Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  On the surface, this passage provides a comic portrait of a world turned upside down, the servant, lowliest person in the household, dominating its patriarchal head. On another level, it can be read as Marx’s voluntary surrender of his patriarchal authority, to express it all the more clearly. He freely permitted Lenchen Demuth to talk him out of his bad moods. When Liebknecht wrote his reminiscences in 1896, he was part of the leadership circle of the German Social Democratic Party, whose members had recently learned the closely guarded truth about the paternity of Freddy Demuth. With that in mind, Liebknecht’s portrayal of the relationship between the master and his servant reads at a deeper but veiled level as if he was describing a subordinate who had a secret hold on her superior, which she used to influence him as no one else could. There was no hint that Lenchen used her power over Marx for purposes of blackmail. Indeed, she died quite poor. But the secret in the midst of the household must have constantly shadowed Karl’s patriarchal authority.

  Marx’s private attitudes about men and women were similar to his public ones. He endorsed women’s political participation: women were free to join the IWMA, and Marx solicited female memberships—albeit from the wives of his friends, Dr. Kugelmann and Engels in particular. As Marx was proud to point out, there was a female member of the General Council, the English freethinker Harriet Law. She generally supported Marx’s positions, and he approved of her forthright, perhaps not entirely feminine rapping on the table while endorsing his remarks. Marx’s comment, though, that “The progress of society can be exactly measured by the societal position of the fair sex (including the ugly ones)” combined ostensible support for women’s rights with some actual contempt for women.20

  Leftists today would denounce these attitudes as repugnant sexism, and late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminists as a group have not embraced Marx or his ideas warmly. Feminists are sometimes more sympathetic to Engels, who late in his life would attempt, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, to integrate women’s issues into Marxist doctrine. Engels’s private life, his cohabitation with the Manchester factory girls Mary and Lizzie Burns, might seem more emancipated than Marx’s proper, bourgeois marriage and his attitudes about his daughters. Yet the printer Stephan Born reported in his memoirs resentment among workers and artisans who knew Engels, seeing his relationship with the factory girls as just another example of a capitalist sexually exploiting his female workers. Engels’s own opinions about sexuality appear in a letter he wrote to Marx’s friend Ludwig Kugelmann, the gynecologist in Hanover. Advising the doctor to take up horseback riding for health, he continued, “You as a gynecologist are obligated to Wissenschaft [to ride] because gynecology is indeed most closely connected with riding and being ridden. In every way, a gynecologist must be firmly in the saddle.”21

  This locker-room attitude was prevalent among the younger bachelors in Marx’s circle: Wilhelm Pieper, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Adolf Cluss, and, in a somewhat different way, Ferdinand Lassalle. They all had a wide variety of assorted sexual relationships with prostitutes and working-class women. They all also contracted venereal disease but eventually got married—except Lassalle, who was killed in a duel by the fiancé of his intended before he could marry her.22 These actual nineteenth-century alternatives to Marx’s stuffy, patriarchal marriage and concerns about his daughters’ purity seem rather less attractive today.

  Among mid-nineteenth-century German communists there existed one marriage of equals: between Fritz and Mathilde Franziska Anneke. He was a Prussian army officer turned communist, she a freelance political journalist—already an unusual, assertive role for a woman. During the 1848 Revolution, they were both communist activists in Cologne, where they jointly edited a left-wing popular newspaper, and tried to remain neutral in the disputes between Marx and Andreas Gottschalk. After fighting on the side of the insurgent governments of southwestern Germany in the spring of 1849 (Mathilde Franziska caused quite a stir by joining her husband in the field), they emigrated to the United States, where they continued their left-wing activism. Fritz was a passionate opponent of slavery and fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, while Mathilde Franziska became an outspoken women’s rights advocate, and probably would have played a major role among American feminists, were it not for her refusal, like many left-wing German émigré(e)s, to learn English. As was common among leftists of the time, Fritz opposed the germ theory of disease. As a matter of political principle, he refused to have their two children inoculated against smallpox; tragically, both children died as a result.23

