The “uneducated” public having ceased to pass judgment on it, the 
Neu-England-Zeitung of Boston has, with-commendable modesty and anticipating 
the significance of its insipid Grenzboten* radicalism, reached the conclusion that it 
is the “best newspaper”. For some time now, that newspaper has performed some 
grotesque antics. It resembles an overladen and frail little craft that has put out 
from the coast of the old world on a voyage of discovery. Suddenly the vessel finds 
itself out on the high seas and, would you credit it, they have forgotten to bring a 
compass, a pilot and a captain who can navigate! They are now at the mercy of the 
winds and the waves. At this juncture a worthy old gentleman tries to lecture the 
unthinking crew on the seriousness of the situation; but he is still sermonising when a 
laughing nymph appears in the distance to chaff at him, and she disturbs the 
edifying devotions by delighting in the confused doings of those trusty gentlemen. 
One man after another goes onto the after-deck from amongst this motley rabble, 
and keeps turning the wheel and trimming the sails. The general confusion is only 
made worse by the contradictory but always well-intentioned instructions of the 
pseudo-captain,° calling for the squaring of the circle, “higher unity”, the true, 
correct course to Canaan, the milk-and-honey world of the future—and this after 
he had, down in his cabin, just seen himself, and felt like, a second Jean Paul. 

Today, as in a final burst of energy, as in death-throes, new and larger sails are 
suddenly hoisted, while tomorrow fatigue sets in as after the agitation of a 
consuming fever. Overworked and on the verge of collapse, the crew reef the sails 
again. They try to put the disorderliness of the chaos from their minds by 
conjuring up “interesting” family quarrels. Seeking to conceal the contradictions of 
reality, in the midst of which they feel helpless, they allow that much-vaunted 
“higher unity” of ideal, free communal activity to go to pieces by decreeing 
differences between the European and the American outlook. The Athenian citizen, 
whose threadbare probity and woollen rags thrown proudly over his shoulder one 
has just admired as he delivered his sermon on freedom, steps into the 
background, and new actors come forward. Can one expect them to understand 

that modern bourgeois civilisation is based on the slavery of wage-labour, after one 
of the family had in his stupor completely failed to see yesterday that ancient 
civilisation was founded on absolute slavery? Most certainly not. 

In the struggle between the “European and the American outlook” the 
spokesman for Europe is “Leonidas”-Confucius*-Ruge, the Pomeranian aurora 
borealis, representing half a dozen Southern German dictators groping around in a 
half-light. Evervone knows that he preaches something he has christened humanism, 
and that occasionally he has someone sound his praises to John Bull as the third 
great German philosopher alongside Strauss and Feuerbach. Ruge’s “outlook” can 
be summed up briefly. In the writings of the philosopher Kant he discerns a system 
of limited freedom, in those of Fichte the principle of absolute freedom, and in those of 
Hegel the principle and system of absolute freedom through the medium of dialectics. Herr 
Ruge has always displayed an instinctive aversion to dialectics and he has always 
taken up its easier aspect, that of becoming entangled in contradictions, but not 
that of mastering them. It is therefore natural that he should constantly malign 
dialectics as being sophistry, as, for example, in the works of Marx. Ruge describes 
his humanism as the introduction in society of the principle and system of absolute freedom. 
So far as we are able to understand it, this humanism of Herr Ruge, his unity of 
practice and theory, consists in passing off his de facto clumsiness as theory to the 
men of practice and his peculiar and feeble thinking as practice to the 
theoreticians. Ever since Feuerbach, Bauer, Strauss and others successively 
dispatched one another from the scene, and no prince of science existed any 
longer, and since even the materialists pushed their noses in, a state of mind has 
occurred in old Ruge infected with which, quoting silly Gretchen, his translator 
into German-American said: 

And all this does my brain impair, 
As if a mill-wheel were turning there. 

