Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood

One of Marx’s several articles in response to the debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung, Nos. 298, 300, 303, 305 and 307, October 25, 27 and 30, November 1 and 3, 1842, signed “by a Rhinelander”.

In the 1840s, Prussia was in the stage of primitive accumulation of capital, one of the main forms of which was the large-scale plundering by the landlord class of forests, meadows and land formerly in the public use of the peasants. Small farmers, paid day-laborers and servants had to cut down trees everywhere to oppose the plundering, and because of their poverty and bankruptcy, which was their “customary right”. The Prussian government, however, wanted to enact a new law and to take severe measures to punish this act, which was regarded as “theft” by the forest owners. Between June 15 and 17, 1841, the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly debated the draft of the Law on Thefts of Wood, and the representatives of the landlord class and the rising bourgeoisie not only demanded heavy penalties for the illicit felling of forests. They even demanded the punishment of the gathering of dry wood as theft. In order to dispel illusions about the Assembly, Marx aimed his criticism at this “really earthly question in all its life-size” of forest theft.

Marx begins the paper by describing the social status quo of the division and antagonism between the rich and the poor and uses the contrast between fallen wood and live growing timber as an analogy for the division and antagonism between the rich and the poor. As to the gathering of fallen wood, Marx believed that there was no organic or artificial connection between the fallen wood and the owner of the wood, and that fallen wood was not the property of the forest owner. For many centuries, the poor have gathered fallen wood, a product of nature, and as such, it is their natural customary right and a legitimate possession. But now the forest owners are demanding, for their own benefit, that the gathering of dry wood be equated with the theft of wood. This sacrificed the rights of human beings for the rights of the young trees, and it can be said that the customary rights of the poor are jeopardized when many innocent poor people are “cut off from the green tree of morality and cast like fallen wood into the hell of crime, infamy and misery” for the sake of fallen wood. And at the same time, the Assembly of Estates, which is supposed to uphold the rights of man, has turned the law into an instrument of private interest by stigmatizing the gathering of dry wood by the poor as theft of wood in the interest of the forest owners. Through analysis, Marx exposed the class nature embodied in the draft of the Law on Thefts of Wood drawn up by the Prussian government to protect the interests of forest owners, and criticized the current Prussian state and its parliament as mere tools for a minority ruling class to rule and plunder the people and protect their own private interests.

The Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood, although it was written before the shift in Marx's world outlook, when his world outlook was still Hegelian rationalism, and the critique was not from the economic but from the political-legal aspect, was highly influential in the development of Marx's thought. In the exploration, the rupture and collision between private interests and the rational conception of the state, especially the final summary of “this abject materialism”, shows that the reflection on the real life represented by the law on thefts of wood pushed Marx to change his conception of the state, and moreover prompted Marx to study political economy and practical economic questions, which became an important motivation for the advancement of his thought. As confirmed by Engels, Marx said to him more than once: “It is the study of the law of thefts of wood and the situation of farmers in the Mosel River region that has pushed him from pure politics to economic relations, so as to move towards socialism.”