Karl Marx Read online

  As written by Engels, the poem began by lamenting that the Bedouin – ‘sons of the desert, proud and free’ – had been robbed of that pride and freedom, and were now mere performing exhibits for the amusement of tourists. It ended with a stirring battle-cry:

  Go home again, exotic guests!

  Your desert robes do not belong

  With our Parisian coats and vests,

  Nor with our literature your song!

  The idea, he explained later, was ‘to contrast the Bedouin, even in their present condition, and the audience, who are quite alien to these people’. But in the published text this was replaced with a new final stanza, added by the editor himself without the author’s permission:

  They jump at money’s beck and call,

  And not at Nature’s primal urge.

  Their eyes are blank, they’re silent, all

  Except for one who sings a dirge.

  Thus an angry exhortation was reduced to nothing more than a melancholy, rueful shrug of the shoulders. Engels was understandably displeased: in his primitive fashion he had already noticed that society is shaped by economic imperatives, but the editor would not allow him to name or condemn the culprits. ‘It has become clear to me,’ he concluded after this unhappy début, ‘that my rhyming achieves nothing.’

  His literary tastes were becoming more political and prosaic. He bought a topical pamphlet, Jacob Grimm über seiner Entlassung, which described the dismissal by Göttingen University of seven liberal professors who had dared to protest at the oppressive regime of Ernst August, the new King of Hanover. ‘It is extraordinarily good and written with a rare power.’ He read no fewer than seven pamphlets on the ‘Cologne affair’ – the refusal, in 1837, of the Archbishop of Cologne to obey the King of Prussia. ‘I have read things here and come across expressions – I am getting good practice, especially in literature – which one would never be allowed to print in our parts, quite liberal ideas, etc … really wonderful.’ In one of his letters to the Graebers, emboldened by beer, he referred to Ernst August as ‘the old Hanoverian he-goat’.

  The most obviously ‘progressive’ voices of the time came from the Young Germany group of writers, disciples of Heine who advocated free speech, the emancipation of women, an end to religious tyranny, and abolition of hereditary aristocracy. ‘Who can have anything against that?’ Engels asked, half-mockingly. He was impatient with their easy, vague liberalism, but in the absence of anything more rigorous or analytical he had nowhere else to turn. ‘What shall I, poor devil, do now? Go on swotting on my own? Don’t feel like it. Turn loyal? The devil if I will!’ So, faute de mieux, he became a Young German himself. ‘I cannot sleep at night, all because of the ideas of the century. When I am at the post office and look at the Prussian coat of arms, I am seized with the spirit of freedom. Every time I look at a newspaper I hunt for advances of freedom. They get into my poems and mock at the obscurantists in monk’s cowls and in ermine.’

  Back home in Barmen his parents knew nothing of their son’s democratic fever: he did his best to keep them in ignorance, then and for many years afterwards. Even in middle age, when he and Marx were joyfully awaiting the imminent crisis of capitalism, Engels was always on his best behaviour during Friedrich senior’s visits to Manchester, playing the part of a dutiful heir who could be trusted with the family fortune – just as, out riding with the Cheshire Hunt, he was able to pass himself off as a conservative local businessman. His communism, his atheism, his sexual promiscuity: these all belonged to his separate life.

  To those in the know, Engels’s true opinions of his parents and their milieu were obvious as early as March 1839, when he wrote a coruscating attack on the smug, complacent burghers of Barmen and Elberfeld for the Telegraph für Deutschland, a Young Germany newspaper. The eighteen-year-old author hid behind the pseudonym ‘Friedrich Oswald’ – a necessary precaution, since the articles were nothing less than journalistic parricide. In the ‘gloomy streets’ of Elberfeld, he reported, all the alehouses were full to overflowing on Saturday and Sunday nights:

  and when they close at about eleven o’clock, the drunks pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter … The reasons for this state of affairs are perfectly clear. First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen – and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six – is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness.

