Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The second task would be to outbid the democrats: in place of the progressive income tax they endorsed, communists should demand a tax on upper incomes so great “that big capital perishes.” Communists should respond to calls for provincial and local self-government, a standard part of the democratic political agenda, with the demand for revolutionary centralization, “like in France in 1793,” during the reign of the Jacobins.

  The third point examined the political implementation of such policies. Marx and Engels asserted that the workers had to be politically independent and put up “workers’ candidates,” against “bourgeois democratic ones,” in elections. The workers:

  must not let themselves be bribed by the slogans of the democrats, such as “in doing this you are splitting the democratic party and giving reactionaries the possibility for victory.” All such phrases are ultimately about swindling and cheating the workers. . . . If the democrats act from the very beginning in decisive and terroristic fashion against the reactionaries, then their influence at the elections will, in any event, be annihilated in advance.

  This drastic political program reflected Marx’s implicit self-criticism. The policies he denounced in the March Address—opposing individual and chaotic violent actions, cooperating with the democrats while avoiding independent workers’ politics, and seeking a compromise left-wing political program—were all central features of his own activities during most of 1848–49 as editor of the New Rhineland News and member of the Cologne Democratic Society and the Rhenish democratic provincial directory. It was Marx’s left-wing rivals, Andreas Gottschalk and Gottschalk’s mentor Moses Hess, who had proposed the policies he now espoused. The very phrase with which the March Address concluded, “The revolution in permanent session!” was coined by Gottschalk, in an article he wrote in January 1849 denouncing Marx for opposing Gottschalk’s plans to put up workers’ candidates against the democrats in the elections to the Prussian parliament. In April 1849, when Marx withdrew from the provincial democratic directory and began to advocate a workers’ political movement, he was adopting his rivals’ policies. The unexpected uprisings of May 1849 had interrupted this political change of course, but in exile it reached its conclusion.

  In contrast to Marx’s realism, Moses Hess’s ideas about politics had always contained strong elements of fantasy. The March Address, with its rejection of any cooperation with the non-communist democrats and its vision of an imminent, more radical, more violent, and more terroristic revolution in the face of the growing strength of reaction on the Continent, seems rather fantastic. One might wonder, as some biographers have suggested, whether this revolutionary vision, so different from his previous political realism, was intended to inspire disheartened followers, or to win over artisan adherents of conspiratorial politics in the Workers’ Educational Association. Yet Marx’s public and private statements from the time both suggest that he genuinely endorsed these extreme points of view. Writing to Joseph Weydemeyer in December 1849, Marx stated that he expected no more than “three perhaps even two monthly issues” of the review to appear before the revolution broke out again in full force, or, as Marx put it, “the great global fire intervenes.”24

  The review itself adopted a more moderate language than the March Address, but beneath its more measured expressions the same intransigence lurked. Marx’s essay on “Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” which appeared in the first three issues, was a brilliant, scintillating history of the defeat of the revolutionary forces in France. Rather than despairing, the essay asserted that such defeats were the precursor to a forthcoming proletarian revolution—one that would declare itself “in permanent session,” creating a “class dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “abolition of class differences,” but would also go to war with the counterrevolutionary European powers: “the new proletarian uprising in France that will immediately coincide with a world war.”25

  Attacks on non-communist radicals were another feature of the review. The fourth issue included an article denouncing one of Germany’s most prominent democrats, Gottfried Kinkel, Marx’s rival for control of the democratic Rhenish provincial directory during 1848. In the spring of 1849, Kinkel had fought with the insurgents in southwest Germany and had been captured by Prussian troops. Tried by a Prussian court-martial, he attempted to save his own life by appealing to the nationalist sentiments of his German military judges. Marx denounced him for not provoking them to put him in front of a firing squad.26

  In taking these extreme positions and making intransigent demands, Marx was swimming in a broader current of European exile politics. From safe havens in Switzerland or Great Britain, leftist political refugees were looking forward to a new revolution and revolutionary war, while advancing ever more radical political schemes.27 They could not believe that the hopes of 1848 and the struggles of 1849 had been in vain, or that the victory of their enemies was complete. They turned to the vision of an even more drastic revolution in the offing, one that would sweep them triumphantly back into power.

