
Weißenburg by Bavarian and Prussian troops on 4 August.

For Marx, the actions performed in the costumes of Grenadier and Cuirassier uniforms on the
battlefi elds of Alsace and Lorraine were also evidently the secret work of the cunning of reason.
If the Prussians won, he calculated, then the resulting predominance of the German working
class over the French on the world stage would inevitably also lead to the predominance of our
theory over Proudhon’s. 245

As Engels maintained, ever since the war against Austria and the founding of the German
Confederation in 1866, Bismarck had in any case done “a bit of our work, in his own way and
without meaning to.”246 Now he was—again without knowing it—well on his way toward also
fi nishing off Proudhon for good and ensuring Marx’s un-challenged position in the international
workers’ movement.

After four weeks of fi ghting, the fortress of Sedan, having been bombarded by Krupp’s cast
steel artillery until it was ripe for attack, was forced to surrender on 2 September. Over a hundred
thousand

114 • Karl Marx

French soldiers, including Louis Napoléon, were taken prisoner. “My Emperor, my Emperor is a
captive!” mocked Engels in an allusion to a poem by Heinrich Heine.247 But the war continued.
Two days after the fall of Sedan, the Republic was proclaimed in the Paris Hôtel de Ville, and
under the leadership of the young Léon Gambetta the call went out immediately for a national
uprising of the people against the Germans. The Germans responded to this French populist
uprising by terrorizing civilians, imposing requisitions, burning down entire villages, and
shooting both alleged and actual guerillas. Marx saw this as a relapse into barbarism reminiscent
of the Thirty Years’

War, something he believed had long been overcome.248 Additionally, with the appearance of
the lust for Alsace and Lorraine, which he considered the greatest misfortune that could befall
Europe and especially Germany,249 he completely changed his mind about the war.

A defensive war had turned into a war of conquest. “History will measure its retribution,” he
wrote on 9 September 1870 in the name of the General Council, “not by the extent of the square
miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of
the 19th century, the policy of conquest!”250
As of 18 January 1871, a cease-fi re prevailed. On 28 February, Adolphe Thiers, chief of the
French Executive, who had always opposed the war, was forced to sign a preliminary peace
treaty in Versailles, and on 1 March the National Assembly, which had moved to Bordeaux, ratifi
ed it. The Thiers government’s policy of surrender was one of the reasons for the uprising of the
Paris Commune. Marx had not desired this development, even though after the cease-fi re was
arranged he felt that France could perhaps be saved if it fi nally grasped that revolutionary
measures and revolutionary energy were required in order to conduct a revolutionary war.251
But that was not to be expected from a country under the leadership of Thiers and Jules Favre,
one of the most notorious tools of the reign of terror of Cavaignac in 1848.252 Moreover, Marx
always rejected actions that were not carefully considered. As the French members of the
International exiled in London set off for Paris after the capture of Louis Napoléon and the
proclamation of the Republic, he feared they might commit all sorts of follies there in the name
of the International, overthrow the provisional government, and seek to establish a Commune de
Paris. 253 The French working class should not allow itself to be deluded by the national
souvenirs of 1792, he insisted in the name of the General Council. Any attempt to topple the new
regime while

Deeds • 115

the enemy was practically pounding on the gates of Paris would be nothing but desperate folly.
They would do better by looking forward and using the republican freedom to employ their
energies and wisdom to build up the organization of their own class.254 Thus Marx was
advocating the actual position of the International.

Yet when, in the National Assembly elections of early February 1871, the majority of the French
voted not for Gambetta’s republicans and the continuation of the war but for the peace-seeking
monarchists, Marx’s mood instantly changed. He now characterized the representatives in this
assembly of Krautjunkers (cabbage Junkers) as only the rebellious slaveholders of Bordeaux.
255 They were the actual secessionists from republican honor, like the Confederates in the
American Civil War. To place the requisite emphasis on the historical-political parallels, Marx
caricatured the French assembly’s political leaders in garish colors, polemically in the style of
George Grosz, who was no better a painter than Marx was consistently a serious historiographer
in his text about the civil war in France. Not only had Thiers proved his lying powers as an
historian prior to becoming a statesman and in the end possessed a brain all the vitality of which
had fl ed to the tongue; he also, Marx claimed, had agitated for the war against Prussia—which
was clearly untrue. Now the Krautjunker assembly had appointed Thiers its chief executive.

In contrast, the majority in Paris—besieged by the Prussians since September 1870—had voted
republican and patriotically. The National Guard was under arms, and the fi rst demands for the
election of a Commune rang out by October. Revolutionary committees formed in the quarters of
Paris and joined the National Guard to become a Central Committee. Thiers and Jules Favre, on
the other hand, were in Marx’s view nothing but reprobate creatures for whom appeasing the
insurgent capital was opportune mainly because only after Paris was again at peace could they
receive commission payments worth millions of francs for arranging state loans in the
billions.256 Only through a violent intervention, he maintained, presuming to have understood
their motives, could the appropriators of wealth hope to shift the costs of a war that they brought
about themselves onto the shoulders of the producers of wealth. 257 In his judgment, this
conspiracy was the true secret of the slaveholders’ rebellion in France.

In fact, however, the French had lost a war for which they had been poorly prepared. They had
little recourse, apart from agree-

116 • Karl Marx

ing to the humiliating conditions of the peace treaty and, as impo-tent spectators, enduring the
proclamations of a German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Bismarck knew their
weakness, and he therefore refused to intervene in Paris. Instead he made a mockery of the
French. They were supposed to fulfi ll the stipulated conditions of the peace treaty themselves,
which was not possible without the government’s control of its own capital city. Bismarck
provided them with a battalion of released war prisoners to solve the problem. The Commune of
Paris was offi cially proclaimed on 29

March through the municipal assembly. On 1 May—as in 1793—a Committee of Public Safety
public was formed. At the end of May, French government troops forced their way into the city
at the Porte de Saint-Cloud. The civil war in Paris lasted one week. According to estimates by
Marshal Mac-Mahon, the war resulted in seventeen thousand dead on the side of the Commune,
though presumably there were many more. Ninety-three death sentences were issued; two
hundred fi fty Communards were sentenced to forced labor; and forty-fi ve hundred were
transported to New Caledonia.

Marx’s text on the civil war in France was an obituary of this drama, one that would fi nally
make him a legend in Europe. The Paris-Journal honored him in a headline as the “Grand Chef
de l’Internationale,”258 and thereafter the title wound its way through the European press. The
text, which the General Council published as an address, went through three editions in two
months and was translated into most European languages. Everyone believed that the Paris
Commune was the work of the International, which was not the case. In reality, according to
Benedetto Croce, it represented a rebellion of the defeated and the armed, people who had not
yet given up and for whom a few federalist ideas were mixed up with the tendencies of a socialist
Republic.259 In a surrounded, starved-out city, Republicans, nostalgic old Jacobins, Blanquists,
and Proudhonists belonging to the International (in whom Marx, incidentally, had little confi
dence) came together—despite considerable differences—in an emergency situation under a red
fl ag. They included the painter Gustave Courbet; the author Jules Vallès, whose novel Jacques
Vingtras was one the most gripping depictions of the events; and Eugène Pottier, author of the
“Internationale,” which later became the anthem of the worldwide communist movement.

The Commune ordered the separation of church and state, prohibited night work in bakeries,
confi scated operations and factories

Deeds • 117

that had been abandoned by their owners, and encouraged the creation of associations with
inalienable common capital and workers’

self-administration. It absolved the petty bourgeoisie of its debts, ordered free schooling for boys
and girls, introduced the principle of the election and recall of state offi cials, and abolished the
division of powers, which Marx considered one of its most important measures.260 France itself
was supposed to be transformed, following the Parisian model, from a centralized state into a
community-based federation of self-administered municipalities. To the extent that the
Commune aligned itself according to any basic ideas, they were most likely drawn from
Proudhon’s Du principe fédératif. In this work written in 1863, Proudhon praised federalism as
the universal key liberating humans from every kind of human enslavement and expected that the
institution of federal, “mutualist” property would provide an escape from exploitation by capital
and the domination of banks. “Whoever says republic says federation, or he says nothing,” he
maintained; also, “whoever says socialism says federation, or he says nothing.”261 Basically,
however, the Commune was what Marx had feared from the start: the last act and swan song of
the revolutionary years from 1792 to 1794. The myth of the revolution had raised its head one
last time and was brutally drowned in blood.

In a certain way, thought Marx, who still wanted to discern in the events the hidden workings of
reason, the Commune, too, remained an opaque sphinx 262 that did not understand itself. As
Hegel interpreted the secret of the sphinx, it represented an “objective riddle,” a larva awaiting
unveiling through a spirited “know thyself.”263

What then was the Commune,264 Marx asked—as had Oedipus, who toppled the sphinx from
the cliff with the words the answer to the riddle is Man.265 “Its true secret was this,” came
Marx’s answer: “It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the
producing against the appropriating class , the political form at last discovered under which to
work out the economical emancipation of labour. ”266 Engels would later give Marx’s theses a
tangible form, maintaining that the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat in
history.267 In a conversation with Eduard Bernstein, however, he qualifi ed that assessment,
adding that such interpretations—including Marx’s—wanted to give expression “more to the
unconscious tendencies of the Commune than to its conscious plans.”268 The Commune did not
follow any plan. In keeping with the doctrine of historical materialism, Marx saw it as a
performance

118 • Karl Marx

of the wisdom of history itself in the world-revolutionary drama he had already described, in his
account of the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, as a devouring and purifying
purgatory.269 Concluding the address by the General Council, he wrote: “Working men’s Paris,
with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its
martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has
already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to
redeem them.”270

With this obituary, Marx—the “Grand Chef de l’ Internationale”—became overnight the best
calumniated and most menaced man of London. The public attention after a tedious twenty
years’ idyll in the backwoods clearly did him well. The Observer even threatened him with legal
prosecution.271 In lead articles, the Times, Telegraph, Standard, Spectator, Daily News, and
Pall Mall Gazette all commented on the text about the civil war in France, which caused more of
a sensation than any previous address by the General Council. To the public, the International
suddenly appeared as a great European power.
The Spectator praised Marx’s powerful language, and the Examiner even came out in support of
the International.272

At the beginning of June 1871, Jules Favre sent a circular letter to the governments of Europe
warning of the danger of the International. The Spanish government did the same. In France, a
harsh emergency law was enacted against the International, but the British government was not
very impressed by these frightening portrayals, and even Bismarck did not believe them.
(However, in 1872 he used the specter of communism to create the so-called Three Emperors’
League, a belated echo of the Holy Alliance.) Marx himself, in an extensive interview with the
New York World, energetically denied that the International was trying to force a specifi c
political form on any movement.273 Yet in a certain sense that was precisely what he tried to do
with his address on the civil war, especially with the claim that the Commune had shown that the
working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery 274 but rather must
destroy it. Later, Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks presumably took this as the basic substance
of Marx’s state doctrine.275

With the collapse of the Paris Commune, the great period of the International approached its end.
Two trade union leaders, Benjamin Lucraft and George Odger, who had sat on the association’s
General Council since its beginnings, announced their resignation

Deeds • 119

in response to the address about the civil war in France. Earlier, they had refused to undersign
the address with their names.276 They were unwilling to be involved in a revolutionary
radicalization of the International, now that it had issued an address on the civil war
characterizing the Paris Communards as the advanced guard of the modern proletariat. 277
Their chief concern in the summer of 1871 was William Gladstone’s Trade Union Act, which
would legally recognize the right to strike and the legal protection of unions and their trea-suries.
Another issue on their agenda was the struggle for the nine-hour workday. A few months later
the union leader John Hales, who until then had been the general secretary of the International,
followed suit. The goals of the real workers’ movement were different than Marx’s, even if the
trade unions did not likewise immediately jump ship.

On another front, Marx faced pressure from the Bakuninists.

In this confl ict, Marx, who initially envisioned his role in the International as the mouthpiece of
a large movement, increasingly developed into a party unto himself. He considered Bakunin
dangerous—as he did the Blanquists who had washed up in London with the masses of
Communard refugees—because he did not want to see the International compromised by their
actionism and ill-conceived attempts at coups d’état and revolutions. In 1872, Bakunin and his
supporters were expelled at a congress of the International at The Hague—the fi rst congress in
which Marx personally took part.

Then Engels made the motion to transfer the Central Committee to New York, a second strategic
move that primarily targeted the Blanquists.278 Marx and Engels wanted by any means to
prevent the General Council from one day falling into the hands of these conspirators. But the
time of the International was over anyway. It was dissolved on 15 July 1876 in Philadelphia,279
and with that, Marx’s career as a politician came to an end.

As early as 1874, in something like an anticipatory obituary, Friedrich Engels characterized the
International as a typical product of the era of the second French monarchy—the expression of a
naive cosmopolitanism of different factions that could not withstand the reality check of the Paris
Commune’s defeat and therefore inevitably disintegrated. He believed, however, that after
Marx’s writings had enjoyed some years of infl uence, the next International would be “directly
Communist and will openly proclaim our principles.”280

Yet things turned out differently. “In fact, with the expulsion of an-

120 • Karl Marx

archism,” in the judgment of Benedetto Croce, “socialism was ex-punging from its midst,
unconsciously, communism itself.”281 This remained valid for subsequent developments until
the catastrophe of the First World War.

After the fall of the Commune, not even Marx still believed in a European revolution in the
foreseeable future. His letters and publications from these years, incidentally, feature much about
the quarrels with Bakuninists in the International, but hardly a word on the 1873 Gründerkrise—
which was, after all, the greatest economic world economic crisis prior to 1929. He mentioned it
only briefl y in the afterword to the second edition of Capital in 1873 and again in a letter of mid
June 1875.282 This is noteworthy, for in the 1850s and 1860s an event of such secular signifi
cance, beginning with an epidemic of over-speculation and lasting many years before settling
down, would still have produced great prophetic hopes. The crisis had resulted in a wave of anti-
Semitism that Marx understood as little as he understood the nationalisms that in part were
invoked by and also followed this wave. But more to the point, the economy underwent a
complete transformation: the collapse revealed quick profi ts to be illusory, and soon everyone
was talking about strategic thinking, the analysis of results, and systematic investment in
industrial research and development. The days of the complete anarchy of primitive capitalism,
which was a constant call for revolution, seemed to belong to the past. “No-one will speak of
socialism again,”

Thiers maintained during these days, “and that is a good thing. We are rid of it.”283 Typical of
Thiers, this was in any case a somewhat carelessly expressed instance of wishful thinking. But in
fact, the myth of the tradition of 1792 had departed from Europe forever.

With the downfall of the Commune, the era of the nineteenth century’s continental revolutions,
into which Marx was born and which shaped him, was over. According to the judgment
pronounced by Croce, all socialisms of the past now lived only in the sacred tales and golden
legends of the party.284 The new reality consisted in unions and interest groups, in the creation
of political parties, in elective assemblies and parliamentary representations. In the years of the
Gründerzeit, Europe became increasingly bourgeois.

Even Marx—to end with an anecdote—was confronted with this fact in a surprising way. In mid
August 1879 at the Waterloo station, he chanced to meet his old friend, the former radical
Chartist Julian Harney, with whom he had founded the Universal Society of Revo-
Deeds • 121

lutionary Communists in the 1850s. Both men were on their way to Jersey, that Channel Island
where one spoke English and cooked French. The train arrived, and upon boarding they went
separate ways to their compartments: while Harney had a fi rst-class ticket, Marx’s ticket was for
second class.285 In the socialist workers’ movement of the bourgeois Fin de Siècle, Marx would
once again move up to fi rst class, but not the way he would have imagined.

Notes

1. Dolf Sternberger, Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1974),
27.

2. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 487, 489.

3. Marx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, Sixth Notebook, in MECW, vol. 1, 491.

4. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 489f.

5. Marx, “Illustrations of the Latest Exercise in Cabinet Style of Frederick William IV,” in
MECW, vol. 3, 209.

6. Alfred Meißner, Ich traf auch Heine in Paris: Unter Künstlern und Revolutionären in den
Metropolen Europas (Berlin, 1973), 103.

7. Marx, Herr Vogt, in MECW, vol. 17, 79.

8. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 318.

9. Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform: By a
Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 201.

10. Waltraud Seidel-Höppner, Wilhelm Weitling (Berlin, 1961), 63 ff.

11. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 319f.

12. Seidel-Höppner, Wilhelm Weitling, 71f.

13. McLellan, Karl Marx, 156.

14. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 318f.

15. Marx to Proudhon, 5 May 1846, in MECW, vol. 38, 39.

16. McLellan, Karl Marx, 159.

17. Marx to Annenkow, 28 December 1846, in MECW, vol. 38, 96.

18. Gurvitch, Dialektik und Soziologie, 120.

19. Quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, 92, 63.

20. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 313.

21. Quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, 170.

22. Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in MECW, vol. 9, 213.

23. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, in MECW, vol. 4, 581.

24. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 321.

25. Friedrich Leßner, “Erinnerungen eines Arbeiters an Karl Marx,” in Erinnerungen an Karl
Marx, 174.

122 • Karl Marx

26. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW, vol. 6, 481.

27. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 6, 211.

28. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW, vol. 6, 497, 518.

29. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §147, OUP, 208.

30. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW, vol. 6, 495.

31. Sternberger, Gerechtigkeit für das neunzehnte, 79.

32. Engels, “The Movement of 1847,” in MECW, vol. 6, 529.

33. Engels to Emil Blank, 28 March 1848, in MECW, vol. 38, 169.

34. Fanny Lewald, Erinnerungen aus dem Jahre 1848 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 22f.

35. Croce, History of Europe, 168.

36. Marx, “Persecution of Foreigners in Brussels,” in MECW, vol. 6, 567.

37. Marx to the Editor of La Réforme, in MECW, vol. 6, 565.

38. McLellan, Marx, S. 200

39. Marx, “Persecution of Foreigners in Brussels,” in MECW, vol. 6, 568.

40. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW, vol. 6, 493.

41. Engels to Marx, 8 March 1848, in MECW, vol. 38, 160.

42. Carl Friedrich Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt to his mother, 5 March 1848, in Revolutionsbriefe
1848/49, ed. Rolf Weber (Leipzig, 1973), 40f.

43. Carl Friedrich Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt to his mother, 13 March 1848, in Weber,
Revolutionsbriefe, 52f.

44. Quoted in Wilhelm Blos, Die Deutsche Revolution von 1848 bis 1849 (Berlin, 1923), 112;
quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

45. Quoted in ibid., 128; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

46. Rudolf Virchow to his father, 19 March 1848, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 68; quotation
translated by Bernard Heise.

47. Ibid., 70; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

48. Adolph von Menzel to Carl Heinrich Arnold, 23 March 1848, Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 77;
quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

49. Ibid., 80; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

50. Marx to Engels, 16 March 1848, in MECW, vol. 38, 162.

51. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 323.

