The 19 June 1848 edition of Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie ("New Rhenish Newspaper: Organ of Democracy") was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung ("Rhenish Newspaper"), also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie ("New Rhenish Newspaper: Organ of Democracy") was founded 1 June 1848 in Cologne (Köln), part of Rhineland. The paper was established by Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, as well as leading members of the Communist League living in Cologne immediately upon the return of Marx and Engels to Germany following the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution.[1] The paper's editorial staff included Joseph Weydemeyer, with Marx serving as editor-in-chief.
The paper was named after an earlier newspaper edited by Karl Marx in Cologne from 1842 to 1843, the Rheinische Zeitung.[1] The paper had the subtitle "Organ of Democracy," referring not to the establishment of parliamentary democracy, but to the revolutionary "Democratic front" which included the progressive petty bourgeoisie, the working class, and the peasantry.[1]
The paper was financed through the sale of shares of stock, contributions and loans, and paid advertising.[1] The paper was produced as a 4-page broadsheet, with the use of occasional special supplements.[1]
Development
Circulation of the paper ranged from 3,000 to 6,000 copies per issue,[2] a number far in excess of the membership of the Communist League itself, which specialists estimate had between 200 and 300 participants.[3] This effectively rendered the publication into what historian Tatyana Vasilyeva has called "the leading centre of the Communist League, directing the political activity of its members throughout Germany during the revolutionary period."[4]
A total of 301 editions of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRZ) were produced during the course of its existence.[1] To these Marx himself contributed a total of not fewer than 80 articles over the course of its existence.[5] Since editorial contributions to the NRZ were unsigned and handwritten manuscripts have not survived, a precise count is impossible, however.[6]
Political line
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRZ) was outspoken in its criticism of Prussia and Austria for Monarchist counter-revolution, and actively agitated for their defeat.[2] The paper was also critical of the willingness of the liberalbourgeoisie to compromise with Monarchist forces — policies which Marx and his comrades believed would have negative impacts upon the German revolution.[2]
More than three decades after the publication's termination, Marx's close associate Frederick Engels recalled that the NRZ had a political program with two main points: "a single, indivisible, democratic German republic, and War with Russia, including the restoration of Poland."[7] With respect to foreign affairs, Engels recalled that the NRZ sought "to support every revolutionary people and to call for a general war of revolutionary Europe against the mighty bulwark of European reaction — Russia."[8]
This policy was intended to undermine both the authority of Prussia and Tsarist Russia, both considered reactionary and militaristic powers, with war against Russia seen as a necessary prerequisite for establishment of a unified and democratic Germany.[9] Marx and Engels believed that "if Germany could be successfully brought to make war against Russia, it would be the end for the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns and the revolution would triumph along the whole line."[10]
The tone of the newspaper was described by Engels as "by no means solemn, serious, or enthusiastic," instead treating political opponents with "mockery and derision" in a manner entertaining to readers.[9] The paper sought to foster the idea that the German events of the spring of 1848 were the starting point of a long revolutionary process akin to the French Revolution of 1789-1794.[11] The paper attempted to undermine the notion that the formal resolutions of various "National Assemblies" were capable of changing state policy in any fundamental way.[11]
Throughout its existence the NRZ was persecuted by the Prussian government, which brought lawsuits against it charging the NRZ with having "slandered" government officials.[1] As the revolutionary upsurge of 1848 ebbed, the government's hindrance of the publication became steadily more effective, culminating in Karl Marx's expulsion from Germany — a move which effectively killed the paper.[1]
Suppression
Page from the last issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which became known as the "Red issue", May 19, 1849
On 2 March 1849, Prussian soldiers came to Marx's home to arrest one of the writers. Marx refused to turn over the writer, and the soldiers eventually left.
On 16 May 1849 Marx received an official note from the royal government declaring:
"The tendency of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to provoke in its readers contempt for the present government, and incite them to violent revolution and the setting up of a social republic has become stronger in its latest pieces.... The right of hospitality which he has so disgracefully abused is therefore to be withdrawn from its editor-in-chief, Dr. Karl Marx, and since he has not obtained permission to prolong his stay in these states, he is ordered to leave them within 24 hours. If he should not comply voluntarily with this demand, he is to be forcibly conveyed across the frontier."[12]
This expulsion order, combined with the growing threat of arrest or exile of its writers forced the NRZ to publish its last issue on 19 May 1849, known as the "red issue" as it was printed entirely in red ink. Marx closed with a sharp rebuttal against the suppression of the NRZ:
"Why these absurd phrases, these official lies? The trend and tone of the latest pieces of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung do not differ a whit from its first 'sample piece.' * * *
"And the 'social republic'? Have we proclaimed it only in the 'latest pieces' of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung? Did we not speak plainly and clearly enough for these dullards who failed to see the 'red' thread running through all our comments and reports on the European movement? * * *
"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable."[13]
The best-known content of the NRZ were a series of five articles on economics published by Marx in April 1849 — a series unfinished due to the suppression of the paper.[15] First gathered under a single set of covers under the title Wage-labor and Capital in 1880, this material was subsequently revised by Engels in 1891 and frequently reprinted thereafter as an accessible popularization of Marxist economics.[15]
The great bulk of the journalism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the NRZ became systematically accessible to an English readership only in 1977, with the publication of volumes 7, 8, and 9 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works. It was then that a total of 357 of the 422 articles contained therein were published in English for the first time.[16]
In 2005 an online newspaper calling itself Neue Rheinische Zeitung was established.[17]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Hal Draper, "Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie," in The Marx-Engels Glossary: Glossary to the Chronicle and Register, and Index to the Glossary: Volume 3 of the Marx-Engels Cyclopedia. New York: Schocken Books, 1986; pp. 150-151.
↑ Tatyana Vasilyeva, "Preface" to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works: Volume 7: Marx and Engels, 1848. New York: International Publishers, 1977; pg. xviii.
↑ Vasilyeva, "Preface" to Marx-Engels Collected Works: Vol. 7, pg. xix.
↑ David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction. New York: Harper and Row, 1971; pg. 42.
↑ Vasilyeva, "Preface" to Marx-Engels Collected Works: Vol. 7, pp. xxxii-xxxiii.
↑ Frederick Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)," Der Sozialdemokrat, No. 11 (March 13, 1884), reprinted in Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 26: Frederick Engels, 1882-89. New York: International Publishers, 1990; pp. 123-124.
↑ Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)," pg. 126.
1 2 Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)," pg. 124.
↑ Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)," pg. 127.
1 2 Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)," pg. 125.
↑ First published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 301, 19 May 1849. Reprinted as "The Summary Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,"Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 9. New York: International Publishers, 1977; pg. 451.
↑ Karl Marx, "The Summary Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,"Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 9. New York: International Publishers, 1977; pp. 451-453.
↑ Hal Draper, "Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politsch-ökonomische Revue," in The Marx-Engels Glossary: Glossary to the Chronicle and Register, and Index to the Glossary. New York: Schocken Books, 1986; pg. 151.
1 2 Hal Draper, The Marx-Engels Register: A Complete Bibliography of Marx and Engels' Individual Writings: Volume 2 of the Marx-Engels Cyclopedia. New York: Schocken Books, 1985; pg. 91.
↑ For individual counts of first English publications see: Vasilyeva, "Preface" to Marx-Engels Collected Works: Vol. 7, pg. xxxii. Vladimir Sazonov, "Preface" to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works: Volume 8: Marx and Engels, 1848-1849. New York: International Publishers, 1977; pg. xxix. Velta Pospelova, "Preface" to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works: Volume 9: Marx and Engels, 1849. New York: International Publishers, 1977; pg. xxxii.
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, without attempting to predict communism's potential future forms.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist, whose father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford and Barmen, Prussia.
The German revolutions of 1848–1849, the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution, were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, including the Austrian Empire. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. This process began in the mid 1840s.
