CHAPTER 1
Gestation
Although Das Kapital is usually categorized as a work of economics, Karl Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world they inhabit – a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of inanimate capital and commodities.
Marx himself was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on 5 May 1818 – a Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars, three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews of Trier thus became subject to an edict banning them from practising in the professions: Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. No wonder the young Karl Marx began to brood upon alienation. ‘We cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called,’ he wrote in a schoolboy essay, at the age of seventeen. ‘Our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them.’
His father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The years of annexation had given Heinrich a taste for French flavours in politics, religion, life and art: one of his grandchildren described him as ‘a real eighteenth-century “Frenchman” who knew his Voltaire and his Rousseau by heart’. The boy’s other intellectual mentor was Heinrich’s friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter Jenny von Westphalen, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion learned by heart – and later used as the essential seasonings in his own writings. In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. As Professor S. S. Prawer has written, anyone in Karl Marx’s household was obliged to live ‘in a perpetual flurry of allusions to English literature’. There was a quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion – or breathe life into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the voice of Shylock (in Volume I of Das Kapital) to justify the exploitation of child labour in factories.
Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:
My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.
To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as the ‘common whore of mankind’, followed by another from Sophocles’ Antigone (‘Money! Money’s the curse of man, none greater!/That’s what wrecks cities, banishes men from home,/Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul,/Pointing out the way to infamy and shame…’). Economists with anachronistic models and categories are likened to Don Quixote, who ‘paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic forms of society’.
Marx’s earliest ambitions were literary. As a law student at the University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel, Scorpion and Felix, which was dashed off in a fit of intoxicated whimsy while under the spell of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. After these experiments, he admitted defeat: ‘Suddenly, as if by a magic touch – oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow – I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing… A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest – whereupon he at last succumbed to the siren voice of G. W. F. Hegel, the recently deceased professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but by middle age he had become comfortable and complaisant, believing that a truly mature man should recognize ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it’. According to Hegel, ‘All that is real is rational,’ and since the Prussian state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, his conservative supporters argued that it must therefore be rational and above reproach. Those who championed his more subversive early work – the Young Hegelians – preferred to quote the second half of that dictum: ‘All that is rational is real.’ An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage that would disappear as soon as anyone dared touch it.
At university, Marx ‘adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read’ – a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann’s History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus’s Germania and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and ‘spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight’. This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference. The description of Democritus in Marx’s doctoral thesis, on ‘The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’, looks remarkably like a self-portrait: ‘Cicero calls him a vir eruditus. He is competent in physics, ethics, mathematics, in the encyclopaedic disciplines, in every art.’
For a while, Marx seemed uncertain how best to use all that erudition. After gaining his doctorate he thought of becoming a philosophy lecturer, but then decided that daily proximity to professors would be intolerable. ‘Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!’ Besides, since leaving university Marx had been turning his thoughts from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. ‘Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.’ That spring he began writing for a new liberal newspaper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung; within six months he had been appointed editor.
Marx’s journalism is characterized by a reckless belligerence which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation. His very first article for the Rheinische Zeitung was a lacerating assault on both the intolerance of Prussian absolutism and the feeble-mindedness of its liberal opponents. Not content with making enemies of the government and opposition simultaneously, he turned against his own comrades as well, denouncing the Young Hegelians for ‘rowdiness and blackguardism’. Only two months after Marx’s assumption of editorial responsibility, the provincial governor asked the censorship ministers in Berlin to prosecute him for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism’. No less a figure than Tsar Nicholas of Russia also begged the Prussian king to suppress the Rheinische Zeitung, having taken umbrage at an anti-Russian diatribe. The paper was duly closed in March 1843: at the age of twenty-four, Marx was already wielding a pen that could terrify and infuriate the crowned heads of Europe. Realizing that he had no future in Prussia, he accepted an invitation to move to Paris as co-editor of a new journal-in-exile for Germans, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. There was only one caveat: ‘I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.’
Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in June 1843. For the rest of the summer, while awaiting their summons to Paris, he and his new bride enjoyed an extended honeymoon in the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach. When not walking by the river he shut himself away in a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity. Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, and a surviving page from the Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:
Note. Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution… The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).
