His endless reading and composition of excerpts sometimes appear to be an escape from the demands of completing the great project he had outlined back in the 1840s. Capital would be his magnum opus in every respect, and for the sake of perfection no expense would be spared. Its composition had to be made artistic; above all, no gaps in knowledge could be left open. At the end of his life, the demands for all-round knowledge became increasingly and heroically unreasonable. Aged and sick, he continued more hectically than ever to throw himself into new worlds of knowledge, whether it was mathematics, chemistry, or social anthropology.
In his private life, the sorrows accumulated. Jenny, who was such a great part of his life, fell ill with an incurable cancer and died in December 1881. It was a horrible blow for him, and it became even worse when his oldest daughter Jenny – his beloved Jennychen – was struck with the same illness and died a few months before her father.
But Karl Marx continued reading and taking notes as if he himself were immortal. He did not even interrupt his studies during his late recreational trips to Algeria and southern France, which he did on the advice of his new friend, the biologist Ray Lankester. Right up to his death, he was on the path towards new knowledge. Fittingly, he died sitting at his writing desk.
Engels’s notes are far more sparse. They testify more infrequently to his wanting to learn a subject from the bottom up. It was after Anti-Dühring that he above all composed a few really ambitious excerpts in physics, obviously to get a solid foundation for the planned work on dialectics that remained unfinished. There are two contemporary works that he primarily delved into: William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait’s 1867 work Treatise on Natural Philosophy and Gustav Wiedemann’s two-volume Die Lehre vom Galvanismus und Elektromagnetismus from 1874. In The Dialectics of Nature, electricity is the subject of by far the most comprehensive and ambitious section, some fifty pages long.17
With electricity in particular, Marx and Engels expressed a strong interest in both the practical and the theoretical sides. Early on, Marx had been preoccupied with its significance for material production. In the middle of the revolutionary tumult at the end of the 1840s, he was captivated by the work of German scientist Gustav Kirchhoff, who showed that circuits were of the same nature as electrostatic phenomena. The possibility of transmission of power across distances could thereby be imagined, something that would be equally as revolutionary as steam power. Marx was enthusiastic.18
During the first dark years in London, he also experienced the highest point of capitalism up to that point: the famous 1851 world exhibition, where the Crystal Palace became a contemporary unifying symbol for a dazzling modernity that was either promising or frightening depending on one’s outlook. The exhibition also turned up in passing in Marx’s and Engels’s correspondence. Engels had to go there on behalf of his job, and Marx visited the exhibition because the world of commodities there appeared more clearly than anywhere else: commodity fetishism took concrete form in front of his eyes before it became a central concept in his theory. Nor could he avoid being fascinated by the remarkable machines that were on public view there: steam locomotives that could reach a dizzying 100 kilometres per hour, and printing presses with theretofore unseen capacities. Even prototypes for electric motors and dynamos, both of which promised a grand future, could be observed.19
Electricity continued to fascinate him. During the last years of his life, he devoted a particularly intensive interest to it. An 1881 exhibition of electricity in Paris was followed by another in Munich in 1882; both had lively commentary by him and Engels. Above all, they stayed with the electro-technician Marcel Deprez, who had – fittingly enough – succeeded in transporting electricity from Miesbach to Munich, a distance of forty-three kilometres. Marx was eager to know more, and in the letter to Engels was annoyed at his son-in-law Charles Longuet for not having sent him the information about the new breakthrough that he had requested. Clearly, he was trying to acquaint himself with the theoretical background to Deprez’s achievements.20 He composed excerpts from an entirely new work by Deprez’s colleague Edouard Hospitalier: La physique moderne: les principales applications de electricité (The Modern Applications of Electricity) from 1882. His notes are nowhere near as detailed as those for chemistry, but Marx’s copy of the work shows that he had carefully read through it, underlining and commenting briefly on many parts. He did not get very far in making the excerpt; his death put an end to it.21
Engels was equally fascinated by the long-imagined opportunities now being realized. In a letter to Eduard Bernstein – a young German Social Democrat who we will be talking about later – he did not mince his words. The transmission of power that Deprez had demonstrated would ‘free industry for good from virtually all local limitations’. It ‘makes possible the harnessing of even the most remote hydraulic power’, and over the long term it would erase the differences between town and country. Productive forces would soon grow beyond the control of the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels were seeing the beginning of the second Industrial Revolution. Electricity would play a crucial role there, alongside a range of specialities within chemistry such as agrarian chemistry and petrochemistry.22
Agrarian chemistry became a central field of study for Marx during the 1850s and 1860s. In particular, he studied the great German chemist Justus von Liebig carefully. He would sometimes mention the latter’s colleague, Christian Friedrich Schönbein, in the same breath. This took place when he was working with ground rent, the large field of study that David Ricardo had placed at the centre of economic theory. With all due respect to Ricardo and his colleagues, ‘the new agrarian chemistry in Germany, especially Liebig and Schönbein, is more important than all the economists put together’, he exclaimed in a letter to Engels in 1866. One week later, in an entirely euphoric epistle, while speaking of these same chemists and their achievements, he burst out in English: ‘I feel proud of the Germans. It is our duty to emancipate this “deep” people.’23
This outburst must be viewed in light of what he just said about his own soon to be completed work, Capital. Despite certain weaknesses in the details it is a triumph for German science, he assured Engels; in fact, the results belonged to the German nation, which is that much more gratifying because that nation was otherwise the stupidest under the sun. He had, perhaps, never expressed his ambivalence for the German people more clearly.