For Ruge was in the habit of singing the praises of the reigning prince of 
science to the public as loudly as possible, in order to win renown himself. Out of 
all that has come an olla podrida of contradictions, which, in the absence of 
dialectics, has very recently had a democratic gravy poured over it, and, in the 
form of a box of humanism, appearing not, it is true, in the world theatre but in 
Janus, blissfully introduced itself to a “very select” public, which unfortunately had 
almost completely dispersed before the box was constructed. 

Of the European press Herr Ruge had in the last few years thrust himself on 
The Leader, edited in London by his friend Thornton Hunt who, logically, was 
extolled in Janus as the “most outstanding writer among the English socialists’. 
This unctuous coward had preached communism in order to divert attention from 
Chartism,° and we denounced him in the American press for it at that time. Today 

that charge is justified before our party. Hunt had forced his way into the 
Chartists’ Executive *?? with the intention of delivering the Chartists into the hands 
of the finance-reformers (the industrial bourgeoisie). In order to trap Ernest Jones 
he preached physical force and talked of nothing but rifles, at a time of the most 
splendid prosperity and in the most unfavourable of circumstances. In recognition 
of his efforts he was thrown out of the official position he held with the workers. 
Good! Nowadays the scoundrel has thrown off his mask. He has become one of the 
most respectable gossips of the middle class, and he declares Bright, that ideal of 
the modern English bourgeois, to be a genuine “old Englishman’”* and the most 
disinterested of humanitarian enthusiasts with regard to the unfortunate Indian 
people, and stated recently that he would even prefer despotism to a “raving 
republic”. That is the sort of pitiable figure that the puffed-up “higher unity” cuts. 
Behind it, whenever real conflicts arise, we see bragging arrogance in all its 
superficiality! 

[Die Reform, No. 49, September 17, 1853] 

Let us now turn to the “American outlook” which represents the counterpart to 
the family row in the Neu-England-Zeitung. For the most part this outlook consists 
of trivialities and latterly of sententious ideas taken from street ballads which, 
apparently strung together in public houses under the influence of Philadelphian 
lager, provide the sort of material to fill a cess-pit whose outer walls are cemented 
with untruths, dirty tricks and platitudes. A few Philadelphian Romans,” notably a 
certain Herr Posche, currently busy earning his spurs as a cheer-leader for Cushing 
in Pierce’s glorious army of place-hunters, are flourishing as matadors of this 
school.*7* A bourgeois conservative economic theory, of the kind that socialists of all 
parties are busy fighting—that propounded by the American Carey and the 
Frenchman Bastiat—is being trotted out to the credulous public* as the latest 
German-American discovery, the “higher unity’ of political economy. We shall see 
that wherever this grand higher unity ventures into contact with real life, it becomes 
a willing tool in the hands of the powers that be. The editors of the Neu-England- 
Zeitung appear not yet to have stained their chaste convictions with studies of such 
a demanding material nature as those that political economy involves; for we see 
daily that [...] discussion of social questions [...]“ everyone who feels like voiding 
his bowels. The said doctrine was last demolished, together with M. Bastiat, before 
the socialist tribunals of Europe in 1849, in the course of a discussion in 
Proudhon's Voix du peuple’ As far as European society is concerned, historical 

* Judging by the continuing cry of distress from the Neu-England-Zeitung and 
the rumours that are going round, the public would appear, incidentally, to have 
become something of a rash hypothesis.— A. C. 

developments have long since cut the ground from under that particular 
theoretical representation of a specific historical epoch. 

In America, where today the social contradictions are much less 
sharp than in radically undermined Europe, this theory found its 
champion in the economist Carey. Its conservative-bourgeois 
opponent (taking the view of the more recent English school) has 
already appeared in the person of Professor Wayland. His 
Principles of Political Economy has been introduced as a textbook at 
most of the academies of New England, much to the annoyance of 
Carey’s adherents. 

Let us summarise briefly the main points of the doctrine which is compiled by 
Bastiat in his Social Harmonies with grace and in easily comprehensible form, but 
propagated by Carey without any talent for presentation or for summing up and 
precision. One cannot deny C.H.Carey a certain amount of positive knowledge 
and even some original and attractive ideas.” 

