Yet it is clear that the soaring language of the Manifesto was aiming at the ultimate goal of a proletarian revolution growing out of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The sudden and unexpected revolutions of 1848, on the other hand, were not going to lead directly to this historical denouement. Hence most of Marx’s writings in the NRZ addressed issues connected with internal German topics: following the debates in the National Assembly in Frankfurt, attacking various German authorities in matters of civil rights and freedom of the press, as the NRZ itself was occasionally closed periodically, accused of inciting violence. But basically Marx disagreed with some of the more radical members of the League of Communists who would have liked to boycott elections and call for active revolutionary confrontation with the authorities. At the same time, in April 1849 the NRZ published a series of theoretical articles by Marx, titled “Wage Labor and Capital,” with a socialist message that was unmistakable.
In the autumn of 1848 the authorities in most European countries succeeded in overcoming their initial shock and regained some control over the situation. In Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, as well as in some of the Italian states, the revolutionary wave appeared to have run its course. Some of the bourgeois liberal groups, which initially supported the call for representative and constitutional government, now became frightened and coalesced with conservative forces against the more radical democratic demands, and in a series of articles Marx was among the first to identify these reversals. Because of Russia’s intervention in support of the governments in the Habsburg lands, Marx even supported views calling for a war against Russia—one of the first intimations of his later concern about the role a reactionary Russia might play in undermining democratic movements in Europe in the future.
The movement toward German unification eventually came to an end when King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia declined the National Assembly’s offer of the title of German emperor. The imperial crown, the king maintained, could not be granted by an elected assembly, and the Frankfurt Assembly never recovered from this refusal.
Marx’s articles in the NRZ reflected his awareness that the revolutionary waves were receding and that the powers-that-be were able, with some adjustments, to regain control and reassert themselves. He followed these developments closely, and as we have seen he made the point that the revocation of the civil rights granted to the Jews in the German states under the initial pressures of the revolutionary impact was indicative of the growing strength of the reactionary forces.
Attempting to block the reassertion of reactionary powers, armed insurrections broke out in some of the smaller German states—including Dresden in Saxony, and later in the historically liberal southwestern state of Baden. Engels joined the insurgents, but their defeat also signified the end of the NRZ, which the Prussian authorities finally closed in May 1849; the final issue, printed in red ink, was published on 19th May. The issue included a fiery poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, a close colleague of Marx in the League of Communists, which called on the workers not to lose hope—but also not to follow provocations that may lead to a failed insurrection and bloody suppression by the reinvigorated authorities.
Subsequently, Marx and his colleagues left Cologne for Frankfurt and Baden, eventually leaving Germany altogether. Marx arrived in Paris in early June; a few weeks later the last insurrection in Baden was crushed. In France, the rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to the presidency and later to the imperial title as Napoleon III made it obvious that Paris, which had served as a relative safe haven for German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and other democrats and radicals under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe in the 1830s and 1840s, would no longer be hospitable to their presence or ideas. In late August 1849, Marx departed with his family, for London, where he lived for the rest of his life.
The revolutionary period of 1848–49 was the only time in Marx’s life when he directly participated in revolutionary activity—mostly as an editor, but also through his leadership roles in the League of Communists. At its height, the League had about five hundred members. It never was a significant player in the 1848 revolutions, although the NRZ was an important organ of democracy in Germany, mainly in the liberal Rhineland. Marx was never to return to live permanently in Germany, and he was never involved again in direct revolutionary activity.
6
London: From Abject Penury to Middle-Class Existence
WHEN MARX AND HIS FAMILY arrived in London, he was a penniless exile who joined an increasing number of European radicals finding asylum in Britain. While political reaction was triumphing on the Continent, Britain’s relatively liberal politics—and the fact that it had not been itself convulsed by the 1848–49 upheavals—turned London into the only place in Europe where radical politics could continue, after a fashion, to be carried out.
British radical groups, and especially the Chartists, were trying to help these destitute exiles, but their growing number exhausted whatever limited assistance could be offered, and most of these expatriates faced years of poverty and misery.
This was also the fate of Marx and his family during their first years in London. Like the other exiles, Marx continued initially to be active in the various revolutionary groups that tried to reconstitute themselves on British soil. He also attempted to pursue his economic studies, while publishing a number of essays on the current political development on the Continent; but his early years in London were the most terrible time of his—and his family’s—life.
These years were a constant struggle for sheer survival, which took its toll on the family. Marx at that time had no sources of income, and was able to scrape by only though the generosity of some of his better situated German exile colleagues, like the poet Freiligrath. Later on, Ferdinand Lassalle, who emerged as the leader of the new German working-class association—the first successful German socialist movement—helped Marx generously several times, as did Engels, who went back to Manchester and reestablished himself as manager of his family’s business there. Marx had exhausted the initial funds from his inheritance, and attempts to draw bills on his mother’s name only caused further friction with her. Marx and his family moved from one cramped dwelling to another, eventually settling from 1850 to 1855 in rooms at 28 Dean Street in Soho. From time to time the family had to pawn whatever family heirlooms Jenny had brought with her, and Marx barely avoided being thrown into debtor’s prison.
More children were born, but not all survived. Two of them, Guido and Franziska, born in London, died at the age of one year each in 1850 and 1851. In 1855, Marx’s oldest son, Edgar, died, and at the same time Jenny gave birth to a still-born child. When Jenny’s health continued to fail, the family could not afford a doctor, and in one harrowing case Marx had to borrow money for the funeral of one of their children. On another extreme occasion he had to pawn his coat, and consequently could not leave home.
PRIVATE TRAVAILS AND PUBLIC SETBACKS
These terrible conditions and pressures also appear to have had their impact on relations between the Marx couple. The deep romantic attachment between the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen and her husband has survived the vagaries of persecution, exile, and destitute poverty caused by his revolutionary commitment. It has often been commented upon as extraordinary, and Jenny’s belief in her companion is indeed remarkable, documented in their correspondence, in their continuous mutual professions of love and companionship. This comes out also in Jenny’s memoir, which was published many years after the couple’s death, showing not only a deep mutual love but also their sharing common beliefs and political views. Jenny, well-read and highly educated, was an intellectual companion to her husband, which is what drew the two together in the first place. Yet a disturbing crisis occurred in 1851—perhaps the worst year in their early exile in London.
When the young couple left Germany for Paris in 1843, soon after their marriage, Jenny’s mother sent along with them her maid, Helene (“Lenchen”) Demuth, who stayed with them as
housekeeper throughout their exile in Paris, Brussels, and London. Despite the extra financial burden of having to provide for an additional soul, this obviously made even their most difficult years somewhat easier—living with them, taking care of the household, the children, and Jenny’s frequent confinements. On 23rd June 1851, in their one-and-a-half-room apartment in Soho, Lenchen gave birth to a son.
The circumstances surrounding the birth of this child out of wedlock, named Alfred (“Freddy”) Demuth, were shrouded in mystery for a long time. After his birth the boy was given out for adoption to a working-class family in London’s East End. His birth certificate does not mention a father, but Engels—who frequently visited London—claimed paternity, and given his bachelor status and knowledge of his relationships with working-class women in Manchester, this was accepted in the family circles. Freddy occasionally visited his birth mother at the various homes of the Marx family, and the Marx daughters knew him as Lenchen’s son and played with him.
Only close to his death in 1895 did Engels confess that Freddy’s father was in fact Marx, and the reason he had accepted paternity was to preserve the Marx marriage. Marx’s daughters were stunned to learn that their occasional playmate was really their half-brother, and kept the information to themselves. The truth came out only in the 1960s from some documents discovered by biographers of Marx’s daughter Eleanor. Occasionally this was contested by some Marxists, especially in the Soviet Union, but there is no serious doubt today about Marx’s paternity.
At the time the secret was well kept, and left no trace in the Marx-Engels correspondence; neither can it be ascertained whether the relationship between Marx and the family maid (so typical in nineteenth-century bourgeois households) was a one-time occasion or a longer liaison. Obviously it signified a crisis in the family, but it appeared to have been overcome, and if it left scars, they are not visible in what can be gleaned from the family history in the following decades.
Lenchen stayed in the Marx household, and when both Karl and Jenny died, she moved to Engels’s home and managed his household; literate and politically engaged herself, she also helped Engels arrange and organize Marx’s papers and manuscripts. Following her death, in 1890, she was buried in the grave of Karl and Jenny Marx at Highgate Cemetery, and her name is inscribed on the family tombstone. Freddy eventually learned about his true paternity from his half-sister Eleanor, who shared some of her inheritance with him. He was trained as a toolmaker, joined the Labour Party, and died in 1929, never publicly divulging his secret.
All this was happening against the background of Marx’s intense activity among the German and other European exiles in London. As sometimes happens in similar situations, many of these exiles viewed their sojourn abroad as a merely temporary setback, hoping that they would be able to go back to their countries and continue their activities, not always realizing that tectonic changes had been taking place that made such hopes irrelevant. It appears that this was also Marx’s initial view, but unlike many others of his colleagues in the League of Communists, he was one of the first to realize gradually that the new situation on the Continent called for a reassessment of his earlier thinking.
Through colleagues in Hamburg—which, as a Hansa Free City, was allowed to maintain a more liberal press law—Marx was able to revive for some time the NRZ as a periodical renamed NRZ Revue, where he published some of his essays dealing with the 1848 revolutions and their aftermath. But most of his efforts, like those of his fellow exiles in London, were devoted to maintaining whatever remained of their earlier organizational structures. So in September 1849, barely two months after arriving in London, Marx and some of his colleagues reconstituted themselves as the new central committee of the League of Communists. A few months later, after Engels returned to England, having survived the failed radical insurrection in Baden, both prepared on its behalf a lengthy “Address of the Central Committee of the League of Communists.” It was printed in London, and the attempt to smuggle copies into Germany basically failed, so it had a very limited impact at the time; yet it is indicative of the somewhat confused state of mind of Marx in these first months of his exile in London.