  As the reference to mysticism implies, Engels had already identified religion as a handmaiden of exploitation and hypocrisy: ‘For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.’ He even named some of these snivelling pharisees, though he forbore to mention his own father.

  The ‘Letters from Elberfeld’ caused outrage. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he wrote to Friedrich Graeber, one of the few to be let in on the secret. ‘Do you know who wrote the article in the Telegraph? The author is the writer of these lines, but I advise you not to say anything about it. I could get into a hell of a lot of trouble.’

  In the spring of 1841 Engels left Bremen for military service in Berlin, enlisting in the Household Artillery. The choice of Berlin, capital city of Young Hegelianism, was no accident: though his army uniform gave him a camouflage of respectability and reassured his parents, he spent every spare moment immersing himself in radical theology and journalism. He pulled off a similar trick in the autumn of 1842 when dispatched to the Manchester branch of Ermen & Engels: while apparently training himself in the family business, as a dutiful heir should, he took the opportunity to investigate the human consequences of capitalism. Manchester was the birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League, the centre of the 1842 General Strike, a city teeming with Chartists, Owenites and industrial agitators of every kind. Here, if anywhere, he would discover the nature of the beast. By day he was a quietly diligent young manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed sides, exploring the terra incognita of proletarian Lancashire to gather facts and impressions for his early masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Often accompanied by his new lover, a redheaded Irish factory girl called Mary Burns, he ventured into slum districts which few other men of his class had ever seen. Here, for example, is his picture of ‘Little Ireland’, the area of Manchester south-west of the Oxford Road:

  Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live?

  What gave the book its power and depth was Engels’s skilful interweaving (he was a textile man, after all) of firsthand observation with information from parliamentary commissions, health officials and copies of Hansard. The British state may have done little or nothing to improve the l
ot of the workers, but it had collected a mass of data about the horrors of industrial life which was available to anyone who cared to retrieve it from a dusty library shelf. Newspaper reports, particularly from criminal trials, provided yet more details. ‘On Monday, 15 January, 1844,’ Engels noted:

  two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman. The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband … When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed.

  Engels was astonished to discover that the organs of the British bourgeoisie provided so much incriminating evidence against themselves. After quoting several gruesome cases of disease and starvation, published in the middle-class Manchester Guardian, he exulted: ‘I delight in the testimony of my opponents.’ One need only study the citations from government Blue Books and The Economist in the first volume of Capital to see how much Karl Marx learned from this technique.

  Marx and Engels complemented each other perfectly. While Engels couldn’t begin to match Marx’s erudition, having missed out on university, he had invaluable firsthand knowledge of the machinery of capitalism. But the ‘complete agreement in all theoretical fields’ didn’t extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels’s script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and often ghost-writing articles for Marx as well. Yet he always found the time to enjoy the comforts of high bourgeois life: horses in his stables, plenty of wine in his cellar and mistresses in the bedroom. During the long years when Marx was almost drowning in squalor, fending off creditors and struggling to keep his family alive, the childless Engels pursued the carefree pleasures of a prosperous bachelor.

  In spite of the obvious disparity of advantage, Engels knew that he would never be the dominant partner. He deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidise the indigent sage without complaint or jealousy – even, come to that, without much gratitude. ‘I simply cannot understand,’ he wrote in 1881, nearly forty years after that first meeting, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded.’ Marx’s friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.

  They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn’t hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. In a letter to Engels on 23 March 1853, to take a more or less random example, Marx discusses the rapid increase in British exports to the Turkish dominions, Disraeli’s position in the Conservative Party, the passage of the Canadian Clergy Reserves Bill through the House of Commons, the harassment of refugees by the British police, the activities of German communists in New York, an attempt by Marx’s publisher to swindle him, the condition of Hungary – and the alleged flatulence of the Empress Eugénie: ‘That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to farting and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it. At one time she resorted to horse-riding as a remedy. But this having now been forbidden her by Bonaparte, she “vents” herself. It’s only a noise, a little murmur, a nothing, but then you know that the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind.’

