Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 11, Marx&Engels 1849–1851
Introduction
I am sorry for the second consecutive entry to say “this is my longest delay.” Life happens. But I will finish all 50 volumes or die trying.
The outline for this entry is as follows:
I. This Introduction, including the MECW “Preface”
II. Engels’ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
III. Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
IV. All other works in this volume (mostly newspaper articles)
The MECW preface (again not mirrored on hiaw.org unfortunately) can be read online as a PDF here (at the website of the Worker-communist Party of Iran — Hekmatist which mirrors the PDFs that Lawrence Wishart claims exclusive copyright over otherwise.)
In my opinion, the MECW sets the stage exceptionally well in this volume:
“Volume 11 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels covers the period from August 1851 to March 1853, when the forces of reaction were consolidating their hold throughout Europe. The revolution in Germany and Italy had already been defeated in 1849. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851 came as a climax to the development of the counter-revolution in France, putting an end to the Second Republic, which had still retained at least some democratic institutions, and creating the Bonapartist monarchy, another bulwark of reaction in Europe and a hotbed of international conflict and military escapades. There was little prospect of a fresh revolutionary outbreak, such as had been possible during the first few months after the defeat of the German, Hungarian and Italian revolutionary movements. The counter-revolutionary order had now, at least for a time, become established. Under these conditions, Marx and Engels found it essential to continue the theoretical generalisation of the experience of the 1848 revolution, which they had begun immediately after its rearguard battles. In particular, they set out to examine the reasons for the temporary triumph of the counter-revolutionary forces and to analyse the historical developments over the last few years. Marxist thinking rose to new heights in this analytical and generalising work, exemplified by many of the writings included in this volume, above all by such masterpieces as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx and Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany by Engels
“Marx also intensified his economic researches, interrupted by the revolution of 1848–49. The present volume includes conclusions he drew in the course of these researches in his journalistic writings for the working-class and progressive bourgeois press. Engels, for his part, realising the importance of armed struggle in the forthcoming revolutionary battles, immersed himself in studying the art of war. Several pieces indicative of his military studies are included in this volume. Particularly important among the practical activities of Marx and Engels were their efforts to preserve, and to educate and rally the proletarian revolutionary cadres, and to protect those among them who had become victims of police persecution. The Cologne trial of Communist League members in Germany was a very severe test for the Communists.”
The preface continues with some brief summaries of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany and the Brumaire, which we can put aside for now since I will delve into those directly. But I will note one thing that seems like a progressive intervention by the Soviet-oriented editors of the MECW, which was a direct contradicting of Engels’ skepticism towards the national liberation of the south Slavic people again in this volume.
Next, the preface covers a third topic, specifically the repression of The Communist League. Why did that matter?: “The Communist League in fact proved to have been the historical prototype of an international proletarian party, a precursor of the First International. After its dissolution the struggle by Marx and Engels for a proletarian party did not cease, but continued in other forms corresponding to the new situation.”
Finally, the preface moves to a fourth topic, that of all the various other investigations Marx and Engels were making at this time, including something that would be integrated into that famous critique of the political economy: “During this period Marx was already directing his attention towards primitive [“original?” — Chris] accumulation as the most important feature of the genesis of capitalist society. His article ‘Elections. — Financial Clouds. — The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery’ contains the first outline of his analysis. The material it contains on the merciless expropriation of the crofters, their eviction from their ancestral lands and the history of the enrichment of the Sutherland family, was to be used later in Capital.”
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
First, some interesting background I was previously unaware of, for biographical interest especially:
“Marx was asked in the summer of 1851 by Charles Anderson Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, to write a series of articles on the German Revolution. Founded in 1842 by Horace Greeley, the Tribune was the most influential paper in the United States at the time. These articles were written by Engels at the request of Marx, who was then busy with his economic studies and felt, besides, that he had not yet attained fluency in English. Engels wrote the articles in Manchester, where he was employed, and sent them on to Marx in London to be edited and dispatched to New York. Thus, although Engels must be rightly considered their author, Marx took a big part in the preparation, for in their almost daily correspondence the chief points were discussed thoroughly between them. The articles appeared under Marx’s name, and it was not until much later, when the correspondence between the two life-long collaborators became available, that the true circumstances were revealed. The contributions to the Tribune thus begun continued until 1862, and though Marx himself wrote most of the articles after 1852, Engels continued to help his friend by writing for him important articles on political and military affairs. When Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, wrote the preface to the 1896 edition she was still under the impression that Marx had written the series.”
