Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Grün went over to the offensive in the pages of the Trier News, a German newspaper propounding socialist doctrines, and in Marx’s old adversary, the Cologne News. He denounced Marx as an “intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority,” who would only let socialist ideas pass if he approved them, and would otherwise try to confiscate them and keep them out of circulation.55 Responding to Marx’s charges that his work on French socialism was superficial and popularizing, Grün scornfully noted that he at least had published a book, and a widely read one at that, while Marx had been unable to finish any major work. In a short story in the Cologne News, Grün described a simultaneously sinister and pathetic “Dr. Ludwig” (a thinly disguised Marx) as an unkempt, ungroomed fanatic unable to support his family, and whose revolutionary dogmas led honest German artisans to perdition.

  What, exactly, did Marx have against Grün politically? The essay published in the Westphalian Steamboat treated Grün’s ideas as one of a piece with the Young Hegelians and the True Socialists, whose politics were based on idealized conceptions of humanity rather than concrete conditions of material production. Another political theme gradually emerged, articulated by both Marx and Engels in public writings and private correspondence. This was the idea that Proudhon and Grün sought to introduce socialism without a revolution that would abolish capitalism, by creating workers’ cooperatives funded by a state bank. Grün himself sometimes posed the controversy similarly, contrasting his and Proudhon’s plans for peaceful reform with Marx’s demands for violent revolution.56 Whether Proudhon’s and Grün’s plans to abolish a market economy via state-supported producers’ cooperatives fit under the heading of reform is another matter, but their idea was not without similarities to the Young Hegelians’ understanding of radicalism as a change in lifestyle: both involved dramatic change outside the political arena, a possibility Marx regarded as problematic at best.

  Ideological differences do not entirely explain the vigor of Marx’s attacks on Grün, since there was a lot in Grün’s work on French and Belgian socialism that was congenial to Marx. Grün denounced the liberal regime in Belgium as facilitating capitalist exploitation of the workers, under the guise of protecting civil rights; he spoke of the concentration of capital and the impoverishment of the proletariat; he was critical of the efforts of Fourier and his followers to get wealthy individuals to finance his socialist schemes. Grün called for the abolition of wage labor, and for the proletariat to assume political power; he expressly associated his socialism with atheism.57 There was certainly much else in the book Marx rejected, but Marx had no trouble adopting and praising the ideas of Wilhelm Schulz, whose concept of Christian social reform was considerably further from Marx’s ideas than Grün’s Feuerbachian socialism. Marx could also cooperate with other men politically in spite of ideological differences, as he was doing with Hermann Ewerbeck in Paris and Karl Schapper in London at the very same time that he was leading his campaign against Grün.

  It is hard to avoid noticing the strong element of personal antipathy in Marx’s attitude, which was considerably more pronounced than in his relations with other rivals of the time. Marx meant literally his condemnation of Grün as a fraud and opportunist. The chief point of his published attack on Grün’s book was to denounce him as a plagiarist. After he broke with the two Westphalian capitalists Meyer and Rempel, following the collapse of the publishing project, Marx angrily returned the money they had collected on his behalf with the remark that he was no Karl Grün—implying that Grün was a self-interested opportunist who used funds collected for political purposes to his personal advantage. Marx was not alone in feeling this way; several of his correspondents reported similar stories, and it seems that Grün, at least in some circles, had a reputation for less than scrupulous use of money.58

  There is a further element that defined their tempestuous relationship: their very considerable similarities. Friends when they had attended the University of Bonn, they had both later moved from Bonn to Berlin. Like Marx, Grün was an academic manqué, although his interests ran to art history rather than philosophy. Marx had attempted to hire Grün when he was editing the Rhineland News. The newspaper had been suppressed before this was possible, but Grün then made a name for himself editing the Mannheim Evening News, another prominent left-wing newspaper. Like Marx, he had been dismissed from his position due to government pressure. Following Marx’s path, Grün became an émigré in Paris, where the two men had moved, amiably, in the same circles, so that Grün was later astonished to hear that Marx was attacking him. Grün’s idea of writing a book that would introduce French socialist ideas to the German educated public overlapped substantially with the project that Marx, Hess, and Engels were pursuing at the same time, that of editing German translations of French socialist authors. The similarities hardly stopped there. Like Marx, Grün was not particularly neat, clean, or fastidious; also like Marx, he had difficulties supporting a family. The conflict between the two men arose precisely because they were so similar, because they were both seeking to occupy the same niche in the German socialist movement: that of the theorist who could provide the missing link between French ideas and German social conditions. Contemporaries, even Marx’s supporters, understood that personal differences were integrally linked with the political disputes in which Marx had become involved. Marx’s personal circumstances in Brussels also were becoming increasingly difficult; all this certainly encouraged the irascible side of his personality, and his tendency to create sharp alternatives and then insist on one to the exclusion of the other.

