Marx- The Key Ideas

by Gill Hands

  The bohemian air of the house was added to by the many visitors and members of the Communist League who dropped in for political discussion with Marx day and night. It was further cramped because Marx employed a secretary to help keep his papers in order, even though he had little money to pay him and the young man, Wilhelm Pieper, was not very efficient.

  Pieper fancied himself as a rather flamboyant Byronesque Romantic and although he was supposed to translate papers for Marx, his translations were so bad that Engels usually redid them. Jenny Marx did not think much of him and was convinced that she could do his work easily and save the family some money, but Marx rather liked the idea of a secretary, even if he was useless and disappeared on romantic adventures time and time again. Pieper lived with the Marx family on and off for several years and often shared a bed with Marx because conditions were so overcrowded. Finally he left to become a teacher and Jenny was able to prove that she was an excellent secretary at last.

  It was in this strange household that the children grew up, often living on a diet of nothing but bread and potatoes for days on end. Marx was not able to pay the bills on many occasions and could not afford to buy medicine when the family were ill. There was no kind of welfare state at that time and doctors’ bills and medicines had to be paid for. The poor conditions and lack of good food meant that the family fell ill frequently. There were no antibiotics then either so infections took hold of people very quickly and they died of illnesses which are easily cured today.

  All through his life Marx was dogged with a bad chest and had recurrent bouts of bronchitis. He was a heavy smoker and often joked that the money he made from Das Kapital was not enough to pay for the cigars he smoked while producing it. He suffered from carbuncles which he complained about frequently in his correspondence; these were boils that flared up when he was angry or stressed and sometimes they were so bad that he could not sit down. They were probably made worse by poor diet and his liver problems caused by drinking too much. He also suffered from what would probably be called stress today. Trying to support a family, write, and organize a political movement led to bouts of insomnia and headaches, which recurred repeatedly.

  Marx became a frequent visitor to the pawn shop where he took the family silver his wife had inherited, and sometimes even the coat off his back, to raise a little cash. On one occasion he was imprisoned overnight because it was believed that the scruffy little refugee who came to pawn such fine silver must have stolen it. He was only released when Jenny went to the police to explain. Engels was a great help to them at this time and he sent money from the offices of his father’s factory to try and keep them solvent.

  When creditors and angry tradesmen came to the door Marx would often send his children down to tell them he was not in. Little Edgar was especially good at throwing them off the scent and, as the only boy, he was his father’s favourite. Family life was chaotic but warm-hearted as Marx delighted in his children and spent a lot of time with them, which was unusual in those times. They all called him by his old nickname of Moor. He read the classics and Shakespeare to them and made up fairy tales and stories about the poor triumphing over evil landlords.

  Another child was born in 1855, a daughter named Eleanor, who was a frail and ill child. At the time of her birth Edgar was only six years old and he also became very ill and weak with some kind of fever. Doctors eventually confirmed that he had consumption, as tuberculosis was called then. This is a highly infectious disease and at that time there was no cure. Edgar wasted away and died in April 1855.

  Although the whole family was grief-stricken, Marx took Edgar’s death very badly and could not be consoled. Engels took the family on a short holiday, but on their return the sight of Edgar’s toys lying around made Jenny and Marx even more upset and they decided they had to move away from the place that had seen the deaths of three of their children. A blue plaque now commemorates their life there.

  They moved to a much bigger house in a nicer part of London, near Hampstead Heath. This was only possible because one of Jenny’s uncles had died and left them some money and shortly afterwards her mother died. It meant that they could redeem their possessions from the pawn shop and live a life of more ease. The girls all went to a private school and had dancing lessons as befitted young ladies of the time. These were happier times for the children as they had a garden where Marx often played with them, carrying them on his back like a horse. Sometimes they would go to the heath for picnics and laugh at their father when he hired a donkey and rode around the park on it.

  Jenny Marx gave birth to a stillborn child not long after they moved in and she found that the house was isolated compared to the bustle in the centre of the city. She felt very run down for a long time and quite lonely, especially as the older girls were now at school and Marx was busy with his writing and socialist meetings.

  The family still drifted in and out of debt and sometimes the girls couldn’t go to school because their clothes were at the pawn shop. Engels kept them going with as much money as he could send. He was always a true friend to the family even though Jenny Marx did not really approve of him.

  Marx and Engels

  When Marx was expelled from Prussia in the summer of 1849 he began to rely more and more on his friendship with Engels. Engels was an excellent linguist; he claimed he could stammer in 12 languages, and Marx relied on him a great deal to help with translations. It was a friendship that lasted for 40 years, quite a surprising length of time considering Marx’s volatile personality. He often fell out with people he had declared to be his close companions and Engels remained his one and only true friend. It helped that Engels had a fairly easy-going nature and idealized Marx and his intelligence. In later years he wrote to a friend, ‘I simply cannot understand how anyone can be envious of genius’.

