The Revolutionary Proletariat

The proletarian class struggle could only develop in the German revolution under the determining influence of the decisive struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. If it had had the slightest courage, the bourgeoisie could have had the entire working class behind it. But by striking its colours in the face of the monarchy and the Junkers out of fear of the proletariat, it provoked precisely what it wished to avoid, and forced the class consciousness of the workers forward more sharply than it would have developed naturally in the historical state of things at the time.

The rural proletariat, it must be said, did not attain a class-conscious organization, except in Silesia, where they had their hands full dealing with the counter-revolution’s so called Rustic Associations. Elsewhere it presented its programme in thousands of petitions to the National Assemblies in Berlin and Frankfurt, but its demands never went beyond the abolition of feudal burdens, the possession of land, be it only a spot on which to keep geese, the raising of the daily wage and the cutting of taxes. And it could not be otherwise, for precisely this programme corresponded with the outlook of feudal dependents who expected that the bourgeois revolution would bring their emancipation and consequently could not adopt an attitude that went far beyond that revolution.

Not so the industrial proletariat, which had long since lived in a state of secret war with capital and only supported the bourgeois revolution in order to clear a battlefield where it could wage open war on the bourgeoisie. When it saw that this bourgeois class was beginning to sacrifice its own interests in order to deny them that battlefield, it was also forced to recognise that it could no longer let itself be led by the bourgeoisie, but would have to organize itself despite the bourgeoisie. The more the bourgeois revolution silted up, the more revolutionary the working class became. It was still far too weak to carry the banner that the bourgeoisie had betrayed to victory, but it fought bravely for that banner and its defeat was not, as was that of the bourgeois class, the beginning of the end, but only the end of the beginning of its struggle for emancipation. In the March revolution it got rid of the last of those illusions that the modern proletariat has to go through in the early phases of its revolutionary development, and it was only thrown off the historical stage to reappear on it with all the more determination, preparation and clarity ten years later, having licked its grievous wounds.

The main centres of proletarian class struggle in 1848 were naturally the great cities, above all Berlin and Cologne. The Berlin workers won the victory of March 18 only to have its fruits wrenched from them the following day. That was only possible because they lacked the clarity to recognize their interests and the organized power to fight for them. Indeed, their political immaturity was still very great, as was proved by the first big meeting that they held on March 26 to discuss the relief of their poverty. Nearly twenty thousand people came, from among whose ranks the most higgeldy-piggeldy suggestions were aired. The meeting ended with a riot that lasted hours because a wily writer from the Vossische Zeitung managed, by a vague formulation, to give the impression that the paper preferred the United Landtag to an organ of modern popular representation.

Understandably the ruling class, consciously or unconsciously, did everything possible to increase confusion in the working class. The furious attacks of the Biirgerwehr and the clumsy confidence tricks of the counter-revolution; the free redemption of all goods in pawn to a value of less than 5 talers in the royal pawnshops; the remission of rent arrears and of all outstanding school fees and fines; the setting up of a sort of workshop, of earthworks and canal works, with which the state employed 3,500 unemployed and the city 2,500; the setting up even of a so-called Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Public Works, which of course immediately unmasked itself as a new bulwark of the propertied classes; the hollow Rodomontades of the demagogues Held and Company; the loving talk of noble-minded friends of the workers; the heart-rending exhortations that the workers should be as willing to live and work for the good of society as they had been to fight and to die for it on the barricades, exhortations uttered with truly woebegone faces by those clowns of the liberal Vormärz philistines, the writers Glassbrenner and Kossak – all that was forced on the Berlin workers like an earsplitting, confusing cacophony. All the more to their credit, therefore, that they did not permit themselves to be pushed from the political path along which their historical task directed them. They permitted themselves neither to be repelled by the liberal alarmists nor to be stupefied by the siren songs of reaction, and up to and including the coup d’état they placed their arms and their blood at the disposal of the bourgeois revolution.

They learnt from their mistakes. Only a few days after the unfortunate mass meeting, 150 workers met to form a special workers’ club, openly acknowledging that they would have to get used to parliamentary forms and the logical formulation of questions before staging great mass meetings where all kinds of fly-by-nights and braggarts could lead them by the nose. The club decided to call upon all workers’ associations, trades and factories to elect representatives to form a Central Committee for Workers.