This simple grammatical inversion also disclosed the flaw in German philosophy. Hegel had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its object, whereas history showed the opposite. Turn Hegel upside down and the problem was solved: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Although he took the idea from Ludwig Feuerbach, who in a recent book had argued that ‘thought arises from being, not being from thought’, Marx extended its logic from abstract philosophy to the material world. As he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, published in 1845, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Here, still in the womb, is the essential thesis of Das Kapital. However glorious its apparent economic triumphs, capitalism remains a disaster since it turns people into commodities, exchangeable for other commodities. Until humans can assert themselves as the subjects of history rather than its objects, there is no escape from this tyranny.
The presiding triumvirate of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – Karl Marx, the journalist Arnold Ruge, the poet Georg Herwegh – arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1843 and set up a ‘phalanstery’ or commune in the Rue Vanneau, inspired by the utopian ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier. The experiment in communal living was short-lived, as was the journal itself: only one issue appeared before the editors fell out. Marx then took up an offer to write for Vorwärts, a bi-weekly Communist newspaper published by German exiles, in which he first outlined his conviction that class consciousness was the fertilizer of revolution. ‘The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French proletariat its politician,’ he wrote, prefiguring a later assessment by Engels that Marxism itself was a hybrid of these three bloodlines. Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French politics; now he set about educating himself in British economics, reading his way systematically through the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and James Mill, scribbling a running commentary as he went along. These notes, commonly known as the Paris manuscripts, are an early rough draft of what eventually became Das Kapital.
The first manuscript begins with this straightforward assertion: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.’ If capital is nothing more than the accumulated fruits of the worker’s labour, then a country’s capitals and revenues grow only when ‘more and more of the worker’s products are being taken from him, when his own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist’. Even in the most propitious economic conditions, the worker’s fate is inevitably ‘overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital’. His labour becomes an external being which ‘exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien’. This image comes from one of Marx’s favourite books, Frankenstein, the tale of a monster that turns against its creator. Although some scholars claim that there is a ‘radical break’ between the thought of the young Marx and the mature Marx, both the analysis and its ghoulish expression are manifestly the work of the same man who argued in Das Kapital, more than twenty years later, that the means by which capitalism raises its productivity ‘distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process… they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the juggernaut of capital’.
In August 1844, while Jenny Marx was visiting her mother in Trier, the twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels came to call on Karl at his Parisian apartment. They had met once before, fleetingly, at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung, and more recently Marx had been profoundly impressed by a ‘Critique of Political Economy’ which Engels submitted to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. One can see why: though he now believed that social and economic forces drove the engine of history, he had no direct knowledge of capitalism in practice. Engels was well placed to enlighten him, as the son and heir of a German cotton manufacturer who owned mills in Manchester – heartland of the Industrial Revolution and birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League, a city teeming with Chartists, Owenists and socialist agitators of every kind. Engels had moved to Lancashire in the autumn of 1842, ostensibly to learn about the family business but actually with the intention of observing the human consequences of Victorian capitalism. By day he was a diligent young manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed sides, exploring the city’s proletarian streets and slums to gather material for his early masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
Although Marx and Engels spent ten days together in Paris, the only account of their epic conversation comes in a single sentence written by Engels more than forty years later: ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.’ They complemented each other perfectly – Marx with his wealth of knowledge, Engels with his knowledge of wealth. Marx wrote slowly and painfully, with countless inky deletions and emendations, while Engels’s manuscripts are neat, businesslike and elegant. Marx lived in chaos and penury for most of his life; Engels held down a full-time job while also maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and still found the time to enjoy the pleasures of high bourgeois life, with horses in his stables and plenty of wine in his cellars. Yet despite his obvious advantages, Engels knew from the outset that he would never be the dominant partner. He accepted, without complaint or jealousy, that his duty was to give the intellectual and financial support that made Marx’s work possible. ‘I simply cannot understand,’ he wrote, ‘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.’
They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: their correspondence is a pungent stew of history and gossip, arcane economics and schoolboy jokes. Engels also served as a kind of substitute mother to Marx – despatching pocket money, fussing over his health and continually warning him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, from October 1844, he was already urging Marx to turn his political and economic notes into a book without delay: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ Three months later his impatience was growing: ‘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.’ A forlorn hope: more than two decades passed before the first volume of Das Kapital was at last delivered to the presses.
Engels himself is not entirely blameless here. Soon after meeting Marx in Paris he proposed that they collaborate on a short pamphlet – forty pages at most – criticizing the more excitable Young Hegelians. Having finished his own portion of twenty pages within a few days, Engels was ‘not a little surprised’ several months later to learn that the pamphlet had now swollen to 300 pages. Marx was the kind of writer who could never resist a distraction, preferring the immediate gratification of pamphlets and articles to the mute inglorious toil required for his magnum opus, then provisionally titled A Critique of Economics and Politics. Despite having promised to deliver the economic manuscript to the German publisher Karl Leske by the end of summer 1845, he set it aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘It seemed to me very important,’ he explained to Leske, ‘to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present… If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’ A likely story: the book in question, The German Ideology, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ Marx wrote, ‘all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.’
Yet he was still unable or unwilling to give the economic work his full attention. There would be many more polemical interruptions over the next few years: The Poverty of Philosophy, a 100-page philippic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; The Great Men of the Exile, a verbose satire on the ‘more noteworthy jackasses’ and ‘democratic scallywags’ of the socialist diaspora; The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, an anti-Russian tirade; The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston, in which he sought to prove that the British foreign secretary was a secret agent of the Russian Tsar; and Herr Vogt, a flailing assault on the professor of natural science at Berne University, who had incurred Marx’s wrath by calling him a charlatan and a sponger. ‘Tit for tat, reprisals make the world go round,’ he hummed merrily to himself while wasting the better part of a year on his feud with Vogt.
Progress was further hampered by continual domestic upheavals. In January 1845 the Prussian envoy in Paris protested to King Louis Philippe about an article from Vorwärts in which Marx ridiculed King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The French Interior Minister duly closed the magazine and ordered the author’s expulsion from France. The only king in mainland Europe willing to take him in was Leopold I of Belgium, and then only after receiving a written promise that Marx would not publish ‘any work on current politics’. Assuming that this needn’t prevent him from participating in politics, Marx summoned Engels to join him in Brussels, where they founded a Communist Correspondence Committee to maintain ‘a continuous interchange of letters’ with socialist groups in Western Europe. By 1847 the committee had converted itself into a branch of the newly formed Communist League in London, which then invited Marx to produce a draft statement of principles. What he gave them was The Manifesto of the Communist Party, probably the most widely read and influential pamphlet in history.
When he wrote the manifesto, in the first weeks of 1848, Marx thought that bourgeois capitalism had already served its purpose and would soon be buried under its own contradictions. By driving hitherto isolated workers into mills and factories, modern industry had created the very conditions in which the proletariat could combine into an irresistible force. ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers.’ Because he thought he was rehearsing a funeral oration, however, he could afford to be generous to the vanquished foe. One critic has described the manifesto as ‘a lyrical celebration of bourgeois works’, and first-time readers are often astonished by the praise he lavishes on the enemy:
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange-value… The bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
He would replay these themes with far greater depth and complexity in Das Kapital, but for now there was no time to elaborate. Both the manifesto’s opening sentence (‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’) and its equally famous conclusion (‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution… WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’) confirm that this is a piece of agitprop, albeit one of unmatched intelligence, written in haste at a time when insurrection seemed imminent.
By happy coincidence, revolution did indeed break out in the week of its publication in February 1848, first in Paris and then, with the speed of brushfire, across much of continental Europe. Following the abdication of King Louis Philippe and the proclamation of a French Republic, the panic-stricken Belgian government ordered Karl Marx to quit the country within twenty-four hours and never return. Fortunately he had just received an invitation from the new provisional government in Paris: ‘Good and loyal Marx… Tyranny exiled you, now free France opens its doors to you and all those who are fighting for the holy cause, the fraternal cause of all peoples.’ After only a month in Paris, however, he departed for Cologne in the hope of spreading revolution in Germany. His chosen weapon, as so often, was the printed word: he established a new daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which endured constant official harassment throughout its brief life. In July he was hauled up before the magistrates for ‘insulting or libelling the chief prosecutor’; in September, after the declaration of martial law, the Cologne military commander suspended publication for a month; the following February, when any possibility of revolution had been thoroughly extinguished, he was charged with ‘incitement to revolt’ but persuaded the jury to acquit him with a brilliant speech from the dock. Finally, in May 1849 the Prussian authorities prosecuted half of the editorial staff and recommended the other half – including Marx, who had forfeited his citizenship – for deportation.
