Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  There you are before me, large as life, and I lift you up in my arms and I kiss you all over from top to toe, and I fall on my knees before you and cry: ‘Madame, I love you.’ And love you I do, with a love greater than was ever felt by the Moor of Venice … Who of my many calumniators and venomous-tongued enemies has ever reproached me with being called upon to play the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre? And yet it is true. Had the scoundrels possessed the wit, they would have depicted ‘the productive and social relations’ on one side and, on the other, myself at your feet. Beneath it they would have written: ‘Look to this picture and to that.’

  That last phrase, as Jenny would not have needed telling, was plucked from Hamlet.

  Why, then, were Karl and Jenny so reluctant to tell her parents of the betrothal? Perhaps Karl thought that the difference in their ages would count against him: marriages to older women were still rare enough to seem a crime against the laws of nature. Or perhaps they feared that, for all his generosity of spirit, the old man would try to dissuade his adored daughter from throwing in her lot with a brilliant but volatile nonconformist. Life with Karl Marx would never be dull, but it held little promise of stability or prosperity.

  Apart from Jenny von Westphalen, the most important passion of Marx’s youth was a dead philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. It followed much the same course as many love affairs: shy wariness, followed by the intoxicating thrill of a first embrace, followed by rejection of the beloved as the amour fou wanes. But he remained grateful for this initiation into the secrets of adulthood. Long after repudiating Hegelianism and declaring his intellectual independence, Marx spoke affectionately of the man who led him out of innocence. He had earned the right to chide Hegel with the robust honesty of an intimate friend; strangers were permitted no such licence.

  ‘The mystificatory side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion,’ he wrote in 1873. ‘But just as I was working at the first volume of Capital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigones, who now talk big in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e. as a “dead dog”. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a conscious and comprehensive manner.’ It was very rare indeed for Marx to pay such a compliment to someone with whom he had disagreed: usually, those who fell foul of him could expect to be condemned as curs and jackasses for ever afterwards. Heinrich Heine was an exception, since Marx believed that one had to forgive great poets their shortcomings; and it seems he had a similar rule for great though flawed philosophers. For the second-raters, however – the poetasters, the posturing ninnies, the self-important numskulls – no epithet was too harsh. When he saw Hegel attacked by lesser minds, Marx knew at once whose side he was on.

  For one thing, he was still in the old boy’s debt, as he admitted all those years later. Hegel used a radical methodology to reach conservative conclusions. What Marx did was to keep the dialectical framework but discard the mystical mumbo-jumbo – rather like a man who buys a deconsecrated chapel and converts it into a habitable, secular dwelling.

  What is dialectic? As any schoolchild with a set of magnets – or, for that matter, any dating agency – will confirm, opposites can attract. If it were not so, the human race would be extinct. Female mates with male, and from their sweaty embrace a new creature emerges who will, eventually, repeat the process. Not always, of course, but often enough to ensure the survival and progress of the species.

  The dialectic performs much the same function for the human mind. An idea, stripped naked, has a passionate grapple with its antithesis, from which a synthesis is created; this in turn becomes the new thesis, to be duly seduced by a new demon lover. Two wrongs may make a right – but, soon after its birth, that right becomes another wrong which must be subjected to the same intimate scrutiny as its forebears, and thus we go forward. Marx’s own engagement with Hegel was itself something of a dialectical process, from which emerged the nameless infant that was to become historical materialism.

  I simplify, of course; but one is obliged to simplify Hegel since much of his work would otherwise remain impenetrably obscure. As an eighteen-year-old, soon after arriving at Berlin University, Marx himself had mocked this opaqueness and ambiguity in a series of epigrams titled ‘On Hegel’:

  Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle,

  Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think;

  Never, at least, is he hemmed in by strict limitations.

  Bubbling out of the flood, plummeting down from the cliff,

  So are his Beloved’s words and thoughts that the Poet devises;

  He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels.

  Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;

  Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!

  Marx included the poem in a notebook of verse ‘dedicated to my dear father on the occasion of his birthday as a feeble token of everlasting love’. The old man must have been delighted to learn that his son hadn’t succumbed to the epidemic of Hegel-worship which was infecting almost every institution in the land. In one of his letters to Berlin, Heinrich warned Karl against the contagious influence of Hegelians – ‘the new immoralists who twist their words until they themselves do not hear them; who christen a flood of words a product of genius because it is devoid of ideas’.