His chief merit is that he has indeed cultivated a native product, 
grown directly from American soil without any foreign admix- 
tures. His science is of anything but universal] character, it is pure 
Yankee science. It attempts to demonstrate that the economic 
conditions of bourgeois society, instead of being conditions for 
struggle and antagonism, are rather conditions for partnership 
and harmony. (Very fine in theory, but modern industrial towns 
demonstrate how things work out in practice!) Those economic 
conditions can be broken down as follows: 

1) Rent, the share of the landowner, 

2) Profit, the share of the capitalist, 

3) Wages, the share of the worker in the value of the finished 
product. 

We can see that Carey is much too experienced to link the 
existence of classes with the existence of political privileges and 
monopolies, as for instance the newly-fledged Roman youths at 
Philadelphia would, or before them s. v.? Heinzen, and thus to see 
social harmony as being unconditionally invented and patented for 
all time with the great French Revolution.*” Carey seeks rather for 
economic reasons behind economic facts, though in so doing he 
fails to transcend the as yet indistinct, hazy and fluid class relations 
of America. He therefore only proves that he regards a point of 
transition in the development of society as the normal condition of 
its life. Most characteristic is the argument of Carey’s school 

against the English economists. It attacks Ricardo, classical cham- 
pion of the bourgeoisie and most stoic opponent of the proletariat, 
describing him as a man whose works provide an arsenal for 
anarchists, socialists, in brief for all “enemies of the bourgeois 
order”. With fanaticism it attacks not only Ricardo but all other 
leading economists of modern bourgeois Europe, and reproaches 
‘these economic heralds of the bourgeoisie with having split society 
and with forging weapons for civil war by cynically providing the 
proof that the economic foundations of the various classes are 
bound to give rise to an inevitable and constantly growing 
antagonism between them. 

The Frenchman Bastiat is an unqualified Free Trader; the 
Philadelphian Roman youths parrot his views about the “blessings 
of free trade” with naive credulity. Carey himself began his 
economic career as a Free Trader, and at the time he would come 
up with some good jokes, for example that one should couple 
bourgeois France with China on account of her preference for 
protective tariffs.* As is usually the case with advocates of free 
trade, he blamed all the discord in society on improper 
interference by the state in ventures which were the prerogative of 
private industry and the like. This was all Yankee, Yankee from 
head to foot. Nowadays Mr. Carey has become sour, he sighs and 
complains together with the Frenchman Sismondi about the 
destructive effects seen in the centralising big industry of England, 
which for him engenders the “evil principle” in society.*” 

He would be highly surprised if he knew how German greenhorns saw the 
avalanche-like growth of the power of big capital as the formation of so many 
snowballs full of ‘“‘Anglo-Saxon” enthusiasm for decentralisation and individualism. 

Apart from the fact that Carey totally overlooks the transform- 
ing, revolutionary element in the destructive effects of industry, he 
is nevertheless again too much of a Yankee to make industry as 
such responsible, yet that would be the only logical conclusion to be 
drawn from his argument. He makes the English personally 
responsible for the effects of their industry, not to mention the 
fact that Ricardo is in his turn made responsible for England. 
Caught in this contradiction, he must necessarily burrow himself 
deeper and deeper in the petty-bourgeois element,advocating the 
long since discarded patriarchal association between agriculture and 
manufacturing. 

But the mark of the Yankee with Carey and his adherents is 
this: under the pretext and, we ought to admit it, with good will 
and with the conviction of speaking for the ‘““most numerous and 
the poorest class’’,* they throw down the gauntlet to the English 
bourgeoisie. Sismondi did that by condemning modern industry and 
expressing his longing to return to the old method of manufacture; 
nowadays, however, they do it by preaching protective tariffs. 
Accordingly all they are really aiming at with all their philan- 
thropic talk is artificially accelerating the English development of 
the industrial bourgeoisie in America. This is a philanthropic and 
utopian gesture in the competitive struggle between England and 
America, this most interesting of phenomena confronting present- 
day bourgeois economists. The ingenious aspect of economics is 
revealed here in all its glory. 