  Engels, for all his intelligence, could not write with the same imaginative flair as Marx and he was happy to help him in any way he could in order to further the cause which they both believed in. He was a well-organized and clear writer though, and his The Condition of the Working Classes in England had greatly impressed Marx and influenced some of his writing. Their working partnership was a useful one because Engels enabled Marx to put some of his more fanciful and chaotic thoughts into simpler and more orderly fashion.

  Engels was a generous benefactor to the Marx family and to the many other people in his life; he gave money for the upkeep of Marx’s illegitimate son for example. He lived in a ménage à trois with his mistress Mary Burns, a beautiful Irish redhead, and her sister Lizzie. He was also very generous to their family. He never seemed to complain about supporting all these people even when he had to embezzle money from the office cash box in order to keep up his financial commitments.

  The only bad feeling between Marx and Engels came when Mary died. Marx appeared unsympathetic and asked for money in his letter of condolence, because he was about to be declared bankrupt. It was insensitive to say the least, but Marx soon apologized and the two became friends once again.

  Engel’s money came from his father, a rich textile merchant who had a branch of his business, Ermen and Engels, in Manchester at the heart of the industrial North of England. He first worked there in 1842 and it was then that he met Mary, who was a Chartist and a strong supporter of the rights of factory workers.

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  Insight

  Chartism was one of the first mass working-class labour movements in the United Kingdom. It grew in popularity after the publication of the People’s Charter in 1838. This asked for changes to the voting system including giving the vote to all men over 21.

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  It was his involvement with Mary that led to some of his writing about the conditions of the working classes. Engels reluctantly went back to work in Manchester in 1850 with the aim of helping Marx financially. He stayed there for 20 years until the closure of the factory meant that he could return to live in London permanently.

  He managed to keep most of his socialist
activities and his ‘secret’ household hidden from his parents; he appeared to be nothing much more than a local businessman to many people who knew him. His father gave him an entertainment and hospitality allowance, a lot of which ended up in the Marx household.

  However he did ride with the Cheshire hunt and entertained guests at his respectable house, one where his mistress was never seen. Jenny Marx could not approve of his way of life, she always referred to Mary as ‘your wife’; she did not refer to Lizzie at all.

  The Marx family always called Engels ‘General’, a nickname he acquired due to his interest in military strategy and time spent in the armed forces. Letters passed between them all very frequently and give an interesting insight into their private lives. Marx and Engels kept no secrets from each other and even invented their own code language in order to keep their correspondence free from the prying eyes of police spies. Most of the letters have personal as well as political details in them as Engels also liked to gossip and write about his favourite hobbies: wine, beer, women and song!

  In addition to working at the family business, Engels helped Marx write articles for the New York Tribune, a radical newspaper that had a large circulation in the USA. Marx did not write very good English when he arrived in London and Engels, as usual, came to his rescue. He helped out with translation and even wrote some of the articles, especially those that needed his expertise in military affairs.

  Engels wrote most of the entries that Marx should have written for the New American Cyclopaedia, which were commissioned by the editor of the New York Tribune. This became difficult when Engels fell ill and Marx had to pretend that his work had been lost in the post on its way to New York.

  Engels was one of the few people who could read Marx’s handwriting and so it was naturally he, with the help of Eleanor Marx, who came to sort out Marx’s papers after he died. Engels found that he was now the authority on communism and he went on to complete the further volumes of Das Kapital that Marx had intended to write. He became the interpreter for all that Marx had said or written and kept up an enormous correspondence until his death in 1895.

  Work in London

  Marx never had a ‘proper’ job while he lived in London, even though the family were sometimes destitute. On the one occasion he applied for a job, as a railway clerk, he was rejected because of his handwriting, which was completely illegible. He dedicated most of his time to the cause of communism and to writing the book that later became Das Kapital and Engels was quite happy to support him financially whenever he was able.

  Marx did have some regular income as he was paid £1 per article (quite a good sum in those days) for his pieces in the New York Tribune, even though Engels helped out with a lot of the work. Marx became a popular journalist with the American readership of the Tribune and wrote for it on a weekly basis for ten years. His articles were witty and often vitriolic in nature against those who had offended him, for Marx kept his fiery temperament until late in his life and it often showed in his writing. He wrote about English politics and social analysis: articles on Chartism, foreign policy, the British rule in India and Ireland, economics, nationalism and land enclosures in Scotland, for example.

  He also wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Revue) a political economy review sold in Germany and London. It was managed and financed by Conrad Schramm, another German who was sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. The Revue did not sell well as it had only a small circulation among German revolutionaries and exiles and it only ran for five issues. Marx hardly made any money from this but he did make some money from the New American Cyclopaedia entries, even though Engels did much of the work.

