The idea of ​​a Rhenish capitalism is common.

It is often used to explain that after 1949 the German national state, which had been halved and shrunk from the central power of Europe to an outpost of the western world, achieved an amazingly rapid economic recovery.

Geographical conditions and religious-historical behavioral dispositions thus worked together to promote a variant of the individualistic attitude towards gainful employment that was moderated in a contemporary way by routines of cooperation.

The complementary idea that Marxism is a Rhenish socialism was put into the world by the Scottish publicist Tom Nairn.

Better to say, to distinguish his style of publication from manifestation as the form of expression of conventional Marxism: he dropped this idea, threw it to his readers, on occasion,

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

  • Follow I follow

In 2006, Nairn reviewed the Marx biography of French intellectual and top civil servant Jacques Attali in the "London Review of Books" with the typically French title "Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde", which goes as high and as far as possible.

With a love of polemical contrast, the reviewer portrayed the local spirit of the small Rhenish world into which Marx and Engels grew up as a mixture of dynamic influences.

"After the French Revolution, this borderland provided the conditions for a startling emancipation: a burst of democratic energies and visionary capacities matched by a simultaneous explosion of applied science." Nairn mentioned the journalistic activities of Marx and Mainz as the cradle of book printing,

Dialectical receipt for Marx and Engels

As participating observers, Marx and Engels benefited from this proximity to social change, they let themselves be carried away by the railway, so to speak.

According to Nairn, although Prussia appropriated the Rhineland in 1815, civil society in the former French territories retained a binational character.

The scientific prophets from Wuppertal and Trier were in a certain sense too far ahead of their time, and Nairn presented them with the dialectical acknowledgment in universal historical retrospect: "Marxism was a detour in world history that originated in the Rhineland, which during a long drawn-out epoch of war, genocide and democratic defeats has been confused with the mainstream.”

Together with Perry Anderson, Benedict Anderson's brother, Nairn was one of the influential authors of the "New Left Review", founded in 1960.

The main objection that Nairn raised against the founders of Marxism concerned nationalism, which Marx and Engels, perhaps too impressed by the resumption of Cologne Cathedral, wanted to see only as a bourgeois transitional stage on the journey to socialism.

In the Communist Manifesto they wrote: “The workers have no fatherland.

You can't take from them what they don't have.” Looking at his native Scotland and the rest of the British Isles united under the British Crown, Nairn reversed this analysis: workers' class consciousness remains underdeveloped as long as they are deprived of their homeland.