And so it happened, and after careful preparations the projected Central Committee constituted itself on April 19, not without this or that unreliable customer in its number, but possessing in the typesetter Born and the goldsmith Bisky a couple of leaders who knew very well what they were about.

Besides them there emerged at that first meeting the student Gustav Adolf Schlöffel, a visionary youth of 19, the son of that Silesian landowner who had previously been persecuted by Stieber and soon to become one of the best members of the Left in the Frankfort National Assembly. Young Schlöffel had been rusticated to the Odenwald from Heidelburg University for the alleged dissemination of inflammatory writings, and the University of Berlin, where he wanted to continue his studies, had refused him admission. He now devoted himself entirely to proletarian agitation and published in irregular broadsheets the Volksfreund, in which he proclaimed in vehement and bold terms the war to the death between capital and labour. His likeable appearance quickly brought him a big following among the workers. Nevertheless he came into sharp conflict with Born and Bisky when he called for a big mass rally that was to march to the Schloss on April 20 and enforce the direct suffrage.

Born had a shrewd but cool and calm brain. He had belonged to the Communist League in Brussels and Paris and, as his essays and speeches show, he had grasped the spirit of the Communist Manifesto. At running meetings, and as a fascinating and pithy orator, he was superior to all the popular leaders in Berlin, as even the organ of the bourgeoisie testified. If he – and also Bisky, who was like him but less able – refused to participate in the mass rally, it was probably because he was afraid that the unarmed crowd would be driven off by the armed Bürgerwehr and that a breach would thus open up between the bourgeoisie and the workers which would open the door to the counter-revolution even before the National Assembly had been elected. Born and Bisky and some bourgeois democrats left the Committee for Popular Elections, which was to work for the granting of the direct suffrage, when the majority voted for Schlöffel’s plan, which anyway collapsed of its own accord, since the expected crowds did not turn up at the rendezvous. Schlöffel was afterwards arrested and, on May 11, sentenced by the Supreme Court to six months fortress arrest, for attempted incitement to rebellion, serving his term at Magdeburg. He was – where the Camphausen ministry was concerned – the first victim of reaction. Expressions of the liveliest sympathy accompanied the noble youth, but his activities left no permanent mark on the Berlin revolution.

The conflict between Born and Schlöffel had a profounder background and was to a certain extent typical of the course events took. Born himself was only speaking his honest opinion when he said that in Germany the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, capital and labour, were not in such sharp conflict as they were in England and France, where they stood face to face, cold-blooded and armed for the fight as strictly separate parties. He thought that the workers in Germany were not yet organized and did not see themselves as a party, and that it would be senseless for individual workers to smash machines or make demands on individual manufacturers that they could not possibly grant. If the working class wanted to be a power in the state, then its first task was its own organization. ‘We count in our number the greatest part of the nation; not only the wage workers and the journeymen, but also the great number of small masters who are oppressed by the competition of large-scale capital, the agriculturalist whose parcel of land is no longer enough, the teacher who educates our children, the girl who sits at the embroidery-frame or the machine are ours. Everybody whose industry and efforts are outbid by the power of capital and must perish in free competition belongs to us.’ Born added this programme to the statutes of the Central Committee for Workers, by which the proletariat was organized.

In later years Engels said that, in the official publications of the organization that Born founded, the conceptions of the Communist Manifesto were mixed up with guild memories and guild aspirations, scraps from Louis Blanc and Proudhon, tariff protection and so on. This is correct, but Engels added that Born, a very talented young man, was in a bit too much of a hurry over his transformation into a great political figure, that he allied himself with any Tom, Dick and Harry in order merely to get his army together, and was not at all the man to bring unity into the conflicting tendencies and light out of chaos. This verdict required at least some qualification.

So far as the workers’ movement of 1848 in the German trading and industrial towns can be judged from reliable sources, it had – with the exception of the Rhineland and parts of Westphalia – only developed to about the level of the French Social Democracy of the day, and could not go beyond questions of the organization of labour, the right to work and a Ministry of Labour. The stage of the aimless fight against hunger lay not far behind it, even though outbreaks of machine-breaking occurred. It had also in the main got over utopian craft-communism; Weitling, who came to Berlin in June, could find no basis among the workers and had to let the Urwähler, a paper he founded, collapse after a few numbers because of the lack of readers. But it was not yet ripe for the viewpoint of the Communist Manifesto, which, in order to become the banner of a mass movement, presupposed large scale industry as the typical form of enterprise to a much greater extent than was then the case in Eastern Germany. If Born wanted to organize the workers as a class, he had to reckon with the mental compass to which they were at that time limited, and he at least did not lack zeal in leading them beyond that horizon.

