This stands comparison with Swift’s modest proposal for curing the misery of Ireland by persuading the starving poor to eat their surplus babies. (It may be worth recording, parenthetically, that in 1870 Marx bought a fourteen-volume edition of Swift’s collected works for the bargain price of four shillings and sixpence.) As Wilson rightly observes, the purpose of Marx’s theoretical abstractions – the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of logic – is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented portraits of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. ‘The meaning of the impersonal-looking formulas which Marx produces with so scientific an air is, he reminds us from time to time as if casually, pennies withheld from the worker’s pocket, sweat squeezed out of his body, and natural enjoyments denied his soul,’ Wilson continues. ‘In competing with the pundits of economics, Marx has written something of a parody …’
Ultimately, however, even Edmund Wilson loses the plot: only a few pages after elevating Marx to the pantheon of satirical genius alongside Swift, he protests at ‘the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the world view of Marx’ and complains that the theory propounded in Capital is ‘simply, like the dialectic, a creation of the metaphysician who never abdicated before the economist in Marx’. This gripe doesn’t even have the merit of originality. Some German reviewers of the first edition accused Marx of ‘Hegelian sophistry’, a charge to which he happily pleaded guilty. As he reminded them in an afterword to the second German edition, published in 1873, he had criticised the ‘mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic’ nearly thirty years earlier, when it was still the fashion. ‘But just when I was working at the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel … 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 mode of expression peculiar to him.’
These dialectical flirtations which so offended Edmund Wilson are all of a piece with the irony he praised so highly: both techniques up-end apparent reality to expose the hidden truth. ‘The mealy-mouthed babblers of German vulgar economics grumbled about the style of my book,’ Marx wrote in 1873. ‘No one can feel the literary shortcomings of Capital more strongly than I myself.’ But critics elsewhere, even when hostile to the theories, acknowledged its stylistic merits. The Saturday Review, a London magazine, commented that ‘the author’s views may be as pernicious as we conceive them to be, but there can be no question as to the plausibility of his logic, the vigour of his rhetoric, and the charm with which he invests the driest problems of political economy’. The Contemporary Review, while patriotically scornful of German economics (‘we do not suspect that Karl Marx has much to teach us’), complimented the author on not forgetting ‘the human interest – the “hunger and thirst interest” which underlies the science’. Marx was particularly gratified by a notice in the St Petersburg Journal which praised the ‘unusual liveliness’ of his prose. ‘In this respect,’ it added, ‘the author in no way resembles … the majority of German scholars, who … write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are cracked by it.’
In spite of its lively charms the first volume of Capital was still too forbidding for the heads of many ordinary mortals, whose task was made all the harder by Marx’s decision to place the most impenetrable chapters at the front of the book. ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences,’ he explained in the preface. ‘The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty. I have popularised the passages concerning the substance of value and the magnitude of value as much as possible.’ The value-form, he reassured readers, was really simplicity itself: ‘Nevertheless, the human mind has laboured for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it … With the exception of the section on the form of value, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.’
A rather ambitious assumption, as it turned out. While the book was being typeset Engels had advised him that it was ‘a serious mistake’ not to clarify the abstract arguments by splitting them up into shorter sections with their own headings. ‘The thing would have looked somewhat like a school textbook, but a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand. The populus, even the scholars, just are no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking, and one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.’ Marx made a few changes on his proof-sheets, but they were mere tinkerings at the margin. ‘How could you leave the outward structure of the book in its present form!’ Engels asked in some exasperation after inspecting the final set of proofs. ‘The fourth chapter is almost 200 pages long and only has four sub-sections … Furthermore, the train of thought is constantly interrupted by illustrations, and the point to be illustrated is never summarised after the illustration, so that one is forever plunging straight from the illustration of one point into the exposition of another point. It is dreadfully tiring, and confusing, too.’ However, he added lamely, ‘all that is of no import’.
Even some of Marx’s most adoring disciples found their eyes glazing over as they tried to make sense of the obscure early chapters. ‘Please be so good as to tell your good wife,’ he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann, ‘that the chapters on “The Working Day”, “Co-operation, Division of Labour and Machinery” and finally on “Primitive Accumulation” are the most immediately readable. You will have to explain any incomprehensible terminology to her. If there are any other doubtful points, I shall be glad to help.’ When the great English socialist William Morris read Capital, years later, he ‘suffered agonies of confusion of the brain … Anyhow, I read what I could, and will hope that some information stuck to me from my reading.’ Sheer incomprehension, rather than political prejudice, may explain the muted reaction to Capital when it was published. ‘The silence about my book makes me fidgety,’ Marx wrote to Engels in October, revealing that insomnia had begun to persecute him again. ‘My sickness always originates in the mind.’ Engels did his best to stir up a commotion by submitting hostile pseudonymous reviews to the bourgeois press in Germany, and urged Marx’s other friends to do likewise. ‘The main thing is that the book should be discussed over and over again, in any way whatsoever,’ he told Kugelmann. ‘And as Marx is not a free agent in the matter, and is furthermore as bashful as a young girl, it is up to the rest of us to see to it … In the words of our old friend Jesus Christ, we must be as innocent as doves and wise as serpents.’ Dr Kugelmann did his eager best, placing articles in one or two of the Hanover newspapers, but they were of little assistance since he barely understood the book himself. ‘Kugelmann becomes more simple-minded every day,’ Engels complained. Jenny Marx was rather more gracious: the Hanoverian acolyte might be a clodhopping dunce but at least he meant well. Depressed by the universal indifference to her husband’s magnum opus, and alarmed by his worsening health, she was grateful for any gesture of support. ‘There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances,’ she said, ‘and I am sure I could write a secret history of it which would tell of many, extremely many unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments. If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes, to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.’
