Conspiracy to convict (1973)

Book Review from the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Cologne Communist Trial. By Karl Marx, with an introduction by Rodney Livingstone. Lawrence and Wishart.

With the publication of Marx’s Revelations concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (1852) a valuable addition has been made to Marxist literature in English.

Besides Marx’s defence of his friends on trial by exposure of the lies, deliberate forgeries, and plots to implicate them, the book also contains Marx’s satirical sketches of the romantic revolutionaries of Germany at the time.

The manuscript of this work had a most curious history and lay undiscovered for a century, having been given by Marx to a certain Colonel Bangya, a Hungarian police spy, who offered to get it published and stole it.

The book’s chief interest to us is, first, that the story of the incidents leading to the arrest and imprisonment of the members of the Communist League shows clearly the origin and development of Marx’s ideas away from romantic insurrection, and to the education of the workers.

Engels explains in his History of the Communist League; and Marx himself quotes his statement in support of a break with the comic-opera “revolutionaries” :

The point of view of the minority is dogmatic rather than critical, idealistic rather than materialistic. For them, revolutions are not the product of the realities of the situation, but the result of a mere effort of will.

What we say to the workers is “You will have 15, 20, or 50 years of civil war and national struggle and this not merely to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.” Whereas you say, “either we seize power at once or take to our beds.” (p. 62)

As Engels reports, Paris and London, at that time, were hotbeds of revolutionary cliques and self-styled “liberators" who actually enrolled recruits into “invasion" armies to march back and take over Germany, or more exactly, Prussia. Whereas Marx and himself counselled exiles to go back home and patiently build a political Socialist movement.

This is not the place to itemize the whole sordid story of the conspiracy to convict innocent men, except to indicate one other interesting sidelight which has bearing on the position of the Socialist Party today.

The whole might and resources of the Prussian state, money, men and apparatus were mobilized, on the direct orders of the King of Prussia himself, to secure a political conviction. Incidentally, the Minister of the Interior who ordered the exercise and sought the extradition of German political refugees was Ferdinand von Westphalen, Marx’s brother-in- law.

Against this, on the other side, was Karl Marx, penniless and stranded in London, never losing his profound sense of humour in the most tragically desperate circumstances. He wrote to Weydemeyer in America:

You will appreciate the humour of our side of this pamphlet when you realise that its author is more or less imprisoned through his lack of adequate covering for his feet and posterior, and moreover at any moment expects to see real misery overwhelm his family, (p. 28)

The spectacle of the penniless and homeless Karl Marx, frantically endeavouring to maintain his family, forced to abandon productive work to defend his threatened comrades, pitting his brain against the organized power of the Prussian state will live in the mind of the reader of this book.

Horatio.