Karl Marx Read online

  ‘Engels really has too much work,’ Marx admitted, ‘but being a veritable walking encyclopedia, he’s capable, drunk or sober, of working at any hour of the day or night, is a fast writer and devilish quick on the uptake.’ Though happy enough to take on this extra burden, Engels was so exhausted by his long hours at the cotton factory that he couldn’t be expected to write everything. Nor did Marx want him to: the Tribune’s huge and influential readership – its weekly edition alone sold more than 200,000 copies – was an irresistible lure for a man more accustomed to addressing audiences of a few dozen in the upstairs room of a London pub. Sometimes he sent a rough outline to Manchester which Engels then fleshed out; on other occasions – when, say, the newspaper wanted something on warfare, or ‘the Eastern question’ – the secret ghost-writer would have to do it all himself, since Marx ‘hadn’t a clue’ about such things.

  Even so, Marx can probably take the credit for at least half of the 500-odd articles that he submitted to the Tribune. In his wearier moments he sometimes neglected the old journalistic injunction to grab the reader’s attention from the outset (‘The Parliamentary debates of the week offer but little of interest’ is the unimprovable opening sentence of a dispatch from March 1853) but most of these commentaries, particularly on British politics, have his inky fingerprints all over them. Here, for example, is an account of the 1852 election: ‘Days of general election are in Britain traditionally the bacchanalia of drunken debauchery, conventional stockjobbing terms for the discounting of political consciences, the richest harvest time of the publicans … They are saturnalia in the ancient Roman sense of the word. The master then turned servant, the servant turned master. If the servant be turned master for one day, on that day brutality will reign supreme.’ His remarks on the violent insurrection by Sepoys, native soldiers in the Anglo-Indian army, are better still: ‘There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them.’

  It is surprising – or, rather, depressingly unsurprising – that none of his journalistic jabs has found its way into a dictionary of quotations. Has anyone ever impaled Palmerston more lethally? ‘What he aims at is not the substance, but the mere appearance of success. If he can do nothing, he will devise anything. Where he dares not interfere, he intermeddles. Not able to vie with a strong enemy, he improvises a weak one … In his eyes, the movement of history is nothing but a pastime, expressly invented for the private satisfaction of the noble Viscount Palmerston of Palmerston.’ Or how about this, on the wretched and squirming Lord John Russell? ‘No other man has verified to such a degree the truth of the biblical axiom that no man is able to add an inch to his natural height. Placed by birth, connections and social accidents on a colossal pedestal, he always remained the same homunculus – a malignant and distorted dwarf on the top of a pyramid.’

  Had he but world enough and time, Marx could have kept this up indefinitely and made his name as the sharpest polemical journalist of the century. But at his back he could always hear the nagging voice of conscience, whispering, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’ As early as April 1851 Marx claimed to be ‘so far advanced that I will have finished the whole economic stuff in five weeks’ time. And having done that, I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the Museum.’ For the next couple of months he sat in the reading room from nine in the morning until seven in the evening most days. ‘Marx lives a very retired life,’ Wilhelm Pieper reported, ‘his only friends being John Stuart Mill and Loyd [the economist Samuel Jones Loyd], and whenever one goes to see him one is welcomed with economic categories in lieu of greetings.’

  But there was still no end to the Herculean task he had set himself. ‘The material I am working on is so damnably involved that, no matter how I exert myself, I shall not finish for another six to eight weeks,’ he told Weydemeyer in June. ‘There are, moreover, constant interruptions of a practical kind, inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are vegetating here. But for all that, for all that, the thing is rapidly approaching completion. There comes a time when one has forcibly to break off.’

  This shows a comical lack of self-knowledge. Marx would happily ‘break off’ from old friendships or political associations with impetuous nonchalance, but he had no such facility for letting go of his work – especially not this work, this vast compendium of statistics and history and philosophy which would at last expose all the shameful secrets of capitalism. The more he wrote and studied, the further the book seemed from completion: as with Casaubon’s interminable ‘Key to All Mythologies’ in Middlemarch, there were always new leads to be pursued, obscure research to be quarried. (As it happens, Marx loved the novels of George Eliot. ‘Well, our friend Dakyns is a sort of Felix Holt, less the affectation of that man, and plus the knowledge,’ he wrote to his daughter Jenny after visiting the geologist J. R. Dakyns in 1869. ‘I could of course not forbear making a little fun of him and warning him to fight shy of any meeting with Mrs Eliot who would at once make literary property out of him.’)

  ‘The main thing,’ Engels advised in November 1851, ‘is that you should once again make a public début with a big book … It’s absolutely essential to break the spell created by your prolonged absence from the German book market.’ But for the next four years the project was set aside, a victim of those ‘constant interruptions’ – many of which, one might add, were entirely of his own making. Immediately after the French coup of December 1851 he began writing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte at the request of the new American weekly Die Revolution, founded by his friend Joseph Weydemeyer: big books might be beyond him, but he had lost none of his pamphleteering brio.