  Apocalyptic dreams of a revolutionary future were one way for exiles to bear the wretched conditions of their daily lives. Marx’s own circumstances, in terms of his skills, education, and opportunities, put him among those most severely affected by the condition of exile. The move from relatively well paid editor-in-chief of the New Rhineland News to penniless political refugee marked the beginning of a six-year period of wearing and soul-destroying poverty. It would engender personal and family crisis, as well as profound parental tragedy.

  The extremity of Marx’s financial miseries began immediately before his expulsion from Cologne. He had expended all his available funds, including the last of the advance on his mother’s inheritance, paying the debts of the New Rhineland News. Marx, who claimed to have spent 7,000 talers doing this, presented his actions as a personal sacrifice, as paying a debt of honor. Jenny identified with, and fiercely defended, her husband’s actions. She presented them to Joseph Weydemeyer as the courageous, self-sacrificing decisions of a man of honor: “To save the political honor of the newspaper, and the civic honor of the Cologne acquaintances, he let all the burdens be placed on him, he gave up his machine [the newspaper’s new printing press], he gave up all his income, on leaving he even borrowed 300 talers to pay the rent on the newly rented office, to pay the back wages of the editors and so on—and he was driven out by force.”28

  Marx’s claim to have expended 7,000 talers on the newspaper seems greatly exaggerated. Even if he included in that sum all three years of his 1,500 talers annual salary as chief editor, he never had anywhere near so much money. He did put all his assets into liquidating the New Rhineland News, and it was a considerable and lasting burden to him; but preserving honor was only part of his motivation. By paying debts Marx could avoid legal bankruptcy proceedings by the newspaper corporation, which would have exposed the paper’s financial dealings and its backers, thereby opening them up to political persecution and making any possible revival all the more difficult. The business manager of the New Rhineland News, Stephan Naut, continued winding up its affairs, paying off creditors and seeking payments from debtors, for a good year after Marx’s expulsion from Cologne.29

  If the eminently bourgeois action of paying off his enterprise’s debts was but a small step on the way to a communist revolution, it left Marx without money to meet his current living expenses. Lying ill in London at the beginning of September, he wrote to Ferdinand Freiligrath: “I am truly in a difficult condition. My wife is in an advanced state of pregnancy; on the fifteenth of this month she must be gone from Paris and I do not know how I can get the money together needed for her to journey from Paris and settle here.”30 Somehow, Marx did find the funds for his wife and children to join him in London; but he then had to face the problem of supporting his growing family. Karl and Jenny’s son Heinrich Guido was born on November 5, 1849, and their daughter Franziska not long afterward, on March 28, 1851. The family settled in Soho, a slum district in inner
London where many émigrés resided, but their miserable surroundings were no bargain. “Conditions here,” Jenny Marx wrote, “are completely different from Germany. All six of us live in one room, with a little study attached, and pay more each week than for the largest house in Germany [in one month].”31

  The family’s problems with expenses paled before their lack of incoming monies. Exiles with easily marketable skills, such as physicians and engineers, or those with business experience, had the best chances of getting a job. Craftsmen and laborers might find work at lower wages, but writers, lawyers, or refugees with broad humanist backgrounds had the greatest difficulties. A fortunate few could give public lectures, or tutor curious Britons in German, but such occupations quickly became overcrowded, and Marx, whose English-language skills at the time were still very rudimentary, could not have done these in any event. As late as 1856, seven years after his arrival in London, Marx feared that his English would not suffice for a dinnertime conversation.32

