Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue 1850

Editorial Comment on the Article “Tailoring in London or the Struggle between Big and Small Capital” by J. G. Eccarius

Source: MECW Volume 10, p. 485;
Written: October 1850;
First published: Reviews from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-okonomische Revue No. 5-6. Marked "editorial Comment"

The author of this article is himself a worker in one of London's tailoring shops. We ask the German bourgeoisie how many authors it numbers capable of grasping the real movement in a similar manner?

Before the proletariat fights out its victories on the barricades and in the battle lines it gives notice of its impending rule with a series of intellectual victories.

The reader will note how here, instead of the sentimental, moral and psychological criticism employed against existing conditions by Weitling and other workers who engage in authorship, a purely materialist understanding and a freer one, unspoilt by sentimental whims, confronts bourgeois society and its movement. Whereas craftsmen resist the collapse of their semi-medieval position and would like to unite as craftsmen, particularly in Germany and to a great extent also in France, the subjection of craft labour to large-scale industry is comprehended here as a step forward and celebrated, while at the same time, in the results and productions of large-scale industry, the real preconditions of the proletarian revolution, generated by history itself and daily generating themselves anew, are recognised and revealed.