KARL MARX

COLOGNE 181
Firstly, Prussia, the key to Germany, still had a social structure much more
akin to that of Eastern Europe and Russia than to the states of Western
Europe. 28 The land-owning aristocracy - the Junkers - still held the decisive
power based on largely unemancipated serfs. The second reason lay in
the nature of the opposition to the Government: once an all-German
Assembly had been promised (it did not meet until mid-May), the opposition
spent its time preparing for the elections, sending in petitions and
indulging its hopes. This opposition was itself extremely diverse, and the
various liberals, radicals and socialists of which it was composed could have
very little common programme. Nor could working-class organisations
make much impact: although now legalised and spreading very fast, they
were mainly interested in improving wages and working conditions.
Faced with this situation the programme of Neue Rheinische Zeitung
contained, as Engels said later, two main points: 'a single, indivisible,
democratic German Republic, and war with Russia which would bring
the restoration of Poland'. 29 In Prussia the events of March had forced
Frederick William to form a ministry headed by Rudolf Camphausen, a
prominent liberal businessman from the Rhineland. A new Prussian
Assembly was elected to work out a constitution. This Assembly was far
from radical: it summoned the King's brother-in-law, the Prince of Prussia,
back from England where he had fled in March; and agreed that its
task was to elaborate a constitution - the panacea of those times - 'in
agreement with the King'. There was an abortive rising in Berlin in mid-
June and Camphausen was replaced by the slightly less liberal Hansemann
who stayed in office until September. It was to sarcastic attacks on the
vacillations and essential impotence of the Camphausen ministry that
Marx devoted most of the few articles that he wrote on German politics
in the first few months of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's existence.
According to Marx, 'the provisional political circumstances that follow
a revolution always require a dictatorship and an energetic one at that.
From the beginning we reproached Camphausen with not acting dictatorially,
with not immediately breaking and abolishing the remains of the
old institutions." 0 One particular field in which Marx felt compelled to
attack the Prussian Assembly was their decision that peasants could buy
their freedom, but at a prohibitively high price. This was a serious
mistake:
The French bourgeoisie of 1789 did not for a moment forsake its allies,
the peasants. It knew that the basis of its rule was the destruction of
rural feudalism, and the creation of a free, landowning peasant class.
The German bourgeoisie of 1848 without any hesitation betrays its
peasants who are its most natural allies, flesh of its flesh, without whom
it is powerless against the nobility. 31