The discussions contined in July 1862, when Lassalle paid Marx a visit in London, staying for three weeks. There were pleasant moments, such as an excursion to Windsor Castle and the ensuing picnic, with Lassalle, Marx’s family, and Lothar Bucher—another democratic refugee, soon to become a secret agent of Bismarck—but the visit was largely a personal and political disaster. Lassalle flaunted his money, spending £1 per day on cigars and cab fare, grating to Marx, who smoked foul-smelling cheap stogies and went everywhere on foot. Lassalle’s proposal to help the Marxes out financially by taking Jenny to Berlin as a companion to the Countess may have been well meaning but it infuriated Jenny’s parents, who feared for their daughter’s virtue if she were anywhere near the Countess and her friends, much less living with her. Almost two decades later, long after Lassalle’s death, the women of the Marx family were still furious with him. After Lassalle consumed, all by himself, a roast that Lenchen had been planning to serve to the whole family, the maid informed her master that the visitor was a “vain, dishonest lad,” not to be trusted. In a political discussion, probably relating to Napoleon III, Lassalle shouted so loud that the neighbors came by to ask if everything was all right.41
The decision not to pursue the idea of a Berlin newspaper was a renunciation of Marx’s belief, held since the beginning of his exile in 1849, that he would one day return to Germany and resume his radical political activity. Exile in England had become comfortable and familiar, too much so for a risky new venture in central Europe. The question was whether this refusal to return was a broader rejection of political activism. Marx continued to work intensively on his treatise on political economy, but the question remained: would he be content with the role of a radical scholar, or would he seek out some other venue of political activism?
FOLLOWING THE FINAL COLLAPSE of the Berlin newspaper project, Marx had no clear path to any of his political goals. He could only watch and grumble privately to Engels as others took the initiative, while persistent financial difficulties and mounting health problems increasingly dominated his life. Marx’s experiences between the summer of 1862 and the summer of 1864 were painfully reminiscent of his earliest years in exile.
The new financial problems stemmed from a very simple source: he had no regular income. A brief re-engagement for the New York Tribune ended in late 1861, followed shortly thereafter by the departure of Marx’s patron, Charles Anderson Dana, from the newspaper. The arrangements with The Press in Vienna, never very lucrative, survived the Tribune’s termination of Marx’s services by just eight months.42 Even when he had a regular income, it only sufficed to service his debts, and once that income disappeared, his situation deteriorated very quickly. He wrote to Engels on June 18, 1862:
It is very revolting to me to discuss with you once more my poverty, but what can be done? My wife says to me every day, she wishes that she and the children lay in the grave and I really cannot hold it against her, because the humiliations, tortures and terrors that are to be borne in this situation are, in fact, indescribable. . . . As you know from your own experience, there are the existing running expenses that must be paid in cash. That occurred by re-consigning items to the pawnshop at the end of April. But this source has been so exhausted that a week ago my wife made the vain attempt to take some of my books. I am so sorry for the poor children, as this is all occurring in the exhibition [1862 London World Exhibition] season, when their acquaintances are having a good time, and they have to go through terrors, so that no one visits them and sees through our filthy circumstances.43
It all seemed like a cruel reprise of the early 1850s. Jenny suffered new humiliations when she tried to put off creditors. Unable to keep up appearances, the family could not see any visitors. One of the most painful debts was for a piano that had been purchased on installments for their daughters. Economizing by canceling their piano lessons paradoxically made matters worse. The piano teacher had not yet been paid, and terminating his services meant receiving and paying his bill. Of course, alongside these debts were ones for more basic items: rent, gas, and the “baker, tea grocer, greengrocer as all those devil’s things are called.”44
So serious were these setbacks that by the fall of 1862 the philosopher and political agitator for the first time in his life sought a position in business. The job appears to have been arranged by Marx’s Dutch cousin August Philips, who had commercial and personal ties with the director of a London-based railway. While visiting England on business in the summer of 1862, Philips had mentioned Marx to his business friend and encouraged his cousin to apply for the job. Supposedly, Marx was turned down for his bad handwriting—which was execrable—although there might well have been more to the story. (The episode is poorly documented.) The attempted assistance was one of many examples of the concern of the Philips family, quite successful capitalists, for their errant communist relative.45
Marx was once again forced to borrow from friends and acquaintances. Engels, his chief source of funds, had to borrow money himself, a result of the crisis in the textile industry stemming from the Civil War and the loss of the chief supply of cotton. As Marx pressed his friend continuously for money, the latter grew steadily more irritated. The situation came to a boil in January 1863, when Marx, who would have been starting at the railroad then, had his employment plans worked out, responded to a letter from Engels reporting the death of his mistress Mary Burns with a renewed request for money. Engels was furious, and the friendship between the two men reached a nadir, not seen since their disputes in Brussels in 1845. Both retreated from the brink and apologized, but Marx’s finances remained untenable.46
In the end, he was temporarily saved by two inheritances. One, long awaited, was from his mother, who died on November 30, 1863. Seriously ill with the skin disease that plagued him at the time, Marx rose from his sickbed, and, taking two gigantic bottles of medicine with him, journeyed to Trier. He spent ten days there but accomplished little, because the estate was in probate, so he gave his brother-in-law a power of attorney, another sign that Marx had renounced his former suspicions of his sister’s husband. Henriette’s death did not fundamentally change her son’s attitude toward her. His letter to Jenny from Trier was quite sentimental, but only in reminiscing about their adolescence and young love. Mentions of his mother in that letter, and in others to Engels, were all about business—mostly derogatory references to his mother’s carelessness with the paperwork connected to her testaments, and the drunken incompetence of the notary who had advised her. There was just one odd remark: the observation that Henriette had died exactly forty-nine years, to the day and hour, after her marriage to Heinrich Marx, “as she had foreseen.” It was not the way a rationalist, a man of Wissenschaft, would view the world. This reference to Henriette’s psychic abilities, which lacks the scorn with which Marx usually treated his mother’s foibles, was just the faintest sign that the reconciliation between the property-obsessed mother and her errant son, begun with his visit in 1861, had made some progress. Thanks to Henriette’s destruction of his IOUs, when the will was finally probated and the Dutch relatives paid out Marx’s share of her estate, he received 7,000 Dutch gulden, or about £580.
