Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in the small German town of Trier, near the Luxembourg border. Trier is the oldest town in Germany, and in 334 or thereabouts had been the birthplace of another man who changed European history, St Ambrose. The town was part of the Rhineland, had been ruled by Napoleon, and in some ways had benefited by his rule. Though incorporated into Prussia in 1815, it was rather more liberal than most Prussian lands. Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer, and an admirer of Rousseau and the French Enlightenment. His mother, Henrietta, of whom we know rather little, was Dutch. Both parents were Jewish, and there were many rabbis in Karl Marx’s ancestry, on both sides of the family. However, Heinrich (whose name had been Hirschel) had converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl’s birth, though Karl was not baptized until he was six. The conversion was a matter of convenience rather than conviction and, like most people with a background in such conversions, Karl Marx was never deeply affected by religion. In his school essays he expressed a conventional, rationalistic Protestantism, but as an adult was a lifelong atheist.
Marx was educated in the Frederick William High School in Trier, and went to university at Bonn and later Berlin, initially to study law, though he later moved over to philosophy. Having been brought up by his father on Enlightenment writers, and introduced by Baron von Westphalen, the father of his future wife, to the romantics, at university he encountered Hegel, whose philosophical system dominated German universities at that time. In Hegel’s thought, many apparent opposites are reconciled, for instance the French Revolutionary belief in the sovereignty of reason and the romantics’ belief in organic community. Hegel’s political philosophy is not a compromise between reason and organic community. It is, in intention, rationalist through and through, and organic through and through. The same could be said, in a different way, of the society Marx was to aim for.
There is a long-standing academic debate on how much Hegel’s philosophy influenced that of the mature Marx, which debate I shall avoid introducing into this book wherever possible. But I think Hegel’s influence on Marx’s cultural attitudes is profound, and left Marx with a far broader outlook and more balanced judgement in these matters than most revolutionaries. I think it would be true to say that what is best in Marx is what is original to him, what is second best is derived from Hegel, and what is mistaken is derived from the Jacobin tradition inherited from the French Revolution.
After obtaining a PhD on the rather obscure topic of the relation between the ancient Greek atomist philosophers Democritus and Epicurus, Marx might have entered an academic career, but his opinions, while not yet socialist, were already democratic and anti-clerical, and this was well enough known to make academic employment unlikely. He began to work for a Cologne-based liberal journal, the Rheinische Zeitung, of which he soon became editor. This was his first engagement in serious politics. It lasted only a few months, since the journal was suppressed by the censors at the request of the Russian tsar, whom it had attacked. Marx decided to move to Paris to work with Arnold Ruge on a projected new journal, the Deutsche–Französische Jahrbucher. While working for the Rheinische Zeitung one experience influenced Marx deeply. He had to consider the issue of ‘thefts of wood’ by the peasants of the Moselle wine-growing area – thefts according to the property owners, the exercise of their traditional right of gathering wood according to the peasants. This alerted Marx to the roots of politics in the social and economic conditions of the people.
Before leaving Germany, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, to whom he had been engaged for seven years. They were married in Kreuznach, and stayed there for the summer of 1843, until everything was ready for them to go to Paris. In Paris, their first child, also called Jenny, was born. She nearly died of convulsions there, and was saved by the presence of mind of the poet Heinrich Heine, one of the few friends with whom Marx never quarrelled.
In Paris too, Marx encountered for the first time not only socialist writers, but the urban wage-earning class, the proletariat. He also began to study and criticize the Scottish and English economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. From this period dates Marx’s conversion to socialism, marked by his writing the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which start with criticism of these economists and continue to make a case against the dehumanization of people under capitalism. This I shall discuss in the next chapter.
