Karl Marx (13 page)

The occasion for his ritual humiliation was a meeting on the evening of 30 March 1846 attended by half a dozen members plus an outside observer, Pavel Annenkov, a young Russian ‘aesthetical tourist’ who had lately turned up in Brussels with a letter of introduction from one of Marx’s old Paris friends. Though not a socialist, Annenkov was fascinated by the character of his host:

Marx was the type of man
who is made up of energy, will and unshakeable conviction. He was most remarkable in his appearance. He had a shock of deep black hair and hairy hands and his coat was buttoned wrong; but he looked like a man with the right and power to demand respect, no matter how he appeared before you and no matter what he did … He always spoke in imperative words that would brook no contradiction and were made all the sharper by the almost painful impression of the tone which ran through everything he said. This tone expressed the firm conviction of his mission to dominate men’s minds and prescribe them their laws. Before me stood the embodiment of a democratic dictator.

The dapper Weitling, by contrast, looked more like a commercial traveller than a hero of the working class.

After introductions had been effected, everyone gathered around the small green table in Marx’s living-room to discuss the tactics of revolution. Engels, tall and erect and dignified, spoke of the need to agree on a single common doctrine for the benefit of those workers who lacked the time and opportunity to study theory. Before he could finish, however, Marx was already spoiling for a fight. ‘Tell us, Weitling,’ he interrupted, glaring across the table, ‘you who have made such a noise in Germany with your preaching: on what grounds do you justify your activity and what do you intend to base it on in future?’

Weitling, expecting nothing more than an evening of liberal commonplaces, was taken aback by this abrupt challenge. He launched into a long, rambling monologue, often pausing to repeat or correct himself as he explained that his aim was not to create new economic theories but to adopt those that were ‘most appropriate’. Marx moved in for the kill. To rouse the workers without offering any scientific ideas or constructive doctrine, he said, was ‘equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only the gaping asses’.

Weitling’s pale cheeks coloured. In trembling voice, he protested that a man who had rallied hundreds of people under the same banner in the name of justice and solidarity could not be treated like this. He consoled himself by remembering the countless letters of thanks that he had received, and by the thought that his ‘modest spade-work was perhaps of greater weight for the common cause than criticism and armchair analysis of doctrines far from the world of the suffering and afflicted people’. This attempt to play the proletarian card was more than Marx could bear. Leaping from his seat, and thumping the table so hard that the lamp on it shook and rang, he yelled, ‘Ignorance never yet helped anybody!’ The meeting was adjourned in uproar. ‘As Marx paced up and
down the room, extraordinarily irritated and angry,’ Annenkov reported, ‘I hurriedly took leave of him and his interlocutors and went home, amazed at all I had seen and heard.’ No one who knew Marx well would have been so amazed: throughout his life he found it both necessary and enjoyable to denounce the false gods and posturing messiahs of the communist movement.

Surprisingly, Weitling continued to visit Marx’s house for some weeks afterwards, and was present in May for another show trial. The defendant, condemned in absentia this time, was the young Westphalian student Hermann Kriege, who had lately emigrated to edit a German-language newspaper in New York. At a meeting on 11 May, the following motion was passed with only Weitling voting against:

1. The line taken by the editor of the
Volks-Tribun
, Hermann Kriege, is not communist.

2. Kriege’s childish pomposity in support of this line is compromising in the highest degree to the Communist Party, both in Europe and America, inasmuch as he is held to be the representative of German communism in New York.

3. The fantastic emotionalism which Kriege is preaching in New York under the name of ‘communism’ must have an extremely damaging effect on the workers’ morale if it is adopted by them.

In support of their indictment Marx and Engels produced a ‘Circular Against Kriege’, deriding the soppy sentimentalism of his newspaper, the
Volks-Tribun
, which described women as ‘the flaming eyes of humanity’, ‘true priestesses of love’ and ‘beloved sisters’ whose sacred duty was to lead men into ‘the kingdom of bliss’. What is a woman, Kriege had asked in an editorial, ‘without the man whom she can love, to whom she can surrender her trembling soul?’ Marx and Engels said that this amorous slobbering ‘
presents communism as the love-imbued opposite of
selfishness and reduces a revolutionary movement of world-historical importance to the few words: love – hate, communism – selfishness … We leave Kriege to reflect for himself on the enervating effect this love-sickness cannot fail to have on both sexes and the mass hysteria and anaemia it must produce in the “virgins”.’

The original eighteen members thus dwindled to sixteen – and soon to fifteen, as Moses Hess resigned before he too could be expelled. With Marx’s growing reputation as a ‘democratic dictator’, new recruits for his letter-writing circle were hard to find. In May, while seeing off Weitling and Kriege, he invited Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to join the club. ‘
So far as France is concerned
, we all of us believe that we could find no better correspondent than yourself. As you know, the English and Germans have hitherto estimated you more highly than have your own compatriots … Let us have an early reply, and rest assured of the sincere friendship of yours most sincerely, Karl Marx.’ The professions of respect and friendship, and the assurance that the committee was engaged in a civilised ‘exchange of ideas’, were undermined by Marx’s scrawled postscript: ‘PS I must now denounce to you Mr Grün of Paris. The man is nothing more than a literary swindler, a species of charlatan, who seeks to traffic in modern ideas. He tries to conceal his ignorance with pompous and arrogant phrases but all he does is make himself ridiculous with his
gibberish
… In his book on “French socialists”, he has the audacity to describe himself as tutor to Proudhon … Beware of this parasite.’