  Marx, by contrast, had his children vaccinated, and then revaccinated when his wife contracted smallpox. His marriage was not a politicized partnership of equals, but one in which he assumed a dominant patriarchal role. Unlike Fritz Anneke, he separated his public political principles from his private life; his children were fortunate their father did so. Marx’s own balancing act of nineteenth-century manifestations of manhood may appear sexist or inappropriate by today’s standards, especially when we think of his treatment of Lenchen Demuth. However, compared to many of his contemporaries, Marx comes across as having chosen some of the best possibilities available to a husband and father of the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-German middle class.

  MARX COULD BE WARM, jovial, and hospitable, but also angry, sarcastic, and hostile. He was a true and loyal friend, but a vehement and hateful enemy. Individuals could be almost instantly resassigned from one category to another, as happened to Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess, Arnold Ruge, and Ferdinand Freiligrath. Marx’s relations with Ferdinand Lassalle would most likely have ended up the same way, were it not for the latter’s untimely death. Those drastic transitions were most common when Marx was a young man, but he was over forty when he ended his friendship with Freiligrath, and in his old age when he brought his close and warm friendship with Dr. Kugelmann to a sudden and abrupt end in the mid-1870s.24

  These were the actions of a person of strong emotions, both positive and negative, a feature of Marx’s personality only strengthened by the constant stress of his decades of exile. They were also the actions of a man for whom personal friendship and political affiliation had become, by the time he was in his thirties, largely identical. In the 1850s and 1860s, when Marx listed members of his party and he or Jenny recounted their friends, the two groups were composed of the same people. Jenny did have non-political friends, but Marx did not, and the new friends he made through the IWMA, to say nothing of his future sons-in-law, were his political associates.25

  Friedrich Engels was personally and politically closer to Marx than any other friends. Marx’s reliance on Engels for financial and emotional support is well known and was already recognized by contemporaries. Marx himself was happy to demonstrate publicly his opinion of his friend and colleague. Discussing members of his “party” in 1853, Marx stated that Engels was “the only one from whom to expect real support . . . an authentic universal lexicon, capable of working at any hour of the day and night, whether drunk or sober, quick as the devil in writing and understanding.” Seven years later, Engels had advanced to the status of Marx’s “alter ego.” Particularly around the time of the publication of Capital, the climax of his life’s intellectual work, Marx expressed his gratitude to and admiration for his friend. “Dear boy,” he wrote in February 1866, “in all circumstances I feel more than ever the good fortune of such a friendship that exists between us. On your side, you know that no relationship is worth so much to me.” The following year, after delivering his manuscript to the publisher, he assured Engels that “Without you I could never have brought the work to an end, and I assure you that it has always weighed on my conscience like the Alps that primarily for my benefit you have allowed your wonderful forces to be wasted and to rust in commercial pursuits. Into the bargain, you have had to endure, along with me, all my petty wretchedness.”26

  The benefits of the close relationship were undeniable, but its costs were not insignificant. A central feature
of the bond between the two men was the denigration of third parties, not just their political enemies but their potential friends as well. The correspondence between Marx and Engels is filled with nasty and hostile remarks about fellow socialists, from Karl Grün and Moses Hess through August Willich and Ferdinand Lassalle, to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, to say nothing of non-communist radicals and democrats. One can only imagine what Marx and Engels said to each other when they met face to face. Sharing hostile remarks, nasty observations, and salacious or scandalous stories about fellow leftists brought them closer together, but also increased their personal and political isolation.

