Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  Marx was an incorrigible fidget, forever breaking off to search for one more fragment of evidence, or pacing up and down his study while brooding on how to improve his argument. (A strip of carpet between the door and window became threadbare from these exertions, as clearly defined as a track across a meadow.) Back in August 1846, when his ‘economic shit’ was already overdue for delivery to another German publisher, he had explained the delay thus: ‘Since the all but completed manuscript of the first volume of my book has been lying idle for so long, I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish word for word what he wrote six months earlier.’ Many authors will know this syndrome – the dread of letting one’s ship finally slide down the slipway, the irresistible need to splash on another coat of paint or add a few more rivets. In that summer of 1846 he had thought it would take about four months to apply the finishing touches: ‘The revised version of the first volume will be ready for publication at the end of November. The second volume, of a more historical nature, will be able to follow soon after it.’

  More than a decade later, Marx’s great ark was still in dry dock. ‘Now let me tell you how my political economy is coming on,’ he wrote to Lassalle at the end of February 1858. ‘I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further.’ So long as there was one source unconsulted, one treatise unread – as there always would be – he could not let go.

  And, of course, there was the unending struggle against those other notorious enemies of promise – illness, poverty and domestic duty. Eleanor went down with whooping cough; Jenny was ‘a nervous wreck’; the butcher, the pawnbroker and the tallyman were all clamouring for payment. As Marx joked grimly, ‘I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about “money” when so short of the stuff.’ Trapped in a quagmire of vexations, he wrote almost nothing throughout the summer. At the end of September he claimed that the manuscript would be ready for dispatch ‘in two weeks’, but a month later he admitted that ‘it will be weeks before I am able to send it’. Everything seemed to conspire against him: the world economic crisis, so cheerfully expected, had fizzled out all too soon and Marx’s ‘very bad humour’ at this turn of events had its predictable physical consequence – ‘the most appalling toothache and ulcers all over my mouth’.

  By the middle of November, six months after the deadline, the publisher in Berlin began to wonder if the book was anything more than a chimera. With heroic chutzpah, Marx explained to Lassalle that the procrastination ‘merely signified the endeavour to give him [Duncker] the best value for his money’. How so?

  All that I was concerned with was the form. But to me the style of everything I wrote seemed tainted with liver trouble. And I have a twofold motive for not allowing this work to be spoiled on medical grounds:

  1. It is the product of fifteen years of research, i.e. the best years of my life.

  2. In it an important view of social relations is scientifically expounded for the first time. Hence I owe it to the Party that the thing shouldn’t be disfigured by the kind of heavy, wooden style proper to a disordered liver …

  I shall have finished about four weeks from now, having only just begun the actual writing.

  Only just begun! This must have come as quite a shock to Lassalle and Duncker, who had been told back in February that the text was in its ‘final stages’. Still, if the work was as weighty and profound as Marx maintained, no doubt it would be worth the wait.

  As Christmas approached, the house in Grafton Terrace seemed more woebegone than ever. Jenny had no time to organise any festivities for the children, being fully occupied copying out Karl’s manuscript when not running errands to the pawnshop and answering the dunning letters from creditors that arrived almost daily. ‘My wife is quite right when she says that, after all the misère she has had to go through, the revolution will only make things worse and afford her the gratification of seeing all the humbugs from here once again celebrating their victories over there,’ Marx remarked. ‘Women are like that.’

  By late January the book was ready to go – but he hadn’t a farthing for postage or insurance. After stumping up the necessary £2, Engels was rewarded with a horrific and astounding confession: ‘The manuscript amounts to about twelve sheets [192 pages] of print (three instalments) and – don’t be bowled over by this – although entitled Capital in General, these instalments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital.’ Engels may have suspected that something was amiss: uncharacteristically, Marx had declined to show him any of the work in progress. Even so, it was a grievous disappointment after the years of boasting. The mountains had heaved in labour, and given birth to a ridiculous mouse. Half of this slim volume was little more than a critical summary of other economists’ theories, and the only section of lasting interest was an autobiographical preface describing how he had reached the conclusion that ‘the anatomy of civil society is to be found in political economy’ through his reading of Hegel and his journalism at the Rheinische Zeitung.

  The general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows. In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

  At a certain stage of development these ‘material relations’ become intolerably restrictive, and then begins an epoch of social revolution in which the whole immense ‘superstructure’ of consciousness – legal, political, religious, aesthetic – melts as quickly as snowfall on a sunny winter morning. This had happened with every previous mode of production, from the Asiatic to the feudal, and would most assuredly be the fate of the modern bourgeois tyranny. But there was one difference: ‘The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.’

