Karl Marx Read online

  Engels came to know the triumvirate while he was visiting London in 1843. They were the first working-class revolutionaries he had ever met, and to an impressionable bourgeois youngster their status as ‘real men’ easily outweighed the narrowness and naïvety of their ideology. Besides, they were undoubtedly efficient, having rebuilt the League of the Just as a thriving concern in London and created a network of supporters in Switzerland, Germany and France. Where workers’ associations were banned by law, their ‘lodges’ masqueraded as choral societies or gymnastic clubs.

  Although these conspirators still looked to Paris as the mother-city of revolutions, they no longer treated French philosophy with quite the old awe or deference. For the League now had a theoretician of its own, the journeyman tailor Wilhelm Weitling, whose book Mankind As It Is and As It Ought To Be had been published by the League in 1838.

  Weitling, the illegitimate son of a German washerwoman, had the pious, anguished demeanour of a martyred prophet. He would have been quite at home among the travelling chiliastic preachers of the Middle Ages, or the communist millenarian sects that flourished at the time of the English Civil War, but he had little in common with the thinkers or agitators of nineteenth-century revolution. His creed was a home-made cocktail of the Book of Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount, in which the cloying sweetness of Sunday-school homily was spiced up with a dash of fire and brimstone. When not warning of imminent Armageddon he babbled happily of a return to Eden, an Arcadia in which hatred and envy would be unknown. It was as if one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had suddenly dismounted to stroke a passing cat.

  Still, there was no denying the power of his evangelism. ‘The respect he enjoyed in our circles was boundless,’ wrote Friedrich Lessner, another communist tailor from Germany. ‘He was the idol of his followers.’ And, because of his wanderings through Europe, these disciples formed an impressive multinational brigade. Escaping to Switzerland after the failed French rebellion of 1839, he established branches of the League of the Just in Geneva and Zurich which eventually brought him to the attention of Swiss officialdom. During a raid on his lodgings the police found more incriminating evidence of his wickedness – an autobiographical manuscript, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner, in which he likened himself to Jesus Christ as an impoverished outcast who had been crucified for daring to speak out against injustice. This impudence earned him six months in jail for blasphemy, followed by deportation to Germany – where he was soon arrested again, this time for deserting from the army to avoid national service. By the time he reached London, in 1844, the thirty-six-year-old tailor was a legendary figure who drew large crowds of expatriate German socialists and English Chartists with his revivalist rhetoric. In one of his favourite coups de théâtre, he would hitch up an elegant trouser leg (as a tailor himself, Weitling always wore well-cut suits) to reveal the livid scars left by the chains and shackles of his jailers.

  It’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to appeal to Marx than this vain utopian dreamer, whose political programme was summarised in a toe-curling preface to his book Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom: ‘We wish to be free as the birds in the sky; we wish to dart through life like them, carefree in joyful flight and sweet harmony.’ The best way of achieving lift-off, Weitling suggested, was to recruit a 40,000-strong army of convicted thieves and robbers – who, driven on by their burning grudge against private property, would bring down the mighty from their seats and usher in a new age of peace and joy. ‘Criminals are a product of the present order of society,’ he wrote, ‘and under communism they would cease to be criminals.’ In Weitling’s earthly paradise everyone would be provided with identical clothes (designed by himself, no doubt), and those who wished to wear anything else would have to earn it by working overtime. Eating would take place in communal canteens, though policy on cutlery had still to be decided. (‘These tailors are really astounding chaps,’ Engels commented after meeting some of Weitling’s followers. ‘Recently they were discussing quite seriously the question of knives and forks.’) When people reached the age of fifty they would be removed from the labour force and dispatched to a retirement colony – a sort of communist Eastbourne, though perhaps without the bowls club.

  One can almost hear Marx snorting with derision at this twaddle. But he hesitated to condemn it publicly. Although he had proclaimed in 1844, with patriotic hyperbole, that ‘the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat’, the truth was that until the mid-1840s he had met very few German workers. (‘What the proletariat does we know not and indeed could hardly know,’ Engels reminded him in March 1845.) At first, therefore, his reaction to the emergence of a truly working-class thinker from his homeland was like that of Dr Johnson to the dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all – and, consequently, you reward the performing mutt with extravagant praise. ‘Where among the bourgeoisie – including its philosophers and learned writers – is to be found a book about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie – political emancipation – similar to Weitling’s work Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom?’ Marx wondered. ‘It is enough to compare the petty faint-hearted mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and brilliant literary début of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete …’

  The itinerant Cinderella never did go to the ball, either in glass slippers or running shoes. Though Messrs Schapper, Bauer and Moll gave Weitling a generous reception when he arrived in London in 1845, they quickly concluded that his ideas were too cranky by half. He was grievously disappointed by their unwillingness to invest in his many ingenious schemes – the creation of a new universal language, the invention of a machine for making ladies’ straw hats – and even more upset when they refused to elect him as president of their association. At the beginning of 1846 he went off to try his luck in Brussels.

  ‘If I tell you what kind of life we have been leading here, you would certainly be surprised at the communists,’ Joseph Weydemeyer wrote to his fiancée in February. ‘To crown the folly, Marx, Weitling, Marx’s brother-in-law and I sat up the whole night playing. Weitling got tired first. Marx and I slept a few hours on the sofa and idled away the whole of the next day in the company of his wife and his brother-in-law in the most priceless manner. We went to a tavern early in the morning, then we went by train to Villeworde, which is a little place nearby, where we had lunch and then returned in the most cheerful mood by the last train.’ It will be noticed that Weitling, after retiring early, played no part in the morning-after amusements: his halo of sanctity made him uncongenial company, especially for bourgeois intellectuals. As Engels wrote, ‘He was now the great man, the prophet, driven from country to country, who carried a prescription for the realisation of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who imagined that everybody was out to steal it from him.’

  When Heinrich Heine met Weitling, he was outraged by ‘the fellow’s utter lack of respect while he conversed with me. He did not remove his cap and, while I was standing before him, he remained sitting with his right knee raised by the aid of his right hand to his very chin and steadily rubbing the raised leg with his left hand just above the ankle’. Cue the old trick with the trouser leg and the prison scars; but even this left Heine unmoved. ‘I confess that I recoiled when the tailor Weitling told me about these chains. I, who had once in Münster kissed with burning lips the relics of the tailor John of Leyden – the chains he had worn, the pincers with which he had been tortured and which are preserved in the Münster City Hall – I who had made an exalted cult of the dead tailor, now felt an insurmountable aversion for this living tailor, Wilhelm Weitling, though both were apostles and martyrs in the same cause.’

  Marx and Engels had a similar revulsion, especially when Weitling took to addr
essing them as ‘my dear young fellows’, but they did their best to conceal it, if only out of respect for his proletarian status and his long years of persecution. Early in 1846 they invited him to become a founder member of the new Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels, whose purpose was to maintain ‘a continuous interchange of letters’ with the League of the Just and other fraternal associations in western Europe. Since the committee was the original Adam from which all the many subsequent Communist Parties were descended, it may be worth listing the eighteen founding signatories: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Jenny Marx, Edgar von Westphalen, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Joseph Weydemeyer, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege, Wilhelm Weitling, Ernst Dronke, Louis Heilberg, Georg Weerth, Sebastian Seiler, Philippe Gigot, Wilhelm Wolff, Ferdinand Wolff, Karl Wallau, Stephan Born. Like most of its twentieth-century successors this communist cell asserted its authority by purging anyone suspected of deviation from official correctness; inevitably, Weitling was picked out as the first sacrificial victim.

  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: