Karl Marx Read online

  The revolt by Sepoy soldiers against British rule in India added to his troubles, since the Tribune naturally expected a lengthy analysis from its expert. Fortunately Marx had learned enough artful dodging from the late lamented Musch to bluff his way out. ‘As to the Delhi affair,’ he confided to Engels, ‘it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the Tribune’s military correspondent, I have taken it upon myself to put this forward … It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’ By September, Engels felt well enough to have another crack at the Cyclopaedia, and from his new place of convalescence on the Isle of Wight there emerged a torrent of articles – on Battle, Battery, Blücher and many more. While visiting Jersey in October he moved on to the next letter of the alphabet, starting with Cannon. Could Campaign and Cavalry be far behind?

  This burst of productivity was, however, interrupted by the most glorious news imaginable: the international financial cataclysm had at last arrived. Beginning with a bank collapse in New York, the crisis spread through Austria, Germany, France and England like a galloping apocalypse. Engels scuttled back to Manchester in mid-November to witness the fun – plummeting prices, daily bankruptcies and panic galore. ‘The general appearance of the [Cotton] Exchange here was truly delightful,’ he told Marx. ‘The fellows are utterly infuriated by my sudden and inexplicable onset of high spirits.’ One factory owner had already sold all his hunters and foxhounds, dismissed his servants and put his mansion up for let. ‘Another fortnight, and the dance will really be in full swing here.’

  Would revolution ensue immediately? He doubted it: the workers were bound to be pretty lethargic after such a long period of prosperity. But this was just as well, since the would-be leaders of the masses must first prepare themselves for the fray. As Engels saw it, he would command the insurrectionary army – crushing any bourgeois resistance with breakneck cavalry charges through the streets of Manchester and Berlin – while Marx directed the civilian side of the campaign, enlightening the proletariat in the mysteries of political economy. ‘It’s a case of do or die,’ Engels announced, strapping on his spurs. ‘This will at once give a more practical side to my military studies. I shall apply myself without delay to the existing organisation and elementary tactics of the Prussian, Austrian, Bavarian and French armies, and apart from that confine my actitvities to riding, i.e. fox-hunting, which is the best school of all.’ The members of the Cheshire Hunt little guessed, as they sipped their stirrup-cups, that the charming Mr Engels on his powerful new steed was secretly preparing to become the Napoleon of north-west England. But he was in deadly earnest: ‘After all, we want to show the Prussian cavalry a thing or two when we get back to Germany. The gentlemen will find it difficult to keep up with me for I’ve already had a great deal of practice and am improving every day … Only now am I getting to grips with the real problems of riding over difficult country; it’s a highly complicated business.’ Equitation, he believed, was the ‘material basis’ of all military success. Why did the French petty bourgeois regard the wretched Louis Bonaparte as a hero? ‘Because he sits elegantly on a horse.’ This must have been rather galling for Marx, whose ungainliness in the saddle – demonstrated during Sunday donkey rides on Hampstead Heath – was a family joke.

  By the end of December, Engels’s training scheme had transformed the sickly cotton merchant into a dashing cavalier. ‘On Saturday I went out fox-hunting – seven hours in the saddle,’ he noted breathlessly on New Year’s Eve. ‘That sort of thing always keeps me in a state of devilish exhilaration for several days; it’s the greatest physical pleasure I know. I saw only two out of the whole field who were better horsemen than myself, but then they were also better mounted. This will really put my health to rights. At least twenty of the chaps fell off or came down, two horses were done for, one fox killed (I was in AT THE DEATH) … And now, a happy New Year to all your family and to the year of strife 1858.’

  Marx, not wholly convinced that all this gallivanting served a greater purpose, wondered how he would earn any more dollars from the Cyclopaedia while his co-author was leaping hedges and ditches. He was deep in debt, and the hungry wolves were again threatening to blow his house down. ‘I try to avoid mentioning the matter to you because the last thing I want is to subject you to any strain that might damage your health,’ he suggested gently. ‘Yet sometimes it seems to me that, if you could manage to do a little every two days or so, it might act as a check on your junketings.’ Engels refused: how could he be expected to read or write while his head was throbbing and buzzing with visions of ‘a general crash’? Marx took the point. For all his protestations about the need to earn a living, he too was infected by the melodramatic spirit of the moment. If fate had appointed him chief theoretician of the revolution, so be it. Fortified by ‘mere lemonade on the one hand but an immense amount of tobacco on the other’, he sat in his study until about 4 a.m. every night through the long winter of 1857–8, collating his economic studies ‘so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge’.

  The deluge never came: those dark storm clouds portended nothing worse than a scattered shower. But Marx continued to build his ark, certain that a drenching flood would come sooner or later. When schoolboy arithmetic proved inadequate for complex economic formulae he took a hasty revision course in algebra. As he explained, ‘for the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter thoroughly’. Very thoroughly indeed: these nocturnal scribblings filled more than 800 manuscript pages. They remained unseen until the Marx – Engels Institute of Moscow released them from the archives in 1939, and became widely available only with the publication of a German edition in 1953, titled Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’). The first English translation appeared as recently as 1971.

  The Grundrisse – as it is now generally called – is a fragmentary and sometimes incoherent tome, described by Marx himself as a real hotchpotch. But as the missing link connecting the Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) with the first volume of Capital (1867), it does at least dispel the common misconception that there is some sort of ‘radical break’ between the thought of Young Marx and Old Marx. Wine may mature and improve in the bottle, but it remains wine for all that. There are long sections on alienation, dialectics and the meaning of money which take up where he left off with the Paris manuscripts, the most striking difference being that now he merges philosophy and economics whereas before they were treated seriatim. (In Lassalle’s words, he was ‘a Hegel turned economist, a Ricardo turned socialist’.) Elsewhere, the analysis of labour power and surplus value anticipates his fuller exposition of these theories in Capital.

  On the first page he proposes that material production – ‘individuals producing in society’ – should be the foundation of any serious enquiry into economic history. ‘The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point with Smith or Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century.’ Humans are social animals, and the belief that ‘production’ began with lone pioneers acting independently ‘is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another’. The subheadings in this introduction – ‘The General Relation of Production to Distribution, Exchange and Consumption’, ‘The Method of Political Economy’, etc. – give the impression that it is to be a rigidly schematic work. But Marx can never stick to a schedule for long, and in no time he is wandering off on picturesque detours and digressions. In his notes on the relation between production and the general development of society at any given time, he suddenly pauses to wonder about the enduring appeal of cultural artefacts. Why do we still value the Parthenon or the Odyssey, even
though the mythology from which they arose is now wholly alien?

  Is the view of nature and social relations which shaped Greek imagination and Greek art possible in the age of automatic machinery and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in, as against Roberts & Co.? Jupiter, as against the lightning conductor … Is the Iliad at all compatible with the printing press and even printing machines? Do not singing and reciting and the muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer’s bar, and do not, therefore, the prerequisites of epic poetry disappear?

  Manifestly not: Marx was writing only a few years after the appointment as poet laureate of Alfred Tennyson, whose ‘Ulysses’ had become one of the most popular verses of the age. Why, then, did the aesthetics of ancient Greece remain not only a source of pleasure but also the standard or model to which many Victorian artists and writers aspired?

  An excellent question – but Marx’s brief answer scarcely did justice to it. Though no man can become a child, he wrote, ‘does he not enjoy the artless ways of the child, and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher plane?’ Similarly, ‘why should the childhood of human society, where it had attained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return?’ Perhaps he was thinking of his own games of leap-frog and giddy-up with the girls on Hampstead Heath: inside that thirty-nine-year-old body, prematurely decaying and crumbling, there was a teenager wildly signalling to be let out. Sometimes, as he watched the children disporting themselves, he yearned to be able to turn somersaults or cartwheels, to clear his mind of the accumulated muck and misery.

  The biggest headache of all was what he called ‘the economic shit’. As long ago as 1845 he had claimed that his treatise on political economy was almost finished, and over the next thirteen years he repeated and embellished the lie so often that his friends’ expectations were raised to an impossible pitch. To judge by the time taken, they reasoned, it must indeed be an explosive magnum opus that would dissolve the baseless edifices of capitalism – the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself – leaving not a rack behind. The regular bulletins from London to Manchester kept up the pretence of splendid progress. ‘I have completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded,’ he wrote triumphantly to Engels in January 1858. In truth, all he had to show for those long days in the British Museum and even longer nights at his desk was a tottering pile of unpublishable notebooks, filled with random scribble.

  The arrival later that month of Ferdinand Lassalle’s new book on the philosophy of Heraclitus – a huge two-volume doorstopper – made him even more conscious of his own inability to deliver the goods. How could Lassalle, the self-appointed leader of German socialism, have found the time to finish such a substantial theoretical tome? Marx dealt with his own guilty conscience by belittling Lassalle’s achievement, assuring Engels that the Heraclitus book was ‘a very silly concoction’. True, it had a tremendous show of learning – but ‘provided one has the time and money and, like Mr Lassalle, can have Bonn University Library delivered ad libitum to one’s home, it is easy enough to assemble such an array of quotations. One can see what an amazing swell the fellow himself thinks he is … Every other word a howler, but set forth with remarkable pretentiousness.’

  Lassalle was seven years Marx’s junior, and although they had much in common – both bourgeois German Jews weaned on Heine and Hegel, with a weakness for aristocratic women – the contrast in their fortunes was painfully acute. While he was still a philosophy student Lassalle had taken up the cudgels on behalf of the Countess von Hatzfeldt, who was fighting a celebrated divorce action. She seemed an unlikely heroine of the socialist cause, but for this ambitious young barrack-room lawyer her plight demonstrated the larcenous villainy of the upper classes: the Count had effectively stolen his wife’s dowry, and under German law at the time she had little chance of retrieving it. Lassalle hurled himself into the case with a fine disregard for legal niceties – suborning witnesses, stealing documents – until, after ten years and dozens of lawsuits, the exhausted husband handed over the loot. Lassalle’s share of the spoils set him up for life: he installed himself in a palatial Berlin residence, furnished in the most exotic and expensive style; his box at the opera was next to that of the King, and no less grand. Even Bismarck came to pay homage, recognising a fellow Man of Destiny when he saw one.

  Unsurprisingly, some of the workers whom Lassalle claimed to represent were deeply mistrustful of his intentions – and troubled by Marx’s apparent support for him. In the spring of 1856 the Düsseldorf communists sent an emissary to London, one Gustav Lewy, in the hope of persuading Marx to break off relations: for a whole week Lewy regaled his host with stories of Lassalle’s skulduggery, opportunism and dictatorial ambitions. ‘He [Lassalle] seems to see himself quite differently from the way we see him,’ Marx wrote to Engels immediately afterwards. ‘The whole thing made a distinct impression on myself and Freiligrath, however prejudiced in Lassalle’s favour and mistrustful of workers’ tittle-tattle I may have been. I told Lewy that it was, of course, impossible to reach any conclusion on the strength of a report from one side only.’

  It was most unusual for Marx to give anyone the benefit of the doubt; but Lassalle was not just anyone. His fearlessness and enthusiasm had greatly impressed Marx at their first encounter, in Germany during the ’48 revolution, and though their friendship since then had been purely epistolary he had heard nothing to make him revise his opinion. Perhaps it was true, as Lewy warned, that Lassalle was a tyrant-in-waiting, a dangerous megalomaniac who would happily trample on the workers and form alliances with Prussian absolutism in his feverish quest for power; if so, however, he had never mentioned it in his letters. Even at the height of his fame, Lassalle remained loyal to his indigent chum in London – praising his ideas, encouraging him to get on with his book, sending occasional donations. Should one disown such a generous benefactor merely because of workers’ tittle-tattle? Marx’s only advice to Lewy and the communists of Düsseldorf was that ‘they should continue to keep an eye on the man but for the time being avoid any public row’.

  By the spring of 1858 he had another reason for avoiding ‘any public row’, since Lassalle was now offering to arrange a contract for him with a Berlin publisher, Franz Duncker (whose wife happened to be Lassalle’s mistress). While sneering at the Heraclitus book in his private correspondence with Engels, Marx delivered a strikingly different verdict to the author: ‘I carefully perused your Heraclitus. Your reconstruction of the system from the scattered fragments I regard as brilliant, nor was I any less impressed by the perspicacity of your polemic … It is incomprehensible to me, by the by, how you found the time in the midst of all your other work to acquire so much Greek philology.’ Having paid these disingenuous respects, he went on to describe the structure of his own masterpiece.

  The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of bourgeois economy … The whole is divided into six books: 1. On Capital (contains a few introductory chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market.

  Marx wanted it issued in instalments. The first volume – on capital, competition and credit – would be ready for the printers in May, followed by the second within a few months, and so on.

  This was a tight series of deadlines; and, as often happened when he found himself under pressure to deliver the goods, his body rebelled. ‘I’ve been so ill with my bilious complaint this week that I am incapable of thinking, reading, writing or, indeed, of anything,’ he wrote to Engels on 2 April. ‘My indisposition is disastrous, for I can’t begin working on the thing for Duncker until I’m better and my fingers regain their vigour and grasp.’ For the rest of the month he was unable to work at all. ‘Never before have I had such a violent attaque of liver trouble and for some time the
re was a fear that it might be sclerosis of the liver … Whenever I sit down and write for a couple of hours I have to lie quite fallow for a couple of days.’

  It was a familiar lament. ‘Alas, we are so used to these excuses for the non-completion of the work!’ Engels commented many years later, after rereading some of Marx’s old letters. ‘Whenever the state of his health made it impossible for him to go on with it, this impossibility preyed heavily on his mind, and he was only too glad if he could only find out some theoretical excuse why the work should not then be completed.’ This assumes that it was his health which sabotaged his work, but one could argue that cause and effect were the other way round. Though Marx’s many ailments over the years were real enough, there was undoubtedly a psychosomatic influence. As he admitted, ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’.

  In the summer of 1851, when starting his regular column for the New York Daily Tribune, he fell ill immediately and begged Engels to take over. A few months later, when asked for a contribution to Weydemeyer’s newspaper Die Revolution, he took to his bed for a week. In the summer of 1857, when poverty forced him to take on hack work for the American Cyclopaedia, he was out of action for three weeks with liver trouble. Now that Lassalle and Duncker were demanding his economic manuscript, anyone who knew Marx would have guessed the consequence. Jenny, for one, was not at all surprised by the sudden bilious bother. In April 1858, at a time when Marx himself was too ill even to write a letter, she told Engels that ‘the worsening of his condition is largely attributable to mental unrest and agitation which now, of course, after the conclusion of the contract with the publisher are greater than ever and increasing daily, since he finds it impossible to bring the thing to a close’. Soon afterwards he spent a week in Manchester, where Engels prescribed his favourite remedy of energetic equestrianism. ‘Moor has been out riding for two hours today,’ Engels revealed in a medical bulletin to Jenny Marx, ‘and feels so well after it that he’s waxing quite enthusiastic about the thing.’ But as soon as he returned to his desk in Grafton Terrace all the old anxieties descended again.