In any case, the discovery of economic motivation had equipped Marx and Engels with an instrument which was to enable them to write a new kind of history as with a biting pyrographie needle.
They were entering upon a phase of their lives in which they were to suffer a relative political eclipse; and now, in their journalism, their pamphlets, their books, and in that extraordinary correspondence which plays for the nineteenth century a role somewhat similar to that of those of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists for the eighteenth, they were to apply their new method of analysis to the events of the past and the present. Karl Marx inaugurated this work with a product of his mature genius at its most brilliant, the study called The Class Struggles in France (1848–50), written in London during the first year of his exile and printed in a magazine called Revue der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung, which he and Engels published and wrote. It was followed in 1852 by The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, dealing with the coup d’état of December 1851; and later, in 1871, by The Civil War in France, which analyzed the episode of the Commune.
This whole series, which aims at a profounder interpretation and is sustained on a higher level of expression than the run of Marx’s newspaper commentary, is in fact one of the great cardinal productions of the modern art-science of history.
Let us look back again at the French historians who have been serving as our point of reference in situating the positions of Marxism. It is obvious that these men were perplexed by the confused and complex series of changes which had been taking place in France during their time and in the course of which republic, monarchy, proletarian uprising and empire had been alternating, existing simultaneously, exchanging one another’s masks. Now Marx knocks away the masks, and he provides a chart of the currents that have been running below the surface of French politics—a chart which has thrown overboard completely the traditional revolutionary language made up of general slogans and abstract concepts and which has been worked out exclusively in terms of the propulsions deriving from such interests as the bread and wine wrung by the peasants out of their tight little plots of land, and as the Parisian security and luxury obtainable through speculation in office. In Michelet’s work of this period, it is, to be sure, becoming possible for him to see that what, for example, had been at the bottom of the imbroglio in the industrial city of Lyons in 1793, when the Convention had played the game of the rich against Joseph Chalier, the revolutionary leader, had been the struggle between the exploited and the exploiters; but this, as he says, he has learned from the socialists, and he fails to follow the clue.
But now Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, never relinquishing this economic thread, is able to penetrate all the pageantry of Legitimists and Orleanists and Bonapartists and Republicans and Party of Order, and to show what had really happened in France after the abdication of Louis-Philippe: The great industrials, the great landlords and the financiers had combined against the small bourgeoisie and the workers; all the political parties had found themselves frustrated in their efforts to achieve their ends through the medium of parliamentary government; and it had then been possible for Louis Bonaparte to take over, not through sheer force of Napoleonic magic, but through the support of a class of farm-holding peasants, who had not been able to organize politically but who wanted a father-protector to stand between them and the bourgeoisie—together with the interested backing of a group of professional bureaucrats, created by the centralization of the government. For a moment, says Marx, Louis Bonaparte will be able to hold all groups in equilibrium; but as it will be impossible for him to do anything for one group without discriminating somehow against the others, he will in time arouse them all against him. And in the meantime, the so-called democrats, who had been trying to unite in a Social Democratic Party the socialist working class with the republican petty bourgeoisie, had, although they had “arrogated to themselves a position of superiority to class conflicts,” been defeated between bourgeoisie and workers, as a result of their inability to rise above the intellectual limitations of the petty bourgeoisie and to do as Marx himself is doing here: grasp the class interests actually involved. Never, after we have read The Eighteenth Brumaire, can the language, the conventions, the combinations, the pretensions, of parliamentary bodies, if we have had any illusions about them, seem the same to us again. They lose their consistency and color—evaporate before our eyes. The old sport of competition for office, the old game of political debate, look foolish and obsolete; for now we can see for the first time through the shadow-play to the conflict of appetites and needs which, partly unknown to the actors themselves, throw these thin silhouettes on the screen.
These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous—in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation; in the energy of the faculty that combines, articulating at the same time that it compresses; in the wit and the metaphorical phantasmagoria that transfigures the prosaic phenomena of politics, and in the pulse of the tragic invective—we have heard its echo in Bernard Shaw—which can turn the collapse of an incompetent parliament, divided between contradictory tendencies, into the downfall of a damned soul of Shakespeare.
At the same time—the summer of 1850—Engels was turning back the high-powered torch on the events of a remoter past. A man named Wilhelm Zimmerman had published in 1841 a history of the German Peasant War of 1525. Zimmerman, who was to figure later on in the extreme Left of the Francfort Assembly, had written from a point of view sympathetic to the rebellious peasants; but he was an idealist and had conceived the whole story as a struggle between Good and Evil—whereas Engels could see through his picture into the anatomy of a relationship between classes of which Zimmerman had hardly been aware. He was struck by an analogy with the recent revolution of 1848–49.
In a short work called The Peasant War in Germany, he analyzed the complicated society of the end of the sixteenth century, when the hierarchy of feudalism was falling apart and the new city republics were rising, and tried to trace the social-economic motives behind the heresies of the Middle Ages and Reformation. He showed how the revolt of Luther had been converted into a middle-class movement for breaking down the political authority and taking away the wealth of the clergy; and yet how Luther’s defiance of the Catholic Church had provided an impetus which carried further the more seriously discontented elements: the peasants, crushed under the bankruptcy of feudalism, the impoverished plebeians of the towns. The peasants, organizing in widespread conspiracies, had finally drawn up a set of demands, which included the abolition of serfdom, the reduction of their crushing taxes, the guarantee of a few rudimentary legal rights, the democratic control of the clergy, and the cutting-down of their salaries and titles. Their leader was a Protestant preacher named Thomas Münzer, who advocated the immediate establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. This was in reality a sort of primitive Christian communism; and Münzer’s professing it had caused a break with Luther. When the general peasant insurrection blazed out in April, 1525, Luther turned against this more drastic anti-clericalism, denounced Münzer as a tool of Satan, and urged the princes to strangle their peasants like mad dogs. His own movement was taken under the protection of these princes, who had acquired the estates of the Church. Thomas Münzer was captured and beheaded, and the uncoördinated movement destroyed.
