Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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munist Manifesto of which the first 1000 copies had just arrived from London; the other was a flysheet listing seventeen points elaborated by Marx and Engels in the last half of March and entitled The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. Marx himself paid for the printing of the Demands which were an attempt to adapt the proposals of the Communist Manifesto to Germany. Only four of the ten points of the Manifesto were included: a state bank, nationalisation of transport, progressive income tax and free education. The right of inheritance was to be limited rather than abolished, and there was no proposal for nationalising land - but only the estates of the feudal princes.9 The Demands were a plan of action for a bourgeois (and not socialist) revolution; they were designed to appeal to the petty bourgeoisie and peasants as well as to the workers, and were very similar to programmes proposed by radical republicans.

II. P O L I T I C S I N C O L O G N E

Marx himself, armed with a passport valid for one year only, left Paris at the beginning of April and travelled to Mainz. He was accompanied by his family, Engels and Ernst Dronke (a young radical writer who had recently been brought into the Communist League). They stopped two days in Mainz where the Workers' Educational Association had shortly before issued an appeal for the organisation and unification of workers' unions throughout Germany. Marx arrived in Cologne on 10 April, and settled in the north of the city.10 About three months later he was followed by Jenny and the children who had been waiting in Trier until he obtained a residence permit. They all moved into lodgings situated in the narrow streets of the Old City," almost next door to the future offices of the

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Cologne was an obvious base: it was the third biggest town in Prussia with nearly 100,000 inhabitants and was situated in the most industrialised region of Germany; Marx had many old contacts there and the Rhineland laws were known to be more liberal than those of any other German state. There was also a group of the Communist League there which in mid-1847 met twice weekly for singing, discussion and propaganda12 - though by the time of Marx's arrival in Cologne, Wolff reported it to be 'vegetating and disorganised'.13 Its leading members had been Andreas Gottschalk, gifted son of a Jewish butcher who practised as a doctor among the poor of Cologne, and August Willich and Friedrich Anneke, both ex-Prussian officers. Cologne had also been the first city to witness mass action by the workers. On 3 March, two weeks before the outbreak of the revolution in Berlin, a crowd of several thousand assembled on the

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main square and invaded the session of the Town Council where Gottschalk and Willich presented their demands: universal suffrage, freedom of the Press and association, a people's militia, and state responsibility for work and education. The army was called in and, after some casualties, Gottschalk, Willich and Anneke were all arrested - to be released three weeks later after the successful revolution in Berlin. Four days before Marx's arrival, Gottschalk had founded a Workers' Association (which he viewed as an extension of the Communist League),14 recruiting 8000 members in a few months. The current business was transacted in a Committee of fifty elected members. Gottschalk was immensely popular with the Cologne workers, more than a quarter of whom were unemployed. The Association, organised in sections according to the different professions, persuaded the municipality to initiate a public works programme and negotiated with employers on wages and hours. It is, of course, important to remember that factory workers were still only a small proportion of Cologne's working population: the number of artisans and traders was much greater.15 Thus Marx entered a situation in Cologne in which the working-class movement was already well under way, and there were suggestions that he would do better to go on to Berlin or even run as a parliamentary candidate from Trier.16

Differences between Marx and Gottschalk were inevitable. Gottschalk was a close friend of Moses Hess and a thoroughly 'true' socialist in his outlook, taking a conciliatory attitude to religion and rejecting notions of class struggle; he also supported a federalist solution to the problem of German unification. Soon after his arrival Marx attacked Gottschalk's organisation of the Workers' Association,17 no doubt because he considered its activities too limited to purely economic demands. But the immediate quarrel between Marx and Gottschalk was over tactics: whether or not to participate in the elections (at the beginning of May) to the Prussian Assembly and the National Parliament at Frankfurt. Although Gottschalk's immediate demands were moderate (he thought that the workers should agitate on the basis of 'monarchy with a Chartist base'18) he could not approve of participation in elections based on an indirect voting system, which in some states came near to disenfranchising the workers completely; he also thought that elections could only be successful when the working-class movement had developed considerably further, and wished to dissuade the workers from taking part in a struggle for a bourgeois republic in which the fruits of victory would not go to them. Marx strongly criticised this isolation of the workers from the political process, and himself helped to found and preside over a Democratic Society in Cologne which successfully sponsored Franz Raveau as candidate for the Frankfurt Parliament. There was a further open clash between

1. Marx's birthplace: Briickergasse 664 (now Briickerstrasse 10). The family lived here for only about eighteen months, occupying two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor.

2. Karl Marx, aged eighteen. Detail from a lithograph of the Trier Students' Club in 1836, made by D. Levy-Elkan.