  The mature friendship took the form of two closely linked individuals together against the world. The place of each of them in that connection appears in two very different reminiscences. Wilhelm Liebknecht wrote that

  Marx was the most accessible of men, and cheerful and amiable in personal relations. Engels was much gruffer. There was something militarily abrupt in his manner, which called out opposition and contradiction, while Marx in the company of others had something extraordinarily winning. In the editorial office of the “New Rhineland News,” everything went smoothly when Marx was there. When Engels took over for him, conflict broke out immediately . . . as I . . . was told. I myself only got into strife with Marx twice, with Engels quite often.27

  Henry Hyndman, the English socialist intellectual who met Marx toward the end of his life, wrote of their acquaintance that “At first the aggressive, intolerant, and intellectually dominant side of him preponderated; only later did the sympathy and good-nature which underlay his rugged exterior become apparent.” Engels lacked those sympathetic sides, being “exacting, suspicious, jealous, and not disinclined to give full weight to the exchange value of his ready cash in his relations with those whom he helped.”28

  These two recollections underscore a common point: in comparison to Marx, Engels was a difficult person, who got along poorly with his fellow leftists. He may have mellowed a bit over the years, especially after Marx’s political associates attempted to expel Engels from leftist politics in the 1840s, but his access to that politics ran through Marx. There was an implicit arrangement between the two: Engels would support Marx, and Marx would guarantee Engels a place in the labor movement, where he might otherwise have been shunned.

  It would be unfair to say that the two friends had such an instrumentalist understanding of their relationship. Their evident pleasure in each other’s company was always apparent to those who knew them, and formed a consistent theme in reminiscences of the two men. Their care for each other appeared not just in their mutual appreciation but in their repeated medical suggestions. Engels’s advice to Marx about how to treat his autoimmune disorder, ranging from taking arsenic to reducing the stress in his life, is one good example. On hearing about Engels’s persistent illness (possibly mononucleosis) in 1857, Marx dropped everything he was doing and rushed off to the British Museum to research the latest medical opinions on the topic. He recommended his friend take iron, advice the latter did eventually try, although he preferred cod-liver oil. Neither would have done much for Engels’s health—except perhaps the vile taste of such remedies temporarily distracting him from his suffering—but the discussion was a way for two men to articulate the depth of their friendship.29

  Still, Engels’s position in the communist movement was, for eighteen years, integrally connected with the money he earned working for Ermen & Engels in Manchester. It might have been an unpleasant pursuit, but was at first relatively lucrative, and after he became a partner, quite opulent. There must have been a temptation for Engels to renounce his radicalism and concentrate on his business as so many of his contemporaries from the 1848 Revolution had done, which would have been a catastrophe for Marx.

  Engels’s liaison with Mary and Lizzie Burns, a secret life involving a clandestine apartment he shared with the two working-class women quite apart from his ostensible residence, always left him slightly disreputable. It prevented him from making a socially more suitable marriage that would probably have alienated him from his friend and their radical politics.30 The Burns sisters helped keep Engels, the desk-bound capitalist, a red, and a loyal friend and associate of Marx. Yet his relations with them were interwoven into the one serious break in the friendship during the years after the two friends moved to England.

  Marx’s letters to Engels were filled with accounts of his wife and children, and Engels’s contained repeated queries about the family. Engels also exchanged letters with Jenny von Westphalen, written more formally than the correspondence with Marx, using the German second-person respectful Sie rather than the informal Du. But until Lizzie Burns’s death, Engels’s letters almost never contained mention of the Burns sisters, and Marx’s, with two very brief exceptions, each of one short sentence, never took note of their existence. In his many visits to Manchester, Marx must have met with the sisters, but he did not commit their names to paper.31

  This was no doubt a concession to Jenny von Westphalen, who had despised Mary Burns ever since she met her in Brussels in 1845. Marx’s balancing act between his wife and his best friend went on for decades; but it came to a crashing end with Mary Burns’s death in January 1863, when Marx responded to Engels’s letter announcing his companion’s demise by asking for money. Engels was appalled at his friend’s lack of empathy, so different from Engels’s own attitude on the death of Marx’s children and the life-threatening illness of his wife. Even Engels’s “Philistine acquaintances” had shown “more sympathy and friendship” than did Marx over Mary’s death.

