From Marx in Köln by U.S./Silicon Valley-Imperialism to the World Marxist Review

Abstract

I greet you from Cologne in Germany, Europe. It is the fourth largest city in Germany, the oldest, founded two thousand years ago by the Roman Empire. The University of this leading Catholic archbishopric led the way in the feudal Middle Ages with the Papal Inquisition in Rome to theologically justify the torture and public burning of heretics and “witches”. But Cologne became the most important German city for the development of Marxism in the 19th century. This was because the Cologne region was liberated from feudalism by Napoleon in 1794 as a result of the French Revolution. Napoleon closed the university and promoted bourgeois-capitalist industry and trade. When resistance to the new Prussian monarchy came to a head in 1842, a certain Karl Marx went to Cologne: the bourgeois forces were strongest here. Marx and Engels ran a joint-stock company with Cologne bankers and industrialists: they financed the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe. It was Marx’s first journalistic-political project. He was not yet a Marxist. He had to deal with economics for the first time; he still spoke vaguely of “material interests”. The monarchy banned the newspaper. Marx and Engels fled into exile, to Paris.