Engels begins his articles on October 25th, 1851 with a background summary he called “Germany at the Outbreak of the Revolution.”
The class summary Engels makes — though I lack the specialized historical knowledge to editorialize about — is fascinating. So please excuse the lengthy quotation below knowing I find it really engaging reading:
“The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or, at least, reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a powerful and wealthy middle class, concentrated in large towns, and particularly in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of their ancient privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of the right to control the princes, they had preserved almost all their Medieval supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed. This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy was considered, officially, the first “Order” in the country. It furnished the higher Government officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.
“The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed by the introduction of steam, and the rapidly extending supremacy of English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic continental system, established in other parts of the country, did not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far inland, and using, mostly, foreign, Dutch, or Belgian ports for their imports and exports, they had little or no interest in common with the large seaport towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons, London and Manchester
…
“The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or, at least, reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a powerful and wealthy middle class, concentrated in large towns, and particularly in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of their ancient privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of the right to control the princes, they had preserved almost all their Medieval supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed. This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy was considered, officially, the first ‘Order’ in the country. It furnished the higher Government officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.
“The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed by the introduction of steam, and the rapidly extending supremacy of English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic continental system, established in other parts of the country, did not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far inland, and using, mostly, foreign, Dutch, or Belgian ports for their imports and exports, they had little or no interest in common with the large seaport towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons, London and Manchester.
…
“The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated, and intelligent proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated, and powerful middle class. The working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power, and remodelled the State according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent, and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can no longer be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized; that the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper light. Now, in Germany the mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern manufacturing lords of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid specimens, but by small tradesmen, whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages.
…
“Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which with its appendix of farm laborers, constitutes a considerable majority of the entire nation. Rut this class again sub-divided itself into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers…Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders, predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had succumbed before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution… Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in perpetuity a certain amount of labor in favor of the lord of the manor. Lastly, the agricultural laborers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns was exactly that of the same class in England, and who in all cases lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers.”
After summarizing the complicated class system, Engels goes on to summarize the Prussian state and then in another chapter, the various other German States (in generality, not in a principality by principality basis no matter how much the Paradox gamers could cry foul.)
This pattern repeats itself as Engels later summarizes counter-revolution in Vienna and Berlin, followed by the lesser States who “found a common centre in the National Assembly at Frankfort.”
An ongoing theme of these post 1848–49 summaries continued, about the failure of multi-class alliances in revolutionary situations when the working class is a junior partner:
“These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the popular, or as it now called itself, the Democratic party. This party, headed by the petty trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under its banner, in the beginning of the revolution, the large majority of the working people, demanded direct and universal suffrage, the same as established in France, a single legislative assembly, and full and open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March, as the base of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be satisfied with a thus ‘democratized’ monarchy, the more advanced demanded the ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions agreed in recognizing the German National Assembly at Frankfort as the supreme authority of the country, while the Constitutionalists and Reactionists affected a great horror of the sovereignty of this body, which they professed to consider as utterly revolutionary.
“The independent movement of the working classes had, by the revolution, been broken up for a time. The immediate wants and circumstances of the movement were such as not to allow any of the specific demands of the Proletarian party to be put in the foreground. In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for the independent action of the working men, as long as direct and universal suffrage was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller states continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what else could the Proletarian party do but watch the — for them all-important — movement of Paris, and struggle in common with the petty shopkeepers for the attainment of those rights, which would allow them to fight afterwards their own battle?
…
“The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, succeeded only very gradually in withdrawing the mass of the working people from the influence of the Democrats, whose tail they formed in the beginning of the Revolution. But in due time the indecision, weakness, and cowardice of the Democratic leaders did the rest, and it may now be said to be one of the principal results of the last years’ convulsions, that wherever the working-class is concentrated in anything like considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that Democratic influence which led them into an endless series of blunders and misfortunes during 1848 and 1849.”
Much later, Engels concluded
“In May the insurrection had broken out; by the middle of July, 1849, it was entirely subdued, and the first German Revolution was closed” and “The defeat of the south-west German insurrection, and the dispersion of the German Parliament, bring the history of the first German insurrection to a close. We have now to cast a parting glance upon the victorious members of the counter-revolutionary alliance”.
