Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  4

  The Mouse in the Attic

  Had Marx confined himself to twitting obscure Hegelians and second-rate novelists, he might have been left in peace. But he couldn’t resist the chance to tease a bigger and more dangerous beast. In the summer of 1844, after surviving an assassination attempt, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia issued this brief message of thanks to his loyal subjects before departing on holiday: ‘I cannot leave the soil of the Fatherland, although only for a short time, without expressing publicly the deeply felt gratitude in My and the Queen’s name by which Our heart has been moved.’ Marx thought this hilarious – and said so, con brio, in an article for Vorwärts!. The King’s syntax, he wrote, seemed to imply that the royal bosoms were moved by the royal name:

  If amazement at this peculiar movement makes one think again, one sees that the relative conjunction ‘by which our heart has been moved’ refers not to the name but to the more remotely situated gratitude … The difficulty is due to the combination of three ideas: (1) that the King is leaving his homeland, (2) that he is leaving it only for a short time, (3) that he feels a need to thank the people. The too compressed utterance of these ideas makes it appear that the King is expressing his gratitude only because he is leaving his homeland …

  If Marx thought that he could get away with this lèse-majesté, he had forgotten that monarchs have their own masonic solidarity. On 7 January 1845, at an audience with King Louis Philippe in Paris, the Prussian envoy Alexander von Humboldt handed over two items – a valuable porcelain vase, and a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm IV protesting at the outrageous insults and libels published by Vorwärts!. Louis Philippe agreed that there were indeed far too many German philosophers in Paris: the magazine was closed down two weeks later, and the interior minister François Guizot ordered Marx’s expulsion from France.

  Where now? The only king in mainland Europe still willing to accept refugees was Leopold I of Belgium, though even he demanded a written promise of good behaviour. (‘To obtain permission to reside in Belgium I agree to pledge myself, on my word of honour, not to publish in Belgium any work on current politics. [signed] Dr Karl Marx.’) While Jenny stayed on for a few days to sell their furniture and linen, Marx left Paris in the company of Heinrich Bürgers, a young journalist from Vorwärts! who was quitting the country in disgust at ‘the punishment inflicted on the man who was my friend and faithful guide in my studies’. As their two-man coach rattled through Picardy, Bürgers tried vainly to lift his mentor’s spirits with choruses from German drinking songs.

  A good night’s sleep was rather more restorative. The next morning Marx was already impatient for action, telling Bürgers to hurry up with his breakfast because ‘we must go and see Freiligrath today’. Ferdinand Freiligrath, a quondam court poet to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had fled to Belgium some weeks earlier to escape arrest after publishing a treasonous Confession of Faith. Once a regular butt of the old Rheinische Zeitung, he was now granted instant absolution as a convert to the anti-Prussian cause. Other new arrivals from the radical diaspora included Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, the Swiss radical Sebastian Seiler, the former artillery officer Joseph Weydemeyer (who was to become a lifelong friend), a gaggle of Polish socialists – and, most importantly, Friedrich Engels, who needed little persuasion to escape from the stifling propriety of Barmen and follow Marx into exile. Jenny’s brother Edgar von Westphalen, the lovable if incontinent puppy of the family, came too.

  By the time Marx’s wife and daughter joined him, he was already back in the old routine – reading, writing, boozing, scheming. ‘We were madly gay,’ Weydemeyer recalled. There were long mornings in cafés and even longer nights of card-playing and tipsy conversation. For once, even the family finances were in credit: two days before leaving Paris Marx was paid a 1,500-franc advance by a publisher in Darmstadt for his embryonic work on political economy, and a whip-round by Engels added another 1,000 francs to the kitty, mostly from supporters in Germany. Engels also handed over the fee for his own book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, so that ‘at least the curs shan’t have the satisfaction of seeing their infamy cause you pecuniary embarrassment’. But, he added presciently, ‘I fear that in the end you’ll be molested in Belgium too, so that you’ll be left with no alternative but England.’

