A World to Win Read online

  With that, the distance from Bauer and his peers increased; they were now gathered in Berlin under the name Die Freien, ‘The Free’. Georg Herwegh, a poet who followed in Marx’s footsteps, wrote a brief article in which he declared that ‘The Free’, through their ‘political Romanticism, their cult of genius, and their new name, compromised the party of freedom’. Most of the members were excellent people, but as a group ‘The Free’ were nothing more than a vain attempt at mimicking a French club. Marx edited the text but let the essential parts remain in the paper. The break was definitive.68 It was Marx, not Bauer, who had taken a new path.

  At the same time, the struggle against censorship had become even more intense. At first, certain articles were forbidden, and finally all publication was put to a stop. The last edition of the paper was dated 31 March 1843. It was a decision that roused a storm of protest in Cologne and other cities in the Rhineland. But the decision stood. Marx’s first adventure in newspapers was at an end.

  He set off for Bad Kreuznach to get married and to write articles, but now for journals. Marx’s usual difficulty with finishing what he started again manifested itself when he was to submit these articles. Only as a newspaper writer did he ever manage to deliver what he was supposed to on time – and more besides. It is easy to see that he is an excellent journalist, with a sure sense of style and often brilliant, quick-witted, and all-round knowledgeable. He addresses himself to a circle of readers that has a large vocabulary. At times, he treats himself to a few Latin phrases – something that probably caused problems for the more mercantile readers of Rheinische Zeitung. French, which he sometimes dusts the text with, is a self-evident feature in these border regions and certainly bothered no one. It seemed equally natural for him to quote Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. Even Papageno from Mozart’s The Magic Flute surely fell within the readers’ frame of reference.

  It is thus freedom of the press and censorship that was first the focus of Marx’s interest when he threw himself into the world of newspapers. Two immense blocks of text are involved: twenty-two large printed pages in Ruge’s Anekdota and forty equally large pages in Rheinische Zeitung.

  In the first article, Marx benefited from the fact that he actually studied law. He conducted a sharp, but also amusing, review of the new provisions on censorship formulated under Friedrich Wilhelm IV. They were seemingly more liberal than their predecessors from 1819 – but only seemingly. Marx conducted a merciless examination of the provision that the censorship ‘not prevent serious and modest (beschiedene) investigations of truth’. The truth – he says as a man of the Enlightenment – is no more modest than light itself. And who should it be modest towards? he wonders. Towards himself? He comes out with a quote from Spinoza: verum index sui et falsi – truth is the touchstone of itself and of falsehood. Should one be considerate towards falsehood? Goethe is also brought in to support the attack: ‘Only the mean wretch is modest.’69

  Against the awkwardly formulated censorship provisions, Marx stresses that not only are results part of truth, but the path to them is as well. Truth must be arrived at; in other words, the truth requires a method.

  He subjects paragraphs that object to ‘frivolous, hostile’ attacks on Christianity to the same merciless scrutiny. By that, it turns out, is meant every questioning of the adopted religion. What is more, religion and politics slide together; religion serves as protection for the state and its interests.70

  The series of articles on the debates regarding freedom of the press has a quicker pulse, but also contains a penetrating discussion on the concept of freedom. The contributions from various representatives in the Rhenish Diet are reported concisely and often sarcastically, and form a contrast to the writer’s own more clear-cut ideas. Freedom, it turns out, is usually discussed in terms of social classes, and on the other hand not from the perspective of the individual. ‘Censorship’, it has been said, ‘is a lesser evil than excesses on the part of the press.’ People are thus devoted to fighting freedom of the spirit, Marx says. One speaker asserts that the shortcomings of the German people are reflected in the shortcomings of the press, and therefore the press needs to be tamed by censorship. Why, Marx wonders, should the Germans be prevented from expressing themselves, their own ‘spirit of the people’ (Volksgeist)?71

  When Marx wrote his series of articles, he readily used formulations that still qualified him as a good Young Hegelian. Freedom of the press, he explains, forms the idea, freedom, the good. The free press is the ‘characterful, rational, moral essence of freedom’, the opposite of the censored press ‘with its hypocrisy, its lack of character, its eunuch’s language’.72 Idea, reason, morality: these are heavy words in Hegel’s vocabulary. For Marx, it is still spirit that governs the world.

  He also objects to the idea that freedom of the press should be regarded as a subpart of freedom of trade. Of course, it is a more reasonable thought than the spineless idealism of German liberals, who only express a typical German weakness for the emotional. There is, in fact, something common between the right to express oneself freely and the right to freely develop trade, crafts, and industry. They are all ‘freedom without any specific name’ – that is, without time-honoured privileges.