  Alas, some of his more questionable skills hadn’t deserted him either. In the spring of 1852 Marx wasted several months composing The Great Men of the Exile, his verbose satire on the ‘more noteworthy jackasses’ and ‘democratic scallywags’ of the socialist diaspora. The chief villain in this rogues’ gallery was Gottfried Kinkel, an occasional poet and sometime political prisoner who was now being lionised by grand London hostesses such as the Baroness von Brüningk, châtelaine of an agreeable salon in St John’s Wood. Marx spent the whole of June in Manchester with Engels, salting the text with ever more elaborate insults against Kinkel and the other scallywags. ‘The process of curing these stockfish,’ he wrote, ‘makes us laugh till we cry.’ Luckily for his reputation, the folie à deux remained a private joke. When Marx entrusted the manuscript to Colonel Bangya for delivery to a German publisher, the treacherous rogue promptly sold it to the Prussian police. It languished unseen for nearly a century, and anyone reading the book today may well judge that this was no great loss.

  But he wasn’t finished with the stockfish. In July rumours reached him that Kinkel, during a fund-raising tour of America, had told an audience in Cincinnati, ‘Marx and Engels are no revolutionaries, they’re a couple of blackguards who have been thrown out of public houses by the workers in London.’ Marx challenged him to deny the story: ‘I await your answer by return of post. Silence will be regarded as an admission.’ Kinkel replied that since he had been attacked by Marx in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1950, while still imprisoned in Germany, ‘I have wanted to have nothing more to do with you’.

  If you believe that you can … provide proof that I untruthfully said or published anything detrimental to your own or Mr Engels’s honour, I must point out to you, as I would to anyone with whom I have neither personal nor political contacts, the usual way which, under the law, is open to everyone who feels himself insulted or libelled. Except in this way, I shall have no further dealings with you.

 
Marx was peeved that his challenge hadn’t been taken up. (‘How coolly everything is rejected that might smack of a duel and the like.’) A libel case was out of the question, as a British court could hardly pass judgment on insults delivered in Cincinnati. Assuming that Kinkel would ignore any further correspondence with a Soho postmark, Marx contrived an elaborate ruse. He persuaded the Chartist leader Ernest Jones to address an envelope to Kinkel (guessing that his own spidery scrawl would be instantly recognised) and then asked Wilhelm Wolff to post it from Windsor. The billet-doux inside, on coloured paper adorned with a posy of forget-me-nots and roses, was full of the predictable sweet nothings that Marx bestowed on his enemies. Revealing that he now had sworn statements from witnesses in Cincinnati, he thundered, ‘Your letter – and this is precisely why it was provoked – provides a new and striking proof that the said Kinkel is a cleric whose baseness is equalled only by his cowardice.’

  Marx took great pride in his schoolboy jape. ‘The cream of the jest,’ he gloated, ‘will only become plain to Kinkel later on, with the appearance of the first instalment of The Great Men of the Exile. Namely, that shortly before this fearsome attack on Gottfried, I diverted myself by doing him direct and personal injury, while at the same time justifying myself in the eyes of the émigré louts. To that end I needed something in “black and white” from Johann etc. Now for greater matters …’

  These ‘greater matters’ turned out to be yet more internecine squabbles, prompted by the opening of the long-postponed trial of Cologne Communists in October 1852. Since the most incriminating exhibits at the trial were minute-books and reports advocating armed insurrection, supposedly purloined from the Communist League in London, Marx spent the summer and autumn collecting affidavits to confirm that the documents were forgeries. When the trial was over he felt obliged to write an article defending himself against the slanders on ‘the Marx group’ that had been aired in the Cologne courtroom – and, by the by, putting the knife into the Willich – Schapper faction from the Communist League. Inevitably enough, this article soon grew into a book, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, which, with equal inevitability, was denounced by August Willich. Marx then dashed off another pamphlet, The Knight of the Noble Conscience, savaging his erstwhile comrade’s ‘overweening conceit’ and ‘foul insinuations’. And so on, and so on …

  With unusual discretion, he omitted one damaging fact about the ignoble knight. During 1852 Willich was given free lodging at the Baroness von Brüningk’s house in north London, and according to a story relayed by Marx to Engels, she ‘used to enjoy flirting with this old he-goat, as with the other ex-lieutenants. One day the blood rushes to the head of our ascetic, he makes a brutally brutish assault upon madame, and is ejected from the house with éclat. No more love! No more free board!’ With his London reputation in tatters Willich emigrated to America shortly afterwards, where he fought with great courage in the Civil War. Even Marx was forced to concede, many years later, that the old he-goat had at least partly redeemed himself.

