by Gill Hands
Marx met many revolutionaries and liberal thinkers in Paris and he became very friendly with the anarchists Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin and with Heinrich Heine the German poet.
* * *
Insight
Anarchists advocate that the state does not need government. The rise in anarchy in the nineteenth century developed from the aftermath of the French Revolution. This led to the term anarchy being used to describe a state of political and social chaos, which is not intended in the original use of the word.
* * *
Although the Annals closed down they had a wide readership in Germany and among German exiles because Marx persuaded Heine to write some satirical socialist poems. Incidentally, Heine was one of the few friends that Marx did not later fall out with as he believed allowances should be made for poets. He told his daughter Eleanor that he did not believe poets should be judged by the standards that apply to other people, but he was also forever grateful because he believed Heine had saved the life of little Jennychen by plunging her into a cold bath when she had convulsions.
The new influences Marx found in Paris led him to write the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1844. They were not published until 1932 but in these we can see him grasping towards some of his later theories on the materialist view of history and the role of the worker in capitalism. These theories are discussed in detail later in this book.
Marx became reacquainted with Friedrich Engels (their paths had crossed very briefly during Marx’s early journalistic career). Engels had a reputation as a radical journalist and young Hegelian and wanted to contribute to the Annals. He had written for the Rheinische Zeitung but at that time Marx had believed him to be too much of a theorist and distrusted his ideas. Since then Engels had gone to work in Manchester for his father’s firm and he saw the terrible poverty in the city and the Industrial Revolution at first hand. He had become involved with the Chartist movement (an early form of trade unionism) and his association with a factory girl, Mary Burns, who became his mistress, meant that he visited slum areas that people from his class would not normally set foot in. The result of these experiences was The Condition of the Working Classes of England, an amazing piece of writing that included shocking accounts of the lives of the poor. It had really impressed Marx and he was very pleased to meet with Engels again when he visited Paris in August 1844. They spent much of that time together, soon became firm friends and began collaborating on pieces of writing.
Their first writing together was supposed to be a short critique of Bruno Bauer and his followers but it ended up as a 200-page booklet, most of it written by Marx. The Holy Family contained philosophy and literary criticism and defended the rights of workers, but really it was a bit of a rant by Marx attacking Bauer and his companions in the ‘Free’, as the Young Hegelians had become known.
Marx was now a notorious figure in France as well as Germany and the French authorities became uneasy. It only took a little persuasion from the Prussian government for them to expel Marx from France in 1845. He moved to Brussels, where Engels soon followed him having given up his job. They worked together on The German Ideology, which was the first time the materialist theory of history was defined in a structured way. It was not published until after Marx’s death but he realized at the time that its main purpose had been to help him clarify his ideas.
Marx and Engels became involved in the League of the Just, a revolutionary secret society with a large German membership. These expatriates were led by Wilhelm Weitling, a German tailor who agreed with Auguste Blanqui, the French extremist who believed in revolution. He thought that the majority of workers would not be won over to communism and a minority would have to seize power on their behalf. The League was banned in France and so the headquarters were based in London, where eventually a large split grew between those who believed the ideas of Weitling and those who believed that the workers could be won over gradually through education and that communism would evolve peacefully.
By 1847 Marx and Engels were in control of the League and had turned it from a secret society into an open organization called The Communist League. At the second meeting of the League in December, Marx and Engels were asked to draw up the statutes of the League and write a statement of principles, or manifesto. The League already had a slogan, ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’
The Communist Manifesto
The aim of the Communist League was to overthrow the old bourgeois society and Marx and Engels had to write some kind of document that would make their objectives clear. Unfortunately, Marx did not concentrate on the task straight away and it was only when he received a letter from the committee threatening ‘that measures would be taken against him’ if he didn’t deliver the goods that he got on with it. It was finally finished in February 1848 and opens with the words, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism’.
It is one of the earliest socialist writings and despite seeming dated and rather quaintly archaic in style it is still in print today and has some contemporary relevance. Although Marx had discussed the Manifesto with Engels and Engels had made several attempts at writing a version of it, the final document is almost entirely the work of Marx himself and it is here that Marxism can be seen in its embryonic form.
The Communist Manifesto:
describes the capitalist system that existed at that time and explains how it came about
describes the proletariat and how it was created
examines the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
puts forward the idea of revolution
explains how communism might work in practice.
It ends with the words, ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!’ and it is one of the most famous of all revolutionary texts. It was written as an appeal to the workers and so it has the feel of propaganda. The ideas in it are discussed in much more detail throughout this book.
