Karl Marx (14 page)

These noisy exchanges soon came to the attention of the French police chief, Gabriel Delessert. When Engels heard that expulsion orders might be issued against himself and Ewerbeck, he decided to keep away from the League until the hue and cry had subsided. ‘I am indebted to Mr Delessert for some delicious encounters with
grisettes
and for a great deal of pleasure,’ he confessed roguishly, ‘since I wanted to take advantage of the days and nights which might well be my last in Paris.’ After satisfying his carnal appetite he spent a week in Sarcelles at the house of Karl
Ludwig Bernays, Marx’s old editor at
Vorwärts
!, but found the atmosphere intolerably fetid: ‘
The stench is like five thousand unaired featherbeds
, multiplied by the release therein of innumerable farts – the result of Austrian vegetable cookery.’ He also wrote a satirical pamphlet ‘pullulating with smutty jokes’ about Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer whose influence over King Ludwig of Bavaria was a cause of scandalised amusement to both Marx and Engels. No publisher would take it, and the manuscript has long since disappeared.

As one can infer from all these
divertissements
, Engels was short of intellectual stimulation. ‘
If at all possible, do come here some time in April
,’ he begged Marx in early March:

By 7 April I shall be moving – I don’t yet know where to – and about that time I shall also have a little money. So for a time we could enjoy ourselves famously, squandering our all in taverns … If I had an income of 5,000 fr. I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living. But so long as there are
grisettes
, well and good! That doesn’t prevent one from sometimes wishing to discuss a decent topic or enjoy life with a measure of refinement, neither of which is possible with anyone in the whole band of my acquaintances. You must come here.

Perhaps all that carousing had addled the Engels brain. Three months before he wrote this letter Jenny Marx had given birth to her first son, Edgar, a brother for two-year-old Jennychen and one-year-old Laura. As the sole provider for an effete wife, three small children and a housemaid, Marx could ill afford to go off on a bachelors’ bender in gay Paree. Unemployed and virtually unemployable, he couldn’t even raise the fare for a rather more important excursion, to London, where the League of the Just summoned a conference in June to discuss a merger with the Brussels correspondence circle.

It was not so much a merger as a takeover. Marx had refused to join forces with the Londoners – Schapper, Bauer, Moll – until they reconstituted themselves as a Communist League, jettisoning the simpering pieties with which the League of the Just had been associated. They were now willing to meet his demands. Proudhon, Grün and Weitling were to be ritually denounced for ‘hostility to the communists’, and the old League slogan that Marx so despised – ‘All Men Are Brothers’ – was replaced by the imperative ‘Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’

Two months after the Communist League’s inaugural meeting in London, the correspondence committee in Brussels converted itself into a branch (or ‘community’) of the League, with Marx as president. Under the new rules, each community must have at least three and at most twelve members, each of whom had to ‘
give his word of honour to work loyally
and to observe secrecy’. It was, after all, an illegal organisation. Following the Londoners’ example, however, Marx also founded a more open and less political Workers’ Association which staged quasi-parliamentary debates as well as ‘singing, recitation, theatricals and the like’. More than 100 workers joined in the first couple of weeks. ‘
However minor it may be
,’ Marx wrote to George Herwegh, ‘public activity is infinitely refreshing.’

His interests were represented at the June congress in London by another German communist from Brussels, Wilhelm Wolff, as well as the delegate from the League’s Paris branch, a certain F. Engels, who had arrived with a draft statement of principles for the new Communist League. Though not formally adopted, this was sent to communities elsewhere in Europe ‘for serious and mature consideration’. As a circular from HQ explained, ‘
We have tried on the one hand to refrain from all system-making
and all barrack-room communism, and on the other to avoid the fatuous and vapid sentimentality of the tearful, emotional communists [i.e. utopians such as Weitling] … We hope that the Central Authority will receive from you very many proposals for additions and amendments, and we will call on you again to
discuss the project with particular zest.’ No one received the invitation with more zest than Marx, who within a year had transformed Engels’s embryonic credo into one of the most influential books ever published.

The
Manifesto of the Communist Party
may be the most widely read political pamphlet in human history, but it is also the most misleadingly titled: no such party existed. Nor, come to that, was it conceived as a manifesto. What the members of the Communist League wanted in 1847 was a ‘profession of faith’, and an early draft written by Engels in June 1847 shows that they were still wedded to the initiation rituals favoured by the French underground sects:

QUESTION
1: Are you a Communist?

ANSWER
: Yes.

QUESTION
2: What is the aim of the Communists?

ANSWER
: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.

QUESTION
3: How do you wish to achieve this aim?

ANSWER
: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property.

And so on for another seven pages, culminating in Question 22 (‘Do Communists reject the existing religions?’), to which the correct answer is that communism ‘makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them’. From a modern vantage point, this laborious Q&A exercise is irresistibly reminiscent of the
Monty Python sketch in which Marx appears on a TV quiz show hosted by Eric Idle:

IDLE
: The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development?

MARX
: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie.

IDLE
: Yes it is indeed. Well done, Karl! You’re on your way to a lounge suite! Now Karl, number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle?

MARX
: A political struggle.

IDLE
: Good! One final question, and that beautiful non-materialistic lounge suite will be yours. Ready, Karl? You’re a brave man. Your final question: who won the English FA Cup in 1949?

MARX
: Er, er, the workers’ control of the means of production? The-the struggle of the urban proletariat?

IDLE
: No, it was Wolverhampton Wanderers, who beat Leicester 3–1.

MARX
: Oh, shit!

Engels’s catechism might have been appropriate for a secret society such as the old League of Outlaws or the League of the Just – but this was the furtive, conspiratorial tradition from which Marx wanted to rescue the new Communist League. Why, he demanded, should revolutionaries hide their views and intentions?

Engels took the point, admitting that ‘since a certain amount of history has to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable’. Returning to Paris in October after an extended stay in Brussels, he discovered that Moses Hess had prepared another draft ‘Confession’ which reeked of utopianism and hardly mentioned the proletariat. Engels ridiculed this document, line by line, at a meeting of the local Communist League – ‘and was not yet half-way through when the lads declared themselves
satisfaits
’, as he reported triumphantly to Marx in Brussels. ‘
Completely unopposed, I got them to entrust me
with the task of
drafting a new one which will be discussed next Friday by the district and will be sent to London
behind the backs of the communities
. Naturally not a soul must know about this, otherwise we shall all be unseated and there’ll be a deuce of a row.’

Within days Engels had finished his new version, less like a credo and more like an exam paper, with a long historical account of the origins and development of the proletariat, as well as ‘all kinds of secondary matter’. Nevertheless, it was still written in the call-and-response style of its predecessor. (‘
What is communism?
Answer
: Communism is the doctrine of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat?
Answer
: The proletariat is that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour …’) ‘Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith,’ he wrote to Marx on 23 November 1847. ‘I think we would do best to abandon the catechetical form and call the thing Communist
Manifesto
.’ Five days later the two men met at Ostend, en route for London and the second congress of the Communist League.

The venue for the congress was the HQ of the German Workers’ Educational Association, above the Red Lion pub in Great Windmill Street, Soho; and the intensity of the debate can be gauged by the fact that it continued for ten days – no doubt with occasional forays downstairs for urgently needed refreshment. Few contemporary records survive, but Marx’s dominant presence was described years later in a memoir by Friedrich Lessner, a journeyman tailor from Hamburg who had been living in London since April 1847:

Marx was a born leader of the people.
His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence was a thought and every thought was a necessary link in the chain of his demonstration. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him. The more I realised the difference between the communism of Weitling’s time and that of the
Communist Manifesto
, the more clearly I saw
that Marx represented the manhood of socialist thought.

By the end of the ten-day marathon, Marx and Engels had carried all before them. The June congress, which Marx had not attended, had declared merely that the League ‘
aims at the emancipation of humanity
by spreading the theory of the community of property and its speediest possible practical introduction’. The rules adopted at the second congress were far more combative and robust: ‘
The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie
, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.’ The delegates agreed these basic principles unanimously, and Marx and Engels were commissioned to draw up a manifesto summarising the new doctrine as soon as possible.

Marx seemed in no great hurry to comply. After returning to Brussels in mid-December, he delivered a course of lectures to the German Workers’ Association on political economy, arguing that capital was not an inanimate object but a ‘social relation’. He wrote several articles for the
Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung
, defending the communists and anticipating with relish the coming revolution in France. He gave a long speech on free trade. At a New Year’s Eve party given by the Workers’ Association he proposed a toast to Belgium – ‘forcefully expressing appreciation of the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish to the good of all Europe’. (Little did he guess that within a couple of months he would be denouncing the ‘unprecedented brutality’ and ‘reactionary fury’ of this erstwhile liberal paradise, when the Belgian government kicked him out of the country at twenty-four hours’ notice.) From 17 to 23 January he visited Ghent to establish a local branch of the Democratic Association.

Most authors will recognise the symptoms: ceaseless procrastination, a quest for distractions, a willingness to do anything
except the job in hand. Most publishers, likewise, will sympathise with the growing impatience of the London leaders of the Communist League, who dispatched an ultimatum to Brussels on 24 January 1848:

The Central Committee charges its regional committee
in Brussels to communicate with Citizen Marx, and to tell him that if the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the writing of which he undertook to do at the recent congress, does not reach London by 1 February of the current year, further measures will have to be taken against him. In the event of Citizen Marx not fulfilling his task, the Central Committee requests the immediate return of the documents placed at Citizen Marx’s disposal.

Marx was usually at his best when up against a deadline, and this final warning seems to have done the trick. Though every modern edition of the
Manifesto
carries the names of Marx and Engels – and Engels’s ideas undoubtedly had an influence – the text that finally reached London at the beginning of February was written by Karl Marx alone, in his study at 42 Rue d’Orléans, scribbling furiously through the night amid a thick fug of cigar smoke.

Kierkegaard says somewhere that life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. This applies also to eras and epochs: the reality of a particular age may not become apparent until it is drawing to a close. Or, as Hegel wrote in his
Philosophy of Right
, ‘the owl of Minerva spreads his wings only with the falling of the dusk’. When Marx wrote the
Communist Manifesto
, in January 1848, he imagined he could see the wise owl once more preparing for flight: the brief but brilliant era of bourgeois capitalism had served its transitional purpose and would soon be buried under its own contradictions. By driving hitherto isolated workers into mills and factories, modern industry had created the very conditions in which the proletariat could associate and combine into a dominant force. ‘What the bourgeoisie,
therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers,’ he noted with satisfaction at the end of the manifesto’s first section. ‘Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’

Perhaps because he thought he was rehearsing a funeral oration, he could afford to be generous to his vanquished foe. Those who have never read Marx, but know of him merely as some kind of bloodthirsty bogeyman whose name is invoked to terrify the middle classes, are often surprised to discover how much praise he lavished on the bourgeoisie. He was not a man to underestimate the enemy’s achievement:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation …

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

One modern critic has described the manifesto as ‘
a lyrical
celebration of bourgeois works’. And so it is, after a fashion: Marx was celebrating capitalism as a temporary phenomenon, as the harbinger of a true revolution. But what he took to be its death throes were in fact nothing more than birth pangs. The signs he misinterpreted – the howls, the thrashing limbs, the blood-spattered sheets – are even more conspicuous today than in his own time, though he is seldom given any credit for noticing them. ‘The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,’ he pointed out. ‘In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.’ Anyone surveying the fruit and veg counter in a supermarket – piled high with mangoes, avocados, sugar-snap peas and out-of-season strawberries – will see what he meant.

While importing exotica, the bourgeoisie foists its own products, tastes and habits on everyone else: ‘In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’ To recognise the truth of this, one need only visit Beijing – the capital of an avowedly communist state – where the city centre now looks eerily like Main Street, USA, with McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Haagen-Dazs and Pizza Hut, plus several branches of Chase Manhattan and Citibank in which to deposit the profits.

‘As in material, so also in intellectual production,’ the
Manifesto
continued. ‘The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property … The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation.’ One can argue about whether Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Grisham and non-stop MTV really constitute ‘civilisation’, but the essential truth of his perception can’t be denied. He also understood that the pace of technological change would become ever more frantic, creating a sort of permanent revolution where any computer software bought more than a couple of years ago is all but obsolete. ‘The bourgeoisie
cannot exist without revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air …’