While in Paris, Marx had his first prolonged meeting with Frederick Engels, who was to be his lifelong friend and co-worker. Engels, while his own judgement that ‘Marx was a genius, the rest of us merely talented’ was no doubt true, had a much more practical knowledge of capitalism. His father was a textile manufacturer with a factory in Manchester as well as one in Wuppertal, and Engels had spent some time in England – the only significant country where the proletariat was a majority. Engels’s first book was The Condition of the Working Class in England, as empirical and practical as Marx’s early writings were speculative and theoretical. During their common exile after the defeat of the German revolution, Engels worked as a manager in his father’s factory, which enabled him to help out the Marx family financially. It has become customary in many circles to blame everything wrong about later Marxism on Engels, but this is wholly unfair. He was as committed to democracy and to an open approach to science as was Marx, and rather more aware than Marx of environmental issues and the oppression of women.
Early in 1845, there occurred the first of a series of expulsions of Marx from countries where he lived. He had been contributing to a journal called Vorwärts which acted as a forum for German radicals in Paris. The journal was closed by the French minister of the interior, and writers Marx, Arnold Ruge and Heinrich Heine were expelled from France. Marx moved to Belgium where his family lived for the next three years in Brussels. Here they were joined by Helene Demuth, a family servant of the von Westphalens, who then stayed with the Marxes for the rest of their lives, following them into exile in England. It was in Brussels that Marx’s second daughter, Laura, was born, followed by his first son, Edgar, a year later.
Several other socialist friends and acquaintances moved to Brussels too, including most importantly Frederick Engels, with whom Marx began to work on their book The German Ideology. They could not find a publisher for this book, and eventually abandoned it ‘to the gnawing criticism of the mice’, as they said (and when it was exhumed and published in the twentieth century, parts had actually been destroyed by mice). The first section of this book, on the German humanist philosopher Feuerbach, who had influenced them profoundly but whom they now found it necessary to go beyond, is a classic statement of their programme for a science of history, and will be discussed later in this book. The later sections of The German Ideology are rambling polemics, which have lost much of their interest with the decline of interest in their targets. Marx’s other most important work of this period is his brilliant, pithy Theses on Feuerbach, which was intended for self-clarification not publication, but which Engels later published. These eleven theses, each only a sentence or a paragraph long, contain some of Marx’s most quoted words, such as the much misunderstood eleventh thesis: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’
Apart from writing and studying the economists, Marx became involved with various socialist groups at this time, meeting – and quarrelling with – the German utopian socialist Weitling, and eventually, in 1847, joining the League of the Just, a German group of socialist workers in exile in various countries and in a dozen cities of Germany itself. This league, partly due to the influence of Marx and Engels, reorganized itself in this year, replacing conspiratorial with democratic forms of organization, renaming itself the Communist League, and adopting as its slogan ‘Proletarians of all countries – unite’ instead of ‘All men are brothers’; apparently Marx (despite his admiration for Robert Burns’s poetry) said that there were many men whose brother he did not wish to be. They also commissioned Marx and Engels to write a manifesto, which was published early in 1848 as the Manifesto of the Communist Party – though the Communist League was not really a party. It is the first statement of Marx’s mature political position, and is normally known as The Communist Manifesto.
The year of 1848 has gone down in history as the ‘Year of Revolutions’ and, almost simultaneously with the manifesto’s publication, the French monarchy fell, and movements for democracy began in many European countries. In England the Chartist Movement, which had been dormant for a few years, revived with its demands for manhood suffrage, annual parliaments and other democratic reforms. Marx regarded this as the first real working-class party. But in Germany too the demands for a parliamentary constitution and for national unity were made. Marx, wanting to be where the action was, returned first to Paris, and then in June to Cologne, where he became editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a journal whose programme was a unified democratic republic of Germany, and the liberation of Poland from Russia – which would have involved war with Russia. The journal was not run by the Communist League, and had liberal as well as socialist backers. In fact, throughout the German revolution, Marx, though he by no means abandoned his socialist aims, concentrated on what he saw as the next step, the democratic republic, and his main criticism of the bourgeois parties was not that they were not socialist but that they were cowardly and compromising in their pursuit of democracy. Towards the end of the revolutionary period, he saw that the bourgeoisie was too scared to lead a revolution, and he turned to more explicitly communist agitation, but by this time the revolution was in retreat.
The German revolution never got as far as bringing down any monarchies, and even the moves towards parliamentary government were half measures and soon lost. In May 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed, and Marx was once more subjected to an expulsion order. At first he went again to France, where he acted in some official capacity on behalf of the German democrats. However, the revolution was in retreat in France too, and Marx was expelled from Paris again, sailing for England in August. For the rest of his life, he lived in London, at first in Soho, in considerable hardship – though Marx’s income was irregular rather than low by working-class standards, and both generosity and mismanagement contributed to the hardship. In the next six years three Marx children died: two (Guido and Franziska), who were born in London, died as babies; the other, Edgar, died at the age of eight. Marx’s daughter Eleanor (always known as Tussy), was born while the Marxes lived in Soho. She was to survive her father and become active in the English labour movement. Also in this Soho period a son, Frederick, was born to Helene Demuth and, according to a document which came to light in 1962, Marx was the father. Frederick was not brought up by the Marxes or by his mother, though he maintained contact with his mother, and became friendly with Marx’s daughters later. Frederick also became active in the English labour movement, and was a founder member of Hackney Labour Party. He survived all the others and died in 1929. Engels is said to have accepted paternity to save the Marxes embarrassment. Helene Demuth remained part of the Marx household, and seems to have been as close to Jenny Marx as to Karl in later years. It is quite possible that the document implicating Marx as Frederick’s father is a forgery – see Terrell Carver’s biography of Engels for the evidence.
In an attempt to get a regular income, at one time Marx applied for a job as a railway clerk, but was turned down because his handwriting was illegible (it was).
At first during his exile, Marx engaged in the unedifying politics of the exiled communists and other German democrats, but soon tired of the sectarianism and, after the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852, took no part in active politics until the foundation of the First International in 1864. During this period, Marx spent a great deal of time in the library of the British Museum, researching for his greatest work, Capital. He did not expect his work on economics to take so long, and in 1851 told Engels that, ‘In five weeks I will be through with the whole economic shit’; but he left huge boxes of unfinished manuscripts on economics when he died, even though it is reported that his last words were, ‘Go away, last words are for those who have not said enough already.’ To make a living, he also wrote numerous articles for the New York Tribune, some of which were mere pot-boilers, though his enthusiasm for the anti-slavery north in the American Civil War – and for President Lincoln – was completely genuine.
Aside from this source of income, he was always dependent too on Engels’s generosity. However, a legacy from Baroness von Westphalen, Jenny’s mother, enabled the family to move from their rooms in Soho to a house near Hampstead Heath, where they loved to walk and picnic.
Marx became involved in active politics again when the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) was founded in 1864. It was founded not by Marx but by groups of French and English workers who saw the need for international solidarity, partly for the practical reason that employers broke strikes by importing workers from one country to another as blacklegs. The founders were not Marxists: the English were liberal trade unionists, the French mostly followers of the co-operative anarchism of Proudhon. But Marx joined the Association straight away, and became its leading figure, writing the Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules. He retained this position throughout the First International’s existence, although Marxists were never more than a minority of its members, partly because Marx had something in common with each of the other factions, and they had little in common with each other. The German socialists, among whom he already had some followers, could not play a full part in the life of the First International due to the laws in Germany. The main threat to his leadership came from Bakunin, a revolutionary Russian anarchist with considerable support in the Mediterranean sections of the International. Bakunin wanted to abolish the state at once, while Marx, as we shall see, thought that a workers’ state was necessary until classes had disappeared, when the state would ‘wither away’. Bakunin presented himself as a libertarian against Marx’s authoritarianism, and opposed centralization in the International. But he was not consistently more libertarian, for on the other hand he wanted to make atheism a condition of membership of the International, which Marx regarded as imposing a dogma (albeit one with which he agreed) on the working class. It would probably have excluded most of the English members. The split between Marx and Bakunin, which may partly have been based on personal suspiciousness on both sides, was one of the reasons why the International was so short-lived (it petered out after Marx got Bakunin expelled and had its centre moved to New York in 1872). But a quarrel between these two was more or less inevitable given Bakunin’s addiction to cloak-and-dagger conspiracies, fantasies of powerful organizations which had no existence in reality, and indeed his virulent anti-Semitism.
