Die Zukunft. No. 185, 11 August 1869

In Germany people have grown accustomed to regarding Ferdinand Lassalle as the originator of the German workers’ movement. And yet nothing is more incorrect. If six or seven years ago, in all factory districts, in all the large towns, the centres of the labouring population, the proletariat streamed to him in masses, if his journeys were triumphal processions that the sovereign princes might have envied him – had the soil not previously, perhaps, been fertilised in secret, to bear fruit that shot up so rapidly? If the workers cheered his teachings with applause, was this because those teachings were new to them, or because they had long been more or less known to the thinking ones among them?

The present generation lives fast and forgets fast. The movement of the forties, which culminated in the revolution of 1848 and found its conclusion in the reaction of 1849-52, has already fallen into oblivion, together with its political and socialist literature. It must therefore be recalled that before and during the revolution of 1848 there existed among the workers, particularly those of western Germany, a well-organised socialist party, which, although it fell apart after the Cologne Communist Trial, saw its individual members quietly continuing to prepare the soil that Lassalle later seized. It must further be recalled that there existed a man who, alongside the organisation of this party, made the scientific study of the so-called social question, i.e., the critique of political economy, his life’s task and had already published important results of his researches before 1860. Lassalle was a highly talented, broadly educated mind, a man of great energy and almost unlimited versatility; he was entirely made to play a political role in any circumstances. But he was neither the original initiator of the German workers’ movement, nor was he an original thinker. The entire content of his writings was borrowed, and not borrowed without misunderstandings; he had a predecessor and an intellectual superior, whose existence he naturally kept silent about, while he vulgarised his writings, and this intellectual superior is called Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, where he received his secondary education. He studied jurisprudence in Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his engagement with philosophy soon turned him away from law. After a five-year stay in the “metropolis of intelligence” he returned to Bonn in 1841 with the intention of habilitating there. At that time the first “new era” prevailed in Prussia. Frederick William IV had declared that he loved a spirited opposition, and attempts were made in various places to organise one. Thus the Rheinische Zeitung was founded in Cologne; in it Marx criticised the proceedings of the Rhenish Provincial Diet with a boldness unheard of at the time, in articles that caused a great sensation. At the end of 1842 he himself took over the editorship and gave the censors so much trouble that they did him the honour of sending a special censor from Berlin for the Rheinische Zeitung. When this did not help either, the paper had to undergo double censorship, with each issue, in addition to the ordinary one, being subjected to a second-level censorship by the president of the Cologne government. But this means also did nothing to help against the “inveterate malevolence” of the Rheinische Zeitung; and at the beginning of 1843 the ministry issued a decree by which the Rheinische Zeitung had to cease at the end of the first quarter. Marx resigned immediately, as the shareholders wanted to attempt a mediation, but this also failed and the paper ceased to appear.

The critique of the proceedings of the Rhenish Diet compelled Marx to study questions of material interest. Here he encountered new points of view, points of view that neither jurisprudence nor philosophy had foreseen. Starting from Hegel’s philosophy of right, Marx arrived at the insight that it was not the state, which Hegel had presented as the “crowning of the edifice”, but rather “civil society”, which Hegel had treated so stepmotherly, that was the sphere in which the key to the understanding of the historical process of development of humanity was to be sought. The science of civil society, however, is political economy, and this science could not be studied thoroughly in Germany, only in England or France.

After his marriage to the daughter of Privy Councillor von Westphalen in Trier (sister of the later Prussian Minister of the Interior, von Westphalen), Marx therefore moved to Paris in the summer of 1843, where he devoted himself mainly to the study of political economy and the history of the great French Revolution. At the same time he published, with Ruge, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, of which, however, only one volume appeared. Expelled from France by Guizot in 1845, he went to Brussels and remained there, engaged in the same studies, until the outbreak of the February Revolution. How little he agreed with the current socialism, even in its most pretentiously learned form, was shown by his critique of Proudhon’s great work: Philosophie de la misère, which appeared in 1847 under the title: Misère de la philosophie, Brussels and Paris. In this work many essential points of his now fully elaborated theory are already to be found. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, London 1848, written before the February Revolution and adopted by a workers’ congress in London, is likewise essentially his work.

Expelled once more by the Belgian government under the influence of the panic of the February Revolution, Marx returned to Paris at the invitation of the French provisional government. The storm flood of the revolution pushed all scientific occupations into the background; the task now was to intervene in the movement. After Marx, during the first excited days, had worked against the nonsense of the agitators who wanted to organise German workers from France as free corps to republicanise Germany, he went with his friends to Cologne and founded there the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which lasted until June 1849 and is still well remembered in the Rhineland. The freedom of the press of 1848 was probably nowhere exploited so successfully as at that time, right in the middle of a Prussian fortress, by that paper. After the government had vainly attempted to kill the paper by judicial persecution – Marx twice stood trial before the assizes, for press offences and for incitement to tax refusal, and was acquitted both times – it was brought down at the time of the May uprisings of 1849, by the expulsion of Marx on the pretext that he had lost his Prussian citizenship, and of the other editors on similar pretexts. Marx therefore had to go back to Paris, from where he was again expelled and, in the summer of 1849, went to his present place of residence, London.

At that time the whole finest flower of the continental refugee community of all nations gathered in London. Revolutionary committees of every kind were formed, combinations, provisional governments in partibus infidelium; there were disputes and squabbles of all sorts, and the gentlemen involved in them now certainly look back on that period as the most unsuccessful of their lives. Marx kept himself aloof from all these machinations. For a time he continued his Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the form of a monthly review (Hamburg 1850); afterwards he withdrew into the British Museum and explored the enormous, largely still unknown library there from the economic point of view. At the same time he wrote regularly for the New-York Tribune, he was, so to speak, the editor of this leading English-American paper for European politics, until the outbreak of the American Civil War.

The coup d’état of 2 December prompted him to write a pamphlet: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York 1852, which is just now appearing in a new printing (Hamburg, Meißner), and will contribute not a little to an understanding of the untenable situation in which this same Bonaparte has now landed himself. The hero of the coup d’état is here presented in his naked reality, as he appears without the halo with which momentary success had surrounded him. The philistine who regards his Napoleon III as the greatest man of the century and now cannot explain how this wonder-genius suddenly blunders time after time and commits one political mistake after another – the said philistine can seek counsel from the aforementioned work by Marx.

Much as Marx kept himself in the background during his entire London stay, Carl Vogt forced him, after the Italian campaign of 1859, into a polemic which concluded with Marx’s: Herr Vogt, London 1860. Around the same time the first fruit of his economic studies appeared: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Berlin 1859. First Part. This part contains only the theory of money, presented from entirely new points of view; the continuation was a long time in coming, since the author had meanwhile discovered so much new material that he deemed further studies necessary.

Finally, in 1867, there appeared in Hamburg: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. This work contains the results of a whole lifetime of study. It is the political economy of the working class, reduced to its scientific expression. Here it is not a matter of agitational phrases, but of strictly scientific deductions. Whatever one’s attitude to socialism may be, one will at any rate have to acknowledge that here it is presented scientifically for the first time, and that it was precisely Germany that was destined to achieve this performance in this field as well. Anyone who still wants to fight socialism will have to deal with Marx; if he succeeds in that, he need, of course, not mention the dei minorum gentium.

Marx’s book is also of interest from another side. It is the first work in which the actual relations existing between capital and labour, in their classic form as they have attained it in England, are described completely and in a clear survey. The parliamentary inquiries provided for this a rich material, covering a period of almost forty years and even in England almost unknown, on the conditions of the workers in almost all branches of industry, on the labour of women and children, on night work, etc., all of this has been made accessible here for the first time. To this is added the history of factory legislation in England, which, from the modest beginnings of the first act of 1803, has now arrived at restricting the working time in almost all trades carried on in factories or domestically to 60 hours per week for women and young persons under 18, and to 39 hours per week for children under 13. From this side the book is of the highest interest for every industrialist.

Marx has for many years been unconditionally the “most slandered” German writer, against which no one will deny him the testimony that he has also fought back bravely, and that his blows...

all struck home sharply. But the polemic in which he has, after all, ‘made’ so much, was at bottom only a matter of self-defence for him. His real interest ultimately always remained with his science, which he has studied and thought through for twenty-five years with a conscientiousness that has no equal; a conscientiousness which prevented him from bringing his conclusions before the public in systematic form, until they satisfied him as to their form and content, until he was clear in his mind that he had left no book unread, no objection unconsidered, that he had exhausted every point completely. Original thinkers are very rare in this age of epigones, but when a man is not only an original thinker but also in possession of a scholarship unrivalled in his field, he deserves to be doubly recognised.

Besides his studies, Marx is, as might be expected, occupied with the working-class movement; he is one of the founders of the ‘International Working Men’s Association’, which latterly has caused so much talk of itself and has already proved in more than one place in Europe that it is a power. We believe we are not wrong in saying that in this society, epoch-making in any case for the working-class movement, the German element — thanks particularly to Marx — occupies the influential position which is its due.