Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 10, Marx&Engels 1849–1851

Introduction

Well, this has been my longest delay for a variety of reasons. No need to get into the details; getting back to it was fun. But The Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW) Volume 10 (V10) didn’t make it easy to catch up quickly at 787 pages.

The outline for this entry is as follows:

I. This Introduction, including the MECW Preface

II. Marx’s well known work, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

III. Engels’ well known work, The Peasant War in Germany

IV. My latest focused section on Marx’s political economy studies, a notebook from London called Reflections

V. Other works. These include some biographical updates, Marx and Engels’ efforts to build an effective “international”, and miscellaneous short pieces on contemporary issues like the British Ten Hours Bill.

The MECW preface (not mirrored on hiaw.org unfortunately) first summarizes the general state of Europe, as well as the communists at this time:

“The bourgeois-democratic revolutions which swept across the European continent in 1848–49 had ended in defeat. The last centres of insurrection in Germany, Hungary and Italy had been suppressed in the summer of 1849. In France, the victory of the counter-revolution was already clearing the way for the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Everywhere workers’ and democratic organisations were being destroyed and revolutionaries severely persecuted. Yet the events of the preceding years had left their mark. They had struck at the remnants of feudalism in the European countries, given an impulse to the further growth of capitalism and aggravated its contradictions.”

From these remarkable but ultimately frustrating events, Marx and Engels took to both “sum up experiences” with works of history — and to the “practical tasks of rallying the working-class organisations.”

In August 1849, Marx has moved to London, after a tumultuous period of fleeing and being deported from country to country on the continent. In November, Engels joined him as well.

The latest attempt at a proletarian publication post-Neue Rheinische Zeitung was Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, in which they summarized its place and purpose as “A time of apparent calm such as the present must be employed precisely for the purpose of elucidating the period of revolution just experienced, the character of the conflicting parties, and the social conditions which determine the existence and the struggle of these parties.”

It lasted only six issues, but the new paper published published Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 and Engels’ The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution and The Peasant War in Germany. Additionally, the paper had their book reviews (I will skip summarizing those for brevity) and other opinion-journalism articles.

The MECW preface also mentions the paper containing “the first time Marx used the phrase ‘dictatorship of the working class’ (Diktatur der Arbeiterklasse) in print.”

Finally, the MECW editors draw a core conclusion from this time period, something that remained a hot topic for the last 170 years:

“Nothing but the victory of the proletariat, he showed, could deliver the non-proletarian sections of the working people from the economic oppression and degradation brought upon them by capitalism. He demonstrated the necessity for close alliance between the proletariat, the peasantry and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, and at the same time the necessity for the leading political role of the proletariat as the most revolutionary class.”

The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850

Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850 were, as mentioned above, a series of articles originally for the new, short lived paper. Originally, it was conceived as a four part series, including a summary of the situation in England. Ultimately Marx did four entries on France, the last appearing later in the last two issues of the magazine. Current events apparently took his attention away from adding the English entry.

In 1895, Engels printed the articles together for the first time in booklet form. He included a new preface by himself [which will we reach and comment upon in Volume 27] as well. It wouldn’t appear in English until 1921. Rosa Luxemburg had noted in 1918 that Engels’ 1895 preface showed that “the belief that the socialist revolution was imminent had become obsolete… Engels demonstrated, as an expert in military science, that it was a pure illusion to believe that the workers could, in the existing state of military technique and of industry, and in view of the characteristics of the great towns of today, successfully bring about a revolution by street fighting.” [Of course her comments were prompted by the situation in Germany as well.]

Marx also included his own brief introduction to the newspaper series, repeated in its entirety here:

“With the exception of only a few chapters, every important part of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bear the heading: Defeat of the revolution!

“What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms — persons, illusions, conceptions, projects from which the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free, from which it could be freed not by the victory of February, but only by a series of defeats.

“In a word: The revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counterrevolution, by the creation of an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.

“To prove this is the task of the following pages.”

In a section on June 1848 to June 1849, Marx lays out maybe the key piece of evidence driving Marx and Engels’ conclusions around this time:

“February 25, 1848, granted the republic to France, June 25 thrust the revolution upon her. And revolution, after June, meant: overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas before February it meant: overthrow of the form of government.