Unlike the long-awaited inheritance from his mother, the second was quite unexpected. Marx’s close friend and political ally Wilhelm Wolff passed away in his Manchester exile on May 9, 1864, leaving Marx some £700, the bulk of his assets. The influx of funds enabled Marx to pay off his debts and the family to move into a new, larger, and more luxurious house (each of the daughters had her own room) at 1 Modena Villas, on Maitland Park Road in North London. Biographers wag their fingers at this aggressive spending when the financial future was so insecure, but even a more careful husbanding of the two windfalls would not have resolved the basic problem of the lack of a steady income. Further financial difficulties, at least, were put off for a few years.47
Even worse than Marx’s financial problems was the sudden and dramatic detorioration of his health. Toward the end of
October 1863, a growth had developed on his back, eventually reaching the size of a fist, so that he could no longer stand upright but had to move around all bent over. After a month of home remedies to avoid the expense of a doctor’s visit, the family physician was finally summoned. He told Jenny to leave the room, and, with Lenchen holding Karl down, took out his scalpel and cut through the growth, releasing a flood of blood and pus.48
This was the beginning of the period (there may have been one brief earlier episode in the 1850s) when Marx had to deal with his notorious carbuncles—repeated growths on his back, thighs, buttocks, and genitals that plagued him for the rest of his life. The latest medical opinion is that the illness was Hidradenitis suppurativa, an autoimmune disorder, whose effects are similar to acne, but on a much larger scale—fist-sized growths, not small pimples, destruction of the outer layer of skin, not just redness and scarring. The disease is painful, disfiguring, and even today very difficult to treat. In Marx’s time, there was nothing helpful that could be done. The chief remedy he used, strongly promoted by Engels and his physician, was to take arsenic, a Victorian-era “wonder drug.” Its only effect was to poison him. At one point, frustrated by the inability of doctors to cure him, Marx took a straight razor and cut through one of the growths himself; it was a minor miracle that he did not get infected and die.
Stress generally worsens the effects of disease, and Marx surely had more than enough stress. After years of seeing the recurring growths, Jenny came to the conclusion, supported by Engels, that overwork, late hours, and inadequate exercise were aggravating her husband’s condition. Their preferred remedy was for him to take more time off and not work so hard, but that made it even less likely that he could play an active political role.49
This was doubly frustrating because upheavals in European and world politics between 1862 and 1864 called for revolutionary intervention. To Marx and Engels, the most important, albeit the most distant, was the American Civil War. Their sympathies were fully with the North and the anti-slavery cause, although Engels, powerfully impressed by the military capabilities of southern generals—he saw Stonewall Jackson as “by far the best guy in America”—despaired, at times, of the Union’s chances. Marx found his friend’s opinions “determined a little too much by the military aspect of the thing,” and not taking into account the long-run significance of the North’s economic and demographic superiority. These would need to be brought to bear, Marx thought, by a revolutionary war—and the campaigns of the Union Army came closer to Marx’s ideal of a revolutionary war than any armed conflict in his lifetime.50
Nearer to home was the 1863 Polish uprising against Russian rule, which enjoyed very widespread left-wing sympathies. Marx and Engels joined in the chorus for Poland and Marx began writing an essay on the insurrection, whose potential victory he described as the “annihilation of today’s Russia,” or at least the termination of its “candidacy for world domination.” Only the malevolent power of the czar defeated the insurgents, with some assistance from the Prussian government—yet another proof, for Marx, of its reactionary policies, and its hostility to Polish and German nationalism. Both Marx and Engels blamed the defeat of the uprising on the refusal of its aristocratic leaders to adopt measures of revolutionary war, in this respect not up to the standards of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. Instead of mobilizing the Polish peasants, they pinned their hopes on the dubious prospect of intervention by Napoleon III.51
Still closer to Marx were the conflicts and controversies in Germany. The struggle between the Party of Progress deputies in the Prussian parliament and the government led by Bismarck became steadily more virulent, as the parliamentarians refused to approve the budget, leading Bismarck to order the illegal collection of taxes and attempt to suppress opposition newspapers and to arrest opposition leaders. In his most optimistic moments, Marx thought a revolution in Prussia was in the offing, an armed conflict between the liberal bourgeoisie and the authoritarian government.