  Jenny, pregnant once more, tried to conceal her disappointment at forsaking the shops and salons of Paris for boring old Brussels, but her mother was worried enough by this latest domestic upheaval to send her maidservant from Trier, Helene Demuth, on permanent loan. The twenty-five-year-old Demuth, who spent the rest of her life holding the Marx household together through countless crises and vicissitudes, was a small, graceful woman of peasant stock – round faced, blue eyed and always immaculately neat and well groomed even when surrounded by squalor. Her domestic efficiency was formidable and unflagging. As late as 1922, an Englishwoman who had visited the Marxes as a girl still recalled Helene’s excellent cooking: ‘Her jam tarts are a sweet and abiding memory to this day.’ Not that she was a meek little drudge: she guarded her new employers with tigerish ferocity, and any guests who outstayed their welcome could expect a severe mauling.

  For the first couple of months Marx and his family lodged in hotels or the spare rooms of friends. But as soon as they found a more permanent billet – a small terraced house at 5 Rue D’Alliance, at the eastern end of the city – Jenny set off with her daughter and maid for a summer vacation in the Baroness von Westphalen’s residence in Germany, leaving Karl to make the place habitable. ‘The little house should do,’ Jenny wrote from Trier. A room would have to be set aside for childbirth, but ‘having concluded my important business on the upper floor, I shall remove downstairs again. Then you could sleep in what is now your study and pitch your tent in the immense drawing-room – that would present no difficulty. The children’s noise downstairs would then be completely shut off, you would not be disturbed upstairs, I could join you when things were quiet … What a colony of paupers there is going to be in Brussels!’ On 26 September, only a fortnight after travelling back from Trier, Jenny added to the colonial population by giving birth to another daughter, Laura.

  Marx had promised the Belgian authorities not to publish anything on current politics, but thought he was quite within his rights to participate in politics and to pursue his studies in economic history. Hence the summons to Engels, by now an indispensable lieutenant. In the summer of 1845 the two men paid a six-week visit to England, partly to take advantage of the well-stocked libraries in Manchester and London but also to meet the leaders of the Chartists, the first working-class movement in the world. On their return, Engels rented a house next door to the Marxes and set about organising the socialist flotsam of Brussels into a comparable political force.

  First, however, there was the small matter of Marx’s book. The research trip to Britain and the long hours he spent in Brussels’s municipal library must have raised the hopes of his publisher, Karl Leske, who was expecting the Critique of Economics and Politics by the end of the summer. But Marx had already set the manuscript aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘It seemed to me very important,’ he explained to Leske, ‘to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present … If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’

  Not so: his ‘polemical piece’, The German Ideology, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. The only public demand for it came from Marx himself, who was now being caricatured by the Young Hegelians as an unthinking disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach. This infuriated him: Feuerbach’s demystification of Hegel had indeed been a glorious moment of revelation, like Keats’s first glimpse of Chapman’s Homer, but Marx had long since concluded that t
he critique merely substituted one myth for another. Feuerbach, the man who had turned Hegel upside down, was now due for the same treatment – or, as Marx put it, a ‘settlement of accounts’.

  His exercise in philosophical bookkeeping began in the spring of 1845 when he scribbled down the brief notes now known as the Theses on Feuerbach. ‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice.’ Feuerbach had exposed the secular basis of religion, but then allowed the secular realm itself to float off into clouds of abstraction. ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking,’ Marx argued, ‘is not a question of theory but is a practical question … All social life is essentially practical … The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Theory without practice was a form of scholastic masturbation – pleasurable enough, but ultimately infertile and of no consequence. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels proceeded to spend the winter of 1845–6 theorising like billy-o as they composed their German Ideology.

  The book begins with one of Marx’s attention-grabbing generalisations: ‘Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be.’ This is followed by another favourite trick, the provocative parable:

  Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

  These thinkers were sheep labouring under the delusion that they were wolves, whose vapid bleating ‘merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class’.

  One sheep was Ludwig Feuerbach himself, whose conception of the world was ‘confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling’. He thus failed to notice that even the simplest natural objects are in fact products of historical circumstance. For instance: ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become a “sensuous certainty”.’ To Feuerbach, the cherry-tree was simply there, one of nature’s altruistic gifts.

  Oddly enough, although the book had been intended as a settling of accounts with Feuerbach, he merited no more than a couple of short chapters. Bruno Bauer – ‘Saint Bruno’ – was dispatched with similar speed. But 300 unreadable pages were devoted to the follies of Max Stirner, an anarchic Young Hegelian author who proposed that heroic egoism and self-indulgence would liberate individuals from their imaginary oppression. Though Stirner’s existentialist credo deserved its come-uppance, a quick stiletto jab would have done the job far more effectively than Marx’s verbose sarcasm – which, ironically, looked very much like an example of the self-indulgent egoism that Stirner advocated.

