The German counter-revolution:
Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung*
Lívia Cotrim**
* Published in MARGEM, São Paulo, number 16, pp. 223-227, December 2002. Translated by V. S. Conttren, March 2019. ** Lívia Cotrim, PhD in Social Sciences by PUC-SP; professor of the Collegiate of Social Sciences-FAFIL-FSA; member of the History Studies Center: Work, Power, Ideology— Department of History—PUC-SP. Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren
Among contemporary thinkers, Marx is undoubtedly one of the most
controversial. There are countless works, from the most diverse levels and with
the most varied objectives, that deal with his thought, whether to criticize,
defend or interpret it under different biases. Naturally, it is not up to us to touch
on the polemics that have developed, but it is always worth calling attention to
the tragic destiny of Marxian thought, most of the time approached on the basis
of external problems or conceptions, assigning meanings and even questions
that are, in fact, alien to it.1
If today, in the face of successive defeats from the perspective of labour, it is
necessary and urgent to critically rethink the history of the workers' movement, it
is equally necessary and urgent to recover Marx's very thoughts. But,
paradoxically, there are still works by the German thinker that, besides earning
less attention from scholars, remain unpublished in Brazil. This is the case of the
articles written by him for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, almost all of them
unpublished in Portuguese (except for The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-
Revolution2), and which, except for the very important work by Claudin,3 barely
have a more detailed analysis. However, the study of the 1848 Revolutions and
the articles published reveals the two tasks mentioned above. With the intention
of contributing to this task, we present here our translation of some articles of
1 See, on this subject, CHASIN, J. (1994), Marx – Estatuto ontológico e resolução metodológica [Marx—Ontological status and methodological resolution]. In: TEIXEIRA, F. Pensando com Marx [Thinking with Marx]. São Saulo: Ensaio; and Revista Ensaios Ad Hominem 1—Tomo III: Política. Santo André: Ad Hominem, 2000. 2 MARX, K. (1991), The bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution. In: Cadernos Ensaio Pequeno Formato I. São Paulo: Ensaio. 3 CLAUDIN, F. (1975), Marx, Engels y la Revolución de 1848 [Marx, Engels and the 1848 Revolution]. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno.
2 Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren that journal.4
The years which precede and prepare the 1848 Revolutions are also the years of ontological change and configuration of Marxian thought, as he himself indicates to us in his “Preface to the Critique of Political Economy” of 1859. 5
Consequently, theoretically and practically, Marx confronted the revolutions of
1848 with his adult physiognomy, and did so using as his main weapon a diary, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ‘Organ of Democracy,’ published from June 1, 1848 to
May 19, 1849, based in Cologne, capital of the province of the Rhine, one of the most economically and politically developed regions of Germany, in which the bourgeois Napoleonic Code was in effect, ensuring ampler press freedoms than what was allowed by feudal-absolutist Prussian legislations.
The foundation of the journal highlights the importance attributed by Marx to theoretical struggle, which can be seen in the observation made at a meeting of the Brussels Correspondence Committee:
In particular, to address workers in Germany, without having rigorously scientific ideas and a concrete doctrine, would be tantamount to carrying out a dishonest and useless game, a propaganda in which one would suppose, on the one hand, an
4 The translation of the group of Marx's articles into the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, among which we have selected those now published, is part of the preparatory works for the elaboration of our doctoral thesis provisionally entitled “Marx Politics and Human Emancipation: 1848-1871,” under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Miguel Chaia (Program of Post- Graduate Studies in Social Sciences PUC-SP). Translation from the German original: Marx- Engels Werke, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1959, vols. 5 and 6. The footnotes were all taken from this edition. The articles “The Camphausen Declaration in the Session of 30 May,” “The Fall of the Camphausen Ministry” and “The Bill on the Revocation of Feudal Obligations” were translated together with Márcia V. M. de Aguiar. 5 A detailed analysis of the Marxian thought configuration process can be found in CHASIN, J., op. cit.
3 Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren
apothetic enthusiasm and, on the other, simplistic fools listening with their mouths wide open.6
For the German thinker, the organizational and political independence of
the working class would presuppose its theoretical independence or, in other
words, the organization is only independent insofar as its understanding of
reality, the clarity of the objectives to be achieved and the consequent
establishment of the steps to be taken at each moment, also remain
independent. In this sense, Marx seeks to create a newspaper that would be
widely disseminated among workers, with the aim of developing and
disseminating strictly scientific ideas and a clear doctrine, participating in the
revolutionary struggle with the weapon of criticism, striving to transform it into
material power through its assumption by the proletariat.