  But freedom of the press still consists from beginning to end of the freedom not to be any branch of industry. The writer who defers to the demands of industry becomes a legitimate victim of censorship. The attitude of the young aristocratic intelligentsia lies in this thought. ‘The press is the most general way by which individuals can communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for persons, but only respect for intelligence’, Marx writes.73

  The series of articles also contains a memorable formulation: ‘No man combats freedom; at most, he combats the freedom of others.’74 This is reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous criticism of Lenin and his view on the dictatorship of the proletariat: ‘Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.’75 This sentence was written a little over seventy-five years later, and without the knowledge of Marx’s earlier utterance.

  There is also reason to cast a glance at another early article in Rheinische Zeitung. It is titled, quite modestly, ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’ and is a furious polemic against a competing newspaper in Cologne. It constitutes a fiery defence of the right of philosophers to develop their thoughts in public. Philosophy had long been attacked in the press for its lack of respect for state and religion, and at the same time accused of leading youth astray. In fact, Marx says, the newspapers were echoing the philosophical ideas of the time without realizing it. Would it not be better if the feared Leviathan, the monster of philosophy, were allowed to appear in the flesh? Philosophers had been silent long enough in the face of self-satisfied superficiality and stale newspaper phrases. It was now time for them to begin to speak in the press. Previously, journalists had been ignorant, and been satisfied with calming phrases that had not been put through the trial of doubt. Quite the contrary – they demanded blind faith. Now the critical mind was to manifest itself.76

  There is a large measure of self-confidence in these lines. But with them, Marx is also justifying his own new activities. It is his task to give philosophy a voice in his newspaper. Marx’s earliest newspaper articles have an introverted element, in their own way: they deal with freedom of the press and the role of philosophy in the press – concepts related to himself and his activities. It would be something else a few months later, when he scrutinized yet another debate in the Rhenish Landtag. This time, it was an issue of a law that affected a completely different kind of person than he himself: small farmers, farmhands, and the poor. Social issues made their entry into Marx’s writings when he wrote about the new proposed law, which meant that clearing out dried branches and brushwood from the forest would be placed on a par with theft. Children would be forbidden from picking berries and fruits. The defenders of the law asserted that the new provisions would be practical; anyone w
ho took anything out of the forest would be punished. Marx said ironically that perhaps he himself was impractical, but nevertheless joined those invoking a customary right that the poor and politically powerless masses had been able to enjoy the fruits of for as far back as memory could reach. Gathered wood, like the berries and fruits, were to be regarded as nature’s alms for the poor.

  But it was a completely different world of ideas that was now making itself heard in the debates of the Landtag. In fact, it was a special interest – that of the forest owners – that speaks from within the proposed law. The interest had a ‘petty, wooden, mean and selfish soul’, Marx said, but this soul was still taking command of the public sense of justice. A person punished with fines for theft in the forest would, if she were unable to pay, be made to perform day labour in the forest, unlike for any other unregulated debts. Prison sentences would also be imposed. The usual effusions about how important it was to have a Christian disposition had to make room here for ‘vicious materialism’. An entire social class would be flogged into forestry work. No consideration was made of the fact that it was hunger and other hardships that drove the poor to what would now, without exception, be called ‘theft’ and judged accordingly.77

  The dark reality Marx takes up here has been depicted in our times in Edgar Reitz’s masterful 2013 film Die andere Heimat (Home from Home). The environment the film portrays is the Hunsrück region in Pfalz, and the era is the early 1840s, exactly the time in which Marx wrote his articles.

  Marx’s articles are characterized by passion for justice and great indignation, and, naturally, they roused the particular annoyance of the censors. Indeed, the reaction was more violent than to anything else published in Rheinische Zeitung. Prussia had not one, but three ministers tasked with censorship; they exchanged a series of outraged messages and put Rhineland provincial authorities on alert. A paper with such an objectionable tendency constituted a threat to the existing order. Either the newspaper had to be re-formed from the ground up, or prohibited. With Marx at the rudder, a conciliatory attitude was ruled out; as far as is known, none of the newspaper’s supporters or readers demanded he be replaced. Rheinische Zeitung was sentenced to death.78

  Nevertheless, the article about the forest thefts is not subversive. It challenges the Landtag, and it critically scrutinizes the forest owner’s acquisitiveness. It sharply outlines the horrible destitution of ordinary people. But it only uncovers the circumstances; it does not sketch out how a resistance should be organized. Those who would be disadvantaged by the new legislation – the poor – are not encouraged to take any illegal action. On the contrary, they are portrayed as passive victims of a merciless development in which old feudal relations of dependency are united with exclusive ownership that permits no non-owners to even pick berries or fallen timber.

  The series of articles are consistent with the radical liberalism of the time. Marx wanted to change opinions in the country. He still contented himself with the resources of the journalist: it was his words that would rouse minds.

