Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The move might be seen as culminating a transition in his life, from penniless political exile to middle-class, settled paterfamilias. And it might be seen that way, were it not for the persistent financial crises. Hardly had the family moved into the new house than Marx was forced to issue a desperate appeal to Engels for funds. Eventually, Engels agreed to send the family £5 each month, but that did not suffice. Marx continued to look for new sources of credit to pay his bills, a very difficult task considering that his previous creditors were threatening to seize his assets. In July 1858, he sent Engels another desperate appeal, including a list of the family’s expenses and debts which Jenny had drawn up. Marx had hoped to consolidate the debts via a new credit from a savings and loan association; but after paying a £2 application fee, he was turned down as not creditworthy. In the end it was Engels who took out the loan to help Marx with his finances.16

  By the mid-1850s, Marx was earning a good income from his journalism, having reached an agreement in 1856 with the New York Tribune by which he would receive £200 per year as a European correspondent—quite an upper-middle-class income for the time. Taking into account exchange rates (about 6 Prussian talers per English pound), his income was close to what his father had earned in the 1830s, although the cost of living in England’s burgeoning capital was far higher than in a German provincial town. In view of Marx’s quite respectable earnings, his most recent biographers have rejected the older story of the family’s continuous desperate poverty throughout the decade of the 1850s, and have seen the root of their fiscal problems in Karl’s extravagance and poor money management.17 There is certainly something to this argument; by the late 1850s, the Marxes were no longer desperately poor, as they had been at the beginning of the decade. A closer look, though, at their debits and credits shows both the limitations on their income and the expansion of the outlay faced by Karl and by Jenny, who ran the household’s finances, as a respectably married woman would.

  Being one of the New York Tribune’s European correspondents was not quite so lucrative as the salary might suggest. Arranging transatlantic payments was tedious and expensive. Marx had to write an invoice or bill of exchange on Dana and give it to a London banker, who would send it to his correspondent bank in New York. The latter would present it to the Tribune for payment, and the payment would then make its way back to London and into Marx’s hands—once a substantial fee had been deducted. The first time Marx tried it, the whole process took over two months, and he discovered that bankers did not handle small amounts right away, but waited until they had a number of such small bills together before they sent them. After that experience, he began waiting until he had written a number of articles, and accumulated a larger sum on account, but that meant taking out new debts to meet his household expenses in the interval. Ferdinand Freiligrath, the poet and former member of the editorial board of The New Rhineland News, by far the best known of Marx’s associates, had fled Prussia and was working as a banker in London. He directed Marx to financiers who would discount his bills and give him cash right away, but that meant accepting less than face value.18

  The yearly £200 payments themselves hardly endured. Begun in 1856, they were cut in half by November of the following year as a result of the paper’s economic difficulties stemming from the 1857 recession. Both Karl and Jenny understood the irony: the long-awaited economic crisis that was to lead to the new outbreak of revolution was undermining their family finances. Charles Dana, who comes across in the correspondence as very friendly and sympathetic, did his best to soften the blow and accepted as much of Marx’s work as possible. Before the cutback he had offered Marx additional funds from another of his publishing ventures, writing articles for a planned American encyclopedia. With Engels’s very considerable assistance, Marx took on the offer, but it was tedious hackwork, and did not entirely make up for the lost journalistic income.19

  If Marx’s income was not quite so extensive as might at first appear, his expenses were also higher than they might have seemed. By far the most significant contribution was the continuing burden of debt Marx had contracted between 1849 and 1853, when he had no regular income but mounting expenses for political activities. Even when optimistic about his future financial prospects, this load continued to bedevil him. With enormous efforts he claimed, rather optimistically, to have reduced his total debts from £80 to £50 between January and September 1854, but by 1858, the figure had swelled to well over £100. Old debts recurred. Continuing recourse to the pawnshop meant equally continuous interest payments; the need to run up a tab for groceries was another problem. Even after moving to Grafton Terrace, Marx still owed money to shopkeepers in Soho. There were also new debts, particularly for the doctor, stemming from Jenny’s pregnancies, the children’s illnesses, expensive to treat whether they had fatal or happier outcomes, and Marx’s own chronic health problems. (At the time, hemorrhoids, liver, and gallbladder complaints and rotten teeth topped the list.) Marx spent the better part of the second half of 1856 in northern England—in the summer with his family in the Yorkshire village of Camberwell, in the fall with Engels in Manchester—hiding out from the family physician, Dr. Jonas Freund. The latter was demanding payment in a particularly energetic way, since he was in serious financial trouble himself and would have to file for bankruptcy two years later.20

  If there was an element of excess in these expenditures, it arose from Karl’s concern for Jenny and his daughters. The maids (Lenchen Demuth was joined for a few years in the late 1850s and early 1860s by her younger sister Marianne) would spare his wife, worn out by pregnancies at an advanced age and concern about her children’s health, the physical work of running a household. The stress of managing the budget and fending off creditors was already too much for her. A larger residence in a better neighborhood, far from cholera-ridden Soho, removed Jenny from the constant reminders of Edgar’s death. Public schools did not exist, just church-sponsored charity schools for the poor, so the older daughters, little Jenny and Laura, attended a private school for proper young ladies. Karl and Jenny intended to bring up their daughters as such, which meant additional expenses for lessons in Italian and French, drawing and music.21 Karl’s protestations to Engels, as he shamefully confessed, in July 1858 that all his additional journalistic income had not been able to keep his debts from increasing, contained an element of self-justification. Yet they also revealed the intersection of his finances and his devotion to family:

  If I wished to move in the direction of the most extreme reduction of expenses—i.e., take the children out of school, get a purely proletarian apartment, abolish the maids, live on potatoes—then the auctioning off of our effects would not suffice to satisfy just the creditors in the vicinity and so make possible the withdrawal into some hole-and-corner refuge. The show of respectability, which up to now has been maintained, was the only means to avoid a collapse. For my part, I would ask the devil to live in Whitechapel [an East London slum neighborhood], if I could finally have a peaceful hour again, and go about my work. For my wife, in her current condition, such a metamorphosis would be connected with very dangerous consequences, and for the girls, who are growing up, it would scarcely be appropriate.22

  In the end, the income Marx obtained from his journalism—sometimes respectable, always erratic—did not enable his family members to escape from the genteel poverty in which they had lived for so many years. Rather, it just raised the condition of genteel poverty to a higher level.

  MARX’S JOURNALISM IN THE years 1853–58 encompassed an enormous variety of subjects, from the 1854 revolution in Spain to the particularities of Lady Bulwer-Lytton, who was committed to an insane asylum on what she and her defenders claimed were false diagnoses of insanity. Three major topics dominated his writing: the Crimean War of 1853–56, and its implications for the foreign policies of the great powers and the domestic politics of Great Britain; the conditions and conflicts of the British Empire in Asia, including the Second Opium War with China in 1856–
60, along with the massive Indian uprising against British imperial rule in 1857, and the implications of these conflicts for global capitalism; and the causes and consequences of the worldwide recession of 1857, including what Marx hoped would be a new wave of revolutions in Europe. His treatment of each of these topics reveals how he fleshed out his economic and political theories and tested them against the intractable reality of the age of reaction.

  It was his reportage on the Crimean War of 1853–56 that transformed Marx into a prominent journalist, admittedly with a little help from Engels, whose ghostwritten articles on military tactics and strategy during the siege of Sevastopol were particularly noteworthy. American audiences were enthralled by the accounts of the conflict and disappointed by dispatches on calmer matters when the hostilities ended.23 The fascination with this war is hard to understand today. If recalled at all, it is remembered for Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” or Florence Nightingale’s nursing of sick and wounded soldiers, while the actual military confrontation, fought over the mysterious “Eastern Question” on the margins of the European world, and ending without much in the way of results, seems both dubious and irrelevant.