During the discussions that led to the formation of the Central Committee for Workers, a liberal bureaucrat, President Lette, turned up to persuade the workers to join a common organization with the employers that could, with its loftier overall view, regulate the relationship of national production to the world market. Born replied that this relationship was no concern of the workers. The relationship with other countries, the sale of products was, he said, a matter of complete indifference to the worker as such. The expansion of industry was not a means to improve the condition of the working class, but rather caused an increase in the numbers of the working class, and the interests of the workers were directly opposed to those of the employers. Born opposed all toying with guilds just as decisively. He said that no state that had introduced large-scale modern industry could ever again return to an already outdated mode of production without ruining itself or taking up a completely subordinate position in the ranks of the European states.

So when Proudhon tried and failed to put his labour-money utopia into practice by founding a Peoples’ Bank Born wrote, completely in the spirit of the Communist Manifesto and the sense of historical materialism: ‘We by no means applauded this enterprise, and if its failure saddens us it does not surprise us, for we expected this outcome with certainty, for the simple reason that an idea, however great and true it is, can never simply be put into practice without any further ado where the elements needed to carry it out are not present to a sufficient degree. The republic, for example, is certainly a more rational form of state than the monarchy; but whether it is equally suitable for all nations, for the Croats as much as for the French, that is a different question ... We have always placed the organization of workers over the organization of work, we always presuppose the political mastery of the working classes before we consider possible the introduction of social ideas affecting all layers of society... We disapprove in advance of all such socialist experiments, although we belong to the socialist party, and indeed have all the more right to do so ... Human society, that ever living and creative organism, can no more be crammed into the straitjacket of a system than the growing poverty can be combatted with Peoples’ Banks, which must draw their funds from the pockets of the poor... We rightly ask: what future, what expectation of life could the Peoples’ Bank have if it collapsed because of – M. Proudhon’s prosecution for press offences. With the Peoples’ Bank Proudhon wanted to build a new world, in the Peoples’ Bank lay his solution to the social question, and because of six months gaol and a fine of a few thousand francs to which Citizen Proudhon is sentenced, the world is once more cheated of its Saviour and Redeemer. We cannot suppress a bitter smile when we think of the petty vanity that sought to light the way to the great popular movement, when the modern Joshuas in their prophets’ robes go marching on before, not, however, to join the fray, to wield their sword, no – to be admired. Here comes M. Considérant, a second rate prophet, who wants to dispute that M. Proudhon invented the Peoples’ Bank – how pitiful is this little war between two personalities at a time when the whole world is pregnant with projects and the earth shakes to the tread of two massive armies who, lusting for the fight, march on each other and will soon be seeing the whites of each others eyes; at a time when a battle won in Hungary by Dembinski or Bem is worth more than all the printed and unprinted works of Citizens Proudhon and Considerant put together; at a time when the greatest reputations are broken by a single day.’ Thus wrote Born in the Volk and the Verbrüderung , the two official organs of the organization he led. If nonetheless in its own programmes the ideas of Louis Blanc predominated, mixed up with all kinds of protectionist, utopian and guild rubbish, this is explained by the fact that the industrial workers of Germany, with the exception of some areas in the West, had as yet only been able to reach the level of the French Social Democracy of the day, which, for the proletariat east of the Elbe, was a pretty good achievement.

The Central Committee for Workers developed a zealous agitation in the press and in meetings and also for the elections for the National Assembly, in which it managed to get Bisky in as a deputy delegate in one Berlin constituency. From June 1 it brought out the Volk three times weekly, a ’social-political newspaper’ with the programme ‘on the one hand to support the bourgeoisie in the fight against the aristocracy, against the Middle Ages and against the forces of God’s Grace, on the other hand to support the small tradesman and the worker against the power of capital and free competition and to be always in the forefront where it is a matter of winning for the people some political right that is still denied them, so that they achieve the means to wrest all the more quickly social freedom and an independent existence’. In its third issue the paper greets the appearance of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which had also come out on June 1, and whose ‘determined line’ was, it said, guaranteed by the names of ‘our friends’ Marx, Engels and Wolff. Politically it supported and tried to put fire into the Left in the Berlin Assembly, courageously supported the Parisian June fighters and honoured the English Chartists, just as in general it was at pains to maintain a spirit of close sympathy with the workers’ parties of Western Europe. Hand in hand with this went a ruthless scourging of the socio-political swindle which demagogues like Held tried on the population. The paper devoted a great part of its space to a discussion of the social ideas that were considered on the Central Committee and which stretched from export subsidies and corporations of craftsmen to the employment of the unemployed by the state.