  For all its longueurs, however, The German Ideology is a most revealing account of what the twenty-seven-year-old Marx had learned from his philosophical and political adventures. Having rejected God, Hegel and Feuerbach in quick succession, he and Engels were now ready to unveil their own scheme of practical theory or theoretical practice – otherwise known as historical materialism. ‘The premises from which we begin,’ they announced, ‘are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life … These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.’ Whereas Feuerbach had argued that you are what you eat, Marx and Engels insisted that you are what you produce – and how you produce it. ‘The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour …’ And so on. These various refinements in the division of labour reflected the development of property – from primitive tribal property to ancient communal and state property, thence to feudal or estate property and onwards to bourgeois property. ‘The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals … It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.’ Slavery could not be abolished without the steam engine or the mule jenny, just as serfdom could not be abolished without improvements in agriculture, and in general ‘people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity’.

  What would this liberation feel like? Though the new materialism of Marx and Engels was presented as the negation of idealism, their own vision of paradise turned out to be a pastoral idyll – bizarrely ironic in view of Marx’s contempt for country life, which he usually described as ‘rural idiocy’. Under the present division of labour, they noted, each man was trapped in an exclusive sphere of activity:

  He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

  A rather exhausting Nirvana, some might think. Engels certainly enjoyed hunting and criticising, but did his heart really thrill at the promise of postprandial cattle-rearing?

  The Marxist paradise was evoked rather more enticingly in the interminable diatribe against Stirner, who had suggested that the division of labour applied only to those tasks which any reasonably trained person could perform – baking or ploughing, for instance. No one, he maintained, could have done Raphael’s works for him. This was an unfortunate example: Raphael had teams of assistants and pupils to complete his frescoes, as Marx and Engels were quick to point out. Besides, the communists didn’t believe that everyone should or could produce the work of a Raphael, but only that a potential Raphael must be allowed to develop without hindrance.

  Sancho [i.e. Stirner] imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour … In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

  Activities such as hunting, fishing and sheep-shearing, presumably. The question of who would clean the lavatories or hew the coal was neither asked nor answered. When a German smart aleck tried to catch him out by wondering aloud who would polish the shoes under communism, Marx replied crossly, ‘You should.’ A friend once suggested that she couldn’t imagine Marx living contentedly in an egalitarian society. ‘Neither can I,’ he agreed. ‘These times will come, but we must be away by then.’

  Since its belated publication this century, extravagant claims have been made for The Germ
an Ideology as a ‘comprehensive exposition’ of the Marxist conception of history. Marx himself was more realistic about its limitations. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ he wrote, ‘all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.’ The tattered pages of the surviving manuscript do indeed appear to have been nibbled at the margin by small rodents, possibly of an unreconstructed Hegelian tendency.

  Having sorted out the theory to their satisfaction, Marx and Engels moved swiftly on to the practice – ‘to win over the European, and in the first place the German, proletariat to our conviction’. And where was the German proletariat to be found? In Paris, London and Brussels, of course.

  The earliest organisation of exiled German communists, the League of Outlaws, had been founded in Paris in 1834. Its members were mostly middle-class intellectuals – ‘the most sleepy-headed elements’, as Engels called them – who soon dozed off altogether. The clandestine League of the Just, which split away from it in 1836, was an altogether livelier outfit run by self-educated artisans who spent many a happy evening plotting putsches and conspiracies. Their politics, however, still amounted to little more than a vague egalitarianism derived from the eighteenth-century utopian Gracchus Babeuf. After participating in the botched Parisian uprising of May 1839 several of the League’s leaders fled to London, where they set up a respectable-sounding German Workers’ Educational Association as a front for their secret society. The most important of these figures were Karl Schapper, a burly typesetter and sometime forestry worker who had won his revolutionary spurs during the storming of a Frankfurt police station in 1833; Heinrich Bauer, a witty little cobbler from Franconia; and Joseph Moll, a watchmaker from Cologne of medium height but huge physical courage. ‘How often,’ Engels wrote, ‘did Schapper and he victoriously defend the entrance to a hall against hundreds of onrushing opponents!’ (Heroic to the last, Moll was shot dead on a German battlefield during the Baden uprising of 1849.)