KARL MARX

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191 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
for those without resources 'weapons and munitions are to be procured
at the expense of the communes and through voluntary subscription');
and, thirdly, any refusal to obey the National Assembly was to be answered
by the creation of Committees of Public Safety. 51 A 'People's Committee'
was set up in Cologne (Marx was not a member), but the feeble reactions
of the Assembly precluded any recourse to arms and tax refusal was the
only point in the programme that was implemented: from 19 November
until mid-December the Neue Rheinische Zeitung carried the slogan 'No
More Taxes' underneath its masthead and the paper devoted much space
to reporting the progress of the campaign. Marx had already given the
historical and economic background to this campaign a month earlier in
a popular application of his materialist conceptions:
After God had created the world and Kings by the grace of God, He
left smaller-scale industry to men. Weapons and Lieutenants' uniforms
are made in a profane manner and the profane way of production
cannot, like heavenly industry, create out of nothing. It needs raw
materials, tools and wages, weighty things that are categorised under
the modest term of 'production costs'. These production costs are offset
for the state through taxes and taxes are offset through the nation's
work. From the economic point of view, therefore, it remains an enigma
how any King can give any people anything. The people must first
make weapons and give them to the King in order to be able to receive
them from the King. The King can only give what has already been
given to him. This from the economic point of view. However, constitutional
Kings arise at precisely those moments when people are beginning
to understand the economic mystery. Thus the first beginnings of
the fall of Kings by the grace of God have always been questions of taxes.
So too in Prussia. 52
In spite of its vigorous campaigning, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was
getting more difficult to produce. At the end of October Marx wrote to
Engels: 'I am up to my ears in work, and find it impossible to do anything
detailed; moreover, the authorities do everything to steal my time.' 53
Engels had wandered through France during the month of October compiling
a delightful travel-diary in which his admiration for the way of life
of the French peasants was mingled with disgust at their political ignorance.
Once he arrived in Switzerland Marx kept him supplied with money
- a strange reversal of their later roles. The 'stupid reactionary shareholders'
had thought that economies would be possible now that the
editorial board had shrunk. But Marx replied 'it is up to me to pay as
high a fee as I wish and thus they will get no financial advantage'. 54 He
further admitted to his friend that: 'it was perhaps not wise to have
advanced such a large sum for the paper, as I have 3 or 4 press prose-