52. Engels to Marx, 25 April 1848, in MECW, vol. 38, 173.

53. G. Mallinckrodt to his son Gustav, 5 March 1848, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 37ff.

54. Engels to Marx, 25 April 1848, in MECW, vol. 38, 172.

55. Otto Camphausen an W. Lenssen, 23 March 1848, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 85;

quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

56. Gustav Mevissen to David Hansemann, 21 March 1848, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 75;
quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

57. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW, vol. 6, 518.

58. Mehring, Karl Marx, 185.

59. Jacques Droz, “Die Ursprünge der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland,” in Droz, Geschichte
des Sozialismus, vol. 3, 20.

60. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 325.

61. Stefan Born to Karl Marx, 11 May 1848, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe, 144; quotation
translated by Bernard Heise.

62. Marx, Herr Vogt, in MECW, vol. 17, 80.

Deeds • 123

63. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 26, 325f.

64. Marx and Engels, “The Programmes of the Radical-Democratic Party and of the Left at
Frankfurt,” in MECW, vol. 7, 49.

65. Marx and Engels, “The Democratic Party,” in MECW, vol. 7, 27.

66. Marx and Engels, “The Crisis and the Counterrevolution,” in MECW, vol. 7, 431.

67. Marx and Engels, “News from Paris,” in MECW, vol. 7, 128.

68. Marx and Engels, “The 23rd of June,” in MECW, vol. 7, 130.

69. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, vol. 10, 70.

70. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, vol. 11, 111.

71. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, vol. 10, 71.

72. Marx and Engels, “The 24th of June,” in MECW, vol. 7, 138.

73. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York, 1996), 66.

74. Marx and Engels, “German Foreign Policy and the Latest Events in Prague,”

in MECW, vol. 7, 212.

75. Marx and Engels, “The Russian Note,” in MECW, vol. 7, 308.

76. Marx and Engels, “The Victory of the Counter-revolution in Vienna,” in MECW, vol.7, 505f.

77. Meißner, Ich traf auch Heine in Paris, 215.

78. Marx, “The Revolutionary Movement,” in MECW, vol. 8, 214.

79. Ibid., 215.

80. Marx and Engels, “The Danish-Prussian Armistice,” in MECW, vol 7, 421–

423.

81. Wilhelm Ribhegge, Das Parlament als Nation: Die Frankfurter Nationalversammlung
1848/49 (Düsseldorf, 1998), 85ff.; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

82. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 117.

83. Marx and Engels, “The Danish-Prussian Armistice,” in MECW, vol. 7, 422.
84. Marx and Engels, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” in MECW, vol. 7,
503.

85. Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” in MECW, vol. 8, 236.

86. Ibid., 238.

87. Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” in MECW, vol. 8, 372.

88. Ibid., 378.

89. Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” in MECW, vol. 8, 368.

90. Ibid., 365.

91. Ibid., 217f.

92. Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to Christian Carl Josia Bunsen, in Weber, Revolutionsbriefe,
331; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

93. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, vol. 11, 107.

94. Engels, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” in MECW, vol.

11, 5.

95. Marx to Engels, 23 August 1849, in MECW, vol. 38, 213.

96. Marx to Engels, 23 August 1849, in MECW, vol. 38, 212.

97. Engels to Harney, 5 October 1849, in MECW, vol. 38, 217.

98. Francois Bédarida, “Der englische Sozialismus von 1848 bis 1875,” in Droz, Geschichte des
Sozialismus, vol. 3, 133ff.

99. Marx and Engels, “Review (January–February 1850),” in MECW, vol. 10, 262f.

124 • Karl Marx

100. Marx and Engels, “Review (March–April 1850),” in MECW, vol. 10, 340.

101. Marx and Engels, “Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists,” in MECW, vol. 10,
614f.

102. Marx and Engels, “Address to the Central Authority to the League, June 1850,” in MECW,
vol. 10, 377.

103. Marx to Weydemeyer, 19 December 1849, in MECW, vol. 38, 220.

104. Marx and Engels, appendices to the “Rules of the Communist League,” in MECW, vol. 10,
634f.

105. Marx and Engels, “Address to the Central Authority to the League, June 1850,” in MECW,
vol. 10, 282.

106. Bédarida, “Der englische Sozialismus,” 136.

107. Engels, introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, in MECW,
vol. 27, 507.

108. Marx and Engels, “Review (May–October 1850),” in MECW, vol. 10, 490f., 510.

109. Marx and Engels, “Review (January–February 1850),” in MECW, vol. 10, 265f.

110. Ansprache der Zentralbehörde an den Bund, 6/22/1851, MEW, vol. 7, 562.

Quotations translated by Bernard Heise.

111. Engels to Marx, 5 February 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 280.

112. Marx and Engels, “Review (May–October 1850),” in MECW, vol. 10, 490ff.

113. Engels to Marx, 13 February 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 290.

114. Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne,” in MECW, vol. 11, 426.

115. Marx to Engels, 19 November 1852, in MECW, vol. 39, 247.

116. Engels, introduction to Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, in MECW, vol.
27, 514.

117. Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen: Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des
Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols.

(Munich, 2000), vol. 1, 184.

118. Otto Pfl anze, Bismarck: Der Reichsgründer (Munich, 1997), 314; quotation translated by
Bernard Heise.

119. Marx to Engels, 24 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, 361.

120. Engels, Introduction to Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, in MECW, vol.
27, 523.

121. Engels to Marx, 27 October 1857, in MECW, vol. 38, 488.

122. Marx to Engels, 24 November 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 492.

123. Engels to Marx, 1 May 1852, in MECW, vol. 39, 98.

124. Marx and Engels, The Great Men of the Exile, vol. 8, S. 267

125. Marx and Engels, The Great Men of the Exile, in MECW, vol. 11, 259, 305, 311.

126. Marx to Engels, 11 February 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 286.

127. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, vol. 11, 103, 142, 183, 140,
194.

128. Engels, “Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Comparatively Inactive in
December Last,” in MECW, vol. 11, 215.

129. Engels to Marx, 13 April 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, 266.

Deeds • 125

130. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, vol. 11, 124.

131. Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW, vol. 11, 6.

132. Marx to Weydemeyer, 27 June 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 377.

133. Marx to Weydemeyer, 2 August 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 402.

134. Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs (Chicago, 1908), 99.

135. Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Politica1 Economy, in MECW, vol. 29,
265f.

136. Liselotte Ungers and Oswald Mathias Ungers, Kommunen in der Neuen Welt (Cologne,
1972), 61ff.

137. Marx to Engels, 8 August 1851, in MECW, vol. 38, 409.

138. Marx to Engels, 9 April 1859, in MECW, vol. 40, 412.

139. Marx to Engels, 23 January 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 98.

140. Marx, “Elections – Financial Clouds – The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery,” MECW,
vol. 11, 494.

141. Marx, “Russian Policy Against Turkey – Chartism,” in MECW, vol. 12, 163.

142. Marx, “The War Question – Doings of Parliament – India,” in MECW, vol.

12, 212.
143. Marx, “Financial Failure of Government – Cabs – Ireland – The Russian Question,” in
MECW, vol. 12, 231.

144. Engels, “The European War,” in MECW, vol. 12, 556.

145. Marx to Engels, 11 July 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 145.

146. Marx to Engels, 20 October 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 191. ( Revue refers to the Neuen
Rheinische Zeitung Revue from November 1850.) 147. Marx to Engels, 13 November 1857, in
MECW, vol. 40, 199.

148. Engels to Marx, 15 November 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 201, 203.

149. Marx to Engels, 26 September 1856, in MECW, vol. 40, 72.

150. Friedrich Wilhelm IV to Groeben, 29 June 1857, in David Barclay, Frederick William IV
and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861 (Oxford, 1995), 277.

151. Marx to Engels, 18 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 224.

152. Ibid.

153. Marx to Engels, 8 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 217.

154. Marx to Engels, 2 April 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, 298.

155. Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital,” 2 vols.

(Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 28ff., 39.

156. Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, 49, 343; vol. 28,
12.

157. Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital,” 2 vols.

(Frankfurt am Main, 1968). 39.

158. Marx to Lassalle, 21 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, 270.

159. Marx to Engels, 13/15 January 1859, in MECW, vol. 40, 368.

160. Engels, “Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ” in MECW, vol.
16, 476.

161. Mehring, Karl Marx, 264.

162. Marx to Lassalle, 12 November 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, 354.

163. Quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, 310.

164. Engels, “Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ” in MECW, vol.
16, 472, 474, 475.

126 • Karl Marx

165. Ludwig August von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik. Angewendet auf die staatlichen
Zustände Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 148, 146; quotations translated by Bernard
Heise.

166. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: Eine Biographie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), vol.
2, 79.

167. Hans Peter Bleuel, Ferdinand Lassalle (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 68ff., 93, 119, 192f.

168. Quoted ibid., 215, 220; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

169. Ibid., 240.

170. Marx to Lassalle, 31 May 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, 317.

171. Marx to Engels, 22 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 227.

172. Engels to Lassalle, 14 March 1859, in MECW, vol. 40, 402.

173. Quoted in Bleuel, Lassalle, 243f., 284; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

174. Marx to Lassalle, 21 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 226.

175. Engels, Po and Rhine, in MECW, vol. 16, 215.

176. Marx to Engels, 7 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 280.

177. Lutz, Zwischen Habsburg und Preußen, 412.

178. Bleuel, Lassalle, 258ff.

179. Marx to Engels, 28 May 1859, in MECW, vol. 40, 435f.

180. Marx to Antoinette Philips, 18 March 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, 241f.

181. Marx to Antoinette Philips, 13 April 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 274.

182. Marx to Antoinette Philips, 24 March 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 270.

183. Ibid., 271.

184. Ibid.

185. Marx to Engels, 10 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 288.

186. Marx to Carl Siebel, 2 April 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 273.

187. Marx to Engels, 7 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 280.

188. Marx to Carl Siebel, 2 April 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 273.

189. Marx to Engels, 7 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 281.

190. Marx to Antoinette Philips, 13 April 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 275; trans.

note: the words here are translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol. 30, 594.

191. Marx to Engels, 30 July 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, 389; trans. note: the words here are
translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol. 30, 257.

192. Quoted in Bleuel, Lassalle, 312; quotations translated by Bernard Heise.

193. Marx to Kugelmann, 23 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 102.

194. Marx to Antoinette Philips, 18 March 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, 243.

195. Quoted in Pfl anze, Bismarck, 235; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.
196. Lassalle to Bismarck, 8 June 1863, quoted in Mehring, Karl Marx, 554.

197. Marx to Kugelmann, 23 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 102f.

198. Marx to Engels, 7 September 1864, in MECW, vol. 41, 560.

199. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (New York, 1978), 166.

200. Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 97.

201. Engels to Marx, 13 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 88.

202. Marx to Engels, 3 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 77.

203. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 16.

204. Marx to Lion Philips, 29 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 47, 48.

Deeds • 127

205. Marx, To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, in MECW, vol. 20,
20.

206. Marx to Lion Philips, 29 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 48.

207. Marx, To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, MECW, vol. 20, 20.

208. Marx, preface to the fi rst German edition of Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol.

35, 10f.

209. Marx, “English Public Opinion,” in MECW, vol. 19, 138.

210. Marx, “The Crisis in England,” in MECW, vol. 19, 53ff.

211. Marx, “A London Workers’ Meeting,” in MECW, vol. 19, 153f.

212. Marx to Engels, 13 February 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, 453.

213. Annie Kriegel, “Die Internationale Arbeiterassoziation (1864 bis 1876),” in Droz,
Geschichte des Sozialismus, vol. 3, 187.

214. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 16; trans. note: the words here are
translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol. 31, 13.

215. Ibid., 18.

216. Ibid., 18.

217. Marx to Engels, 13 February 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, 453; trans. note: the words here are
translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol. 30, 324.

218. Engels to Marx, 2 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 9.

219. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 19.

220. Marx to Engels, 20 May 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, 160.

221. Marx, “Value, Price and Profi t,” in MECW, vol. 20, 145, 146, 149.

222. Marx to Schweitzer, 13 February 1865, cited in Marx to Engels, 18 February 1865, in
MECW, vol. 42, 95f.; trans. note: the words here are translated directly from the German version,
MEW, vol. 31, 446.

223. Marx to Engels, 11 September 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, 424.

224. Marx to Kugelmann, 14 January 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, 221.

225. Marx, Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association, in MECW, vol.
20, 11.

226. Marx, “Value, Price and Profi t,” in MECW, vol. 20, 146.

227. Marx to Engels, 2 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, 351.

228. Marx, “Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress of the International
Working Men’s Association,” in MECW, vol. 21, 70.

229. Mehring, Karl Marx, 459.

230. Marx, “Connections between the International Working Men’s Association and English
Working Men’s Organisations,” in MECW, vol. 21, 26.

231. Kriegel, “Die Internationale Arbeiterassoziation,” 192ff.

232. Marx to Engels, 17 December 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, 405.

233. Jean Bruhat, “Das Kapital in der Geschichte des Sozialismus,” in Droz, Geschichte des
Sozialismus, vol. 3, 183.

234. Marx to Engels. 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, 19.

235. Marx, Confi dential Communication, in MECW, vol. 21, 114.

236. Ibid., 115.

237. Marx to Engels, 10 February 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, 424.

128 • Karl Marx

238. Quoted in Mayer, Engels, vol. 2, 222; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

239. Marx, Confi dential Communication, in MECW, vol. 21, 120.

240. Engels to Marx, 20 November 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, 165.

241. Marx to Sigfried Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, 475.

242. Marx, Confi dential Communication, in MECW, vol. 21, 86.

243. Marx to Lafargue, 2 June 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, 288.

244. Marx to Engels, 20 July 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 3.

245. Ibid., 4.

246. Engels to Marx, 15 August 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 47.

247. Engels to Marx, 4 September 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 61.

248. Marx to Kugelmann, 13 December 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 92f.

249. Marx to Engels, 17 August 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 51.

250. Marx, “Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s
Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” in MECW, vol. 22, 266.

251. Marx to Lafargue, 4 February 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, 114.

252. Marx to Hermann Jung, 18 January 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, 99.

253. Marx to Engels, 6 September 1870, in MECW, vol. 44, 64.

254. Marx, “Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s
Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” in MECW, vol. 22, 269.

255. Marx, The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, 319, 322; trans. note: some of the words
here are translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol.

17, 230.

256. Ibid., 314, 317, 320.

257. Ibid., 319.

258. Marx, To the Editorial Boards of the Volksstaat and the Zukunft, in MECW, vol. 22, 287.
259. Croce, History of Europe, 267.

260. Marx, The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, 331.

261. Gurvitch, Dialektik und Soziologie, 133; quotations translated by Bernard Heise.

262. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 328.

263. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans.

T.M. Knox, electronic edition (Oxford, 2000), 361.

264. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 328.

265. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, 361. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, S.
272.

266. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 334.

267. Engels, introduction to Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 27, 191.

268. Quoted in Mayer, Engels, vol. 2, 228; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

269. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW, vol. 11, 106.

270. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 355.

271. Marx to Kugelmann, 18 June 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, 158.

272. Engels, “The Address The Civil War in France and the English Press,” in MECW, vol. 22,
375.

273. McLellan, Karl Marx, 402.

Deeds • 129

274. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 328.

275. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Whitefi sh, MT, 2004), 32.

276. Kriegel, “Internationale Arbeiterassoziation,” 215.

277. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, vol. 22, 354.

278. Leßner, “Erinnerungen eines Arbeiters an Karl Marx,” 181.

279. Kriegel, “Internationale Arbeiterassoziation,” 213.

280. Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 12 September 1874, in MECW, vol. 45, 42.
281. Croce, History of Europe, 301.

282. Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 20;
Marx to Pyotr Lavrov, 18 June 1875, in MECW, vol. 45, 78.

283. Robert Schnerb, Europa im 19. Jahrhundert: Europa als Weltmacht (Munich, 1983), 437.
Quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

284. Croce, History of Europe, 301.

285. Marx to Engels, 14 August 1879, in MECW, vol. 45, 370.

DISCOVERIES

The Terrible Missile

In 1879, at the request of the Hohenzollern Princess Victoria, the liberal Sir Mountstuart
Elphinstone Grant Duff met Marx at the Devonshire Club at No. 50, St. James Street. Founded in
1874, the establishment was a favorite meeting spot for energetic, mostly younger Whigs. Grant
Duff, as fully bearded as Marx, was supposed to provide the princess with an authentic portrayal
of the former

“Graand Chef ” of the International, for the liberal daughter of the British king—married to
Friedrich, the future heir apparent to the German throne—had political notions that were
decidedly her own, running in some respects counter to Prussian traditions. After the meeting,
the emissary of the Hohenzollern court wrote to the princess that his counterpart had impressed
him as a “well informed, nay, learned man,” who, in his opinion, advocated sound ideas when
talking about the past and the present. But, according to Grant Duff, Marx became “unsatisfying
when he turned to the future.” Marx spoke extensively about the tremendous scale of the
Gründerkrise, ongoing for over fi ve years now. He expected, and in this respect agreed with
Grant Duff, that inner political turbulence would soon lead to an overthrow in Russia, and both
were worried about the increasing danger the arms race posed to Europe. Marx placed his hopes
in a revolt against the Prussian military system once Russia had collapsed. Grant Duff, the
perfect gentleman, did not follow his

132 • Karl Marx

view completely and asked him politely how he would get from the expected republic to his fi
nal objective. The republic was just a step along the way, Marx replied: “all great movements are
slow.”1

Marx had become noticeably more cautious about his prognosis.

Above all, he no longer expected the great crisis to have the same catalytic effect he had
predicted earlier. In the best-case scenario of a Russian collapse, the crisis could increase
dissatisfaction and lead to a republican situation—as actually would happen in a certain way in
1918. But he had evidently abandoned the hope that a crisis would reveal the capitalist system’s
inability to survive and thus immediately lead to a proletarian uprising; he now entertained vague
prospects of a slow, growing movement.

But basically, demonstrating the necessary connection between crisis and revolution was the
content of his entire life’s work, which he continued now as he had before. Marx’s lifetime
coincided with the greatest transformation humanity had witnessed since the Neo-lithic period.
Far more than other theoreticians before him, he was overwhelmed by the scope and speed of the
Industrial Revolution’s upending of an entire world in such a short time. Adam Smith’s Wealth
of Nations appeared in 1776, just prior to the Industrial Revolution; David Ricardo’s Principles
of Political Economy was published in 1817, when it was still in its infancy. Marx, whose
Capital was also an intense engagement with both of these classical economists, was poised to
become the most important theoretician of this secular transformation. To use the words of
Immanuel Kant, he found himself in the middle of the fog instead of being able to view it from
the outside. Grandiose sharp-sightedness was therefore almost inevitably accompanied by
irrational expectations of redemption, especially since these, coming from other sources, were
transferred to the mighty time machine that was seizing Europe and the world.

His antinomic thinking misled him above all to declare contradictions that could have been
resolved through trial and error to be fundamentally unsolvable. But this does not mean the
contradictions Marx discovered in the modern world never existed.