  Marx’s finances had reached another very low point, following the termination of his work as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, and his seeming lack of empathy for his friend was partly the result of the emotional strains emerging in his marriage. Jenny had been denouncing her husband for allowing his pride to get the best of him, and refusing to let Engels know how desperate their financial situation was. Without Karl’s knowledge, she had written a begging letter to Wilhelm Wolff in Manchester, asking for a few pounds to help pay their bills, infuriating her husband, who saw the letter as undermining his authority as head of household. Jenny’s search for money was a response to her husband’s plans to resolve the family’s financial difficulties by drastically cutting expenses. Since the previous summer, he had been toying with the idea of giving up their Kentish Town house. The two teen-aged daughters, Jenny and Laura, would find work as governesses; Lenchen Demuth would be dismissed; and Karl, his wife, and the eight-year-old Eleanor would move into a small flat in a model working-class housing project. The lives of all the family would have been disrupted, but none more so than Jenny’s, who for the first time in her marriage would have had to do the housework herself.

  The news of the death of Engels’s longtime female companion reached the Marxes on the same day a bailiff was in the house seizing goods their landlord had attached for failure to pay the rent, a sign that Karl had failed in his duties. As a result, Jenny faced the prospect of a future working-class existence without a servant. Showing his sympathies for a woman from the working class whom his wife despised at this time was more than Marx could manage. In writing the letter to Engels that requested money, he was evidently choosing his wife over his friend.32

  Resolving the break in the friendship required realigning relations between the two households. Financial support from Engels coupled with some timely inheritances meant that the Marxes could keep their home; the older daughters would not become upscale servants, but remain eligible; and their mother would continue to have household help. In return, the Marxes became much more solicitous of Engels’s female companion. After Lizzie Burns replaced her sister in Engels’s affections, Marx went out of his way to include greetings to her and inquiries about her in his letters. In return, Engels began including news of Lizzie in his letters. Even Jenny Marx eventually sent greetings in a letter to Engels, something inconceivable for Lizzie’s sister.33
When Engels and Lizzie moved to London in 1870, the Marxes socialized with both of them. Some mutual concessions in his family enabled Karl to reconcile the two central personal relationships in his life and his obligations as friend and patriarch.

  THE GREAT ANTAGONIST OF the bourgeoisie was distinctly bourgeois in his private life. Rather than making hostile and sarcastic observations about this, as later critics of Marx’s ideas would, or declaring the connection irrelevant to Marx’s political and economic conceptions, as is typical of his defenders, it would be more helpful to consider Marx as a nineteenth-century Anglo-German bourgeois. He was a figure of his age, a man who endorsed bourgeois cultural and behavioral ideals, struggled with them, and modified them to fit his own circumstances.

  To be bourgeois was to have property, income, security. Marx had none of those; their absence was a continuous dead weight in his life. Just before he reached the midcentury point, he wrote to Engels:

  In a few days, I will be 50. If that Prussian lieutenant said to you: “Already 20 years in service and still a lieutenant,” so I can say: half a century on my back and still a pauper! How right my mother was! “If Karrell had only made capital, instead of, etc!”34

  Whether Henriette Marx actually made that oft-quoted remark is doubtful, since she died four years before the publication of Capital, and probably before Marx’s economic treatise had even acquired that name. Marx’s description of his mother, her Dutch accent turning “Karl” into “Karrell,” evoked the woman of property, who came to Trier from Amsterdam with her dowry, the owner of house and vineyard, sheets and table linens. She had a fierce hold on the assets Marx wanted and could only acquire after her death. Such an evocation only underlined his feelings of failure about his own acquisition and preservation of property and income for himself and, especially, his family. Marx felt this failure to be properly bourgeois at a most atavistic level. Three years before his fiftieth birthday, Jenny let Engels know confidentially that her husband lay awake every night thinking about his family’s impoverished future after he lost the Tribune job: