Julius Kovesi
In the 1890 edition of The Communist Manifesto Engels added the following footnote to the section dealing with ‘The True Socialists’: ‘The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble further in Socialism …’
If there is any truth in this remark it is true only in so far as the storm of 1848 swept away many things, including the Democratic Association of Cologne and Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But there were many things that survived the storm, including Moses Hess’ belief in the ‘creative spirit of the people’ which is a very characteristic belief of a True Socialist. In 1863 Lassalle asked Hess to represent his Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein in Cologne and Düsseldorf. In his first speeches to the branches in the Rheinland Hess abandoned the economic interpretation of history that he had adopted in 1846 under Marx’s influence but again appealed to the ‘creative spirit of the people’ to build a better world. Marx in London was furious. He wrote:
So Lassalle collects those who were excreted from our party twenty years ago for his dung factory, with which world history will be manured. So he has named Moses Hess as his viceroy in the Rhine province. Oh youth, what were you thinking when you let yourself be hanged on Herwegh and Moses Hess![i]
Hess’ reply is a a very interesting illustration of how a leading ‘True Socialist’ saw in retrospect Marx’s tactics in Cologne in 1848 and the theoretical foundations of those tactics when Marx drafted his Manifesto, including its criticism of the ‘True Socialists’, at the end of 1847.
According to the Marxist recipe of 1847, the workers should not press their claims against the bourgeoisie, or in fact, should work with them, until the bourgeoisie has gained its own demands, for by this means the ground will have been prepared on which the workers can carry on their own battle with the bourgeoisie. This general and, as a matter of historical fact, long-employed revolutionary strategy is certainly obvious and did not need to be presented as new dogma in 1847, nor does it need repeating now. Less understandable, however, are the conclusions that the reader is supposed to deduce from all this. Because the final demands of the bourgeoisie have not been achieved anywhere in Europe, Lassalle’s organization is too early; one must wait until the Republic is once again declared and a ‘Neueste Rheinische Zeitung’ can be started. Until then one should fold one’s arms and with dumb devotion look to Mecca-London.
One could justifiably assume that Hess is here referring only to Marx’s criticism of the ‘True Socialists’ in the Manifesto. Weiss, in his work on Moses Hess, however, tries to suggest that there is more to Hess’ complaint, and that he is probably also referring to Marx’s political behaviour and tactics in 1848 in Cologne. Weiss quotes from an anonymous letter addressed to Marx in the 29 February 1849 issue of a Cologne workers’ paper, Freiheit, Arbeit.[ii]
You are not interested in the freedom of the oppressed. For you the misery of the workers and the hunger of the poor are only of scientific and doctrinal interest. You are above such miseries … You are not gripped by that which moves the hearts of men …
… If only we had not let your phrases confuse us … then we ourselves would not have to do penance today for believing you when you made the revolution in Germany depend on the revolution of the French petty-bourgeoisie, and the revolution of the proletariat in France depend on the revolution of the proletariat in England, and when you made the victory of the proletarian revolution überhaupt depend upon the development of industry and the rule of the bourgeoisie – things which we could only wait for.
One must be careful however not to infer from such arguments that Marx’s opponents in Cologne were the True Socialists. Silberner in his only reference to Freiheit, Arbeit refers to it as Gottschalk’s paper.[iii] He refers to the issue of 15th April 1849 which complains that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung did not print the protest against the French police’s treatment of Willich, but rather used the opportunity to throw ‘einigen Kot’ on the signatories of the protest. So although Weiss presents the above quotation as coming from True Socialist quarters, perhaps at best we can say only that it merely coincides with what a True Socialist could have and would have said at the time.
Marx ended the Section of the Manifesto on the True Socialists by claiming that ‘with very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that [1847] circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.’ But in fact there were many other socialists and communists in Germany, as Marx was soon to discover in Cologne. Nevertheless this Section has become the most relevant part of the whole Manifesto for Marx’s struggles in 1848–49 with other socialists and communists, besides the True Socialists. I shall indicate why this was so after outlining the well known argument of the relevant Section of the Manifesto.
According to Marx’s argument, France had already had a bourgeois revolution, therefore the next, socialist, revolution was proper for French conditions. But in Germany the bourgeoisie was still the growing revolutionary force destined to destroy the feudal conditions, especially the absolute monarchy. According to Marx, the ‘True Socialists’ transferred to Germany the socialist criticism of the bourgeoisie before the conditions were ripe for such a criticism, and thereby in effect they joined forces with the feudal absolute government: while it resisted the bourgeoisie from above, the ‘True Socialists’ attacked from below. They should leave the bourgeoisie alone, or even join forces with it while it carries on its historic mission of destroying feudal conditions and establishes its liberal institutions, and attack it only afterwards. Marx accused the ‘True Socialists’ of
…confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
This passage can be read either as a theory of history, or as a theory of revolutionary tactics – or, of course, as both. As a theory of history it represents what one could call the ‘escalator theory of revolution’: history consists of successively better and better periods ushered in by successive revolutions and each revolution ushers in a better period just by virtue of being the next one. This theory is accepted by many people even today who hardly question why there should be a nextrevolution at all. But even fewer people ask whether what Marx called a ‘socialist’ revolution isn’t an alternative rather than a successor to what he called a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. I mention this only because it throws light on the ambiguity of Marx’s argument when it is interpreted as a theory of revolutionary tactics. The ambiguity consists in the fact that it opposes both those who would accept a theory of successive stages of development but impatiently want to jump a stage, and also those who simply envisage a revolution different from the liberal democratic revolutions. Since apart from Marx’s circle, all socialists and communists of the time belonged to either one or the other of these categories – whether they were followers of Weitling’s doctrine of revolution now or never, or of Gottschalk’s uncompromising republicanism –Marx’s incidental castigation of the True Socialists in the Manifesto turned into the most characteristic Marxist formulas of revolutionary theory and practice. I said ‘incidental’, because Marx, in writing that section of the Manifesto, did not have in mind his socialist and communist opponents of the following year. The example for Marx is from the past. Sidney Hook is probably right in saying that Marx must have had in mind Karl Grün, who formulated the anti-liberal attitude of the True Socialists most sharply. When, after the revolt of the Silesian weavers the demand for a constitution became strong, this is what Grün wrote in the Rheinische Jahrbücher:
Who in Prussia wants a constitution? The liberals. Who are the liberals? People who sit within their four walls, and some literateurs who either themselves own property or whose horizon is bounded by the wishes of the worthy factory owners. Does this handful of owners with their literary hacks constitute the people? No. Does the people desire a constitution? Not in its dreams … Had the Silesian proletariat a consciousness … it would protest against a constitution. The proletariat has no consciousness … but we … act in its name. We protest.[iv]
Although, as I said, the Section on the True Socialists in the Manifesto turned out to be the most relevant for he future, originally it was backward-looking. As Marx thought he had settled his philosophical accounts with the past in the German Ideology, in this section of the Manifesto he is settling his political accounts. But is Marx settling his ownaccounts? My own question that forms the title of this paper is itself backward-looking. I am asking, as Sidney Hook also asked, ‘Was Marx a True Socialist?’ or, to make use of McLellan’s title, was Marx before Marxism a True Socialist?
It has been asked, though a satisfactory answer has never been given, why Marx criticised so many of Moses Hess’ views in his criticisms of the True Socialists, without actually naming Hess himself. Though I have some suggestions towards answering this question, to give them here would lead us far away. To answer it one would have to ask a further question: Why is it that Marx criticises so many of his own views in the German Ideology without actually naming himself?
If someone who changes his mind and yet wishes to preserve the image that he has always been right has to adopt a version of a historical theory of knowledge, he has to maintain that certain theories were at one time true and correct, and indeed were appropriate and historically necessary stages in the development of Truth, while at the same time saying that they are no longer true and appropriate. As Hess himself wrote in a letter to Marx on 28 July 1846: ‘Necessary as it was in the beginning to tie communistic efforts to the German ideology, so it is now just as necessary to base them on historical and economic assumptions, otherwise we will never be finished with the ‘Socialists’ or with the opponents of all colours.’ His letter tried to show that ‘True Socialism’ was justified in the early forties, but is not so any longer under the changed historical circumstances. I think one has to keep in *****
[i] Zlocisti: Moses Hess, Der Vorkämpfer des Sozialismus und Zionismus, Berlin, Weltverlag, 1921, p.331.
[ii] I am relying for these quotations on John Weiss: Moses Hess, Utopian Socialist, Wayne State U.P., Detroit, 1960.
[iii] Edmund Silberner: Moses Hess, Geschichte Seines Lebens, Leiden, 1966, pp.298-99.
[iv] As quoted by Sidney Hook: From Hegel to Marx, Ann Arbor, 1962, p.201. Also in Sidney Hook: “Karl Marx and Moses Hess’ in The New International, December, 1934, pp.143-4.