And the last entry of Revolution is on the trial of Communists, including forged documents and conviction of the defendants, which I will touch in in the last section, as Marx and Engels return to the topic of the trial separately.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Now we come to one of Marx’s most famous works, especially pre-Capital. The MECW places it within a process of learning for both Marx and for actual revolutions:
“In this work Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifest themselves in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content. The proletariat of Paris was at this time too inexperienced to win power, but the experiences of 1848–51 would prove invaluable for the successful workers’ revolution of 1871.”
Before we get to the core text, there is an Engels preface from 1885 worth quoting as well to show his loyalty to the text three decades later:
“In addition, however, there was still another circumstance. It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science — this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.”
Of course, most people who would be reading this are already familiar with how the Brumaire begins:
“Hegel remarks somewhere* that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793–95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”
*Before we move on, did Hegel really say this? What did Marx mean? How did he work his way to this famous quote? Here is a screenshot from Marxists.org with some background:
Though the most famous, this isn’t the only memorably flowery text from Marx in the first chapter:
“Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day — but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s wing] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals — until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
[Here is the rose, here dance!]”
After some more flowing prose, Marx moves into a “general outline” of this French revolution:
“Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; the period of the constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly — May 1848 to May 28 1849; and the period of the constitutional republic or the Legislative National Assembly — May 28 1849 to December 2 1851.”
Than elaborating:
“The first period — from February 24, the overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly — the February period proper, may be designated as the prologue of the revolution.
…
“The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic. Immediately after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May 15, a few days after it met, to negate its existence forcibly, to dissolve it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation.”
…
“The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared, had leveled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of ‘republic or monarchy.’ It had revealed that here ‘bourgeois republic’ signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life — as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the old world of ghosts.
“During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had ‘saved’ society from ‘the enemies of society.’ They had given out the watchwords of the old society, ‘property, family, religion, order,’ to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: ‘In this sign thou shalt conquer!’”
Chapter 2 and 3 cover the downfall of the Republicans and the Defeat of Petty-bourgeois democracy:
“As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent during these recesses and its body dissolved into the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still lacking to complete the true form of this republic: to make the former’s recess permanent and replace the latter’s inscription, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, with the unambiguous words: infantry, cavalry, artillery!”
“Chapter 4 covers the rise of Louis Bonaparte, beginning with the sacking of his previous ministers, the appointment of the Hautpoul Ministry, and laws establishing wine taxes and education law described as an abolition of non belief (bringing schools under virtual supervision of the clergy.) This chapter ends with the important thrust and detailed mechanics of this reaction:
“The law of May 31, 1850, was the coup d'etat of the bourgeoisie. All its conquests over the revolution hitherto had only a provisional character and were endangered as soon as the existing National Assembly retired from the stage. They depended on the hazards of a new general election, and the history of elections since 1848 irrefutably proved that the bourgeoisie's moral sway over the mass of the people was lost in the same measure as its actual domination developed. On March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was therefore one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution required a minimum of two million votes to make an election of the President of the Republic valid. If none of the candidates for the presidency received this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from among the three candidates to whom the largest number of votes would fall. At the time when the Constituent Assembly made this law, ten million electors were registered on the rolls of voters. In its view, therefore, a fifth of the people entitled to vote was sufficient to make the presidential election valid. The law of May 31 struck at least three million votes off the electoral rolls, reduced the number of people entitled to vote to seven million, and nevertheless retained the legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It therefore raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of the effective votes; that is, it did everything to smuggle the election of the President out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the National Assembly. Thus through the electoral law of May 31 the party of Order seemed to have made its rule doubly secure, by surrendering the election of the National Assembly and that of the President of the Republic to the stationary section of society.”
Chapter 5 describes further struggle between the National Assembly and Bonaparte after the abolition of universal male suffrage and chapter 6 with the ultimate victory of Napoleon. Chapter 6 also contains a useful summary of the revolutionary period to this point:
“1. First period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal-brotherhood swindle.
2. Second period. Period of constituting the republic and of the Constituent National Assembly.
a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.
c. December 20, 1848, to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.
3. Third period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.
a. May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.
b. June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.
c. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.
(1) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army.
(2) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.
(3) April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes definite.
(4) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire”
Finally, chapter 7, Marx summarizes the entire reactionary period in France beautifully:
“The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy — Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken.
…
“The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s dilemma: ‘In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.’ It solved it in the ‘Cossack republic.’ No Circe using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.”
And again, as with Engels above, Marx observed the back stabbing of the working class:
“On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and shopkeeper to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the scene of battle. For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had learned that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had abolished the secret ballot and had ordered them to put a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ after their names on the official registers. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the shopkeeper believed they had gained their objective. Those who failed to appear next morning were the bourgeois and the shopkeeper.”
