The Rebellious Petty Bourgeoisie

Out of fear of the working class, the German bourgeoisie submitted to absolutist feudal reaction. If the monarchy and the Junkers suppressed the proletariat, the bourgeoisie permitted itself, willing or otherwise, to be suppressed as well. It had at least one consolation in its sorrow: for all its feeble condition it had made some advances. It remained a class in the ascendant despite the leading-reins that had been once more laid on it.

Not so the German petty bourgeoisie. In the German revolution this class suffered a decisive defeat from which it was never to recover. From the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century it made a number of tentative attempts and had in its way fought for bourgeois freedom. But it had never gone so far as to rid itself thoroughly of the stick-in-the-mud philistinism that had been drummed into it since the sixteenth century. As soon as the illusion of the the March days died, that the fall of the Vormärz state meant the dawn of an age of universal happiness, as soon as it became obvious that bourgeois liberty merely prepared the ground on which the great class struggles of modern bourgeois society could develop, the German petty bourgeois shrank back from the ghastly prospect. They wanted peace at any price, even at the price of moral, economic and political ruin.

In England and France, in English Chartism and French Social Democracy, the most powerful elements of the petty bourgeoisie had allied themselves with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This was not beneficial to the working class, for it greatly delayed their development as a class, but it was of great use to the petty bourgeoisie, which won revolutionary drive from this alliance. The German petty bourgeois could never think of such an alliance; he thought he was doing enough by childishly suggesting that the working class should blindly accept his leadership. This limitation of the petty bourgeoisie was extraordinarily advantageous to the German working class; it is one of the most important reasons why the political organization of the proletariat had a much bigger impetus in Germany than it did in England or France. Conversely it was fatal for the German petty bourgeoisie that it never, not even after the bitterest experiences, was able to gain an understanding of proletarian class struggle. In the last half century scarcely a decade has gone by without some individual ideologists trying to organize a petty-bourgeois democratic movement with its ranks open to the left resolutely closed to the right. But only a handful of ideologues has regularly rallied around this banner, which has sunk back into the dust almost as soon as it has been raised. The great mass of the German petty bourgeoisie remained deaf to all those who called on it to follow a bold and far-sighted class policy.

In 1848 this mass split into three parts, whose decaying remnants drag out a spectral existence in today’s Reichstag as anti-semites, free-thinkers and the South German ‘Peoples’ Party’. The anti-Semite and craft-guild tendency found its main support in the small and medium-sized states of North Germany, where the guilds had still not been cleared out; in the Hansa towns, in Hanover, Brunswick, Mecklenburg and parts of Saxony. As early as April 22, 1848, 22 Masters of Leipzig guilds issued an Open Letter to ’all fellow guild members in Germany’ urging them to hold fast to the guild system as a jewel without which the labour question could never be solved and without which Germany would never see the good days return. Hand in hand with this extolling of the guild went a violent declaration of war on the Jews, whose heart it said was a moneybag and whose emancipation was simply a fashionable fad. It said that Germany had their activities to thank in good part for the growth of the proletariat, which was then stirred up against the existing order by Jewish orators and writers. The reactionary character of this appeal was revealed not least in the particularist way it looks askance at other German states and in its violent polemic against universal suffrage, which, it said, oppressed the craft masters by giving their servants and journeymen the right to vote.

Similar announcements were issued by the guild masters of Bremen and Hamburg, and, on June 2,200 delegates met in Hamburg at an ‘Assembly of the North German Craft and Trade Estate’, where the old song about the one true faith of the guild and the total ruin caused by the liberation of industry from it was sung in every key. A Berlin delegate even found enthusiastic support for the audacious claim that the attempt to estrange the Berliners from their gracious King would never have succeeded without the liberation of industry from the guilds. The Assembly would, no doubt, have broken up in this hopeless confusion, especially since a violent dispute developed between masters and journeymen, had not a member – who was only admitted after long opposition --intervened to soothe feelings and, so to speak, bring a modern context into this guild confusion. It was Professor Winkelblech who had been sent by a popular assembly in Kassel.

Winkelblech taught chemistry at the Technical College in Kassel and had, curiously enough, discovered his socialist convictions during a trip to Norway, as a result of the description of the plight of the proletariat given him by a German factory worker he chanced to meet. This made Winkelblech decide, in his own words, to concern himself no longer purely with machines and technology, but with man and his economic system. He conceived a learned system, later copiously developed in a long-winded work, which was supposed to reconcile liberalism and communism in federalism, abolish monopolism through panpolism and generally replace all the badisms with good-isms. In the essence of the matter it was a narrow-minded, petty-bourgeois socialism, which could only put its estimable hatred of the exploitative tendencies of the bourgeoisie to practical use by plaiting the Christian Teutonic guild system, Malthus’ population theory and individual ideas from Fourier and Louis Blanc into a pigtail tacked on behind.

Such a pigtail, however, was just the thing for an assembly of guild masters who wanted to put new life into the guild on the basis of the bourgeois revolution. At Winkelblech’s suggestion, the Hamburg assembly declared that only a thorough guild-system, covering all branches of industry, could save Germany from the fate of France and England, or even from the threat of communism, and decided to convene a general congress of the German crafts at Frankfurt-am-Main to discuss such a system and to place it before the German National Assembly. This congress, which was attended by 116 master craftsmen from 24 individual German states, met between the middle of July and the middle of August and, under Winkelblech’s guidance, managed to produce the draft for a statute of crafts and trades, which was then handed over to the National Assembly as a ‘solemn protest against the liberation of industry, sealed by millions of unfortunates’. The German parliament, however, did not know what to do with this curious mixture of progressive and reactionary proposals, and that perhaps was not the greatest of its sins.

The draft demanded a kind of hierarchically structured guild state with a general German chamber of trade at its head. The ‘social chamber’ was to be elected by direct suffrage of all guild-masters, and meet whenever the German parliament met to support it in an advisory capacity. Within the guilds the old hierarchy of apprentice, journeyman and master was to remain, as were work-books, articles of apprenticeship, the obligation to travel, the certificate of competence and the limitation to one trade only. In addition a marriage test was demanded: the proof of possession of sufficient capital by all those wishing to marry. Side by side with this reactionary utopia there were, it is true, some demands for practical reform: the introduction of a progressive income and property tax, legal regulation of the working day, thorough improvement of the education system, free education and the raising of the elementary schools to the level of institutions of general culture for all elements of civil society, so that art and science should become the common property of the people and not remain the monopoly of wealth.

The centre of gravity of the congress of the crafts remained nonetheless the reactionary guild system. This was particularly obvious in the attitude towards the ten journeymen who were elected as delegates to the congress. At first they were not going to be admitted at all; then they were only given an advisory role. Thereupon the journeymen issued a call for a special congress of journeymen for which numerous delegates were elected and which similarly met in Frankfurt from the end of July until the end of September. It took up a position sharply hostile to the congress of masters. ‘The selfishness of the masters’, it wrote in a submission to the National Assembly, ‘has so clouded their reason that they dare to declare that we are not of age, we who are the youth and thus also have our own strength, we who work, and are thus the real producers, and therefore the heart of Germany, we who form the great majority and know that we form it.’ Nevertheless, this congress, too, was stuck fast in the guild mire.