Engels regards Münzer as a genius, whose perception of the necessity of communism reached too far beyond the conditions of his time. What in Münzer’s time was directly ahead was a society the antithesis of communistic. Woe to him who, like Münzer at Mülhausen in 1525, like so many whom Engels had known in Francfort in 1848, finds himself, in the heat of his struggle for a society which will abolish social classes, compromised in a governing body which, in the slow evolution of things, can do nothing but further the interests of the, to him alien, propertied classes, while he must feed the dispossessed with empty promises!
In the midst of this literary activity, so congenial to him and Marx, Engels exclaims at the foolishness or hypocrisy of any real revolutionary of the Left who can still desire at that date to hold office.
For the fires of ‘48 had now faded.
That movement which had had its first stimulus in Switzerland from the defeat of the Catholic cantons by the Radicals and which had resulted in insurrections in France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Hungary, had ended with the suppression of the Hungarian revolt by the Austrian and Russian emperors. All the efforts of the proletariat had served only, as Engels said, to pull the bourgeoisie’s chestnuts out of the fire. He and Marx were still continuing to count, for a year after they got to England, on a new crisis that would start trouble again. Marx believed that a new rebellion on the part of the petty bourgeoisie would upset the big bourgeoisie in France; and they hoped that their Revue der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung would be able to preserve the bulb of the old paper for a new sprouting of revolution in Germany. But as they studied the depression of the forties which had precipitated the events of ’48, they had come to see that political developments were connected in a way they had not realized with the fluctuations of world trade. They saw by the fall of 1850 that a new period of bourgeois prosperity had commenced; and they announced in the last number of the Revue that “a revolution can hope for success only when the modern factors of production and the bourgeois technique of production are at variance. A new revolution is possible only after a new crisis.”
The brave boasts of 1848 had now definitely to be dropped behind with the rest of romantic literature; and out of the old confused and candid talk about fatherland, brotherhood and freedom emerged cold problems of long-distance strategy. The Communist League had been revived after the failure of the German Revolution; but now it was split between August Willich, Engels’ former commander in the Baden campaign, who continued to demand immediate action and whom Engels, now completely at the orders of his intellectual commander, vied with the master in deriding; and Marx, who insisted that the workers had before them “fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war and national wars, not merely in order to change your conditions, but in order to change yourselves and become qualified for political power.” Willich’s faction, says Marx, “treats pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of actual conditions.” It is the moment when the dynamic self-assertion of the philosophy of pre- ’48 abates and relinquishes its purpose to what inevitably come to be conceived as the more automatic forces of history. At a meeting on September 15, 1850, it turned out that Marx had a majority of the members of the Executive Committee; but he knew that the rank and file were for Willich, so he transferred the headquarters to Cologne. At this time there was an attempt on the life of Friedrich Wilhelm IV; and eleven of the communists in Cologne were arrested and indicted by means of documents clumsily forged by the police. Marx and Engels exposed this evidence so effectively that it was abandoned by the prosecution; but in cases where political prejudice is involved, it is not enough, as we know, to prove the falsity of evidence; and the jury sentenced seven of the accused men to from three to six years in jail. This was the end of the Communist League, which was dissolved in November, 1852. Nor did the Chartist movement, on which Engels had counted, long outlast 1848. In the spring of 1848, the Chartists had been quite active in the North and had gotten up a demonstration in London which had so seriously disquieted the authorities that they had called out the Duke of Wellington and put the Bank of England in a state of defense. But, after that, with the new boom, the movement lapsed. Marx helped them with one of their papers, but it died.
Later on—June, 1855—a Sunday Trading Bill was passed which, in the interests of keeping the lower classes sober, deprived them of their Sunday beer; and the common people of London congregated every Sunday in Hyde Park to the number of from a quarter to half a million and insubordinately howled “Go to church!” at the holiday-making toffs. Marx was ready to believe that it was “the beginning of the English revolution” and took himself so active a part in the demonstration that on one occasion he was nearly arrested and only escaped by entangling the policeman in one of his irresistible disputations. But the government gave the people back their beer, and nothing came of the agitation.
Marx and Engels in February, 1851, are congratulating one another on the isolation in which they find themselves. “It corresponds to our position and our principles,” says Marx. “The system of reciprocal concessions, of half-measures tolerated for appearances, and the obligation to share in public with all these asses in the general absurdity of the party—we’re done with all that now.” “From now on,” Engels answers, “we are responsible for ourselves alone; and when the moment arrives when these gentlemen find they need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms.” He tells Marx that they must write “substantial books,” in which they will not even “need to mention these spiders.” What will all the malignant gossip of all the revolutionary rabble count for when Marx answers them with his Political Economy?*
The next June Marx obtained admission to the British Museum reading room, and there he sat from ten to seven every day. He got hold of and read very carefully some blue-books of factory reports which had been sold by members of Parliament to a dealer in old books whom he frequented. Those who did not sell them, it seems, were in the habit of using them as targets, measuring the force of their fire-arms by the number of pages they pierced.
Intellectually, again, they were free; but there is no real way for the revolutionary leader to beat the game of the society he is opposing. Marx was to have no peace, and Engels was to have no leisure.
The failure of their review had left them penniless. They had depended for circulation on the German émigrés in London; but as they made a habit of insulting in their commentary all the more influential of these latter, their paper had been coldly received. They had managed to get out four numbers, then later a double number; then they had been obliged to stop. Marx had put into it the last penny of some money that he had raised by selling the last remnants of his father’s estate. His mother refused to give him any more, though he threatened to draw a note on her and, if she protested it, go back to Germany and let himself be put in jail. For a time he was expecting to make something out of the publication of his collected writings. One of the communists in Cologne had bought a printing business and had undertaken to bring them out in two volumes; but this man was arrested in the police raids of May, 1851, when only the first volume had been published (it seems, however, to have had a pretty good sale). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte might never have appeared at all if an immigrant German tailor in New York had not put up his whole savings, forty dollars, to have it published there. A thousand copies were printed, and a third of them were sent to Europe; but all these latter had eventually to be distributed among sympathizers and friends: not a bookseller could be persuaded to touch it.
Marx, when he first came to England, had taken furnished lodgings for his family in the fashionable suburb of Camberwell; but they were evicted in the spring of 1850 for inability to pay the rent, and had resorted to a poor street in Soho. There the whole family lived in two small dark unventilated rooms: there were six of them now, with the children, and with the maid, Helene Demuth, called Lenchen, whom Jenny’s mother had given her as a wedding present and who, though they rarely had the money to pay her, was to stay with them to the end of their lives. The boy that Jenny had borne a few days after coming to England died in this place that November. They had been turned out while she was still nursing the baby; and she has left a vivid record of the incident in a letter to the wife of a comrade.
“I shall describe to you a day of this life just as it is, and you will see that perhaps few other refugees have gone through anything like it. Since wet-nurses are here much too expensive for us, I decided, in spite of continual and terrible pains in my breasts and back, to nurse the child myself. But the poor little angel drank in from me so much secret sorrow and grief with the milk that he was constantly unwell, lay in violent pain night and day. He has not slept a single night since he came into the world—two or three hours at most. Now lately he has been having violent cramps, so that the poor child is always hovering between life and death. In this pain he used to suck so hard that my nipple got sore and bled; often the blood would stream into his little quivering mouth. As I was sitting like this one day, our landlady suddenly appeared. We have paid her in the course of the winter over two hundred and fifty thalers, and we had made an arrangement with her that in future we were not to pay her but the landlord, who had put in an execution. Now she denied this agreement and demanded five pounds, which we still owed her; and as we were unable to produce this sum at once, two bailiffs entered the house, took possession of all my little belongings: beds, linen, clothes, everything, even my poor baby’s cradle, and the best of the toys that belonged to the little girls, who were standing by in bitter tears. They threatened to take everything away in two hours’ time—in which case I should have had to lie flat on the floor with my freezing children and my sore breast. Our friend Schramm hurried to town to get help. He got into a cab, and the horses bolted. He jumped out and was brought bleeding into the house, where I was in misery with my poor shivering children.
“The next day we had to leave the house. It was cold and rainy and dreary. My husband tried to find a place for us to live, but no one was willing to have us when we mentioned the four children. At last a friend came to our rescue, we paid, and I quickly sold all my beds, in order to settle with the chemist, the baker, the butcher and the milkman, who had been alarmed by the scandal of the bailiffs’ arrival and who had come wildly to present their bills. The beds which I had sold were taken out of doors and loaded on to a cart—and do you know what happened then? It was long after sunset by this time, and it is illegal in England to move furniture so late. The landlord produced the police and said that there might be some of his things among them, we might be escaping to a foreign country. In less than five minutes, there were two or three hundred people standing in front of our door, the whole Chelsea mob. The beds came back again—they could not be delivered to the purchasers till after sunrise the next day …”
She apologizes for talking so much about her troubles, but says that she feels the need of pouring out her heart for once to a friend. “Don’t imagine that these petty sufferings have bent me. I know only too well that our struggle is no isolated one, and that I in particular belong to the specially fortunate and favored, for my dear husband, the mainstay of my life, is still by my side. The only thing that really crushes me and makes my heart bleed is that he is obliged to endure so much pettiness, that there should be so few to come to his aid, and that he who has so willingly and gladly come to the aid of so many, should find himself so helpless here.”
They were to remain in Dean Street, Soho, six years. As Jenny said, few would help her husband; and it turned out, as time went on, that he would not do much to help himself. And now we must confront a curious fact. Karl Marx was neurotic about money. It was one of the most striking “contradictions” of Marx’s whole career that the man who had done more than any other to call attention to economic motivation should have been incapable of doing anything for gain. For difficult though it may have been for an émigré to find regular work, it can hardly have been impossible. Liebknecht, Willich and Kossuth managed to support themselves in London. Yet on only one recorded occasion during the whole of Marx’s thirty years’ stay did he attempt to find regular employment.
This resistance to the idea of earning a livelihood may, at least partly, have been due to an impulse to lean over backwards in order to forestall the imputation of commercialism which was always being brought against the Jews. Certainly the animus of those of his writings which are sometimes characterized as anti-Semitic is mainly directed against the Jew as moneychanger or as truckler to bourgeois society. Take the passage in Herr Vogt, for example, in which he so remorselessly rubs it in that a certain newspaper editor in London has taken to spelling his name “Levy” instead of “Levi” and made a practice of publishing attacks on Disraeli, in order to be accepted as an Englishman, and elaborates with more stridency than taste on the salience of Levy’s nose and its uses in sniffing the sewers of gossip. The point is that this man—who has libeled Marx—is a toady and a purveyor of scandal. And Marx’s charge against another Jew, who has been profiteering out of the Second Empire, is that he has “augmented the nine Greek muses with a tenth Hebraic muse, the ‘Muse of the Age,’ which is what he calls the Stock Exchange.” If Marx is contemptuous of his race, it is primarily perhaps with the anger of Moses at finding the Children of Israel dancing before the Golden Calf.
In any case, there is no question at all that Marx’s antipathy to writing for money was bound up with an almost maniacal idealism. “The writer,” he had insisted in his youth in the article already quoted, “must earn money in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money… . The writer in no wise considers his works a means. They are ends in themselves; so little are they a means either for himself or for others that, if necessary, he sacrifices his own existence to their existence and, in his own way, like the preacher of religion, takes for his principle, ‘Obey God rather than man,’ in relation to those human beings among whom he himself is confined by his human desires and needs.” This was written, of course, before Marx had developed his Dialectical Materialism; but he was to act on this principle all his life. “I must follow my goal through thick and thin,” he writes in a letter of 1859, “and I shall not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine.” Note Marx’s curious language: the writer is “confined” (“eingeschlossen”) among men. Instinctively Marx thinks of himself as a being set above their world.
Yet he is confined in this world by his “human needs and desires”; and if he will not allow himself to be turned into a money-making machine, somebody else will have to turn himself into one in order to make money for him.
Engels had written in The Peasant War in Germany of the ascetism indispensable to proletarian movements both in the Middle Ages and modern times: “This ascetic austerity of behavior, this insistence on the renunciation of all the amenities and pleasures of life, on the one hand sets up in contrast to the ruling classes the principle of Spartan equality, and on the other hand constitutes a necessary transitional stage, without which the lowest stratum of society would never be able to launch a movement. In order to develop their revolutionary energy, in order to feel clearly their hostile position in relation to all the other elements of society, in order to concentrate themselves as a class, they must begin by stripping themselves of everything that could reconcile them to the existing social order, must deny themselves even the smallest enjoyment which could make their oppressed position tolerable for a moment and of which even the severest pressure cannot deprive them.” Karl Marx, as the proletariat’s Münzer, exemplified something of the sort; and Engels had made a resolute effort to dissociate himself from his bourgeois origins. But the miseries of the Marxes in London weighed upon Engels’ mind. From almost the beginning of the Marx-Engels correspondence, when Engels writes to his friend about hunting for a lodging for him in Ostend, with details about the dejeuners and cigars, and gives him specific instructions about trains in a tone which suggests that Marx could not be depended upon to catch them, there is apparent a sort of loving solicitude in which the protector is combined with the disciple; and now, by the autumn of 1850, that terrible year for the Marxes, Engels has decided that there is nothing for it but to return to the “filthy trade” against which he had so rebelled in Barmen. After all, the revolution had been adjourned; and Marx had to have the leisure to accomplish his own work.
Engels went back to Ermen & Engels in Manchester and began sending over to his father highly competent reports on the business. The old man came on the next spring. Engels wrote Marx that he had blasted old Caspar with “a few words and an angry look” when, trusting in his son’s sense of decency in the presence of one of the Ermens, he had ventured to “give voice to a dithyramb” on the subject of Prussian institutions; and that this had made them as frigid as before. Friedrich evaded a plan on his father’s part to put him at the head of the Manchester counting-house; but he made an arrangement with him to stay there three years without binding himself in any way which would interfere with his political writing or with his leaving if the events demanded. He went to work in the “gloomy room of a warehouse looking out on the yard of a public-house.” He had always detested Manchester, and he complained of being lonely and dull there, in spite of the fact that he had gone back to his former arrangement of living with Mary Burns: he had always to keep up his bachelor establishment, too. He still attempted to make a life apart from that society which was based on the cotton trade. When his father gave him a horse one Christmas, he wrote Marx that it made him uncomfortable “that I should be keeping a horse here while you and your family are in straits in London.” “If I’d known about you, I’d have waited a couple of months and saved the cost of upkeep. But never mind: I don’t have to pay right away.” He loved riding: it was, he once wrote Marx, after spending seven hours in the saddle, “the greatest physical pleasure I know.” He was soon fox-hunting with the gentry whom he disdained, and telling Marx that it was “the real school for the cavalry” and hence valuable as military training for the European Armageddon which—as he was coming to believe in the later fifties—would soon be upon them now.
Thus he was able to send his friend regular remittances; and in the August of 1851 a new source of income opened for Marx. He was invited by Charles A. Dana to write regularly for The New York Tribune. Horace Greeley, the editor of The Tribune, had at that time declared himself a socialist and had been giving Fourierism a great deal of publicity; and Dana, his managing editor, had been himself one of the trustees of Brook Farm. He had met Marx and been deeply impressed by him in Cologne in 1848; and now he asked him to contribute a bi-weekly article on European affairs.
Marx accepted, but, pleading the badness of his English and his having his “hands full” with his economic studies, requested Engels to write the articles. Engels complied, with some inconvenience to himself, as he had now only his evenings free, and for a year turned out a series called Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, that did for recent events in that country, though with something less of brilliance and passion, what Marx was doing for France. They appeared over Marx’s name, and even when Kautsky brought them out in a volume after Engels’ death, were still credited by the editor to Marx. By the beginning of 1853, however, Marx was writing most of the articles himself. Through 1853–56 he was largely concerned with the Crimean War; Engels, who had applied himself seriously to the study of military strategy in the belief that revolutionists would need to master it, contributed opinions on the military situation. In the fall of 1854, they reported on the Spanish Revolution; and during 1861–62, on the American Civil War. Marx also supplied a commentary on British politics both for The Tribune and for the Chartist People’s Paper.
This journalism, though not as a rule so remarkable as such an analysis as The Class Struggles in France, which Marx had written for his own review and into which he had been able to put all his thought, may nevertheless still be read with profit and with that intellectual satisfaction which is to be derived from all Marx’s work. Marx differed from the ordinary political correspondent in that he had no contact with politicians: he was assisted by no inside gossip, by no official informants. But what he did have were all the relevant documents available in the British Museum; and as he was incapable of making a perfunctory job of anything, he put as much reading into these dispatches—both of the histories of such large subjects as Spain and India and of all sorts of diplomatic correspondence and parliamentary reports—as has often sufficed respectable writers for whole books. He was quite justified in complaining to Engels that he had been giving those fellows too much for their money.
One of the most striking features of all this commentary of Marx and Engels, if we return to it after the journalism and the political “theses” of the later phases of Marxism, is precisely its flexibility, its readiness to take account of new facts. Though the mainspring of the Dialectic was conceived as a very simple mechanism, the day-by-day phenomena of society were regarded by Marx and Engels as infinitely varied and complex. If they were mystical about the goal, they were realistic about the means of getting there. Certain assumptions—we shall examine them later—they had carried over from the more idealistic era of the Communist Manifesto; but these never blocked their realization that their hypothesis must fit actual facts. There are many respects in which Marx and Engels may be contrasted with the crude pedants and fanatics who have pretended to speak for the movement which Marx and Engels started; but none is more obvious than the honesty of these innovators in recognizing and respecting events and their willingness to learn from experience.
With this went an omnivorous interest in all kinds of intellectual activity and an appreciation of the work of others. This last may not seem easily reconcilable with the tendency we have noticed in Marx to split off from and to shut out other thinkers or with his habitual tone of scornful superiority and the earnest imitation of it by Engels. There are many passages in the Marx-Engels correspondence in which these two masters, who, like Dante (much quoted for such utterances by Marx), have decided to make a party by themselves, seem perversely, even insanely, determined to grant no merit to the ideas of anyone else. Yet it is as if this relentless exclusion of others were an indispensable condition for preserving their own sharply-angled point of view. It is as if they had developed their special cutting comic tone, their detached and implacable attitude, their personal polyglot language (“Apropos! Einige Portwein und Claret wird mir sehr wohl tun under present circumstances”; “Die verfluchte vestry hat mich bon gré mal gré zum ‘constable of the vestry of St. Pancras’ erwählt”) in proportion as they have come to realize that they can take in more and more of the world, that they can comprehend it better and better, while other men, vulgarly addicted to the conviviality of political rhetoric, have never caught the sense of history at all, have no idea what is happening about them. Inside that reciprocal relationship, limited to the interchange of two men, all is clarity, coolness, intellectual exhilaration, self-confidence. The secret conspiracy and the practical joke conceal a watch-tower and a laboratory.
