Karl Marx (11 page)

Engels was astonished to discover that the organs of the British bourgeoisie provided so much incriminating evidence against themselves. After quoting several gruesome cases of disease and starvation, published in the middle-class
Manchester Guardian
, he
exulted: ‘I delight in the testimony of my opponents.’ One need only study the citations from government Blue Books and
The Economist
in the first volume of
Capital
to see how much Karl Marx learned from this technique.

Marx and Engels complemented each other perfectly. While Engels couldn’t begin to match Marx’s erudition, having missed out on university, he had invaluable firsthand knowledge of the machinery of capitalism. But the ‘complete agreement in all theoretical fields’ didn’t extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels’s script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and often ghost-writing articles for Marx as well. Yet he always found the time to enjoy the comforts of high bourgeois life: horses in his stables, plenty of wine in his cellar and mistresses in the bedroom. During the long years when Marx was almost drowning in squalor, fending off creditors and struggling to keep his family alive, the childless Engels pursued the carefree pleasures of a prosperous bachelor.

In spite of the obvious disparity of advantage, Engels knew that he would never be the dominant partner. He deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidise the indigent sage without complaint or jealousy – even, come to that, without much gratitude. ‘
I simply cannot understand,
’ he wrote in 1881, nearly forty years after that first meeting, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded.’ Marx’s
friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.

They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn’t hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. In a letter to Engels on 23 March 1853, to take a more or less random example, Marx discusses the rapid increase in British exports to the Turkish dominions, Disraeli’s position in the Conservative Party, the passage of the Canadian Clergy Reserves Bill through the House of Commons, the harassment of refugees by the British police, the activities of German communists in New York, an attempt by Marx’s publisher to swindle him, the condition of Hungary – and the alleged flatulence of the Empress Eugénie: ‘That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to
farting
and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it. At one time she resorted to horse-riding as a remedy. But this having now been forbidden her by Bonaparte, she “vents” herself. It’s only a noise, a little murmur, a nothing, but then you know that the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind.’

As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: ‘Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiösen Formalitäten z. B. Auguris etc. od. d.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.’ Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx’s handwriting, as was Jenny. Apart from those two close collaborators, however, few have managed the task without tearing their hair out. After Marx’s death, Engels had to give a lengthy course of instruction in paleography to the German Social Democrats
who wished to organise the great man’s unpublished papers.

Engels served Marx as a kind of substitute mother – sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and continually reminding him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, written in October 1844, he was already chivvying Marx to finish his political and economic manuscripts: ‘
See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched
into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ And again on 20 January 1845: ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot … So try and finish
before
April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will
definitely have finished
, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’

Fat chance. Marx was led astray by Engels himself, who made the mistake of proposing that they collaborate on a pamphlet demolishing Bruno Bauer and his troupe of clowns, under the working title
Critique of Critical Criticism
. He emphasised that it should be no more than forty pages long, since ‘
I find all this theoretical twaddle daily more tedious
and am irritated by every word that has to be expended on the subject of “man”, by every line that has to be read or written against theology and abstraction …’

Engels dashed off his portion of twenty pages while still at the flat in the Rue Vanneau, and then returned home to the Rhineland. He was ‘not a little surprised’, several months later, to hear that the pamphlet was now a swollen monstrosity of more than 300 pages and had been renamed
The Holy Family
. ‘If you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd,’ he pointed out. ‘I contributed practically nothing to it.’ But this was not the only reason for wanting his name removed. ‘
The
Critical Criticism
has still not arrived!
’ he told Marx in February 1845. ‘Its new title,
The Holy Family
, will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you, of course, could not have known that.’ The angry parent was, of course, his bigoted and despotic father, who had begun to
fear for the boy’s Christian soul. ‘
If I get a letter, it’s sniffed all over
before it reaches me,’ he grumbled. ‘I can’t eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by the same accursed lamb-of-God expression.’ One day, when Engels staggered home at two in the morning, the suspicious patriarch asked if he had been arrested. Not at all, Engels replied reassuringly: he had simply been discussing communism with Moses Hess. ‘With Hess!’ his father spluttered. ‘Great heavens! What company you keep!’

