Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  Perhaps because he thought he was rehearsing a funeral oration, he could afford to be generous to his vanquished foe. Those who have never read Marx, but know of him merely as some kind of bloodthirsty bogeyman whose name is invoked to terrify the middle classes, are often surprised to discover how much praise he lavished on the bourgeoisie. He was not a man to underestimate the enemy’s achievement:

  The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation …

  The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

  One modern critic has described the manifesto as ‘a lyrical celebration of bourgeois works’. And so it is, after a fashion: Marx was celebrating capitalism as a temporary phenomenon, as the harbinger of a true revolution. But what he took to be its death throes were in fact nothing more than birth pangs. The signs he misinterpreted – the howls, the thrashing limbs, the blood-spattered sheets – are even more conspicuous today than in his own time, though he is seldom given any credit for noticing them. ‘The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,’ he pointed out. ‘In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.’ Anyone surveying the fruit and veg counter in a supermarket – piled high with mangoes, avocados, sugar-snap peas and out-of-season strawberries – will see what he meant.

  While importing exotica, the bourgeoisie foists its own products, tastes and habits on everyone else: ‘In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’ To recognise the truth of this, one need only visit Beijing – the capital of an avowedly communist state – where the city centre now looks eerily like Main Street, USA, with McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Haagen-Dazs and Pizza Hut, plus several branches of Chase Manhattan and Citibank in which to deposit the profits.

  ‘As in material, so also in intellectual production,’ the Manifesto continued. ‘The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property … The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation.’ One can argue about whether Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Grisham and non-stop MTV really constitute ‘civilisation’, but the essential truth of his perception can’t be denied. He also understood that the pace of technological change would become ever more frantic, creating a sort of permanent revolution where any computer software bought more than a couple of years ago is all but obsolete. ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air …’

  To mark the Manifesto’s 150th anniversary, in 1998, countless academics and politicians were trotted out to gloat over the old boy’s imbecility. A British intellectual, Lord Skidelsky, sneered that Marx had ‘got it wrong’ by predicting imminent revolution – and that his work was, therefore, no longer worth a second glance. As it happens, revolution did break out within days of the Manifesto’s publication, first in Paris and then, with the speed of brushfire, across much of continental Europe. But it was doused just as quickly, and bourgeois triumphalism began its long reign. In that sense, Marx’s optimism was misplaced, even though his vision of the global market was uncannily prescient.

  How could he be so wrong and yet so right? When he is in prophetic mood, Marx sometimes thinks like a chess player devising a fatal pincer movement on the black king six moves hence – not noticing, all the while, that his opponent can mate him far sooner. If the other player makes a mistake, Marx’s calculations will be vindicated. And even if Marx loses, he can argue that he would have been proved right if only the battle had continued for a few minutes longer.

  We know these chess players well – brilliant strategy, fragile tactics – and Marx was indeed one of them. Though unbeatable at draughts or checkers, he lacked the artful patience required for the infinite complexities of the chessboard. His style was noisy, argumentative, hot-tempered. In the early 1850s, soon after his arrival in London, he ended many an evening in wild fury as yet another German exile cornered his king. ‘One day,’ Wilhelm Liebknecht recalled, ‘Marx announced triumphantly that he had discovered a new move by which he would drive us all under cover. The challenge was accepted. And really – he defeated us all one after the other. Gradually, however, we learned victory from defeat, and I succeeded in checkmating Marx. It had become very late, and he grimly demanded revenge for next morning, in his house.’

  At 11 a.m. the following day Liebknecht duly presented himself at Marx’s rooms in Dean Street, to find that the great man had sat up all night refining and perfecting his ‘new move’. Once again, it seemed to work at first, and Marx celebrated his victory by calling for drinks and sandwiches. But then the struggle commenced in earnest: throughout the afternoon and evening the two men faced each other grimly across the black-and-white battlefield until, at midnight, Liebknecht succeeded in checkmating his opponent twice in succession. Marx was ready to continue until dawn, but his strong-willed housekeeper Helene Demuth had had enough: ‘Now,’ she ordered the bleary-eyed contestants, ‘you stop!’

  Early the next day Liebknecht was roused from his bed by a knock on the door. It was Helene, bearing a message: ‘Mrs Marx begs that you play no more chess with Moor in the evening – when he loses the game, he is most disagreeable.’*

  Liebknecht never played chess with Marx again; but his description of the Marxian technique – ‘he tried to make up what he lacked in science by zeal, impetuousness of attack and surprise’ – might be applied to the Communist Manifesto. Kings, queens, bishops and knights would all be forced into submission sooner or later, beaten down by the sheer determination of their challengers. Like the ‘new move’ of which he was so proud, the manifesto was a weapon of revenge against his smugly superior adversaries, forged and fashioned during sleepless nights of brooding rage. His equally smug detractors today are therefore missing the point. Any text from the 1840s will include passages that now seem slightly quaint or outdated; the same could be said of many party election manifestos or newspaper editorials published only a year or two ago. It was never intended as a timeless sacred text, though generations of disciples have sometimes treated it as such. The very first paragraph – with its references to Metternich, Guizot and the Tsar – emphasises that this is a perishable commodity, written at a specific moment for a particular purpose, without a th
ought for posterity.

