Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

  To Marx’s unforgiving eye, Proudhon’s socialist manifesto looked suspiciously like a reluctant acceptance of the status quo. Workers shouldn’t organise to demand higher wages, Proudhon warned, since they would then have to pay their own bill in the form of higher prices. Nor was there anything to be gained from revolutionary violence. In fact, it was hard to tell what he did advocate, beyond a vague reliance on ‘providence’.

  When, Marx demanded, did meek acquiescence ever achieve anything? On the final page of The Poverty of Philosophy, his simmering indignation boiled over:

  The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in its brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?

  Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

  It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: ‘Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put.’ (George Sand.)

  Proudhon made no public riposte to The Poverty of Philosophy, but his own copy has furious marginal scribbles on almost every page – ‘Absurd’, ‘A lie’, ‘Prattle’, ‘Plagiarism’, ‘Brazen slander’ and ‘Actually, Marx is jealous’. An entry in one of his notebooks describes Marx as ‘the tapeworm of socialism’.

  The Communist Correspondence Committee would have to find someone else to represent it in France. Engels moved to Paris in August 1846 to reconnoitre. ‘Our affair will prosper greatly here,’ he reported after talking to August Hermann Ewerbeck, a local leader of the League of the Just. ‘What remains here of the Weitlingians, a small clique of tailors, is now in process of being thrown out … The cabinet-makers and tanners, on the other hand, are said to be capital fellows.’ Ewerbeck had identified four or five of them who might be reliable enough to join the correspondence network. (The assumption that all revolutionaries must be artisans was hard to dislodge: that same month the Parisian Journal des Economistes described Marx as ‘a shoemaker’ with a penchant for ‘abstract formulas’.)

  A few weeks later, having attended several meetings of the League, Engels seemed less cheerful. Ewerbeck, though amiable and well-intentioned, was a ghastly old bore who specialised in hair-splitting disquisitions on ‘true value’ and lectures on old German etymology. Worse still, he and his members treated the effusions of Proudhon and Grün as holy writ. ‘It is disgraceful that one should still have to pit oneself against such barbaric nonsense. But one must be patient, and I shall not let the fellows go until I have driven Grün from the field and have swept the cobwebs from their brains.’

  He staged his coup in mid-October by initiating a debate at the League on the pros and cons of communism, thus forcing the Parisian artisans to decide whether they were avowedly communist or merely ‘in favour of the good of mankind’, as preferred by Grün and his followers. Engels warned that if the vote went against him he ‘didn’t give a fig for them’ and would attend no more meetings. ‘By dint of a little patience and some terrorism,’ he told Marx, ‘I have emerged victorious with the great majority behind me.’ Grün’s chief disciple, an old carpenter called Eisermann, was so intimidated by Engels’s verbal battering-ram that he never showed his face again.

  These noisy exchanges soon came to the attention of the French police chief, Gabriel Delessert. When Engels heard that expulsion orders might be issued against himself and Ewerbeck, he decided to keep away from the League until the hue and cry had subsided. ‘I am indebted to Mr Delessert for some delicious encounters with grisettes and for a great deal of pleasure,’ he confessed roguishly, ‘since I wanted to take advantage of the days and nights which might well be my last in Paris.’ After satisfying his carnal appetite he spent a week in Sarcelles at the house of Karl Ludwig Bernays, Marx’s old editor at Vorwärts!, but found the atmosphere intolerably fetid: ‘The stench is like five thousand unaired featherbeds, multiplied by the release therein of innumerable farts – the result of Austrian vegetable cookery.’ He also wrote a satirical pamphlet ‘pullulating with smutty jokes’ about Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer whose influence over King Ludwig of Bavaria was a cause of scandalised amusement to both Marx and Engels. No publisher would take it, and the manuscript has long since disappeared.

  As one can infer from all these divertissements, Engels was short of intellectual stimulation. ‘If at all possible, do come here some time in April,’ he begged Marx in early March:

  By 7 April I shall be moving – I don’t yet know where to – and about that time I shall also have a little money. So for a time we could enjoy ourselves famously, squandering our all in taverns … If I had an income of 5,000 fr. I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living. But so long as there are grisettes, well and good! That doesn’t prevent one from sometimes wishing to discuss a decent topic or enjoy life with a measure of refinement, neither of which is possible with anyone in the whole band of my acquaintances. You must come here.

