Young Marx and the Wood-Theft Debates in Prussian Rhineland in the Early Nineteenth Century

This article revisits the young Marx’s 1842 account of wood-theft law. It intends to analyse both his strengths and limitations without being either hagiographic or dismissive. Marx’s take on the wood-theft question prompted him for the first time to pay attention to the interconnection between political power, social property relations and the law as a superb instrument of class domination. The weakness of Marx’s account was that he was not fully informed about the Prussian forest regulations in the beginning of the 1840s and wrongly presumed that the 1841 bill intended to dispossess peasants of their traditional usufruct rights. This shortcoming does not invalidate Marx’s spirited endeavour but sets considerable limitations to it.