Alas! Proudhon was actually rather fond of Karl Grün, a well-known publicist for ‘True Socialism’, and thought the warning ill-judged and distasteful. ‘Grün is in exile, with no wealth, with a wife and two children to support, living by his pen. What would you wish him to exploit in order to earn a livelihood, if not modern ideas? … I see nothing here except misfortune and extreme necessity, and I pardon the man.’ Marx’s vindictiveness worried Proudhon far more than Grün’s harmless vanity. ‘
Let us,
if you wish, collaborate in trying to discover the laws of society,’ he proposed.

But for God’s sake, after we have demolished all the dogmatisms
a priori
, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instill another kind of dogma into the people … With all my heart I applaud your idea of bringing all opinions out into the open. Let us have decent and sincere polemics. Let us give the world an example of learned and farsighted tolerance. But simply because we are at the head of the movement, let us not make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance … Let us never regard a question as exhausted, and even when we have used up our last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony. Under these conditions I will gladly enter into your association. Otherwise – no!

Marx could not allow such a snub to go unpunished – as Proudhon had anticipated towards the end of his letter: ‘This, my dear philosopher, is where I am at the moment; unless, of course, I am mistaken and the occasion arises to receive a caning from you, to which I subject myself with good grace …’ The occasion for this larruping arose only a few months later when Proudhon produced a two-volume work on
The Philosophy of Poverty
. Marx retaliated with a 100-page philippic titled
The Poverty of Philosophy
, published in both Paris and Brussels in June 1847, which ridiculed the Gallic guru for his fathomless ignorance. In the foreword he wrote:

Monsieur Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood
in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest of French economists. Being both a German and an economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error. The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often
had to abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticise German philosophy, and at the same time to give some observations on political economy.

Though the ad hominem swipes at Proudhon are entertaining enough, it is these ‘observations’ on economics and philosophy that give the book its lasting value. With
The German Ideology
consigned to a mouse-infested attic,
The Poverty of Philosophy
is the first published work in which Marx set out his materialist idea of history. Economic categories such as ‘the division of labour’ were, he argued, only the theoretical and transitory expression of actual conditions of production. But Proudhon – ‘holding things upside down like a true philosopher’ – thought these actual conditions were only the incarnation of timeless economic laws, from which he concluded that the division of labour was an eternal and inevitable fact of life. Marx overturned this topsy-turvy logic in a justly famous paragraph:

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

To Marx’s unforgiving eye, Proudhon’s socialist manifesto looked suspiciously like a reluctant acceptance of the status quo. Workers shouldn’t organise to demand higher wages, Proudhon warned, since they would then have to pay their own bill in the form of higher prices. Nor was there anything to be gained from
revolutionary violence. In fact, it was hard to tell what he did advocate, beyond a vague reliance on ‘providence’.

When, Marx demanded, did meek acquiescence ever achieve anything? On the final page of
The Poverty of Philosophy
, his simmering indignation boiled over:

The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the
opposition
of classes should culminate in its brutal
contradiction
, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?

Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that
social evolutions
will cease to be
political revolutions
. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: ‘Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put.’ (George Sand.)

Proudhon made no public riposte to
The Poverty of Philosophy
, but his own copy has furious marginal scribbles on almost every page – ‘Absurd’, ‘A lie’, ‘Prattle’, ‘Plagiarism’, ‘Brazen slander’ and ‘Actually, Marx is jealous’. An entry in one of his notebooks describes Marx as ‘the tapeworm of socialism’.

The Communist Correspondence Committee would have to find someone else to represent it in France. Engels moved to Paris in August 1846 to reconnoitre. ‘
Our affair will prosper greatly here
,’ he reported after talking to August Hermann Ewerbeck, a local leader of the League of the Just. ‘What remains here of the Weitlingians, a small clique of tailors, is now in process of being thrown out … The cabinet-makers and tanners, on the other hand, are said to be capital fellows.’ Ewerbeck had identified four
or five of them who might be reliable enough to join the correspondence network. (The assumption that all revolutionaries must be artisans was hard to dislodge: that same month the Parisian
Journal des Economistes
described Marx as ‘a shoemaker’ with a penchant for ‘abstract formulas’.)

A few weeks later, having attended several meetings of the League, Engels seemed less cheerful. Ewerbeck, though amiable and well-intentioned, was a ghastly old bore who specialised in hair-splitting disquisitions on ‘true value’ and lectures on old German etymology. Worse still, he and his members treated the effusions of Proudhon and Grün as holy writ. ‘
It is disgraceful that one should still have to pit oneself
against such barbaric nonsense. But one must be patient, and I shall not let the fellows go until I have driven Grün from the field and have swept the cobwebs from their brains.’

He staged his
coup
in mid-October by initiating a debate at the League on the pros and cons of communism, thus forcing the Parisian artisans to decide whether they were avowedly communist or merely ‘in favour of the good of mankind’, as preferred by Grün and his followers. Engels warned that if the vote went against him he ‘didn’t give a fig for them’ and would attend no more meetings. ‘
By dint of a little patience and some terrorism
,’ he told Marx, ‘I have emerged victorious with the great majority behind me.’ Grün’s chief disciple, an old carpenter called Eisermann, was so intimidated by Engels’s verbal battering-ram that he never showed his face again.