  Perhaps all that carousing had addled the Engels brain. Three months before he wrote this letter Jenny Marx had given birth to her first son, Edgar, a brother for two-year-old Jennychen and one-year-old Laura. As the sole provider for an effete wife, three small children and a housemaid, Marx could ill afford to go off on a bachelors’ bender in gay Paree. Unemployed and virtually unemployable, he couldn’t even raise the fare for a rather more important excursion, to London, where the League of the Just summoned a conference in June to discuss a merger with the Brussels correspondence circle.

  It was not so much a merger as a takeover. Marx had refused to join forces with the Londoners – Schapper, Bauer, Moll – until they reconstituted themselves as a Communist League, jettisoning the simpering pieties with which the League of the Just had been associated. They were now willing to meet his demands. Proudhon, Grün and Weitling were to be ritually denounced for ‘hostility to the communists’, and the old League slogan that Marx so despised – ‘All Men Are Brothers’ – was replaced by the imperative ‘Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’

  Two months after the Communist League’s inaugural meeting in London, the correspondence committee in Brussels converted itself into a branch (or ‘community’) of the League, with Marx as president. Under the new rules, each community must have at least three and at most twelve members, each of whom had to ‘give his word of honour to work loyally and to observe secrecy’. It was, after all, an illegal organisation. Following the Londoners’ example, however, Marx also founded a more open and less political Workers’ Association which staged quasi-parliamentary debates as well as ‘singing, recitation, theatricals and the like’. More than 100 workers joined in the first couple of weeks. ‘However minor it may be,’ Marx wrote to George Herwegh, ‘public activity is infinitely refreshing.’

  His interests were represented at the June congress in London by another German communist from Brussels, Wilhelm Wolff, as well as the delegate from the League’s Paris branch, a certain F. Engels
, who had arrived with a draft statement of principles for the new Communist League. Though not formally adopted, this was sent to communities elsewhere in Europe ‘for serious and mature consideration’. As a circular from HQ explained, ‘We have tried on the one hand to refrain from all system-making and all barrack-room communism, and on the other to avoid the fatuous and vapid sentimentality of the tearful, emotional communists [i.e. utopians such as Weitling] … We hope that the Central Authority will receive from you very many proposals for additions and amendments, and we will call on you again to discuss the project with particular zest.’ No one received the invitation with more zest than Marx, who within a year had transformed Engels’s embryonic credo into one of the most influential books ever published.

  5

  The Frightful Hobgoblin

  The Manifesto of the Communist Party may be the most widely read political pamphlet in human history, but it is also the most misleadingly titled: no such party existed. Nor, come to that, was it conceived as a manifesto. What the members of the Communist League wanted in 1847 was a ‘profession of faith’, and an early draft written by Engels in June 1847 shows that they were still wedded to the initiation rituals favoured by the French underground sects:

  QUESTION 1: Are you a Communist?

  ANSWER: Yes.

  QUESTION 2: What is the aim of the Communists?

  ANSWER: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.

  QUESTION 3: How do you wish to achieve this aim?

  ANSWER: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property.

  And so on for another seven pages, culminating in Question 22 (‘Do Communists reject the existing religions?’), to which the correct answer is that communism ‘makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them’. From a modern vantage point, this laborious Q&A exercise is irresistibly reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch in which Marx appears on a TV quiz show hosted by Eric Idle:

  IDLE: The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development?

  MARX: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie.

  IDLE: Yes it is indeed. Well done, Karl! You’re on your way to a lounge suite! Now Karl, number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle?

  MARX: A political struggle.

  IDLE: Good! One final question, and that beautiful non-materialistic lounge suite will be yours. Ready, Karl? You’re a brave man. Your final question: who won the English FA Cup in 1949?

  MARX: Er, er, the workers’ control of the means of production? The-the struggle of the urban proletariat?

  IDLE: No, it was Wolverhampton Wanderers, who beat Leicester 3–1.

  MARX: Oh, shit!

  Engels’s catechism might have been appropriate for a secret society such as the old League of Outlaws or the League of the Just – but this was the furtive, conspiratorial tradition from which Marx wanted to rescue the new Communist League. Why, he demanded, should revolutionaries hide their views and intentions?