Shaping this judgment was Marx’s opinion of Bismarck. Like most contemporaries, he saw the Prussian prime minister as an ultra-reactionary, born-again Christian conservative, who shared the former Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s endorsement of the society of orders and anti-constitutional, monarchical rule. Bismarck had in fact begun his political career in that way. During the Revolution of 1848, he expressed his extreme reactionary opinions in such a provocative fashion that even the king, who never shied away from public provocation, was a little appalled. But the burly, balding Prussian statesman had changed his views during the era of reaction. He had come to understand that repression was not enough, that he would have to win over public opinion by endorsing German nationalism. Bismarck did so by taking up a radical and nationalist cause dating back to the Revolution of 1848. In 1864, he launched a war pitting all the German states, including the great powers Prussia and Austria, against Denmark over the northern duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Marx and Engels saw the quick victory of the German states’ forces over a badly outnumbered Danish army, followed by an international peace conference to decide the status of the disputed territory, largely in terms of the counterrevolutionary connection of the Prussian government to Russia. They were sarcastic about the idea that a Prussian government could represent German nationalism. Their cynicism was not shared by much of central European public opinion.52
Most striking to Marx were the actions of Ferdinand Lassalle. In mid-1863, Lassalle founded a labor party, the General German Workers’ Association. During the following year, he traveled all across central Europe in an enormous campaign of agitation and association, organizing local branches of the group, and promoting his platform of the introduction of democratic suffrage, to be followed by state credit for workers’ production cooperatives. The self-glorifying activist put himself at the center of these campaigns, making dramatic entrances into cities where he spoke. On one famous occasion, he even allowed the workers to unhitch the horses from his carriage and pull it in themselves.
Lassalle was establishing an independent workers’ political voice; in doing so, he was withering in his condemnation of the Party of Progress as cowardly and inactive bourgeois democrats. Both aspects of his agitation were very congenial to Marx and Engels, corresponding to political goals they had been following since 1849. On the other hand, the self-dramatization and self-glorification of Lassalle’s activities seemed to magnify the worst features of his personality; Marx promoted Lassalle in his disdain from “Itzig” to “Baron Itzig.” The attacks on the Party of Progress for its inability to deal with Bismarck increasingly shaded into praise for the latter, as Lassalle weighed the possibility of rejecting the long-term affiliation of the labor movement with democratic and republican ideas in favor of support of the Prussian monarchy. Rumors flew—later proven true—that the labor agitator was secretly meeting with the conservative prime minister, offering to combine forces against the Party of Progress. Here, once again, was the awkward choice Marx had confronted in 1848–49, between opposing an authoritarian Prussian government, which meant organizing across class boundaries, and organizing an independent working-class movement, which would not necessarily be hostile to Prussia.
Marx was well acquainted with Lassalle’s activities, and the political issues they raised, receiving reports from Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had returned from exile to Berlin in 1862. Engels especially, and other associates as well, wanted Marx to come out with a forthright statement condemning Lassalle for having gotten far too close to the Prussian authorities. In private, Marx was scathing about Lassalle, yet he refused to make any public statements about him and his labor party. Marx might have learned the lesson of his past disputes with rivals, from Karl Grün to Karl Vogt, and decided that polemical exchanges with fellow socialists and radicals were a losing affair. Or perhaps, in view of his financial difficulties and worsening health, Marx was in no position to challenge Lassalle’s leadership, and so, once again, found himself condemned to political passivity.53
T
HE TWO-YEAR PERIOD of political passivity and involvement with personal problems came to an abrupt end in September 1864 because of two largely accidental events. One was the result of Ferdinand Lassalle’s final act of self-dramatization. He fell in love with the daughter of a high Bavarian state official, and following a frustrated courtship, challenged her fiancé to a duel; he was shot to death in Switzerland on the last day of August 1864. It all strongly resembled a soap opera, but as a result the General German Workers’ Association was lacking a president. The Countess and others in Germany turned to Marx. Marx refused, pointing out that he was not a Prussian citizen and so could easily be expelled from the country. But he remained involved in the affairs of the group and its planned newspaper—the first daily socialist paper in Germany, the Social Democrat, which started appearing in Berlin at the beginning of 1865.54
Although Marx’s involvement with the German labor movement thus began accidentally, it was a logical consequence of his past as a radical revolutionary, the chief surviving leader of the Communist League, and Lassalle’s mentor and theoretical inspiration. Marx’s second political initiative in September 1864, eventually rendering him an internationally known figure, was even more fortuitous. It emerged from a public meeting at St. Martin’s Hall in London on September 28, 1864, sponsored by British trade unions and French workers’ associations, held for the purpose of supporting the cause of Polish independence from Russian rule.
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