4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 41 44social questions. Marx joined this group when he moved to Cologne
in October 1842.^178
The interest aroused in social questions by these seminars was
heightened, for Marx, by his study of socio-economic conditions in the
Rhineland. In his first important article as editor (the fourth in the planned
series of five dealing with the debates in the Rhineland Parliament), he
discussed the more stringent laws recently proposed in regard to thefts
of timber. The gathering of dead wood had traditionally been unrestricted,
but the scarcities caused by the agrarian crises of the 1820 s and the
growing needs of industry led to legal controls. The situation had become
unmanageable: five-sixths of all prosecutions in Prussia dealt with wood,
and the proportion was even higher in the Rhineland.^179 So it was now
being proposed that the keeper be the sole arbiter of an alleged offence
and that he alone assess the damages.
Marx discussed these questions from a legal and political standpoint,
without much social and historical detail, and claimed that the state should
defend customary law against the rapacity of the rich. For some things
could never become the private property of an individual without injustice;
moreover, 'if every violation of property, without distinction or more
precise determination, is theft, would not all private property be theft?
Through my private property, do not I deprive another person of this
property? Do I not thus violate his right to property?'^180 Marx here used
the language of Proudhon, but not his spirit, for he confined himself to
strict legal grounds. Men's social relationships would become 'fetishes' -
dead things that maintained a secret domination over living men; the
natural relationships of domination and possession were reversed, and
man was determined by timber, because timber was a commodity that
was merely an objectified expression of socio-political relationships. Marx
maintained that this dehumanisation was a direct consequence of the
advice given by the Preussische Staats-Zeitung to lawgivers: 'that, when
making a law about wood and timber, they are to think only of wood and
timber, and are not to try to solve each material problem in a political
way - that is, in connection with the whole complex of civic reasoning and
civic morality'.^181 Marx concluded his article by comparing an independent
observer's impression that wood was the Rhinelanders' fetish with the
belief of the Cuban savages that gold was the fetish of the Spaniards.
This article illustrated Marx's growing interest in socio-economic
realities. It stuck in his mind as a turning point in his intellectual evolu-
tion. As he himself wrote later: 'In the year 1842-3, as Editor of the
Rheinische Zeitung, I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of
having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests. The
proceedings of the Rhineland Parliament on thefts of wood, and so