  A pretty extravagant ‘therefore’, some might say. These few paragraphs alone have produced an entire industry of disputation, in which Marxist philosophers quarrel among themselves about the precise significance of ‘base and superstructure’ while sceptics wonder why Victorian capitalism must necessarily be the last form of antagonistic production before the creation of a communist nirvana. Mightn’t bourgeois society merely mutate into a sharper if subtler version of itself, with more sophisticated instruments of torture and more persuasive justifications for its hegemony?

  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as Marx called it, thus provided much to chew on – but little to satisfy the hunger of his admirers. As publication day loomed he kept up a splendid show of hyperbolic huckstering, declaring that the book would be translated and admired throughout the civilised world. But his body knew better: in the middle of July 1859, shortly after the finished copies reached London, he was ‘overcome by a kind of cholera as a result of the heat and was vomiting from morning to night’.
And no wonder. The reaction of his friends, when they at last got their hands on the long-promised opus, was one of consternation. Wilhelm Liebknecht said that ‘never had a book disappointed him so much’.

  There were no advertisements and few reviews: the explosive bombshell had turned out to be a very damp squib indeed. ‘The secret hopes we had long nourished in regard to Karl’s book were all set at naught by the Germans’ conspiracy of silence,’ Jenny complained at the end of the year, ‘only broken by a couple of wretched, belletristic feuilleton articles which confined themselves to the preface and ignored the contents of the book. The second instalment may startle the slugabeds out of their lethargy …’ Ah yes, the second instalment – due a few months after the first, or so its author had once promised. He now adjusted the timetable slightly, imposing an ‘extreme limit’ of December 1859 for completion of his thesis on capital, which had been so eccentrically omitted from the Critique. Connoisseurs of Marx’s working habits would have predicted that he was most unlikely to stick to this plan – and, sure enough, for the next year his economic notebooks lay unopened on the desk as he distracted himself with a spectacular, pointless feud against one Karl Vogt, the professor of natural science at Berne University.

  This absurd interlude began with a chance remark by the radical author Karl Blind, who shared the platform with Marx at an anti-Russian rally organised by the Urquhartites in May 1859. Whenever two or three German socialists were gathered together it was a safe bet that they would soon begin swapping slanderous gossip about fellow émigrés, and on this occasion Blind happened to mention that Karl Vogt – a former liberal member of the Frankfurt Assembly now exiled in Switzerland – was receiving clandestine payments from Napoleon III.

  Since Vogt had recently written a pro-Bonapartist political tract, Marx thought this titbit interesting enough to pass on to the journalist Elard Biskamp, who duly published it in his new weekly paper for London refugees, Das Volk. Meanwhile, Blind produced an anonymous flysheet repeating the accusation, which was reprinted in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, a respectable German newspaper. Vogt, wrongly assuming Marx to be the author, issued libel writs against the paper – whereupon the man responsible for the brouhaha, Blind, went into a blue funk and refused to testify, pretending that the flysheet had nothing to do with him. Though the case was dismissed on a technicality, Vogt claimed a moral victory since the defence had been unable to prove its allegations. (A few years later, documents found in the French archives showed that Bonaparte had indeed been paying him a secret stipend.)

  There it might have ended, had not Vogt decided to gloat over his success in a small book called Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung (‘My Lawsuit Against the Allgemeine Zeitung’) which denounced Marx as a revolutionary charlatan who sponged off the workers while consorting with the aristocracy. He was also identified as the leader of a ‘Brimstone Gang’ which blackmailed German communists by threatening to expose them unless they paid hush money. The many pages of supporting evidence included a particularly damning letter from Gustav Techow, an ex-lieutenant in the Baden campaign, describing a meeting of the Communist League soon after his arrival in London in 1850:

  First we drank port, then claret (which is red Bordeaux), then champagne. After the red wine he [Marx] was completely drunk. That was exactly what I wanted, because he would be more openhearted than he would probably otherwise have been. I became certain of many things which would otherwise have remained mere suppositions. In spite of his condition Marx dominated the conversation up to the last moment.

  He gave the impression not only of rare intellectual superiority but also of outstanding personality. If he had had as much heart as intellect and love as hate, I should have gone through fire for him, even if he had not just occasionally hinted at his complete contempt for me, which he finally expressed quite openly. He is the first and only one among us all whom I would trust to have the capacity for leadership and for never losing himself in small matters when dealing with great events.

  In view of our aims, I regret that this man, with his fine intellect, is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that the most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away at all the good in him. He laughs at the fools who parrot his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs over the communists à la Willich and over the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the genuine ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from government, he needs a source of strength, which he can find only in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. In spite of all his assurances to the contrary, and perhaps because of them, I took away with me the impression that the acquisition of personal power was the aim of all his endeavours.

  Engels and all his old associates, in spite of their many fine talents, are all far inferior to him, and if they should dare to forget it for a moment, he would put them in their place with an unashamedness worthy of a Napoleon.