“The June fight was led by the republican faction of the bourgeoisie; with victory political power necessarily fell to its share. The state of siege laid, gagged Paris, unresisting, at its feet, and in the provinces there prevailed a moral state of siege, the threatening, brutal arrogance of victorious bourgeoisie and the unleashed property fanaticism of the peasants. No danger, therefore, from below!

“The crash of the revolutionary might of the workers was simultaneously a crash of the political influence of the democratic republicans; that is, of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie, represented in the Executive Commission by Ledru-Rollin, in the Constituent National Assembly by the part of the Montagne and in the press by the “Réforme” [which Marx would later be published in! Then Napoleon III banned it .] Together with the bourgeois republicans, they had conspired on April 16 against the proletariat, together with them they had warred against it in the June days. Thus they themselves blasted the background against which their party stood out as a power, for the petty bourgeoisie can preserve a revolutionary attitude toward the bourgeoisie only as long as the proletariat stands behind it. The proletarians were dismissed.”

The legislative results were born out and the treachery against the proletariat accelerated:

“As Plato banned the poets from his republic, so it banished forever from its republic the progressive tax. And the progressive tax is not only a bourgeois measure, which can be carried out within the existing relations of production to a greater or less degree, it was the only means of binding the middle strata of bourgeois society to the ‘respectable’ republic, of reducing the state debt, of holding the anti-republican majority of the bourgeoisie in check.

“…the tricolor republicans had actually sacrificed the petty bourgeoisie to the big bourgeoisie. They elevated this isolated fact to a principle by the legal prohibition of a progressive tax. They put bourgeois reform on the same level as proletarian revolution. But what class then remained as the mainstay of their republic? The big bourgeoisie. And its mass was anti-republican.”

But a Red party would form:

“On January 27 Montagne and the socialists had celebrated their reconciliation; at the great banquet of February, 1849, they repeated their act of union. The social and the democratic party, the party of the workers and that of the petty bourgeois, united to form the Social-Democratic party, that is, the Red party.”

And even found support in what Marx and Engels previously would have considered an unlikely ally:

“A considerable part of the peasants and of the provinces was revolutionized. Not only were they disappointed in Napoleon, but the Red party offered them, instead of the name, the content, instead of illusory freedom from taxation, repayment of the milliard paid to the Legitimists, the adjustment of mortgages, and the abolition of usury.

“The army itself was infected with the revolutionary fever. In voting for Bonaparte it had voted for victory, and he gave it defeat.”

But again, the cowardly betrayals would return after the losses for revolutionaries:

“The counterrevolution subjugated Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and they believed that the restoration was already at the gates of France. Among the masters of ceremonies of the factions of Order there ensued a real competition to document their royalism in the Moniteur, and to confess, repent, and crave pardon before God and man for liberal sins perchance committed by them under the monarchy. No day passed without the February Revolution being declared a national calamity from the tribune of the National Assembly, without some Legitimist provincial cabbage-junker solemnly stating that he had never recognized the republic, without one of the cowardly deserters of and traitors to the July Monarchy relating the belated deeds of heroism in the performance of which only the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or other misunderstandings had hindered him. What was admirable in the February days was not the magnanimity of the victorious people, but the self-sacrifice and moderation of the royalists, who had allowed it to be victorious”.

And yet again!:

“The cry ‘Long live the Social-Democratic Republic!’ was declared unconstitutional; the cry ‘Long live the Republic!’ was prosecuted as social-democratic. On the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a representative declared: ‘I fear an invasion of the Prussians less than the entry of the revolutionary refugees into France.’ To the complaints about the terrorism organized in Lyons and the neighboring departments, Baraguay d’Hilliers answered: ‘I prefer the white terror to the red terror.’” [How sad it is that last line continued for so many years as well.]

I found Marx’s fresh analysis of the peasantry to be both notable and interesting compared to earlier volumes:

“The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that their exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant’s title to property is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of capital can raise the peasant; only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies. And the scale rises or falls according to the votes the peasant casts into the ballot box. He himself has to decide his fate. So spoke the socialists in pamphlets, almanacs, calendars, and leaflets of all kinds. This language became more understandable to him through the counter-writings of the party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and which by gross exaggeration, by its brutal conception and representation of the intentions and ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant note and overstimulated his lust after forbidden fruit. But most understandable was the language of the actual experience that the peasant class had gained from the use of the suffrage, were the disillusionments overwhelming him, blow upon blow, with revolutionary speed.”

