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The Cologne Communist Trial
English, German (translation)
298 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1853
20 people want to read
About the author
Karl Marx
3,296 books6,639 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 1, 2025
Some of this book is extremely important; ‘Heroes of the Exile’ is not, but it gives a sarcastic, humorous view of the pretensions of some of the exiles of the German 1848 Revolution. Personally, I didn’t finish it, being slightly familiar with only a few of the people discussed.
The most important thing in the book is Engels’ “On the History of the Communist league,” updated for 1885 publication. I enjoyed Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Karl Marx,’ which he says is based on letters. But I think Marx and Engels are shown in the movie as rather arrogant well-educated young men who used their knowledge and a bit of ruthlessness to take over a workers’ party. The view Engels presents is dramatically different. Engels got to know the League of the Just, as the pre-Marxist communist group was called while researching The Condition of the Working Class in England. He and then Marx early on were asked to join, but although they had a keen interest in the group and its militant members, they refused to join so long as the group was based on unscientific ideas. Once their ideas caught on, they joined and were asked to draft what became ‘The Communist Manifesto in 1847. The next year, revolution broke out in France, Germany (including Austria), Italy, and elsewhere. The thrust of the revolution was bourgeois-democratic, and the Communists formed the extreme far left of the democratic movement. For why the German Revolution failed (mostly the cowardice of the liberal bourgeoisie and its fear of the working class) see Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany.
As is explained in the Communist Manifesto by people who read it, avoiding the endless anti-communist introductions (or even worse, introductions by academics who claim that Marx gave up his revolutionary ideas and became simply an important sociologist), the situation at the time was that the bourgeoisie still had a progressive role to play. While they didn’t live up to this in Germany, they did a lot better in the US, in the Second American Revolution, during which Marx and Engels were active partisans of the Union Army (see The Civil War in the United States. But the bourgeoisie failed to carry through Radical Reconstruction (see Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction.
I suggest the Pathfinder Press edition of the Communist Manifesto that has an introduction by another famous revolutionary—Leon Trotsky, from 1938.
‘The Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial’ was written in 1852, in defense of members of the Communist League who had a propaganda group that due to Prussian law had to function underground. They were charged with (what else?) conspiring to overthrow the government. Marx writes in an 1875 postscript: “The work saw the light of day only a few weeks after the end of the trial [actually some of it appeared in newspapers while the trial was going on]. At that time the most pressing need was to make the facts known quickly and so errors of detail were unavoidable.” The errors were not significant, and it's a humorous primer on how the political police operate.
Marx felt bad that he had gone so hard on the Willich-Schapper group that the Communist League had expelled because of their continuous scheming plots in a period when revolution was not on the agenda. But the prosecution was continuously trying to tie them together, which made things difficult.
As Marx points out, “[August] Willich has shown in the American Civil War that he is something more than a visionary” becoming a Union Army brigadier general. And Karl Schapper redeemed himself as a “lifelong champion of the of the workers movement.”
Some of the people put on trial became quite important as well. Dr. Abraham Jacobi (in the book spelled Jacoby) after being acquitted took his communist views to the United States but is better known as the founder of American pediatrics.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, convicted in a farce of a trial became a prominent leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and his son Karl, after the SPD betrayed the working class by supporting Germany in World War I, was a major founder of the new Communist Party of Germany, and one of its first martyrs.
If ‘Heroes of the Exile’ is non-essential reading, the appendices are quite important--mostly writings and speeches by Marx. Unfortunately, they were printed in a tiny font size.
For the German Marxists’ role in US politics, see Revolutionary Continuity: the Early Years, 1848-1917 For understanding the role of the political police in the United States I recommend 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US: Washington's Political Police and the American Working Class.. And for how communists defend their views in bourgeois courts, see Socialism on Trial: Testimony at Minneapolis Sedition Trial.
The most important thing in the book is Engels’ “On the History of the Communist league,” updated for 1885 publication. I enjoyed Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Karl Marx,’ which he says is based on letters. But I think Marx and Engels are shown in the movie as rather arrogant well-educated young men who used their knowledge and a bit of ruthlessness to take over a workers’ party. The view Engels presents is dramatically different. Engels got to know the League of the Just, as the pre-Marxist communist group was called while researching The Condition of the Working Class in England. He and then Marx early on were asked to join, but although they had a keen interest in the group and its militant members, they refused to join so long as the group was based on unscientific ideas. Once their ideas caught on, they joined and were asked to draft what became ‘The Communist Manifesto in 1847. The next year, revolution broke out in France, Germany (including Austria), Italy, and elsewhere. The thrust of the revolution was bourgeois-democratic, and the Communists formed the extreme far left of the democratic movement. For why the German Revolution failed (mostly the cowardice of the liberal bourgeoisie and its fear of the working class) see Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany.
As is explained in the Communist Manifesto by people who read it, avoiding the endless anti-communist introductions (or even worse, introductions by academics who claim that Marx gave up his revolutionary ideas and became simply an important sociologist), the situation at the time was that the bourgeoisie still had a progressive role to play. While they didn’t live up to this in Germany, they did a lot better in the US, in the Second American Revolution, during which Marx and Engels were active partisans of the Union Army (see The Civil War in the United States. But the bourgeoisie failed to carry through Radical Reconstruction (see Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction.
I suggest the Pathfinder Press edition of the Communist Manifesto that has an introduction by another famous revolutionary—Leon Trotsky, from 1938.
‘The Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial’ was written in 1852, in defense of members of the Communist League who had a propaganda group that due to Prussian law had to function underground. They were charged with (what else?) conspiring to overthrow the government. Marx writes in an 1875 postscript: “The work saw the light of day only a few weeks after the end of the trial [actually some of it appeared in newspapers while the trial was going on]. At that time the most pressing need was to make the facts known quickly and so errors of detail were unavoidable.” The errors were not significant, and it's a humorous primer on how the political police operate.
Marx felt bad that he had gone so hard on the Willich-Schapper group that the Communist League had expelled because of their continuous scheming plots in a period when revolution was not on the agenda. But the prosecution was continuously trying to tie them together, which made things difficult.
As Marx points out, “[August] Willich has shown in the American Civil War that he is something more than a visionary” becoming a Union Army brigadier general. And Karl Schapper redeemed himself as a “lifelong champion of the of the workers movement.”
Some of the people put on trial became quite important as well. Dr. Abraham Jacobi (in the book spelled Jacoby) after being acquitted took his communist views to the United States but is better known as the founder of American pediatrics.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, convicted in a farce of a trial became a prominent leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and his son Karl, after the SPD betrayed the working class by supporting Germany in World War I, was a major founder of the new Communist Party of Germany, and one of its first martyrs.
If ‘Heroes of the Exile’ is non-essential reading, the appendices are quite important--mostly writings and speeches by Marx. Unfortunately, they were printed in a tiny font size.
For the German Marxists’ role in US politics, see Revolutionary Continuity: the Early Years, 1848-1917 For understanding the role of the political police in the United States I recommend 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US: Washington's Political Police and the American Working Class.. And for how communists defend their views in bourgeois courts, see Socialism on Trial: Testimony at Minneapolis Sedition Trial.
January 7, 2015
Karl Marx views on the Communist Trials in Collogne. Not really that interesting for people interested in legal matters. It might be of interest from a legal historical sense.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews