Karl Marx Page 27
One wonders if the Prussian King would have been flattered by this bizarre image of a sabre-rattling baguette. Probably not: in spite of this gushing allegiance, Lassalle actually envisaged a ruling triumvirate of King Wilhelm, Bismarck and himself, and once the middle classes had been forcibly cut down to size he would have no further use for his two partners. His dictatorial scheme, which has been well described as ‘social Caesarism’, was anathema to Marx – and all the more annoying because its rhetoric included much ‘brazen plagiarism’ from the Communist Manifesto to which Lassalle had added his own reactionary, self-serving embellishments. He was the Master, the Redeemer, the Hero on Horseback. Even at the age of twenty, in a ‘Manifesto of War Against the World’, his melodramatic egoism had been uncontainable: ‘Alike to me are all means; nothing is so sacred that I shunned it; and I have won the right of the tiger, the right to tear to pieces … Insofar as I have power over the mind of a person, I will abuse it without mercy … From head to toe I am nothing but Will.’ If he hadn’t existed, Nietzsche would have invented him.
That was the spirit in which he lived – and died. In 1864 Lassalle became infatuated with a Titian-haired young beauty called Helene von Dönniges who was already engaged to one Janko von Rakowitz, a Wallachian prince. The aggrieved fiancé challenged the Superhero to a duel and shot him fatally in the stomach. It was observed that Lassalle did not even lift his pistol, but smiled enigmatically as his rival took aim. Had he come to believe in his own invincibility? Or had he decided that a romantic and premature death would guarantee immortal fame? It was all a great mystery. As Engels commented, ‘Such a thing could only happen to Lassalle, with his strange and altogether unique mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and chivalry.’ The news distressed Marx more than he might have expected. Whatever else he might have been, Lassalle was ‘the foe of our foes’, one of the old guard of quarante-huitards. ‘Heaven knows, our ranks are being steadily depleted, and there are no reinforcements in sight.’ To the Countess von Hatzfeldt he offered the consolation that at least ‘he died young, at a time of triumph, as an Achilles’.
This was a generous tribute in the circumstances. Two years earlier Marx had nearly bankrupted himself while entertaining Lassalle at Grafton Terrace; he had been repaid with tetchiness, mistrust and ultimately silence. Since that visit – and partly because of it, Marx suspected – the family finances had gone from bad to worse. In August 1862, a few days after Lassalle left London, Marx travelled to Zaltbommel in the hope of arranging another loan from Lion Philips only to find that his uncle was away. He then proceeded to Trier, but his mother refused to give him anything. At Christmas that year Jenny Marx tried working her charm on Monsieur Abarbanel, a French banker of their acquaintance, with even more disastrous results. Her ferry to Boulogne nearly sank in a storm; the train taking her to Abarbanel’s house was two hours late; when she finally arrived it turned out that the banker had just been paralysed by a stroke which left him helpless and confined to bed. While returning to London empty-handed, she endured yet more mishaps: a bus in which she was travelling turned over, and then her London cab crashed into another vehicle, losing a wheel. After making her way back to Grafton Terrace on foot, accompanied by two boys carrying her luggage, she learned that Marianne Creuz, Helene Demuth’s stepsister, had died of a heart attack two hours earlier. Imagine the scene: one maid dead in the front room, another howling in grief, a mud-spattered and exhausted wife – and the master of the house wondering where on earth he could find £7.10 in cash to pay the undertakers. Marx allowed himself a bleak laugh at this tragicomic tableau: ‘A fine Christmas show for the poor children.’
For once, however, grotesque misfortune did not have the usual debilitating effect on his health and productivity. Those Lassallean sneers at ‘theory’ had been the goad he needed to finish the book which had been so catastrophically interrupted by the feud with Vogt. ‘If only I knew how to start some sort of business!’ he wrote to Engels in a low moment soon after Lassalle’s trip to London. ‘All theory, dear friend, is grey, and only business green. Unfortunately, I have come to realise this too late.’ It was at about this time that Marx applied for a clerical job on the railways but was rejected because of his poor handwriting. No matter: he could still put his pen to good use, as long as Jenny was there to transcribe the scrawl into something a typesetter could recognise. With few journalistic commissions to distract him, he started writing the next instalment of his critical economy.
‘It is a curious and not unmeaning circumstance that the country where Karl Marx is least known is that in which he has for the last thirty years lived and worked,’ the economist John Rae commented in the Contemporary Review of October 1881, two years before Marx’s death. ‘His word has gone into all the earth and evoked in some quarters echoes which governments will neither let live nor let die; but here, where it was pronounced, its sound has scarcely been heard.’ When Engels sent a detailed analysis of Capital to the liberal Fortnightly Review in 1869, the editorial board returned it with a brief note explaining that it was ‘too scientific for the English Review-reader’. A few years later, at a lecture delivered by an English economist on the ‘harmony of interests’, a socialist in the audience questioned the blithe assumption that all classes of society had the same interests, backing his scepticism with references to Capital. ‘I know of no such work,’ the speaker retorted.
Almost none of Marx’s major works was translated into English during his lifetime and the most important exception, the Communist Manifesto, was available only to the handful of Chartists who subscribed to George Julian Harney’s Red Republican in November 1850. Ten months later, however, a copy turned up belatedly at The Times, which hastened to warn its readers of ‘cheap publications containing the wildest and most anarchical doctrines … in which religion and morality are perverted and scoffed at, and every rule of conduct which experience has sanctioned, and on which the very existence of society depends, openly assailed’. There followed two extracts from the Manifesto – though the source went unacknowledged, since The Times was ‘not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers, or the works of which it is composed’. The Tory politician John Wilson Croker tried to prolong the red-scare by penning a lurid denunciation of ‘Revolutionary Literature’ (complete with the same quotations from the Manifesto) in the Quarterly Review of September 1851. But nobody else seemed inclined to join in. The Communist Manifesto disappeared from view in England until Samuel Moore issued his new translation in 1888, five years after its author’s death.
John Rae may have thought it ‘curious’ that the English paid so little attention to the presence of this old mole burrowing away in the very heart of London, but in fact it was entirely reasonable. How could they have heard of him? After falling out with the radical Harney and the crackpot Urquhart, Marx lost his lines of communication to English workers and intellectuals. The journalism with which he supported his family during the 1850s appeared in the New York Tribune. To the British public he was all but invisible, spending his days at the museum and his evenings in the company of fellow Germans. In May 1869 he joined the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, which had become famous for its involvement in the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, but there is no evidence that he attended any lectures or used the library. He may have been put off by his experience at the Society’s summer party, a ‘Conversazione’ held at the South Kensington Museum on 1 July 1869. Jennychen, his escort for the evening, sent a full report to Engels:
Of all dreary concerns a conversazione is certainly the dreariest. What genius the English have for the inventing of melancholy pleasures! Fancy a crowd of some 7,000 in full evening dress, wedged in so closely as to be unable either to move about or to sit down in the chairs, and they were few and far between, a few imperturbable dowagers had taken by storm … Nothing was to be seen but silks, satins, brocades and laces, and these too on the ugliest of pegs – on women, vulgar, coars
e-featured, dull-eyed, and either short and stumpy or tall and lank. Of the much talked-of beauty of the English aristocracy there wasn’t a trace. We saw only two passably pretty girls. Among the men there was a sprinkling of interesting faces, the owners of which were probably artists, but the great majority consisted of insipid-looking ‘Dundrearys’ and parsons all run to fat.
Her father relieved the tedium by getting squiffy and giggling ostentatiously at a notice that had been handed to all guests, headed ‘Mobbing of Distinguished Persons’, which asked that royal patrons and other eminences should be allowed to walk about unmolested ‘like any private person’. As Jennychen vowed, ‘they won’t catch us there a second time’.
Marx’s encounters with the natives were almost always disastrous, especially if he had a few drinks inside him. One night he set off with Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht for a drunken jaunt up the Tottenham Court Road, intending to have at least one glass of beer in every pub between Oxford Street and the Hampstead Road. Since the route included no fewer than eighteen pubs, by the time they reached the last port of call he was ready for a rumpus. A group of Oddfellows, enjoying a quiet dinner, found themselves accosted by this drunken trio and taunted about the feebleness of English culture. No country but Germany, Marx declared, could have produced such masters as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Haydn; snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for philistines. This was too much even for the mild-mannered Oddfellows. ‘Damned foreigners!’ one growled, while several others clenched their fists. Choosing the better part of valour, the German roisterers fled outside. Liebknecht takes up the story:
Now we had enough of our ‘beer trip’ for the time being, and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double-quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. ‘Hurrah, an idea!’ And in memory of mad students’ pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious – Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps – it was, perhaps, two o’clock in the morning and the streets were deserted … But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately counter-signals were given. The position became critical. Happily, we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed an agility that I should not have attributed to him. And after the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there through an alley – a back yard between two streets – whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe. They did not have our description and we arrived at our homes without further adventures.
While strolling through the London streets Marx would often pause to stroke the hair of some young urchin or ragamuffin sitting in a doorway, and to slip a halfpenny into its little hand. But experience taught him that British adults do not take kindly to strangers with alien accents. Riding up Tottenham Court Road on an omnibus one day, he and Liebknecht noticed a large crowd outside a gin palace and heard a piercing female voice call out ‘Murder! Murder!’ Though Liebknecht tried to restrain him, Marx leaped off the bus and shoved his way into the throng. Alas, the woman was merely a drunken wife enjoying a noisy argument with her husband; and Marx’s arrival at the scene instantly reunited the couple, who turned their anger on the interfering busybody. ‘The crowd closed more and more around us,’ Liebknecht reported, ‘and assumed a threatening attitude against the “damned foreigners”. Especially the woman went full of rage for Marx and concentrated her efforts on his magnificent shining black beard. I endeavoured to soothe the storm – in vain. Had not two strong constables made their appearance in time, we should have had to pay dearly for our philanthropic attempt at intervention.’ Thereafter, Liebknecht noticed, Marx was ‘a little more cautious’ in his encounters with the London proletariat.
Not that he minded. As the historian Kirk Willis has pointed out, ‘by 1860 Marx was not interested in acquiring English disciples or propagandists, for he had another project under way which was much more important – the intellectual destruction of classical political economy’. For the next four years he again took refuge in the anonymity of the British Museum’s reading room, preparing for his final assault on capitalism. ‘I myself, by the by, am working away hard and, strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding misère than it has done for years,’ he told Engels in June 1862, adding that he had hit upon ‘one or two pleasing and surprising novelties’ in his analysis. Between 1861 and 1863 he filled more than 1,500 pages. ‘I am expanding this volume,’ he explained, ‘since those German scoundrels estimate the value of a book in terms of its cubic capacity.’
Theoretical problems which had formerly defeated him were suddenly as clear and invigorating as a glass of gin. Take the question of agricultural rents – or this ‘shitty rent business’ as he preferred to call it. ‘I had long harboured misgivings as to the absolute correctness of Ricardo’s theory, and have at length got to the bottom of the swindle.’ Ricardo had simply confused value and cost price. In mid-Victorian England, the prices of agricultural products were higher than their actual value (i.e. the labour time embodied in them), and the landlord pocketed the difference in the form of higher rent. Under socialism, however, this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers. Thus, even if the market price remained the same, the value of the goods – their ‘social character’ – would change utterly.
He was so pleased with this progress that sometimes optimism got the better of him – as when a doctor from Hanover, Ludwig Kugelmann, wrote at the end of 1862, enquiring when the sequel to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy could be expected. ‘I was delighted to see from your letter how warm an interest is taken by you and your friends in my critique of political economy,’ Marx replied at once. ‘The second part has now at last been finished, i.e. save for the fair copy and the final polishing before it goes to press.’ He concluded with a suggestion that ‘you could write to me occasionally about the situation at home’. Thus began a friendly correspondence that continued for more than ten years, until Marx suddenly decided that he wanted nothing more to do with this ‘hair-splitting philistine’.
The manuscript was nowhere near completion, of course: plenty more carpentry was needed before it would be ready for ‘final polishing’. Even so, this was at least the raw timber from which he built the great baroque masterpiece that finally emerged in 1867. The cumbersome working title – A Contribution to the Critique of Critical Economy, Volume II – was now abandoned. By some inverse logic, big books deserved short names. And so, as he revealed for the first time in that letter to Kugelmann, ‘it will appear on its own under the title Capital’.
9
The Bulldogs and the Hyena
Jenny Marx could never quite share her husband’s fondness for Friedrich Engels. She was grateful for his largesse, of course, just as she appreciated the intellectual companionship and encouragement he gave Karl. She was touched, too, by his interest in the children, who adored their avuncular ‘General’. To Jenny, however, he always remained Mr Engels. An unshockable woman in many ways, happy to contemplate violent revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, she still had enough middle-class propriety – or prudery – to be scandalised by the idea of a man and woman living together out of wedlock, especially when the woman concerned was an illiterate ‘factory girl’.
Engels had met Mary Burns on his first visit to Manchester in 1842, while he was collecting material for The Condition of the Working Classes in England, and they soon became lovers. Though largely uneducated, this lively redhead of proletarian Irish stock taught Engels at least as much as she learned from him. As with her sister Lydia, who eventually joined them in a ménage à trois, he admired her ‘passionate feeling for her class, which was inborn, [and] was worth infinite
ly more to me and had stood by me in all critical moments more strongly than all the aesthetic niceyniceness and wiseacreism of the “eddicated” and “senty-mental” daughters of the bourgeoisie could have done’.
The affair was renewed when Engels and Marx came over in 1845; he then paid for Mary to come and visit him in Brussels for a while. After resigning himself to a life of vile commerce in Manchester, Engels set her up in a little house near his own, and by the end of the 1850s they were living together. On the rare occasions when Jenny Marx was forced to acknowledge Mary’s existence she referred to her as ‘your wife’, though in fact the relationship was never legally solemnised. The addition of Lydia (‘Lizzy’) to the household was an even greater affront to Frau Marx’s puritanical sensibilities. But Engels didn’t give a damn.
His devotion to Mary Burns also caused the only froideur in his otherwise warm and uninterrupted partnership with Karl Marx. Although Marx had no objection to his friend’s unorthodox domestic set-up (in fact it gave him a certain amount of vicarious titillation), out of deference to Jenny he tended to underestimate the importance of the Burns sisters – and never more disastrously than when he received this short, ghastly note from Engels, dated 7 January 1863:
Dear Moor,
Mary is dead. Last night she went to bed early and, when Lizzy wanted to go to bed shortly before midnight, she found she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart failure or an apoplectic stroke. I wasn’t told till this morning; on Monday evening she was still quite well. I simply can’t convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.