But one extraordinary event took place during the lifetime of the International, though not at its instigation: the Paris Commune. After the defeat of France in the Franco–Prussian War and the abdication of Napoleon III, the provisional government tried to disarm Paris. The National Guard resisted, taking over the city and holding elections on manhood suffrage. The resultant council of ninety-two members included seventeen members of the International, but the International was in no way in control of it, as the press and governments later claimed. In fact the majority of its members were lower-middle class rather than working class, and harked back to the great French Revolution of 1789, though there were notable minorities of Proudhonian anarchists and Blanquists (the latter were revolutionary workers who, unlike Marx, worked in a conspiratorial manner, and looked for a dictatorship by a revolutionary élite after the Revolution, rather than the broader democratic workers’ state proposed by Marx). The measures of the Paris Commune were quite moderate reforms – abolition of nightwork for bakers, a law against reducing wages, and so on. The only socialistic measure was the handing over of enterprises whose bosses had abandoned Paris to the workers to run as co-operatives, under reserve of compensation. The Commune used terror relatively little, and only in response to greater terror on the part of its enemies. Those Communards who were members of the International, though ‘extremists’ in terms of class politics, were ‘moderates’ so far as terror was concerned. The worst outrage committed under the Paris Commune was the massacre of fifty hostages, which was not ordered by the Commune, but carried out by a lynch mob in the last days of the Commune when its supporters were being massacred in thousands. The leading First Internationalist in the Paris Commune, Varlin, tried unsuccessfully to rescue the hostages. He himself was brutally murdered by anti-Commune government soldiers soon afterwards. The numbers of Commune supporters executed after its defeat ran into tens of thousands – several times as many as those guillotined in the great French Revolution.
Marx was initially sceptical about the Commune’s chances of success – a scepticism that was borne out by the fall of the Commune after just over two months. But he not only defended the Communards’ courage and their right to self-defence, but saw it as the first intimation of what a workers’ state would be like. This view will be discussed later.
After the fall of the Paris Commune and the decline of the First International, Marx’s main political attentions turned to Germany, where there were two working-class political parties, one following Lassalle, and tending to favour German unity even under Prussian domination, the other (the ‘Eisenachers’), with more support in south Germany where Prussia was regarded with suspicion, and with more willingness to make alliances with liberal bourgeois parties. Marx supported the Eisenachers, one of whose leaders, Liebknecht, he had known for a long time. In 1875 the two parties merged at a conference in Gotha, and became the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which, much changed in a rightwards direction, still exists. Marx found a fair bit to object to in the Gotha Programme adopted by the party, which he saw as too Lassallean. Among other things he objected to the statement that all classes but the proletariat were ‘one reactionary mass’. Marx wanted to make a distinction between the landed aristocracy who supported Bismarck and the liberal bourgeoisie who should be supported against them, and more particularly the lower-middle class and peasantry who needed to be won over to the workers’ side. He suspected – what later turned out to be true – that Lassalle had been willing to make a deal with Bismarck. However, Marx maintained good if sometimes uneasy relations with the SPD leaders and, at the theoretical level, his influence in the party grew and became paramount. At the practical level, the SPD was much more a party of moderate reform than he or its own members realized.
Towards the end of the 1870s, Marx’s health, and that of his wife Jenny, was increasingly bad. McLellan writes that, ‘By the turn of the decade the topics of sickness and climate pervaded Marx’s letters to the virtual exclusion of all else’ (Karl Marx, p. 430). Jenny had cancer of the liver, and their daughter Jenny Longuet had cancer of the bladder. Marx himself was suffering from chronic bronchitis and an ulcer on the lung. When he became well enough to go into his wife’s room, their daughter Eleanor reports, ‘They were young again together – she a loving maid and he a loving youth, who were entering life together – and not an old man devastated by illness and a dying old woman who were taking leave of one another for life’ (Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 1, p. 127). But she died on 2 December 1881. When Engels saw Marx after this, he told Eleanor, ‘Moor [Marx] is also dead,’ and indeed he did not recover his will to live. In January 1883 Jenny Longuet died aged thirty-eight, and two months later Marx himself died, aged sixty-four. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, where he shares his grave with his wife Jenny, Helene Demuth, his grandson Harry Longuet, who died a few days after Marx, aged four, and his daughter Eleanor (Tussy), who died by her own hand in 1898 after her lover deserted her. The large black bust of Marx which now adorns the grave would not have been to his taste, but has become something of a local landmark.
It is natural that anyone with as strong political opinions as Marx would provoke strong and opposite reactions among different people. But people’s reactions at a more personal level could be opposite as well, ranging from an American senator who said, ‘I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable,’ to his daughter Eleanor who calls him, ‘a man brimming over with humour and good humour … the kindliest, gentlest, most sympathetic of companions’ (McLellan, Karl Marx, pp. 453–5). Yet a coherent picture does emerge. In political relations he was a hard man to have against you. When attacking an opponent, he loaded his pen with vitriol. But he did not, I think, confuse the emotions appropriate to politics with those appropriate to personal relations, as so many political activists do. He was devoted to his wife and children; despite his alleged affair with Helene Demuth, his love for his wife – and hers for him – was passionate and lifelong, though Marx later advised that a revolutionary ought not to marry and bring a family into such an insecure existence, and indeed Jenny was often at her wits’ end during their long exile. He loved playing with his children; a Prussian spy who visited him during the hard years at Dean Street, Soho, reported that, ‘As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and restless character, is the gentlest and mildest of men,’ and that the only chair with four legs, which he as a visitor was offered, was being used by the children to play at cooking, and, ‘if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers’. Later Marx was a good friend to his grown-up daughters. He took the early deaths of three of his children very badly, commenting, when eight-year-old Edgar died, ‘Bacon says that really important men have so many relations with nature and the world that they recover easily from every loss. I do not belong to these important men.’ (Quoted by Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, p. 26.)
He was a loyal and generous friend once he had given his friendship, but he did not suffer fools gladly, and thought that rather a lot of the people he met were fools. He had a caustic wit, and people feared his criticism, yet according to his daughter Eleanor he could discuss and criticize Heine’s unfinished poems with Heine in friendship and good humour, though Heine was in general hypersensitive to criticism. Liebknecht says that, as a teacher, Marx had the rare quality of being stern without being discouraging. His sometimes excessively polemical style was an unfortunate legacy to the socialist movement, yet the socialist advocacy by means of objective reporting and explanatory science in Capital is unequalled in the literature of politics and social science. What Lessner said about his speech is also true of his writing: ‘He never said a superfluous word; every sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the chain of his argument.’ Despite what is sometimes said about him, he was not a snob – though of course he was from the professional middle class by background and education – and he made friends easily among the proletarian members of the Communist League and the First International.
Outside working hours, he was a great student of world literature. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and admired Aeschylus, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe and Burns, all of whom he knew in their original languages. He read Aeschylus every year, and drew inspiration from the story of Prometheus stealing the fire of the gods for the benefit of humankind. His daughters knew several Shakespeare plays by heart, and they would be performed in the house. Among moderns, he particularly admired Balzac. He also kept abreast of scientific developments, and was enough of a ‘technological determinist’ to believe at one time that the discovery of the electric motor would eventually bring the downfall of capitalism. His interest in applied science extended to the critique of new agricultural practices which were impoverishing the soil – an early example of ecological concern (see John Bellamy Foster in International Socialism Journal 96, pp. 71–86, October 2002). Aside from intellectual pursuits, his main recreations seem to have been his walks and picnics on Hampstead Heath. He enjoyed wine and beer, and one visitor reports that he was often drunk; but the quantity and quality of his literary output is proof enough that this was not so often as to interfere with his work.
In the Victorian parlour game of ‘Confessions’ – the equivalent of what modern magazines call a ‘quiz’ – he gave as his favourite maxim, Nihil humani a me alienum puto (I consider that nothing human is alien to me), and as his favourite motto, De omnibus dubitandum (You must have doubts about everything). In these respects, he was a true son of the Enlightenment.