  HAVING BEEN EXPELLED FROM Paris at the urging of the Prussian government, Marx was by no means secure in Brussels. He gave the Belgian authorities written assurances that he would not engage in any political activity, offering the Prussians no pretext to demand his extradition. But the report that the Prussian government was planning to do just that led Marx, six months after he arrived in Brussels, to renounce his Prussian citizenship and to inform the Prussian authorities that he was planning to emigrate to the United States. His hope was that the authorities would be only too happy to see him go and would not trouble themselves about him further.59

  Marx did not leave for the States, as he had no plans to. The possibility of a new extradition request continued to hang over his head for the rest of his residence in Brussels. Yet these threats, severe as they may have been, took a backseat to his steadily increasing economic difficulties. While in Brussels, his family responsibilities continued to grow. Marx and Jenny’s second daughter, Laura, was born on October 26, 1845; their son, the ill-fated Edgar, on February 2, 1847. In order to economize, Marx gave up his apartment in May 1846 and moved his family into a hotel with furnished rooms, which meant employing fewer servants. Then, and through the rest of his life, Marx’s poverty would always be a genteel poverty; except on one disastrous occasion, he never proposed that Jenny keep house for him, and her frequent pregnancies and bouts of ill health would have made that a difficult prospect. Karl and Jenny were very fortunate in regard to their household help. The young woman from Trier who had accompanied Jenny to Paris did not make the move to Brussels, so Jenny’s mother found a replacement from another one of the Westphalen family retainers, Helene (Lenchen) Demuth, who would remain with the couple for the rest of their lives.60

  Nonetheless, Lenchen was yet another mouth to feed. The failure of the potato crop in 1845 and the dire grain harvest the next year had doubled food prices, increasing the cost of everything else—not a small problem when Marx’s income was far from keeping pace.61 There was an additional and perhaps unexpected source of expenses for Marx: his role as aspiring political leader. Potential and current followers and associates expected financial support. Marx funded Weitling even while shouting at him, and received requests for money from Karl Ludwig Bernays and Hermann Ewerbeck in Paris. Visits from new adherents, such as the former artillery officer Joseph Weydemeyer or the Silesian Wilhelm Wolff, were encouraging signs and ge
nerally led to carousing, but Marx had to put up his guests.62

  As Marx’s expenses grew, his income shrank inversely. At the beginning of his stay in Brussels, his friends and supporters in Cologne and the vicinity continued to send him money, as they had done when he was living in Paris. But Marx’s increasing turn toward a militantly anti-bourgeois communism made him ever more reluctant to depend on them for funds. As he wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer, “There still exist in Cologne several bourgeois who would probably advance me money for a fixed term. Only these people have for some time turned to a direction opposed in principle [to mine], so I would just as soon not be obligated to them in any way.”63 Like many radical intellectuals of the era, Marx tried to support himself as a freelance author, but press censorship in Germany made it almost impossible for him to get published. What little he earned that way was more than consumed by the expense of self-publishing The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx did receive some money from his mother, and he continued to press, unsuccessfully, for an advance against his share of her estate.64

  His circumstances became increasingly straitened. In May 1846, he had pawned the last of the family’s gold and silver, and most of the linens, yet another reason to move into furnished rooms. The following winter, he received a visit from the journeyman typesetter Stephan Born, one of the radical German artisans living abroad, who would be an important labor leader during the Revolution of 1848. Many years later, Born remembered seeing Marx’s “highly modest little apartment, furnished, one can well say, in impoverished fashion, in a [working-class] suburb of Brussels.” About the time of this visit, Marx was trying to keep his head above water by writing some very dubious IOUs. Engels, Marx’s future savior in financial matters, was in equally difficult circumstances, dependent on a monthly check from his father. When it did not arrive, Engels too had recourse to the pawnshop, or to sending Marx COD letters from Paris. Marx’s other leftist associates were doing no better. He wrote Weydemeyer, “You see poverty and misery all around! At the moment, I do not know what to do to help myself out.”65

  Although Marx himself denied it, it is hard to believe that his “private misery,” as Moses Hess put it in regard to the break with Weitling, was not directly tied to the political “party strife.”66 Certainly, Marx’s friends and supporters rebuked him for his antagonistic attitudes, and his tendency to personalize political differences. Joseph Weydemeyer was appalled by Marx’s treatment of the two Westphalian capitalists after they refused to support his publishing project, accusing him of wanting “to make out of these conflicts a question of party, conflicts that are quite personal and have no connection with questions of principles. . . .” Weydemeyer went on to emphasize the background of Marx’s personal economic difficulties, noting that Marx had rejected the money the capitalists sent him, refusing to engage in “begging,” as he said. Instead, Weydemeyer pointed out, the money was support for “party authors who have gotten into financial difficulties” because political censorship prevented them from earning a living with their pens. Hermann Ewerbeck was no less critical of “this break with the bourgeois, who at least have a noble will and money” needed for the crucial “publication of your writings.”67