As this is completely overlooked even by Carey’s school, it would of course be 
unfair of us to assume even an inkling of all this in the thinking of a 
“State-haemorrhoidarius” and the newly-fledged political economists of the Neu- 
England-Zeitung, since they are stuck in the bourgeois mire right up to their ears 
and are not even remotely aware of the historical significance of the school of 
thinking which they themselves have learned by heart. 

[Die Reform, No. 50, September 21, 1853] 

In the competitive struggle between America and England we 
see the latter pushed increasingly into the position of Venice, 
Genoa and Holland, which were all forced to lend their capital on 
interest after the monopoly of their trading power had been 
broken. Genoa and Venice helped Holland to emerge, Holland 
provided England with capital, and now England is obliged to do 
the same for the United States of America. Only today all the 
conditions in this process are of a much larger scale than they 
were at that time. England’s position differs from that of those 
countries in that the main factor for them was a monopoly of 
trade, which is easy to break, whilst she possesses a monopoly of 
industry as well, which by its very nature is tougher. On the other 
hand the English bourgeoisie’s surfeit of capital is all the more 
colossal, so that it is obliged to build railways in both continents, 
and to invest capital in gas-lighting in Berlin, in the vineyards of 
Bordeaux, and in Russian factories and American steamers. All 
this provides one with material to support the most interesting 
observation that the attraction which English central capital 
exerts necessarily has its complement in a centrifugal force which 

pours it out again into all the corners of the world. If there were 
to be a revolution, then the English would have furnished the 
European continent with all those lines of communication and all 
that production machinery for nothing. America is not waiting for 
revolutions. It is settling its accounts in a conservative bourgeois 
fashion by from time to time liquidating its business with England 
through bankruptcies. This is one of the secrets of its rapid rise, a 
regular phenomenon just like railway accidents and shipwrecks. 
That same lack of concern, that same mad frenzy of production 
which makes it possible for tens of thousands to be brought into 
the world who under different circumstances would never see the 
light of day, cold-bloodedly sends hundreds upon hundreds, 
propelled by steam, to an early death. The one is simply the 
complement of the other. The unscrupulous multiplying of the wealth 
of capitalist companies accompanied by complete disregard for human 
life! That is how the commentary reads on the “victory. of 
individuality amongst the Anglo-Saxons”! 

All these are facts which are naturally incomprehensible to the “sober 
non-violence and homely good sense” of Philadelphian Roman youths who have 
ingeniously managed to find out from some conservative review or other that the 
women workers of Lowell today are three times better off as regards their earnings 
than they were thirty years ago. According to that clever conclusion those women 
workers of years ago must have eaten only four and a half days a week and must 
have covered their nakedness with nothing more than a fig-leaf. That Lowell 
should only have come into existence during the last thirty years, or should have 
worked its way up from a quietly vegetating population of 200 souls to an 
industrial town of 36,000 souls; that today approximately a third of that population 
should consist of women workers* who are living from hand to mouth on an 
average wage of three dollars a week, that is to say that their wages fluctuate to 
such an extent above and below this average that they can put a few coppers into 
the savings bank when times are good, only to use them up again when business 
stagnates completely or they are laid off for half the week; that these women workers 
should for the most part be condemned to celibacy, not by democratic decree but 
through pressure of circumstances—these are all things which a “democratic” 
candidate for high office must not see, even if one wanted to assume that he had 
the necessary powers of vision. 

It is true that here in America we cannot deny the existence of that “equality 
of opportunity for the individual, which is the highest goal one (i.e. the 
Philadelphian Romans) can perceive”. Yellow fever has for long enough been 
acting as a delegate of the Roman democrats and has demonstrated that principle 
in New Orleans. However, the possibility of equality, young Sir, lies beyond the 
range of vision of the bourgeoisie, and only the reformer* who has perceived the 

* Five-eighths of the population of Lowell is estimated to be women, and only 
three-eighths men. We believe that in fact the disproportion is much more 

glaring.— A. C. 

full implications of the present conditions of workers has the requisite wider 
horizon, not hedged round by any kind of prejudice, to include it. 

