ABSTRACT
In the Prussia of the 1840s, an academic career was no real option for the young Marx. So he started working as a journalist. As early as 1842, he wrote his first articles on economic matters – like the situation of the wine-growers of the Mosel region and the debates on one of the last remnants of the commons Germany, the right to gather wood in the forests. That was the beginning of his life-long affair with political economy. During the 1840s and in particular during the revolution of 1848-9 he became famous as the leading journalist and newspaper editor of the democratic left in Germany, writing and editing hundreds of articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [New Rhine Gazette]. Marx’s first lectures on political economy were published in this newspaper in April 1849. In 1850, just arriving as political refugees in London, Marx and Engels immediately started the project of a new journal. Using the title Neue Rheinische Zeitung again, they announced the new journal as a political economic review. In this journal, they declared, they would be able to discuss extensively, following a new scientific approach, the economic relations that serve as the basis for the whole political movement. Three longer political economic reviews were actually published in this journal, the first covering the period January-February 1850, the second the period March-April 1850, the last and longest review covering the period of May-October 1850. In those three reviews, Marx and Engels described the course of events of the crisis of 1847-8 – at large and in three countries – Britain, France and Prussia – in particular. The specific and different course of the crisis in those countries provided the explanation why Britain remained relatively unaffected by the wave of political revolts and revolutions on the continent and returned to a new prosperity while the other European countries still suffered from the crisis. The crisis had initiated a further expansion and restructuring of the world market which would change the course of the crisis cycles in the future. So, the second and the third review ended with a prognosis: the next crisis would come soon and it would be much worse than the preceding one. In its wake, one should expect another revolution. The journal soon went bankrupt, but Marx and Engels continued to support the radical Chartist
press in England. Quite a lot of the economic articles in the Notes to the People and the People’s Paper had been written with Marx’s direct collaboration.
