A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  And how could the child’s mother permit such a thing? To all appearances, she had no choice; she shared the hard lot of countless other maidservants of having to sacrifice an immense amount for the family she served. Helene Demuth saw her son often, of course, but he seldom was found in the Marx household.

  Jenny Marx could certainly have imposed her definite conditions for how the matter would be handled. Karl would outwardly have nothing to do with the boy. The world would believe that Engels was the father. Only she and Karl and Lenchen (and Engels) would know how things really stood. Their own children would be kept out of it, as would the often hostile world around them. But the indifference Marx showed the boy can neither be explained nor forgiven by this.

  The person who has provided the most well-considered account of the subject is Rachel Holmes, in her great 2014 biography Eleanor Marx. The pieces that point to Marx’s paternity are carefully put together there. Even Lenchen Demuth receives a reasonable portion of the attention. She was not just the one who handled the family’s last line of defence against pure destitution. She was a beloved and respected member of the family, a good friend to Jenny, a comforting asset for the children, and – especially – a fairly irreverent comrade to the head of the family with whom she gladly played chess and often beat. This is a possible background to the relationship between them becoming more intimate.35

  And yet: Lenchen was among the many women of the age (and, perhaps, of all ages) who never had space for their own lives. She continued to serve the Marxes, husband and wife, for as long as they lived. When they both died, she managed Engels’s household as well.

  In summary, it is easy to say that in his view of women – and especially of those who were closest to him – Marx was a child of his time. But this also means that in his view of equality, he was far less advanced than his friend Engels, to say nothing of another contemporary: the liberal philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, author of the 1869 book The Subjection of Women.

  Karl Marx’s daily life was often hard and brimming with troubles. But it was still Jenny Marx who bore the heaviest burden. Like many other contemporary women, she bore a long series of children – the last when she was over forty (an age that today does not need to entail any risks, but which did to a great extent in the 1850s; at that time, in fact, every birth regardless of the mother’s age was life-threatening). It was she who first had to tackle the daily problems – everything from the children’s illnesses to the creditors constantly knocking on the door. This taxed her mental powers heavily. Karl had his scientific and journalistic work. For her, putting his writings into presentable and readable condition was one of the greatest causes for joy. A brilliant, first-rate stylist, like many other women of the time she had to otherwise be satisfied with letter-writing. It was there she could give her talents free rein.

  We know that she accepted the lot of women in the age she lived in before her marriage to Karl, even if it was with regret. She bravely defended her fiancé against the criticism of her relatives. Life with Karl later became harder and more bitter than she ever could have imagined. It weighed heavily on her, but she endured it. It was a heroic achievement.

  9

  Journalist on Two Continents

  Work, Despite Everything

  Daily life in the slum quarters of London was hard. Nonetheless, Marx tirelessly continued his activities on many fronts. Only a few months after his arrival, he started his life’s project again – the project that had occupied him ever since 1844 and would be the backbone of his work up until his death. ‘Here you have to study matters’ (Hier muss studiert werden), he exclaimed in a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer on 4 February 1850.1 But it would be several years before the great project yielded anything besides further contributions to the increasingly bloated pile of excerpts.

  There was also much else that occupied Marx and demanded more immediate efforts than the grand unified theory of society. He once again took up the work of the Communist League and its central committee. He helped organize the efforts to resettle the large group escaping the repression in the German states. He joined London’s ‘Educational Society’, soon offering his services there and lecturing both on economic theory and on the fundamental ideas in the Manifesto.

  There were attempts to unite all radical forces in the mixed (to say the least) community of people who had been stranded in London. The refugee committee was called social democratic because it was to both help and unite those who had demonstrably taken part in the revolution and now needed relief. The phrase ‘social democracy’ began showing up here and there, and people even spoke of ‘a social democratic party’ even though it would be long before this party actually established itself as a mass movement. The purpose was obviously to include not only organized communists, but other radical forces as well.2

  As we will remember, during the years of revolution Marx had had the ambition for an even broader radical coalition in which faith in democracy would constitute the principle of unity. This was the main line he pursued in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But it soon proved difficult to preserve the line of mutual understanding. Many of those with democratic goals believed that a compromise with royal power would be possible. Marx found this hope preposterous and abandoned the line of compromise. His newspaper reaped numerous successes at the same time as popular rebellions flared up in several places. With the defeat of the revolution, a new attempt at a broader coalition began. But even this time, the united front was soon broken up.

  Marx was not the first to sound the call to battle. Back in the late fall of 1849, the Marx family’s doctor, Louis Bauer, had been part of founding a Demokratischer Verein (Democratic Association), which was a direct competitor to the Educational Society Marx was devoting his energies to. Furious, Marx wrote a letter to Bauer in which he declared that the latter’s attack on Marx’s colleagues and friends made all personal relations impossible. Marx wanted only a bill for the services Bauer had provided to him and his family as a doctor. After that it was ‘thanks, and farewell’.3

  He appeared even more furious in a letter to another London emigrant, Eduard von Müller-Tellering, a lawyer who had previously contributed to Neue Rheinische Zeitung but had never been a supporter of Marx, despite holding Marx’s writings in high esteem. He did not belong to Marx’s group, but felt he was ‘opening a new world that we have before us,’ he wrote in a letter in the fall of 1849. But once in London, he ventured to criticize Engels, and accused Marx in a letter of striving for the role of ‘democratic Dalai Lama and the possessor of the future’. Marx’s letter to him outwardly bears witness to a boiling rage. His handwriting was even more cryptic than otherwise, and he crossed out a part of what was written with thick lines. He concludes the letter by declaring that von Müller-Tellering had acted wisely in not turning up at a meeting the evening before. ‘You knew what was to be expected from a confrontation with me.’4

  The strife would soon come closer to Marx himself. But now it was not an issue of leadership; it was an issue of whether the radicals, with the communists at their head, would go immediately on the attack against the counterrevolution that was now triumphant. In a way, it was a repetition – though on a smaller scale – of Georg Herwegh and others’ direct but doomed war of aggression against Prussia early on in the revolution of 1848. Now it was August Willich who placed himself at the head of the men of immediate action.

  Willich had a remarkable life. Having lost his father early on, he was brought up in the home of the famous theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. But he embarked upon a military career, not a theological one, and he climbed the ranks to lieutenant before his radical opinions made it impossible to serve any longer in the Prussian army. On the other hand, he was given a prominent place in the revolutionary battles, particularly in Baden. Engels was directly subordinate to him there. As a refugee in London, Willich wanted to continue his military adventures. He did not receive much of a hearing for his plans, instead just barely earning
a living as a carpenter; after several years, disappointed with Europe, he emigrated to the United States. He had his great breakthrough there in the Civil War; his efforts gained him attention and he again climbed the ranks to brigadier general. But he also continued with his grand ideas; he was among the pioneers of Hegelianism in the United States. When in 1870 he returned briefly to Prussia, he was not accepted into the victorious army, and instead defended his doctoral thesis in philosophy at the age of sixty at the University of Berlin.5

  This remarkable man rebelled against Marx and Engels in the Communist League; as if that were not enough, he recruited Carl Schapper – one of the most important contributors to the League and now a zealous supporter of immediate revolutionary actions – to his side. There were intense disputes, and Conrad Schramm, one of Marx’s most faithful followers, even challenged Willich to a duel. Marx and Engels tried to prevent the spectacle, but in vain. The combatants set off for Brussels, where duels were still permitted. It was a foregone conclusion: Willich was a trained military man, his opponent a businessman and private teacher. But Schramm was only lightly wounded – whether from luck or Willich’s competence has been left unsaid. Their friends were relieved. Schramm was known for his excitable temperament. ‘He was the Percy Hotspur of our party,’ Marx wrote after his premature death from tuberculosis. This was a comment typical of Marx. Shakespeare’s characters (in this case from Henry IV) constantly populated his world of ideas.

  Both Marx and Engels also had lively temperaments and pushed through the expulsions of Willich and Schramm from the association – in contravention of its regulations.6 But why were they both now so hostile to the idea of initiating a new rebellion? The answer is already clear from their actions during 1848–49. Once a worker’s rebellion had broken out, they supported it wholeheartedly. But they considered it futile, and fundamentally incorrect, for a leading group – however revolutionary the party they were in – to try to start an insurrection. The liberation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, as they maintained in the Communist Manifesto.

  This is a long way from Lenin’s notion of a party elite bringing the masses with them. It is not the professional revolutionaries who would start a revolution. But on the other hand, the manner of excluding those who hold different opinions can be seen as the start of a bad tradition.

  The Neue Rheinische Zeitung as Periodical

  It was through enlightenment, not military actions, that Marx, like Engels, wanted to influence the working class. This is why the press became such an important channel for them both. Their first great project in London was a continuation, in journal form, of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, now with the subheading Politischökonomische Revue. For nearly a year starting in the late fall of 1849, this was Marx’s and Engels’s primary effort. When Marx started the project, however, he believed that it would soon be interrupted by a new, bigger revolution. ‘A world conflagration will intervene,’ he wrote confidently to Joseph Weydemeyer.7 But the world conflagration failed to take place and other, more trivial things caused the journal’s downfall.

  Neue Rheinische Zeitung had been a brilliant success in Cologne, particularly after Marx gave up the idea of a broader democratic coalition. It turned out to be significantly more difficult, after the guns fell silent, to raise similar enthusiasm among potential readers. In addition, it was now a thick journal with long articles. Marx was aware that the new Revue would lose the opportunities of a newspaper to comment on current events. He comforted himself with the fact that on the other hand, it would gain analytical depth.

  Their journal would contribute to providing for both Marx and his family, and Engels. This required a great stock of subscribers, and additionally a number of individual issues sold.