  As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: ‘Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiösen Formalitäten z. B. Auguris etc. od. d.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.’ Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx’s handwriting, as was Jenny. Apart from those two close collaborators, however, few have managed the task without tearing their hair out. After Marx’s death, Engels had to give a lengthy course of instruction in paleography to the German Social Democrats who wished to organise the great man’s unpublished papers.

  Engels served Marx as a kind of substitute mother – sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and continually reminding him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, written in October 1844, he was already chivvying Marx to finish his political and economic manuscripts: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ And again on 20 January 1845: ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot … So try and finish before April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’

  Fat chance. Marx was led astray by Engels himself, who made the mistake of proposing that they collaborate on a pamphlet demolishing Bruno Bauer and his troupe of clowns, under the working title Critique of Critical Criticism. He emphasised that it should be no more than forty pages long, since ‘I find all this theoretical twaddle daily more tedious and am irritated by every word that has to be expended on the subject of “man”, by every line that has to be read or written against theology and abstraction …’

  Engels dashed off his portion of twenty pages while still at the flat in the Rue Vanneau, and then returned home to the Rhineland. He was ‘not a little surprised’, several months later, to hear that the pamphlet was now a swollen monstrosity of more than 300 pages and had been renamed The Holy Family. ‘If you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd,’ he pointed out. ‘I contributed practically nothing to it.’ But this was not the only reason for wanting his name removed. ‘The Critical Criticism has still not arrived!’ he told Marx in February 1845. ‘Its new title, The Holy Family, will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you, of course, could not have known that.’ The angry parent was, of course, his bigoted and despotic father, who had begun to fear for the boy’s Christian soul. ‘If I get a letter, it’s sniffed all over before it reaches me,’ he grumbled. ‘I can’t eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by the same accursed lamb-of-God expression.’ One day, when Engels staggered home at two in the morning, the suspicious patriarch asked if he had been arrested. Not at all, Engels replied reassuringly: he had simply been discussing communism with Moses Hess. ‘With Hess!’ his father spluttered. ‘Great heavens! What company you keep!’

  He didn’t know the half of it. ‘Now all my old man has to do is to discover the existence of the Critical Criticism and he will be quite capable of flinging me out of the house. And on top of it all there’s the constant irritat
ion of seeing that nothing can be done with these people, that they positively want to flay and torture themselves with their infernal fantasies, and that one can’t even teach them the most platitudinous principles of justice.’

  The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Consorts was published in Frankfurt in the spring of 1845. Rereading the book more than twenty years later, Marx was ‘pleasantly surprised to find that we have no need to feel ashamed of the piece, although the Feuerbach cult now makes a most comical impression on one’. Few other readers have shared his satisfaction. By the time Marx started writing this scornful epic, the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer – the holy family of the title – had already slipped from militant atheism and communism into mere buffoonery, rather like the Dadaists or Futurists of the 1930s. All they deserved or needed was a quick slap, not a full-scale bombardment. Who shoots a housefly with a blunderbuss?

  Marx’s scattergun hit other targets who were no more worthy of his attentions. There were several chapters of invective against Eugène Sue, an author of popular sentimental novels, whose only offence was to have been praised in Bruno Bauer’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Though Sue may well have been every bit as dire as Marx suggested, the punishment was absurdly disproportionate to the crime: try to imagine, by way of a modern equivalent, a magnum opus by Professor George Steiner attacking The Bridges of Madison County. Even Engels had to admit that Marx was wasting his sourness on the desert air. ‘The thing’s too long,’ he wrote. ‘The supreme contempt we two evince towards the Literatur-Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets [352 pages] we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and of abstract being in general will be incomprehensible to the public at large, nor will it be of general interest. Otherwise the book is splendidly written …’

  Or, as the tactful curate said on being served a rotten egg by his bishop, ‘No, my lord, parts of it are excellent!’