The Central Committee moreover sent a delegation to the Hamburg Handicrafts Congress, with whose ‘fanatical defence of the medieval guilds’ it naturally declared itself to be in disagreement. It was equally dissatisfied with a smaller congress of craftsmen’s and worker’s associations which met in Berlin on July 18 which, although it did not strike such extreme guild attitudes, did in general get no further than well-meaning phrases about the good of the workers. Six members of this congress, Born for the Central Committee, Lucht and Krause for the Berlin millwrights, Bühring and Steinhauer for the Hamburg and Crüger for the Königsberg workers, on June 27 issued an appeal ‘to all workers’, craftsmen’s and cultural associations, to the German associations in Switzerland, Paris, Brussels and London’ for the election of delegates to a workers’ parliament that was to meet in Berlin. ‘The working classes of all towns and industrial and agricultural areas’ were to be represented. The proposed subjects for discussion were the guarantee of work by the state, state support of industrial associations of workers, state aid for all helpless and invalid workers, regulation and limitation of the excessive working day, reform of the taxation system in favour of the working classes by a sharply progressive income tax, limitation of the right of inheritance and the abolition of all taxes on food as well as all feudal fees and burdens, free education in national schools, free legal care and the introduction of Ministries of Labour in the individual German states which were to come from a free vote of all the working classes.

The Workers’ Congress met on August 23. It counted 40 participants, of whom 5 only had an advisory capacity. 35 workers’ associations in Berlin, Breslau, Hamburg, Leipzig, Königsberg, Munich and other large cities had sent delegates. There was also a representative of the Frankfurt Journeymen’s Congress present. Together with him Weitling moved, immediately after the opening of the Congress, that a petition for the calling of a special Workers’ Parliament should be sent to the Frankfurt National Assembly. He left the hall in high dudgeon when the Congress, while not rejecting the motion, put it back to the agenda of the second session. The Congress elected Nees von Esenbeck and Born as its chairmen, Bisky and the surveyor Schwenniger from Hamm as its secretaries, and then, in ten days of discussion, dealt with a great number of proposals more or less within the areas proposed by its initiators. On the whole they represent a pretty colourfully mixed confusion. Thus precise regulations concerning the right to be a master were decided upon, for which the Congress demanded proof of competence. The plan to collect subscriptions from wages in order to buy land and divide it into smallholdings also played a big role. In a manifesto, the German National Assembly was called upon to include the decisions of the Congress among the basic rights of the German people and to convene a Workers’ Parliament at Frankfurt at the expense of the state, in order to ‘support’ the Assembly’s economic committees in an advisory capacity.

More important than these theoretical decisions were the statutes that the Congress drafted for the organization of German workers. The Workers’ Brotherhood, as the new league was to be called, was structured in local and district committees, over which stood a Central Committee as the highest authority. The different trades in a locality were to be represented on the local committees in proportion to their membership. The job of these committees consisted of holding regular meetings of workers and representing the interests of local workers. A number of these local committees were grouped under a district committee elected by a district meeting of representatives of the local committees that was to be held at least one a year. The district committees had the responsibility of looking after workers’ interests in their district and forming a link with the Central Committee; the cause of women workers was to be represented on them by a special commission. The Congress provisionally named Danzig, Königsberg, Stettin, Cologne, Bielefeld, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Augsburg, Munich, Linz, Vienna, Brno, Prague, Nuremberg, Bamburg, Jena, Coburg, Marburg, Hannover, Osnabrück, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Berlin, Breslau and Dresden as the seats of the district committees, although the local committees were not to be deprived of the right to form themselves into further district committees. Over the district committees stood the Central Committee, which was removed to Leipzig and entrusted with the publication of a national newspaper. For its part, it was under the supervision of and re-elected by a General Congress of all German workers that was to take place at least annually. The Congress provisionally decided upon Born, Kick and Schwenniger as its members, and from October they published the Verbrüderung from Leipzig as the organ of the League.

