Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

(^216) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
articles for 'he can handle language like no one else on earth'.^28 The issue
intended for January with a printing of 2500 eventually appeared early in
March and the three ensuing numbers followed fairly quickly until mid-
May. However, relations with Schuberth swiftly deteriorated: he was slow
in sending information about the sale of the journal; he altered the text
without consultation; and did not distribute it according to instructions.
The revenue from sales was very small and in May Jenny Marx wrote to
Weydemeyer saying bitterly that it was impossible to tell which was the
worst, 'the delays of the publisher or those of the managers and friends
in Cologne or the whole general attitude of the democrats'.^29 The charges
against Schuberth were certainly justified, but the tone of the Revue was
too intellectual to have any wide impact. One of the leading members of
the Cologne group, Roland Daniels, wrote to Marx: 'Only the more
intelligent from this party and the few middle-class people who have
some knowledge of history will be interested in the revolution by the
publication of your monthly.'
During the summer the Revue was in abeyance and the final number
(a double issue) appeared in November. Marx considered Schuberth to
have been so negligent that he (unsuccessfully) took steps to prosecute
him. He also had plans to continue the Revue as a quarterly in Cologne
or, alternatively, to publish it in Switzerland. These plans came to nothing.
It is difficult to see how the Revue - or indeed the Communist League
to which it was intended to give an intellectual orientation - could have
been successful in the circumstances: both depended on the enthusiasm
generated by the revolutions of 1848-4 9 and the expectation of the
imminence of a similar wave of unrest. These hopes were common to all
the refugees including Marx who, before he left Paris, had told Lassalle
that he expected a fresh revolutionary outbreak there early in the follow-
ing year. In fact Marx's contributions to the Revue (whose declared aim
was 'to provide a complete and scientific treatment of the economic
relationships that form the basis of the whole political movement'^50 )
document his progressive realisation that the economic prerequisites for
his political aims were just not there.
In the original publicity for the Revue Marx had stated that: '... a
time of apparent truce like the present must be used to shed light on the
period of revolution that we have lived through.'^31 This was the intention
of one of Marx's main contributions to the Revue, a series of articles
entitled '184 8 to 1849'. These articles were republished later by Engels
under the title The Class Struggles in France and described, with justifi-
cation, as 'Marx's first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history
by means of his materialistic conception'.^52
The Class Struggles in France was a brilliant and swift moving account