The revolutions of 1848 constitute a privileged object, since they offer the
opportunity to approach the emergence of the proletariat as an independent
class, the first direct opposition between capital and labour, and to this extent in
the framework of a European revolution that is until today unique. The range of
issues opened up by Marx's writings in the journal is extremely broad. The
articles published below were selected with a view to offering a first
approximation of his analysis of revolution and counter-revolution in Germany, in
order to highlight the specificity of this in relation to the French situation
emerging, thus the problem of the particular forms of objectification of
capitalism, a particularity that is being obtained from the apprehension of the
everyday movement. A Marxian analysis that presents a proper treatment of the
sphere of politics, highlighting the links between it and other areas of sociability,
6 Apud CHASIN, J. Introduction to MARX, K. op. cit., p. 19.
4 Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren especially the matrix of production and reproduction of life, and those that stand between individuals and their class, as well as the unresolved character of this sphere with regard to the perspective of social revolution.
The articles produced for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung occupy a prominent position among the several occasions in which Marx focused on the distinction between the classical, or “European,” forms of the French process and the backwardness of Germany, the 'German misery', since this distinction indelibly marked the course of the 1848 revolutions.
Marxian analysis reconstructs the multiple determinations of German misery, from the root of its close economic and social relations to the various manifestations of political cowardice, weakness and ferocity, so that the sphere of politics as well as, in it, the actions of the various individuals gain in consistency and specific weight. This allowed Marx to realize that the narrowness of German poverty could no longer be overcome by a revolutionary movement led by the bourgeoisie, since the historical-universal possibility of such a step had lapsed when its antagonism was made explicit towards the proletariat. Such an antagonism, fundamental node of the revolutions of 1848, also showed practically the powerlessness of the political sphere to resolve social problems.
In the following texts, Marx reveals that events which at first sight may seem similar can entrench very different meanings, as evidenced in the elucidation of nexuses which link them to the particularities of their respective historical processes. Thus, in both the Prussian revolution of March and the French revolution of February, the workers and the bourgeoisie opposed the monarchy; however, the German bourgeoisie, unlike its French counter-part, had developed
5 Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren
slowly while always opting for non-revolutionary solutions, but rather conciliatory
solutions with the feudal or semi-feudal and absolutist forces, and did not see
itself compelled to seize political control by any urgent need. The German
proletariat—in its turn poorly developed, ill-organized, educated in spiritual
submission—barely presaged its antagonism of interests with the bourgeoisie,
and remained as its political appendix. But, fearing what the German proletariat
could become and what the French proletariat already was, the bourgeoisie saw
its salvation in a cowardly deal with both the monarchy and the nobility. Thus,
while in France the revolution of '48 culminated in a proper opposition between
labour and capital, in Germany it configured itself as a bourgeois revolution.
However, Germany’s 1848—the result of the weakness, slowness and cowardice
of the development of the German bourgeoisie—was not a “European” type of
revolution, but only a weak echo of a European revolution in a backward country,
whose ambition was to constitute an anachronism, since it was not a question of
establishing a new society, but the Berliner rebirth of a city that had been killed in
Paris.7
As an indicator of German developmental backwardness, national
unification was the revolution’s central objective and a necessity for the
implementation of bourgeois rule. The destruction of remaining feudal agrarian
relations stood out as a fundamental part of such problem; its conciliatory
disposition, weakness and cowardice are evidenced by the solution that the
Prussian bourgeoisie sought for this problem. These are reflected clearly in the
sphere of political relations, whether it be in the stance of the representatives of
this class in the two Assemblies of Frankfurt and Berlin, be it in the succession of
7 MARX, K. The bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
6 Huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren
the various cabinets, which foreshadow their defeat. As Marx said about Minister
Camphausen: “He sowed reaction in the direction of the bourgeoisie, and he will
reap it towards the aristocracy and absolutism.”8
This comment, derived from the analysis the bourgeoisie's procedure, is also
indicative about the presence of political illusions on the part of that class.
Plunged at the helm of political power through a popular uprising, and willing
from the beginning to betray its allies, the Prussian bourgeoisie supposed that
the seizure of formal political power had put the forces of the old state at its
disposal, for they unreservedly supported them in repressing the workers. Just as
the Parisian revolution of February was the spark for the Prussian revolution of
March, the June Parisian events and their defeat signalled the unleashing of a
counter-revolution in Germany, during which, however, the defeat of the workers
foreshadowed that of the bourgeoisie in favour of more retrograde forces—the
junkers, the Prussian army and bureaucracy—, preserving feudal relations on the
countryside and making democratic national unity unfeasible.
The following articles, addressing critical themes and moments of the
revolution and counter-revolution in Germany of 1848-49, offer us an outline of
the character of this movement, the specificity of the Prussian way of objectifying
capitalism—or German misery—, the problematic of politicism, as well as point to
several other issues that the observant reader will certainly discover. At the same
time, they are an expressive sample of the sharpness of Marxian analyses of
politics; elaborated in the midst of events and as a means to intercede in them;
analyses that never lose either the specificity of everyday events, or their link with
historical trends and the potentialities present in reality.
8 Ibid., p. 38.
7