The Central Committee dedicated itself to its task with tireless zeal and succeeded in spreading the League over a great part of Germany, particularly through a series of district congresses that took place in Altenburg, Leipzig, Hamburg, Heidelburg, Nuremberg and other places. In Heidelburg, Born collided with Winkelblech, and the typesetter beat the learned professor so thoroughly that Winkelblech left the congress after the first day of discussion. Everywhere the workers’ association set up by the Frankfurt Journeymen’s Congress was either driven out or absorbed by the new League. Politically the Workers’ Brotherhood was consistently bold. Its Berlin district committee, led by Bisky, placed itself at the disposal of the Berlin National Assembly in order to fight the coup d’état not simply with phrases but also with arms, and during the night-long meeting of the Bürgerwehr Majors, Bisky showed the utmost personal zeal to drive the bourgeois philistines to the barricades. In November, the Central Committee in Leipzig also issued an urgent demand to the district and local committees to see to the arming of the workers.

The social aims of the Workers’ Brotherhood were less immune from criticism. It had simply accepted everything, possible and impossible, for its social programme, and the more points at which it tried to exert leverage, the more it dispersed its forces. Its attempt to use subscriptions from wages to buy land, to set up credit funds for the workers, to found all kinds of producer co-operatives and generally to put the cart before the horse – attempting a reckoning with the capitalist mode of production before the proletariat had seized political power – all led to disappointments and losses. But the league’s organ greatly contributed to awakening and sharpening workers’ class consciousness. It was skilfully edited and tore apart the pompous phrases about how capitalist wealth trickles down to the people, how there have always been rich and poor, and all the rest of those capitalist mirages, with telling wit. It also gave the wages struggles of the workers real support by proving how justified they were and warning about blacklegging.

1848 was particularly rich in such wages struggles. In Berlin alone there were many dozens of them after the March days. It lies in the nature of things that the striking workers had many temporary but no permanent successes. What was granted them out of fear of the revolution was wrested back from them in the arrogance of the reaction. The countless occasional strikes gave rise in some trades to attempts to form permanent national organisations, first and most strongly among the typesetters and cigar workers. The typesetters founded themselves a trades union journal, the Gutenberg, and the cigar workers started the Konkordia. The bourgeoisie were much more hostile to the trades union organization of the workers, which threatened their profits directly, than they were to their socio-political organization; and they found willing helpers in the courts and the police, who calmly used the Vormärz prohibition of combinations as if the laws of April 6 had never guaranteed unlimited freedom of association.

Faced with these powers of crude and illegal suppression, no permanent trades union organization could yet maintain itself, but the intellectual victory went undiminished to the workers. When the Berlin typesetters, worked to death and badly paid as they were, struck for a cut in the working day and a wage increase, the Berlin master printers declared that if their employees’ demands were granted, prices would rise by fifty per cent and therefore demand would drop by one hundred per cent. For it was a fearful, irrevocable truth, proved by a century of statistical studies and invincible legions of counted facts, that if the price of labour rises in arithmetical progression consumption drops in geometrical progression. To such inexpressible nonsense this ‘educated’ bourgeoisie appended the outraged question: ‘Can and should we, who belong to a trade that truly nourishes the intellect, deny the greatest and highest properties of intelligence?’ But the Nationalzeitung was of the opinion that strikes should only take place with the permission of the authorities, since otherwise the state would dissolve into warring associations, and the Vossische Zeitung denounced the typesetters as the bribed mercenaries of foreign powers, who, it said, had received 14,000 francs from France and Switzerland. Since that paper’s own typesetters had to work 14 to 16 hours a day seven days a week for a weekly wage of 4 to 6 talers, the Berlin bourgeois could easily grasp that dissatisfaction with such idyllic working conditions could only be aroused by vile French money.

Even today it is a pleasure to read how effortlessly the leaders of the proletarian wages struggles, the typesetters Born and Fröhlich, and the cigar workers Kohlweck and Stechan, dealt with this chatter was born of the unholy matrimony of bourgeois ignorance and bourgeois greed for profit. They were all, or almost all, proletarians who had been trained in the Communist League.