Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  FOLLOWING HIS BREAK WITH Arnold Ruge, Marx was politically on his own in Paris. A few months later, he was personally on his own as well, when his wife, taking little Jenny with her, went to Trier for an extended visit to her mother. Jenny had some anxieties about leaving her husband alone in a city that had a well-developed reputation for sexual licentiousness, but there was no need for her to worry.41 In her absence Karl continued his political activities, read economists voraciously, and developed his communist ideas. His one important personal encounter was not with a chorus girl but with Friedrich Engels.

  Marx moved in the same circles after the collapse of the Yearbooks that he had before. He continued to associate with German intellectuals in Paris, having some success in getting them, especially their leading figure Heine, on his side in his feud with Ruge.42 Marx also pursued contacts with both French socialists and radical émigrés from other countries. It was at this time that he first encountered the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Some decades later, the two would become bitter enemies, a hostility perhaps encouraged by memories of their earlier friendship.

  Marx also intensified his connections to the secret societies of German artisans. He reported to Ludwig Feuerbach in August 1844 that the leaders of these groups had been reading out loud to their followers excerpts from Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity twice a week, during the summer. Although Marx would certainly have endorsed spreading atheist notions among the radical artisans, it is not clear if the initiative to do so came from him, since Hermann Ewerbeck, one of the secret society leaders, was a great Feuerbach enthusiast, who eventually published a French translation of the Essence of Christianity. Nonetheless, Marx’s knowledge of the secret meetings of secret societies suggests a growing involvement with them.43

  At the beginning of 1844, a biweekly German-language journal, Forwards!, began publication in Paris. The original founders were a dubious duo, an eccentric theatrical director and a Prussian police spy; but in the spring of 1844, secret society leaders and other leftist intellectuals, including Marx, gained greater influence on its editorial policy. Hoping that the small publication could, at least in part, replace the Franco-German Yearbooks, Marx pushed for it to adopt a socialist editorial policy. To that end, he published an essay in Forwards! on the uprising of the Silesian weavers, the first example of a working-class insurgency in central Europe, using the occasion to reiterate his views on the proletariat as the vehicle for political change.44

  It was a couple of weeks after Marx’s essay on the Silesian weavers appeared, on August 23, 1844, that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met in person for the first time. Out of this meeting would come a lifelong political and personal collaboration, seeming in retrospect so close that the two men are invariably described together: Marx & Engelstm, so to speak. In part, this representation points to the odd closeness of two such dissimilar people: one tall and fair, the other short and dark; one practical, businesslike, and good at earning money, the other moving in a realm of abstract ideas and chronically having trouble making ends meet; son of a businessman and son of a lawyer; one of Protestant, the other of Jewish background, or, as emphasized in a past era of racial thinking, one of Nordic and one of Semitic descent. The way these differences, these contradictory personal characteristics, could be overcome in a common cause was, one might say, almost dialectical. The common cause was cemented by an intimate friendship, making them the Damon and Pythias of communism.45

  Like so many well-known features of Marx’s life, this portrayal of the two men’s lifelong ties as inevitable from the first meeting is a half-truth, ironing out personal and political differences, and projecting the relationship of later years onto the early period of their acquaintance. The information about Marx and Engels’s initial encounter is on the scanty side—just three paragraph-long retrospectives by the protagonists, perhaps surprising for the significance of the event, although neither of the two was much given to writing memoirs. Other evidence has been suppressed: after Marx’s death, his daughters Eleanor and Laura destroyed letters he wrote critical of Engels. Still other letters were kept hidden for decades, and only published at the end of the twentieth century in the new MEGA.46 Looking more closely, it does seem that the initial meeting of the two men launched a period of intellectual and political cooperation, but one that did not always go smoothly. In the years after their first encounter, the two went their separate ways for longer periods of time, and contemporaries saw Marx’s closest collaborators in his friends in Cologne.47 The relationship between Marx and Engels only became truly unbreakable in the early 1850s, when they were both political refugees in England. It was also then that certain of their contrasting personal characteristics became fully developed, particularly Engels as the practical moneymaker and Marx as the impecunious theorist. So, rather than understanding this first meeting as the almost miraculous unity of opposites leading inevitably to a permanent collaboration, it might be more helpful to see what impulses brought the two men together.