He didn’t know the half of it. ‘Now all my old man has to do is to discover the existence of the
Critical Criticism
and he will be quite capable of flinging me out of the house. And on top of it all there’s the constant irritation of seeing that nothing can be done with these people, that they positively
want
to flay and torture themselves with their infernal fantasies, and that one can’t even teach them the most platitudinous principles of justice.’

The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Consorts
was published in Frankfurt in the spring of 1845. Rereading the book more than twenty years later, Marx was ‘
pleasantly surprised to find that we have no need to feel ashamed
of the piece, although the Feuerbach cult now makes a most comical impression on one’. Few other readers have shared his satisfaction. By the time Marx started writing this scornful epic, the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer – the holy family of the title – had already slipped from militant atheism and communism into mere buffoonery, rather like the Dadaists or Futurists of the 1930s. All they deserved or needed was a quick slap, not a full-scale bombardment. Who shoots a housefly with a blunderbuss?

Marx’s scattergun hit other targets who were no more worthy of his attentions. There were several chapters of invective against Eugène Sue, an author of popular sentimental novels, whose only offence was to have been praised in Bruno Bauer’s
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung
. Though Sue may well have been every bit as dire as Marx suggested, the punishment was absurdly disproportionate to the crime: try to imagine, by way of a modern equivalent, a
magnum opus
by Professor George Steiner attacking
The Bridges of Madison County
. Even Engels had to admit that Marx was wasting his sourness on the desert air. ‘The thing’s too long,’ he wrote. ‘The supreme contempt we two evince towards the
Literatur-Zeitung
is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets [352 pages] we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and of abstract being in general will be incomprehensible to the public at large, nor will it be of general interest. Otherwise the book is splendidly written …’

Or, as the tactful curate said on being served a rotten egg by his bishop, ‘No, my lord, parts of it are excellent!’

Had Marx confined himself to twitting obscure Hegelians and second-rate novelists, he might have been left in peace. But he couldn’t resist the chance to tease a bigger and more dangerous beast. In the summer of 1844, after surviving an assassination attempt, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia issued this brief message of thanks to his loyal subjects before departing on holiday: ‘I cannot leave the soil of the Fatherland, although only for a short time, without expressing publicly the deeply felt gratitude in My and the Queen’s name by which Our heart has been moved.’ Marx thought this hilarious – and said so,
con brio
, in an article for
Vorwärts!
. The King’s syntax, he wrote, seemed to imply that the royal bosoms were moved by the royal name:

If amazement at this peculiar movement makes one think again,
one sees that the relative conjunction ‘
by which
our heart has been moved’ refers not to the name but to the more remotely situated
gratitude
… The difficulty is due to the combination of three ideas: (1) that the King is leaving his homeland, (2) that he is leaving it only for a short time, (3) that he feels a need to thank the people. The too compressed utterance of these ideas makes it appear that the King is expressing his
gratitude
only because he is leaving his homeland …

If Marx thought that he could get away with this lèse-majesté, he had forgotten that monarchs have their own masonic solidarity.
On 7 January 1845, at an audience with King Louis Philippe in Paris, the Prussian envoy Alexander von Humboldt handed over two items – a valuable porcelain vase, and a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm IV protesting at the outrageous insults and libels published by
Vorwärts!
. Louis Philippe agreed that there were indeed far too many German philosophers in Paris: the magazine was closed down two weeks later, and the interior minister François Guizot ordered Marx’s expulsion from France.

Where now? The only king in mainland Europe still willing to accept refugees was Leopold I of Belgium, though even he demanded a written promise of good behaviour. (‘To obtain permission to reside in Belgium I agree to pledge myself, on my word of honour, not to publish in Belgium any work on current politics. [signed] Dr Karl Marx.’) While Jenny stayed on for a few days to sell their furniture and linen, Marx left Paris in the company of Heinrich Bürgers, a young journalist from
Vorwärts!
who was quitting the country in disgust at ‘the punishment inflicted on the man who was my friend and faithful guide in my studies’. As their two-man coach rattled through Picardy, Bürgers tried vainly to lift his mentor’s spirits with choruses from German drinking songs.

