A German Revolution?
Even before the defeats of the revolutions of 1848, they recognized that the mutually advantageous arrangements between the middle class and an old regime which it sought to reform to its specifications, would make a bourgeois revolution in Germany dependent upon wider political upheavals across Europe- more specifically another revolutionary breakthrough in France bringing a European and perhaps world war in tow. This would be a recapitulation of the sequence that unfolded from 1789 to 1814, but on a far more developed world market basis, one which would put a nascent international proletariat into contention.
The backwardness of the continent in comparison to England led liberal and conservative parties to support economic demands that were the opposite of the ones upheld by their counterparts across the channel. In Prussia as well as in France, the liberal opposition was protectionist, while in this period, the conservative establishment was pro-free trade. It might seem to follow then that communists should support the German liberal demand for protection against the laissez-faire old regime, in order to build up German industry, forming a German proletariat.
“The industrial bourgeoisie can rule only where modern industry shapes all property relations to suit itself, and industry can win this power only where it has conquered the world market, for national bounds are inadequate for its development. But French industry, to a great extent, maintains its command even of the national market only through a more or less modified system of prohibitive duties.”
The same was true of Germany: “the lack of capital is the basis of the German status quo”. The workers movement might benefit then from tariffs accelerate the domestic accumulation of the capital needed to launch industrial development. Engels briefly accepted this deduction, Marx did not. As he put it in very impassioned Young Hegelian terms in an unpublished diatribe against Friedrich List from 1845.
“We shall be able to put an end to England’s domination in the sphere of competition only if we overcome competition within our borders. England has power over us because we have made industry into a power over us.”
While this language of national destiny would soon be eclipsed by the maxims of international proletarian revolution, an abolitionist passion for the universal ruled out alliances with any but world historical interests and movements- nations whose interests did not coincide with the universal interest of the times would simply be swept off the stage of history.
This viewpoint diminished the significance of the national economic integration, which was laying the groundwork for the onset of full-blown capitalist development on the continent. The mid-19th century onset of world market fueled economic development within the north German Zollverein was made possible in part by Prussian state’s promotion of an expanding railway network, which by increasing the tax burden on its propertied classes, sharpened the conflict between Crown and the semi-parliamentary liberal opposition. Marx saw railway way construction as a way for the Prussian government to circumvent parliamentary accountability of the budget, and as diversion of wealth from private enterprise, ‘crowding out’ the autonomous formation of national capital. No
quarter was to be given to the modest developmental and welfare initiatives of the Royal Prussian police state, and against it Marx resolutely supported the opposition of liberal notables selected on the basis of a property franchise to any taxation imposed on them without their consent. Except for a few stray passages, Marx never conceptualized modern forms of tax characteristic of the new relationship of state to civil society. The upshot of what he did have to say was that increased taxes on the bourgeoisie would be of no benefit to workers.
“Competition necessarily reduces the average wage to the minimum, that is to say, to a wage which permits the workers penuriously to eke out their lives and the lives of their race. Taxes form a part of this minimum, for the political calling of the workers consists precisely in paying taxes. If all taxes that bear on the working class were abolished root and branch, the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by the whole amount of taxes which today goes into them. Either the employers’ profit would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity, or else no more than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have taken place. Instead of the present system, whereby the capitalist also advances, as part of the wage, the taxes which the worker has to pay, he [the capitalist] would no longer pay them in this roundabout way, but directly to the state.”
Marx’s Ricardian conception of the real wage as permanently frozen at a bare subsistence level ruled out anything but defensive struggles to keep compensation from sinking below this minimum. Even if the powers that be were so inclined, they could do nothing to mitigate against this iron law, except to provide some measure of poor relief. In Marx’s view, taxation and public debt were not vehicles of redistribution but props of a parasitic old regime bureaucracy increasingly in hock to a pack of financial swindlers.
“In a country like France, where the volume of national production stands at a disproportionately lower level than the amount of the national debt, where government bonds form the most important
This purely political-tactical approach to taxation is evident in his Address to the Communist League: “If the democrats propose proportional taxation, the workers must demand progressive taxation; if the democrats themselves put forward a moderately progressive taxation, the workers must insist on a taxation with rates that rise so steeply that big capital will be ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of state debts, the workers must demand state bankruptcy.” mecw
subject of speculation and the Bourse the chief market for the investment of capital that wants to turn itself to account in an unproductive way — in such a country a countless number of people from all bourgeois or semi-bourgeois classes must have an interest in the state debt, in the Bourse gamblings, in finance.”
Marx assumed that the struggle of Europe’s liberal parliaments for supremacy over the executive was a matter of economic life and death for its national bourgeoisies. Without political power they would be unable to form and protect a truly national home market and would eventually be wiped out by English competition. But even if they succeeded in transforming themselves into the political ruling class, did this not simply open another path to the grave, hastening a revolutionary process that would eventually consume them? Marx did not explain why the European bourgeoisie would opt for this second, more heroic path of self-destruction. In any event, the passage from monarchy to republic was expected to open a naked class war heralding the abolition of bourgeois society, wage slavery, and all the rest.
“The first manifestation of a truly active communist party is contained within the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is eliminated.”
Compared to their ancient predecessors, early modern political philosophers had been relatively indifferent to the problem of the best form of state; whatever secured the underlying natural order of property and persons sufficed. The early Marx wrote in a bourgeois revolutionary context in which the problem of the form of state- the antithesis of monarchy and republic- had returned with a vengeance. Hegel had portrayed constitutional monarchy as the best form of the modern state in its ability to contain the contradictions of civil society, while Marx’s inversion of the Hegelian concept of the state expressed a diametrically opposed conception of the best.
“The best form of state is not in which social antagonisms are blurred or forcibly checked. It is rather that in which they can freely come into conflict and thus be solved.”
From 1843, the dialectic of state and civil society passed through a sequence of transformations in the constitutional division of powers, unfolding as a struggle between executive and legislature. The coming victory of the latter over the former would turn the state into an arena of the class war- with legislation as a weapon aimed at the class enemy. But this moment of liberal ascendancy in parliaments unchecked by executive prerogative, would be brief. Either it would the framework an advance towards the emancipation of the proletariat, or society would be subjected to a new form of executive domination, inaugurating an era of political servility, socio-economic stagnation, and cultural decline. Although modern parliaments had only just begun to take root on the continent some twenty years before, Marx regarded them as inherently transitional forms, destined to be replaced by a new order of collective self-determination. By this reckoning, the modern bourgeoisie had a pre-history which went back to the Mercantilist age and was now attaining its peak form in constitutional conflict with the old regime. This precarious balance of old and new was destined to be torn asunder by the proletarianizing consequences of Europe’s integration into the world market. The 1850s would likely witness the beginning of the end of bourgeois society.
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