But back to chemistry. He pointed out the significance of Schönbein in his letter, but the man’s name was given no place in Capital. Another author whom he had read and been influenced by to a certain degree without citing him in Capital was the Bavarian agronomist Carl Fraas. Unstable development leads to wasteland, he wrote to Engels regarding Fraas’s 1842 work Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit (Climate and the Plant World); he did not only have capitalism in mind, but also ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, and Greece.24 But the book that above all roused his interest was Liebig’s 1840 work Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology). Marx was not alone in appreciating the book; it was published in numerous editions and translated into many languages. Earlier on, Liebig had established himself as one of the great pioneers in the new speciality of organic chemistry, and he also made a name for himself for his practical efforts in a number of fields, from the first sleeping pill to bouillon cubes.25
Most saw in Liebig’s work on the chemistry of agriculture grand promises of a future when no one would have to starve thanks to a judicious use of artificial fertilizer. But Marx belonged to the minority that also saw something else in it. Increasing ruthless exploitation threatened to deplete the soil over the long term. ‘To have developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i. e. destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits,’ he wrote in a note in Capital. He also reproduces a few striking figures on how, in a number of European states, height and capacity among soldiers decrease
d from the end of the 1700s to the 1830s, something that according to Liebig (and Marx) would be a sign of impaired nutritional intake. On the other hand, he was not satisfied with certain other elements in the German chemist’s account, for example how he presented contemporary economic theory.26
But the essential thing is that Marx took arguments in Liebig to mean that capitalization of agriculture, which he seemed to see, would entail increasing depletion of the soil. More than that, in fact: it would create a growing gap between humanity and nature.
In the third volume of Capital – which Marx wrote the manuscript to back in 1864 – important references to Liebig are found. Supported in part by Liebig, Marx speaks there of an ‘irreparable break’ (unheilbarer Riss) between nature and society, which is created through fewer and fewer people pursuing increasingly industrialized agriculture while more and more people are drawn to the industries of the cities. In his treatment, Engels made rearrangements in the text and moved the expression ‘irreparable break’ to a later context, where the reader gets the impression that it is the transition itself from small-scale to large-scale agriculture that creates the growing gap.27
Engels also struck out a number of Marx’s references to Liebig, which blunted the acuity to a certain extent. The distance that capitalism creates between humanity and nature plays a large role in the first volume of Capital. The power of the soil to grow is ruined, and this ruination is spread over national borders through commerce. In this way, large-scale industry and industrial agriculture aid each other.
The person who above all has the honour of centring Marx’s alarm in the face of the destruction of nature is American author John Bellamy Foster, through his book Marx’s Ecology. But Foster does not escape the danger of presenting Marx as a champion of the environment, or at least an ecologically conscious person in the modern sense.28 This was not the case. Marx found support in Liebig for his thesis that over the long term, capitalism was devastating in all respects – including where the production of food was concerned. But he also imagined that the society that would replace capitalism could also restore the balance between humanity and nature in agriculture. The growing gap between town and country would then be filled in a way that many utopian socialists and communists had previously imagined. The countryside would no more sink back into its old narrowness of outlook than the industries would be localized to growing megalopolises.
The pessimistic conclusions that Marx – in glaring contrast to most of his contemporaries – drew from Liebig’s book are thus not unconditional. In another society, agriculture would not drain nature of its resources, just as industry would not devastate the air, the water, and the soil. All the blessings of technology would then be bestowed on both humanity and nature. The ‘irreparable break’ he spoke about is thus only irreparable in a capitalist society.
A present-day reader must remember that Marx lived in a time the environmental impact of production was insignificant in comparison with that of the early twenty-first century. Locally, it could be devastating – industry’s contamination of the local environment was frightening, and large areas of land were devastated by injudicious agriculture – but it affected the entire atmosphere of the Earth and its water resources only marginally. Like any of his contemporaries, Marx could little imagine the development of production that has taken place over the last 150 years.