That same long paragraph above did end with a core conclusion of Marx here:

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”

Overall, you see some observations here by Marx going deeper into class analysis: the peasantry as I just mentioned, but also the financial bourgeoise vs. industrial bourgeoise, between British and French capitalists, etc. But ultimately the proletarians were doomed by playing the junior partner role, ejected from power in parliament after being beat down in street battles.

Though a little less famous perhaps than The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, these articles were an important attempt by Marx to explain current events through his materialist analysis, with a base structure ultimately determinant of the major events. Despite some lucid writing, Engels I think correctly identified some limits of the work as well, in 1891:

“But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time as an illusion. It has done even more; it has not merely dispelled the erroneous notions we then held; it has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion.”

The Peasant War in Germany

The Peasant War in Germany was published in the fifth and sixth issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue, and was also later released in book form as well.

Engels would take a similar observation of the crucial and primary importance of the class conflict (as opposed to a “merely religious”) in the German revolution of 1525; a long way from the German uprisings in 1848–49, though he would argue, maybe not so far in another sense after all.

Those obvious parallels to Marx’s Class Struggles in France aside, Engels’ subject matter was primarily hundreds of years earlier, which was an interesting choice in the midst of such tumultuous times in Europe.

A “Second Edition” appeared in 1870, where Engels wrote a new preface, and in 1874 he wrote another introduction as well. In fact, he planned on further revising the work significantly (imagining it could be a “cornerstone of German history”), though the editing of Capital volumes 2 and 3 ran into his way.

Riazanov observed “Marx and Engels, who very soberly regarded the role of the peasantry in the realization of a social revolution never underestimated its role as a revolutionary factor in the struggle against the large landowners and the feudal masters. They understood very well that the more the peasantry falls under the leadership of revolutionary classes which unite it, the more capable it is of general political actions. Led by the revolutionary proletariat, supporting its struggle against capitalism in the city and the village, the peasantry appeared to be a very important ally. This is why Marx and Engels, during the revolution of 1848–49, mercilessly exposed the cowardly conduct of the German bourgeoisie, which, currying favour with the Junkers and afraid of the proletariat, had refused to defend the interests of the peasantry.

“It was with the aim of instructing the German bourgeois democracy that in 1850, Engels, supported by the factual material collected by the democrat, Zimmermann, wrote this splendid account of the German Peasant War”.

Indeed, Engels gave upmost credit to noted vegetarian writer Wilhelm Zimmerman, who published a three volume “Allgemeine Geschichte des großen Bauernkrieges (General History of the Great Peasant War) for providing the factual, historical basis for Engels to launch his analysis from.

Engels started by in a sense stating a thesis, with the familiar “you are the sons of Talleyrand!”-style rhetoric he seemed to use frequently:

“The German people are by no means lacking in revolutionary tradition. There were times when Germany produced characters that could match the best men in the revolutions of other countries; when the German people manifested an endurance and energy which, in a centralised nation, would have brought the most magnificent results; when the German peasants and plebeians were pregnant with ideas and plans which often made their descendants shudder.

“In contrast to present-day enfeeblement which appears everywhere after two years of struggle (since 1848) it is timely to present once more to the German people those awkward but powerful and tenacious figures of the great peasant war. Three centuries have flown by since then, and many a thing has changed; still the peasant war is not as far removed from our present-day struggles as it would seem, and the opponents we have to encounter remain essentially the same. Those classes and fractions of classes which everywhere betrayed 1848 and 1849, can be found in the role of traitors as early as 1525, though on lower level of development.”

Engels launches into a nice, fairly lengthy summary “Germany” in the 16th century: its guild organization, industries, commerce, the Hanseatic League, mining, agriculture, and of course — its class system. The classes included Princes, lesser nobility, clergy (divided into a higher class like bishops and a lower class like rural and urban preachers), urban patricians, burgers, plebeians (“tramps”/“ruined” members of the middle class), and its largest class — the heavily taxed and exploited peasants.

The peasants lives? Not so good!