Further, Napoleon could reply on a mass base after all “And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants.”
Why? “ Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.”
A familiar ruse had returned: “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another.”
Marx concludes as an accurate prophet, predicting the literal and symbolic destruction of a symbol (in 1871):
“The cult of the Holy Tunic of Trier [A Catholic relic, allegedly taken from Christ when he was dying, preserved in the cathedral of Marx’s native city] he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column”.
All other works in this edition
Another longer entry of note in this book is “Heroes of the Exile”, which goes beyond have Marx’s usual satirical elements into being a full on satire (albeit unpublished in his lifetime) regarding emigrate leaders of the petty-bourgeois Willich-Schapper group that caused a split in the Communist League in 1850. Marx had hoped to publish something satirical on the topic in the USA (home to many of these emigrate Germans) through Joseph Weydemeyer in 1851, but it wasn’t until 1852 that a pamphlet had been written. It was not printed during the lifetime of Marx or even Engels; a manuscript survived and was passed on to Eduard Bernstein, who purposefully hid it from public life. In 1924, it was handed over to the German Social-Democratic Party and in 1930 it was finally published in a Russian translation in Book 5 of the Marx-Engels Archives. It finally had a German release in the Werke in 1960. In 1971 it was published in English for the first time by Lawrence & Wishart, though corrections were made before it appeared in the MECW I read it in today.
Many of the “red 48er” figures satirized in “Heroes” are obscure today, of course through no fault of Marx. But it makes some of the satirical comments quite obscure to read today. The humor though still shines through, especially to those of us familiar with the “toxic culture” of the left with all of its internecine scheming and gossip. A few samples:
- “Everyone who knows Ruge, knows that the mania for proclamations is his incurable disease.”
- “Johannes Ronge or Johannes Kurzweg as he likes to be known in his intimate circle, is certainly not the author of the Book of Revelations. There is nothing mysterious about him, he is banal, hackneyed, as insipid as water, luke-warm dish-water.”
- “The latest fashionable arrivals had made up the full complement of the Emigration and the time had now come for a more comprehensive ‘organisation’, to round it off upwards to a full dozen.”
- “With this we bring the adventures of our demagogic Hidalgo from the South Jutland Mancha to a close. In Greece and Brazil, on the Vistula and La Plata, in Schleswig-Holstein and in New York, in London and in Switzerland: the representative of Young Europe and of the South American Humanidad, painter, nightwatchman and employee, peddler of his own writings; among Poles one day and gauchos the next, and ship’s captains the day after that; unacknowledged, abandoned, ignored but everywhere an itinerant knight of freedom with a thoroughgoing dislike of ordinary bourgeois hard work — our hero at all times in all countries and in all circumstances remains himself; with the same confusion, the same meddlesome pretensions, the same faith in himself. He will always defy the world and never cease to say, write and print that since 1831 he has been the mainspring of world history.”
The next entry I want to highlight was Marx’s “Pauperism and free trade. The approaching commercial crisis”, first published in the New York Daily Tribune in November 1852. Originally Marx wrote this article and “Political Consequences of the Commercial Excitement” in German, then he sent it to Engels to be translated into English. Engels divided the text into two independent articles for the Tribune.
This contains a repetition of an earlier schema of Marx and Engels — that free trade and protectionism are both Bourgeois policies with inherent flaws. — “Either side of the Bourgeois commercial policy, Free Trade or Protection, is, of course, equally incapable of doing away with facts that are the mere necessary and natural results of the economical base of Bourgeois society. And a matter of a million of paupers in the British workhouses is as inseparable from British prosperity, as the existence of eighteen to twenty millions in gold in the Bank of England.”
In the face of historic economic growth in 1852 Britain, Marx follows (begins?) that Marxist tradition of predicting a looming crisis. Perhaps over generally speaking, Marx was wrong about a coming crisis for capitalists in to follow the short-cycle boom bust cycles of the 1830s and 1840s; but it might have made sense for him to make such a prediction considering what he observed from those two decades, and the instability suggested by reading various Economist articles about California gold, a recent repeal of the Corn Laws, and the recent Irish famine. Though his political point about free trade may or may not have been correct, it was for a period of time incorrect about being irrelevant to British economic cycles, as a favorable trade environment gave the United Kingdom generally continued growth until the slighter 1867–69 recession or the more significant 1873–1896 long depression caused by cheap American agriculture and the panic of ‘73.