  Part of the idea behind the review was to provide both Marx and Engels with an income, but its poor sales and the questionable financial and managerial practices of their German associates brought Marx just 130 talers from the first three issues. Jenny was reduced to writing begging letters behind her husband’s back, telling Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt that the family desperately needed every last taler and asking him to send her any sales monies he might have received, rather than passing them through the distributor in Cologne and the publisher in Hamburg.33 Marx had hopes of getting a publisher’s advance for a book on political economy, but in an increasingly counterrevolutionary atmosphere his work was political poison. Even his offer to write entries on politics and political economy in Great Britain for Brockhaus Publishers, then as today Germany’s leading producer of dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias, was rejected.34

  A number of prominent political refugees were the beneficiaries of fund-raisers conducted on their behalf; but Marx, although he certainly worked hard at raising money and distributing it to his fellow refugees, was too proud to take any for himself. Reiterating a position he had held very strongly during his time in Brussels, he refused to countenance such support, and even rebuked one of his German supporters, Ferdinand Lassalle, when the latter circulated an appeal for funds to support Marx in exile. At one particularly desperate moment, when both his landlady and the actual owner of the building were coming after him, seizing the family effects in the process, Marx borrowed £30 from the refugee committee—a move he kept very secret—but, so he claimed, he paid the money back “to the last farthing.”35

  The family’s expenses were large and unrelenting; its income was, at best, small and erratic. Reconciling these two meant taking on new debt. Marx began issuing bills of exchange, IOUs repayable from individuals who supposedly owed him money. Creditors were reluctant to accept these IOUs, and bankers to discount them. If Marx could find someone to take the notes, there were embarrassing scenes when they came due, as Marx and his friends scrambled to find the money to cover them. At one particularly difficult moment, Marx wrote his mother, in March 1851, telling her that if she did not cover his IOU, he would return to Prussia and let the police arrest him. Henriette was unimpressed, evidently understanding that her son’s threat was just a bluff.36 In less sophisticated financial transactions, Karl and Jenny began running up tabs—with shopkeepers, at the pub where Marx drank, with their landlady, and with everyone else who would extend them credit. Those too came due, and Marx would issue still more IOUs, or find himself spending whole days, even weeks, “running around” all over London, seeking funds to make a partial payment. Family members were pressed into service; six-year-old Edgar knew enough to tell his father’s creditors, with a cockney accent, “No he an’t upstairs!”37

  Edgar’s antics sound amusing, but for Marx and his family there was nothing comic about their condition. This is how Jenny described one of the periodic financial disasters to Karl when he was out of town in June 1852:

  I had firmly decided not to torment you constantly with money problems, and now here I am again. But truly Karl, I no longer have any good course. Marengo [the landlady] came and will not wait any longer, she has really put me in a state of terror. She has already had our belongings auctioned off. And, in addition, baker, governess, tea grocer, grocer, and the terrible man, the butcher. I am in a state, Karl, I no longer know what to do. For all these people, I am exposed as a liar, I must have some advice . . . Karl I cannot hold out here any longer. And where shall I go? If I were to run off [to evade the creditors], then we would be lost.38

  What comes through in this desperate appeal is the crushing burden of repeated borrowing, and Jenny’s fear of losing the family’s very last refuge. The emotions were particularly pronounced for her here as a woman alone, with her husband and protector temporarily absent, but Karl himself expressed similar fears of losing his home and being crushed by debt.39

  Jenny’s letter reflected a strong element of genteel poverty. She feared not just debt but financial dishonor, having given her word that she would pay and then could not. Although there was no money for food, the children had a governess, in addition to the maid Lenchen Demuth. As was typically the case with genteel poverty, this condition marked a coming down in the world, from the revolutionary year in Cologne when the Marxes had been relatively affluent, even lending money to members of their circle.40 The political defeat of the 1848 revolutionaries and the expulsion of their leaders was simultaneously a personal defeat for Karl and Jenny. It made their impoverished life in London particularly bitter and fueled increasingly fantastic hopes of a renewed revolutionary upheaval.