The Rheinische Zeitung was a 19th-century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx. The paper was launched in January 1842 and terminated by Prussian state censorship in March 1843. The paper was eventually succeeded by a daily newspaper launched by Karl Marx on behalf of the Communist League in June 1848, called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany is a book by Friedrich Engels, with contributions by Karl Marx. Originally a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune published from 1851 to 1852 under Marx's byline, the material was first published in book form under the editorship of Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1896. It was not until 1913 that Engels' authorship was publicly known although some new editions continued to appear incorrectly listing Marx as the author as late as 1971.
Alexander Schimmelfennig was a Prussian soldier and political revolutionary. After the German revolutions of 1848–1849, he immigrated to the United States, where he served as a Union Army general in the American Civil War.
"The Civil War in France" was a pamphlet written by Karl Marx, as an official statement of the General Council of the International on the character and significance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune.
"Wage Labour and Capital" was an 1847 lecture by the critic of political economy and philosopher Karl Marx, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It is widely considered the precursor to Marx’s influential treatise Das Kapital. It is commonly paired with Marx's 1865 speech Value, Price and Profit. In 1883, a Russian translation was published as a book and included an excerpt from Capital volume 1 in the appendix, chapter 23 on Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. In 1885, a pamphlet version was first published as an English translation. An 1885 pamphlet based on the newspaper articles was published in Hottingen-Zürich without Marx's knowledge and with a brief introduction by Engels. The German edition was revised by Friedrich Engels in 1891 and published by Vorwärts after the Anti-Socialist Laws had lapsed the previous year. In 1893, an updated English translation from the 1891 German edition was published in London.
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, nicknamed "Lupus" was a German schoolmaster, political activist and publicist.
Ernst Andreas Dominicus Dronke was a German writer and journalist. Because of his philosophical beliefs, Dronke became a "true socialist". Later he became a member of the Communist League and became an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He participated in the German uprising of 1848-1849; after the suppression of this uprising, Dronke emigrated to England. Subsequently, he withdrew from politics.
August Hermann Ewerbeck, known by his middle name of Hermann, was a pioneer socialist political activist, writer, and translator. A physician by vocation and a German by birth, Ewerbeck is best remembered as an early political associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as a leader of the Parisian communities of the utopian socialist organization, League of the Just, and as the translator of the French writings of Étienne Cabet and Ludwig Feuerbach into German.
Konrad Bernhard Schramm was a German socialist revolutionary and as a result a member of the Communist League. Following the suppression of the uprisings of 1848 and 1849, Schramm refugeed to London, England in 1849. He became a manager of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-ökonomische Revue. Schramm was also a friend and an associate of both Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Ferdinand Wolff was a German journalist by profession and a proletarian revolutionary. He joined the Communist League and became an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849. He was a close friend and associate of both Karl Marx and of Frederick Engels and he sided with the Marx and Engels group during the 1850 split in the Communist League. Wolf died in 1895.
Johann Heinrich Georg Bürgers was a German journalist and an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung He became a member of the Communist League and, in 1850, he became a member of the League's Central Authority. For his participation in the 1848-1849 uprising, Bürgers became one of the defendants in the Cologne communist trial in Cologne, Germany in 1852.
Franz Sebastian Seiler was a German, an associate of Wilhelm Weitling, a Swiss reformer. He was a journalist on the Rheinische Zeitung and a member of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee in 1846. Seiler was "a stenographer to the French National Assembly in 1848 and 1849." He joined the Communist League and took part in the 1848-1849 revolution in Germany. Following the suppression of that revolution, Seiler escaped to London, England in the 1850s. From 1859-1860 he was the editor of the Deutsche Zeitung, and he started a weekly paper in 1860, The New Orleans Journal. Seiler later worked for Negro suffrage.
Joseph Arnold Weydemeyer was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States as well as a journalist, politician and Marxist revolutionary.
The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as a critique of the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.
The Communist League was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.
The Karl Marx Library is a topically-organized series of original translations and biographical commentaries edited by historian and Karl Marx scholar Saul K. Padover (1905-1981) and published by academic publisher McGraw-Hill Books. Originally projected as a 13 volume series at the time of its launch in 1971, ultimately only 7 volumes found print prior to Padover's death, supplemented by a biography and an unnumbered volume of selected correspondence.
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