Next I mention The Trials at Cologne from November 1852, a letter to the editor of The Morning Advertiser (which as a side note had a print run from 1794 to 2020.) This is a fairly novel entry as it shows Marx pleading to an editor to publish a letter to stop the Prussian police from intercepting it and framing him. It’s brief enough you could read it at the link above now in a minute.
A more major entry, over 50 pages, is Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. The MECW endnotes summarize it as Marx exposing “the unseemly methods used by the Prussian police state against the communist movement. On October 27, 1852 Marx wrote to Engels: ‘My pamphlet is not intended to defend any principles but to brand the Prussian Government on the basis of an account of the facts and the course of the trial.’” Unfortunately for Marx, after initial publication of around 2000 copies in January 1853, the pamphlet was confiscated by the police in Baden on their way to Germany. German refugees in the United States however were able to publish it out of a Boston émigré newspaper. In English, it wasn’t published until 1971 by Lawrence and Wishart. If you don’t want to take the time to read the whole pamphlet, Wiki has a basic summary as does marxists.org
In his final judgement argument, Marx claimed public opinion had turned against the defendants especially as a key piece of evidence was exposed as fraudulent. However, that key piece of evidence (the “minute book”) being exposed did not stop the prosecutors from claiming that it still said things that were true, and unlike what we may see regarding American law on television, the “you can’t un-ring a bell” scenario did not lead to a mistrial. The prosecution shifted from saying this was not a “political” trial but a criminal one to making blatantly political arguments about the nature of conspiracy. Ultimately the repressive state apparatus did its job: “With their verdict of Guilty the Rhenish nobility and the Rhenish bourgeoisie joined in the cry uttered by the French bourgeoisie after December 2: ‘Property can be saved only by theft, religion only by perjury, the family only by bastardy, order only by disorder!””
However, looking for a revolutionary silver lining as comrades were sent to prison, Marx claimed the illusions of superstitious Rhenish Prussia were broken by the trial; that people saw this system as a court-martial of the bourgeois and that there would be another Jena.
In March 1853, Marx had published an article in The People’s Paper called The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery.
The main thrust was the hypocrisy of aristocratic slavery opponents in Britain: “As for a large number of the human beings expelled to make room for the game of the Duke of Atholl, and the sheep of the Countess of Sutherland, where did they fly to, where did they find a home?
In the United States of America.
The enemy of British Wage-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton-lord — never!”
But most interesting to me was this earlier version of Marx talking about what is translated sometimes as “primitive accumulation” or “so called primitive accumulation” but perhaps would be better translated as “original accumulation”:
“The process of clearing estates, which, in Scotland, we have just now described, was carried out in England in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Thomas Morus already complains of it in the beginning of the 16th century. It was performed in Scotland in the beginning of the 19th, and in Ireland it is now in full progress. The noble Viscount Palmerston, too, some years ago cleared of men his property in Ireland, exactly in the manner described above.
If of any property it ever was true that it was robbery, it is literally true of the property of the British aristocracy. Robbery of Church property, robbery of commons, fraudulent transformation, accompanied by murder, of feudal and patriarchal property into private property — these are the titles of British aristocrats to their possessions. And what services in this latter process were performed by a servile class of lawyers, you may see from an English lawyer of the last century, Dalrymple, who, in his History of Feudal Property, very naively proves that every law or deed concerning property was interpreted by the lawyers, in England, when the middle class rose in wealth in favor of the middle class — in Scotland, where the nobility enriched themselves, in favor of the nobility — in either case it was interpreted in a sense hostile to the people.”
Finally, there is a “first” for the MECW so far beginning in the Appendices section: a piece officially written by someone other than Marx or Engels. Ernest Jones was listed as the author of “A Letter to the Advocates of the Co-Operative Principle, and to the Members of the Co-Operative Societies”.
Jones’ most lasting influence may have been to help convince Marx to take a more critical view towards imperialism (especially vis a vis Ireland and India), which Marx had sometimes had a view of being a more progressive historical force as opposed to a cause of immiseration.
The MECW said they included this piece because it not only showed the influence of Marx upon Jones but that Marx literally took part in helping to write these entries in the Notes to the People and The People’s Paper charterist newspapers.
The core argument of this particular entry is one I’ve long agreed with, and that I think stays true 170 years later: co-ops cannot on their own constitute a basis of a future socialism and indeed would be battered by having to compete with Capital.
The essay ends with a call to “NATIONALIZE CO-OPERATION” [all caps in original.]