  Though some modern critics have found this picture ‘only too credible’, as did Karl Vogt, it is a blotchy caricature. Marx may have been uxoriously proud of Jenny’s innate nobility, but there is no evidence whatever that he admired the aristocracy as a class. He had rather more respect for the bourgeoisie, as he proved in the Communist Manifesto with that lyrical celebration of capitalism’s progressive achievements. And the portrayal of Engels as a cowering subordinate is laughable. Nevertheless, the description of Marx’s domineering style had just enough verisimilitude to be very damaging indeed.

  Vogt’s book was an instant bestseller in Germany, but copies were hard to find in London. For some weeks Marx had to rely on hearsay about the ‘horrible scurrilities’ and ‘absurd calumnies’ in its pages. ‘Needless to say,’ he warned Engels, ‘I have kept the whole squalid business from my wife.’ She found out soon enough. At the end of January 1860 the National-Zeitung in Berlin carried two long articles based on the Vogt indictment, confirming Marx’s suspicion that ‘he is obviously seeking to represent me as an insignificant and rascally bourgeois blackguard’; he began libel proceedings against the newspaper forthwith. When the book itself arrived, on 13 February 1860, he found it to be ‘nothing but shit, sheer tripe’.

  Defending his honour would be a costly business. Postage stamps alone came to several pounds, as he dashed off dozens of letters inviting old comrades – some of whom he hadn’t seen since 1848 – to act as character witnesses. There was a retaining fee of 15 thalers (£2.10) for the Berlin lawyer he had hired, J. M. Weber, plus a payment to ‘that bastard Zimmerman’, an official at the Austrian embassy who supplied the wording for Weber’s power of attorney. ‘You will have gathered from the foregoing,’ he told Engels, ‘that I’m now stone-broke.’ He even borrowed a pound from his baker – a splendidly ironic gesture by a man seeking to refute the slur that he cadged off the workers.

  The Berlin lawsuit might have cost him nothing if, instead of instituting a private action for libel, he had used the services of the Royal Prussian Public Prosecutor, but he doubted that this worthy gent would ‘display especial zeal in upholding the honour of my name’. Quite so: unbeknown to Marx, his lawyer did try this route and was informed that no public interest would be served by the case. He pressed ahead with a civil action but that too was dismissed (on 5 June 1860) when the court ruled that the National-Zeitung articles ‘do not exceed the bounds of legitimate criticism’ and had no ‘intention to insult’. (‘Like the Turk who cut off the head of a Greek, but without intending to injure him,’ Marx muttered.)

  Very well then: he would find some other way of avenging himself. The only surprise is that he didn’t challenge Vogt to a duel: perhaps the fare to Switzerland deterred him, or perhaps he was simply feeling his age. He shut himself away in his study and composed a rip-roaring counterblast which in both length and savagery far outdid the original pamphlet to which it was supposedly a riposte. ‘Tit for tat, reprisals make the world go round!’ he hummed merrily while venting his sarcasm over more than 300 pages. One mi
nute Vogt was a cut-price Cicero, the next a humourless Falstaff. He was a buffoon, a windbag, a clammy-handed pot-boy, a performing dog. Mostly, however, he was a skunk – ‘which has only one method of defending itself at moments of extreme danger: its offensive smell’.

  Anyone who had ever aided or abetted the gruesome Vogt was given the same treatment. Several steaming buckets of scatological insults were tipped over a London newspaper which had reprinted the National-Zeitung articles:

  By means of an ingenious system of concealed plumbing, all the lavatories of London empty their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way every day the capital of the world spews out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills, and it pours out into a great central paper cloaca – the Daily Telegraph … At the entrance which leads to the sewer, the following words are written in sombre colours: ‘Hic quisquam faxit oletum!’, or as Byron translated it so poetically, ‘Wanderer, stop and – piss!’

  When Marx was in this sort of mood there was no stopping him – more’s the pity. Joseph Moses Levy, the Telegraph’s editor, was subjected to many pages of heavy-handed and anti-Semitic taunts for changing the spelling of his surname from ‘Levi’.

  Levy is determined to be an Anglo-Saxon. Therefore, at least once a month, he attacks the unEnglish policies of Mr Disraeli, for Disraeli, ‘the Asiatic mystery’, is, unlike the Telegraph, not an Anglo-Saxon by descent. But what does it profit Levy to attack Mr D’Israeli and to change ‘I’ into ‘y’, when Mother Nature has inscribed his origins in the clearest possible way right in the middle of his face. The nose of the mysterious stranger of Slawkenbergius (see Tristram Shandy) who had got the finest nose from the promontory of noses was just a nine days’ wonder in Strasbourg, whereas Levy’s nose provides conversation throughout the year in the City of London … Indeed the great skill of Levy’s nose consists in its ability to titillate with a rotten smell, to sniff it out a hundred miles away and to attract it. Thus Levy’s nose serves the Daily Telegraph as elephant’s trunk, antenna, lighthouse and telegraph.