  Someone as limitlessly curious and disputatious as Karl Marx was unlikely to resist for long. Hegel had held the chair of philosophy at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831, and by the time Marx enrolled at the university, five years later, his intellectual heirs were still fighting over the legacy. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but like so many radicals – then as now – he became comfortable and complaisant in middle age, believing that a truly mature man should recognise ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it’. The world in question – the Prussian state – was a complete and final manifestation of what he called the Divine Spirit or Idea (the Geist). This being so, there was nothing left for philosophers to discuss. Any further questioning of the status quo was the merest vanity.

  Naturally, this line of argument made him very popular indeed with the Prussian authorities, who brandished it as proof that their system of government was not only inevitable but unimprovable. ‘All that is real is rational,’ Hegel had written; and since the state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, it must therefore be rational and above reproach. Those who championed the subversiveness of his earlier work – the so-called Young Hegelians – preferred to cite the second half of that famous dictum: ‘All that is rational is real.’ An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage or spectre that would disappear as soon as anyone dared to touch it.

  As a student in the Berlin law faculty, Marx had a front-row seat at the arena. His lecturer in jurisprudence was Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a thin, severe reactionary who, though not a Hegelian, nevertheless agreed that the development of a country’s law and government was an organic process reflecting the character and tradition of its people. To challenge Prussian absolutism was to defy nature: one might as well demand a reform in the structure of oak trees, or the abolition of rain. The alternative view was represented by the chubby and cheerful professor of criminal law, Eduard Gans, a radical Hegelian who believed that institutions should be subjected to rational criticism rather than mystical veneration.

  For his first year at Berlin, Marx struggled to ignore the temptations of philosophy: he was, after all, meant to be studying law
. Besides, hadn’t he already rejected the devilish Hegel and all his works? He distracted himself by writing lyrical verse, but produced only ‘diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts …’ (Out of the quarrel with others, as W. B. Yeats said, we make rhetoric; from the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.) He then set about composing a philosophy of law – ‘a work of about 300 pages’ – only to discover the same old gulf between what is and what ought to be: ‘What I was pleased to call the metaphysics of law, i.e. basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, [was] divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law.’ Worse still, having failed to bridge the gap between theory and practice he found himself unable to reconcile the form of law with its content. His mistake – for which he blamed von Savigny – ‘lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a real form but something like a desk with drawers into which I then poured sand’.

  His labours weren’t entirely wasted. ‘In the course of this work,’ he revealed, ‘I adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read’ – a habit he never lost. His reading list from this period shows the breadth of these intellectual explorations: who else, while composing a philosophy of law, would think it worthwhile to make a detailed study of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Art? He translated Tacitus’s Germania and Ovid’s Tristia, and ‘began to learn English and Italian by myself, i.e. out of grammars’. In the next semester, while devouring dozens of textbooks on civil procedure and canon law, he translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and ‘spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight’.

  All good exercise for the brain, no doubt; but even the artistic animals couldn’t rescue his magnum opus. Abandoning the 300-page manuscript in despair, young Karl turned again to ‘the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs’. He dashed off a short ‘humoristic novel’, Scorpion and Felix, a nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage that was all too obviously written under the spell of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It does, however, have one passage that deserves quotation:

  Every giant … presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine, and every storm at sea – mud, and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly.

  The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain, as one may see from the facts, for champagne leaves a lingering repulsive aftertaste, Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe …

  No previous writer on Marx appears to have noticed the resemblance between this jokey conceit and the famous opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written fifteen years later:

  Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a great tragedy, the second as a miserable farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–1851 for the Montagne of 1793–1795, and the London constable [Louis Bonaparte] with the first dozen indebted lieutenants that came along for the little corporal [Napoleon] with his band of marshals! The eighteenth Brumaire of the idiot for the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius!

  Apart from that suggestive echo, there is little in Scorpion and Felix that need detain us; and even less in Oulanem, an overwrought verse drama that groans under the weight of Goethe’s influence. After these experiments, Marx finally accepted the death of his literary ambitions. ‘Suddenly, as if by a magic touch – oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow – I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing.’ The discovery had cost him many a sleepless night and much anguish. ‘A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ Suffering some kind of physical breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest. He took a house in the tiny village of Stralau, on the banks of the River Spree just outside Berlin.