Even enthusiastic visionaries can make lasting scientifi c discoveries. The most famous example
is perhaps the hermetist Isaac Newton, who alongside his exacting studies always found himself
searching for an alchemical doctrine regarding the general coherence of the whole, and whom
alchemy frequently inspired to develop sustainable scientifi c hypotheses. Did the same also
apply to

Discoveries • 133

Marx? In the eyes of Joseph Schumpeter, for one, he was a fi rst-rate economist, and in light of
his considerable detailed economic research, the philosophical garb of his doctrine was
something that could safely be ignored.2 Thomas Nipperdey thought that his politically
eschatological will was precisely what made him more clear-sighted than his contemporaries and
predecessors.3 Signifi cantly, Marx was not a theorist of economic equilibrium or theologian of
the market place—merits that the fi nancial magnate George Soros, of all people, valued highly
in him.4 His most decisive economic discovery, according to Charles Taylor, was the identifi
cation of capitalism as the most innovative and creative economic system in human history—and
simultaneously also the most destructive. But, Taylor maintained, he should have remained
satisfi ed with this insight instead of losing himself in the hope that complex chaos could resolve
itself into a new harmony and simplicity.5 Richard Sennett supposed that Marx’s vision of a fl
eeting modernity also had something to do with his origins in a world of Biedermeier tranquility
and the nostalgic feeling for the ancient rhythms of the countryside that still lived within him,6
as was especially vividly demonstrated by his familial Sunday excursions to the hills of
Hampstead Heath, singing songs and reciting Shakespeare.7

By April 1864, two inheritances had enabled Marx to move from Grafton Terrace to a
comparatively comfortable row house with a winter garden in Maitland Park between Camden
Town and Hampstead Heath. His neighbor was the concierge of the House of Lords, Henry
Goddard. Here, in a fi rst-storey study with a picture window overlooking the park, the better
part of his main work was born.

Bookshelves stood on both sides of the fi replace and lined the walls, and in the middle of the
room stood two tables crammed with papers, books, and newspapers. Next to his work desk was
a leather sofa in which he occasionally relaxed. The wall over the fi replace was adorned with
original wallpaper from the study of Leibniz, the great philosopher of the rationality of a world
with inherently contradictory dynamics, with whom Marx incidentally shared an interest in
calculus.8 Enthroned on a mantel was a bust of Zeus from Otricoli.

For the fi rst time, Marx was working in an atmosphere befi tting a private scholar.

But no sooner had he settled in than the room became a regular meeting place for commissions
from the General Council of the International, which always interrupted his work on Capital.
Over

134 • Karl Marx

almost twenty years Marx had attempted many times to fi nish his work on economics. In 1866,
a clean copy of the manuscript of the fi rst volume of Capital was fi nally ready. He would be
sending the fi rst pages to his publisher in Hamburg next month,9 he informed a friend in mid
October; after it had gone into print, he wrote: “It is without question the most terrible missile
that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included).”10 Using all
scientifi c means, the terrible missile was supposed to prove to the bourgeoisie that its world
order was fi nite and fl eeting.

Without his precursors in the fi eld of economics, Marx’s thought was just as inconceivable as it
would have been without Hegel or the theories of early communism and socialism. In this fi eld,
like everyone else of his era, he was a labor-value theorist. “The annual labour of every nation is
the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it
annually consumes,” read the fi rst sentence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; and elsewhere
Smith wrote: “Labour, therefore, it appears evidently, is the only universal, as well as the only
accurate measure of value, or the only standard by which we can compare the values of different
commodities, at all times, and at all places.”11 The engagement with Adam Smith comprises a
large part of Theories of Surplus Value, sometimes referred to as the fourth volume of Capital,
which was published from Marx’s estate by Karl Kautsky between 1905 and 1910.

Marx accused Smith of theoretical inconsistencies and contradictions, but above all, by long
habit, he treated him phenomenologically, as an unfi nished step along the way to an actual self-
awareness of the modern—the revealed economic law of motion of modern society 12 on which
Marx was working. This also applied to David Ricardo, who likewise was among the labor-value
theorists. They represented unfi nished stages, due in part to the unfi nished temporal stages in
which they were produced, in part to the methodological limits of their theoretical approach, and
in part—and, according to Marx, most importantly—the limitations of their bourgeois horizons.
The crux of the matter for him was perhaps demonstrated most emphatically in a letter he wrote
to a friend in Hanover: Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year,
but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts
of products corresponding to the

Discoveries • 135

differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s
aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specifi
c proportions is certainly not abolished by the specifi c form of social production; it can only
change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can
change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves.
And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in
which the intercon-nection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the
individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. Where science
comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself.13

Neither Smith nor Ricardo had managed to do the latter because, infl uenced by Isaac Newton’s
theory of causality, they were thinking one-sidedly in terms of quantitative categories and fi xed
substances.14

Marx, however, was concerned with the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production,
with the analysis of capital in its basic structure, 15 and therefore with qualities, structures, and
determined social forms—with the life of the subject matter,16 as he put it, following Hegel. The
infl uence of Hegel’s logic, especially his distinctions between inner causes, external
requirements, and reciprocal actions,17 is noticeable throughout Capital. For Marx, the law of
value implemented an unconsciously unifying principle of societal labor,18 which guided the
regulating mechanisms of the modern mar-ket19 economy and was unique to that economy. It
proceeded from the simple assumption that value is added to available raw materials only and
exclusively through labor, and that nothing except this added value can be allocated for
distribution. Supply and demand admittedly regulate prices, which sometimes deviate signifi
cantly from value, but overall and in the long term they can only oscil-late around the level of
value—the “annual labor,” in Adam Smith’s terms. Because that is the case, and because the
regulating principle functions unconsciously in the market economy, this level violently
reestablishes itself in periodical crises—which also represent corrections of value.

Marx’s book is the representation of an ideal type, not an empirical description of capitalism.
Moreover, it is not a treatise on national economies but rather, according to its claims, a theory of
global economic relationships and their general principles. Marx

136 • Karl Marx

believed that this subject could be accomplished only with a theory that in all its details always
maintained a view of the overall coherence. For him, as for Hegel, the truth was the whole, a rich
totality of many determinations and relations. 20

This view determined his methodological approach. Here is a central quote:

The 17th-century economists, for example, always started with the living whole, the population,
the nation, the state, several States, etc., but analysis always led them in the end to the discovery
of a few determining abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As
soon as these individual moments had been more or less clearly deduced and abstracted,
economic systems were evolved which from the simple [concepts], such as labour, division of
labour, need, exchange value, advanced to the State, international exchange and the world
market. The latter is obviously the correct scientifi c method. The concrete is concrete because it
is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore
appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point, although it is the real
starting point, and thus also the starting point of perception and conception. The fi rst procedure
at-tenuates the comprehensive visualisation to abstract determinations, the second leads from
abstract determinations by way of thinking to the reproduction of the concrete.21

Marx thus did not begin his presentation in Capital with general concepts like population,
division of labor, or production sectors, which in themselves, as he saw it, only represented a
chaotic, unstructured, and therefore meaningless whole. Infl uenced by the discoveries of his
era’s modern biology, he focused fi rst on what he felt represented—as in microscopic anatomy
—the cell form 22 of modern reality: the commodity. At the fi rst abstract level, capitalism
represented a fully formed market economy that permeated the entire life of the society. Whereas
his precursors had identifi ed the commodity as something of a fi xed entity, for Marx it
represented the elementary embryonic form of the unity of all of the complexities and
contradictions of capitalism. Its entire corresponding economic and social system could
subsequently be appropriately explained, according to his central hypothesis, only on the basis of
the immanent contradictions of the commodity and its development into money and capital.23

Discoveries • 137

Marx’s Capital contains three basic theses: (1) Hidden behind apparent objective economic
conditions are actually social relationships; (2) the source of the acquisition of capital is the
exploitation of labor; (3) the inner contradictions of capitalism lead to its collapse. On two and a
half thousand pages in three volumes, he developed around these theses a widely ramifi ed and
richly detailed theory of the production, circulation, and distribution processes of capital. It was
avowedly an economic theory that was simultaneously a social theory and a prognosis of
historical development.

The commodity is not only a thing. The mystery of the commodity, according to Marx, lay in the
fact that in the commodity,

“the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the
product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour
is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the
products of their labour.”24 This thought informs the whole of Capital, and leading to it was a
straight path from the fi rst theories of alienation and objectifi cation of the early 1840s.25

But now, as his program for a Copernican revolution of humanity had required in 1843, self-
alienation in its unholy form 26 was exposed on the basis of what he saw as a developed positive
science, based on empirical research. “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his
own brain,” Marx wrote in the chapter about the general law of capitalist accumulation, “so in
capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”27

The critique of heaven had ultimately transformed into a critique of earth. Marx now stated that
for a society of commodity producers, Christianity, with its cult of abstract humanity, was the
appropriate form of religion. But for him, all this was only the expression of an inverted world in
which social relations appeared as material relations between persons and social relations
between things. With respect to people in a market economy, Marx wrote, “To them, their own
social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being
ruled by them.”28 In his view the capitalist market economy did not merely represent the
delirium of an uncontrollable automatism; rather, precisely because it did, this market economy
was above all a power relationship. And in contrast to earlier historical epochs like feudal
societies in the Middle Ages or the slave-holding societies of the ancient world, which were
based

138 • Karl Marx

on relations of personal dependence, the capitalist market economy was a power relationship of
objects over people.

As a consequence, this also applied to the person of the capitalist himself. “But here individuals
are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifi cations of economic categories,
embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests,” wrote Marx in the preface to the fi
rst edition of Capital: “My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of
society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual
responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively
raise himself above them.”29

Everything—at least everything essential for the functioning of the economic system—was,
Marx held, determined not by individuals but instead by the inner organization and dynamic, the
structure of the mode of production.30 His analysis concerned only the laws themselves,31
ignoring real-life psychological factors ranging from prudence and responsibility to greed and
avarice, which for him were mere accidents. “Only as personifi ed capital,” Marx maintained,
was the capitalist worthwhile for the scientifi c analysis of capitalism.32

And as such, he was nothing but the incarnation of the material will of capitalistic relations. The
actual object of his analysis was these relations, not the fi gure of the capitalist.

It was on this basis that Marx posed his question, in the fi rst volume of Capital, about the
origins of capital profi t and its consequences for the dynamic of the system as a whole. Even
Adam Smith had divided the value that workers added to material into two parts, one pertaining
to wages and the other to profi ts.33 Of all the contradictions that Smith otherwise entangled
himself in, this was Marx’s most groundbreaking realization, in particular because Smith had
demonstrated that the “newly-created surplus-value in itself has nothing to do with the part of the
capital which has been advanced (as materials and instruments).”34 Smith thereby identifi ed the
problem, but he did not solve it, nor did David Ricardo.

According to Marx, the ambiguous concept standing in the way of a solution was the value of
labour. 35
Left Ricardians of the 1820s like William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin concluded from
these theories that capital itself was wholly unproductive;36 consequently they demanded the
worker’s full rights to the product of his work.37 Marx, in contrast, held such talk about the
unproductivity of capital to be complete nonsense,38

Discoveries • 139

with one signifi cant limitation: “One can only speak of the productivity of capital,” he stated, “if
one regards capital as the embodiment of defi nite social relations of production”39—not, like
Ricardo and his leftwing students, as simple elements of every labour process.

For him, neither capital nor labor was productive in itself: it was rather capitalism that was
productive. If Ricardo had spoken not of labor but rather of labor capacity or labor power, he
would have discovered the key to the mystery of this system.40

The worker’s labor power was the only product on the market that had the special quality of
producing more value than it was worth itself.41 Its own value—namely, that which was
required to reproduce the worker himself—represented only part of the value that could be
produced through the use of his labor power for a specifi c period of time. Marx used this
division between the labor that was necessary to reproduce the worker and the surplus labor
attained through the use of the worker’s labor power to explain new profi ts—in his terminology,
surplus value. This surplus value would increase with the length of the workday; it would also
increase when gains in productivity reduced the cost of reproducing labor power and the amount
of time needed to produce the product. Marx called the fi rst absolute surplus value and the
second relative surplus value.

At the moment that a general labor market developed, the market economy—due to the unique
nature of labor power as a commodity—became a relation of capitalist production, which
paradoxically can be based on both the principle of fair exchange and exploitation at the same
time.

Did Marx consider the appropriation of surplus labor theft? No, he said: considered purely in
legal terms, there could be no objections. Neither could such objections be raised against the
right of the worker, as the seller of his labor, to limit the workday to a standard length: “There is
here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of
exchanges.”42 But this applied only to the sphere of the market. The labor contract having been
concluded, the worker discovered that he was not a free agent, “that the time for which he is free
to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it.”43 In contrast to the market,
the relation of production was a relation of exploitation that, with the progress of productivity,
was also materialized in the labor process itself. “Being independent of each other, the labourers
are isolated persons,” Marx maintained, but as part of a productive

140 • Karl Marx

mechanism they were only a particular mode of the existence of capital.44 This development
reached its zenith with the Industrial Revolution, for only machinery allowed it to become a
technologically tangible reality, in which the power of capital over labor could also become
materially complete.45 “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous
connected process, of a process of reproduction,” declared Marx in conclusion, “produces not
only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist
relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer.”46 All this necessarily
followed in a particular way from the explication of the inner contradictions of the commodity,
which fi rst—through the expansion of trade relations—

produced money, then—as the accumulation of money—capital, and fi nally—through the

emergence of the labor market—capitalism. Marx developed this genesis as a logical evolution
on the basis of his theory of labor value.

Yet in a preliminary excerpt in 1844, he had already presented a theory of capitalism that entirely
lacked the labor-value theory and the surplus-value theory based on the former, and that in
principle would also have been compatible with a theory of marginal util-ity. Even prior to his
reception of the classical labor-value theory, Marx had maintained that the relation of exchange
resulted in labor becoming “directly labour to earn a living,” leading to all the consequences that
would basically also characterize his later theory.47

Regardless, Marx’s central argument—with or without labor-value theory—was that market

relations cannot explain profi t; rather, the explanation must be sought in the relations of
production, for the market could distribute value but not create it.

But what happens to the profi t? And what role do the owners of capital themselves play in the
production process? During his studies of economics, when he was driven by the question of
how capitalists calculate the part of their income that they themselves consume and do not invest,
Marx had to pose these questions to his capitalist friend Engels in Manchester, who was
experienced in such matters.

“In commerce the merchant as a fi rm, as a producer of profi ts,” Engels answered, “and the same
merchant as a consumer are two entirely different people who confront one another as
antagonists. The merchant as a fi rm means capital account and/or profi t and loss account. The
merchant as a guzzler, toper, householder and procreator means household expense account.” In
the balance sheet, the latter

Discoveries • 141

was actually a pure loss and must be “written off the profi t.”48 And it was in fact the case, as
John Maynard Keynes wrote after the First World War, that the nouveaux riches of the
nineteenth century did not tend toward lavish expenditures, preferring the power they obtained
through their investments over the amenities of immediate consumption.49

More important, however, was the question of whether Engels’s calculation was in fact correct.
Did not the owner of capital, insofar as he was active in his own operation, also perform socially
necessary labor as planner, director, and organizer of the production process?

“The labour of superintendence and management,” Marx asserted,

“is naturally required wherever the direct process of production assumes the form of a combined
social process, and not of the isolated labour of independent producers.” That, too, he
maintained, was a productive job, which must be performed in every combined mode of
production. 50 Marx was indeed not concerned with the individual capitalist but rather with the
relation of capital, which remained a property and class relation even if by far the largest portion
of the profi t fl owed into reinvestment. Marx was not a moralist.

Without a doubt, capitalism was and is unjust. Yet Marx directed all of his ambition precisely
toward showing that things were being done in a rightful manner in modern class society. He
saw surplus value and exploitation as dialectic categories, not moral ones. Never, Engels insisted
in 1884, did Marx base his communist demands on an indictment of exploitation. “He says
only,” Engels noted tersely,

“that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact.”51

Marx’s communist argument was much more that a system based on economic anarchy would,
because of its exploitative character, encounter irresolvable contradictions and thus at some point
collapse.

He had to make this argument because his theory, according to its own claims, dealt with the
natural laws of capitalist production 52 and not with moral indignation. These laws were the
focus of the fi nal chapter of the fi rst volume of Capital and especially the chapter in the third
volume about the tendency of profi t rates to fall.

The individual capitalist in this great game, in Marx’s assessment, was only a chess piece. His
deployment was subject to pain of destruction, for competition dictated the immanent laws of
capitalistic production as external coercive laws. “It compels him to keep constantly extending
his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive
accumulation.”53 For Marx,

142 • Karl Marx

this coercive mechanism was at the same time responsible for capitalism’s revolutionary role in
world history, namely, to create at all costs a world of social wealth. 54 Continuing technological
innovation and increasing productive capacity of labor, as well as a concomitant increase in
relative surplus value and the rate of exploitation, were the necessary consequences of this
mechanism. In short, the colossal progress that he was able to observe in his lifetime had an
antagonistic character. 55 “As the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom a new
proletariat, a modern proletariat,” he wrote as early as 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy,
directed against Proudhon. “From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations
in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that
in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced.”56 The same
antinomic ideas were also taken up twenty years later in the chapter on the general laws of
capitalistic accumulation in the fi rst volume of Capital. But they did not exactly conform to the
facts of this same period. If, for the year 1850 in France, for example, one assumed an index of
100, then for 1870 the corresponding indices would be 358 for total profi ts, 175 for wages, and
123 for living expenses. Things looked similar in the other industrialized countries of Europe.57
Profi ts had admittedly increased dramatically, but real wages had risen modestly as well. This
corresponded to the fi gure of scissors, but hardly that of an antinomy.

In 1912, when Werner Sombart took stock of Germany’s economic development in the
nineteenth century, his results came as a surprise to many of his contemporaries. First, it was not
true that the poor had grown increasingly poorer—not even those at the lowest levels of society
who were commonly referred to as paupers. Second, the income of the middle classes had signifi
cantly increased. And third, it was not true that the number of the rich had increasingly shrunk—
quite the opposite.58 In many respects this contradicted Marx’s prognosis, which along with the
consolidation of wealth in an ever-decreasing number of hands also predicted the increasing
proletarianization of the rest of the population.

To be sure, after the fi rst great world economic crisis of 1857 and especially after the crisis of
1873—six years after the publication of the fi rst volume of Capital—a signifi cant concentration
and centralization process was observable with respect to industrial enterprises and banks, and
especially during the 1870s the formation of con-

Discoveries • 143

glomerates, trusts, cartels, and syndicates increased. But even here, the developments did not
take place so clearly in terms of polar opposites. The number of self-employed had in fact signifi
cantly declined during the second half of the nineteenth century, but while the trades were unable
to maintain their position with respect to their share of total production, they managed to do so in
terms of absolute numbers. In particular, metalworkers, construction workers, blacksmiths,
locksmiths, plumbers, cabinetmakers, opticians, and also small business dealing with luxury
goods proved quite capable of surviving.59 In early July 1850 Marx himself stood fascinated in
front of a model electric train on London’s Regent Street, enthusiastic about the prospect that the
“the electric spark” would in the future be even more revolutionary than “King Steam.”60 But he
never considered the potential that would accrue in particular to small-scale industry and the
trades through the development of serviceable three-phase motors.61 He saw only what did not
call his antinomic worldview into question.

