88 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYlaziness. I referred to him several times as a wanton and said that when
someone got married he ought to know what he was doing.. .. Marx
said nothing and took friendly leave of me. But the next day he wrote
to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future in front of him
and that he had been angry to hear me treat him as a wanton, adding
that I had a narrow-minded outlook lacking in humanity.... He could
no longer work with me as I was only interested in politics, whereas
he was a communist.^102Thereafter the break between the two men was complete. Marx publicised
these disagreements later that summer by means of a sharp attack on an
article Ruge had written concerning a weavers' revolt in Silesia. Several
thousand weavers had smashed the newly introduced machinery that had
driven down their wages, and had been repressed with great brutality.
Ruge's article criticising the paternalistic attitude of Frederick William IV
to social problems appeared in Vorwiirts, a new twice-weekly publication
that had become (largely owing to the flair of its editor, F. C. Bernays)
the main forum for radical discussion among German emigres. Bernays,
who had recently fled from Baden, was a journalist of some resource: in
order to make the conservative Press in Germany appear ridiculous he
had once wagered that in one week he could get them to print fifty items
of manifest stupidity; he won his bet and republished the items in book-
form. In his article Ruge rightly denied that the weavers' rebellion was
of any immediate importance: no social revolt, he said, could succeed in
Germany since political consciousness was extremely underdeveloped and
social reform sprang from political revolution.
Marx published his reply in Vorwiirts at the end of July 1844. Pie
attached a quite unrealistic weight to the weavers' actions and favourably
contrasted the scale of their revolt with workers' revolts in England. A
political consciousness was not sufficient to deal with social poverty:
England had a very developed political consciousness, yet it was the
country with the most extensive pauperism. The British Government had
an enormous amount of information at its disposal but, after two centuries
of legislation on pauperism, could find nothing better than the workhouse.
In France, too, the Convention and Napoleon had unsuccessfully tried to
suppress beggary. Thus the fault was not in this or that form of the state
- as Ruge believed - and the solution could not be found in this or that
political programme. The fault lay in the very nature of political power:
From the political point of view the state and any organisation of
society are not two distinct things. The state is the organisation
of society. In so far as the state admits the existence of social abuses, it
seeks their origin either in natural laws that no human power can
control or in the private sector which is independent of it or in the