Winkelblech, who wanted to bring all the enemies of large-scale capital together under one roof, watched the quarrel between masters and journeymen that threatened his petty-bourgeois utopia with lively disquiet. By dint of tireless activity, he succeeded in winning the journeymen for the essential demand of the masters, for compulsory guilds and even for the limitations on workers’ right to marry. The journeymen, it must be admitted, did not want the old pattern of guild system. In their own way they demanded the ‘organization of labour’, the ‘introduction of a new guild system, completely different from the old, corresponding to our highly developed industrial conditions, recognizing the equal rights of all producers and extending to all social professions.’ In important details, too, they opposed the clauses the masters had put in their draft claiming the privilege of tutelage. They rejected work-books as a ‘burdensome police measure’, were totally against the obligation on journeymen to travel and accepted the progressive taxes only as a palliative, and not in the slightest degree as a sufficient measure to assure equity between capital and labour. But in the heart of its outlook the journeymen’s congress only represented that section of the German journeymen who were still caught up in the stolid prejudices of the craft guilds.

Therefore it started as clumsily as possible on the formation of a General Union of German Workers, which was to unite the German workers’ unions behind the watchword that the workers should serve no-one but themselves, that they should only pursue their own ends. This sensible principle was immediately broken by the decision that the Workers’ Union would only involve itself in politics when they immediately touched its class interest. The adoption of a common cockade and a common banner, which the workers were urged to accept in bombastic phrases, seemed more important to the congress than politics. The congress finished by appointing a commission, to which Winkelblech also was elected, which it entrusted with the organization of the whole body of German workers and the publication of a general German workers’ newspaper. The paper appeared on January 1, 1849 in Frankfurt, but placed itself beyond the pale, even given the partial state of workers’ development, in the very first issue, which was at great pains to mock the constitutional system in the romantic phraseology of the King of Prussia.

Besides the reactionary craft element in the petty bourgeoisie there was also a petty-bourgeois democratic movement. It was made up of those elements of the crafts that were not yet threatened by large-scale industry or had learned to accommodate to it, of small traders, the politically awakened stratum of the peasants, and not least, of those sections of the educated and literary class who still struggled against the wage slavery with which capitalism threatened them. They organized themselves politically in congresses and associations and around newspapers. This democratic petty bourgeoisie was however not a unified whole but was divided into a North German and a South German component, which were in many ways different despite substantial similarities.

The petty-bourgeois democracy of Northern Germany found its classical expression in the Left of the Prussian National Assembly. If it had liberated itself from medieval guild fantasies, it was taken all the more firmly in tow by the bourgeoisie on a rope which stretched from time to time but never broke. It dared not in the long run carry out consistently independent policies, and any desire to do so regularly deserted it at the moment when it was faced with a decision between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. At such times it clung blindly to the progressive faction of the bourgeoisie. There were indeed among the Left in the Prussian National Assembly members who would not have shrunk from an alliance with the working class and even demanded it, socialists by sentiment like the old man, Nees von Esenbeck from Breslau, or determined practical men like young Doctor d’Ester from Cologne. But they were only individuals, and in the Assembly’s decisive moments of crisis the democratic petty bourgeoisie danced to the tune of the liberal bourgeois piper.

It showed its worst side in Berlin, where it paid for the momentary intoxication of March 18 with an endless hangover. In its local and military organizations, the municipal authorities and the Bürgerwehr, it outrivalled itself in quivering fear. It even had to swallow its humiliation when the newspaper of the Berlin bourgeoisie – itself quite immune from a surfeit of heroism, if truth be told – took it to task for ‘sounding the alarm over every little thing.’ It created its own classical memorial in the Vossische Zeitung. The general cowardice of this organ was from time to time, in the days following the March fighting, interrupted by those extreme and overweening phrases which the petty bourgeois loves when for once he thinks he can play the hero at a safe distance. According to the ‘joyous special edition’ that the Vossische Zeitung issued on March 20, the most respectable municipal officials had defended the barricades. But this ‘joy’ really was only a ’special issue’. A democratic historian of 1948 has correctly said that no reactionary voice defended as persistently as the Vossische Zeitung the rumour about the rogues and criminals who supposedly fought on the barricades. The paper invented the lucrative ‘correspondent’ system. For ready cash it would turn itself into a trumpet for every slanderous word that the Junker reaction undertook to throw at the bourgeoisie and that the bourgeoisie undertook to throw at the proletariat. The first issue of the first workers’ paper that appeared in Berlin aimed a proud protest against this ‘venal press’. The Volk, the Organ of the Central Committee for Workers , said in its issue of May 25: ‘The Vossische Zeitung has the unusual advantage that, instead of paying its contributors, it is on the contrary paid by them. Now and then there are exceptions; for example it prints a lengthy article from the Berlin master printers without payment from the authors, but on the other hand they made the printing workers, poor working men, pay 16 talers and 22 silver groats for the reply’. Even the bourgeois newspapers stood aloof from such money-grubbing in those days.

Northern German petty-bourgeois democracy showed its best side in the Kingdom of Saxony. The high level of economic development in this small country rebelled continuously against the still very backward state-form, while its basis in cottage industry slowed down the differentiation between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Fourteen members of the Saxon Landtag had set themselves up as a Social Democratic faction – Social Democratic in the French, petty bourgeois-proletarian sense of the word – and, of the 24 deputies Saxony elected to the German National Assembly, 20 joined the Left. At their head were Blum and Trützschler, the two parliamentarians of 1848 who, in desecration even of summary military justice, were murdered by the vengeful reaction, the one with Imperial Austrian bullets, the other with Royal Prussian bullets. Trützschler was a refined, elegant aristocrat, a determined mind with a fist of ivory; Blum a child of the Rhenish proletariat, pithy and indefatigable, a bold heart densely packed in an ugly body. In Blum, the German petty bourgeoisie of the bourgeois revolution found its best man. But the fate of this class also fulfilled itself in him, except that in him it achieved tragic intensity. In the pre-parliament, when the issue was to call the masses to the ballot boxes, Blum had correctly prevented a break between the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, but he was completely wrong to make the same decision in the fatal September days, when the German Parliament was beyond any salvation and the German revolution could only be saved by a second revolution. After that, he lost his bearings, and tried in vain to make good, in the street fighting in Vienna, what he had let slip in the street fighting in Frankfurt. He expiated his political sins by a brave death, and his name lives on, not, indeed, in the class for which he fought, but in the class for which he was unable to fight, although it gave him birth. Twenty years later, Bismarck expressed sympathy for him because he would have nothing to do with the proletarian class struggle, and that sympathy was unfortunately not entirely unmerited.

The petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat came closest together in the Democratic Congresses, although, admittedly, it was only in order soon to go apart once more. The first of these Congresses took place in Frankfurt-am-Main in the middle of June. It was attended by more than 200 delegates who represented 88 democratic associations. Moll and Schapper were there, among other members of the Communist League. The Congress unanimously declared that the democratic republic was the only possible constitution for Germany, and made an effort to create an organization for democratic republican propaganda. The democratic associations were to combine by area or by province under the leadership of regional committees, which, it was recommended, should be based on Mannheim, Stuttgart, Bamberg, Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Marburg, Halle, Breslau, Stettin and Konigsberg. There stood over the regional committees a central committee of five which, against the lively opposition of the South German particularists, was sent to Berlin. The election of two of its members was left to the Berlin association. Of the three who were elected by the Congress two tended towards an admittedly very dubious socialism: Julius Fröbel and that Kriege from New York whose ‘drivel about love’ Marx and Engels had criticized so sharply. As well as the Mannheimer Abendzeitung, Southern Germany’s most radical paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne and the Zeitungshalle in Berlin were chosen as the Congress’s organs.

This organization was unable to develop powerful life of its own except in Cologne, where beside two bourgeois democrats there sat on the regional committee three members of the Communist League, Marx, Moll and Schapper and, as a sixth member, Hermann Becker, later Lord Mayor of Cologne, who did not belong to the Communist League but was very close to it. An exhaustive sample of the confusion that reigned in the Central Committee is given by the fact that Fröbel went to Vienna because, as Kriege explained, ‘the idea of a Federal Republic with the Slav peoples seemed to us to be even more sublime than even the idea of a German Republic’. The second Congress, which met in Berlin, showed the organization to be already in full dissolution. This Congress was attended by 240 delegates mainly from North Germany. The only Communists present were Ewerbeck from Paris, who was soon to part with the Communist League, and Weitling, who had long since left it in utopian egoism. On Kriege’s suggestion Georg Fein was elected President of the Congress, a political mummy from the long departed days of the romantic Bürschenschaft. Reporting from the Central Committee, Kriege opened the Congress with the promising words: ‘Our main support must be the bourgeoisie; we cannot use the proletariat, it is too coarse and uneducated to enter into our endeavour.’ Kriege added, it is true, that the Congress would have to stand armoured as a government of the democratic social republic, and that it would be unconscionable to make a revolution without such an organization. But this and similar outbursts of other speakers only had the effect that many members left the Congress, saying that their constituents had not known that ‘the members of the present Congress were steeped in the republican form of the state’ and were obliged to ‘work to bring it about’.

The rump of the Congress wasted its time with all sorts of party games, with extensive hair-splitting over whether the Central Committee should not have three or seven members rather than five, with debates on Robespierre’s Rights of Man, a thorough discussion of which was recommended to the democratic associations, and an appeal for beleaguered Vienna from Ruge’s pen. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung aptly said of this appeal that its lack of revolutionary energy was compensated by a strident sermonizing pathos that hid the most decided poverty of thought and feeling. And all this while the Prussian coup d’état was in the air! The failure of this Congress contributed in no small measure to encouraging the military moustaches, while the wild phrases that individual members indulged in only succeeded in giving the Prussian State Prosecutor an excuse, after the coup, to accuse the most harmless rebels of being sinister conspirators. This happened particularly to Waldeck, whose royal Prussian patriotism was absolute anathema to the Democratic Congress with its republican tendencies.

The petty-bourgeois democrats of Southern Germany generally held aloof from this democratic organization once the first Congress chose Berlin as the centre of republican propaganda. An admirable abhorrence of the Borussian despot co-exists with a decidedly reactionary element in the South German hatred of Prussia: the hatred of the sluggish hayseed for the big plantation on whose soil the great conflicts of modern society were beginning to unfold. The South German petty bourgeois wanted to have as little to do with these conflicts as did the North German. He had a horror of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in the instinctive knowledge that his class would be ground to nothing between these two millstones. The pocket republicanism that made a big splash in Southern Germany and was particularly strongly represented in the Left at the Frankfurt Assembly was much more the rear-guard than the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. The fresher air that blew in from abroad into the petty states of South West Germany, despite the despotic misrule they had all had to suffer for decades, profoundly agitated the petty bourgeois masses and particularly the small peasants. They were quicker to get their muskets down from the wall than the Prussian petty bourgeoisie, and they felt the moral force of the ‘monarchical principle’ much more weakly, but in other respects their vision was even more limited. Their gaze scarcely penetrated beyond their village boundary post, and their ideal state was no more than an inflated parish. These masses easily became playthings of others somewhat more far-sighted than themselves, lawyers, booksellers, schoolmasters, newspaper-writers, who lured on them with expressions of worthy integrity until they betrayed them at the first opportunity to their own, now childish and now cunning ambition.

In Baden, the heartland of South German democracy, the leaders of the Vormärz opposition had made a reputation for themselves which echoed throughout Germany. No sooner had the storm clouds of revolution gathered, however, than one part of these model patriots immediately collapsed. Once Blum reached Frankfurt he could not complain loudly enough about these ‘rascals who for years had passed as determined liberals’, and had now become ‘reactionaries’. Had he lived longer he would have discovered that even in the Frankfurt Left not all the chaff had been sorted out from the wheat by a long chalk. At his very side sat the leader of the Parliamentary Left, Karl Vogt from Giessen, who played the German National Regent in 1849 only to play the bonapartist paper-hero with the same dignity in 1859.