  Engels took the point, admitting that ‘since a certain amount of history has to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable’. Returning to Paris in October after an extended stay in Brussels, he discovered that Moses Hess had prepared another draft ‘Confession’ which reeked of utopianism and hardly mentioned the proletariat. Engels ridiculed this document, line by line, at a meeting of the local Communist League – ‘and was not yet half-way through when the lads declared themselves satisfaits’, as he reported triumphantly to Marx in Brussels. ‘Completely unopposed, I got them to entrust me with the task of drafting a new one which will be discussed next Friday by the district and will be sent to London behind the backs of the communities. Naturally not a soul must know about this, otherwise we shall all be unseated and there’ll be a deuce of a row.’

  Within days Engels had finished his new version, less like a credo and more like an exam paper, with a long historical account of the origins and development of the proletariat, as well as ‘all kinds of secondary matter’. Nevertheless, it was still written in the call-and-response style of its predecessor. (‘What is communism? Answer: Communism is the doctrine of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour …’) ‘Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith,’ he wrote to Marx on 23 November 1847. ‘I think we would do best to abandon the catechetical form and call the thing Communist Manifesto.’ Five days later the two men met at Ostend, en route for London and the second congress of the Communist League.

  The venue for the congress was the HQ of the German Workers’ Educational Association, above the Red Lion pub in Great Windmill Street, Soho; and the intensity of the debate can be gauged by the fact that it continued for ten days – no doubt with occasional forays downstairs for urgently needed refreshment. Few contemporary records survive, but Marx’s dominant presence was described years later in a memoir by Friedrich Lessner, a journeyman tailor from Hamburg who had been living in London since April 1847:

  Marx was a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence was a thought and every thought was a necessary link in the chain of his demonstration. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him. The more I realised the difference between the communism of Weitling’s time and that of the Communist Manifesto, the more clearly I saw that Marx represented the manhood of socialist thought.

  By the end of the ten-day marathon, Marx and Engels had carried all before them. The June congress, which Marx had not attended, had declared merely that the League ‘aims at the emancipation of humanity by spreading the theory of the community of property and its speediest possible practical introduction’. The rules adopted at the second congress were far more combative and robust: ‘The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.’ The delegates agreed these basic principles unanimously, and Marx and Engels were commissioned to draw up a manifesto summarising the new doctrine as soon as possible.

  Marx seemed in no great hurry to comply. After returning to Brussels in mid-December, he delivered a course of lectures to the German Workers’ Association on political economy, arguing that capital was not an inanimate object but a ‘social relation’. He wrote several articles for the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, defending the communists and anticipating with relish the coming revolution in France. He gave a long speech on free trade. At a New Year’s Eve party given by the Workers’ Association he proposed a toast to Belgium – ‘forcefully expressing appreciation of the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish to the good of all Europe’. (Little did he guess that within a couple of months he would be denouncing the ‘unprecedented brutality’ and ‘reactionary fury’ of this erstwhile liberal paradise, when the Belgian government kicked him out of the country at twenty-four hours’ notice.) From 17 to 23 January he visited Ghent to establish a local branch of the Democratic Association.

  Most authors will recognise the symptoms: ceaseless procrastination, a quest for distractions, a willingness to do anything except the job in hand. Most publishers, likewise, will sympathise with the growing impatience of the London leaders of the Communist League, who dispatched an ultimatum to Brussels on 24 January 1848:

  The Central Committee charges its regional committee in Brussels to communicate with Citizen Marx, and to tell him that if the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the writing of which he undertook to do at the
recent congress, does not reach London by 1 February of the current year, further measures will have to be taken against him. In the event of Citizen Marx not fulfilling his task, the Central Committee requests the immediate return of the documents placed at Citizen Marx’s disposal.

  Marx was usually at his best when up against a deadline, and this final warning seems to have done the trick. Though every modern edition of the Manifesto carries the names of Marx and Engels – and Engels’s ideas undoubtedly had an influence – the text that finally reached London at the beginning of February was written by Karl Marx alone, in his study at 42 Rue d’Orléans, scribbling furiously through the night amid a thick fug of cigar smoke.

  Kierkegaard says somewhere that life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. This applies also to eras and epochs: the reality of a particular age may not become apparent until it is drawing to a close. Or, as Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right, ‘the owl of Minerva spreads his wings only with the falling of the dusk’. When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, in January 1848, he imagined he could see the wise owl once more preparing for flight: the brief but brilliant era of bourgeois capitalism had served its transitional purpose and would soon be buried under its own contradictions. By driving hitherto isolated workers into mills and factories, modern industry had created the very conditions in which the proletariat could associate and combine into a dominant force. ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers,’ he noted with satisfaction at the end of the manifesto’s first section. ‘Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’