He returned to Paris in June 1849, only to find the city in the grip of a royalist reaction and a cholera epidemic. Served with an official order banishing him to the malaria-infested département of Morbihan in Brittany, he took refuge in the only European country still willing to accommodate rootless revolutionaries. He sailed to Britain on 27 August 1849 and remained there until his death in 1883. ‘You must leave for London at once,’ he wrote to Engels, who was visiting Switzerland. ‘In London we shall get down to business.’
A few months after his arrival in London, Karl Marx noticed a working model of an electric railway engine in the window of a Regent Street shop. He became ‘flushed and excited’, according to a witness – not from the thrill of novelty but because of the economic implications. ‘The problem is solved – the consequences are indefinable,’ he told his fellow gawpers. ‘In the wake of the economic revolution the political must necessarily follow, for the latter is only the expression of the former.’ It seems unlikely that anyone else in the Regent Street throng had paused to consider the economic and political consequences of this Trojan iron horse; for Marx, it was all that mattered.
Having obtained a ticket to the British Museum reading room in June 1850, he spent much of the next year reading books on economics and back numbers of The Economist. By April 1851 he 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.’ He sat in the reading room from nine in the morning until seven in the evening most days, but there seemed no end to the 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 wrote in June. ‘There are, moreover, constant interruptions of a practical kind, inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are vegetating here…’
From the moment of their arrival in London, Karl and Jenny Marx were beset by one domestic crisis after another. They already had three young children, and a fourth was born in November 1849. Evicted from a Chelsea flat in May 1850 for non-payment of rent, they found temporary shelter in the house of a Jewish lace-dealer in Dean Street, Soho, where they spent a miserable summer teetering on the edge of destitution before moving to a more permanent billet up the road. Jenny was pregnant again, and constantly ill. Engels came to the rescue by sacrificing his own journalistic ambitions in London and returning to the Manchester office of Ermen & Engels, where he remained for the next twenty years. Although this was largely for the purpose of supporting his brilliant, impecunious friend, he also acted as a kind of agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade and expert observations on the state of international markets – as well as regular consignments of banknotes, pilfered from the petty-cash box or guilefully prised out of the company’s bank account.
Even with these subventions, the Marxes lived in squalor and near despair. The furniture and fittings in their two-room apartment were all broken, tattered or torn, with a thick carpet of dust over everything. The entire ménage – parents, children, housekeeper – slept in a small back bedroom, while the other room served as a study, playroom and kitchen. A Prussian police spy who inveigled his way into the flat reported back to his masters in Berlin that Marx ‘leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual… Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.’ This chaotic existence was punctuated by regular domestic tragedies. The Marxes’ youngest son, Guido, died suddenly from a fit of convulsions in November 1850; their one-year-old daughter Franziska died at Easter 1852 after a severe attack of bronchitis. Another son, his beloved Edgar, died of consumption in March 1855. Out of his wits with grief, Marx stepped forward as the coffin was lowered into the earth and convinced most of the mourners that he intended to hurl himself in after it. One stuck out a restraining hand, just in case.
‘If only,’ Engels wrote in his letter of condolence after Franziska’s death, ‘there were some means by which you and your family could move into a more salubrious district and more spacious lodgings.’ Whether or not penury killed Franziska, it certainly dominated the lives of her parents. Irate creditors – butchers, bakers, bailiffs – were continually banging at the front door and demanding payment. ‘A week ago I reached the pleasant point where I am unable to go out for want of the coats I have in pawn,’ Marx wrote in February 1852, ‘and can no longer eat meat for want of credit.’ Later that year he revealed to Engels that ‘for the past eight to ten days I have been feeding the family solely on bread and potatoes, but whether I shall be able to get hold of any today is doubtful… How am I to get out of this infernal mess?’ By then he was earning a regular stipend as European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, to which he submitted two articles a week at £2 apiece, but even with Engels’s extra subsidy it was not enough – and, of course, provided yet another reason for failing to concentrate on his economic masterwork.