  The truly remarkable thing about the manifesto, then, is that it has any contemporary resonance at all. In a London bookshop recently I counted no fewer than nine English editions on sale. Even Karl Marx, who never suffered from false modesty, could scarcely have expected that his little tract would still be a bestseller at the end of the millennium.

  The unforgettable first sentence of the Communist Manifesto has the force of a thunderbolt. ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe …’ That, at least, was how it appeared in the first English edition, published by the Red Republican newspaper in 1850 and translated by Helen Macfarlane, a feminist Chartist who knew Marx and Engels and was greatly admired by both of them. Somehow, alas, the frightful hobgoblin never caught on. The version that everyone now knows is the translation by Samuel Moore, first published in 1888 and reprinted countless times since: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.’

  This opening salvo was out of date almost as soon as Marx fired it. The original German edition of the manifesto was published on or about 24 February 1848, having been set up in type by the Workers’ Educational Association in London (using a new Gothic font they had bought) and then rushed to a printer near Liverpool Street by the eager young Friedrich Lessner. ‘We were intoxicated with enthusiasm,’ Lessner recalled. By the time he collected the finished copies – bound in appropriately jaunty yellow paper – word was already arriving from France that the revolution had begun, with fighting and barricades in the streets of Paris. François Guizot, the man who had signed Marx’s expulsion order in 1845, was dismissed as prime minister on 23 February; King Louis-Philippe abdicated the next day, with his throne literally ablaze. Another of Marx’s bêtes noires, the Austrian chancellor Metternich, was toppled within three weeks. On 18 March the turmoil spread to Berlin.

  The Gallic cock had crowed, and all Europe was suddenly awake. ‘Our age, the age of democracy, is breaking,’ Engels wrote in an ecstatic dispatch for the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung. ‘The flames of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal are the dawn of the proletariat. Everywhere the rule of the bourgeoisie will now come crashing down, or be dashed to pieces. Germany, we hope, will follow. Now or never will it raise itself from its degradation …’ Germany – or rather the King of Prussia – had other ideas. His spies in Belgium had been watching the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung with mounting horror:

  This noxious paper [a police agent reported] must indisputably exert the most corrupting influence upon the uneducated public at whom it is directed. The alluring theory of the dividing-up of wealth is held out to factory workers and day labourers as an innate right, and a profound hatred of the rulers and the rest of the community is inculcated into them. There would be a gloomy outlook for the fatherland and for civilisation if such activities succeeded in undermining religion and respect for the laws and in any great measure infected the lower class of the people.

  As early as April 1847 the Prussian ambassador was demanding the suppression of this incendiary rag, which ‘attacked His Majesty’s government with revolting scurrility and savagery’. Nothing happened. But with the proclamation of a French Republic, the Belgian police panicked. In the late afternoon of 3 March 1848, Marx received a royal decree signed by King Leopold I of Belgium, ordering him to quit the country within twenty-four hours and never return.

  By happy coincidence, he was already planning his departure. Paris was where the action was, and he had just been sent a comradely invitation from Ferdinand Flocon, the editor of La Réforme and now a member of the provisional government in France. ‘What an ass Flocon is!’ Engels had written only four months earlier, dismissing him as a dunderhead ‘who sees everything through the eyes of a third-rate Parisian clerk in a fourth-rate bank’. If Flocon was aware of the contempt which Marx and Engels felt for him, his message did not betray it:

  Good and loyal Marx,

  The soil of the French Republic is a field of refuge and asylum for all friends of liberty.

  Tyranny exiled you, now free France opens its doors to you and to all those who are fighting for the holy cause, the fraternal cause of all peoples.

  Marx needed no further encouragement to pack his bags – and for the rest of the evening he did just that. At 1 a.m., however, ten police officers burst into the house and dragged him off to a prison cell at the town hall, where he was locked up with a ‘raving madman’ who spent much of the night trying to punch him on the nose. The official reason given for the detention was that his ‘passport was not in order’, even though he presented his captors with no fewer than three passports that were all correctly stamped and dated, together with the expulsion order signed by the King. But the police’s suspicions of Marx may not have been quite as capricious as they seem. In mid-February his mother had belatedly sent him the huge sum of 6,000 gold francs as his share of old Heinrich Marx’s legacy, and most of this windfall was immediately put to subversive use. According to one of Marx’s most recent biographers, David McLellan, ‘the police suspected (there was no evidence) that he was using it to finance the revolutionary movement’. There is in fact ample evidence – not least from Jenny Marx herself. ‘The German workers [in Brussels] decided to arm themselves,’ she admitted. ‘Daggers, revolvers, etc., were procured. Karl willingly provided money, for he had just come into an inheritance. In all this the government saw conspiracy and criminal plans: Marx receives money and buys weapons, he must therefore be got rid of.’

