Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/57

Rh tactics. In this keen analysis of capitalist production, the class distinctions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were heavily underscored, and thereby removed out of the shadow into which the great historical epoch, the revolution, had for the moment placed them.

Exiled from his fatherland, Marx returned to Paris, where turbulent events seemed to be in the making. Here the capitalist class, living in constant fear of the proletariat, was preparing its coup d'état. Of course, to the intriguing and conspiring government of Louis Napoleon this clear-headed, discerning and uncompromising revolutionist was a most unwelcome visitor. Therefore, as early as July, Marx was exiled, this time by a bourgeois republic, to take up residence in the Department Morbihan, which is situated somewhere in an obscure corner of the Bretagne. Here Marx would have been condemned to political as well as scholarly inactivity—a thing which Louis Napoleon sought to accomplish by this move. Instead Marx, stripped of all means of subsistence and with no future prospects anywhere in sight, decided to go to London. He was certain that the revolution was only temporarily suppressed, that it was bound to rise again; and he, a stranded outcast with a family dependent upon him, started to work with renewed vigor to make the coming revolution a class-conscious proletarian revolution, as far as the material conditions of that period permitted and made such a distinct class movement possible. His first task was the reorganization of the Communist League whose leading men were now practically all in London, but whose activity was henceforth mainly confined to Germany. In the "Neue Rheinische Revue" ("New Rhenish Review"), he sought to provide a fighting organ for the revolutionary forces in Germany. The "Neue Rheinische Revue" was published in Hamburg, and, of course, in close collaboration with Frederick Engels and other friends. Marx desired this periodical to be a continuation of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung," and quite positively hoped to turn this unpretentious monthly into a semi-