  But more lay in wait in his toolbox. This is indicated by an article he published right before the series about the laws on wood theft was inaugurated, and was the first he publicized after he became editor of Rheinische Zeitung: ‘Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung’. The background is simple: Allgemeine Zeitung had accused Rheinische Zeitung of communism after the latter had both reproduced an article from a communist journal and also covered a conference in France that dealt with the factory workers’ situation. Marx was not the one who wrote it, but he was the one conducting the defence. Communism, he said, was spreading in Europe. It was on the agenda in France and England. Since the bourgeoisie had taken the nobility’s position, the propertyless now also wanted to have a part of society’s riches. These were facts that the newspaper in Augsburg was trying to avoid.

  Rheinische Zeitung did not even ascribe a theoretical reality to communism, Marx wrote. Even less did they desire it to be realized in practice. On the other hand, it asserted that the writings on the subject – and ‘the sharp-witted work of Proudhon’ in particular – should be studied thoroughly, and not dismissed with superficial flashes of wit. Only in-depth study could be the starting point for serious criticism. To understand the reality of communism, Augsburger Zeitung was not looking back to Plato but to an ‘obscure acquaintance’. By all appearances, this obscure acquaintance was one Gustave d’Eichthal, who was part of creating a small utopian society in which the responsibility for production, as well as profit, was shared equally among all. But, Marx said, it was not this kind of practical experiment that constituted the real danger. If the masses participated in them, those in power could always respond with cannons. It was the theoretical achievement – Marx italicized the words – that constituted the real threat. Ideas that conquer our intelligence and capture our minds and our conscience become chains that could not be broken without also bursting our hearts asunder. Ideas could be like demons forcing people into submission. But Allgemeine Zeitung ran no risk there, Marx added. The newspaper had neither its own understanding nor its own insights, and thereby did not have its own conscience, either.

  Philosophical idealism was still speaking in these lines: it was through ideas that the world could be changed. A small utopian society would lead nowhere as long as it did not have innumerable others like it, and many such societies could be mowed down with cannons. But the ideas!79

  Marx continued his journalistic deeds in the same spirit. He wrote articles about a draft for a law on divorces. Once again, the Hegelian world of concepts appears. The authors behind the proposal did not understand the essence of marriage, but mixed worldly and spiritual conceptions together in an absurd manner, Marx explained. They were not striving for the real reforms needed, but only wanted to revise existing legislation. They did not understand that if the base (Basis) of marriage was not the family, then a marriage law would be as little required as a law on friendship. The discretion of neither legislators nor private persons were part of marriage; it was its essence that needed to be expressed. If a marriage dies, then the divorce decree itself should only be regarded as a record of the fact.80

  With articles so mercilessly critical, it was not surprising that Rheinische Zeitung had increasing problems with censorship. More government-friendly newspapers began attacking it for its lack of moderation; that kind of exhortation made Marx even more indignant. The press had to form the connecting link between the head of the state and the heart of civil society, he said. Its task was not just to express itself judiciously and intelligently, but also to temperamentally put the injustices of society into words.

  Another criticism Marx encountered concerned the accusation that the articles in his newspaper were anonymous. He declared frankly that ‘anonymity is an essential feature of the newspaper press’. It was only through this that a newspaper got its special Geist, its spirit.

  What he wrote about the proposed law on forest theft also met with criticism in other newspapers. He responded that the vineyard workers on the Mosel were living in a Notzustand (state of distress) that entailed Notwendigkeit (necessity) for the free press. The peasants could not express themselves publicly on their own. It was the duty of the newspapers to put their terrible situation, which was now threatened with becoming even worse through ill-advised legislation, into words.81

  This would not be the last time Marx linked Not and Notwendigkeit.

  But the censors were not persuaded by these words. On 20 January 1843, the decision came to shut down Rheinische Zeitung; Marx would continue his futile struggle against the powers that be for a time. On 17 March, he drew his ultimate weapon. In a brief notice, he explained that the editorial board was giving up their work. It was signed ‘Dr. Marx’. It was the first time he appeared over his own name in the newspaper.82 It was, of course, also the last. His time as a journalist had come to an end, for now.

  On the Way Out

  It was not easy for Marx to cut his links
with Hegel. He was dissatisfied when his own presentation was entirely too reminiscent of the old philosopher’s writing style. But no matter how he tried to liberate himself, relics still remained. In fact, there would always be a more or less distant echo of Hegel in whatever Marx wrote.

  The distance increased markedly after his encounter with the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach.

  Feuerbach, born in 1804, was himself a student of Hegel and had long followed in his footsteps. But by the late 1830s he had become more and more critical, and in 1839 he published his book Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie (Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy). Two years later, it was followed by the great work that above all else built his fame: The Essence of Christianity. It quickly gained influence and became the subject of equal parts admiration and loathing. Its theses are clear, and rather easy to understand. Against Hegel’s speculative thinking, Feuerbach placed an epistemological sensualism. It is thus through our senses that we attain knowledge. But this does not mean the word essence disappears from Feuerbach’s vocabulary – something even the title of his book testifies to. Evidence from the senses is of course the foundation of all sustainable knowledge. But from this material it is possible to sort out the essential – that which makes something what it is.