  The tone of injured innocence is hardly justified by her confession: if the authorities could connect her husband with the arsenal of ‘daggers, revolvers, etc.’, he would be in the soup right up to his bushy eyebrows. Deeply alarmed, she scampered off to break the news of his arrest to a left-wing lawyer, leaving the three small children in the care of Helene. When she returned home in the early hours the door was guarded by a policeman who told her, with perfect politeness, that if she wanted to talk to Monsieur Marx he would be happy to escort her. But as soon as they reached the police station Jenny was arrested for ‘vagabondage’ – on the grounds, apparently, that she didn’t have her papers with her – and thrown into a dark cell with ‘prostitutes of the lowest order’.

  When Jenny appeared in court the next day, an examining magistrate expressed sarcastic surprise that the police hadn’t arrested her babies while they were about it. She and Karl were released without charge at three o’clock in the afternoon – which left them just two hours to put their affairs in order, collect the children and catch the train to Paris. Jenny hastily sold a few possessions but had to leave her family silver and best linen in the care of a friendly bookseller. The Marxes were then forced to travel with a police escort all the way to the border, presumably to give them a final taste of Belgian hospitality.

  Already weary from their night in the cells, Karl and Jenny had an exhausting transmigration. There were no spare seats and scarcely any standing room, since most of the available space had been commandeered by Belgian troops heading south to guard the frontier against revolutionary contagion. On the French leg of the journey, passengers had to alight and continue by omnibus once they reached Valenciennes, where Luddite coachmen had taken advantage of the mayhem to uproot tracks and destroy the engines that were stealing their livelihood.

  Reaching Paris on 5 March, Marx found the streets smothered by a rough porridge of broken glass and paving stones. As if to make up for what he had missed, he plunged into the struggle without delay. The very next day he informed the London Communist League that the executive headquarters had been transferred to Paris; on 9 March the League unanimously approved his proposal that all members should wear a ‘blood-red ribbon’ on their coats. Since the League was still a semi-clandestine outfit, he also founded a German Workers’ Club, whose committee was announced in the newspaper La Réforme as ‘H. Bauer, shoemaker; H
ermann, cabinet-maker; J. Moll, watchmaker; Wallau, printer; Charles Marx; Charles Schapper.’ Karl Schapper was in fact a compositor by trade, but it’s hard to imagine what sort of artisanal status Marx could have claimed; ‘troublemaker’, perhaps.

  That was certainly how he was regarded by some fellow exiles – particularly his old colleague Georg Herwegh and the former Prussian army officer Adalbert von Bornstedt, who had conceived a mad romantic scheme to form a ‘German legion’ which would march triumphantly into their homeland and liberate it. After that, they would invade Russia. ‘Oh, just for one day, dare it!’ was Herwegh’s recruiting slogan. The French provisional government, only too glad to see the back of these quixotic foreigners, offered free billets and a daily wage of fifty centimes for every volunteer.

  Marx accused Herwegh and Bornstedt of ‘behaving like scoundrels’, dismissing their plan as an arrogant adventure that was bound to end ignominiously. He was right: Herwegh’s raggle-taggle army, probably numbering no more than a thousand, set off for Germany on April Fools’ Day and was comprehensively routed as soon as it crossed the border.

  What was required for a German revolution, Marx argued, was not a regiment of poets and professors brandishing second-hand bayonets, but ceaseless agitation and propaganda. As soon as Engels joined him in Paris, on 21 March, they produced a handbill headed ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’, which was swiftly reprinted by democratic newspapers in Berlin, Trier and Düsseldorf. One modern critic has claimed that this seventeen-point programme was ‘calculated to intimidate the bourgeoisie’. Far from it: since Germany had no proletariat worth the name, Marx realised that the first stage of his campaign must be a bourgeois revolution. By his standards, the ‘demands’ were therefore surprisingly modest. They included only four of the ten points from the Communist Manifesto – progressive income tax, free schooling, state ownership of all means of transport and the creation of a national bank. To emphasise his intentions, Marx added that the state bank would substitute paper money for metal coins, thus cheapening the universal means of exchange and liberating gold and silver for use in foreign trade. ‘This measure,’ he wrote, ‘is necessary in order to bind the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the cause of the revolution.’