Having now sketched the heroes of both worlds, but, where the hero of the 
New World was concerned, having preferred to discuss political economy in the 
original rather than the dull and bloodless imitation which he is always repeating 
(and we have done this in order to be able to observe the decorum which we owe 
to the public, and to interrupt the personification of boredom in all its monotony 
and trite learning in all its gloom), we must add that each of the two parties is 
accusing the other of gross ignorance in matters of world history (a fact which we 
simply register), and that the editors occasionally christen these touching, 
“interesting” scenes a “struggle between materialism and idealism”, with Heinzen 
appearing as godfather in the old disguise of Orlando Furioso. 

The feud had become very vehement, and it seemed that the interplay of 
opposing arguments would end in a brawl rather than resolving itself in that 
“higher unity” which everyone had so hoped for. They therefore improvised a 
plan to produce unity through arbitration, a deus ex machina, summoned in the 
person of an “earnest” man, a former diplomat and envoy of some petty republic, 
unless the solemn protestations of the political sages and grandees of international 
law are ‘totally deceiving us, betraying to us with their carefully restrained 
judgments, as they do at every turn, the man who is already groaning under the 
burden of some future government office. He settles the “struggle” to the 
satisfaction of both sides, for both parties are adjudged to be at fault, and 
therefore neither has to make a more dishonourable retreat than the other. 
Though occasionally still grunting bad-temperedly, “Leonidas” walks peaceably 
along with his opponents, the “unknown Greeks”, whose rdéle in the comedy had 
been taken by the Philadelphian Roman youths. Moved, the choir of the priests of 
humanism sings “These sacred halls know not what vengeance is!” The curtain 
falls, but there is no Bengal flame to cast a red light on the patriotic tableau. The 
final scene is yet to come. 

[Die Reform, No. 51, September 24, 1853] 

Thanks to his manner of a whimpering Heraclitus, the “earnest” arbitrator had 
gained universal sympathy, extravagantly bestowed upon him by all the treasure- 
hunters who subscribe to the “science of the future”, who were whimpering before 
him, and who, on their own admission, cast their pearls before the public as 
Californian gold-diggers would, still rough and unpolished. And lo, full of good 
cheer and with a happy heart a guest suddenly arrives on the scene, all the more 
worthy for being uninvited,? who chooses, in the réle of Democritus, to make fun 
of everything that is funny, and thinks all the evidence indicates that throughout 
the whole struggle there has been much ado about nothing. He scoffed at the 
whole fantastic notion of a special democratic mentality, which cannot conceive of 

the revolution as anything other than the “fiery hell-hounds” of the wire-pulling 
European Central Committee.*?” He pacifies their lordships, saying they need have 
no fear of Bashkirs, and the Prussians and the Bavarians are not so bad either. He 
explains to them how, without the princehood of its princes, without the customary 
collection of youths in spiked helmets, with or without monkey-tail cockades, 
Germany might have stood a chance of Bashkirs. He chuckles at the tender 
“revolutionary” concern for the national independence of the thirty-six sovereigns, 
of the Prussian, Biickeburg, Darmstadt or Baden governments, and at the way 
imperial troops—imperial troops for the “German nation”—are preferred to 
Bashkirs. He laughs at people’s dread of the impending floods of Bashkirs, at the 
festive bluster, at all the rubbish of political wisdom, the moralising national 
manifestos addressed to the Prusso-Baden princelings, at the way they are urged 
faithfully to protect the thirty-six mother-countries with their half-and-half 
despotism from the Bashkirs, so as to prevent at all costs the premature outbreak 
of the great conflict, which the democrats do not expect to occur until fifty years 
after Napoleon’s prophecy* but which must not occur during their lifetimes. He 
laughs at the feeble and absurd efforts of democratic sects to reduce all the existing 
convulsions of European society, the whole enormous historical crisis, and the 
thousands of difficulties, complications and class problems to a superficial and 
insipid difference between Cossacks and republicans, and to treat the overthrow of 
a whole system of production with all the shocks for the world market, with all the 
class struggles and upheavals in industry that this inevitably entails as if it were just 
the plainest of pot-house fare, like some fraternal IJuncheon that has yet to be 
arranged. He laughs at the barbaric somersaults of Menchikoff, at the diplomatic 
absurdities of his superiors, Nesselrode-Libinsky,” at the top-booted Don Quixote 
of the European counter-revolution, the mighty and formidable recruiter of Jews 
Nicholas, and at the “helpless voice” of his politically skilled opponents together 
with their high-ranking judge. He offers his congratulations on the final 
extinguishing of the “tiny spark [of revolution] flickering on”, and on the final 
decaying of the whole theatrical apparatus of official democracy, but on the other 
hand whispers into the ears of the jousters, numb with astonishment at the 
proletarian audacity they have witnessed, that the material revolution without 
hollow-sounding words is for that very reason more inevitable today than ever, and 
that it was Russia’s equal opponent. 

