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Heute Deutschland! Marx as Provincial Politician
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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Fully trained in the appropriate skills, Karl Marx, then in Brussels, went out to meet the revolutions sweeping Europe during 1848. He had already established himself as a genial thinker, inspiring or, if the circumstances required it, annihilating propagandist, and masterly leader. From London the Central Committee of the Communist League, recognizing Marx's quality and separated from the great events by the English Channel, entrusted him with the command of the organization. Up to then the bookman and journalist Marx had been simply and unofficially the league's chief ideologist. As leader Marx began badly. In his revolutionary optimism he lost himself in a fantasy of the great French Revolution repeating itself, tried to make a Belgian revolution in its image, and got himself arrested and expelled. In Paris at his next revolutionary station, however, he oriented himself immediately, and during the month he spent there acted with economic effectiveness. He made no mistakes in Paris. On the day of his arrival Marx spoke at a meeting of the revived Society of the Rights of Man, which he had joined: “I am a revolutionary. I want to march in the shadow of the great Robespierre.” This was sentimentality and diplomacy. He was not interested in France's revolution en soi. Enlisting a number of Germans he had found there, he proceeded to make use of it as a base for his revolution.
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References
1. Quoted, Bernstein, Samuel, “Marx in Paris, 1848: A Neglected Chapter,” Science and Society 3 (Summer 1939): 348.Google Scholar
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3. Hammen, Oscar J., The Red' 48ers (New York, 1969)Google Scholar is a detailed study of Marx's activities during this period and invaluable to any scholar investigating it. The density of detail provided me with an almost daily awareness of events even when I did not need to refer to them explicitly. The book, however, did not always cite its sources, while the Marx-Engels editions, with their own detailed notes, and other republications of original sources, some appearing after the Hammen work, permitted me to develop an independent evaluation of the facts and issues. This was set in the frame of the whole of Marx's life, which I see as that of a consummate political leader in my Marx as Politician (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
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17. Article of June 29, 1848, Werke, 5: 133, 134, 136; Works, 7: 144, 144–47, 149.
18. Issue of July 12, 1848, Werke, 5: 202; Works, 7: 212.
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28. Werke, 6: 257, 245; Works, 8:339, 327.
29. There were also two other defendants, Schapper and Karl Schneider, the latter a Democrat and a lawyer by profession. Schneider had, with Marx, signed the NRZ's call to arms.
30. Werke, 6:195; Works, 8:266.
31. In an open letter in Feb., quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 217. When the German Revolution ended, and quiet had been reestablished in Cologne, Gottschalk returned—and returned to his old profession. Later in 1849 he died while caring for his working-class patients in a cholera epidemic.
32. Statement of Röser, in Blumenberg, “Zur Geschichte des Bundes des Kommunisten,” pp. 90–91. Röser did not specify a more precise date than “the spring of 1849.”
33. Werke, 6:397–423; Works, 9: 197–228.
34. Werke, 6:397; Works, 9:197.
35. Werke, 6:426; Works, 9:282.
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40. See chapter, “The Politics of Capital,” pp. 126–54 passim, Felix, Marx as Politician.
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