On one hand, the “Address” maintains that the Communist Manifesto had proved to be the only correct analysis of the political situation in Europe—a claim that could hardly be vindicated by what happened during the revolutions of 1848 as well as in their suppression. It then contradicts itself by accusing the liberal bourgeoisie of the “betrayal of the revolutionary movement”—which is exactly the opposite of what the Manifesto foresaw as the role of the bourgeoisie in a coming revolution. But after this, the text tries to explain why further developments would be more complicated, why the Communist League needed to adopt a more extended time perspective, and suggests tactical steps to be taken to maintain its drive. The “Address” calls for radical demands (such as nationalization of all factories, which the Manifesto avoided), yet ends up with a generalized exhortation to the workers “to do their utmost for their eventual victory.”
The ambivalent and somewhat contradictory language of this text clearly suggested the dilemmas and tensions faced by the members of the League of Communists in London, and they came to the surface within a few months. A radical faction, led by some of its veteran members, like the former army officer August Willich, who advocated resumption of revolutionary and clandestine activities, viewed the defeat of the revolution in 1849 as a mere temporary setback. In the ensuing internal debates, Marx called Willich and his supporters “alchemists of revolution,” and toward the end of 1850 the League split, as did its London-based German Workers’ Educational Association. Its headquarters were moved to Cologne, which effectively limited its ability to act and eventually led to its penetration by Prussian secret agents and the arrest of its local members and their trial. In November 1852, Marx moved to dissolve the rump League, claiming that the move to Cologne and the trial there of its activists had in fact put an end to its existence and its raison d’être. Willich eventually emigrated, like many German Forty-Eighters, to America, and distinguished himself as a brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War.
These internal splits—acrimonious and sometimes petty, as such developments usually are among exile groups—did reflect, however, a fundamental reassessment of Marx’s own thinking, which he expressed in his writings during those years. While these writings never explicitly criticized his own statement in the Manifesto, they clearly suggested a significant revision. They also accentuate the difference between texts like the Manifesto, the aim of which was mainly ideological and propagandistic on behalf of a radical, revolutionary organization, and Marx’s own analytical pieces, where he was speaking for himself.
Toward the mid-1850s Marx’s personal financial situation slowly changed. With diminishing hopes for a reawakened revolutionary activity—and the dismantling of the League of Communists—Marx was able to establish himself as a contributor to various democratic journals on the Continent (Die Presse in Vienna, the Neue Oder Zeitung in Germany) as well as among the German émigré press in the United States. Some improvements in his personal fortunes also came his way, and the Marx family was able to extricate itself from the terrible conditions of their first years in London. Financial difficulties never left Marx, but at this time they were on another level: it was not a question of survival anymore, but of maintaining a decent, middle-class existence in a comfortable house in Hampstead, and trying to give his daughters a respectable education. His perennial financial struggles did not end, but at least the terrible years of poverty were over. Marx slowly grew from a penurious revolutionary exile into a freelance radical author and journalist.
In the summer of 1852, Marx started writing regular commentaries on European politics for the New York Daily Tribune. He started as an occasional contributor, and initially Engels—from Manchester—had to help with his English before he sent these dispatches by mail to New York. But slowly the pieces turned into almost weekly reports,
and Marx was paid between three and five pounds per article. This was not sufficient for the Marx household’s growing expenses, but it gave him some financial security. He continued writing these articles until 1862, most of them running commentaries on current affairs, but also some addressing wider issues with theoretical implications, as we shall see.
In the spring of 1856 Jenny inherited two considerable sums of money from her uncle, and later that year she received a further legacy from her mother’s estate. Marx’s own mother, who consistently refused to help her son financially, died in Trier in November 1863, and Marx—who was able to attend her funeral—received his share of her (and actually his father’s) inheritance. This enabled the Marx family to move from the cramped quarters in Soho to a commodious house at 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Hampstead.
At the same time one of Marx’s closest colleagues in the League of Communists, Wilhelm Wolff, died in Manchester. An educator of independent means, he left Marx the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds. This made a major difference, extricating Marx from most of his debts, although, lacking a fixed income of his own, it did not solve all of his financial problems. Engels eventually settled on granting him a regular fixed sum of money. Eventually, the Marx family moved to another address in Hampstead, at 41 Maitland Park Road. Eleanor, their youngest daughter, was born in 1855.
RETHINKING THE REVOLUTION
After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 there was a distinct shift in the nature of Marx’s writings. Hitherto, most of his writings were either philosophical treatises in the Young Hegelian vein, criticism of the existing order, polemics against fellow radicals, and attempts to lay the foundations of his economic thinking, or political brochures like the Manifesto published on behalf of groups he was associated with and which did not carry his name. After 1849 his most significant writings are detailed analytical studies of developments in specific countries—mainly France and Germany—trying to understand the reasons for the failures of the revolutionary waves—and hopes—of 1848. The shift is not only from the philosophical and exhortative to the sociological, but also from the powerful world-historical generalities of the EPM and the Manifesto to the tedious quotidian details of political and social reality.
Karl Marx Page 11