  At this point, he seems to have become slightly unhinged. Still striving to ignore the siren voice of Hegel (‘the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me’), he wrote a twenty-four-page dialogue on religion, nature and history – only to find that ‘my last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system’. He had been delivered into the hands of his enemy. ‘For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which “washes souls and dilutes the tea”. [A quotation from Heinrich Heine.] I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.’ Interestingly, Hegel himself had undergone a similar crack-up at the time when he was jettisoning his ideals and embracing ‘maturity’. It is no coincidence that both Hegel and Marx wrote at length about the problem of alienation – the estrangement of humans from themselves and their society. For in the nineteenth century ‘alienation’ had a secondary meaning as a synonym for derangement or insanity: hence, mental pathologists (or ‘mad-doctors’) were known as alienists.

  While he was convalescing – restoring his strength with long walks, regular meals and early nights – Marx read Hegel from beginning to end. Through a friend at the university he was introduced to the Doctors’ Club, a group of Young Hegelians who met regularly at the Hippel café in Berlin for evenings of noisy, boozy controversy. Members included the theology lecturer Bruno Bauer and the radical philosopher Arnold Ruge, both of whom were to become intellectual collaborators with Marx – and, a few years later, his sworn enemies.

  On the night of 10 November 1837, Marx wrote a very long letter to his father describing his conversion, and the intellectual peregrinations that had led him to it. ‘There are moments in one’s life,’ he began, ‘which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself likes to look back in this way and take stock …’

  No false modesty there: at the age of nineteen he was already trying on the clothes of a Man of Destiny and finding that they fitted him handsomely. Now that he had begun the next stage of life, he wanted to erect a memorial to what he had lived through – ‘and where could a more sacred dwelling place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours!’

  Ornate flattery got him nowhere. Heinrich was neither sympathetic nor merciful as he read, with rising horror, the full story of his son’s intellectual adventures. To have a Hegelian in the family was shaming enough; worse still was the realisation that the boy had been squandering his time and talents on philosophy when he should have been concentrating solely on obtaining a good law degree and a lucrative job. Had he no consideration for his long-suffering parents? No duty to God, who had blessed him with such magnificent natural gifts? And what of his responsibility for his wife-to-be – ‘a girl who has made a great sacrifice in view of her oustanding merits and her social position in abandoning her brilliant situation and prospects for an uncertain and duller future and chaining herself to the fate of a younger man’? Even if Karl cared nothing for his fretful mother and ailing father, he must surely feel obliged to secure a happy and prosperous future for the gorgeous Jenny; and this could hardly be achieved by sitting in a smoke-filled room poring over books about arty animals:

  God’s grief!!! Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of
knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp, running wild in a scholar’s dressing-gown and with unkempt hair instead of running wild over a glass of beer; unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum … And is it here, in this workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition, that the fruits are to ripen which will refresh you and your beloved, and the harvest to be garnered which will serve to fulfil your sacred obligations!?

  This stinging reprimand – which is also a brilliant description of Marx’s lifelong working methods – was delivered in December 1837, when Heinrich was already dangerously ill with tuberculosis. It sounds like the last desperate howl of a dying man who has placed all his hopes in the next generation – only to see those hopes crumpled like so much waste paper. Fortifying himself with a fistful of pills prescribed by his doctor, he hurled grievances galore at the wastrel son. Karl scarcely ever replied to his parents’ letters; he never enquired after their health; he had spent almost 700 thalers of their money in one year, ‘whereas the richest spend less than 500’; he had weakened his mind and body chasing abstractions and ‘giving birth to monsters’; he never returned home during university holidays, and ignored the existence of his brothers and sisters. Even Jenny von Westphalen, who had previously been praised to the skies, was now revealed as yet another irritant: ‘Hardly were your wild goings-on in Bonn over, hardly were your old sins wiped out – and they were truly manifold – when, to our dismay, the pangs of love set in … While still so young, you became estranged from your family …’ True enough; but this litany of complaint was scarcely calculated to reunite them. Karl’s parents begged him to visit Trier for a few days during the Easter vacation of 1838; he refused.