Marx, constantly immersed in new books that complicated the image of the society he lived in, had difficulties not only in bringing his presentation to an end but also in setting out the decisive results of his research without letting them be buried under the tremendous profusion of the fruits of his reading.
Frenhofer died, grieved, after what he saw as his failure. But posterity could see that he had in fact anticipated the art of a later time. Marx’s Capital did not have many contemporary readers. Most did not even notice the work. Others found it entirely too difficult to understand. One thing is certain: there are today many more people who are not only reading his great works but also seem to understand the essential features of its content – and its greatness.
12
Twin Souls or a Tragic Mistake?
Anyone who wants a picture of Marx needs to take a position on Engels. The two of them were the closest of friends for several decades. They wrote a few early works more or less jointly. In abundant correspondence, year after year, they exchanged ideas on society, politics, science, and life. There were fewer letters after 1870, when Engels moved from Manchester to London. But then they could meet face to face more often. The intellectual and emotional exchange ought to have been enriched, but posterity – obliged to use words on paper – can only follow the course of events indirectly though impressions in the things they wrote down during the London years they spent in common.
As we know, there were also more prosaic bonds between them. Without Engels’s constant subsidies, Marx would not have been able to provide for himself and his family. Neither of them wasted many words on this aspect of their relationship. It became a matter of course for Engels to send his friend money week after week. Marx was like a nestling who constantly needed more.
It is difficult to say what this financial dependence did for their relationship. Their views on capitalism played a role, of course. It was profits from Engels’s capitalist operation that Marx was living off. Their common goal was a society without such private profits. But what did the incessant need for money mean on a more personal level? Did Marx feel coerced into a kind of gratitude? Did he, the inveterate critic, become careful before reading what Engels wrote?
That last question inevitably presents itself in the face of Marx’s reactions to Engels’s first independent post-1840s work, his 1878 book Anti-Dühring. It is both a defence of Capital and a tract on science and reality in quite general terms. What did he think of the defence, and how did he view the text? The few reactions that posterity can acquaint itself with are rather uninteresting. But many have had quite definite ideas about how it should or must have been. Their views differ widely. According to the one extreme, Marx and Engels were like twin souls; according to the other, Engels made a ‘tragic mistake’ when he tried to make Marx’s theory accessible to many while at the same time wrapping it up in a comprehensive philosophy.1
Here, it is not a question of the one extreme or the other. Marx and Engels were two very different people who collaborated for many years, and thereby also influenced each other. Marx played first fiddle, Engels explained, and he himself said he was satisfied with playing second.2 Their division of labour was definitively established when Engels gave up the attempt at supporting himself by his pen and went off to Manchester to work in the family company of Ermen & Engels. In practice, this meant that, for most of the 1850s, he could manage neither any political nor any scientific activity to an appreciable extent. He only barely kept the journalist alive through the articles in the New York Daily Tribune he wrote on Marx’s behalf. But they dealt primarily with current economics – that is, what he was occupying himself with every day of the week. When in 1859 he wrote the manuscript for a review of Marx’s A Contribution, he asked the author himself to correct the text. ‘Through lack of practice I have grown so unused to this sort of writing that your wife will be greatly tickled by my awkwardness,’ he sighed. ‘If you can knock it into shape, do so.’3
Incidentally, it was right at the end of the 1850s that Engels began taking sporadic notes on a subject to which he would gradually devote great energy but which Marx would only touch on in passing: the conception of the world that could be furnished in connection with current scientific development. In Anti-Dühring, Engels excelled in far-reaching ideas of that type, but he would never complete the greater project that occupied him up until Marx’s death – the result of which posterity only got to read in the 1920s under the title The Dialectics of Nature.4 After 1883, his main task became bringing the second and third parts of Capital to a successful close. In addition, he had to take over first fiddle in the rapidly growing international workers’ movement. But he also managed to write a shorter work titled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, which was published in 1886.
We will return to all this later. But to put the issue of the relationship between Marx the author and Engels the author into some sort of order, we will have to start with a few more basic circumstances. We will begin with mathematics. Towards the end of his life, Marx worked assiduously on mathematical manuscripts. Engels expressed his enthusiasm over the results, but by all appearances was not as fascinated by the subject. His notes in Anti-Dühring, at least, are more dutiful. After that, there is a question of the interest that both men devoted to technology and the natural sciences in particular, areas that in accordance with their views of society and of history are of crucial significance for historical development. Further on, we will have to see how this interest is expressed in their work. A number of important themes will thereby have to come into focus. One of them concerns what similarities Marx on the one hand and Engels on the other found among the natural scientific theories they encountered and the theory of capital that Marx in particular was trying to develop. The concept of dialectical law will be in focus here. Organic chemistry provided Marx with the material for a law of this kind. The representative of chemistry in the lives of Marx and Engels is named Carl Schorlemmer, a major scientist and a striking individual.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was just as important for the Marxist conception of the world. But Marx also took up certain ecological problems. In addition, a new subject came up that would occupy him over his final years, and which Engels afterwards would work at in his own way: social anthropology.
Both Marx and Engels thus tried to get a clear idea of development within a broad range of fields. The question, ultimately, is: How did all this new knowledge relate to the theory of capitalism that Marx was in the process of developing? Could Capital claim a central spot in the world of late nineteenth-century science? If so, what did its scientific value consist of? Did this scientific value risk being lost when Engels tried to make it the fixed core of a philosophy that resembled a conception of the world?
Both Marx and Engels tried – in somewhat different ways – to understand and interpret the world in many of its aspects. But how did this intensive activity fit with their ambition to also change the world? The question naturally leads to the next chapter, which deals with political activity in the International and beyond.
Mathematics
Mathematics was a recurrent problem in the construction of Marx’s theory. He made a number of quantitative calculations and worked up a large amount of statistical material. When he was working on the manuscript that would later be called the Grundrisse, he was tormented by a number of miscalculations and tried to find a better way through making use of algebra instead (see above, p. 370).
In Capital, he contented himself with the thesis that economic crises could not be predicted – a claim that holds true even today, after an infinite amount of mathematizing within economic theory. But, however correct the statement was, Marx nonetheless dreamed of surmounting this obstacle to the knowable. He talked about his hopes in a letter to Engels at the end of May 1873. Engels was on a short visit to Manchester (he was now living in London), visiting people such as their friends Carl Schorlemmer and Samuel Moore. Moore had
a solid education in mathematics, and Marx plied him with questions on the mathematics of a potential crisis. These are thoughts I have long gone over again and again by myself, Marx wrote in his letter. But Moore considered the problem to be unsolvable, or at least impossible to treat for the time being. Marx had hoped that a regularity could be read in the zigzag movements of prices, interest rates, and the like. But no, Moore assured him, it was impossible to mathematically determine ‘the principal laws governing crises’ – at least as long as a number of factors were unknown. Marx wrote in his letter that he had decided to ‘give it up for the time being’.5
On the other hand, he obstinately continued to improve himself in mathematics. He had begun this back in 1859, and his efforts had intensified over the last few decades – in fact, during the last few years of his life. It is impossible to read from the excerpts whether he was ultimately aiming for the solution of the crisis question. It could be said, at least, that in that case he had a long way to go. The path from the type of differential equations he was occupying himself with to the mathematics of economic crises seems quite far.
His work consisted of both excerpts from above all English textbooks, and a number of his own comments. Only in 1968 was the entire material published in both the original German and in a Russian translation by the Russian mathematician S. A. Yanovskaya. A German edition, in which the excerpts were cut out, was published in 1974. The publisher, Wolfgang Endemann, also wrote a foreword and a long introduction. Endemann asserted, as against Yanovskaya, that Marx’s notes only aimed at further developing the great project of Capital. Through mathematics, Marx hoped to reach ‘inner connections that would barely be conceivable without mathematical language’, he said.6
But above all, Marx’s notes contain a number of ideas on dialectical connections within differential calculations. He sees a negation of the negation in the very starting point of the zero of calculus signifying the ‘absolute smallest’ – a nothing that nonetheless ‘leads to real results’. The line of thought is simple. Zero signifies a nothing that nonetheless turns out to be something, namely the instantaneous change.7
The basic problem for Marx was the relationship between mathematics and reality, and it was his hope, through more advanced mathematics, to be able to capture deeper aspects of an economic development that was changing and difficult to survey. The equations themselves were ‘only a symbolic indication of operations that had to be carried out’.8 This is an enigmatic expression: what, besides operations, are being carried out when the mathematical symbols are being used? But, with these words, Marx surely wanted to emphasize the close connection between calculus itself and the processes it was to demonstrate. He could hardly have intended anything else when he spoke about the contents of the equations. He complained that contemporary mathematicians were not interested in this aspect, while those who had discovered differential calculus – Marx uses just that word, ‘discovered’ – made the differential symbol itself the starting point of calculus. He had Isaac Newton in mind, who never forgot that with his new method of calculation he had reached aspects of reality, primarily instantaneous movement, which previously had resulted in paradoxes of the ‘Achilles and the tortoise’ type.
According to this paradox, attributed to the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, Achilles would never catch up to the tortoise despite running ten times as fast. When Achilles had run a hundred metres, the tortoise had managed to crawl ten, but when Achilles had run those ten metres, the tortoise was still a metre ahead. After that metre, the tortoise would have crawled a decimetre, and so forth. With his ‘fluxions’ (his term for derivatives), Newton overcame such problems mathematically; Leibniz did the same thing on his own with the nomenclature still used today. Marx, reasonably, devoted particular attention to this historical development. It is easier to learn something new by seeking its historical roots, when the problem to be solved was still relatively simple.9 He never had any opportunity to make serious use of his new insights in his work on Capital. If, in the end, it was ‘the principal laws governing crises’ he wanted to get at, it would have required him to thoroughly revise what would become the third volume of Capital in Engels’s edition; Marx had not worked on that since 1864. The reality he wanted to capture was entirely too chaotic.
His studies in mathematics nonetheless certainly gave him a certain amount of pleasure. He seemed to imagine more effective ways of capturing a constantly changing societal reality. In a sense, he anticipated the later mathematization of the subject of economics. But he of course cherished other hopes than those who still dominate neoclassical economic theory.
Engels had not had any particular access to Marx’s manuscripts and excerpts while he was alive. When he went through what Marx left behind, it surprised him that the text on dialectics Marx had talked so much about was not there.10 The condition in which the continuation of Capital found itself it was also an unpleasant surprise for him. We do not know if he had any awareness before Marx’s death of the existence of excerpts in social anthropology that would later form the starting point for his own book on the same subject.
On the other hand, Marx at least let him read a part of the mathematical manuscripts. We know this from a letter Engels wrote to Marx in August 1881. The letter is full of appreciation and agreement. He was even of the opinion that Marx had realized something that mathematicians usually denied. It seemed not to concern any shocking innovations, just a way of understanding the nomenclature.11 Marx did not react to the praise; his subsequent letter dealt with entirely different concerns.
By all appearances, Engels was not influenced any more deeply by Marx’s notes. What he stated on the subject in Anti-Dühring lay five years back in time, and even the notes and drafts for The Dialectics of Nature had come into being earlier. In Anti-Dühring, he asserted that mathematics has its origins in the practical needs of humanity despite it developing into an exact system, and in The Dialectics of Nature he stressed that the number 0 was not devoid of content, but on the contrary found itself at the centre of the entire sequence of numbers.12 The statement appears extremely trivial but could lead to the most extraordinary consequences when The Dialectics of Nature became an important part of Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. One such consequence occurred when the regime of Mao Zedong was going to create a new centre of power after taking over in 1949. One idea was to locate this centre outside the old city. But Mao and his advisor Chen Gan came to the conclusion that the old city would then be competing with the new one. They found support in Engels, who said that the zero point in relation to both positive and negative numbers ‘is the point on which they are all dependent, and by which they are all determined’. Conclusion: the zero point of the emperor’s power had to be razed and a new zero point created.13
Encounter with the Natural Sciences
Engels had been forced to give up his successful high school studies early to go into commerce. A few years later he underwent a year’s training as an officer in Berlin, where he also came into contact with the radical currents of thought blossoming in the city’s young universities.
Marx finished both high school and university. He ground away at the classical languages and was forced to cram in a bit of jurisprudence, but above all philosophy – in its wide-embracing version of the time – became the centre of his studies. His doctoral thesis in classical Greek philosophy testified not only to his ability to handle Greek texts, but also to his interest in natural philosophy in a broad sense, regarding the smallest component parts of matter and the necessity or randomness of the course of nature.
There has been a bit of fuss made about the fact that, back in high school, he had teachers who were close to some of the men behind the breakthroughs in natural science of the time, and that in Berlin he heard lectures by the polymath natural philosopher Heinrich (or Henrik) Steffens and one of the men behind the breakthrough of modern geography, Carl Ritter.14 In the long letter to his father in 1837, he wrote that he was also studying ‘natura
l science, and history’.15 We know nothing about how deeply he was influenced by these studies. On the other hand, we know that early on, he displayed the interest in technological innovations that would follow him throughout life. His fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen, jokingly called him a ‘dear little man of the railways’.16 This means of transportation, at the time absolutely new, roused a burning interest in him. In general, he was convinced early on that the lives and labour of people were on the verge of being fundamentally changed by an entire suite of technological innovations.
When, in the mid-1840s, he and Engels came to the conclusion that ‘industry’ – that is, humanity’s adaptation of nature through various kinds of technology – was the most dynamic power in historical development, both of them were well prepared to understand it. This applied in particular to Engels, who during his time in Manchester could not only see how the factories drastically transformed all of society, but also came into contact with the daily life of capitalism from the perspective of the factory owners. It was also he – not Marx – who first engaged the new economic theories of the Manchester School.
But Marx contributed to their collaborative effort with all of his intellectual acuity, his broad education, and especially his enormous appetite for reading. The difference between him and Engels cannot be perceived if their different ways of reading are not taken into consideration. Engels also read a great deal, even though other duties long divided up his time. But he was not a devourer of books like Marx, and above all he did not regularly compose detailed excerpts. Marx obviously most often had the ambition to fundamentally learn what he read, with a view to using it for future writing. All his notebooks, which became an increasingly bulky collection over the years, also served as a reference library. Marks in the margins show that Marx returned to his excerpts, and it was from them that he poured out the myriad of notes that flow through Capital.
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