  Why, one must ask again, did Marx fritter away his talents on these extravagant vendettas? One explanation is that his domestic chaos was unconducive to grander or more taxing work. (‘All one can do,’ he sighed, ‘is produce miniature dunghills.’) Perhaps, too, the ancient scar from that undergraduate duel had never quite healed. When the London German newspaper How Do You Do? hinted that he was secretly in cahoots with his brother-in-law Ferdinand von Westphalen, the fiercely oppressive Prussian Minister of the Interior, Marx strode down to the office and challenged the editor to a duel. The terrified hack published an apology at once. In October 1852 he used the same threat against Baron von Brüningk, who had accused him of spreading a rumour that the coquettish Baroness was a Russian spy. Marx proposed a meeting at which he would demonstrate his innocence – ‘and should my explanation not suffice, I shall be prepared to give you the satisfaction customary among gentlemen’. The dispute was eventually settled without bloodshed by a formal exchange of letters. But one month later he was at it again, this time sending a splenetic message to the left-wing historian Karl Eduard Vehse who was apparently broadcasting ‘insolent’ and ‘impertinent’ gossip in Dresden about Marx’s pamphlet on The Great Men of the Exile. ‘Should this letter cause you offence,’ he concluded after several ripe paragraphs of invective, ‘you need only come to London; you know where I live and may be assured that you will always find me prepared to give you the satisfaction customary in such cases.’

  The only people likely to receive satisfaction from this communist cannibalism were the Prussian authorities: Marx’s vendettas against men such as Willich were far more effective than the bungled attempts at sabotage and entrapment by their own Keystone Cops. Though aware that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Marx argued that the conspirators he attacked were the truly dangerous enemies because their siren song of instant revolution might lure socialists into some sort of premature and disastrous stunt. Fake messiahs, if left unexposed, were far more attractive to the masses than genuine monarchs. The ad hominem pamphlets, and the threats of pistols at dawn, were therefore essential political interventions rather than mere manifestations of pique and wounded pride – or so he convinced himself. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘engaged in a fight to the death with the sham liberals.’ The most deadly weapon against these poltroons would be a finished copy of his magnum opus, demonstrating once and for all why revolutionaries could never succeed without first doing their economic homework. ‘The democratic simpletons to whom inspiration comes “from above” need not, of course, exert themselves thus,’ he sneered. ‘Why should these people, born under a lucky star, bother their heads with economic and historical material? It’s really all so simple, as the doughty Willich used to tell me. All so simple to these addled brains!’

  Marx’s enemies, then and since, have attributed his dislike of Willich and the other ‘great men of the exile’ to pure jealousy. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions many of the heroes of that glorious defeat had come to London garlanded with campaign medals and romantic glamour – men such as Mazzini from Italy, Louis Blanc from France, Kossuth from Hungary, Kinkel from Germany. Society hostesses vied for their attention; lavish banquets were held in their honour; portraits were commissioned. Gottfried Kinkel, who had fled to England after a daring escape from Spandau jail, was eulogised by Dickens in Household Words. He then gave a series of lectures on drama and literature for which tickets were sold at an amazing one guinea a head. As Marx commented, ‘No running around, no advertisement, no charlatanism, no importunity was beneath him; in return, however, he did not go unrewarded. Gottfried sunned himself complacently in the mirror of his own fame and in the gigantic mirror of the Crystal Palace of the world.’ Though trapped in poverty, obscurity and near starvation, Marx never envied these swaggering world-liberators their réclame. He often quoted Dante’s maxim, Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti – go your own way and let tongues wag. What he admired in the British co-operative pioneer Robert Owen was that whenever any of his ideas became popular he would immediately say something outrageous to make himself unpopular all over again.

  ‘He loathed fine speakers and woe betide anyone who engaged in phrasemongering,’ Liebknecht observed. ‘He kept impressing upon us “young fellows” the necessity for logical thought and clarity in expression and forced us to study … While the other emigrants were daily planning a world revolution and day after day, night after night, intoxicating themselves with the opium-like motto “Tomorrow it will begin!”, we, the “brimstone band”, the “bandits”, the “dregs of mankind”, spent our time in the British Museum and tried to educate ourselves and prepare arms and ammunition for the future fight.’ His favourite story about the perils of posturing concerned Louis Blanc, a very small but exceedingly vain man, who turned up at Dean Street early one morning and was asked by Lenchen to wait in the front parlour while Marx dressed. Peeping through the connecting door, which had been left slightly ajar
, Karl and Jenny had to bite their lips to stop laughing: the great historian and politician, former member of the French provisional government, was strutting in front of a shabby mirror in the corner, contemplating himself with delight and frisking like a March hare. After a minute or two of this entertainment Marx coughed to announce his presence. The foppish tribune wrenched himself away from the narcissistic pleasures of the looking-glass and ‘hastily adopted as natural an attitude as he was capable of’.

  The applause of the multitude was worthless until the workers were ‘spiritually soaked’ in socialist ideas – through education not elocution, political organisation rather than preening. And where better to begin the task? England was not only the cradle of capitalism but also the birthplace of Chartism. While his fellow exiles contented themselves with secret societies and salons, the natives had already recruited a huge army of proletarian resistance. ‘The English working men are the first-born sons of modern industry,’ Marx declared. ‘They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry.’