“Whether the peasant was the subject of a prince, an imperial baron, a bishop, a monastery or a city, he was everywhere treated as a beast of burden, and worse. If he was a serf, he was entirely at the mercy of his master. If he was a bondsman, the legal deliveries stipulated by agreement were sufficient to crush him; even they were being daily increased. Most of his time, he had to work on his master’s estate. Out of that which he earned in his few free hours, he had to pay tithes, dues, ground rents, war taxes, land taxes, imperial taxes, and other payments. He could neither marry nor die without paying the master. Aside from his regular work for the master, he had to gather litter, pick strawberries, pick bilberries, collect snail-shells, drive the game for the hunting, chop wood, and so on. Fishing and hunting belonged to the master. The peasant saw his crop destroyed by wild game.”

Comparing the situation to the class alliances in the mid 19th century, Engels remarks “At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century the various groups of the empire, princes, nobility, clergy, patricians, middle-class, plebeians and peasants formed a highly complicated mass with the most varied requirements crossing each other in different directions. Every group was in the way of the other, and stood continually in an overt or covert struggle with every other group.”

Engels goes on in part two to summarize and contrast the “opposition” of Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer. Luther had “given the plebeian movement a powerful weapon — a translation of the Bible. Through the Bible, he contrasted feudal Christianity of his time with moderate Christianity of the first century. In opposition to decaying feudal society, he held up the picture of another society which knew nothing of the ramified and artificial feudal hierarchy. The peasants had made extensive use of this weapon against the forces of the princes, the nobility, and the clergy. Now Luther turned the same weapon against the peasants, extracting from the Bible a veritable hymn to the authorities ordained by God — a feat hardly exceeded by any lackey of absolute monarchy. Princedom by the grace of God, passive resistance, even serfdom, were being sanctioned by the Bible. Thus Luther repudiated not only the peasant insurrection but even his own revolt against religious and lay authority. He not only betrayed the popular movement to the princes, but the middle-class movement as well.”

Luther of course went on to write one of the most incredible titles of an essay, leaving no doubt where he stood on peasant uprisings: “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.”

Engels then contrasts “middle class reformist” Luther to Muenzer, a “plebian revolutionary”:

“He [Muenzer] directed his attacks almost exclusively against the priests. He did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress, as Luther had begun to do at that time, but he continued the early violent preachments of Luther, appealing to the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms against the Roman priests.”

And his unique ideology/faith as well:

“Under the cloak of Christian forms, he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembles the modern speculative mode of contemplation, and at times even taught open atheism. He repudiated the assertion that the Bible was the only infallible revelation. The only living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation which existed among all peoples at all times. To contrast the Bible with reason, he maintained, was to kill the spirit by the latter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible spoke was not a thing outside of us; the Holy Spirit was our reason.”

His politics followed from the above:

“Muenzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions very closely, and as his theology reached far beyond the current conceptions of his time, so his political doctrine went beyond existing social and political conditions. As Muenzer’s philosophy of religion touched upon atheism, so his political programme touched upon communism, and there is more than one communist sect of modern times which, on the eve of the February Revolution, did not possess a theoretical equipment as rich as that of Muenzer of the Sixteenth Century. His programme, less a compilation of the demands of the then existing plebeians than a genius’s anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop among the plebeians, demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God, of the prophesied millennium on earth…Princes and nobles were to be invited to join, and should they refuse, the union was to overthrow or kill them, with arms in hand, at the first opportunity.”

After summarizing some periodic “precursor” peasant uprisings, Engels moves on to the “Uprising of the Nobility”:

“ The manifold and contradictory strivings of the knights and the middle-class, the peasants and the plebeians, the princes craving for sovereignty, the lower clergy, secretly playing at mysticism and the learned writer’s opposition of a satirical and burlesque nature, found in Luther’s theses a common expression around which they grouped themselves with astounding rapidity. This alliance of all the opposing elements, though formed overnight and of brief duration, suddenly revealed the enormous power of the movement, and gave it further impetus.

…

“Already in the first years of the Reformation, the assembling of the heterogeneous mass of the opposition around two central points became a fact. Nobility and middle-class grouped themselves unconditionally around Luther. Peasants and plebeians, yet failing to see in Luther a direct enemy, formed a separate revolutionary party of the opposition.”

Finally, we here again reach what we have called the core conclusion of this period regarding class alliances:

“The attitude of the German nobility towards the peasants of that time was exactly the same as that of the Polish nobility towards its peasants in the insurrections since 1830. As in the modern Polish upheavals, the movement could have been brought to a successful conclusion only by an alliance of all the opposition parties, mainly the nobility and the peasants. But of all alliances, this one was entirely impossible on either side. The nobility was not ready to give up its political privileges and its feudal rights over the peasants, while the revolutionary peasants could not be drawn by vague prospects into an alliance with the nobility, the class which was most active in their oppression. The nobility could not win over the German peasant in 1522, as it failed in Poland in 1830. Only total abolition of serfdom, bondage and all privileges of nobility could have united the rural population with it. The nobility, like every privileged class, had not, however, the slightest desire to give up its privileges, its favourable situation, and the major parts of its sources of income.”

At the end of the entries, Engels summarizes the gains and losses of the various classes: the clergy suffered the most loss of position, though nobility suffered as well. Ultimately, the princes gained the most, with church estates secularizing in their favor, taxes from the cities and peasants enriching them, as they gained relatively as well in the very divided state of German government across so many little city republics and the like.

Engels’ final conclusions on both the 16th century and current events come at the end:

“Still, the two revolutions, that of the Sixteenth Century and that of 1848–50, are, in spite of all analogies, materially different from each other. The revolution of 1848 bespeaks, if not the progress of Germany, the progress of Europe.”

“Who profited by the revolution of 1525? The princes. Who profited by the revolution of 1848? The big princes, Austria and Prussia. Behind the princes of 1525 there stood the lower middle-class of the cities, held chained by means of taxation. Behind the big provinces of 1850, there stood the modern big bourgeoisie, quickly subjugating them by means of the State debt. Behind the big bourgeoisie stand the proletarians.

“The revolution of 1525 was a local German affair. The English, French, Bohemians and Hungarians had already gone through their peasant wars when the Germans began theirs. If Germany was decentralised, Europe was so to a much greater extent. The revolution of 1848 was not a local German affair, it was one phase of a great European movement. The moving forces throughout the period of its duration were not confined to the narrow limits of one individual country, not even to the limits of one-quarter of the globe. In fact, the countries which were the arena of the revolution were least active in producing it. They were more or less unconscious raw materials without will of their own. They were molded in the course of movement in which the entire world participated, a movement which under existing social conditions may appear to us as an alien power, but which, in the end, is nothing but our own. This is why the revolution of 1848–50 could not end in the way that the revolution of 1525 ended.”

Reflections (Reflections on Money)

Continuing my extra-focus on the work of “political economy” that Marx and Engels had previously touched on in their “1844 Economic Manuscripts”, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, “The Poverty of Philosophy”, “[A Notebook Entitled] Wages”, and “Wage Labor and Capital”, we now reach “Reflections” (also known as “Reflections on Money.”)

First, we should place this within Marx’s biography. This notebook is one of 24 that he wrote from 1850–1853 in the British Library during his daily visits there. Specifically, this is notebook VII, and had never been published in English until the MECW. Most of his other notebooks were excerpts and synopses of other economic writers — though this one includes greater commentary by Marx, sparked by the works of Thomas Tooke (A History of Prices and of the State of Circulation) — and this spark led him to comment more widely on some core economic topics.

Of note, Marx continues his still evolving (and arguably never finished) crisis theory — this time, launching from the focus of Tooke writing about the division of trade between dealer to dealer and dealer and consumer — to again criticize the classical economists like Tooke and Adam Smith for assuming certain impossibilities. Marx was again the sharp critic of the presuppositions of economists, specifically this time in their belief in the:

1.“impossibility of over-production, or at any rate universal over- production, deal only with trade between dealers and dealers...This becomes even more evident when one considers that at least three-quarters of the exchange between dealers and consumers consists of exchange between workers on the one hand and retail traders and artisans on the other; this exchange however depends in turn on the exchange between workers and industrial capitalists, which in its turn is determined by the exchange between dealer and dealer — cercle vicieux.”

Marx goes on to four additional observations/arguments:

2. “First, the trade between dealers and dealers in England, for example, is by no means circumscribed by the trade between dealers and consumers in England, but more or less by that between dealers and consumers on the world market as a whole.

…

“Because the working class forms the largest section of consumers, one could say the fact that the Income of the working class decreases- not in one country, as Proudhon thinks, but on the world market-leads to an imbalance between production and consumption, and hence over-production. This is largely correct. But it is modified by the growing extravagance of the propertied classes. It would be wrong to put forward this proposition unconditionally — as though the trade of the planter were determined by the consumption of his Negroes.