  The severity of the clash with Karl Grün seemed even less comprehensible. Hermann Ewerbeck rebuked Marx’s “grudge against and hatred of Grün,” seeing this personal basis for political antagonism as unworthy of someone he regarded as the “Aristotle of the nineteenth century.” Heinrich Lüning, editor of the Westphalian Steamboat, was unhappy with the “too bitter and offensive tone” of the attacks on Grün. Admitting that both Grün’s ideas and his personality were dubious, Lüning pointed out that he was nonetheless on the same side as other socialists: “what’s the purpose of beating someone with a club, when they are working at least halfway in the same direction?”68

  Marx’s friends tended to place the blame for the many personal conflicts in which he was involved on Engels’s “dictatorial demands and his overbearing tone,” his “arrogance and vanity.”69 It was true that Engels’s interventions often did make matters worse, and his letters to Marx were filled with contemptuous and condescending remarks about other political activists. But Engels did not cause Marx’s conflicts so much as he reinforced Marx’s inclination to bring together the personal and the political, an inclination exacerbated by the difficult condition of the family finances and Marx’s politically precarious position as an émigré and apprentice revolutionary.

  Drawing a balance of Marx’s activities toward the end of 1846 after almost two years in Brussels, the negatives would rather outweigh the positives. Trying to rally and organize the German-speaking communists across Europe had produced just a handful of followers and a lot of personal antagonisms. The publishing plans and the attempts to bring Marx’s theoretical insights to the left-wing German-speaking intellectuals had largely been foiled. Ties to the workers, in whose name he spoke, were generally made through other intellectual leaders with whom Marx did not always see eye-to-eye.

  Engels himself articulated these discouraging perspectives in a letter he wrote to Marx from Paris in November or December 1846. He recounted his frustrations with the supporters of Grün among the German artisans in Paris. There was still no “organ,” no publication with which Marx could articulate his ideas to the public, so that he and Engels remained dependent on the London communists, who had let Marx’s communist correspondence “go to sleep in the Lord.” After relating differences with the communist German artisans in London, Engels noted that openly asserting them would be useless. “These lads would declare themselves to be the ‘people’ the ‘proletariat’ against us, and we could only appeal to a communist proletariat that in Germany has yet to be formed.”70

  Such experiences were typical of the frustrations radical émigrés felt across all of Europe. Trying to be a revolutionary in a situation where the authorities were firmly in command was hard enough, and trying to do so from a foreign country was even harder. Energies were dissipated in fruitless quarrels, and personal antagonisms would embitter political controversies and divert them into largely useless channels. The situation would change rapidly in 1847, as the pillars of political order began to shake and totter. New opportunities for political action would open up for Marx, and he would gain the chance to formulate and circulate his ideas in a number of different public forums. The outbreak of revolution at the beginning of 1848 would increase all these possibilities exponentially and make clear that the painful revolutionary apprenticeship in Brussels, for all its difficulties, had been a worthwhile period of preparation.

  PART II

  Struggle

  6

  The Insurgent

  BEFORE THE STORM ARRIVES, the wind picks up and the skies darken. Animals seek shelter and people sense, uneasily, the declining air pressure. The year 1847 was filled with signs of an approaching revolutionary storm—not just apparent in retrospect, but evident to contemporaries. A commercial, financial, and industrial crisis—today, we would say a severe recession—following on the harvest failures of the two previous years, drastically shook public confidence in the existing systems of government. As trust in the political status quo of Europe waned, its many and varied opponents, what contemporaries called the “party of movement,” accelerated and redoubled their oppositional activity. Paris, the Continental center, was the scene of political mass meetings, lightly disguised, for legal reasons, as enormous banquets. In this “banquet campaign,” leaders of the opposition spoke in favor of a democratic franchise.

  The form of meetings spread throughout urban France, and speeches calling for reform were increasingly mixed with invocations of the heroic revolutionary days of 1789 and 1793. In Southern and Eastern Europe, where absolutist governments still reigned, it was a radical step to call for the very same constitutional monarchy that the French opposition was criticizing. The Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, summoned his Provincial Diets to meet together in Berlin, only to discover that this “Unit
ed Diet” was dominated by liberals, who demanded that he grant a constitution. Similar widely known, public confrontations between an absolutist monarch and some form of representative institution controlled by a liberal opposition were features of 1847 in Rome, where the Consultative Assembly of the Papal States called for a constitution, and in Budapest, where the Hungarian Diet squared off against the Austrian Empire. These and many other portents of imminent political change acted as galvanizing shocks, prompting organizing efforts and the formulation of political platforms. In the German states, the radicals articulated theirs in Offenburg and the liberals in Heppenheim, in September and October 1847, respectively.

  For Marx, this surge of political activity was a welcome reprieve from the doldrums in which his efforts had been stranded by late 1846. He became deeply involved in two different organizing efforts: the transformation of the London-based League of the Just into the Communist League; and the creation of an international democratic association in Brussels. Both these new organizations offered him the opportunity to articulate to a broader public the theories he had been developing: for the Brussels democrats, Marx’s thoughts on free trade and its relation to the development of capitalism and of a revolutionary proletariat; for the Communist League, his famous manifesto.