  Marx’s friends and political associates knew very well the precarious state of his finances and wondered how much longer he would be able to hold out in a crushingly expensive London with little or no income.41 In the summer of 1850, Marx and Engels pursued a drastic solution to these financial difficulties, the idea of moving to New York City. There were political motives in this decision, but financial concerns were a powerful force. Engels too was broke, cut off from the regular allowance his parents had been sending him since 1844. His revolutionary actions in Elberfeld and Baden had been the last straw. Even his long-suffering mother wrote that “since you are pursuing a path, that we, to put it mildly, cannot endorse, so you cannot expect that we will support you in it, especially as you are of an age and possess the capabilities to earn your own living.”42

  Odd as it may sound, New York was then the world’s third largest German city, after Berlin and Vienna. The substantial German immigrant community there, and in other American cities, included radical political refugees and labor activists, among whom Marx and Engels hoped to find supporters and purchasers of their writing.43 In the early 1850s, a fair amount of Marx and Engels’s political activity took place in the United States. Marx’s chief American adherent was a young draftsman and architect named Adolf Cluss, who had been a member of the Communist League in the Rhineland city of Mainz. Then a bachelor, with a secure, good-paying job as a mechanical draftsman at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., Cluss vigorously advocated for Marx among German immigrants in the United States, even more vigorously attacked Marx’s enemies, and regularly reported back on his activities, and on American politics more generally. Jenny wrote to Cluss, “Your letters incite the greatest joy. My husband always says, ‘if we had many lads like Cluss, then we could really accomplish something.’ ” Eventually drifting away from communism, Cluss would join the Republicans—under Lincoln a radical if eminently pro-capitalist political party—and become a prominent Washington architect. Among the buildings he designed is one that today houses part of the Smithsonian Institution.44

  The fate of Marx’s supporter is perhaps an indication of what would have happened to Marx and Engels themselves had they carried out their plans to move to America. For other nineteenth-century German radicals, the trip across the Atlantic was a one-way political journey; none of them ever played a role i
n European politics again. The fact that Marx did not move to New York would prove to be a major turning point in his life, comparable only to the unexpected death of his potential mentor, Eduard Gans, in 1839.

  The American plans came to nothing because neither Marx nor Engels could raise the money for the transatlantic passage. Engels told his family that he had broken with Marx and the communists, and wished to move to America to go into the cotton wholesaling business. But his mother, fearing that close proximity to German radicals in New York would only encourage a relapse into his old bad habits, proposed instead to send him to Calcutta, to work for a German merchant named Heilgers. Family members casually brushed aside Engels’s fears of fevers in tropical Bengal, insisting that his “healthy, strong stomach and body” would protect him.45

  Marx approached his mother’s Dutch relatives, sending Jenny to his uncle Lion Philips in Kaltbommel, in August 1850. After a very stormy crossing of the English Channel, Jenny arrived at her in-laws during a steady rain, soaking wet, and at first unrecognizable. In spite of her claims that Karl had been offered a professorship in New York, the uncle was unwilling to offer any money—presumably, another advance on Karl’s future claims to his mother’s estate. Weaving “little Jewish-Christian marginal comments on communism” into the conversation, Karl’s uncle made it clear that Marx’s family was no more willing to support godless radicalism than Engels’s was.46

  The attempt to relocate to New York affected a decision Marx and Engels made a few months later, this one in the fall of 1850. Engels, playing on his previous claim to have broken with the communists and devoted himself to business, proposed to live in Manchester and to act as his father’s representative. Although Engels’s family apparently had their doubts about the genuineness of Friedrich’s conversion to capitalism, they accepted his offer. Arriving in Manchester, Engels went through the books and found that his father’s business partners, the Ermen brothers, were cheating him. His inside information quickly made him indispensable to his father and guaranteed him a position with a potentially lucrative income.47