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56
KARL MARX: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

monthly and then into a weekly on a large scale. And with a fresh outbreak of the revolution, which he anticipated would be the logical product of the reaction ruling with an iron hand in Germany, the review was to be turned into a powerful daily newspaper. As stated in the foregoing, however, Marx's plans were not to materialize. The tidal wave of the revolution, which had carried the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung," was gradually breaking upon the rocks of a luke-warm bourgeois liberalism. The fears of the capitalist class for the thorough measures and class-aspirations of the proletariat were quickly turning their course into the less dangerous avenue of a parliamentary struggle against feudal prerogatives, a struggle in which the workers as a class were destined to play a historical role, but which forever separated them from the contaminating influence of bourgeois liberalism. But four numbers of the "Neue Rheinische Revue" were published and those under the most ungratifying pecuniary difficulties. Three copies appeared somewhat regularly up to April, 1850, and then after a lapse of four months, the review with a double-number had to definitely suspend publication.

In this periodical Marx and Engels labored to prepare the ground for the anticipated approaching revolution. By subjecting the struggles of the preceding years, struggles in which they had so actively participated, to a critical examination, they sought to accomplish this task. Truly in accord with their Historical Materialistic Philosophy, they attempted to find the connecting causes of these historical and social manifestations and upheavals in the existing class antagonisms, thereby stripping these events of their ideological cloak and exposing the class war in all its nakedness. Aside from distinctly German and in the broader aspect local subjects, Engels wrote a treatise on the Peasant War, and Marx contributed his masterly work, so well known to all Marxian students, "The Class-Struggles in France 1848-1850." This study found its continuation in the profound and brilliant essay entitled "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,"