And here, in the general field of thought, if not always in that of practical politics, Marx and Engels are candidly alert for anything in science or literature that can help them to understand man and society. The timid man who seizes a formula because he wants above everything certainty, the snob who accepts a doctrine because it will make him feel superior to his fellows, the second-rate man who is looking for an excuse that will allow him to disparage the first-rate—all these have an interest in ruling out, in discrediting, in ridiculing, in slandering; and the truculence of Marx and Engels, which has come down as a part of the tradition, is the only part of their equipment they can imitate. But to the real pioneers of the frontiers of thought, to those who have accepted the responsibility for directing the ideas of mankind, to supply the right answer to every problem is far from appearing so easy. Such pioneers are painfully aware how little men already know, how few human beings can be counted on even to try to find out anything new, to construct a fresh picture of experience. Though Marx and Engels trusted the Dialectic, they did not believe it would do everything for them without initiative or research on their part nor did they imagine that it relieved them of the necessity of acquainting themselves with the ideas of other men. Hypercritical and harsh though Marx is in his strictures on such competitors as Proudhon, his sense of intellectual reality did compel him to do them justice—though it must be admitted that he was likely, as in the cases of Lassalle and Ernest Jones, to wait until after they were dead; and he was punctilious to the point of pedantry in making acknowledgments not merely to such predecessors as Ricardo and Adam Smith, but even to the author of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1740, in which he had found the first suggestion of the Labor Theory of Value.
Also, the Marxism of the founders themselves never developed into that further phase, where it was to be felt by the noblest of those working-class leaders who had accepted Dialectical Materialism, that all their thought should be strictly functional—that is, agitational and strategic; that they must turn their backs on non-political interests, not because these were lacking in value but because they were irrelevant to what had to be done. The tradition of the Renaissance still hung about Marx and Engels: they had only partly emerged from its matrix. They wanted to act on the course of history, but they also loved learning for its own sake—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they believed that learning gave power; and for all the intensity of Marx’s desire to defeat the antagonist in the class struggle, he declared that his favorite maxim was “Nihil humanum alienum puto”; and he and Engels approached the past with a respect that had nothing in common with the impulse which, justified on Marxist grounds, figured in one phase of the Russian Revolution and which was imitated by Marxists in other countries: the impulse to make a clean slate of culture.
Engels’ championship of the Humanities in Anti-Dühring might indeed be cordially approved by any defender of the “Liberal Arts” education. “The people’s school of the future” projected by Herr Dühring, says Engels, is to be “merely a somewhat ‘ennobled’ Prussian grammar school in which Greek and Latin are replaced by a little more pure and applied Mathematics and in particular by the elements of the philosophy of reality, and the teaching of German brought back to Becker, that is, to about a Third Form level.” Dühring “wants to do away with the two levers that in the world as it is today give at least the opportunity of rising above the narrow national standpoint: knowledge of the ancient languages, which opens a wider common horizon at least to those who have had a classical education; and knowledge of modern languages, through the medium of which alone the people of different nations can make themselves understood by one another and acquaint themselves with what is happening beyond their own frontiers.” “As for the aesthetic side of education, Herr Dühring will have to fashion it all anew. The poetry of the past is worthless. Where all religion is prohibited, it goes without saying that the ‘mythological or other religious trimmings’ characteristic of poets in the past cannot be tolerated in this school. ‘Poetic mysticism,’ too, ‘such as, for example, Goethe practised so extensively’ is to be condemned. Well, Herr Dühring will have to make up his mind to produce for us those poetic masterpieces which ‘are in accord with the higher claims of an imagination reconciled to reason,’ and which represent the pure ideal that ‘denotes the perfection of the world.’ Let him lose no time about it! The conquest of the world will be achieved by the economic commune [proposed by Herr Dühring] only on that day when the latter, reconciled with reason, comes in at double time in Alexandrines.”
And Marx and Engels had always before them—something which the later Marxists have sometimes quite lost sight of—the ideal man of the Renaissance of the type of Leonardo or Machiavelli, who had a head for both the sciences and the arts, who was both thinker and man of action. It was, in fact, one of their chief objections to the stratified industrial society that it specialized people in occupations in such a way as to make it impossible for them to develop more than a single aptitude; and it was one of their great arguments for communism that it would produce “complete” men again. They themselves had shied desperately away from the pundits of idealist Germany, whom they regarded as just as fatally deformed through a specialization in intellectual activity as the proletarian who worked in the factory through his concentration on mechanical operations; and they desired themselves, insofar as it was possible, to lead the lives of “complete” men. Something of the kind Engels certainly achieved, with his business, his conviviality, his sport, his languages, his natural sciences, his economics, his military studies, his article-writing, his books, his drawings and verses, and his politics; and what Marx lacked in practical ability and athletic skill he made up for by the immense range of his mind. It is true that the work of Marx himself, merging into and almost swamping that of Engels, had to become, under the pressure of the age, more exclusively economic; that the effects of the advance of machinery, which we have noted in the methods of Taine, are seen also in the later phases of Marxism, where it grows grimmer, more technical, more abstract. But there is still in Marx and Engels to the end that sense of a rich and various world, that comprehension of the many kinds of mastery possible for human beings, all interesting and all good in their kinds.
Engels’ visits to London were always great events for the Marxes. Karl would become so much excited the day he was expecting his friend that he would be unable to do any work; and he and Engels would sit up all night, smoking and drinking and talking. But the life of the Marxes in England continued to be dismal and hard.
Marx had characteristically neglected to talk terms when he had been invited to write for The Tribune, and was taken aback when he learned that he was to get only five dollars an article. He supplied Dana with sixty articles during the first year that he was writing them himself. Dana liked them so well that he began running the best parts of them as leaders and leaving the remains to appear over Marx’s name. Marx protested, but the best he could do was to get Dana to run the whole article anonymously in this way. Marx found himself reduced to two articles a week; and then—when the war was over and the boom of the early fifties collapsing, so that The Tribune began to retrench—to one; though Dana tried to make up for this by offering Marx supplementary work for The American Encyclopaedia and certain American magazines. In any case, Marx found that his income had now been cut down by two-thirds.
There is extant an apparently veracious account of the Marx household at the time when they were living in Soho, by a police agent who got to see them in 1853:
“[Marx] lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest neighborhoods in London, He occupies two rooms. The room looking out on the street is the parlor, and the bedroom is at the back. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick dust over everything and the greatest untidiness everywhere. In the middle of the parlor there is a large old-fashioned table covered with oilcloth. On it there are manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, odds and ends from his wife’s sewing-basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives and forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumblers, some Dutch clay-pipes, tobacco ashes—all in a pile on the same table.
“When you go into Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that for the first moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, until you get used to it and manage to pick out certain objects in the haze. Everything is dirty and covered with dust, and sitting down is quite a dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, then another, which happens to be whole, on which the children are playing at cooking. That is the one that is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking is not removed, and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers. But all these things do not in the least embarrass Marx or his wife. You are received in the most friendly way and cordially offered pipes, tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be. Eventually a clever and interesting conversation arises which makes amends for all the domestic deficiencies, so that you find the discomfort bearable. You actually get used to the company, and find it interesting and original.”
Sometimes they lived on bread and potatoes for days. Once when the baker had given them notice and asked for Marx when he brought the bread, the little boy, then seven and a half, had saved the situation by answering, “No, he ain’t upstairs,” and grabbing the bread and rushing off to deliver it to his father. They pawned everything at one time or another, including the children’s shoes and Marx’s coat—which prevented them from going out of doors. Jenny’s family silver went to the pawnshop piece by piece. On one occasion, the pawnbroker, seeing the crest of the Duke of Argyll, sent for the police and had Marx locked up. It was Saturday night, and his respectable friends had all gone out of town for the week-end, so that he had to stay in jail till Monday morning. Sometimes Jenny would cry all night, and Karl would lose his temper: he was trying to write his book on economics.
The neighborhood was full of infections. They survived a cholera epidemic; but one winter they all had grippe at the same time. “My wife is sick. Jennychen is sick,” Marx wrote Engels in the fall of ‘52. “Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever. I can’t and haven’t been able to call the doctor, because I haven’t any money for medicine.” Marx was visited with piles and boils, which made it impossible for him to sit down and prevented his frequenting the library. In the March of 1851 another little girl was born, but she died of bronchitis a year later. She had never had a cradle, and Jenny had to go to a French refugee to borrow two pounds for a coffin: “Quoique de dure complexion,” Marx wrote Engels on this occasion, “griff mich diesmal die Scheisse bedeutend an.” In January, 1855, another girl was born; but in April the surviving boy died. Liebknecht says that he had “magnificent eyes and a promising head, which was, however, much too heavy for his body”; and he had shown signs of inheriting his father’s brilliance: it was he who had outwitted the baker. But he was delicate, and they had no way of taking care of him. Marx was more affected by the death of this boy than by that of any of his other children. “The house seems deserted and empty,” he writes Engels, “since the death of the child who was its living soul. It is impossible to describe how much we constantly miss him. I have suffered all sorts of bad luck, but now I know for the first time what a genuine misfortune is. I feel myself broken down [the last phrase is in English in the original]… . Among all the frightful miseries that I’ve been through in these last days, the thought of you and your friendship has always kept me up, and the hope that we still have something useful to accomplish in the world together.” Two years later Jenny gave birth to a still-born child under circumstances so painful that Karl tells Engels he cannot bring himself to write about them.
Jenny does not seem to have been a very good housekeeper; the strong-minded Lenchen ran the household. But she had much humor: her daughter Eleanor remembered her mother and father as always laughing together; and she brought to her unexpected role a dignity and loyalty that endured. To the orphan Wilhelm Liebknecht, still in his twenties, another socialist refugee from Germany, she appeared “now Iphigenia, softening and educating the barbarian, now Eleonore, giving peace to one who is slipping and doubts himself. She was mother, friend, confidante, counselor. She was and she remains for me still my ideal of what a woman should be… . If I did not go under in London, body and soul, I owe it in a great measure to her, who, at the time when I thought I should be drowned in fighting the heavy sea of exile, appeared to me like Leucothea to the ship-wrecked Odysseus and gave me the courage to swim.”
The police agent who has been quoted above said that Marx “as a husband and father, in spite of his wild and restless character, was the gentlest and mildest of men”; and everybody else bears him out. With his family Karl Marx was a patriarch, and where he dominated, he was able to love. He always turned off his cynical jokes and his bad language when there were women or children present; and if anybody said anything off-color, he would become nervous and even blush. He liked to play games with his children and is said to have written several of the biting pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte while they were sitting behind him playing horse, and whipping him to giddap. He used to tell them a long continued story about an imaginary character named Hans Röckle, who kept an enchanting toy-shop but who never had money in his pocket. He had men and women, dwarfs and giants, kings and queens, masters and journeymen, birds and four-footed beasts, as many as there were in Noah’s Ark, tables and chairs, boxes and carriages, big and little, and all made out of wood. But in spite of the fact that he was a magician, he had debts to the butcher and the Devil, which he was never able to pay, and so he was forced to his great distress to sell all his beautiful things piece by piece to the Devil. And yet, after many adventures, some frightening and some funny, every one of them came back to him again.
Liebknecht, who called on the Marxes almost every day, gives a very genial picture of the family. They had Sunday outings on Hampstead Heath, with bread and cheese and beer and roast veal, which they carried along in a basket. The children were crazy for green things, and once they found some hyacinths in a corner of a field which had No Trespass signs but which they had had the temerity to invade. The walk home would be very gay: they would sing popular nigger songs and—“I assure you it’s true,” says Liebknecht—patriotic songs of the fatherland, such as “O Strassburg, O Strassburg, Du wunderschöne Stadt,” which had been one of the pieces that Karl had copied out in a collection of folk-songs from different lands which he had made, when he was a student, for Jenny; and Marx would recite Faust and The Divine Comedy, and he and Jenny would take turns at Shakespeare, which they had learned so to love from her father. They made it a rule on these occasions that nobody was to talk about politics or to complain about the miseries of exile.
Sometimes little Jenny, who had the black eyes and big forehead of her father, would burst out in what Liebknecht describes as a “prophetic Pythian rapture.” On one of these walks one day she seemed to go into a trance and improvised a kind of poem about another life on the stars. Her mother became worried, and her father gave her a scolding and made her stop.
The life of political exiles becomes infected with special states of mind which are unimaginable for men who have a country. Those precisely whose principles and interests have raised them above the ordinary citizen, now, lacking the citizen’s base and his organic relation to society, find themselves contracted to something less. And, even aside from the difficulties that the exile encounters in finding work and making friends in a foreign country, it is hard for him to take hold in the new place, to build himself a real career there, because he lives always in hope of going home when the regime by which he has been banished shall have fallen.
For communists the situation is even harder. If they write in their own language about what is happening at home, they can print only on foreign presses works which have small currency among the émigrés and which, sent back into the fatherland, may compromise those who get them (see Engels’ letter to Marx on the subject of the latter’s pamphlet exposing the Communist trials in Cologne). And since the communist has set himself against the whole complex of society, he must try to live in it without being of it. He is thrown in upon his few comrades and himself, and they develop bad nerves and bad tempers; they are soon wasting their mental energies and their emotions in sterile controversies and spiteful quarrels. Group enthusiasm turns to intrigue, and talent becomes diseased with vanity. The relationships of revolutionary brotherhood become degraded by jealousy and suspicion. Always braced against the pressure that bears down on them both as aliens and as enemies of society, the self-alienated man gives way to impulses to round upon his associates and accuse them of selling out the cause; always subject to secret espionage, always in danger of deportation or prison, he is obliged to suspect an informer in every person who seeks his acquaintance, becomes demoralized by shattering fears lest those closest to him be scheming to undo him by a betrayal for which his own poverty all too easily suggests a motive.
Of this danger Marx and Engels were well aware. “One comes to see more and more,” Engels wrote Marx on February 12, 1851, “that the emigration is an institution which must turn everybody into a fool, an ass and a common knave, unless he manages to get completely away from it.” But it was impossible for them really to get away: their letters continue to rasp with quarrels over revolutionary funds, sabotage of political meetings, ungenerous judgments, uneasy fears. Marx writes, in a letter to Weydemeyer of August 2 of the same year, that on top of all his other troubles he is obliged to support “the baseness of our enemies, who have never once attempted to attack me objectively, but who, revenging themselves for their own impotence, spread unspeakable slanders about me and try to blacken my reputation… . Several days ago, the ‘famous’ barrister Schramm meets an acquaintance on the street and immediately begins to whisper to him: ‘However the revolution comes out, everybody agrees that Marx is done for. Rodbertus, who is the most likely to come to the top, will immediately order him shot.’ And that’s the way they all go on. So far as I myself am concerned, I laugh at all this idiocy, and it doesn’t distract me from my work for a moment, but you can imagine that it does not produce any very salutary effect on my wife, who is ill and occupied from morning to night with problems of making both ends meet of the most depressing kind, and whose nervous system is run down, when every day foolish gossips bring her the stinking exhalations of the poisonous democratic sewer.”
The crowning affront of this phase of Marx’s life was an attack by a man named Karl Vogt, a German professor of Zoölogy, who had sat on the Left of the Francfort Assembly and who had afterwards lived in exile in Switzerland. In the course of one of those wars of exiles, whose complications it would be unprofitable to trace, Vogt published in January, 1860, a brochure in which he accused Marx of blackmailing former revolutionists who were trying to go along with the regime in Germany, of fabricating counterfeit money in Switzerland, and of exploiting the workers for gain. This provoked Marx to write and publish in the November of the same year a long counterattack on Vogt. His friends had done their best to dissuade him, telling him that he was wasting his time and his money (since he was printing the book at his own expense); but Marx insists that, filthy though the whole affair is, he owes it to his wife and children to make a defense of his character and career.
Herr Vogt did certainly vindicate Marx; and it made out a convincing case against Vogt on the basis of the charge which had been printed in a paper sponsored by Marx and which had started the polemics between him and Vogt: that the latter was a paid propagandist in the service of Napoleon III. Yet the reader is likely to agree with Marx’s friends that Marx might better, as the Marxists say, have left his denouncer to History. For when the republican French government, after Sedan, published the archives of the Second Empire, it was found that Karl Vogt had indeed received forty thousand francs from the Emperor. And in the meantime Marx’s book about him—in spite of a chapter of acute analysis of international events, which included a characteristically macabre caricature of one of those sordid police agents who were the plague of the exile’s life—proved certainly one of the dreariest, most tedious and most exasperating productions of which a man of genius has ever been proud. Here Marx, by very force of his compulsion to go into every subject exhaustively, to fix each point with the last degree of exactitude, exposes a few ignoble lies and frauds with a machinery whose disproportion to its function only makes them appear more trivial. Marx’s habitual sneer, which did duty for normal laughter and which sometimes seems almost passionate, can only here push mercilessly for pages jokes that are both forced and disgusting (Marx was almost as excremental as Swift).
And yet Herr Vogt itself is not without a moment of greatness which stands at the end like Marx’s signature. When Vogt’s charges had first been made, Marx had brought a libel suit in Germany against a paper which had given them currency. The Berlin court had refused his plea; he had appealed it and again been refused; he had taken it before the Supreme Court, and for the third time it had been rejected. Now, thwarted, he sets his brand of scorn with stinging and somber force on these judges of the petty courts of law who will not justify the higher judge. “It does not appear in the present case,” the Royal Supreme Court had written, “that there has been any judicial error.” So, says Marx, by a simple “not” (which has stood at the end of the sentence in German), a certain Herr von Schlickmann, in the name of the Royal Supreme Court, is empowered to reject his plea. It is a matter merely of writing that one word, without which the plea would have been granted. Herr von Schlickmann does not need to refute the arguments presented by Marx’s counsel; he does not even need to discuss them; he does not need to mention them even. He has simply to tack a “not” on to a sentence.