…

“The trade between dealers and dealers largely creates the trade between dealers and consumers. For example, when manufacturers receive very large orders from speculators, workers are fully employed, their wages rise and so does their consumption. Speculative railway construction enterprises actually create large-scale consumption, which in the end proves to be entirely ‘unproductive.’

…

Over-production must not be attributed solely to disproportionate production, but to the relationship between the class of capitalists and that of workers”

3. Marx then splits currency into two distinct forms of trade: currency used in trade properly speaking and currency used in the exchange of income for commodities. However, both are connected as well. Various groups and individuals like landlords, capitalists, public creditors, and even workers would have savings and the like, which he says is the surplus of the receipts of the non-trading classes. There then is a monetary movement of transfers and credit operations becoming unproductive capital.

4. This, he says, leads to a lack of currency — which is not a lack of capital, but a depreciation of money, in inversion proportion to the depreciation of commodities. Marx does mention those “Birmingham men” who would wish to solve this issue (like the Keynesian or MMT advocates of later eras?) by introducing large sums of currency into circulation, though he writes them off in his notes as “fools.” If this wasn’t a private notebook, but a finished work, he might explain their alleged foolishness better, though he does at least mention to himself that his old argument against Prodhoun (and the Birmingham men as well presumably) is that they wish to maintain value and private value exchange, retaining a division between a product and its exchangeability — which is to say they want to “retain money but in such a way that it should no longer have the properties of money”, also marking them as “fools.”

5. Escalating “fools” to “complete simpletons”, he continues to his biggest conclusions (apologies for the long quotation, but it’s hard to cut it up:)

“The complete simpletons, i. e. the staunch ignorant democrats, are familiar only with money as used in the trade between dealers and consumers. They therefore do not know the sphere in which the collisions take place, the tempests of monetary crises and big financial transactions. Thus the problem, just as everything else, appears to these simpletons to be as simple and silly as they themselves are. They regard the trade between dealers and consumers as a straightforward exchange of values, in which the freedom of each individual receives its supreme practical confirmation. Class antagonism is in no way involved in this exchange. One trader confronts another, one moneyed individual confronts another. The precondition that every individual must be moneyed to be able to participate in the consumer goods trade, i.e. to be able to live, this precondition is of course automatically given by the fact that every individual must work and let his talent act, as Stirner says.

“First of all it Is a historical fact, which no one can deny, that in all hitherto existing social formations which were based on separation and contradiction between castes, tribes, social estates, classes, etc., money was an essential component of this organisation, and the monetary system was always symptomatic of the heyday or decline of this organisation. It is therefore not our task to prove that the monetary system is based on class contradictions, it is up to the simpletons to prove that, in spite of all previous historical experience, the monetary system can make sense even where there are no class contradictions, and that this particular element present in all social formations up to now will be able to survive in a situation that negates all hitherto existing social formations. To confront complete simpletons with such a task would be too simple. They deal with everything in monosyllables and this constitutes their specific talent. The monetary, system and the entire present system are in their opinion as straightforward and as stupid as they themselves are.

“But let us again visualise their beloved trade between consumers and dealers. They do not look beyond it, neither sideways nor forward and backward.

“What does the free individual use to pay for fits purchases at the grocer? He uses an equivalent — or token of value — of his income. The worker exchanges his wages, the manufacturer his profit, the capitalist his interest, the landowner his rent — transformed into gold and silver and bank-notes — at the grocer, the cobbler, the butcher, the baker, etc. And what does the cobbler, the grocer, and so on, exchange for the money which represents wages, rent, profit and interest? He exchanges his capital for it. He replaces his capital, reproduces it and expands it in this transaction.

“Thus to begin with in this seemingly so simple transaction all class relations manifest themselves and are presupposed, [i. e.] the classes of workers, of landowners, and of industrial and non-industrial capitalists. On the other hand, it first and foremost presupposes the existence of these specific social relations, which give wealth the form of capital, and separate capital from revenue. The simplicity disappears with the transformation into money.

“The fact that the worker receives his wages in money-and likewise the landowner his rent and the manufacturer his profit-and not as provisions in kind, payment in kind or by means of barter, merely shows that the monetary system presupposes a high level of development and greater differentiation and separation of classes than does the absence of a monetary system in the pre-monetary stages of society. There is no wage labour without money, and therefore also no profit and interest in the latter form, and accordingly no rent of land either as this is simply a part of profit.”