A good night’s sleep was rather more restorative. The next morning Marx was already impatient for action, telling Bürgers to hurry up with his breakfast because ‘we must go and see Freiligrath today’. Ferdinand Freiligrath, a quondam court poet to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had fled to Belgium some weeks earlier to escape arrest after publishing a treasonous
Confession of Faith
. Once a regular butt of the old
Rheinische Zeitung
, he was now granted instant absolution as a convert to the anti-Prussian cause. Other new arrivals from the radical diaspora included Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, the Swiss radical Sebastian Seiler, the former artillery officer Joseph Weydemeyer (who was to become a lifelong friend), a gaggle of Polish socialists – and, most importantly, Friedrich Engels, who needed little persuasion to escape from the stifling propriety of Barmen and follow Marx into exile. Jenny’s
brother Edgar von Westphalen, the lovable if incontinent puppy of the family, came too.

By the time Marx’s wife and daughter joined him, he was already back in the old routine – reading, writing, boozing, scheming. ‘We were madly gay,’ Weydemeyer recalled. There were long mornings in cafés and even longer nights of card-playing and tipsy conversation. For once, even the family finances were in credit: two days before leaving Paris Marx was paid a 1,500-franc advance by a publisher in Darmstadt for his embryonic work on political economy, and a whip-round by Engels added another 1,000 francs to the kitty, mostly from supporters in Germany. Engels also handed over the fee for his own book,
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, so that ‘at least the curs shan’t have the satisfaction of seeing their infamy cause you pecuniary embarrassment’. But, he added presciently, ‘
I fear that in the end you’ll be molested
in Belgium too, so that you’ll be left with no alternative but England.’

Jenny, pregnant once more, tried to conceal her disappointment at forsaking the shops and
salons
of Paris for boring old Brussels, but her mother was worried enough by this latest domestic upheaval to send her maidservant from Trier, Helene Demuth, on permanent loan. The twenty-five-year-old Demuth, who spent the rest of her life holding the Marx household together through countless crises and vicissitudes, was a small, graceful woman of peasant stock – round faced, blue eyed and always immaculately neat and well groomed even when surrounded by squalor. Her domestic efficiency was formidable and unflagging. As late as 1922, an Englishwoman who had visited the Marxes as a girl still recalled Helene’s excellent cooking: ‘
Her jam tarts are a sweet and abiding memory
to this day.’ Not that she was a meek little drudge: she guarded her new employers with tigerish ferocity, and any guests who outstayed their welcome could expect a severe mauling.

For the first couple of months Marx and his family lodged in hotels or the spare rooms of friends. But as soon as they found a
more permanent billet – a small terraced house at 5 Rue D’Alliance, at the eastern end of the city – Jenny set off with her daughter and maid for a summer vacation in the Baroness von Westphalen’s residence in Germany, leaving Karl to make the place habitable. ‘
The little house should do
,’ Jenny wrote from Trier. A room would have to be set aside for childbirth, but ‘having concluded my important business on the upper floor, I shall remove downstairs again. Then you could sleep in what is now your study and pitch your tent in the immense drawing-room – that would present no difficulty. The children’s noise downstairs would then be completely shut off, you would not be disturbed upstairs, I could join you when things were quiet … What a colony of paupers there is going to be in Brussels!’ On 26 September, only a fortnight after travelling back from Trier, Jenny added to the colonial population by giving birth to another daughter, Laura.

Marx had promised the Belgian authorities not to publish anything on current politics, but thought he was quite within his rights to
participate
in politics and to pursue his studies in economic history. Hence the summons to Engels, by now an indispensable lieutenant. In the summer of 1845 the two men paid a six-week visit to England, partly to take advantage of the well-stocked libraries in Manchester and London but also to meet the leaders of the Chartists, the first working-class movement in the world. On their return, Engels rented a house next door to the Marxes and set about organising the socialist flotsam of Brussels into a comparable political force.