  The initiative for the meeting lay with Engels. Born in 1820 in the city of Barmen in the Wupper Valley about thirty-five miles to the east of Cologne, across the Rhine River, he was the son of Friedrich Engels, Sr., a prominent textile manufacturer in a region that was a central European pioneer of industrialization.48 Then as today, the Wupper Valley was home to several varieties of particularly intense Protestantism, and Engels’s father was a prominent lay proponent of the Awakening, the German version of revivalism, directed against both the Enlightened, rationalist religion Marx was taught and also the Calvinist orthodoxy prevalent in the area. Sent as a young man, after his years at the Gymnasium, to be a commercial apprentice in the North German port city of Bremen, Engels had a crisis of faith, intensified by reading the works of the Young Hegelians. The many notes he took on David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, complete with sarcastic observations about biblical literalism and German revivalists, have been preserved and testify to his movement from piety to non-belief.49 In contrast to Marx, for whom the transition from a rationalist, Enlightened religion to Young Hegelian atheism may have been intellectually stormy but was personally smooth, for Engels it meant a painful break with his family background, especially his father.

  Engels’s conservative and pious family had none of the reservations of the Marxes about their son serving in the Prussian army, and Engels did his military service in 1842, as an officer candidate in the artillery, stationed in Berlin. Being a soldier agreed with him, and he was a lifelong armchair strategist. In later years, his nickname in Marx’s circle would be “The General.” While in Berlin, Engels was a regular member of the Free Men, and wrote several pieces for the Rhineland News, continuing the practice of occasional freelance journalism that he had begun while living in Bremen.50 After the end of his one-year army service, he returned to the Wupper Valley and, on a visit to Cologne, met Moses Hess, who convinced him of the virtues of communism.

  Engels’s father sent him to England for further commercial training with the family’s business partners in Manchester, and also to keep him away from his subversive and atheistic German friends. The paternal plan backfired badly: the stay in Manchester only reinforced the young Engels’s radical and communist sympathies. Manchester was, as contemporaries said, “Cottonopolis,” the global symbol and global center of the industrial revolution. As many people lived in this English provincial manufacturing town as in the Prussian capital, but in place of Berlin’s intellectual and cultural attractions—the royal palace, the university and Academy of Sciences, the Opera House and the Singakademie—Manchester featured hundreds of steam-powered textile mills, whose emissions blanketed the city in a dense cloud of smoke and coal dust. This vast manufacturing establishment generated enormous amounts of wealth, but also massive misery. The contrast between the suburban villas of the manufacturers, bankers, and cotton wholesalers and the factory workers’ slum neighborhoods—narrow streets, filthy, permeated with raw sewage, and shrouded in a perpetual gloom o
f pollution—made it clear just which groups received the wealth and which the misery. Manchester was as much the city of working-class struggle as of working-class suffering, where the English radicals, the Chartists, denounced the plutocratic government and demanded universal manhood suffrage. Trade unionists strove, in everyday effort, to improve wages and working conditions; socialists proposed sweeping changes to all of society. A year before Engels’s arrival, in the Plug Riots—a combination general strike, insurrection, and outburst of rage at working-class existence—the city’s factory proletariat had risen up and only been suppressed with a large deployment of armed force.

  Associating after business hours with the city’s many political opponents of the existing order, Engels also found an informal entrée into working-class life through his mistress and future companion, an Irish immigrant named Mary Burns, a factory worker and domestic servant. He decided to write a book about his experiences, emphasizing the contrast between rich and poor, outlining the misery and exploitation of the industrial workers who produced the capitalists’ wealth: The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German in 1845). While in Manchester, Engels continued to send in pieces to the Rhineland News. As a result of this connection, he wrote an article on political economy for the Franco-German Yearbooks.51 On his way home from Manchester, he stopped in Paris to meet the editor of the newspaper and magazine that had published his writing.

  The meeting went far more successfully than expected. Engels stayed with Marx for ten days. They laid plans to co-author a book criticizing Bruno Bauer and his lifestyle-oriented radicalism. But their collaboration was not purely intellectual. Engels, the bachelor, and Marx, leading a bachelor existence while his wife and daughter were in Trier, went out each night to a café on the Quai Voltaire. The entertainment had a political edge, since they met with émigré radicals from Germany and other European countries. One of the participants in the get-togethers was Mikhail Bakunin, who took Engels to a meeting of a secret society of French communist workers.52

  Marx and Engels got along so well because of issues and conditions specific to each of them. For Marx, Engels was a quite different kind of collaborator from his previous ones. Up to that point, Marx, who had started his university studies at a very youthful age, had largely worked with older, more experienced men, including Gans, Bauer, Hess, Jung, Claessen, Camphausen, and Heine, who provided him with intellectual and professional opportunities. The most recent example of such a patron, Arnold Ruge, made no secret of the fact that he regarded Marx as his protégé. Following their personal and political conflict, Ruge also made no secret of his disappointment and, increasingly, disgust at what he saw as his former protégé’s ungrateful behavior.53

  With Engels, the relationship was reversed. He was two years younger than Marx, less experienced and less well connected, and had sought out the notorious editor of the Rhineland News by letter and in person—another example of the impact Marx had made during the few months he held that position. Engels became Marx’s protégé and Marx enjoyed the new opportunity to be a mentor, a role that would expand over the following years. Another of Marx’s long-term political associates, Wilhelm Liebknecht, 1848 revolutionary and one of the founders of the German labor movement, remembered how, in London exile during the 1850s, Marx, “in possession of his advantage of 5 or 6 years over us ‘young lads’ was conscious of the entire superiority of his mature manhood. . . .”54

  The collaboration with Marx gave Engels the chance to escape from an escalating existential dilemma: a communist in training to be an eminently capitalist textile merchant and manufacturer, an atheist living in a household of born-again Christians. His letters to Marx from Barmen after their initial meeting are eloquent testimony to this dilemma. There were triumphant reports of the progress of communism in the Wupper Valley and in Cologne. But Engels’s own personal life was wretched. After a few days working “in the factory of my old man . . . it is just too dreadful not only to remain a bourgeois, but, still more, to be a manufacturer, a bourgeois actively opposing the proletariat.” Engels’s pro-communist attitudes had “reawakened all the religious fanaticism of my old man.” Engels Senior and all of the relatives went around with a “divinely blessed face of misery” in response to the insubordinate young man’s radical ideas. “You have no clue,” Engels wrote Marx, “of the malice of this Christian hunt, complete with its beaters, on my soul.”55 The personal and the political converged in the young Friedrich Engels’s life, as his communist and atheist allegiances exacerbated the difficult relationship with his authoritarian father, and the prospect of pursuing these allegiances with the assistance of the older and more experienced Marx offered a way out of increasingly intolerable domestic circumstances.

  A VERY CONSIDERABLE PORTION of Marx’s efforts and energy during the nine to ten months between the failure of the Franco-German Yearbooks and his expulsion from France was devoted to writings on economic and philosophical questions. These “Paris manuscripts,” or “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime and, in fact, for fifty years after his death. After the Second World War, when excerpts were widely translated, they became the center of an extensive scholarly dispute. One camp saw the manuscripts as examples of a “young Marx,” concerned with broad existential and philosophical issues, contrasted to a more dogmatic and positivist older Marx, for whom these initial interests had been overlaid or replaced with more narrowly economic questions and the advocacy of an unflinching class struggle. Others did not disagree with this chronology, but saw the older Marx as the genuine Marx, whose theoretical insights marked a break with his fuzzier, excessively Hegelian and existentialist earlier thinking.56

