Marx & Germany

[Caulfield]

What were Marx's views on Germany in the 19th century?
I have to do this paper for school, but there's no information to be found about this subject on the internet. Could someone help?


Caulfield

[Tower of Bebel]

At first Marx fought for a unified all-German, democratic republic (Prussia, "Germany" and Austria all together). He did so by writing down a program for a German communist party. The first demand was: "The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm)". He did not want a German state under control of either Prussia or Austria because that would always mean that one part of Germany (either Austria or Prussia) would be excluded. And because of the autocratic, undemocratic Junker-regime of both Austria and Prussia.
By 1848 it was clear that the German bourgeoisie was not able to succeed in its bourgeois tasks (a unified all-German republic), and therefor he urged the peasantry and the early German proletariat to take over the role of the bourgeoisie and make the struggle for a the republic "permanent" (uninterrupted) (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm).

The demands of petty-bourgeois democracy summarized here are not expressed by all sections of it at once, and in their totality they are the explicit goal of only a very few of its followers. The further particular individuals or fractions of the petty bourgeoisie advance, the more of these demands they will explicitly adopt, and the few who recognize their own programme in what has been mentioned above might well believe they have put forward the maximum that can be demanded from the revolution. But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.
Eventually it did not happen like that. The cowardly (petty) bourgeoisie gave way to repression of the revolution by the Prussian king.

By 1870 it was Prussia which had unified Germany, though it left Austria out of it (just like Marx had predicted). Marx critically supported the unification, because it helped further the development of the proletariat by partially ending feudal reign over large parts of Germany. Yet Marx was still critical towards Prussia and still urged for the democratic republic in which all power would lie with the proletariat. The war that eventually unified Germany was the war against France, which marx opposed and which his colleagues in Germany also opposed (Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel). It was this war that eventually gave rise to the revolutionary proletariat of the Paris commune, but it is the combined efforts of Prussia and france that eventually slaughtered this revolution.

In 1875 we see the unification of both the Lasallian socialists in the South (under direction of Ferdinand Lasalle) and the "Eisenachers" in the north (under direction of Liebknecht, Bebel, Marx and Engels). Marx opposed the unprincipled unification of both socialist parties, yet he supported the attempt to unify both socialist parties because a unified Germany only needs one party of the working class. He criticized the Gotha program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm) for not addressing socialism in the right way, for not being internationalist enough and for al lot of other reasons (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm):

Our party has absolutely nothing to learn from the Lassalleans in the theoretical sphere, i.e. the crux of the matter where the programme is concerned, but the Lassalleans doubtless have something to learn from the party; the first prerequisite for union was that they cease to be sectarians, Lassalleans, i.e. that, first and foremost, they should, if not wholly relinquish the universal panacea of state aid, at least admit it to be a secondary provisional measure alongside and amongst many others recognised as possible. The draft programme shows that our people, while infinitely superior to the Lassallean leaders in matters of theory, are far from being a match for them where political guile is concerned; once again the "honest men" [4] have been cruelly done in the eye by the dishonest..