  The diligence of the editors was exemplary. The first issue came out on 6 March, and the last on 29 November. They both had written a large part of the content themselves.8

  But by 29 November, Engels had already given up. In Manchester, he was going to acquire the fixed income that would not only provide for him, but also in part for the growing Marx family. At the same time, the decision meant a defeat. For a few years, he and Marx had stood side by side, though Marx was the leader in both their own eyes and those of the world around them. Now they were going their separate ways. It was Marx who would write the heavy, epoch-making tomes, with the great work of social theory that would become Capital in the centre. Engels would earn his daily bread in the family company, supporting the Marx family with what was left over. The time and energy not required by his ordinary work could be devoted to the Great Cause.

  The journal had not been the success they expected. The difficulties emerge with painful lucidity in the substantial correspondence the project gave rise to. Marx sent a long series of letters, above all to fellow thinkers stationed at various locations in the German states. But the responses were rather discouraging. There was not as much interest as they had expected. Weydemeyer, still in Frankfurt, did not have much of anything positive to report, or money from sales to send. He observed bitterly that even the workers in Frankfurt had become petty bourgeois.

  But the difficulties did not stop there. Distribution was poor; subscribers were not getting their issues. Finally, even the editors were handing in their manuscripts late.9

  In short, it was a project that gave neither Marx nor Engels any income or any new influence among those in Germany whose revolutionary convictions could be strengthened and deepened.

  The contents of the journal were considerably more solid than its influence, to say nothing of its finances. Both Marx and Engels started by summarizing what had actually happened during the revolutions that had just taken place. Engels wrote on the struggle for a new constitution, and Marx’s first major contribution was a long text on the class struggles in France during the last revolution: ‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850’. It is the first work – and one of few – in which Marx provided a picture of all social classes in a society of the time and of their mutual battles and compromises. We must therefore stop a moment before this text, which is barely a hundred pages long.

  Marx began with an assurance that the result of the revolution was not due to the revolutionaries themselves but to the fact that the development of society had not managed to go far enough. But the tragicomic result was a counterrevolution. Now it was a question of getting to know the true face of the counterrevolution in more detail.

  The masters after the July Revolution of 1830 were not the entire bourgeoisie but only sectors of them: the bankers, the kings of the stock exchange, and other similar groups with rapidly growing fortunes – in short what was called the ‘finance aristocracy’, in contrast to the old aristocracy that was soon to be left behind. This finance aristocracy was made of the people who had flourished in the ‘fabulously rapid enrichment’ of the years Guizot and Louis Philippe were in power.

  An observer from our time, seemingly so distant from France of the 1830s and 1840s, would suddenly feel at home. In the world of the 2010s it is also the bankers, the kings of the stock exchange, and their ilk who have ultimate power in their hands. Politicians are at their beck and call, as Guizot once was, and the smallest ripple on the surface of the stock market rouses their consternation – or their delight. We are living in a modified July monarchy.

  But the real July monarchy fell in February 1848. The provisional government that was first formed at the time constituted a compromise between various classes. The bourgeoisie was in the majority, but there were also petty bourgeois; even the workers were allowed to be part, in a (small) corner with Louis Blanc as their chief representative. But the mutual understanding could not last long, and moreover the various social perspectives and interests were too different – incompatible, in fact.

  The role of the industrial proletariat was, as Marx pointed out, rather insignificant in France. Simply put, industry had not managed to go far enough in its development. The workers disappeared behind all t
he petty bourgeoisie and farmers, and were sucked into the general talk of brotherhood. Under that word, brotherhood (la fraternité) – that old slogan from the French Revolution of 1789 – everyone could be united in a ‘pleasant dissociation from class antagonisms’, a ‘sentimental reconciliation of class interests’, and people dreamily believed they could rise above the class struggle.

  But concrete political actions always favoured someone and were unfair to someone else. The state needed money, but a tax increase primarily affected the farmers. To defend itself against discontent, the Republic created a ‘garde mobile’ that consisted of what Marx called the ‘lumpenproletariat’, which meant everything from career criminals to people with unspecified occupations. The temperature rose. The workers – journeymen and others who were imbued with radical thinking, it should be said – gathered on the Champ de Mars. The rumour spread that they were armed, and the regular army was called in. But the general election was a success for the left, and the antagonisms soon hardened. The bourgeoisie could no longer tolerate the advances of the left; in Marx’s interpretation, they forced the June rebellion, which ended in a bloody massacre. He saw one cause of the left’s defeat in the lack of planning and leadership.

  The February Revolution was the beautiful revolution, and the June Revolution was the ugly one, he said. In the long run, the bourgeoisie could not stay on good terms with the petty bourgeoisie, but got into constant conflicts. Moreover, the interests of the shop owners or journeyman craftsmen were far too different to those of the factory owners, the big merchants, and the bankers. The former thought they had a trump card in their hand through their parliamentary situation. But they never got any equivalent power. In the election of September 1848, both Louis Bonaparte – the future Napoleon III – and the chemist François-Vincent Raspail, a radical leftist (Marx called him a communist) who had just been sentenced to a long term of imprisonment for the sake of his opinions, were both elected as representatives.