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paradoxically, there are still works by the German thinker that, besides earning less attention from scholars, remain unpublished in Brazil. This is the case of the articles written by him for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, almost all of them unpublished in Portuguese (except for The Bourgeoisie and the Counter- Revolution2), and which, except for the very important work by Claudin,3 barely have a more detailed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.