Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

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inadequacy of the administration that depends on the state. Thus,

Britain sees misery as founded in the natural law according to which

population must always outstrip the means of subsistence; on the other

hand, it explains pauperism by the cussedness of the poor; whereas the

King of Prussia explains it by the un-Christian spirit of the rich, and

the Convention by the counter-revolutionary and suspicious attitude

of the property-owners. Therefore, Britain punishes the poor, the

King of Prussia exhorts the rich and the Convention beheads the prop-

erty owners.^10 '

Thus if the state wanted to transcend the impotence of its administration
it would have to abolish itself, for the more powerful the state and the
more developed the political consciousness of a nation, the less it was
disposed to seek the cause of social ills in the state itself. Marx once again
substantiated his point by reference to the French Revolution, whose
heroes 'far from seeing the source of social defects in the state, see in
social defects the source of political misfortunes'.^104
Thus for Marx it was not 'political consciousness' that was important.
The Silesian revolt was even more important than revolts in England and
France because it showed a more developed class-consciousness. After
favourably comparing Weitling's works with those of Proudhon and the
German bourgeoisie, Marx repeated his prediction made in the Deutsch-
Franzosische Jahrbiicher of the role of the proletariat and the chances of a
radical revolution:

The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat,

as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician.

It must be admitted that Germany has a vocation for social revolution

that is all the more classic in that it is incapable of political revolution. It

is only in socialism that a philosophical people can find a corresponding

activity, and thus only in the proletariat that it finds the active element

of its ffeedom.^10 S

Marx finished his article with a passage that gave a concise summary
of his studies of social change:

A social revolution, even though it be limited to a single industrial

district, affects the totality, because it is a human protest against a

dehumanized life, because it starts from the standpoint of the single,

real individual, because the collectivity against whose separation from

himself the individual reacts is the true collectivity of man, the human

essence. The political soul of revolution consists on the contrary in a

tendency of the classes without political influence to end their isolation

from the top positions in the state. Their standpoint is that of the state

• an abstract whole, that only exists through a separation from real life.
  Thus a revolution with a political soul also organizes, in conformity