Exile
Marx had already been exiled from Germany and from France and now that The Communist Manifesto had been published the Belgian authorities began to look on him with suspicion. The year 1848 was exciting for Marx and Engels, for not long after the Manifesto was published revolutions and uprisings began in many European cities. King Louis Philippe abdicated in February 1848 as a result of the new unrest sweeping through France. A new French Republic was proclaimed. Could this be the start of the revolutions that Marx and Engels had hoped for?
Prussian police spies had been watching Marx; in April 1847 the Prussian ambassador in Brussels had demanded the suppression of the journal he was editing and now that uprisings had begun the authorities wanted him out of the country.
In March 1848, a decree signed by King Leopold I of Belgium ordered him out of the country never to return. Marx was not particularly upset by this as he had already considered returning to life in France. The official who had signed the form ordering his expulsion from Paris had been dismissed and Marx had been invited back by an old socialist comrade Ferdinand Flocon, who was now a member of the provisional government.
Despite his willingness to leave, he was arrested on trumped-up charges of not having a proper passport and thrown into a prison cell. Although this was the official reason for his imprisonment, it is likely that it had more to do with his funding of dissident Germans working in Belgium. Some of the money ended up being used to buy guns, knives and other weapons – no wonder the authorities were nervous. Jenny Marx was also imprisoned under very wide-reaching vagrancy laws and although both of them were acquitted by a jury the next day, they were given only a few hours to leave the country. They had to quickly sell all their possessions before being taken to the French border under police escort.
Marx arrived in Paris on 5 March and he and Engels, inspired by the French example, soon began working towards a German revolution. They amended The Communist Manifesto into The Demands of the Communist Party i
n Germany and distributed it as far as they could.
Marx realized that he needed to be back in Germany in order to be more effective and so he decided to move back to Cologne. He still had contacts there and he hoped some of them would help in his new endeavour, a paper to be called Neue Rheinische Zeitung. When he arrived in Cologne he reported to the authorities and asked them to renew his Prussian citizenship but they refused. Engels returned to his family hoping that he could persuade them to finance this new venture but they did not.
Scraping together money, including Marx’s family inheritance, they managed to publish the first issue in June 1848 and the paper soon had a large circulation. Some of this was due to the style of the paper, which was daring and often witty. In contrast to the other more dry and rambling philosophical German papers it was informative and came to the point. This did not go down well with the authorities as revolutionary uprisings were beginning throughout Germany and there were street fights in Berlin. A campaign of police harassment against the paper and its editors began. In October 1848 Engels left for Belgium where he was arrested and deported to France and the paper suspended publication for a few weeks.
When Engels returned, he and Marx were put on trial for ‘insulting the public prosecutor’. No sooner did they get off this charge through Marx’s brilliant and witty defence, than Marx was re-arrested on charges of ‘incitement to revolt’ for encouraging people to resist paying taxes, using force if necessary. Again, he was acquitted. Because he had been acquitted twice Marx began to feel that he was above the law and he still continued to write articles that upset the authorities and became even more daring. This was too much and the authorities pounced on the paper in May 1848, closed it down and prosecuted the workforce. All non-Prussians were to be deported and as Marx had not been able to get his citizenship renewed this included him. Everything was sold up, the family silver went into pawn and Marx and his family moved to Paris.
Paris was now totally changed from the city that he had left only recently. There had been a royalist reaction to the revolution and all foreign revolutionaries were to be evicted. Marx had hardly arrived when armed police came to the door to banish him to a rural part of Brittany; as Jenny was pregnant she was allowed another month to follow him. Marx did not wish to live in what he considered to be a swamp in the middle of nowhere. He could not go back to Germany or Belgium, he tried going to Switzerland but they wouldn’t give him a passport, so he got on the next ship to Dover in England.
* * *
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at Trier in Germany, which was then part of Prussia.
The Industrial and French Revolutions meant that Europe was going through major social and political upheavals at that time.
Not much is known about Marx’s early childhood.
He was intelligent and witty in character but sometimes moody and irritable and often fell out with friends.
He studied law at university but changed to the study of philosophy.
On leaving university he began work as a journalist and soon came to the notice of the authorities with his controversial writings on the plight of peasants.
He married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a cultured and aristocratic family friend, in 1843.
In 1843 he moved to Paris where he mixed with radicals and revolutionaries and joined the Communist League.
Friedrich Engels became his life long friend and co-writer at this time and together they wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1847.
Marx was exiled from France, Prussia and Belgium and so he moved to England.
* * *
2
Marx’s later life
In this chapter you will learn:
key facts about Marx’s later life and work in London
about his friendship and working partnership with Engels
about his work on Das Kapital and with the International
about the end of his life.
The move to London
When Marx moved to London in 1849 he only expected to be there for a few months at the most. As things turned out he ended up living there until his death in 1883 nearly 35 years later. He was buried in Highgate cemetery, so it could be claimed that he never left London.
London welcomed many refugees and was a place of sanctuary for many political dissidents. It was the largest city in the world at that time and there was a marked contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor.
The world of the poor was a sprawling industrial wilderness filled with factories spewing out smoke, sewers that poured into the river Thames and slum housing where people crowded together in unhygienic conditions without clean drinking water or proper toilets. Disease was rife, cholera epidemics were frequent and mortality rates were high.
* * *
Insight
Further insight into the lives of the Victorian poor can be found in novels by Charles Dickens, especially Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit and Hard Times and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South.
* * *
Marx observed this world at first hand. His early years in London were spent in poverty and this had some effect on his family life. Three of his children died and one was stillborn. Although this was not uncommon at the time in all social classes, it was most often the poor who died young. Marx’s own life and his observation of the lives of those around him meant that his writing about poverty was often vivid and full of hatred against a system that allowed people to live in such terrible conditions.
It must have been particularly hard for Jenny, his wife, to come to terms with the reduction in their circumstances as she was used to an aristocratic life of wealth and privilege. In September 1849 she arrived in London with their three young children, Jenny (Jennnychen), Laura and Edgar and was heavily pregnant with their fourth child. He was born on Guy Fawkes Night, 5 November. Marx rather liked the idea that his son was born on the day commemorating an attempt by revolutionaries to blow up the Houses of Parliament and named him Heinrich Guido in memory of the chief conspirator. He was often known in family circles as Fawkesy.
Family life in London
Marx is such a well-known icon that it is easy to forget he was also a human being and a family man. At first, the family lived in various temporary lodgings around Soho, where many other refugees lived. They were evicted on one occasion and the bailiffs came round and took all their meagre possessions, including the children’s toys. They left Jenny Marx nursing little Fawkesy on bare boards, while their furniture was put onto the pavement outside.
Poor Fawkesy was a sickly child and prone to convulsions and he died in December 1850. By this time Jenny Marx was pregnant again and their daughter Franziska was born in March 1851.
Franziska died when she was just a year old after a bout of severe bronchitis and her father could not afford to pay for the funeral. A kindly French neighbour finally lent the family money to hire an undertaker and see that she was laid to rest with dignity.
The family moved to more permanent lodgings at 28 Dean Street at the end of 1850. These were at the top of the house and were only two rooms. They must have been very cramped for a man and wife, children, a housekeeper (Helene Demuth) and sometimes a male secretary (Wilhelm Pieper). Helene Demuth, known as Lenchen, became pregnant and it is alleged that Karl Marx was the father of her son.
The boy, born in June 1851, was known as Freddy Lewis Demuth. He was given to foster parents and lived most of his life in Hackney, London. There was no father’s name on his birth certificate and many people at the time believed that Engels was the father, although the boy was said to look very like Marx. Engels said in later life that he had only let this story be circulated because he wanted to spare the Marx family from embarrassment. Although there is no conclusive proof, there are several family letters that hint at the paternity of the boy and most academics now believe that Freddy was indeed the son of Marx. It is no wonder that a Prussian police spy reported that Marx was livi
ng the life of a ‘real bohemian’.
The Marx family had been systematically spied on by agents of the Prussian police because they were believed to be dangerous revolutionaries who wanted to bring down the governments of several European states and guillotine their ruling classes and monarchs. As Jenny’s half-brother Ferdinand von Westphalen was the Prussian interior minister there was also an element of bad family feeling involved. He had been against her marriage to Marx in the first place.
These spies were not very efficient and Marx and Engels usually managed to spot them as they followed them or loitered about taking notes. They were not fooled by attempts to invite them into fake conspiracies either. However, one spy did infiltrate their household and wrote a report about the terribly dirty state of the place and of Marx in particular, who he describes as being an unwashed, heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking individual who kept irregular hours. Visitors wrote that the place was in a state of chaos with broken furniture, papers scattered everywhere, books, pipes, tobacco and toys lying about, all covered in a layer of dirt.