  Contemporaries would have disagreed. The war was the first clash between the great powers of Europe in almost forty years, in fact, since the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The Napoleonic Wars had been full-out, all-encompassing conflicts, and it was widely suspected that the new war would not remain a limited engagement, merely pitting Russia against France and England on the shores of the Black Sea, but would expand into a continentwide conflict, involving all the powers. Marx heard these concerns personally from his mother-in-law. Her stepson and Jenny’s half brother, Ferdinand von Westphalen, minister of the interior in a Prussian government precariously clinging to neutrality, had informed her that she should prepare herself for a return to an era of warfare on a Napoleonic scale.24

  For the exiled revolutionaries, the war had a special significance. As early as the 1830s, the leader of the Polish political refugees, Count Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, had hoped for a war between the liberal powers, England and France, and the conservative power, Russia, over the Ottoman Empire, whose current and future status made up the so-called Eastern Question. Such a war, he thought, would lead to the liberation of Poland from czarist oppression.25 Marx’s own political contacts were with radical democratic émigrés from Poland, not the aristocratic and politically moderate Czartoryski. Nonetheless, Marx shared the count’s hopes about the political potential of a war with czarist Russia.

  In 1848–49, Marx had persistently called for a revolutionary war with Russia. He conceived of the war largely as a rerun of the French Revolution, pitting a revolutionary France, with the assistance of insurgents in other European countries, against all the other great powers, joined in a counterrevolutionary union. Around the time of his arrival in England, Marx had become increasingly hopeful that a future war with Russia would follow Count Czartoryski’s lines, with the British government adopting an anti-Russian foreign policy. Marx expected the impetus for reorientation to come from England’s capitalists, who would renounce non-intervention in continental European affairs in order to create a European and global mercantile hegemony.26

  In view of these expansive hopes, the Crimean War could not help but be a major disappointment. It was not fought by a revolutionary government but by the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III, and by an English coalition ministry composed of Whig aristocrats and Tory moderates. Such governments would not engage in all-out conflict, to say nothing of a revolutionary war. Marx’s coverage of the Crimean War attacked their failure to act decisively. As the diplomatic tensions rose between the czarist realm and the Western powers in early 1853, he asserted that the British and French governments would never press their position to the point of going to war. When the war did begin in October, he criticized the British and French for not actually fighting but seeking a peace involving Austrian mediation, that would largely grant all of Russia’s demands and leave their Turkish ally to its fate at the hands of the czar. The invasion of the Crimea appeared to Marx a halfhearted and militarily inept effort. He and Engels constantly asserted that if the Western powers did not expand the conflict beyond a limited war in the Black Sea, the superior forces of the czar would inflict a humiliating defeat. As late as the summer of 1855, when the British and French armies besieging Sevastopol had already seized part of the outer ring of fortifications, Marx and Engels continued to insist on Russia’s better position and future prospects for victory.27

  Little disappointed Marx more than the craven attitudes of the English capitalists. Far from calling for the more vigorous prosecution of the conflict, or just supporting the government’s plans for a limited war, the two most prominent Radical parliamentary representatives of England’s manufacturers, Richard Cobden and John Bright, took a strong anti-war stance. They asserted that there was no economic necessity for the war and no economic benefit from prosecuting it. In extreme frustration, Marx denounced the “Peacemongering Bourgeoisie,” a phrase diametrically opposed to the epithet of “warmongers” his twentieth-century disciples would hurl at capitalist politicians.28

  In some ways, Marx’s dispatches floated in a broader tide of British public opinion. Politicians and journalists denounced the government’s indecisive policies. The very inept showing of the British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea triggered a parliamentary commission of inquiry and the resignation of the government. Its successor, led by the veteran Whig politician Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, promised a more effective prosecution of the war. Palmerston was true to his word. Besieged Sevastopol fell in October 1855, and the Russians sued for peace the following year.29