  Marx was always busy, even if his work was unpaid. One of his unpaid roles involved helping out with the German Workers Education Society. He was an inspiring teacher, although a little intimidating to some of his young students. He gave lectures which were often packed out with people impressed by his oratory and political invective. One series of lectures, which was filled to capacity, was on the subject ‘What is bourgeois property?’ He attended weekly discussion groups and also lectures on subjects ranging from astronomy to languages. Singing and dancing and musical entertainment were also available for the German refugees who made up most of the membership of the German Workers Education Society. Marx was fond of fencing and joined a club of French émigrés where he could practise his swordsmanship. He obviously hadn’t been put off by the duel earlier in his life during which he was wounded.

  Within a few days of arriving in London he met with other refugees and began to set up London headquarters for the Communist League. He was soon to be one of its most dominant members due to the force of his charismatic and intense personality; this was one of the reasons that a split formed in the League and it was eventually dissolved. Marx did not like having to work on projects where he was not in control, and when his ideas clashed with those of others he was likely to fly into rages and denounce them. He spent a great deal of time that he could have spent working on Das Kapital, writing lengthy diatribes against those who he believed had wronged him in some way. An example of this was his campaign against Karl Vogt. Vogt had written a book denouncing Marx as a lover of the aristocracy who wanted nothing but personal power. The book was not printed in London but Marx went into a white hot rage and, as he couldn’t afford to sue for libel, he wrote a book in return, denouncing Vogt and anyone who had ever supported him.

  These numerous distractions led him away from what he believed to be his true purpose, the writing of Das Kapital.

  Das Kapital

  Nearly every day of his life in London Marx would turn up at the reading room of the British Library to work on his writing. He often stayed there for 12 hours and wrote again at home into the small hours of the morning. This was the writing which eventually became Das Kapital or Capital as it is sometimes known in England. Volume one was finally finished in August 1867, but even then Marx continued revising and refining his work, making notes for the sequel he intended to publish. His letters are full of references to the toll that this work took on him. He was forever predicting that he was about to complete it but then finding he had more to write about.

  Marx considered Das Kapital to be a scientific study of capitalism, politics and economics. He used the government Blue Books that were available at the Library to gather first-hand evidence on the plight of the poor. These contained statistics, census figures and reports from factory and public health inspectors. Engels had used these as a source for The Condition of the Working Classes in England. Marx was impressed by this and decided to use them in a similar way in his masterwork.

  Opinion is divided over the merits of Das Kapital. Many people find it a very difficult read. Marx was fond of satirical puns and he uses many literary references which are not easily understood by the general reader of today.

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  Insight

  Insight into the literary background of Das Kaptial can be found in Francis Wheen’s book Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography.

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  Das Kapital is very long with a lot of footnotes, which can be off-putting to anyone first opening the book. The footnotes are some of the most interesting bits, in my opinion, because it is there that Marx gives some of the first-hand accounts of the lives of working people and they give a fascinating glimpse into our industrial past. One example, taken from a Children’s Employment Commission Report of 1865, is of children walking the equivalent of 15–20 miles every six hours in a bottle factory while continually performing their work. They were not allowed meal breaks as the furnace would cool down and their shifts were often 14 or 15 hours long.

  Engels tried to get Marx to change the format of Das Kapital because he could see that it opened with difficult abstract concepts. ‘It is dreadfully tiring and confusing too’, he wrote, when shown the proofs. He thought Marx should have broken up the chapters into much shorter sections with headings to make the book easier to read. Marx did not take much notice o
f his comments.

  The publication of Das Kapital brought Marx a great deal of personal satisfaction but it did not have the huge reception that he had hoped for. Engels, ever the true friend, sent false reviews to German papers with the hope that they might stir up some public opinion but to no avail. There were a few favourable reviews in the British press but the book did not have mass sales or lead to any type of political action by workers as Marx had hoped.

  The first nine chapters of the book deal with the explanation of Marx’s economic theory in rather abstract terms, while the rest of the book explores the evidence that shows the ways in which capitalists exploit their workers. Marx uses a lot of historical examples for he believed that capitalism was a stage in a process of social history that was inevitably and ultimately leading to its own downfall. For those who find Das Kapital a difficult read, the basics of Marx’s economic theory can be found in the works Value, Price and Profit and Wage-labour and Capital. These were based on lectures given to working men’s associations and are much easier to understand. The ideas in Das Kapital are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

  The International

  One of the other distractions that took Marx away from his writing was his involvement with The International Workingmen’s Association. The International, as it became known, was founded in 1864 at a public meeting to which Marx was invited. Until then, workers throughout Europe and America had been concentrating on their own struggles, without much thought for others in similar situations worldwide. It was French and British trade unionists who finally realized that there would be strength in numbers and that they would all reach their aims more efficiently if they banded together.