Describing a central aspect of his general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx wrote:

Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means
of production, and of the command over labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual
capitals one from another. This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual
capitals or the repulsion of its fractions one from another, is counteracted by their attraction. This
last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of the command
over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed,
destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist,
transformation of many small into few large capitals.62

Basically, the law was supposed to demonstrate that capital was well on its way toward passing a
sentence of expropriation against itself, whereby a Hegelian fi gure of sublation would follow.63
“One capitalist always kills many.”64 Marx was not so much describing a real, and actually
observable, course of events during his time but rather the logical fi gure of a polarization: on the
one hand, the expropriation of capital by capital led to growing concentration and centralization;
on the other hand, the same process led to the downfall of the middle classes, the growth of the
proletariat, and the mass of

144 • Karl Marx

unemployed that Marx called the “industrial reserve army.” “It follows therefore,” he concluded,
“that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low,
must grow worse.”65 But growing along with “the mass of misery, oppression, slavery,
degradation, exploitation,” Marx reasoned on the basis of this antinomic coercive mechanism,
was also the outrage of “the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined,
united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”66

Here his language suddenly acquired the violence of Old Testa-ment prophets like Isaiah, who in
his purifying judgment promised some that they would be “smoke in my nostrils” and others that
the Lord would create for them “new heavens and a new earth.”67 “The knell of capitalist private
property sounds,” Marx announced at the end of the fi rst volume in the tone of a punishing
World Judge: “The expropriators are expropriated,” for the capitalistic mode of production
begot, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.

For Marx, this inversion meant a fi nal negation of negation:68 the riddle of history that he had
pursued for a quarter of a century was also fi nally solved by means of positive science. In
reality, however, this was just the explosive seduction of a logical antinomy laden with
tremendous historical-theological emotions.

Crisis and End Times

Marx naturally saw himself as a scientifi c theoretician of social evolution who operated on a
strictly empirical basis. “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it
provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle,” he wrote to Lassalle in mid
January 1861: “One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument.
Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the fi rst time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not
only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.”69

He did not want to say that his theory bore similarities to Darwin’s natural selection. But the idea
that teleology could have a rational core had fascinated him ever since he thought he had
discovered the rational core of absolute knowledge from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the
communist sublation of the alienation of man.70 The difference, though, was that Darwin did not
make prognoses about

Discoveries • 145

the future of species. He had discovered in human anatomy the key to the anatomy of other
species, but his view of evolution always remained retrospective. Had Marx actually been the
one who, as Engels stated in a eulogy upon his friend’s death in 1883, like Darwin recognized
the “fundamental law according to which human history moves and develops itself,”71 he would
have contented himself with the role of Minerva’s owl, which began its fl ight only with the fall
of dusk. There are no scientifi c statements about the future of history, and if one seeks a general
guiding criterion, at most it is the very indeterminate notion that the course of history is marked
by increasing complexity.72

Even so, if one formulates the parameters as did Ernest Gellner, for example, who is beyond any
suspicion of having Marxist sympathies, then historical materialism and the theory about modes
of production were indeed discoveries. “The contention is,” Gellner maintained, “that the
economic or productive base does indeed determine our problems, but that it does not determine
our solutions.”73 Capitalism is undoubtedly a problematic system, a fact that is revealed
especially by its periodic outbreaks of crisis. Even today, with respect to this problem, the
science of economics fi nds itself in a situation comparable to that of the geologist who very well
knows the dangers of California’s San Andreas Fault but does not know when the next
earthquake will occur and how dangerous it could be for the city of San Francisco. In 1954, John
Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his classical book about the Great Crash of 1929: “The causes of the
Great Depression are still far from certain.”74 And Joan Robinson, a student of John Maynard
Keynes, noted in 1966, shortly before a much less intense crisis: “It is impossible to understand
the economic system in which we are living if we try to interpret it as a rational scheme.”75
Nothing about this has changed since then. As a leading theorist in America, Lester Thurow,
once said, crises are

“built into its [capitalism’s] genetic code.”76

Marx thought so too, and this insight was perhaps one of his most important discoveries. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, James Mill, the father of Marx’s occasional visitor and
discussion partner John Stuart Mill, had developed the thesis about the “metaphysical necessity”
of market equilibrium, which was brought to the attention of the public by the Frenchman Jean-
Baptiste Say77 and has represented the creed of all market fundamentalists ever since.

The view of the tedious Say, noted Marx, “that overproduction is not

146 • Karl Marx

possible or at least that no general glut of the market is possible” is basically founded on nothing
but the naive and simplistic illusion that in a developed market economy “products are
exchanged against products. ”78 Pure humbug, he wrote on this occasion: as if modern
capitalism was simply barter trade that had existed for eons, but only on a far greater scale.

In contrast, the entire architectonics of Marx’s great economic work, starting with the commodity
as a “cell form”—the “genetic code” of the modern world—and going into many individual
details, was a highly complex portrait of an economic system. Not only was it not based on a
simple barter system, but together with the market, it had formed an entity—always endangered
and contradictory—

whose determining measure was the profi tability of capital and not the consumer needs of
market participants. In this system there was no metaphysical equilibrium; nor could there be, for
the system consisted of too many contradictory elements. However, without equilibrium it was
not viable in the long term. Whatever was not there therefore had always to reestablish itself, in
the normal case through market fl uctuations and in extreme cases through violent corrections,
marking the moment of the outbreak of a crisis.
Hardly anyone has described the roots of this mechanism as precisely as Marx. His philosophical
background, which elsewhere misled him into historical-theological speculation, served him well
here. Making use of Hegel, Marx described capitalism as an identity of identity and non-
identity,79 thus a unity of the different aspects, 80

which, as a unity, must necessarily assert its inner contradictions at some point in the process of
its development. As with the relation of capital itself, its periodic crises were also, for Marx,
already founded in the form of the commodity. “No one can sell unless some one else purchases.
But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold,” it says in the fi rst book of
Capital: To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an intrinsic unity, are
essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrinsic oneness expresses itself in an external
antithesis. If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete meta-
morphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase
become too pronounced, the intimate con-nexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by
producing—a crisis.81

Discoveries • 147

Marx posited these diverging trajectories of selling and buying as the most general cell form of
the crisis, the potential crisis as he formulated it, but without content, without a compelling
motivating factor. 82

They were, formulated in Hegelian fashion, its intrinsic potential form, which had to be
complemented by a series of factors before it could turn into an actual crisis.

Like a hidden virus, this cell form could quickly produce a veritable outbreak of a disease once it
no longer pertained merely to buying and selling but rather to the investment of capital. If such
an investment became unprofi table or was even threatened with losses, accumulation faltered.
The reasons for this varied, but as a rule they had something to do with general overproduction in
relation to solvent demand,83 which could be covered for a certain time through an expansion of
credit.84 Market disproportions could play a role in this, but the key factor was above all
consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution—that is, the buying potential
of the working population, which was limited by the relation of capital itself.85 At some point,
the money lay fallow, and this phenomenon of idle capital, according to Marx, usually precedes
crises. 86 It often found ways that only led faster to the outbreak of a crisis—for example,
speculative transactions. John Kenneth Galbraith classically described this mechanism using the
example of the Florida boom and other bubbles prior to the Great Crash of 1929. Marx observed
it for the fi rst time during the crisis of 1857. Uncommitted capital from trade and industry
moved into the stock market, allowing stock prices to rise to completely unrealistic heights. This
occurred chiefl y with respect to railway stocks, even though, as Marx wrote to Engels, revenues
had in places dropped dramatically by a quarter.

It was, he maintained, nothing but gambling in market 87—a game of pure chance that at some
point would inevitably collapse.

In extreme conditions, a new consonance of the market, according to Marx, could be reached
only by passing through the most extreme dissonances. 88 Basically, he viewed the crisis as
empirical proof of the validity of the unconsciously asserted law of value: a de facto trial-and-
error process that could strikingly prove the veracity of his theoretical deductions. “The world
trade crises,” he concluded,

“must be regarded as the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of
bourgeois economy.”89 There is little to object to here, even if Marx devoted only scant
attention to the

148 • Karl Marx

psychological factors that generally play a large role in overspecula-tion. An extreme early
example of this was the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, which burst after speculation had driven
up the value of four black tulips to that of a house on the Grachtenring in the center of
Amsterdam.90 But this preindustrial though nonetheless capitalistic trade crisis did not affect the
entire economy. And even extreme psychological irrationalities could come into play only in a
system that revealed the capitalistic genetic code observed by Marx.

Even Marx’s theory could hardly predict when, under what circumstances, and with what
intensity a crisis would erupt. However, it is an undisputed fact that each bust to date has been
followed by a boom. Marx did not see this any differently: “a crisis always forms the starting-
point of large new investments,” he maintained.91 Periodic “crooked dealing” was virtually a
prerequisite for “respectable trade and industry.”92 Marx regarded a large crisis as not merely a
violent adjustment of disproportionalities that occurred at the moment when, in line with
Hegelian logic, “all conditions”93—inner contradictions and external causes—required for its
eruption were at hand. It also formed the privileged mechanism by which capitalism, in
correcting its immanent destructive tendencies, secured its immediate survival. Apart from that,
Marx held, the periodic de-valuation of available capital through crises was a means—intrinsic to
capitalism itself—to stop the fall of general profi t rates and ac-celerate the accumulation of
capital value through the creation of new capital.94

He did not invent this theory. Adam Smith had thought he could discern a trending decline in
profi t rates through the indicator of empirically rising interest rates, and David Ricardo observed
that the pressure of a growing industrialized population on scarce natural resources necessarily
then led to increasing food prices and rents. As a countermeasure, Smith recommended the
expansion of international trade to increase profi t rates; Ricardo promised similar results from
free importation of cheap grain from overseas.95 Marx could not accept such solutions, fi rst of
all because they were purely national-economic in nature. For an analysis of the global economy,
which was his aim, they were not applicable because over time on a global scale their effects
would disappear on their own. At heart, however, his criticism pertained to the fact that neither
Smith nor Ricardo wanted to view the trend of falling rates of profi t as an inherent law of

Discoveries • 149

capitalism. They stood before a phenomenon they admittedly perceived, but they could not
explain it because they sought external causes for something that, according to Marx, could only
be found in the inherent contradictions of the system itself. As Hegel once said, just as cold or
wetness could hardly be the cause of a fever,96 the reasons provided by Smith and Ricardo could
hardly be the cause of the trend of falling rates of profi t.

Marx saw profi t as a different category from surplus value. The latter indicated the relation of
the value of labor power to the value newly produced by that labor power within a certain period
of time. In contrast, profi t represented the actual gains of capital. It was calculated on the basis
of total expenses, which included above all—apart from labor power—the amortization value of
the technological facilities used. To be sure, these facilities in themselves did not produce any
value, but they were the product of previous labor and in that respect represented a value. Marx
therefore called them constant capital, as opposed to the variable capital of labor power, which
produced new value. The development of technological innovation, however, engendered an
always-changing relation between constant and variable capital in favor of constant capital—
which in Marx’s terminology was the equivalent of capital’s increasing organic composition of
value. In this simple-to-discover relationship, he thought he had now discovered the mystery
whose solution has been the goal of all political economy since Adam Smith.

The actual tendency of capitalist production, according to Marx, produced namely “a

progressive relative decrease of the variable capital as compared to the constant capital, and
consequently a continuously rising organic composition of the total capital. The immediate result
of this is that the rate of surplus value, at the same, or even a rising, degree of labour
exploitation, is represented by a continually falling general rate of profi t.” The general profi t
rate’s progressive tendency to fall, Marx continued, was only an expression peculiar to the
capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of
labor.97 Sticking with Hegel’s analogy, it was neither cold nor wetness that caused the fever, but
rather the virus—the relation of capital itself—whose driving force was represented precisely by
the profi t rate. It was, for Marx, at once the driving force and the cause of disease for capitalism,
and he assumed the actual cause of the English economists’ anxiety over declining rates of profi t
lay in this inherent contradiction.98 For Marx, mean-

150 • Karl Marx

while, the trend toward decline was for the same reason the most important law of modern
political economy. 99 From his perspective, this law could decisively prove that the real barrier
of capitalist production is capital itself. 100 For him it was another critical fulcrum of the
scientifi c demonstration of an impending negation of the negation.

In any case, that was the trend. Considering the enormous development of productive powers
during the past thirty years alone, Marx cautiously maintained in the third volume of Capital,
instead of the previous diffi culty of explaining the falling profi t rate, the diffi culty arose of
explaining why this fall had not occurred faster and more severely. There must obviously be
counteracting infl uences at work, which cross and annul the effect of the general law, and which
give it merely the characteristic of a tendency. 101 Within the generally fragmentary third
volume, the chapter on counteracting tendencies, written in manuscript in the mid 1860s,
remained especially fragmentary—as if Marx had meanwhile been gripped by the same fear he
had ascribed to Smith and Ricardo when formulating his general law. He identifi ed the
predominant factors as the increase in the degree of exploitation and the decline of wages below
the value of labor power, international trade, and the declining cost and increased effi ciency of
technology. Apart from increased productivity in agriculture and consumer goods production,
which he did not mention, the latter was actually the salient point. This namely shows, according
to Marx, “that the same infl uences which tend to make the rate of profi t fall, also moderate the
effects of this tendency.”102 However, this in turn prompted the question whether technological
progress actually had to lead necessarily to an increase in capital’s organic composition of
value.103 Marx himself conceded that the mass of elements of constant capital could certainly
increase while its value remained the same or even fell.104 And in fact, since Marx’s time
capitalism’s greatest progress has been the declining costs of production techniques. What could
only have been seen as an exception during his time later became the rule in industrial and
agricultural development.105 For Marx, however, above all else, the periodical de-preciation of
existing capital during economic crises was the actual sys-temically inherent means to reduce the
fall of profi t rates.106 Still, he believed, none of this would ultimately change the fact that the
fall of profi t rates, despite counteracting tendencies, ultimately had to lead to the collapse of
capitalism. It could be no other way, without calling his entire theoretical construct into question.

Discoveries • 151

At the beginning of the 1880s he arrived at the conviction that the old ten-year cycle was over,
and that in future intermediate crises would make themselves felt at shorter intervals. Engels
even saw this as evidence of the complete exhaustion of capitalism. “If, from being acute, the
crises becomes chronic yet lose nothing of their intensity, what is likely to happen?” he wrote in
1886 to August Bebel: “We have entered a period which poses a far greater threat to the
existence of the old state of society than did the period of ten-year crises.”107 In any event,
Marx had long ago predicted the scenario that would be staged during these end times.
Pronounc-ing his curse on the capitalistic market economy at the end of the 1850s, Marx wrote:
“The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of
production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions.
The violent destruction of capital as the condition for its self-preservation, and not because of
external circumstances, is the most striking form in which it is advised to be gone and to give
room to a higher state of social production.”108 As of yet there has been no collapse, and
capitalism has survived wars, great catastrophes, and thereby also the hypothesis of falling profi t
rates. What actually occurs after severe crises has always been a new organization of capitalism
at a more effective level.

But Marx only saw the antinomic alternative between a dubious metaphysical market
equilibrium and the idea of common, all-embracing and far-sighted control 109 that would
banished the chaos of crises, transition capitalism to common property, and at the same time, by
abolishing the law of value, end the domination of profi t rates.

The solution he had in mind was very simple—indeed, in principle, insuffi ciently complex—if
he believed that the situation could be mastered by suspending the production relation itself
which is expressed in the category of money 110 and replacing it with a thoroughly planned
organization of labor. 111 Apparently, in 1843, while Marx was working through Hegel’s
political law in Kreuznach, it occurred to him briefl y that such models would necessarily
develop new systemic contradictions. Every bureaucracy, he noted at the time, had a tendency to
consider the entity of the state—and subsequently the state-analogous management of affairs that
Marx had in mind as a future prospect after the “death of the state”—as its private property, and
every bureaucrat was thus compelled to deal with the actual state jesuitically. 112 Yet he never
came back to this idea.

152 • Karl Marx

Thereafter, for the rest of his life, enchanted by the inverted historical theology of his eleventh
thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wanted to changed an inverted world by leveling complexities—
instead of only interpreting the world and thereby perhaps making it controllable within limits. A
proper interpretation of the contradictions of capitalism would, in any event, have secured
important advantages.

Every future policy of state (and global) regulation ultimately relies on how and to what extent
policy makers properly interpret what is supposed to be regulated. Marx’s theory provided
important theoretical approaches and suggestions. Equally signifi cantly, however, and in all of
his writings from beginning to end, his description of a communist future was always an
unsteady walk on thin ice.

Notes

1. Quoted in Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor (Chicago,
1976), 628, note 96.

2. Joseph

Schumpeter,

Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie (Bern, 1950), 78, 12.

3. Nipperdey,

Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, 525.

4. George

Soros,

Die Krise des globalen Kapitalismus: Die offene Gesellschaft in Gefahr (Frankfurt am Main,
2000), 27f.

5. Charles Taylor, “Kapitalismus ist unser faustischer Pakt,” in Fegefeuer des Marktes: Die
Zukunft des Kapitalismus, ed. Jens Jessen (Munich, 2006), 10f.

6. Richard

Sennett,

Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus (Berlin, 2007), 19.

7. Liebknecht,
Karl Marx, 131.

8. Paul Lafargue, “Karl Marx, Persönliche Erinngerungen,” in Mohr und General: Erinnerungen
an Marx und Engels (Berlin, 1985), 318.

9. Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, 328.

10. Marx to Johann Philipp Becker, 17 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, 358.

11. Smith, Adam , An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, The
Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6

vols., electronic edition (InteLex 2002), vol.1, 54.

12. Marx, preface to the fi rst German edition of Capital, vol. 1., in MECW, vol.

35, 10.

13. Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, 68.

14. Jindrich Zeleny, Die Wissenschaftslogik und ‘Das Kapital’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 23ff.

15. Marx,

Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 818, 266.

16. Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.

Discoveries • 153

17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Doctrine of Formal Logic, in G.W.F.

Hegel: The Oxford University Press Translations, 117ff.

18. Helmut

Reichelt,

Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 144.

19. Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main,
1976), 115.

20. Marx,

Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 28, 37.

21. Ibid.,
37f.

22. Marx, preface to the fi rst German edition of Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 8.

23. Zeleny,

Die Wissenschaftslogik und “Das Kapital,” 53, 136.

24. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 83.

25. Reichelt,

Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx, 137.

26. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol.

3, 176.

27. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 616.

28. Ibid.,

85.

29. Ibid.,10f.

30. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Das Kapital lesen, 2 vols. (Reinbek, 1972), vol. 2, 247.

31. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 9.

32. Ibid.,

588.

33. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 30, 385.

34. Ibid.,

387.

35. Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 31, 252.

36. Ibid., vol. 32, 397.

37. Bedarida, “Der Sozialismus in England bis 1848,” 54ff.

38. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 404f.

