A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  After the wave of revolutions, the front against all social change was stronger than ever, both in Great Britain and across Europe. It was a change that not only dashed many hopes. It also opened the path to a new way of thinking – or, rather, it brought ideas that had recently been repressed to the foreground. Views on social development – in fact, on change in general – were transformed. The conviction that most processes require dramatic breaks was overshadowed by its opposite: the idea of continuity.5

  Central players in this shift were both politically active and outstanding scientists. The German doctor, archaeologist, and politician Rudolf Virchow – who was three years younger than Marx – was certainly the most important of them. As a doctor he was innovative, one of the foremost of the nineteenth century. For him, the real political alarm clock was the 1847 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, a few years after the great weavers’ uprising. Despite the deaths of 16,000 people, the government authorities merely shrugged their shoulders. The reason for the deaths of so many was nonetheless patently obvious: poverty and wretched hygienic conditions. Like many other young doctors, Virchow drew the conclusion that society had to be fundamentally changed. He hailed the 1848 revolution with joy, and eagerly involved himself in it. His foremost biographer, Constantin Goschler, even asserts that he was close to the young Marx. He probably means the Marx of the Manuscripts rather than the Marx who stood behind the Manifesto. In a letter Virchow wrote to his father, which Goschler quotes, he explained that he was not a communist: communism was madness to the extent that it strove to realize its ideals in one stroke. On the other hand, he was a socialist. It was a socialist system that he wanted to see with the revolution.

  It is natural that he had primarily social and medical aspects in mind in the society he wanted to fight for. And it remained so even after the revolution. But now he believed more in a slower, more gradual development towards a more just order of things. That is why, like Heinrich Bürgers, he got involved in the Progress Party, became a member of parliament, and represented a nationally-minded reformism in numerous parliamentary debates. The dominant figure of the conservative bloc, Otto Bismarck, soon become his chief opponent. At one point, the exchange of opinions became so intense that Bismarck challenged Virchow to a duel. As the challenged, it was Virchow’s business to choose the weapon, and his proposal got Bismarck to back down immediately: the duellists would choose between two sausages, one of which would be filled with a deadly poison.

  Enemies or no, Virchow and Bismarck were united in a belief in evolutionary processes. Revolutions were a bad thing. The idea of continuity also influenced Virchow’s scientific convictions. Cellular pathology was his great contribution to medicine. In it, he built on the relatively new theory that all living creatures consisted of cells, and he launched the theory that illnesses had their basis in harmful cellular changes. He would come to emphasize the gradual more and more in the process of an illness. Even his archaeological studies were characterized by the same fundamental pattern of thought.6

  It is particularly interesting to see which theories in evolutionary biology dominated before and after the middle of the nineteenth century. The ‘catastrophe theory’ occupied the seat of honour for a long time. Its chief representatives were the French biologist Georges Cuvier, who maintained that the fossils of extinct species indicated earlier catastrophes that annihilated various life forms again and again. It is telling that Cuvier, in the title of his central work on the subject, spoke of these changes as révolutions. This word, as we have already seen, designated courses that were constantly repeated – such as the path of the planets around the sun, according to Copernicus – but from the mid-eighteenth century had been given entirely different content, namely the one we use now. Marx belonged to a generation that had also begun to talk about social revolutions. The term ‘industrial revolution’ had already begun to be used.7

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of revolutions was overshadowed more and more by its opposite: the idea of slow, continuous processes. Charles Darwin and his 1859 book The Origin of Species became the symbol of this ideological displacement. According to him, species changed step by step through natural and sexual selection. One foundation for his theory was the geological work of Charles Lyell, according to which the same forces had acted on the surface of the Earth throughout its entire history. Lyell presented this ‘uniformitarianism’ in his 1830 book Principles of Geology, but it was only with Darwin that this line of thought became known to a greater public.

  Darwin also sought support for his thesis in an economist named Thomas Robert Malthus, whose population theory became crucial for Darwin’s conviction that each species produced such a large amount of offspring that not all individuals would survive. It is an interesting detail that the first edition of Malthus’s 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, was a polemical pamphlet against on the one hand the ‘father of anarchism’, the Englishman William Godwin, and on the other hand one of the French Revolution’s most brilliant spokesmen, Jean Antoine de Condorcet. Both recommended violent upheavals. Malthus, on the contrary, emphasized continuity. The development of a population would always remain such that those in the worst position would perish. There was, simply, never enough food for everyone who was born.

  Darwin generalized a demographic theory to apply it to every living thing. He himself was extremely reluctant to draw just any conclusion regarding people and their world from his thesis on natural selection. But he took important support for his argument from social theory.8

  The ideological changes around 1850 did not, of course, mean that ways of thinking that had recently been dominant disappeared, and that an opposite way of thinking that previously had had no representatives was suddenly alone in the arena. Our examples show that there had already been ideas about continuity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that the idea of drastic upheavals did not disappear after the failed revolutions of 1848–49. Rather, it is that the one kind of thinking seemed more and more natural during the one epoch, while on the contrary its opposite had to raise more and more arguments in its defence.

  Nowadays, it is often said that one discourse has been replaced by another. For my part, I prefer to speak about ideological changes. The new, dominant way of thinking is related to the unsuccessful revolutions. But, at the same time, the interaction between the various courses of events is extremely subtle and complicated. There is no direct connection between what happened in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna in 1848 and 1849 and the enormous response to Darwin’s Origin of Species a decade later. Darwin himself was certainly not influenced significantly, if at all. On the other hand, the public responded to the decisive outside events of the period. Expectations about the future had changed. It became easier to think in long, continuous processes of development than in drastic social changes. Even the accent in ordinary people’s view of nature shifted as a result. So it was in Great Britain as well, where a potent hope – or vision of horror – during the 1840s was that the Chartists would seize power.

  Marx fought bravely against these shifts in thinking. But he could not remain uninfluenced by them, either. At the same time, during the 1850s he experienced a difficult – horrible, in fact – period in his private life. The burden was nonetheless greatest for Jenny. It is therefore natural that she, rather than her husband, come into focus over the following pages.

  Poverty and Death

  Jenny von Westphalen was born a baroness, but as Jenny Marx she lived a life of poverty, occasionally bordering on pure destitution. The worst years were the early ones in London, and a real improvement in the situation came only in 1864 when she and her family moved into their own, rather spacious house. Hitherto, that had been far beyond the borders of possibility. But the change did not mean that their financial problems were over and done with. Karl lived beyond his means even as a student and he did so throughout his life, even when age began to weigh him down. But from the mid-1860s,
their money woes moved on to a higher level, so to speak. It was no longer a question of bread and potatoes, but of gowns for their daughters.

  Moreover, few could equal Jenny in generosity and hospitality. After the defeat in 1849, German refugees flocked to London. Many were as bitterly poor as the Marx family; others had it even worse. One of the youngest who sought refuge in Great Britain was named Wilhelm Liebknecht, a student of languages who had become a revolutionary and who would at length become one of the most important leaders of German social democracy. He was quickly sucked into the magic circle around Jenny and Karl Marx. Karl would remain his political model throughout his life, and he would always describe Jenny with great warmth, admiration, and gratitude. Without her generosity, he would scarcely have survived the poverty of his refugee years, he wrote. Ulrich Teusch, who wrote the finest and most well-balanced biography of Jenny, points out that she became a mother figure for Wilhelm, who lost his mother early in life. Women long remained foreign to me, he admitted in his autobiography. ‘And here I found a beautiful, noble-minded, high-spirited woman who in a half-sisterly, half-motherly way took care of the friendless fighter for liberty, driven ashore on the banks of the Thames,’ he wrote. ‘She was to me the ideal of a woman, and she is the ideal even now.’9

  Jenny’s care for the young Liebknecht is that much more impressive as she daily had to fight hard to get food on the table. She was, of course, not alone in that fight. Helene Demuth, the family’s self-effacing maid, stood unflinchingly by her side. She was the one who handled practical matters, made purchases, cooked the food, did the laundry, fixed and mended. But Jenny was the one who chiefly tried to keep the host of creditors in check. The baker, the butcher, the greengrocer, and many others kept knocking more persistently and more threateningly on the door. It was the master of the house – or, more correctly, of the narrow hovel – they were looking for, but he was often not at home. Gradually, he had found the only temple he ever worshipped: the British Museum, a place where he could sate his unique hunger for reading. There he sat, safely anchored during periods when his family – and he himself – were somewhat healthy and his own clothes presentable enough that he could show himself among society. His tattered coat became legendary, and when in the 1860s he allowed himself to be photographed in an elegant topcoat, there were friends who expressed their happy surprise.10

  But he also often worked at home, under intolerable conditions. Jenny did everything so that he could nonetheless further his great work – what would become Capital. In the spring of 1850, the plans to finally complete this project that had already occupied him for a great many years had awakened again. Jenny was in agreement with the plan and supported it wholeheartedly. In fact, she took an active part in it, as she did with everything else her husband wrote. She was not only his secretary, but discussed his texts knowledgeably. It was work she perceived as a comfort during those heavy years. She wrote in her memoirs: ‘The hours I sat in Karl’s little room making fair copy of his texts were among the happiest in my life.’11

  Karl’s income always remained too little to cover the costs of the household. During their first years in London, when Engels was also trying to support himself as a freelance writer, there was no help to be had even from their friend, whose own economic situation had also started to become precarious. Engels’s father, the elder Friedrich, was becoming more and more reluctant to help his wayward son with more money. Finally, the younger Friedrich had to make the best of a bad job and set out for Manchester to work in the family company, Ermen & Engels. At first, the father had no faith in his son’s ability – or, rather, desire – to make a real effort. But he was mistaken. The younger Friedrich discovered early on that their business partner, Ermen, was cheating the Engels family out of their rightful share of the company’s profits. He thus finally proved to his father that he could be a capable force. His position was assured.12

  But his wages were relatively insignificant. Nevertheless, he tried to share it with the Marx family. It was important help – in fact, the deliverance from pure destitution. Gradually the allowance became bigger, but nonetheless it remained insufficient – at least up until 1864.

  We have gripping testimony of what Jenny had to endure in a letter she sent to Engels in early 1853. It was, she wrote, ‘a hateful task’ to write to him about money; he had already helped them entirely too often. But now the situation was intolerable. She had written to many of her acquaintances, including her mother-in-law and her sister. She had not received a single response, and now her hopes – as they often were – were set on Engels. Could he send something? The baker was threatening to stop the delivery of bread.13

  But Karl was not living an easy life, either. To the same Engels, he wrote in September 1852: ‘My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen [Demuth] has some sort of nervous fever. I could not and I cannot call a doctor because I have no money to buy medicine. For the last 8–10 days I have been feeding my family solely on bread and potatoes, but whether I shall be able to get hold of any today is doubtful.’14

  There is an eyewitness description from the same period that heavily underlines the poverty in the Marx household. It is written by a German police spy who had wormed his way into the hovel on Dean Street (Marx had been monitored by police spies ever since the first years in Paris). The narrative is so frightful that it is difficult to believe its veracity. A thick layer of dust lay on the furniture; diapers with the customary contents lay strewn over the chairs, and Marx himself was wearing unwashed underclothes. It is highly improbable that Helene Demuth would have let the dust collect in drifts, or that she would not have scrubbed even the most tattered underwear clean. Was our friend the spy, with his racy description, trying to say that Karl Marx would soon be a closed chapter and thus not much to worry about?15 But those who love anecdotes about Marx’s life of course hold this description in high regard.

  Poverty was not the only issue; the entire family was affected by various painful illnesses. They lived in an unhealthy apartment on an unsanitary street – the dark, stinking Dean Street in Soho. Overcrowding made the situation even worse. Six, seven, and at one point eight people lived in two rooms. The toilet was located in the back yard. The hygiene problems were terrible.

  It is understandable why Jenny was not only affected by physical illnesses. The desperate situation made her constantly anxious, and periodically deeply unhappy. Everyday life was difficult to endure, and her burden became too heavy. It so happened that she sought out more long-term relief in the situation, but was unsuccessful. She talks about it in a letter to Karl, written in August 1851. The text breathes despair, but there is also a streak of bitter humour. Jenny was a masterful writer of letters, even under the heaviest of circumstances.

  She had taken a trip to see Karl’s relatives in the Netherlands, the Philipses. The journey was a terrible one, with seasickness and other hardships, and once at her destination she only met one of the less influential members of the family, a certain Fritz. Fritz did not know who Jenny was, but once informed of it he embraced her. The conversation that followed dealt with revolutions and communism – the theme of the day – and Fritz also encouraged the Marx family to emigrate to the United States. So far, the conversation had been pleasant, but when Jenny turned to the reason for her journey – namely money – Fritz’s tone changed. He complained about bad business and wretched financial prospects. He could not relinquish a single penny to his relatives.

  Jenny then gave up and set out for her simple bed for the night, exhausted and dissolved in tears. The entire journey had been in vain. ‘Zerrissen’ – tattered – and plagued by mortal dread, she set off for home. Certainly you, Karl, would have had much better success! she exclaimed.16

  That last sigh of course raises the question why it was not actually Karl who made the trip. The Philipses were his relatives, not Jenny’s. Did he think that his charming wife would make his rich kinfolk more generous? Or did he feel that his journalistic, political, an
d scientific work bound him to London? We do not know.

  The dreary lot of the Marx family in London was not only poverty and illness, but death as well. The family had grown just before their move. Apart from the older daughters, Jennychen and Laura, there was also a little boy, Edgar (named after his uncle), who had been born in Brussels. He had been part of the revolutions in both Paris and Cologne in his young life, and now he was a child refugee in the poorer districts of London. In the midst of all the sorrow he was a constant source of joy, a little humourist and a rogue. In her gloomy begging letter to Engels in the spring of 1853, Jenny wrote how her six-year-old son fooled the baker who had come to call in his debts with Karl. ‘Is Mr Marx at home?’ the baker asked, and the boy quickly answered in the local dialect: ‘No, he ain’t upstairs.’ The baker left, cross, and Edgar quickly scampered up to his beloved Moor (as everyone in the family, and some even outside it, called Karl) and told of his successful efforts.

  When Jenny arrived in London, she was expecting yet another child. A boy was born on 5 November 1849, less than two months after the strenuous journey from Paris. 5 November is an eventful day in England’s history. On 5 November 1605, the conspiracy Guy Fawkes became a symbol for was exposed – the plot to blow up King James I and the entire House of Lords. Fawkes was a zealous Catholic who ardently wished that his faith would once again become the official religion of the country. He was thus far from one of Marx’s fellow thinkers. But Marx was attracted by his rebellious spirit and named his newborn son Heinrich Guido – Heinrich after his grandfather, Guido after the given name Guy Fawkes used when he fought on the side of Spain in the Dutch Revolt.

  The little boy was given the nickname Föxchen (‘the little fox’ in Germanized English) and his father also called him der Pulververschwörer (‘the Gunpowder Plotter’). But the boy was not healthy; he seemed to constantly be hovering between life and death. Above all, he suffered from intense convulsions. He died a little over a year old.