As has been pointed out, the word Marx used throughout when portraying the relationship between humanity and nature was ‘Stoffwechsel’ – that is, metabolism. The idea that man lives in symbiosis with nature had been a natural one for him since his youth. He had encountered it among his Romantically inspired teachers, with Heinrich Steffens at their head, and in the Manuscripts, nature is called humanity’s ‘inorganic body’. But the concept of metabolism is more precise and advanced. It had spread out among German biologists in the 1830s, and had its big breakthrough thanks to Liebig’s 1840 book Tierchemie (Animal Chemistry). Humanity’s manner of assimilating various nutrients could be studied at a certain level of detail there.29
But Marx used the concept in a broader sense. He included everything that had to do with humanity’s adaptation of nature, both in agriculture and industry, in humanity’s metabolism with nature. Humanity lives on nature, but through its work and its production it also changes nature. Sometimes, as in capitalism, humans do this in a way that is harmful to both nature and to themselves. But the idea of a possible healthy relationship between humanity and nature was important to Marx.
In the previous chapter, we saw how Marx argued in Capital that the theoretical apparatus concerning society in nature that we have constructed expressed the altered relationship between both. He derived the entire world of religious ideas, including commodity fetishism, from this fundamental disharmony.30
It is therefore entirely natural that both technology and the natural sciences played a central role for him. But his interest was not always of the same type. Sometimes it is practical to a great degree; so, for example, when he wrote the long chapter on machinery in Capital or when he composed excerpts on the development of technology. The excerpts, unfortunately, have been lost. Marx wrote about them in a letter to Engels in 1863, and Georg Lukács was able to read them in Moscow in the 1920s.31 But sometimes his interest concerns more vague theoretical topics. For him, chemistry was not just a discipline that had achieved the most striking results in both industry and agriculture. It also entailed an adventure into the world of theory, and adventure that could lead him along remarkable paths that in due course would turn out to be fraught with momentous consequences. No one played a greater role in this conviction than Carl Schorlemmer.
Carl Schorlemmer
Carl Schorlemmer was an internationally acknowledged specialist in organic chemistry. He was also a member of both the First International and the German Social Democratic Party. Next to Marx, he was Engels’s closest friend. He also played an important role for Marx, but has strangely been forgotten. In three of the latest great Marx biographies – by Attali, Sperber, and Stedman Jones – he is not even mentioned. Nor does Foster, who nonetheless dwells much upon the significance of chemistry for both Marx and Engels, speak about him.32 If anything, this indicates selective dealings with the sources. Schorlemmer’s name occurs frequently in Marx’s and Engels’s correspondence, just as he is mentioned a number of times in their writings. Only a very few of Schorlemmer’s own letters are preserved. In the obituary he wrote for his friend in 1892, Engels declared that they both exchanged many ideas by letter on ‘the sciences and party affairs’.33 But it was also Engels who went through all the papers Schorlemmer left behind. For some reason, he must have destroyed what he wrote to his friend, just as he destroyed nearly all the letters he himself received. What remains is only one letter from Engels in a manuscript on the history of chemistry, and a few letters from Schorlemmer. In addition, there are seven brief messages from Schorlemmer to Marx.34
It is not much, considering how important he was in the lives of both Marx and of Engels. In addition, this life played out within the borders of three extraordinarily dynamic fields: organic chemistry, the prevailing fashionable science of the time; socialism, embodied in both of its principal leaders; and the external environment that ‘the cradle of the Industrial Revolution’, the Manchester area, represented.
We also know relatively little of Schorlemmer’s life before he came to Manchester. He was born in Darmstadt in 1834 and received a scanty education. Like many chemists of the time, he learned the basics of the subject as an apprentice pharmacist. He is said to have attended lectures on the history of chemistry in Heidelberg without enrolling at the University. In the spring of 1859, he had the great luck to get work in the most celebrated of all chemical laboratories at the time – the one that Justus von Liebig had constructed in Giessen. Once there, he was soon invited to come to Manchester to be the personal assistant of English chemist Henry Enfield Roscoe. Roscoe’s move of bringing on a rather unlearned apprent
ice pharmacist was a consequence of his respect for German chemistry. Like most of the more prominent British chemists of the time, he himself had been educated in Germany. Now it was a question of constructing the theoretical basis for a chemical industry in Great Britain. This is why Owen’s College – the educational institution that later became Manchester University – came to Manchester. Roscoe’s own speciality was inorganic chemistry. Schorlemmer would soon master organic chemistry.
In Manchester, there was a large German colony that flourished up until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The men created a meeting place in the Schiller-Anstalt, in which Engels was an important member. Schorlemmer also went there, and made Engels’s acquaintance. Engels mentioned his name in a letter from 1865.35 Soon, the both of them would be close friends.
Both of the men who had the most to do with Schorlemmer, Roscoe and Engels, provide entirely different pictures of him. Roscoe wrote in an obituary of his friend: ‘He was of a retiring, most modest and unassuming disposition.’ Oddly enough, Roscoe – who himself was politically active as a liberal – maintained that he did not know much about Schorlemmer’s socialist opinions.36 Engels and Marx were much better informed about their friend’s political involvement; in addition, they had a standing nickname for him: Jollymayer. It meant that Schorlemmer was a jolly fellow. If anything, it became clear when happiness left the sick and prematurely aging Schorlemmer.37
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