39. Ibid.,

398.

40. Ibid.,

37.

41. Engels, introduction to Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in MECW, vol. 27, 200.

42. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 5, 243.

43. Ibid.,

306.

44. Ibid.,

338.

45. Ibid.,

426.

46. Ibid.,

577.

47. Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Élémens D’économie Politique, 1844,” in MECW, vol. 3,
219.

48. Engels to Marx, 3 April 1851, MECW, vol. 38, 327.

49. Joan

Robinson,

Economics: An Awkward Corner (New York, 1967), 3.

50. Marx,

Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 381.

51. Engels, preface to the fi rst German edition of Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW,
vol. 26, 282.

52. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 9.

53. Ibid.,

588.

54. Ibid.

154 • Karl Marx

55. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 640.

56. Marx,

Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 6, 175.

57. Schnerb,

Europa im 19. Jahrhundert, 322.

58. Werner

Sombart,

Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, quoted in Michael Stürmer, Das ruhelose
Reich: Deutschland 1866–1918 (Munich, 2004), 65.

59. Michael

North,

ed.,

Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 2000), 228.

60. Liebknecht,

Karl Marx; Biographical Memoirs, 57.

61. North,

Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 243.

62. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 621.

63. “The repulsion therefore has an equal right to be called Attraction; and the exclusive One, or
Being-for-self, suppresses itself ”: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Science of Logic,” in
Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §84, OUP Translation, 143.

64. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 750.

65. Ibid.,

639.

66. Ibid.,

750.

67. Isa. 65: 5 and 17.

68. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 750.

69. Marx to Lassalle, 16 January 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, 246f.

70. Marx,

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 331.

71. Engels, draft of a speech at the graveside of Karl Marx, published in the newspaper La
Justice, 20 March 1883, in MECW, vol. 24, 463.

72. Habermas,

Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, 155.

73. Ernest

Gellner,

Plough, Sword and Book (Chicago, 1988), 19.

74. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (New York, 2009), 171.

75. Robinson,

Economics: An Awkward Corner, 3.

76. Lester C. Thurow, Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build A Long and Lasting
Global Properity (New York, 2003), 90.

77. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol.

29, 333.

78. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 124.

79. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy (Albany, 1977), 156.

80. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 131.

81. Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 123.

82. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 140.

83. Ibid.,

137.

84. Engels to Marx, 11 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 220.

85. Marx,

Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 243.

86. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 126.

87. Marx to Engels, 25 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 231; translator’s note: the words here
are translated directly from the German version, MEW, vol.
29, 237f.

88. Marx,

Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 28, 86.

89. Marx,

Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 32, 140.

90. Thurow,

Fortune Favors the Bold, 50.

Discoveries • 155

91. Marx, Capital, vol. 2, in MECW, vol. 36, 188.

92. Marx to Engels, 8 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, 216.

93. Quoted in Zeleny, Die Wissenschaftslogik und “Das Kapital,” 3; quotation translated by
Bernard Heise.

94. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 248.

95. Joseph M. Gillman, Das Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profi trate (Frankfurt am Main,
1969), 9ff.

96. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 2, Werke in zwanzig Bänden,
ed. Eva Moldenhauer, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1969–1971), vol. 6, 228.

97. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 211.

98. Ibid., 257f.

99. Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, 133.

100. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 248.

101. Ibid., 230.

102. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 234; Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW,
vol. 32, 542.

103. Gillman, Das Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profi trate, 29.

104. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 234.

105. Gillman, Das Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profi trate, 35.
106. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 248.

107. Engels to August Bebel, 20–23 January 1886, in MECW, vol. 47, 390.

108. Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, 134.

109. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 121.

110. Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 28, 61.

111. Ibid., 108; translator’s note: the words here are translated directly from the German version,
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Berlin, 1953), 42.

112. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW, vol. 3, 47; see
also Daniel Bell, Die nachindustrielle Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1979).

CONSEQUENCES

To the Sun, to Freedom

Thus, with a certain degree of inevitability, Marx’s political effect was subject to the law of
unintended consequences. The history of the International had already shown that Marx’s
greatest success came when he acted as a theoretician of union struggle, and that it surpassed its
zenith the moment he wanted to proclaim his old chiliastic message of salvation after the Paris
Commune. The history of German social democracy would stage anew this struggle between
heaven and earth. Even during the 1848 revolution, Stefan Born’s Workers’ Brotherhood—at the
time the most important workers’ organization on the continent—was already marked by a
“revisionist”

softening of communist principles. “We are not conspiring against the existing regime,” Born
maintained during the revolutionary days, when he was still a member of the Communist
League: “We only want to be allowed our own place in the common Fatherland.”1

The real workers’ movement, as Marx was forced to learn with frustration, always revealed such
traits of pragmatic softening bound up with the desire for civic recognition. The same problem
would re-appear with Lassalle and the British trade unions. Marx therefore watched German
social democracy like a hawk.

Its history began with Lassalle’s German Workers’ Association, and over the course of time the
Social Democratic Party became the fi rst party in the world to explicitly invoke Marx. Above all
it

158 • Karl Marx

was a political entity that kept alive a wide range of traditions from 1848 in a counter-world that
withdrew from the offi cial world of the Kaiserreich.
The Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was established in 1875

in Gotha through the amalgamation of Ferdinand Lassalle’s German Workers’ Association,

founded in 1863, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party that Wilhelm Liebknecht and
August Bebel founded in Eisenach in 1868. Increasingly under suspicion in the new empire of
being vaterlandslose Gesellen (journeymen without a fatherland), party members found strength
in Marx’s confi dence in history, and especially in the comforting certainty that in the end they
would stand with the victors, since developments would inevitably have to proceed along a
trajectory in favor of the workers’ movement. Marxism established itself on solid ground as a
kind of secular religion of redemption; it was revolutionary only within limits, but Bismarck
would be powerless against it in the long run. And through futuristic dreams popularized by best
sellers like August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, it seduced hundreds of thousands readers with
the consolation that the future held a better world where, after the expropriation of capitalists, a
central plan would allow for a workday of only two or three hours, and where, once exploitation
had disappeared, all crime would vanish as well. First published in 1879, Bebel’s book had gone
through fi fty editions by 1909.2 It contained much about a futuristic world along the lines of
Fourier—something that could excite even bourgeois teenagers of the Gründerzeit with its faith
in science—and a little Marx.

Capital found its readers much less easily. It took four years to sell the fi rst thousand copies of
the fi rst edition. A French and Russian translation appeared in 1872. The latter in particular went
through considerably more editions than the German version. Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber at the
University of Kiev praised the book as an important further development of the theories of Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, which very much fl attered Marx.3 But Sieber was basically a social
liberal who—like the so-called Russian legal Marxists Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, Peter Struve,
and Sergei Bulgakov—

took from Capital above all the historical necessity of the capitalistic development of Russia.
Ferdinand Freiligrath, who referred to himself as an economist by instinct, thought that many
merchants and factory owners along the Rhine would be enthusiastic about the book, and that
within these circles it would also fulfi ll its actual pur-

Consequences • 159

pose. But the terrible missile occasionally had diffi culty reaching its actual readers.

However, Arnold Ruge, Marx’s erstwhile comrade-in-arms and later opponent during his time in
Paris, conceded without envy that Capital was an “epoch-defi ning work,” and that particularly
the argument regarding surplus value through unpaid labor and the impending expropriation of
the expropriators was classically successful.4 Johann Baptist von Schweitzer reviewed the book
in the Social-Democrat, as did the former tanner and autodidact Joseph Dietzgen in the
Demokratische Wochenblatt. 5 Within Germany’s social democratic movement, Liebknecht and
Bebel admittedly considered themselves supporters of Marx, but this essentially pertained to
only a couple fundamental programmatic points. Liebknecht felt that workers basically needed to
clearly understand three things: fi rst, that labor was the source of all value; second, that capital
exploited the workers; and third, that in a social-democratic state wage labor needed to be
replaced by an association. Anyone with a scholarly interest beyond that could, naturally, read
Capital. 6 But Liebknecht himself had practical problems to solve. As he categorically informed
Engels, Liebknecht was anyway of the opinion that theory and praxis were “two very different
things.”7 He let Marx know that he would allow himself to be instructed on theoretical matters
but that in the fi eld of practice, compared to the Church Fathers in London, he was “somewhat
more profi cient.”8

After the unifi cation of the Reich in 1871, the two German workers’ parties had found
themselves under increasing pressure from above. Bismarck was gripped by a growing fear of
“enemies of the Reich.” At the end of March 1872, Bebel and Liebknecht were sentenced to two
years in prison because of their negative attitude to the Franco-Prussian War and their
sympathies for the Paris Commune. After crisis broke out in 1873, the situation grew more
severe. In 1874, the General German Workers’ Association was banned in Prussia. During the
Reichstag election of the same year, however, Lassallean and Eisenach supporters of Marx
campaigned successfully on shared electoral lists. Within the Reich as a whole they obtained
only 6.5 percent of the votes, but regionally their successes were signifi cantly higher in some
places. In Hamburg they had 40.7 percent of the vote; in Saxony, 36.2 percent; in Schleswig-
Holstein, 32.5 percent; and in Lübeck, 32.4 percent.9 The ban in Prussia, the electoral successes,
and the challenges of the crisis en-

160 • Karl Marx

couraged a unifying mood in both parties. The Lassalleans made an initial offer to the committee
of Eisenachers sitting in Hamburg in fall 1874. On 22 May 1875, the party congress for unifi
cation took place in Gotha. One hundred twenty-seven delegates represented 29,659 members,
the majority of whom were Lassalleans. Even so, Wilhelm Liebknecht was offered the offi ce for
dealing with program issues, and he could hardly manage to formulate anything beyond the
previously negotiated pragmatic compromise.

Ever since the early 1850s when, exiled in London, he frequented Marx’s home, Liebknecht had
been a kind of confi dant to the two heads of the movement in Germany. “He was my teacher,”
he said of Marx, who sometimes, according to Liebknecht, could destroy his enemies with the
“aroused seriousness of Tacitus.”10 This aroused seriousness was now directed at him, after the
appearance, without the Londoners’ prior knowledge, of a jointly written program draft in the
party press in early March 1875. Marx thought that such a reprehensible program that
demoralizes the Party, which Liebknecht wanted to present in Gotha and from which Marx and
Engels would remain altogether remote, could under no circumstances be recognized through
diplomatic silence. It contained nothing but a blatant canonization of the Lassallean articles of
faith, and the momentary success of unifi cation was thus purchased far too dearly.11 “Our party
could hardly demean itself further,” wrote Engels shortly thereafter, directing his anger at Bebel.
“Neither Liebknecht nor anyone else has let us have any kind of information.” Engels suspected
that Liebknecht had allowed himself to be bamboozled by the Lassalleans. If the program was
accepted, he threatened, he and Marx could “never recognise a new party set up on that basis.”
Hardly a word in this

“insipidly written” program, he maintained, could withstand a serious critique.12

Marx composed comprehensive “Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Workers’
Party” and, even prior to the party congress, sent them to Germany. They were a scathing
critique of the Gotha program, which in Marx’s eyes did not reject a single one of the slogans
once coined by Lassalle. He was especially annoyed by the formulation of the future “free basis
of the state.” Which state, he asked, noting that the freedom of the state basically only existed in
raising itself above society, so no other state was as free as the despotic state in Russia. The
question regarding the transformation of the state into a communist society, in contrast, could
only be

Consequences • 161

answered scientifi cally, the way Marx believed he had already done at the beginning of the
1850s. “Between capitalist and communist society,” Marx continued in a fi nal denunciation of
Lassalle’s phras-ing, “there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the
other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing
but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. ”13 It was his last attempt to intervene in
German politics. But it went largely unnoticed.

Liebknecht prudently kept the text under lock and key, thus assuring that only a very small circle
of comrades were familiar with Marx’s “Marginal Notes.” If “the International had not created
such a shameful fi asco,” he shot back somewhat angrily at Engels, the unifi cation would have
taken place without problems, and it would have been easy to come together and agree upon the
program of the International.14 The latter was in any event, in contrast to Marx’s irate drafts, not
really a revolutionary program, as they both knew.

Marx’s concept of a revolutionary transition period of a proletarian dictatorship would never

play a role in social democracy. His “Marginal Notes” simply disappeared amongst the fi les and
were fi rst published in 1891, not for political but rather antiquarian purposes—as a document
from a bygone era in the history of the Social Democratic Party.15 Only with Lenin and
Bolshevism did the Critique of the Gotha Programme acquire the status of a fundamental
revolutionary text. August Bebel took a very long time to respond to Engels’s vehement
accusations. He essentially agreed with Engels’s critique of the draft of the program, Bebel wrote
to London in September 1875, and he reproached Liebknecht harshly for his willingness to make
concessions. But in general, he wrote, “we can be quite satisfi ed with the course of the party,”
placatingly invoking the mantle of history.16 Marx would never again attempt with such severity
to infl uence German social democracy.

Quite the contrary, in fact: he apparently came to terms with the old doctrines, namely that any
real movement was better than a dozen programs.17 “The muster-roll of the Social-Democratic
party in Germany on the occasion of the general elections,” he wrote enthusiastically in the
beginning of 1877, “has rudely alarmed, not only our amiable German philistine, but also les
classes dominantes in England and France.” There was indeed a pleasant contrast between the
melodramatic fi ts and starts of the French and the businesslike way of proceeding of the
German socialists. 18 Apart from that, with

162 • Karl Marx

social democratic workers’ parties not only in Germany but also in other countries, he now felt
that “instead of dying out, the International did only pass from its fi rst period of incubation to a
higher one where its already original tendencies have in part become realities.”19 Any new
revolutionary spark ignited in the course of their sober, day-to-day business would probably
concern the outbreak of revolution in Russia, which Marx once again feverishly expected in the
wake of the Eastern Crisis of 1877. In this case, however, the Social-Democratic legions at home
would be available in Germany and would very quickly convince the cultural philistines that
there are more important things in the world than Richard Wagner’s music of the future. 20
Marx was never quite able to decide between heaven and earth. Neither did he need to, at this
point in time, for the Eastern Crisis ended anyhow with a compromise at the Berlin Congress.

Incidentally, as before, the Social-Democratic legions were a heterogeneous mass that hardly
stood especially close to Marx’s theories.

The change was more or less the result of coincidence, having something to do with the sudden
popularity of the writings of the blind and eccentric independent lecturer Eugen Dühring.
Dühring gave lectures outside the university about his concept of a “socialistic”

( sozialitär) transformation of the economy and his ethic of natural piety and courageously facing
life; hordes of students with socialist inclinations and nonconformists streamed to these lectures
as if they were revelations.21 His voice was soft and his judgments were downright crude. He
irreverently referred to Goethe as the Kötchen (little shit) and to Helmholtz as Helmklotz (helmet
klutz); he called Gaussian mathematics a “geometry of stupidity.” Shortly thereafter, Dühring
also drew attention to himself as a militant anti-Semite when, in his book about the “Jewish
question,” he referred to the Jews as an “inner Carthage” “whose power must be broken by the
modern nations [Völker] so that they do not themselves have to suffer the destruction by [this
Carthage] of their moral and material foundations.”22 But that was in 1880. In the mid 1870s,
the doctrines of this “new Communist” impressed even Bebel, no less so than they did the young
bank employee Eduard Bernstein.

But when Dühring also took aim at Marx, calling him a “scientifi c portrait of misery” (
wissenschaftliche Jammergestalt), Liebknecht boiled over, especially since he had just received
an article written for Vorwärts that celebrated Dühring as a “fi ghter for science.” He pressured
London for a “sharp reckoning,” but Engels, who was occupied

Consequences • 163

with studies for his Dialectics of Nature, took his time making up his mind to do it. Marx was
not available anyway, because Engels—who incidentally had been residing in London since
1870—was insisting that he complete the two subsequent volumes of Capital. Engels was

“pestered … dreadfully,” as he noted in late November 1876, until he had undertaken the
“disagreeable task”—“disagreeable because the man is blind so that the contest is unequal.”23
“Anti-Dühring”

initially appeared as a series of articles in Vorwärts from January 1877

to July 1878 and then, shortly before the decree of the Anti-Socialist Laws, also as a book
entitled Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, published by Dietz in Stuttgart.
This book did more than anything else to spread Marxism throughout continental social
democracy. Only after reading Engels’s popular text about the “superiority of the Marx-Engels
theory over all other justifi cations of socialism” did Bebel and Bernstein appeared to be
convinced.24 It was no different for Karl Kautsky, who was later the keeper of Grail of Marxism
within social democracy, the exiled Russians Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, and the
Italian Antonio Labriola. “Only now,” wrote Engels’s biographer Gustav Mayer, “did an actual
Marxist school and tradition take form on the continent.”25 In 1889, this development led to the
founding of the Second International of social democratic parties on an increasingly Marxist
basis.26 Marx became a very well-known fi gure even among European workers. At the
beginning of the 1890s, Engels observed during a trip on the continent that Paris was virtually
teeming with Marx medallions, and Germany, Austria, and Switzerland abounded with plaster
busts of Marx.27

Engels’s text against Dühring (Marx contributed substantially to its chapters on economics)28
achieved its great popularity chiefl y because it claimed to provide, within three hundred pages
of clearly comprehensible language, a “more comprehensive view of the world.” It explained
what would later be called dialectical materialism—in the words of Engels, an “exact
representation of the uni-verse, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the refl
ection of this evolution in the minds of men,” and thus of nature, history, and thought. Such a
representation, Engels continued, was only possible with the help of dialectics, which
“comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin, and ending.” Even the speculative fi gure of the negation of the
negation became thus for Engels an

164 • Karl Marx

“extremely general—and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important—law of

development of nature, history, and thought.”

29 Engels’s text basically represented an attempt, in the form of a polemic against Dühring, to
introduce a materialist version of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that, in
terms of its construct, completely mimicked its Hegelian model. Like Hegel’s text, it began with
nature and, after a dialectical progressive movement, fi nished with socialism, which in the
Hegelian original corresponded to Absolute Spirit. It struck a vital nerve in the zeitgeist of an
epoch that craved a simple approach to the solution of all of the world’s riddles.

Especially among freethinkers, “scientifi c worldview” was then an increasingly popular

buzzword, and Engels was not the only one who opposed the closed worldview of theology and
idealistic philosophy with a materialistic monism. But Engels considered himself, as a
dialectician, vastly superior to authors like Ludwig Büchner, Ernst Haeckel, or Jacob Moleschott,
whom he characterized as vul-gar materialists. Additionally, he saw himself as the mouthpiece of
the workers’ movement, which, as he wrote a few years later, was the only legitimate “inheritor
of German classical philosophy” and the only place where the “German aptitude for theory”
remained unimpaired, whereas bourgeois science had long since regressed to

“inane eclecticism.”30 Engels was the consequential founder of dialectical materialism and so-
called proletarian science, which, however, would fi rst come to full fruition during Stalin’s real
socialism.

For the time being, and especially after the promulgation of the Anti-Socialist Laws, it served
social democrats, who were partially forced underground, as a kind of comforting philosophy.
Bismarck won an initial battle when he fi nally managed to railroad a ban on the Social
Democratic Party through the Reichstag on 18 October 1878. Two assassination attempts against
the Kaiser in late spring that year had provided both the pretext and the required votes.

Crown Prince Friedrich opposed the ban because he feared, quite rightly, that Bismarck’s “war
of annihilation” against Social Democrats would ultimately also affect the Liberals,31 which
would have been the reason his wife, Victoria, charged Grant Duff with learning more about
Marx. The liberal crown prince, however, did not prevail. Forty-fi ve social democratic
newspapers, 1,300 print publications, and over 300 workers’ organizations were banned, and

Consequences • 165

900 evictions were carried out from areas where the government declared a so-called small state
of siege. Around 1,500 people ended up in prison.

But despite the prohibitions, arrests, evictions, and ruined lives, social democracy could not be
erased from Germany’s political life, especially since the prohibition applied to the party
organization but not to the fraction in the Reichstag. During the twelve-year period in which it
was banned, the number of social democratic voters increased fourfold. As Gordon A. Craig
once noted, in an act of a conservative denial of reality Bismarck had completely underestimated
the power of the social transformation.32 He also underestimated the vitality of social democracy
itself. Basically, Engels thought, Bismarck was once again working unwittingly “for us.”33 In
1879, a new party newspaper created in Zurich, the Social Democrat, spread throughout the
Reich via an illegal postal service and was able to reestablish the connections between the party
leadership and the individual party organizations. The fi rst party congress of the Social
Democrats in exile, which took place in 1880 at the Wyden castle in Switzerland, sided all the
more strongly with Marx’s ideas.

After the passing of Bismarck era, the Anti-Socialist Laws were abolished at the end of
September 1890. At no time were the masses more aware of the class-based character of state
and society than during the almost twelve-year duration of the emergency laws, Bebel reported
on this day. Bebel had been shaping the party at least since the 1887 party congress in St. Gallen,
and his prognosis about the inevitable “large unholy mess” ( großer Kladderadatsch)—that is,
the fi nal crisis of the bourgeois world, which in the not-too-distant future would be replaced by a
socialist “state of the future”—played a role here as well. In light of the Gründerkrise, which had
already lasted longer than ten years, Bebel’s expectation felt very immediate, like something that
could happen at any time, almost overnight.34

But the life of day-to-day politics suddenly gained increasing signifi -

cance, inserting itself between the hopes for historical automatism and the utopia of a future
state. The Erfurt Program of the SPD, resolved in 1891, made this apparent. It was the result of a
cooperative effort by Karl Kautsky, the editor of the social democratic theory journal Neue Zeit,
and Eduard Bernstein, who during the last two years of the Anti-Socialist Laws published the
weekly journal Sozialdemokrat in London under Engels’s wing.

166 • Karl Marx

Wholly in the tradition of Marx, Kautsky swore by capital’s process of concentration and the
system’s susceptibility to crisis, concluding from this that

Only the transformation of the capitalist private ownership of the means of production—land and
soil, pits and mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation—into social
property and the transformation of the production of goods into socialist production carried on by
and for society can cause the large enterprise and the constantly growing productivity of social
labor to change for the hitherto exploited classes from a source of misery and oppression into a
source of the greatest welfare and universal, harmonious perfection.35

Shortly thereafter Kautsky wrote in Neue Zeit that the Social Democratic Party was admittedly “a
revolutionary, but not a revolution-creating party,” invoking this distinction to counter any
possible rumors of an overthrow. Kautsky saw the revolution as something like a natural law of
history that proceeded toward the collapse of capitalism.

But the second part of the Social Democrats’ program, formulated by Bernstein, revealed an
unabashed reform-oriented attitude. Bernstein believed less and less in the collapse of capitalism.
The part of the program for which he was responsible dealt above all with numerous aspects of
democratic reform: universal direct and secret voting rights for men and women; direct
legislation by the people; a citizens’ militia rather than a standing army; the guarantee of the
right to the free expression of opinion, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly; the
abolishment of all laws that contributed to the discrimination of women; the designation of
religion as a private matter; the secularization of schools; free education and learning materials;
free medical care and judicial administration; the election of judges by the people; the
abolishment of the death penalty; and the reform of the tax code. For the protection of workers in
particular, the following was demanded: the legal implementation of the eight-hour day; the
prohibition of the gainful employment of children; an extensive ban on night work; guaranteed
minimum rest periods; making the legal status of agricultural workers and servants equal to that
of workers in commerce and industry; securing coalition rights for workers.36 Engels thought
that the theoretical portion of the Program was presentable, but that the practical demands

Consequences • 167

could perhaps do with some corrections.37 He apparently failed to notice that the Program
featured the collision of two worlds that did not fi t together.

Strangely enough, the Erfurt Program’s combination of the prognosis of a Kladderadatsch and
concrete democratic and social demands was precisely what captivated workers struggling for
better economic conditions, social security, social recognition, and civic equality. This
contradiction would defi ne the social democratic movement until it could fi nally free itself from
its counterworld milieu to become an integrated part of the society and state. The Erfurt Program
continued to point the way for decades.

Its two authors, however, developed along different political lines: while Kautsky became one of
the most infl uential interpreters of Marxist orthodoxy, Bernstein advocated increasingly openly
for a revision of the Marxist understanding of socialism. He was ultimately successful, even if
Rosa Luxemburg, on the Left within the party, accused him of wanting to transform social
democracy into a democratic-socialist reform party and demanded his exclusion from the
party.38 “If the triumph of socialism is supposed to be an immanent economic necessity,”
Bernstein wrote in Vorwärts in late March 1899, “then it must be based on the proof of the
inevitability of the economic collapse of the present society. This proof has not been provided
and it cannot be provided.”39 Bernstein wanted social democracy to have its own Immanuel
Kant, someone who would critically view the inherited Marxist theoretical system and “reveal
where its apparent materialism [was] the highest and therefore most easily misleading ideology,”
because “the contempt of the ideal, the elevation of material factors to omnipotent powers of
development”

was nothing but a self-deception “that was and is exposed as such by the actions at every
opportunity of the people who proclaim it.”40 In the future, a values- and reform-oriented
political praxis would become the central element of social democratic politics, even though the
language of revolution continued to dominate the social democratic milieu for a long time.

Was this a result that arose from Marx, subject to the law of unintended consequences? In a
certain way, yes, for he always called for concrete steps in the struggle of the political economy
of the proletariat against the political economy of the bourgeoisie and basically thought
revolution possible only in exceptional circumstances. But if revolution did not occur, then the
development toward social dem-

168 • Karl Marx

ocratic reformism was simply a necessary realignment in accordance with reality that set in with
capitalism’s new phase of prosperity in the mid 1890s—which was no coincidence. Other
realignments would at some point be due as well. “Those who create proletarians also create
Social Democrats,” Engels called out to his audience at a meeting in Berlin in late September
1893.41 He sincerely believed that, according to the law of linear progression, if the party
continued to grow at its previous rate “we shall have a majority between the years 1900 and
1910.”42 But this would never be the case. First, society would never be as polarized as Marx
had predicted; second, not all workers were automatically social democrats. Thus, like social
democrats in the rest of Europe who had joined the Second International, the party that had been
created on the basis of Marx either had to become one among many democratic forces capable of
forming coalitions or lapse into the status of a political sect. Marx always considered the latter to
be the worst-case scenario. Only he had assessed the course of the real movement, to which he
attached such great importance, differently and wrongly—resulting in consequences for civil
society that, though unintended, were highly benefi cial.

Salvation from the East

If social democracy developed as a critique of the Marxist heaven of ideas from an earthly
perspective, then Bolshevism, in contrast, reinstated the unconditional dominion of that heaven.
It was the second unintended consequence of Marx, who did not invent it. But in his old age, he
saw Russia become a screen for the projection of almost messianic expectations—even though a
phobia of Russia had previously been one of the most constant components of his worldview.
Regarding the czarist regime as the most dangerous bulwark of the European Reaction, he had
therefore called repeatedly for a revolutionary world war against Russia. Yet he also judged
Alexander Herzen’s and Mikhail Bakunin’s faith in Russia’s socialist calling to be nothing but a
fanatical pan-Slavic conspiracy against civilization, going so far as to temporarily ally himself
with the eccentric conservative David Urquhart simply because Urquhart publicly referred to
Lord Palmerston—who during the Ottoman-Russian confl ict stood on the side of Petersburg—as
a paid agent of the czar.43 At

Consequences • 169

the beginning of the 1870s, however, his image of Russia began to change. Marx learned
Russian44 and immersed himself in the study of Russian agricultural conditions.45

During this period he let his Russian translator of Capital know that in the following volumes he
would deal in detail with ground rents in their Russian form. Apart from that, he became
interested in Nikolay Chernyshevsky and intended to write an article that would “create some
interest in him in the West.”46 Nothing became of either of these intentions, but the great
Russian scholar and critic Chernyshevsky rated honorable mention in the afterword to the
second edition of Capital of 1873.47 Chernyshevsky, Marx maintained, had written noteworthy
articles on the question “whether Russia should start, as its liberal economists wish, by
destroying the rural community in order to pass to a capitalist system or whether, on the contrary,
it can acquire all the fruits of this system without suffering its torments, by developing its own
historical conditions .” Namely, if Russia, in its agricultural economy, continued to pursue the
course of capitalism initiated by the Emancipation Reform of 1861 and the associated liberation
of the peasants, it would miss the fi nest chance that history has ever offered to a nation and
instead lose itself in the vicissitudes of capitalism.48

Chernyshevsky’s name was closely associated with the movement of radical intelligentsia in the
1860s in Russia. A man with a German education, he had studied Hegel and, like Marx, had
gained his materialistic worldview by way of Feuerbach, a worldview he fi rst presented in his
1860 work The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy. Like many of his intellectual
contemporaries, Chernyshevsky was deeply disillusioned with the results of the Emancipation
Reform that Alexander II saw himself forced to undertake after the Crimean disaster. He became
a socialist. From prison in 1862/63, he wrote his most famous work, the novel What Is to Be
Done? Here he described life in a cooperative where a circle of conspiratorial political activists
operated in the background; their leader, Rakhmetov, an ascetic and battle-hardened professional
revolutionary, would later capture Lenin’s imagination.49 But Marx was more interested in
Chernyshevsky’s theoretical writings about the future of the Russian village community.

Chernyshevsky fi rst mentioned the thesis that it was possible in Russia—and only in Russia—to
bypass the phase of capitalistic development in order to arrive at socialism in an essay entitled
“Cri-

170 • Karl Marx

tique of Philosophical Prejudices Against Communal Ownership.”

He was not an outspoken romantic and by Russian standards was something of a “Westerner”
unopposed to the technological and scientifi c progress of capitalism. But he felt that in Russia, it
was possible for modernization to operate on a communist basis from the outset by taking the
common property of the village community as its point of departure. This, according to
Chernyshevsky, would be a negation of the negation of archaic collectivism without the
intermediate stage of capitalism.50 Marx was so taken by this idea that he appropriated its fi gure
of thought in almost all of its details. Alone in Europe, he claimed a few years later, the Russian
community was still the predominant organic form of rural life throughout an immense empire.

He continued:

The common ownership of land provides it with the natural basis for collective appropriation,
and its historical setting, its contemporaneity with capitalist production, lends it—fully
developed—the material conditions for cooperative labour organised on a vast scale. It can thus
incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its
Caudine Forks. It can gradually replace parcel farming with combined agriculture assisted by
machines, which the physical lie of the land in Russia invites. Having been fi rst restored to a
normal footing in its present form, it may become the direct starting point for the economic
system towards which modern society tends and turn over a new leaf without beginning by
committing suicide.51

Russia might even display here an element of superiority over the countries still enslaved by the
capitalist regime, Marx observed, if—and only if — revolution comes at the opportune moment.
Faced with such prospects, Marx’s ruminations rose to a height of pathos that sometimes verged
on toppling over into unintentional sentimentalism.

Even in the district of Trier, in my native country, he recalled with the long-term memory typical
of a man his age, relics still existed of this archaic communal property, but only in Russia was it
preserved extensively and without adulteration. It was as if these childhood memories and the
associated romantic atavism had always been the unconscious springs that animated his utopia
and were suddenly erupting again to assume authority by donning the garb of science.

In any case—with or without western capitalism’s fall from grace—the historical agenda
featured the return of modern societies

Consequences • 171

to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property, but in a superior form. 52 As he maintained at the
same time to refute Bakunin, Marx was still convinced that a radical social revolution is bound
up with certain defi nite historical conditions of economic development. 53 But he believed that
Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances—above all because of its
contemporaneity with capitalist production 54—could avoid the mistakes of the West. This
transfer of modernity to the East could take place only if the Revolution was also victorious in
the West.

On the other hand, according to Marx’s vision, a revolution in Russia could inspire the West.
Just as his depiction of czarism as the center of the European Reaction was always larger than
life, so too would be the consequences of its collapse.55 “Russia, I believe, will play the most
important part in the near future,” his friend Engels wrote during the Eastern Crisis at the
beginning of 1878: Whatever the outcome of the war, the Russian revolution is ready and it will
break out soon, perhaps this year; it will begin, contrary to Bakunin’s predictions, from above, in
the palace, in the heart of the impoverished and frondeuse nobility. But once set in motion, it will
sweep over the peasants, and you will then witness scenes in comparison with which those of ’93
will pall. Once Russia has been pushed into revolution, the whole face of Europe will change.56

The Bulgarian Horrors—the Turkish massacre of an insurgent Bulgarian civilian population,

which moved the British Liberal William Gladstone to launch a publicly effective protest and led
to an early form of foreign policy based on human rights—was the immediate cause of the
Eastern Crisis and Russia’s intervention in the Balkans.

Marx, however, saw only a Slavophile conspiracy at work here and in fall 1877 praised the
gallant Turks for the severe thrashing they had given the Russians, which had initiated a turning
point in European history by accelerating the erosion of czarism by years.57 But shortly
thereafter the Russian army was at the gates of Constantinople, and Sultan Abdülhamid II had to
submit to the humiliating Treaty of San Stefano (today Yesilköy). “Things took a different
course,” conceded Marx, somewhat irritated.58 Yet the hope for salvation from the East did not
abandon him.

In late August 1879, the executive committee of the revolutionary Russian secret organization
Narodnaya Volya—“People’s Will”—sentenced Czar Alexander II to death for “crimes against
the

172 • Karl Marx

people.” On 1 March 1881, they blew him sky-high with a bomb as he rode along a scenic
embankment in his carriage.59 Marx situated the terrorist central committee among those circles
in Russia “ where Capital is more read and appreciated than anywhere else,”60 but this was not
the only reason he showed sympathy for the assassination.

In his eyes, the larger-than-life magnitude of czarist despotism necessarily required extraordinary
action , which no more lends itself to moralising—for or against—than does the earthquake in
Chios. He characterized the Petersburg assassins as sterling chaps through and through, sans
pose mélodramatique, simple, matter-of-fact, heroic. 61 They had executed the will of the world.

Marx was not the only one to render such judgments. Even the Social Democrat maintained that
in a country where there prevailed a tyranny like that in Russia, even poison and daggers,
revolvers and dynamite must be regarded as permitted means to put an end to blood-soaked
despotism.62 Not even a staunch monarchist like Fyodor Dostoevsky could bring himself to
condemn the assassin Vera Zasulich, who in late January 1878 severely wounded the governor of
St. Petersburg, General Trepov, with a shot from a revolver. Punishing this woman, the author of
Demons maintained, would be “inappropriate and superfl uous.”

Zasulich was in fact acquitted by a jury court.63 She immigrated to Switzerland and in February
1881 turned inquisitively to Marx with her question about the future of the Russian village
community.
Those among the Russian emigrants who regarded these villages as having been sentenced to
extinction “call themselves your disciples par excellence, ” she wrote to him.64 Zasulich wanted
his authentic opinion, and Marx replied that the analysis provided in Capital admittedly included
no evidence whatsoever either for or against the viability of the village community; however,
having engaged in a special study of the matter that included the use of original sources, he had
become convinced that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia. 65

This was not necessarily the view of the Marx supporters in Swiss exile whom Zasulich referred
to, meaning in the fi rst instance Georgi Plekhanov. He advocated the view that Russia by no
means occupied a special place in the world: in his homeland as in others, the path to socialism
was by way of capitalism, and to that extent the old peasant communities were sentenced to
extinction.66 Plekhanov held that a revolution that invoked socialism without fulfi lling the

Consequences • 173

necessary requirements would inevitably be a “political monster,”

a “tsarist despotism disguised in communist colors.”67 In principle, this kind of prognosis made
Plekhanov the more rigorous Marxist, comparatively speaking.

In taking his position, Marx had in a certain sense even sided in favor of the romantic peasant
socialism of the so-called ethnic traditionalists of the Narodnaya Volya party,68 thus opening a
viable path to the Bolshevist synthesis of the ethnic traditionalist movement and Marxism—
which the social democrat Plekhanov decisively rejected. “If the Russian Revolution becomes
the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,”

Marx wrote in the foreword to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, “the
present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist
development.”69

In this form, as Ernest Gellner once noted, Marxism appeared to be tailor-made for the Russian
soul. It also resolved an apparently insurmountable Russian contradiction by reconciling the
coercive tension between Russia’s westernizing tendencies and its mystical, messianic, and
populist inclinations to produce a unifi ed vision.70

It was during the period of the Anti-Socialist Laws that Marx was suddenly gripped by his old
revolutionary fever. The sooner czarism collapsed, he maintained, the sooner Bismarck’s
repressive policies would come to an end, and the wave of terror that beset Russia at the time
seemed to herald its impending burial.71 Plekhanov had spoken out quite clearly against
terrorism; the immediate result of the czar’s murder was the declaration of a state of emergency
in many provinces in the Russian empire. It did not ignite a revolution, if only because the
population remained indifferent in light of the assassination, whereas the terror increasingly took
on an aimless life of its own.72 Perhaps Marx was only infected by a brief fl are-up of old-age
radicalism, particularly since during the last years of his life his house increasingly became a
meeting place for young Russian supporters and admirers. Not all of them were terrorists or
revolutionaries; among them were people like Maxim Kovalevsky, a liberal opponent of czarism
who after 1905 taught at Petersburg University and still, as an old man, considered Marx his
beloved teacher. Also included was the young German Lopatin, who had vainly attempted to
liberate Nikolay Chernyshevsky from his banishment in Siberia and had also, together with
Nikolai Danielson, translated Capital into Russian.

174 • Karl Marx

But above all it was Russians like Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, and fi nally also Vera
Zasulich who were the fi rst to offi -

cially call themselves “Marxists.”73 After Marx died on 14 March 1883, his burial in London’s
Highgate Cemetery was attended by scarcely more than a dozen close acquaintances, among
them Wilhelm Liebknecht. Engels gave the eulogy. In Russia, however, Marx’s death became a
publicly recognized event. Students at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow sent a
telegram expressly asking Engels to lay a wreath at his grave in their name.74 “The Russian
socialists,” stated an address to the mourners from exiled groups in Paris, “bow before the grave
of the man who sympathised with their strivings in all the fl uctuations of their terrible struggle, a
struggle which they shall continue until the fi nal victory of the principles of the social
revolution.”75 Much more so than in Germany and Western Europe, the doctrine of Marxism
had gained a secure footing among the intelligentsia in Russia.