Finally, Marx says qualitative class differences are transformed to quantitive class differences, so even within classes; for example the big, middle, and petit bourgeoise. Or that workers with higher wages can afford academic pursuits in addition to bread and meat for their families.

We’ll read much more from Marx’s London economic notebooks later, but I presented this year in the order the MECW published it.

Other Works and Conclusion

Some of the other pieces I found worth highlighting in V10 include:

• Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue which declares its goals: “The greatest interest of a newspaper, its daily intervention in the movement and speaking directly from the heart of the movement, its reflecting day-to-day history in all its amplitude, the continuous and impassioned interaction between the people and its daily press, this interest is inevitably lacking in a review. On the other hand, a review provides the advantage of comprehending events in a broader perspective and having to dwell only upon the more important matters. It permits a comprehensive and scientific investigation of the economic conditions which form the foundation of the whole political movement.”
• Engels’ Letters From Germany and Letters From France. The paper didn’t last long enough, and Engels couldn’t contribute as early as he would have liked for more standard “current events” opinion-journalism of these type to appear, but it is at least the main examples of that format for our authors at this time. The later focuses on a potable liquors excise tax that Engels says will disproportionately fall unevenly upon class lines — the French estate owners (12 million of them!) will mostly grow their own wine, while 18 million in towns (working and middle class) will be hit harder. And even within liquor types, the drinks of the workers are targeted for higher taxes than the drinks of the wealthy. Engels says even the middle class in England would not put up with this — but France remains backwards even by the standards of British finance. His hope though is that the uniquely bad situation would lead to another French revolution, including the introduction of a progressive type of taxation under a red flag.
• An Announcement stated that the first issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was already behind, but that future issues would contain updates on the current situation in England (Marx), the campaign for an Imperial German constitution (Engels), lectures by Marx on property, and “The Last Days of the German Parliament” by Wilhelm Wolff. I am not sure if that Wolff entry ever was published, but we’ll spend some more time with the brave Wilhelm in 1876, when Engels published a short biography about him.
• Marx and Engels jointly wrote a Review of January 1849–1850. This is a wide ranging state of the world considering the limited space, commenting on China, England, Russia, Switzerland, and of noted interest, the United States: “The most important thing which has happened here, still more important than the February revolution, is the discovery of the Californian gold mines. Even now, after scarcely eighteen months, it can be predicted that this discovery will have much greater consequences than the discovery of America itself. For three hundred and thirty years all trade from Europe to the Pacific Ocean has been conducted with a touching, long-suffering patience around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. All proposals to cut through the Isthmus of Panama have come to grief because of the narrow-minded jealousy of the trading nations. The Californian gold mines were only discovered eighteen months ago and the Yankees have already set about building a railway, a great overland road and a canal from the Gulf of Mexico, steamships are already sailing regularly from New York to Chagres, from Panama to San Francisco, Pacific trade is already concentrating in Panama and the journey around Cape Horn has become obsolete. A coastline which stretches across thirty degrees of latitude, one of the most beautiful and fertile in the world and hitherto more or less unpopulated, is now being visibly transformed into a rich, civilized land thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yankee to the Chinese, from the Negro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European. Californian gold is pouring in torrents over America and the Asiatic coast of the Pacific and is drawing the reluctant barbarian peoples into world trade, into the civilized world. For the second time world trade has found a new direction. What Tyre, Carthage and Alexandria were in antiquity, Genoa and Venice in the Middle Ages, what London and Liverpool have been hitherto, the emporia of world trade — this is what New York, San Francisco, San Juan del Norte, Léon, Chagres and Panama will now become. The focal point of international traffic — in the Middle Ages, Italy; in modern times, England — is now the southern half of the North American peninsula: industry and wealth of others, who demanded and still demand a different distribution of property — indeed the total abolition of private property.”
• The very next entry, in February 1850, was Engels’ “The Ten Hours Question”, which apparently unlike much of Engels’ writing so far, apparently caused quit a stir in the British reading public. As I have mentioned before, so far the most common footnote of the MECW, appearing in every volume, was “The Corn Laws”. The Corn Laws as you probably know by this point were also a symbol of the victory of the industrial bourgeoisie in 1846 over the landed landed aristocracy. Apparently, a form of legislative revenge drove some rural Tory MPs to side with reformers to pass a 10 hour limit to the work day against some Liberals. However, many manufacturers were already evading enforcement of the law, and further were working to de facto annul it entirely. I recommend a full read on this one. Though Engels’ analysis of the situation is strong, his optimism at the end did not age as well — telling the working class of England that if they are forced back to miserable 13 hour days, that it will only hasten the burying of their masters, as the French and German workers will not be satisfied with small reforms at all, and will join in ending the “tyranny of Capital” through struggle for “that political and social ascendancy of the proletarian class which will enable you to protect your labour yourselves.”
• Next in London in March of 1850, Marx gave an “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.” The address begins with a clear, strongly stated summary of their situation — both reasons to be proud but also their current challenge after the events of 1848–49: “In the two revolutionary years of 1848–49 the League proved itself in two ways. First, its members everywhere involved themselves energetically in the movement and stood in the front ranks of the only decisively revolutionary class, the proletariat, in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields. The League further proved itself in that its understanding of the movement, as expressed in the circulars issued by the Congresses and the Central Committee of 1847 and in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, has been shown to be the only correct one, and the expectations expressed in these documents have been completely fulfilled. This previously only propagated by the League in secret, is now on everyone’s lips and is preached openly in the market place. At the same time, however, the formerly strong organization of the League has been considerably weakened. A large number of members who were directly involved in the movement thought that the time for secret societies was over and that public action alone was sufficient. The individual districts and communes allowed their connections with the Central Committee to weaken and gradually become dormant. So, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, has become more and more organized in Germany, the workers’ party has lost its only firm foothold, remaining organized at best in individual localities for local purposes; within the general movement it has consequently come under the complete domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This situation cannot be allowed to continue; the independence of the workers must be restored.” A similar paragraph ends the speech, adding, “Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.”
• Another such “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” came in June. This one followed up on its members assigned to specific countries, with some concerning news!: “The League’s organization among the Belgian workers, as it existed in 1846 and 1847, has naturally come to an end, since the leading members were arrested in 1848 and condemned to death, having their sentences commuted to life imprisonment with hard labour.” In Germany, the news was at least somewhat more positive, where League members were influencing directly peasant and agricultural associations and won influence in workers’ and sports associations as well. In Switzerland, “The report of the emissary is still being awaited” [update: as of 2021, I have not heard much of the Swiss.] France included too many Parisians who were hostile to the League itself. And finally, England, where the London district was strong, especially among continental refugees.
• But those radical refugees in London also meant Prussian Spies were there as well, as we learn in “Prussian Spies in London.” After appealing to British patriotism against the conservative “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Marx Engels and Willich make a public plea in this letter to the editors of The Spectator: “We believe, Sir, that under these circumstances, we cannot do better than bring the whole case before the public. We believe that Englishmen are interested in anything by which the old-established reputation of England, as the safest asylum for refugees of all parties and of all countries, may he more or less affected.” The letter was indeed published by the world’s oldest weekly magazine.
• By September of 1850, Marx, Engels, and 10 of their allies resigned from their organization, as stated in a “Statement on Resignation from the German Workers Educational Society in London.” Though their reasons are not listed in this letter, it is clear from other documents that Marx and Engels believed another revolutionary upsurge was not yet imminent, and therefore a focus on building independent, proletarian parties was the more immediate task. This was not a consensus in the Communist League, where others thought a minority could launch and win new revolutions through “adventurist” [MECW footnotes’ language] actions, leading to this split. The League was a tightly organized group, with exacting requirements for membership (consensus to admit a member, “emancipation” from religion, freedom from other organizations, etc.) and I think we can conclude by 2021 that such groups to have a tendency towards splits!

I took a lot of notes on Engels “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution” many months ago, but have no motivation to put them into some paragraphs here. My one brief note is Engels was literally under gun and canon fire in 1849, so it was interesting enough to read something that shifts from first person to broader overview, but I’m out of gas for now, and Volume 11 is also a particularly large and dense one. In the mean time, be careful of the class alliances!

This volume ends with a December 30th, 1850 speech by Engels that the papers briefly reported him decrying both ignorance and the treachery of leaders around the world. Go off, Fred!