Whispering is heard everywhere, and “righteous indignation” manifests itself 
amongst the democratic notabilities. The agitation grows and nobody notices that, 
having ended his scornful reprimand, the proletarian rogue has silently turned his 
back on the sacred halls of “higher unity”. People clear their throats. Misunder- 
stood and foundering, political wisdom fires a distress signal, which fades away in 
melancholy, and there appears the now inevitable factotum of governmental power 
in partibus.© Slowly and discreetly, and with earnest, ominous demeanour and 
thoughtfully folded arms, the latter shakes off the fiercely snapping cluster of 
talents. Resplendent under his arms is the testament of Peter the Great, er history 
of Russia, bound in pigskin, is borne in and opened at his behest, and bundles of 
treaties on parchment are piled up round him. He begins to speak. Svyatoslav, Ivan 

Vasilyevich, Peter I, Catherine II and Nicholas file past, a series of irrefutable 
signposts pushed successively forward from Moscow to the Danube. What is the 
direction in which they point? To Constantinople, the fateful city of the Tsar. Is 
that understood? Tremble Byzantium! Who will save you? And who will save the 
world from the Cossack flood? Democracy? “It alone speaks out* and vainly raises 
its helpless voice against Russia; the democratic party has got into disrepute in the 
City, at Westminster Hall and St. James’s alike” —thus speaks the factotum himself. 
The German princes? They are themselves nothing more than the princelings of 
the Cossacks. Boustrapa ’? He wants to parade as a Cossack on the Rhine himself. 
Aberdeen? Has he not once already allowed the Cossacks to get as far as 
Adrianople? 

Who then is left? The Slav revolution? A miserable Montenegrin ‘“Holper- 
lips”.479 The pessimistic political sages no longer think much of that. What then? 
There is nothing, nothing else, nowhere is there salvation! Let us cover our heads 
and hide our tallow candles—l’Europe sera cosaque. But wait! Here comes the 
revolution, the great “mighty people’s revolution”, the “fourth estate” is on its way, 
the “estate” which has no more to do than to “launch itself against the Tartar 
flood of tsarist despotism” if it wishes later to see the “knife and fork question” © 
resolved, an issue which has of course long since been resolved for the people of 
other estates. Indeed, forward with the “fourth estate”, forward with the “people’s 
revolution”, forward into battle against Russia! Russia is the seat of “Europe’s 
order based on sceptre, cross, sabre and money”! 

The speaker has finished, his “helpless voice” falls silent. He throws back his 
head, looks about him, triumphant, “earnest”, serenely cool. 

Where is that other horseman, 
His mount has left the stable? 

Dumbfounded, they cast an eye round the trusty company. “Thalberg not here?” 
No answer. The speaker’s mournful gaze strays involuntarily out to the blue-vaulted 
sky. “Paradoxes,” he stammers. In resignation he lowers his gaze, and on the street it 
lights upon the missing intruder, who is playing with a box of matches and laughing 
away.