  In retrospect, this whole debate, fueled by strongly differing opinions about the (ostensibly) communist regimes of the Eastern bloc, and by 1960s-era searches for alternative lifestyles, is not very enlightening for Marx’s own ideas. Creating distinctions between a young and an old Marx overlooks the persistence of Hegelian concepts in his intellectual efforts. The idea that the Paris manuscripts were concerned with an existentially understood alienation can only be supported by a very partial reading of these manuscripts, ignoring their extensive discussions of economic questions—admittedly, parts that were generally left out of the published excerpts so popular in the 1960s. Rather, a comprehensive consideration of the manuscripts demonstrates Marx’s incorporation of his readings of prominent economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into his critiques of civil society, and his advocacy of its communist transformation.

  The manuscripts dealt with a rich variety of topics, not always closely connected, including materialist speculations on the creation of the human race, a discussion of Shakespeare’s ideas about money, and a lengthy materialist-Feuerbachian critique of Hegel’s philosophical writings.57 The heart of the manuscripts, though, stemmed from Marx’s reading in Paris, for the first time, of the classics of political economy by Adam Smith, James Mill, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say (the Englishmen in French translations). Although Marx did look at the works of a few early socialist critics of economic orthodoxy, such as Eugène Buret, the vast majority of his notes, and of the corresponding citations in his manuscripts, came from mainstream, pro-capitalist economists.58 The conclusions Marx drew from them were deeply pessimistic for the condition of the proletariat.

  Comparing the classical economists’ three sources of income—wages of labor, profit of capital, and rent of land—Marx concluded that wages were the least likely to increase, and would usually be reduced to subsistence level. He explained this development in a number of different ways: in terms of the tendency of food prices to change with wages, keeping their purchasing power constant; in capitalists shifting their investments to the greatest source of profits, while workers were generally stuck in one particular occupation and threatened with unemployment; and in the capitalists’ ability to place the burden of net payments to the agricultu
ral sector on the workers. Marx followed up this static analysis with a dynamic one, quoting Adam Smith that when “the wealth of society is in decline . . . no one suffers more cruelly from its decline than the workers.”59 Marx admitted that when social wealth was increasing, and capitalists were competing for workers, wages could rise, but hours of labor would increase, wearing out the workers and shortening their lives. He also noted that social wealth increased via mechanization and the rise of factory employment, a growing division of labor, and a concentration of capital, so that the number of capitalists would shrink, while former capitalists would themselves become workers, all of which would reverse the favorable effects for the workers of, as we might say today, a growing gross domestic product. Once more quoting Adam Smith, Marx noted that economic growth would eventually come to an end in a stationary state, when wages and profits were low, most income flowed to landowners, workers would be reduced to a subsistence minimum, and an excess population would die off. “Thus in a declining condition of society progressive misery of the worker, in progressing condition, complicated misery, in completed final condition, stationary misery.”60

  The prognoses Marx drew from the work of the leading political economists of his day did involve an emphasis on the negative side of their findings, but they were not fundamentally different from the conclusions reached by Smith or Ricardo themselves. Unlike many of today’s perennially optimistic economists, who so often envisage a future of economic growth and rising prosperity (at least, if no one interferes in the operation of free markets), political economy of the early and mid-nineteenth century was the “dismal science” that foresaw a declining, or, at best, a stationary future—especially for the lower classes—which the maximum productivity and efficiency generated by free markets could delay but not avert. In these respects, Marx, with his pessimistic views about the decline of wages to subsistence levels, the increasing concentration of capital combined with declining profits and rates of interest, and the increasing claims of landowners on national income, was no dissident from the political economy of his day, but expressed the dominant, orthodox viewpoint.61