First, however, there was the small matter of Marx’s book. The research trip to Britain and the long hours he spent in Brussels’s municipal library must have raised the hopes of his publisher, Karl Leske, who was expecting the
Critique of Economics and Politics
by the end of the summer. But Marx had already set the manuscript aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘
It seemed to me very important
,’ he explained to Leske, ‘to
precede
my
positive
development with a polemical piece against
German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present … If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’

Not so: his ‘polemical piece’,
The German Ideology
, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. The only public demand for it came from Marx himself, who was now being caricatured by the Young Hegelians as an unthinking disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach. This infuriated him: Feuerbach’s demystification of Hegel had indeed been a glorious moment of revelation, like Keats’s first glimpse of Chapman’s Homer, but Marx had long since concluded that the critique merely substituted one myth for another. Feuerbach, the man who had turned Hegel upside down, was now due for the same treatment – or, as Marx put it, a ‘settlement of accounts’.

His exercise in philosophical bookkeeping began in the spring of 1845 when he scribbled down the brief notes now known as the
Theses on Feuerbach
. ‘
The chief defect of all previous materialism
(that of Feuerbach included) is that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the
object
, or of
contemplation
, but not as
sensuous human activity, practice
.’ Feuerbach had exposed the secular basis of religion, but then allowed the secular realm itself to float off into clouds of abstraction. ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking,’ Marx argued, ‘is not a question of theory but is a
practical
question … All social life is essentially
practical
… The philosophers have only
interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to
change
it.’ Theory without practice was a form of scholastic masturbation – pleasurable enough, but ultimately infertile and of no consequence. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels proceeded to spend the winter of 1845–6 theorising like billy-o as they composed their
German Ideology
.

The book begins with one of Marx’s attention-grabbing generalisations: ‘Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be.’ This is followed by another favourite trick, the provocative parable:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow
had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the
idea of gravity
. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

These thinkers were sheep labouring under the delusion that they were wolves, whose vapid bleating ‘merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class’.

One sheep was Ludwig Feuerbach himself, whose conception of the world was ‘confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling’. He thus failed to notice that even the simplest natural objects are in fact products of historical circumstance. For instance: ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by
commerce
into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become a “sensuous certainty”.’ To Feuerbach, the cherry-tree was simply
there
, one of nature’s altruistic gifts.

Oddly enough, although the book had been intended as a settling of accounts with Feuerbach, he merited no more than a couple of short chapters. Bruno Bauer – ‘Saint Bruno’ – was dispatched with similar speed. But 300 unreadable pages were devoted to the follies of Max Stirner, an anarchic Young Hegelian author who proposed that heroic egoism and self-indulgence
would liberate individuals from their imaginary oppression. Though Stirner’s existentialist credo deserved its come-uppance, a quick stiletto jab would have done the job far more effectively than Marx’s verbose sarcasm – which, ironically, looked very much like an example of the self-indulgent egoism that Stirner advocated.

For all its
longueurs
, however,
The German Ideology
is a most revealing account of what the twenty-seven-year-old Marx had learned from his philosophical and political adventures. Having rejected God, Hegel and Feuerbach in quick succession, he and Engels were now ready to unveil their own scheme of practical theory or theoretical practice – otherwise known as historical materialism. ‘The premises from which we begin,’ they announced, ‘are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life … These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.’ Whereas Feuerbach had argued that you are what you eat, Marx and Engels insisted that you are what you produce – and how you produce it. ‘The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour …’ And so on. These various refinements in the division of labour reflected the development of property – from primitive tribal property to ancient communal and state property, thence to feudal or estate property and onwards to bourgeois property. ‘The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals … It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.’ Slavery could not be abolished without the steam engine or the mule jenny, just as serfdom could not be abolished without improvements in agriculture, and in general ‘people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain
food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity’.