  At this point, Marx parted company with most of British public opinion. He became increasingly convinced that behind the ploys and feints of the foreign policies of Her Majesty’s government was one obscene fact: that the Whig leader and prime minister Lord Palmerston was actually a paid agent of the czar. Marx maintained this assertion both in his public journalism for the New York Tribune and in his private correspondence with Engels and other political allies, and continued to do so well into the 1860s.30 After extensive study of parliamentary papers, Marx decided that Palmerston’s activities as a Russian agent extended back at least a quarter century, and that his policies during previous tenures as government minister had been aimed at betraying the interests of opponents of Russia across the world, from Poland to Afghanistan. Marx’s reading of old pamphlets at the British Museum led him to the conclusion that Palmerston was hardly the first traitor in high places, that Russian bribery of Whig politicians was a practice that had been going on for well over a hundred years. He outlined these accusations in a twelve-part series he wrote for newspapers in Sheffield and London, both named The Free Press, in 1856–57. After his death, the articles, themselves just a fragment of an unfinished longer work, were gathered by his daughter Eleanor and reprinted as The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.31

  The newspapers in which Marx published his views were controlled by a British politician, David Urquhart, a strange and perversely fascinating figure. Urquhart was what today would be called an “Orientalist,” someone who believed that the society and culture of the peoples of the Islamic world were very different from those of the West and alien to it. But, unlike most nineteenth-century European Orientalists, who regarded that Eastern “other” as inferior to Europe, Urquhart saw it as distinctly superior. He advocated the replacement of the handshake with Turkish salutations, lauded Turkish baths and Turkish clothing, and was a tremendous admirer of Islamic monotheism. Urquhart’s views on domestic policy were every bit as peculiar as his opinions of the Near East. His core belief about English politics, the need to purge centuries of Norman innovations and to return the United Kingdom to its ancient Anglo-Saxon institutions, represented a seventeenth-century radicalism that seemed quaintly archaic after the French Revolution. Urquhart’s position on th
e Crimean War was of a piece with the rest of his eccentric opinions. He opposed the war, but not out of pacifist or pro-Russian and anti-Turkish attitudes. Rather, he believed that the entire war effort was a sham, whose real purpose was to coerce the Turks, eminently capable of defending themselves against the Russians, into conceding to Russian demands. Behind such a policy, according to Urquhart, stood the treasonous attitudes of—who else?—Lord Palmerston.32

  After reading Marx’s condemnation of Palmerston in the New York Tribune, Urquhart sought Marx out and came from Sheffield to London for a personal meeting with him. The anti-war rallies in the industrial areas of the Midlands, which Urquhart and his followers launched, sent addresses to Marx praising him for his trenchant observations. Marx began to write occasional pieces for Urquhart’s newspapers; one of Urquhart’s supporters reprinted Marx’s articles as pamphlets that sold over 15,000 copies. Quarrels over proper compensation (Marx was never paid for those pamphlets reprinting his articles) limited the cooperation, but it was still considerable—the largest political commitment Marx made in a period when he was generally avoiding such activity.33

  If there was ever any proof of the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, it was the collaboration of Marx and Urquhart. Their many differences were manifest. Urquhart rejected the demand for universal manhood suffrage raised by the more modern English Radicals, the Chartists, Marx’s main connection to English politics since the 1840s. Urquhart’s belief that the revolutions of 1848 were fomented by agents of the czar was rather too much for Marx, who had been an 1848 revolutionary himself, and a vehemently anti-Russian one—as he made a point of telling Urquhart in their private conversation. Marx and Engels were reluctant to become close to Urquhart. They regarded him, as did most of the British political class, as a crackpot—or as Marx’s American disciple Adolf Cluss put it in an article Marx inspired, a modern-day Don Quixote, whose initial, praiseworthy anti-Russian attitudes had hardened into a monomaniacal obsession.34