Here, too, was where it underwent its most radical revision and consequential reformulation. In
1902, Lenin—an aristocratic lawyer from Simbirsk on the Volga, already a second-generation
Marxist, whose real name was Vladimir Ulyanov—wrote the foundational Bolshevik text What
Is to Be Done? It was no coincidence that he borrowed the title from the Chernyshevsky novel
featuring the character of the professional revolutionary Rakhmetov. In this text, Lenin called for
an avant-garde party consisting of professional revolutionaries that, like a military formation,
was to function according to the principle of central discipline. On the one hand, here Lenin was
operating within the framework of Russian ethnic traditional-ism, insofar as he reignited debate
over an organizational model that Pyotr Tkachev, the fi rst actual theoretician of the Russian
revolution, had called for as early as 1874.76 This was the pragmatic Russian characteristic of
his plan.

On the other hand, however, he also sought a theoretical response to the Western European
workers’ movement’s shift into so-called revisionism. Targeting a general problem in Marx’s
doctrine, Lenin wrote:

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to
develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in
unions, for fi ghting against the employers, and for striving to compel the govern-

Consequences • 175

ment to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the
philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated
representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.77

Consequently, according to Lenin, political class consciousness could be brought to the workers
“only from without”78—through the political mission of his envisioned organization of
professional revolutionaries. Basically, he thereby said that the real movement that had always
been held aloft by Marx inevitably had to undergo the reformist developments observable in
Western European social democracy. Conversely, if one wanted to retain the original goals of
communism, one had to decide against the real movement. Lenin corrected Marx by pulling the
rug out from under his historical materialism.

The dilemma itself, however, was the result of a fundamental mistake by Marx. In 1845 he had
written, and basically never questioned, the following:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment
regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this
being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and
irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of
bourgeois society today.79

As Heinrich August Winkler once noted, Marx had succumbed to a historical fallacy when he
tried to envision the future history of the modern proletariat in the role of a new universal class
according to the model of the French Revolution of 1789.80 The proletariat was—in contrast to
its existence as a metaphysical assumption that was based on nothing—a sociological fact of
modernity, not a world-historical class that could take the impulse of the storming of the Bastille
to a higher level. Without openly saying so, Lenin saw things this way as well and thus had to
either accept this fact or create a surrogate. Notoriously, he decided for the latter. Like a
medieval order of knights, the Bolshevik party was to assert through violence this principle that
had no equivalent in real historical development and civil life.

The results are well known. The rape of the earth led to the utopia of purges described by Gerd
Koenen81 and the domination of the

176 • Karl Marx

surreal analyzed by Martin Malia,82 which silently came to an end in autumn 1989. In the
meantime the associated megalomania of the ability to create history claimed millions of victims.
Are these to be blamed on Marx? Yes and no. Whoever stood by his conviction that communism
was the necessary result of history then needed to produce it through violence, if Marx’s
prognoses proved unrealistic. In the end, the communist experiment failed due to a lack of the
profane,83 to a quasi-religious overloading of all real spheres of life. This fatal tendency,
however, was already embedded in the materialistic eschatology of Marx’s early writings. The
landmark events of 1989

made it a profane year: human interests triumphed over what had long ago become an infi rm,
spiritless industrial variant of belief and redemption, and they did so without facing any
resistance worth mentioning, running through doors that the Communist state powers had left
open toward a freedom that had within seconds suddenly become possible. A clearer refutation
of Marx’s fundamental fallacies can hardly be imagined. However, this applies primarily to the
political and historical-theological Marx.

For the same reason, during the Cold War Marx, as a theoretician of capitalism and historical
evolution, had resided in a political ghetto; thus, with all of his fragmentary insights and
contradictions, he remains to be discovered through impartial inquiry. It would be best, Richard
Rorty once noted, if a higher knowledge of the forces that guide history were attainable without
prophecies and demands.

But even if today Marx seems somewhat dated in many respects, he formulated—in a manner
that is still admirable—an important lesson learned in light of untrammeled industrial capitalism:
the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the creation of constitutional democracies is not
enough to ensure equality and decency among human beings.84

What concerns us today—more so than his apocalyptic answers, attributable to the restless
zeitgeist of the nineteenth century—are rather Marx’s still-vexatious questions, through which he
contemplated the unstable circumstances and self-destructive tendencies of our modern world.
We have learned to mistrust prophesies, even those that, after the silent disappearance of
communism, once again rashly predicted the end of history and have since been overthrown by
the very spirits who proclaimed them.

Consequences • 177

Notes

1. Quoted in Jacques Droz, “Die Ursprünge der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland,” in Droz,

Geschichte des Sozialismus, vol. 3, 20; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

2. Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel: Künder und Kärrner im Kaiserreich (Bonn, 1988), 157ff.

3. Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 17.

4. Mehring,

Karl Marx, 384.

5. Ibid.,

382.

6. Seebacher-Brandt,

Bebel, 144.

7. Liebknecht to Engels, 17 February 1865, in Wolfgang Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker
(Munich, 1991), 115; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

8. Liebknecht to Marx, 13 May 1879, in Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, 115; quotation
translated by Bernard Heise.

9. Joseph Rovan, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 36.

10. Liebknecht,

Karl Marx, 66 and 76.

11. Marx to Bracke, 5 May 1875, in MECW, vol. 45, 70; translator’s note: the words here are
translated directly from the German, Marx to Bracke, 5 May 1875, in MEW, vol. 34, 137.

12. Engels to Bebel, 18–28 March 1875, in MECW, vol. 24, 70, 67, 71, 13. Marx, “Marginal
Notes on the Programme of the German Workers’ Party,” in MECW, vol. 24, 95f.

14. Quoted

in

Mayer,

Friedrich Engels, vol. 2, 277; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

15. Engels, preface to Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx, in MECW, vol. 27, 92f.

16. August

Bebel,

Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1988), 425f.; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

17. Marx to Bracke, 5 May 1875, in MECW, vol. 45, 70.

18. Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles, 21 January 1877, in MECW, vol. 45, 190.

19. Marx, “Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association,” in
MECW, vol. 24, 239.

20. Marx to Wilhelm Alexander Freund, 21 January 1877, in MECW, vol. 45, 192.

21. Mayer,

Friedrich Engels, vol. 2, 282.

22. Winkler,

Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 1, 235; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

23. Engels to Becker, 20 November 1876, in MECW, vol. 45, 174f.

24. Seebacher-Brandt,

Bebel, 183; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

25. Mayer,

Friedrich Engels, vol. 2, 285; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

26. Jacques Droz, introduction to Droz, Geschichte des Sozialismus, vol. 4, 14.

27. Engels to Turati, 16 August 1894, in MEW, vol. 39, 288.

28. Marx to Engels, 5 March 1877, in MECW, vol. 45, 205f.

178 • Karl Marx

29. Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, in MECW, vol. 25, 125,
23, 131.

30. Engels,

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 26, 397.

31. Stürmer,

Das ruhelose Reich, 217.

32. Gordon

Craig,

Germany, 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1978), 143.

33. Engels to Lawrow, 10 August 1879, in MEW, vol. 34, 337; quotation translated by Bernard
Heise.

34. Mayer,

Friedrich Engels, vol. 2, 348.

35. “The Erfurt Program of 1891,” in From Revolutionary to Governing Party: Adjusting
Political Programs: Selected Programs of German Social Democracy, ed.

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Manila, 2009), 7.

36. Winkler,

Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 1, 288.

37. Engels to Kautsky, 3 December 1891, in MEW, vol. 38, 234.

38. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform oder Revolution, in Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1970), vol.
1/1, 445.

39. Vorwärts, 26 March 1899; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

40. Eduard
Bernstein,

Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Reinbek, 1969),
217; quotation translated by Bernard Heise.

41. Engels, “Speech at a Social-Democratic Meeting in Berlin on September 22, 1893,” in

MECW, vol. 27, 410.

42. “Interview of Frederick Engels by the Daily Chronicle Correspondent at the End of June
1893,” in MECW, vol. 27, 553.

43. Engels to Marx, 10 March 1853, in MECW, vol. 39, 284.

44. Marx,

Letter

to

Otechestvenniye Zapiski, in MECW, vol. 24, 199.

45. Marx, “Notizen zur Reform von 1861 und der damit verbundenen Entwicklung in Russland,”
in MEW, vol. 19, 407–424.

46. Marx to Nicolai Danielson, 12 December 1872, in MECW, vol. 44, 457.

47. Marx, afterword to the second German edition, Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol.

35, 15.

48. Marx,

Letter

to

Otechestvenniye Zapiski, in MECW, vol. 24, 199.

49. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (London, 1997), 346f., 363f.

50. Nikolai G. Tschernyschewski, Ausgewählte philosophische Schriften (Moscow, 1953), 45ff.

51. Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, third draft, in MECW, vol. 24, 368.

52. Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, fi rst draft, in MECW, vol. 24, 349, 360, 350.

53. Marx, “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy, ” in MECW, vol. 24, 518.

54. Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, fi rst draft, in MECW, vol. 24, 349.
55. Gerd Koenen, “Ein deutscher Russland-Komplex? Elemente einer longue du-rée
gegenseitiger Wahrnehmungen und projektiver Besetzungen,” unpublished manuscript.

56. Engels, “On the Socialist Movement in Germany, France, the United States and Russia,” in
MECW, vol. 24, 205.

57. Marx to Sorge, 27 September 1877, in MECW, vol. 45, 278.

58. Marx to Liebknecht, 4 February 1878, in MECW, vol. 45, 296.

Consequences • 179

59. Hosking,

Russia, 358.

60. Marx to Sorge, 5 November 1880, in MECW, vol. 46, 45.

61. Marx to Jenny Longuet, 11 April 1881, in MECW, vol. 46, 83.

62. Koenen, “Ein deutscher Russland-Komplex,” 68.

63. Quoted

in

Hosking,

Russia, 336.

64. Quoted

in

McLellan,

Karl Marx, 441.

65. Marx to Zasulich, 8 March 1881, in MECW, vol. 46, 71.

66. Hosking,

Russia, 361.

67. Hélène

Carrère

d’Encausse,
Lenin (London, 2001), 32.

68. Koenen, “Ein deutscher Russland-Komplex,” 67.

69. Marx and Engels, preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist
Party, in MECW, vol. 24, 426.

70. Ernest Gellner, Bedingungen der Freiheit: Die Zivilgesellschaft und ihre Rivalen (Stuttgart,
1995), 45.

71. Carrère

d’Encausse,

Lenin, 31.

72. Hosking,

Russia, 358ff.

73. Carrère

d’Encausse,

Lenin, 32.

74. Engels to Lawrow, 24 March 1883, in MECW, vol. 46, 464.

75. Engels, “Karl Marx’s Funeral,” in MECW, vol. 24, 469.

76. Carrère

d’Encausse,

Lenin, 51.

77. Vladimir Ill’ich Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings
(New York, 1966), 74.

78. Ibid.,

112.

79. Marx

and

Engels,
The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 37.

80. Heinrich August Winkler, “Die unwiederholbare Revolution,” in Streitfragen der deutschen
Geschichte, ed. Heinrich August Winkler (Munich, 1997), 9–30.

81. Gerd

Koenen,

Utopie der Säuberungen: Was war der Kommunismus? (Frankfurt am Main, 2000).

82. Martin

Malia,

Vollstreckter Wahn: Sowjetunion 1917–1991 (Berlin, 1998).

83. Gellner,

Bedingungen der Freiheit, 49.

84. Richard Rorty, Das Kommunistische Manifest: 150 Jahre danach (Frankfurt am Main, 1998),
29, 20.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Àkademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte and Centre
d’Histoire et d’Analyse des Manuscrits Modernes am Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi
que, eds. Heinrich Heine und die Zeitgenossen: Geschichtliche und literarische Befunde. East
Berlin, 1979.

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Das Kapital lessen. 2 vols. Reinbek, 1972.

Barclay, David. Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861. Oxford, 1995.

Bauer, Bruno. Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. Frankfurt am Main, 1968.

Bebel, August. Aus meinem Leben. Berlin, 1988.

Bell, Daniel. Die nachindustrielle Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main, 1979.

Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. New York, 1978.

Bernstein, Eduard. Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der
Sozialdemokratie. Reinbek, 1969.

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste. Schriften zur Revolution, Nationalökonomie und Sozialkritik.

Reinbek, 1971.
Bleuel, Hans Peter. Ferdinand Lassalle. Frankfurt am Main, 1982.

Blos, Wilhelm. Die Deutsche Revolution von 1848 bis 1849. Berlin, 1923.

Buchheim, Christoph. Industrielle Revolutionen. Munich, 1994.

Busch, Günter. Eugène Delacroix: Die Freiheit auf den Barrikaden. Stuttgart, 1960.

Butler, Eliza Marian. The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany. New York, 1960.

Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène. Lenin. London, 2001.

Clark, Christopher. Preußen: Aufstieg und Niedergang 1600–1947. Munich, 2007.

Craig, Gordon. Germany, 1866–1945. Oxford, 1978.

Croce, Benedetto. History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Henry Furst. New
York, 1933.

Droz, Jacques, ed. Geschichte des Sozialismus. 4 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Erinnerungen an Karl Marx. Berlin, 1953.

Fauvel, John et al., eds. Newtons Werk: Die Begründung der modernen Naturwissen-schaft.
Berlin, 1993.

182 • Bibliography

Feuerbach, Ludwig. Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze. Leipzig, 1969.

Fourier, Charles. Ökonomisch-philosophische Schriften. Berlin, 1980.

Friedenthal, Richard. Karl Marx: Sein Leben und seine Zeit. Munich, 1983.

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, ed. From Revolutionary to Governing Party: Adjusting Political
Programs: Selected Programs of German Social Democracy. Manila, 2009.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash 1929. New York, 2009.

Gans, Eduard. Philosophische Schriften. Edited by Horst Schröder. Berlin, 1971.

Gellner, Ernest. Bedingungen der Freiheit: Die Zivilgesellschaft und ihre Rivalen. Stuttgart,
1995.

Gellner, Ernest. Plough, Sword and Book. Chicago, 1988.

Gillman, Joseph M. Das Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profi trate. Frankfurt am Main, 1969.

Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume. Die Demokratie in Frankreich. Grimma, 1849.

Gurvitch, Georges. Dialektik und Soziologie. Berlin, 1965.

Gutzkow, Karl. Wally, die Zweifl erin. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Habermas, Jürgen. Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt am Main,

1976.

Habermas, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main, 1988.

Hahn, Manfred, ed. Vormarxistischer Sozialismus. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Hardtwig, Wolfgang. Vormärz: Der monarchische Staat und das Bürgertum. Munich, 1998.

Hazard, Paul. Die Krise des europäischen Geistes 1680–1715. Hamburg, 1939.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Briefe von und an Hegel. Edited by Johannes Hoffmeister. 4
vols. Hamburg, 1954.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl M. Michel. 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1969–1971.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy. Albany, 1977.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Doctrine of Formal Logic, in G.W.F. Hegel: The
Oxford University Press Translations. Electronic edition. Oxford, 2000.

Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §147, OUP, 208.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. G.W.F. Hegel: The Oxford University Press Translations.
Electronic edition. Oxford, 2000.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree.

Kitchener, Ontario, 2001.

Heine, Heinrich. The Poems of Heine. Translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. London, 1866.

Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Edited by Klaus Briegleb. 12

vols. Munich, 1976.

Heine, Heinrich. The Works of Heinrich Heine. 20 vols. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland.
London, 1893.

Herrnstadt, Rudolf. Die Entdeckung der Klassen. Berlin, 1965.

Herwegh, Georg. Werke in einem Band. East Berlin, 1975.

Herwegh, Georg, ed. Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz [1843]. Leipzig, 1989.

Hess, Moses. The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings. Translated and edited with an
introduction by Shlomo Avineri. Cambridge, 2004.

Bibliography • 183

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. New York, 1996.

Höppner, Joachim, and Waltraud Seidel-Höppner. Von Babeuf bis Blanqui: Französischer
Sozialismus vor Marx. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1976.

Hosfeld, Rolf. “Massendemokratie oder Erziehungsdiktatur? Überlegungen zur poli-tischen

Form der Diktatur des Proletariats bei Marx.” In Eurokommunismus und Theorie der Politik, ed.
Hans Werner Franz et al. Berlin, 1979.

Hosfeld, Rolf. Die Welt als Füllhorn: Heine: Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert zwischen Ro-mantik
und Moderne. Berlin, 1984.

Hosfeld, Rolf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Berlin, 1988.

Hosfeld, Rolf, and Hermann Pölking. Die Deutschen 1815–1918: Fürstenherrlichkeit und
Bürgerwelten. Munich, 2007.

Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. London, 1997.

Immermann, Karl. Werke. Edited by Harry Maync. Vol. 3. Leipzig, n.d.

Jessen, Jens, ed. Fegefeuer des Marktes: Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus. Munich, 2006.

Koenen, Gerd. “Ein deutscher Russland-Komplex? Elemente einer longue durée gegenseitiger
Wahrnehmungen und projektiver Besetzungen.” Unpublished manuscript.

Koenen, Gerd. Utopie der Säuberung: Was war der Kommunismus? Frankfurt am Main, 2000.

Kojéve, Alexandre. Hegel: Kommentar zur Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main,
1975.

Kool, Frits, and Werner Krause, eds. Die frühen Sozialisten. 2 vols. Munich, 1972.

Kosellek, Reinhart. Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution. Stuttgart, 1987.

Lasky, Melvin J. Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor. Chicago, 1976.

Lenin, Vladimir Ill’ich. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings.
New York, 1966.

Lenin, Vladimir Ill’ich. The State and Revolution. Whitefi sh, MT, 2004.
Lenk, Kurt. Deutscher Konservatismus. Frankfurt am Main, 1989.

Lewald, Fanny. Erinnerungen aus dem Jahre 1848. Frankfurt am Main, 1969.

Liebknecht, Wilhelm. Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs. Chicago, 1908.

Löwith, Karl. Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neun-zehnten
Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main, 1969.

Löwith, Karl. Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte: Philosophische Bilanz des 20. Jahrhunderts.
Stuttgart, 1990.

Löwith, Karl. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der

Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart, 2004.

Lübbe, Hermann. Politische Philosophie in Deutschland. Munich, 1974.

Lutz, Heinrich. Zwischen Habsburg und Preußen: Deutschland 1815–1866. Berlin, 1985.

Luxemburg, Rosa. Reform oder Revolution, vol. 1/1, Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols. Berlin, 1970.

Malia, Martin. The Soviet Tragedy – A History of Socialism in Russia 1917-1991. Free Press,
New York, 1994.

Mann, Golo. Friedrich von Gentz: Geschichte eines europäischen Staatsmannes. Frankfurt am
Main, 1972.

Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Humanities
Press, New York, 2nd Ed., 1954.

184 • Bibliography

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Berlin, 1953.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Werke ( MEW). 39 vols. and 2 supplementary vols. Berlin,
1956–1990.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Collected Works of Marx and Engels (MECW).

Electronic Edition. InteLex: 2003.

Mayer, Gustav. Friedrich Engels: Eine Biographie. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1975.

McLellan, David. The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. London, 1969.

McLellan, David. Die Junghegelianer und Karl Marx. Munich, 1974.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. Bristol, 1973.
McLellan, David. Karl Marx: Leben und Werk. Munich, 1974.

Mehring, Franz. Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. London, 2003.

Meißner, Alfred. Ich traf auch Heine in Paris: Unter Künstlern und Revolutionären in den
Metropolen Europas. Berlin, 1973.

Mignet, François Auguste. Geschichte der Französischen Revolution von 1789 bis 1814.
Leipzig, 1975.

Mohr und General: Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels. Berlin, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Adrian
Del Caro. Cambridge, 2006.

Nipperdey, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat.

Munich, 1983.

Nipperdey, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist.

Munich, 1994.

North, Michael, ed. Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Munich, 2000.

Pepperle, Ingrid. Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie. Berlin, 1978.

Pepperle, Heinz, and Ingrid Pepperle, eds. Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und
Politik im deutschen Vormärz. Leipzig, 1985.

Peters, Heinz Frederick. Die rote Jenny: Ein Leben mit Karl Marx. Munich, 1984.

Pfl anze, Otto. Bismarck: Der Reichsgründer. Munich, 1997.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Bekenntnisse eines Revolutionärs. Reinbek, 1969.

Raddatz, Fritz J. Karl Marx: Eine politische Biographie. Hamburg, 1975.

Reichelt, Helmut. Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx. Frankfurt am Main,
1970.

Reissner, Hanns-Günter. Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz. Tübingen, 1965.

Ribhegge, Wilhelm. Das Parlament als Nation: Die Frankfurter Nationalversammlung 1848/49.
Düsseldorf, 1998.

Ribhegge, Wilhelm. Konservative Politik in Deutschland: Von der Französischen Revolution bis
zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt, 1992.
Riedel, Manfred, ed. Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1975.

Robinson, Joan. Economics: An Awkward Corner. New York, 1967.

Rochau, Ludwig August von. Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die staatlichen
Zustände Deutschlands. Frankfurt am Main, 1972.

Rorty, Richard. Das Kommunistische Manifest: 150 Jahre danach. Frankfurt am Main, 1998.

Rosdolsky, Roman. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital.” 2 vols. Frankfurt am

Main, 1968.

Bibliography • 185

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Teddington, 2007.

Rovan, Joseph. Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Frankfurt am Main, 1980.

Ruge, Arnold, and Karl Marx, eds. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher [1844]. Frankfurt am
Main, 1973.

Salomon-Delatour, Gottfried, ed. Die Lehre Saint-Simons. Neuwied, 1962.

Schieder, Wolfgang. Karl Marx als Politiker. Munich, 1991.

Schmidt, Alfred. Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit: Ludwig Feuerbachs anthropologischer

Materialismus. Munich, 1973.

Schneider, Michael. Kleine Geschichte der Gewerkschaften: Ihre Entwicklung in Deutschland

von den Anfängen bis heute. Bonn, 2000.

Schnerb, Robert. Europa im 19. Jahrhundert: Europa als Weltmacht. Munich, 1983.

Schuffenhauer, Werner. Feuerbach und der junge Marx. Berlin, 1972.

Schumpeter, Joseph. Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie. Bern, 1950.

Schunck, Peter. Geschichte Frankreichs von Heinrich IV. bis zur Gegenwart. Munich, 1994.

Schweitzer, Albert. Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung. Tübingen, 1933.

Seebacher-Brandt, Brigitte. Bebel. Künder und Kärrner im Kaiserreich. Bonn, 1988.

Seidel-Höppner, Waltraud. Wilhelm Weitling. Berlin, 1961.

Sengle, Friedrich. Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Re-stauration

und Revolution 1817–1848. Vol. 1. Stuttgart, 1971.

Sennett, Richard. Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus. Berlin, 2007.

Siemann, Wolfram. Die deutsche Revolution von 1848/49. Frankfurt am Main, 1985.

Siemann, Wolfram. Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat: Deutschland 1806–1871.

Munich, 1995.

Smith, Adam . An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: The Glasgow
Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Electronic edition. InteLex: 2002.

Soros, George. Die Krise des globalen Kapitalismus: Die offene Gesellschaft in Gefahr.

Frankfurt am Main, 2000.

Stein, Lorenz von. Die industrielle Gesellschaft: Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus
Frankreichs von 1830 bis 1848. Munich, 1921.

Sternberger, Dolf. Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Sternberger, Dolf. Gerechtigkeit für das neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 1975.

Steussloff, Hans, ed. Die Junghegelianer: Ausgewählte Texte. Berlin, 1963.

Stürmer, Michael. Das ruhelose Reich. Deutschland 1866–1918. Munich, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Frankfurt am Main, 1983.

Thurow, Lester C. Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build A Long and Lasting
Global Prosperity. New York, 2003.

Tiliette, Xavier. Schelling: Biographie. Stuttgart, 2004.

Tschernyschewski, Nikolai G. Ausgewählte philosophische Schriften. Moscow, 1953.

Ungers, Liselotte, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. Kommunen in der Neuen Welt. Cologne, 1972.

Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August. Kommentare zum Zeitgeschehen. Leipzig, 1984.

Warschauer, Otto. Saint-Simon und der Saint-Simonismus. Leipzig, 1892.

Weber, Rolf, ed. Revolutionsbriefe 1848/49. Leipzig, 1973.

186 • Bibliography

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vol. 2. Munich, 1996.

Weigel, Siegfried. Der negative Marx: Marx im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen. Stuttgart, 1976.

Wheen, Francis. Karl Marx: Das Kapital. Munich, 2008.

Winkler, Heinrich August. Der lange Weg nach Westen: Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des
Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik. Munich, 2000.

Winkler, Heinrich August, ed. Streitfragen der deutschen Geschichte. Munich, 1997.

Zeleny, Jindrich. Die Wissenschaftslogik und “Das Kapital.” 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1968.

INDEX OF NAMES

Buonarroti, Filippo, 37, 47

Abdülhamid II, Sultan, 171

Abdülmecid I, Sultan, 94

Cabet, Etienne, 33, 38

Ahrens, Heinrich, 62

Camphausen, Ludolf, 13, 15, 73

Alexander II, Czar, 169, 171–172

Camphausen, Otto, 72

Anneke, Friedrich, 72

Carey, Henry Charles, 91

Annenkov, Pavel, 61–62

Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène, 76, 81, 90, 114

Aristotle, 26

Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 99, 101

Ashley-Cooper, Lord Anthony, 39

Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 169–170,

Assing, Ludmilla, 102

173–174

Axelrod, Pavel, 163, 174

Copernicus, Nicolaus, 19, 29, 42, 137

Courbet, Gustave, 116

Babeuf, François Noël “Gracchus,” 37–38,

Craig, Gordon A., 165

47

Croce, Benedetto, 2, 66, 116, 120

Bakunin, Mikhail, 112, 119–120, 168, 171

Bardedienne (company), 111

d’Agoult, Marie, 34

Bauer, Bruno, 5, 8, 9–12, 14, 102

Dana, Charles Anderson, 92–93

Bauer, Edgar, 16

Danielson, Nikolai, 173

Bauer, Heinrich, 63

Darwin, Charles, 144–145

Bazard, Saint-Amand, 41

Delacroix, Eugène, 2, 23

Bebel, August, 151, 158–163, 165

Demuth, Frederick Lewis, 91

Beesley, Edward Spencer, 112

Demuth, Helene, 59, 92

Berlin, Isaiah, 104

Deutsch, Lew, 174

Bernstein, Eduard, 117, 162–163, 165–167

Dézamy, Theodore, 38

Bismarck, Otto von, 87–88, 104, 113, 116,

Dickens, Charles, 105

118, 158–159, 164–165, 173

Diderot, Denis, 39

Blanc, Louis, 24, 38

Dietz (publisher), 163

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 38, 47–49, 63,

Dietzgen, Joseph, 159

83–86, 102, 116, 119

Disraeli, Benjamin, 39

Boeckh, August, 99

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 172

Boëthius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 28

Droste zu Vischering, Clemens August, 13

Born, Stefan, 73 –74, 81, 157

Dühring, Eugen, 162–164

Borsig, August, 4

DuMont-Schauberg (publisher), 13

Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 44

Duncker, Franz, 96–97, 99

Büchner, Georg, 63

Büchner, Ludwig, 164

E
Bulgakov, Sergei, 158

Eichhorn, Friedrich von, 11, 17

188 • Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 92

Hales, John, 119

Engels, Friedrich, 25, 29, 33, 39–43, 46–47,

Hansemann, David, 13, 16, 73

58, 60–61, 63–64

Hardenberg, Karl August von, 6

Engels, Friedrich Sr., 39

Harkort, Friedrich, 32

Ermen & Engels (company), 41

Harney, George Julian, 40, 82–84, 120

Ewerbeck, Hermann, 33

Hatzfeldt, Sophie von, 101–103

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 92

Hecker, Friedrich, 74, 88

Favre, Jules, 115

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 4–12,

Fellmann (weaving entrepreneur), 36

14–16, 18, 20–22, 24–28, 31–33, 36–39,

Ferdinand II, king of the two Sicilies, 66

41–44, 60, 62, 64, 79–80, 89, 97–98,

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 25–29, 35, 38, 41–43,

102, 106, 117, 134–136, 143–144,

48, 152, 169

146–149, 151, 164, 169

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5

Heine, Heinrich, 2, 23–25, 33–35, 41, 46,

Flocon, Ferdinand, 67

59, 114

Förster, Friedrich, 102

Heinzen, Karl, 16

Fourier, Charles, 36, 38–40, 46, 92–93, 158

Helmholtz, Hermann von, 162

Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 77, 92, 158

Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 9, 11

Friedrich I, Emperor Barbarossa, 70

Heraclitus, 98–99

Friedrich II, king of Prussia (the Great), 100

Herwegh, Georg, 8, 34

Friedrich Wilhelm, elector of Hessia, 88

Herzen, Alexander, 168

Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia, 7–8,

Hess, Moses, 14, 27, 39

11, 13–14, 18, 59, 68–70, 80, 94, 97

Hobbes, Thomas, 44

Hobsbawm, Eric, 76
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 145, 147

Hodgskin, Thomas, 138

Gambetta, Léon, 114–115

Holbach, Paul Heinrich Dietrich von (Paul

Gans, Eduard, 2, 6, 11, 21, 27

Henri Thiry d’), 10, 41

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 88, 105–107

Hosfeld, Elke, viii

Gauß, Carl Friedrich, 162

Humboldt, Alexander von, 99

Gellner, Ernest, 145, 173

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 4

George V, king of Hanover, 88

Hume, David, 91

Gladstone, William, 106, 119, 171

Goddard, Henry, 133

Immermann, Karl, 4

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9, 162

Göhringer (tavern keeper), 89

Gottschalk, Andreas, 72

Jäger, Michael, viii

Grandjonc, Jacques, 25

Jellachich, Joseph von, 77, 79

Grant Duff, Sir Mountstuart

Jung, Gustav, 14

Elphinstone, 132, 164

Granville, Lord George Leveson-Gower,

111

Kant, Immanuel, 5, 14, 132

Grimm, Jacob, 9

Kautsky, Karl, 134, 163, 165–167

Grimm, Wilhelm, 9

Keene, Mr., 77

Grosz, George, 115

Keynes, John Maynard, 141, 146

Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 44–45,

Kinkel, Gottfried, 88

59–60, 67, 90

Kleist, Heinrich von, 102

Gurvitch, Georges, 21

Koenen, Gerd, 175

Gutzkow, Karl, 3

Köppen, Karl Friedrich, 102

Kossuth, Lajos, 77, 88

Kovalevsky, Maxim, 173

Habermas, Jürgen, 23
Krupp (company), 113

Haeckel, Ernst, 164

Index • 189

Mevissen, Gustav, 13–16, 18, 32, 72

Labriola, Antonio, 163

Meyen, Eduard, 17

Lafi tte, Jacques, 45

Meyendorff, Peter von, 7

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 24

Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti

Lamennais, Felicité de, 24

Simoni), 37

Laponneraye, Albert, 38

Mignet, François Auguste, 44

Lassalle, Ferdinand, 97–106, 109–110,

Mill, James, 145

112, 145, 157–161

Mill, John Stuart, 89, 145

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 41, 133

Miquel, Johannes, 97–98, 103–104

Le Lubez, Victor, 108

Mirabeau, Gabriel de Riqueti, Marquis

Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), 118,

de, 6
161, 169, 174–175

Moellendorff, Karl von, 69–70

Leopold I, king of Belgium, 67

Moleschott, Jacob, 164

Lepsius, Richard, 99

Moll, Joseph, 63, 73

Leroux, Pierre, 23–24, 40–41

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron

Lewald, Fanny, 66

de, 46

Liebig, Justus, 3

Montez, Lola, 67, 88

Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 81, 92, 96–97, 105,

112, 158–162, 174

Napoleon I (Napoléon Bonaparte), 2–3,

Lincoln, Abraham, 105–106

14, 37, 39, 77–78, 89

Liszt, Franz, 34

Nassau, Adolf von, 88

Locke, John, 26–27, 91, 111

Newton, Isaac, 132

Lopatin, German, 173

Nicholas I, Czar, 1, 18, 93

Louis Napoléon (Louis Bonaparte), 80,

Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 9

90, 99, 107, 114

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49

Louis Philippe, king of France, 45, 60,

Nipperdey, Thomas, 14, 133

63, 66

Löwith, Karl, 43

Lucraft, Benjamin, 118

O’Connor, Feargus, 82

Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, 25

Odger, George, 105, 107, 118

Lukas, Jutta, viii

Oppenheim, Dagobert, 15–16

Luxemburg, Rosa, 167

Oppenheim, Salomon, 13, 15

Owen, Robert, 40, 109

Mac-Mahon, Patrice de, 116

Malia, Martin, 176

Palmerston, Lord Henry John Temple, 168

Malthus, Thomas Robert, 91, 65

Paxton, Joseph, 89

Mann, Heinrich, 80
Pfuel, Ernst von, 102

Manteuffel, Edwin von, 87

Philips, Antoinette, 103

Marat, Jean Paul, 8

Philips, Lion, 101, 105

Marcuse, Herbert, 27

Plekhanov, Georgi, 163, 172–174

Marx, Edgar, 82

Potter, George, 107, 111

Marx, Heinrich, 4

Pottier, Eugène, 116

Marx, Jenny, 71, 82

Preußen, Elisabeth von, 59

Marx, Laura, 71, 82

Preußen, Friedrich von, 131, 164

Mäurer, German, 33

Preußen, Victoria von, 131, 164

Mayer, Gustav, 163

Preußen, Wilhelm von see Wilhelm I, king Mazzini, Giuseppe, 2, 63, 88

of Prussia

Mehring, Franz, 65

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 24, 36–40, 42,

Meißner, Alfred, 59

61–62, 64, 98, 112–113, 116 –117, 142

Menzel, Adolph, 57, 70

Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von, 12

Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Lothar, 7,

67, 68–60

190 • Index

Potter, George, 107, 111

Soros, George, 133

Pottier, Eugène, 116

Spinoza, Baruch de, 61

Preußen, Elisabeth von, 59

Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 11

Preußen, Friedrich von, 131, 164

Stalin, Josef W., 11

Preußen, Victoria von, 131, 164

Stein zum Altenstein, Karl vom, 4, 11,

Preußen, Wilhelm von see Wilhelm I, 15

king of Prussia

Stein, Lorenz von, 14, 27–28, 45, 98,

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 24, 36–40,

104

42, 61–62, 64, 98, 112–113,

Sternberger, Dolf, 65

116 –117, 142

Strauß, David Friedrich, 8–9, 11, 27

Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von, 12

Struve, Gustav, 75, 88

Struve, Peter, 158

Stumpf, J. A., 57

Racine, Jean, 81

Radetsky, Joseph Wenzel von, 76

Ricardo, David, 65, 91, 132, 134–135,

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 160

138–139, 148–150, 158

Taylor, Charles, 133

Robespierre, Maximilien de, 8, 37, 44,

Themistocles, 13

65

Theodoric, 28

Robinson, Joan, 145

Thiers, Adolphe, 114–115, 120

Rochau, Ludwig August von, 98

Thompson, William, 138

Rorty, Richard, 176

Thoré, Théophile, 48

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22, 37, 39, 48

Thoreau, Henry David, 92

Ruge, Arnold, 16–17, 19–20, 24–25,

Thurow, Lester, 145

31, 33–35
Tkachev, Pyotr, 174

Rutenberg, Adolf, 16–17, 102

Trepov, Fyodor, 172

Tschech, Heinrich Ludwig, 59

Tugan-Baranovsky, Mikhail, 158

Saint-Just, Antoine de, 76

Turner, William, 57

Saint-Paul (censor), 19

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 36,

38–41, 44, 57

Urban, Friedrich Ludwig, 70

Salomon Oppenheim jun. & Cie

Urquhart, David, 168

(company), 15

Sand, George, 24

Say, Jean-Baptiste, 145

Vallès, Jules, 116

Schapper, Karl, 63, 73, 85–86

Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 34,

Schärttner, August (tavern keeper), 89

99, 102

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 11

Venedey, Jakob, 79

Schubarth, Karl Ernst, 11

Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 35

Schumpeter, Joseph, 133

Virchow, Rudolf, 69

Schweitzer, Albert, 9

Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Carl Friedrich,

Schweitzer, Johann Baptist von,

68

109–110, 159

Vogt, Carl, 79, 88

Sennett, Richard, 133

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 39,

Shakespeare, William, 81, 133

59

Sherman, William Tecumseh, 88

Sieber, Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber, 158

Sieyès, Abbé Emmanuel Joseph, 32

Wagener, Hermann, 104

Simon, Ludwig, 74

Wagner, Richard, 162

Smith, Adam, 40, 91, 132, 134–135,

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 14

138, 143, 148–150, 158

Weitling, Wilhelm, 60–61, 63, 85

Sombart, Werner, 142

Welcker, Carl Theodor, 11

Index • 191

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke

Willich, August von, 72, 85, 86

of, 82

Windisch-Graetz, Alfred I Candidus

Weston, John, 109–110

Ferdinand zu, 76–77

Westphalen, Caroline von, 19–20, 59

Winkler, Heinrich August, 175

Westphalen, Ferdinand von, 19

Wolff, Wilhelm, 74

Westphalen, Jenny von, 19–20, 23, 59,

Worms & Cie (company), 25

67, 71, 82, 91–92, 103

Weydemeyer, Joseph, 91

Wilhelm I, king of Prussia, 70, 101, 164

Zasulich, Vera, 172, 174

Document Outline
Contents
Acknowledgments
Ideas
Deeds
Discoveries
Consequences
Bibliography
Index of Names