‘But, for all that, the thing is rapidly approaching completion,’ he wrote in June 1851. ‘There comes a time when one has forcibly to break off.’ This shows a comical lack of self-knowledge: Marx could happily break off from friends and political associations, but he had no such facility for letting go of his work – especially not this work, a vast compendium of statistics and history and philosophy which would at last lay bare the shameful secrets of capitalism. The more he researched and wrote, the further it seemed to be from completion. ‘The main thing,’ Engels advised in November 1851, ‘is that you should once again make a public debut with a big book… It’s absolutely essential to break the spell created by your prolonged absence from the German book market.’ Then the project was laid aside once again, a victim of yet more ‘constant interruptions’. Immediately after the French coup of December 1851 he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte at the request of the new American weekly Die Revolution. The next few years were largely wasted on feuds and score-settling polemics against fellow émigrés. Marx argued that these were essential political interventions rather than manifestations of pique, since false socialist messiahs – if left unexposed – were far more attractive to the masses than genuine monarchs. ‘I am engaged in a fight to the death with the sham liberals,’ he declared.
What eventually drove him back to economic studies was the apparent arrival of the long-awaited international financial cataclysm in the autumn of 1857. Beginning with a bank collapse in New York, the crisis spread through Austria, Germany, France and England like a galloping apocalypse. Engels, who had been convalescing from illness, scuttled back to his post in Manchester to witness the fun – plummeting prices, daily bankruptcies and wild panic. ‘The general appearance of the [Cotton] Exchange here was truly delightful,’ he reported. ‘The fellows are utterly infuriated by my sudden and inexplicable onset of high spirits.’ Marx, too, was infected by the melodramatic spirit of the moment. Throughout the winter of 1857–8 he sat in his study until about 4 a.m. every night, collating his economic papers ‘so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge’. The flood never came; but Marx continued to build his ark, convinced that it would be needed sooner or later. When his rudimentary arithmetic proved inadequate for complex economic formulae he took a quick revision course in algebra, explaining that ‘for the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter thoroughly’.
His nocturnal scribblings, which ran to more than 800 pages, remained unseen until the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow released them from the archives in 1939, and became widely available only with the publication of a German edition in 1953, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’). Despite its vast length, the Grundrisse is a fragmentary work – described by Marx himself as a real hotchpotch – but as the missing link between the Paris manuscripts of 1844 and the first volume of Das Kapital (1867) it demonstrates the continuity of his ideas. There are long sections on alienation, dialectics and the meaning of money which echo passages from the 1844 manuscripts, the most striking difference being that he now merges philosophy and economics whereas before they were treated as separate disciplines. (As the German writer Ferdinand Lassalle commented, he was ‘a Hegel turned economist, a Ricardo turned socialist’.) Elsewhere, the analysis of labour-power and surplus value reads like a draft of the fuller exposition of these theories in Das Kapital.
Marx often referred to his work in this period as ‘the economic shit’, and in that contemptuous phrase there was undoubtedly an element of guilt. As long ago as 1845 he had pretended that the treatise on political economy was almost finished, and over the next thirteen years he had repeated and embellished the lie so often that his friends’ expectations were raised to an almost impossible pitch. Judging by the time taken, they assumed that it must indeed be a huge explosive charge that would instantly destroy the baseless edifices of capitalism. The regular bulletins to Engels in Manchester maintained the myth of striding progress. ‘I have completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded,’ he announced jubilantly in January 1858. In truth, however, 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 jottings.