“Wo also bleibt die Begründung der ‘zurückweisenden’ Verfügung? Wo die Antwort auf die sehr ausführliche Beschwerdeschrift meines Rechtsanwalts? Nämlich:
“SUB III: ‘Ein solcher (Rechtsirrthum) erhellt jedoch im vorliegenden Falle nicht.’
“Streicht man aus diesem Satze SUB III das Wörtchen nicht weg, so lautet die Motivirung: ‘Ein solcher (Rechtsirrthum) erhellt jedoch im vorliegenden Falle.’ Damit wäre die Verfügung des Kammergerichts über den Haufen geworfen. Aufrecht erhalten wird sie also nur durch das am Ende aufpostirte Wörtchen ‘Nicht’ womit Herr von Schlickmann im namen des Obertribunals die Beschwerdeschrift des Herrn Justizrath Weber ‘zurückweist.’
“Aὐτότατος ἔφη. Nicht. Herr von Schlickmann widerlegt die von meinem Rechtsanwalt entwickelten Rechtsbedenken nicht, er bespricht sie nicht, ja erwähnt sie nicht. Herr von Schlichmann hatte natürlich für seine ‘Verfügung’ hinreichende Gründe, aber er verschweigt sie. Nicht! Die Beweiskraft dieses Wörtleins liegt ausschliesslich in der Autorität, der hierarchischen Stellung der Person, die es in den Mund nimmt. An und für sich beweist Nicht Nichts. Nicht! Aὐτότατος ἔφη.
“So verbot mir auch das Obertribunal den ‘Democrat’ F. Zabel zu verklagen.
“So endete mein Prozess mit den preussischen Gerichten.”*
What is really behind the whole book, one realizes when one comes to this conclusion, is the helpless indignation of the man of integrity, whose principles have made him a rebel, in the face of a judicial system which, precisely because he is a rebel, will not recognize that integrity. One of the things that infuriated Marx most was a statement in the court’s decision that there had been nothing in the published slanders from which Marx’s reputation should suffer. And Marx’s case is the type of all such cases. The court says: You make war on society; why should you expect vindication from its tribunals? Had not the judges of Augsburg decided against Karl Vogt in his suit against an Augsburg paper which had printed the accusations against him, just as the judges of Berlin had decided against Karl Marx? Why not reduce the thing to absurdity by appealing to the bourgeois court to give you a good character with your comrades as a sincere and self-denying revolutionist?
For another kind of charge had been involved which was serious enough and had enough truth in it to goad Marx—as such charges always goaded him—more sharply perhaps than all the foolish stories of counterfeit money and blackmail. Vogt had included in his book a letter from a Prussian lieutenant named Techow, written in 1850, at the time of the split in the Communist League, of which Techow had been a member. “If Marx,” this former comrade had said, “had only as much heart as intellect, if he had only as much love as hate, I would go through fire for him, even though he has not only on several occasions indicated his utter contempt for me, but has finally expressed it quite frankly. He is the first and only one amongst us whom I would trust for the capacity for leadership, the capacity for mastering a big situation without losing himself in details.” But Marx, said Techow, had come to be possessed by the ambition for personal domination: he could now tolerate only inferiors and despised his working-class supporters.
So Karl Marx must make his own court of justice, in which he can vindicate his own moral superiority against the police with their spies, the petty officials, the big officials, all the hollow simulacra of the Law, who are able, without effort, without suffering, without intellectual lights, to reject what ought to be, what must certainly come, simply by writing that single word “not.”
Between Herr Vogt and The Class Struggles in France lies a decade of the life of exile. The difference between them is shocking. In Marx’s writing of 1850, when he was a man in his early thirties, for whom it was still a fine gesture to spend his patrimony on a revolutionary paper and pawn all his personal belongings, still flushed from his fight in Cologne, he had exulted in the consciousness of mastery of a vigorous and original mind with a new intellectual world before it; in Herr Vogt of 1860, half-atrophied in the monotony of London, with Jenny now in so bad a nervous condition that when she finally comes down with smallpox just as the book is being published, the doctor is to tell Karl that the infection has probably saved her from a mental collapse, he can only grind the wheels of his mind, spit out acid puns, rail reproachfully against that society which he has once so roundly defied.
And his protest itself will be stifled. He got rid of about eighty copies in England, but the book was never distributed in Germany, because of the failure of the German publisher who had brought it out in London. Marx’s agreement with this young German had been that they should go halves on both profit and loss; but the young man had had a partner who did not hesitate to invoke the law and to claim the whole costs of printing, so that Marx not only lost what he had put up, but had to pay out almost as much again. He had never thought to get a written contract.
* See Appendix C.
* “Where then is the argument to he found on which this rejection is based? Where is the answer to the detailed petition drawn up by my attorney? This is it.
“Under III: ‘Now it does not appear in the present case that there has been such a judicial error.’
“If we strike out of this sentence under III the single little word ‘not,’ then the decision runs thus: ‘Now it does appear in the present case that there has been such a judicial error.’ In this way the order of the Court of Appeals is annulled and annihilated. It will only stand up through the interposition of that single little word ‘not,’ with which Herr von Schlickmann in the name of the Supreme Court rejects the petition of Herr Justizrath Weber.
“He himself has spoken, ‘Not’! Herr von Schlickmann does ‘not’ refute the legal arguments adduced by my attorney; he does ‘not’ make any attempt to discuss them; he does ‘not’ mention them even. Herr von Schlickmann had of course his good and sufficient reasons for his order; but he prefers to keep silence about them. ‘Not’! The power of demonstration possessed by this tiny word exclusively resides in the authority, in the hierarchical position, of the person who takes it in his mouth. In and by itself ‘not’ means ‘nought.’ ‘Not’! He himself has spoken.
“So the Supreme Court has forbidden me to bring suit against the ‘democrat’ F. Zabel.
“So ended my case in the Prussian courts.”