A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals (Counterfire) by Faulkner Neil

Author:Faulkner, Neil [Faulkner, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849648653
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2013-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

The Unification of Germany

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany was still divided into 39 separate states. Political unification to create a single national market was the central question on which the future of German capitalism turned.

The attempt to resolve ‘the national question’ by revolution from below had failed in 1848. The Frankfurt Parliament had attempted to unify Germany and impose a liberal constitution by making speeches and passing resolutions. It had been dissolved by the armies of the German states in the counterrevolution of 1849.

The dominant German state was Prussia and the dominant class in Prussia was the Junker landowning aristocracy. By origin a class of Teutonic crusader knights who had settled on conquered Slav land in the eastern part of the North German Plain, the Junkers’ social evolution had been shaped by three factors. First, because the land they farmed was of marginal fertility, the returns on their estates were meagre and the Junkers were, as aristocrats go, relatively poor. Marx derided them as ‘cabbage-Junkers’.

Second, their territory was vulnerable to attack. Germany is in the centre of Europe and lacks natural frontiers, especially in the east, where the North German Plain merges into the great open spaces of Poland and European Russia.

Third, Germany as a whole was politically divided – the 39 states of the nineteenth century had numbered no less than 300 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – making Germany one of the three main cockpits of European warfare throughout this period (the other two being Belgium and northern Italy).

Prussia was a product of these factors. During the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great (1740–86) had turned Prussia into a military barracks: the Sparta of Europe. Five-sixths of state spending was devoted to war. Mass conscription raised an army of 150,000. And the Junkers became an elite officer caste, defined by landownership and state service, deeply loyal to the absolute monarchy which guaranteed their property, privilege, and power. The Prussian Junkers were the black heart of the German counter-revolution which had crushed the ‘Forty-Eighters’.

But the world was changing in ways that the Junkers could not control. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the economic, social, and military geography of Europe. The first railways were constructed in the mid-1830s, and by 1850 some 23,500 km of track had been laid. The military significance of the new technology was obvious: railways could move troops from one theatre of war to another in a fraction of the time taken to march. Junkers did not need parliaments, but they did need railways.

In 1815, as part of the reordering of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, Prussia had been granted the Rhineland – the region that was fast becoming Germany’s industrial powerhouse. Though the Rhineland revolutionaries – including Marx and Engels – had been defeated in 1849, the Junker state’s military power was increasingly dependent on the region’s mines, steelworks, and engineering plants.

One lesson of 1848 was that the new social classes of the industrial era – the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and

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