At the beginning of 1858, Ferdinand Lassalle offered to arrange a contract for Marx with a Berlin publisher called Duncker (whose wife happened to be one of Lassalle’s mistresses). Marx informed the publisher that his ‘critical exposé of the system of bourgeois economy’ would be divided into six books, which should be issued in instalments: ‘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.’ The first volume would be ready for the printers in May, followed by the second within a few months, and so on. However, as so often when he faced tight deadlines, Marx’s body rebelled in protest. ‘I’ve been so ill with my bilious complaint this week that I am incapable of thinking, reading, writing or, indeed, of anything,’ he confided to Engels in April 1858. Beset by liver pains, he found that whenever he sat and wrote 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 non-completion of the work,’ Engels commented many years later, when rereading some old letters. As Marx himself admitted, ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’. But other distractions were real enough: his daughter Eleanor went down with whooping cough; his wife was ‘a nervous wreck’; the pawnbroker and the tallyman were clamouring for payment. As Marx joked grimly, ‘I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about “money” when so short of the stuff.’ Despite writing almost nothing through the summer, he promised at the end of September 1858 that the manuscript would be ready for posting ‘in two weeks’ – but confessed a month later that ‘it will be weeks before I am able to send it’. Everything conspired against him: even the world economic crisis, by fizzling out too soon, had provoked a bad temper and thus given him ‘the most appalling toothache’.
By the middle of November, six months after the initial deadline, Lassalle gently inquired on behalf of the Berlin publisher if the book was nearly ready. Marx replied that the procrastination ‘merely signified the endeavour to give him the best value for his money’. As he explained:
The style of everything I wrote seemed tainted with liver trouble. And I have a twofold motive for not allowing this work to be spoiled on medical grounds:
It is the product of fifteen years of research, i.e. the best years of my life.
In it an important view of social relations is scientifically expounded for the first time. Hence I owe it to the Party that the thing shouldn’t be disfigured by the kind of heavy, wooden style proper to a disordered liver…
I shall have finished about four weeks from now, having only just begun the actual writing.
This must have come as a surprise to Lassalle, who had been assured back in February that the text was in its ‘final stages’. Engels, too, was in for a shock. After finally sending the parcel to Berlin in January 1859, Marx told him: ‘The manuscript amounts to about twelve sheets [192 pages] of print (three instalments) and – don’t be bowled over by this – although entitled “Capital in General”, these instalments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital.’ After all those loud and lengthy fanfares, he had produced nothing more than a slim volume. Half of it was simply a summary of other economists’ theories, and the only section of lasting interest was an autobiographical preface describing how his reading of Hegel and his journalism at the Rheinische Zeitung had led him to the conclusion that ‘the anatomy of civil society is to be found in political economy’.
Marx put on a brave show of hyperbolic huckstering as publication day loomed, predicting that the book – now titled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – would be translated and admired throughout the civilized world. But his friends were appalled: the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht said that never had a book disappointed him so much. There were few reviews. ‘The secret hopes we had long nourished in regard to Karl’s book were all set at naught by the Germans’ conspiracy of silence,’ Jenny Marx complained. ‘The second instalment may startle the slugabeds out of their lethargy.’
The next instalment was due a few months after the first. Marx now adjusted the deadline slightly, imposing an ‘extreme limit’ of December 1859 for completing his thesis on capital, which had been so inexplicably omitted from the Critique. But for the next year his economic notebooks lay unopened on the desk as he pursued his feud with Karl Vogt of Berne University through newspaper articles, libel actions and a full-length book. No sooner was that finished than the new Prussian king celebrated his coronation with an amnesty for political émigrés, raising Marx’s hope that he could return home and found a newspaper modelled on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. This prompted a long – and fruitless – fund-raising trip to Germany in the spring of 1861, financed by Ferdinand Lassalle, followed by a return of hospitality when Lassalle decided to come to London for the second Great Exhibition in 1862. ‘The fellow has wasted my time,’ Marx grumbled during the third week of that ordeal, ‘and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any “business” just now, but merely upon a “theoretical work”, I might just as well kill time with him!’
Lassalle’s sneer at ‘theory’ turned out to be the goad Marx needed to finish the job which had been so calamitously interrupted by the duel with Vogt. With few journalistic commissions to divert him, he took refuge again in the British Museum reading room, gathering the ammunition for his final assault on capitalism. The notes he took in 1862 and 1863 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 hitherto defeated him were now as clear and invigorating as a glass of gin. Take the question of agricultural rents – or the ‘shitty rent business’, as he called 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.’ David Ricardo had simply confused value and cost-price. The prices of agricultural products were higher than their actual value (as measured by the labour-time embedded in them), and the landlord pocketed the difference in the form of higher rent; but under a socialist system this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers. Even if the market price remained the same, the value of the goods – their ‘social character’ – would change utterly.
Marx’s delight at his progress bred over-optimism. At the end of 1862 an admirer from Hanover, Dr Ludwig Kugelmann, wrote to ask when the sequel to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy could be expected. ‘The second part has now at last been finished,’ Marx replied, ‘save for the fair copy and the final polishing before it goes to press.’ He also revealed for the first time that the cumbersome working title, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Volume II’, had been abandoned. By some inverse logic, big books deserved short names, and so ‘it will appear on its own under the title Das Kapital’.
In truth, much more carpentry would be required before his raw timber was ready for ‘final polishing’; and soon a new distraction lured him from his workshop. Marx had declined all requests to participate in new political groups ever since the collapse of the Communist League in 1850, ‘firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day’, but in September 1864 curiosity got the better of him when an invitation arrived to the inaugural meeting of the International Working Men’s Association, an Anglo-French alliance of trade unionists and socialists. Although he attended only as a silent observer, at the end of the evening he was co-opted on to the General Council – and by 1865 had become its de facto leader.
It was a time-consuming commitment. A letter to Engels in March 1865 describes a typical week’s work: Tuesday evening was given over to the General Council, which bickered until after midnight; the next day there was a public meeting in Covent Garden to mark the anniversary of the Polish insurrection; Saturday and Monday were devoted to committee meetings on ‘the French question’, both of which continued until one in the morning; and so to Tuesday, with another long slanging-match between English and French members of the General Council. In between all these engagements, there were ‘people dashing this way and that to see me’ in connection with a conference on suffrage which was to be held the following weekend. ‘What a waste of time!’ he groaned. Engels thought so too. Why did his friend wish to spend hours signing membership cards and arguing with fractious committee men when he could be at his desk writing Das Kapital? ‘I have always thought that the naïve fraternité in the International Association would not last long,’ he warned after yet another bout of internecine squabbling among the French. ‘It will pass through many more such phases and will take up a great deal of your time.’
Through the summer of 1865 Marx was vomiting every day (‘in consequence of the hot weather and related biliousness’) and plagued by carbuncles. A sudden influx of house guests – Jenny’s brother from Germany, Marx’s brother-in-law from South Africa, a niece from Maastricht – provided further unwelcome interruptions. There was also the familiar queue of creditors ‘hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day’. And yet, at the still point of this whirlwind, his unknown masterpiece was nearing completion. By the end of the year Das Kapital was a manuscript of 1,200 pages, a blotted mess of crossings-out and indecipherable squiggles. On New Year’s Day 1866 he sat down to make a fair copy, ‘licking the infant clean after long birth pangs’. It took just over a year. Even liver trouble and carbuncles couldn’t thwart him: he wrote the last few pages standing at his desk when an eruption of boils on the bottom made sitting too painful. (Arsenic, the usual anaesthetic, ‘dulls my mind too much and I needed to keep my wits about me’.) Engels’s experienced eye immediately spotted certain passages in the text where the carbuncles had left their mark, and Marx agreed that they might have given the prose a rather livid hue. ‘At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,’ he cursed. ‘What swine they are!’
The boils disappeared as soon as he completed the last page. ‘I always had the feeling,’ Engels told him, ‘that that damn book, which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back.’ Feeling ‘as voraciously fit as 500 hogs’, Marx set off for Hamburg in April 1867 to deliver the manuscript and oversee its printing. Even the news that the publisher expected the next two volumes before the end of the year couldn’t dampen his high spirits. ‘I hope and confidently believe that in the space of a year I shall be made,’ he predicted. The reactions of those who were allowed to glimpse parts of the work encouraged him to hope that his name and fame would resound throughout Europe. In the words of Johann Georg Eccarius, an old ally from the Communist League and the International Working Men’s Association: ‘The Prophet himself is just now having the quintessence of all wisdom published.’