Two days before Christmas 1867, while Karl lay on the couch in carbuncular agony, Jenny was in the kitchen joylessly preparing the seasonal pudding – seeding raisins, chopping up almonds and orange peel, shredding suet, kneading eggs and flour – when a voice called down the stairs, ‘A great statue has arrived.’ It was the Kugelmanns’ bust of Zeus, sent from Germany as a Christmas
gift and only slightly chipped from its long journey. ‘You can have no idea of the delight and surprise you occasioned us,’ she wrote to the Doctor. ‘My warmest thanks to you also for your great interest and indefatigable efforts on behalf of Karl’s book.’ The form of applause preferred by most Germans, she added bitterly, ‘is utter and complete silence’.
For the first three months of 1868 Marx was unable to work at all. If he walked to the British Museum, the carbuncle on his inner thigh rubbed against his trousers; if he sat at his desk, the carbuncle on his bottom soon forced him to retreat to a couch and lie on his side; if he tried to write, the carbuncle below his shoulder-blade took a painful revenge. Even his letters to Engels became noticeably shorter. ‘During the whole of last week I had many bleeding shingles; particularly obstinate and hard to obliterate the mess under my left armpit,’ he reported on 23 March. ‘But generally I feel much better …’ Not for long: the very next day, while he was reading a book, ‘there was something like a black veil before my eyes. In addition, a frightful headache and chest constriction.’ If only he didn’t have to produce the next ‘two damned volumes’ of Capital and seek out an English publisher, he would move to Switzerland forthwith. In London the Marxes’ living costs were between £400 and £500 a year, but in Geneva he reckoned they could muddle along quite comfortably on about £200.
The only reasons for staying in London were those two institutions that occupied so much of his time – the British Museum and the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association. However, one other consideration may have crossed his mind: Geneva was now the home of Michael Bakunin, whom Marx had already identified as the man most likely to destroy the International.
11
The Rogue Elephant
Michael Bakunin was a hairy Russian giant, the very model of a thunderbolt-hurling revolutionist, all impulse and passion and pure will. The composer Richard Wagner, a comrade-in-arms during the Dresden uprising of 1849, is said to have modelled the character of Siegfried on him; his presence can also be detected in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed. Legends naturally attached themselves to such a figure, many of his own invention. There was the story of how, during a revolt in Italy, the fearless colossus marched out of a besieged house straight through a crowd of soldiers: none dared touch him. He roamed the world claiming to be the leader of vast insurrectionary Brotherhoods or Leagues, which usually turned out to be no more than a dozen cronies in a pub. He had a boyish enthusiasm for the paraphernalia of plotting – cyphers, passwords, invisible ink. Marx referred to him as the Russian hierophant (high priest), but Engels suggested that elephant would be more accurate: the gigantic frame, the lumbering gait, the habit of trampling anything that stood in his path.
Bakunin is often described as the Father of Modern Anarchism (Proudhon being his main rival for the title); but he bequeathed no great theoretical scripture. His legacy was the single idea that the state was evil and must be destroyed. Communist states were no better than capitalist: authority would still be centralised in the hands of the few, and even if the state were run by ‘workers’ they would soon become as corrupt and despotic as the tyrants they had overthrown. He proposed instead a form of federal anarchy in which power was so widely dispersed that nobody could abuse it.
Or so his disciples would have you believe. It is remarkable how many of them there are: during his lifetime he may have been a general without an army or a Mohammed without a Koran, but in the twentieth century he acquired a legion of admirers – many not in the least revolutionary or anarchistic – who hailed him as the one person to foresee that Marx’s ideas could lead only to the Gulag. The two men are consistently juxtaposed, and always to Marx’s discredit. ‘The struggle between the two lies at the very heart and core of all debates about the history of the workers’ movement even to the present day,’ writes the German Marxologist Professor Fritz Raddatz. ‘There is no way of evading the answer … Marx and Bakunin = Stalin and Trotsky.’ The British historian E. H. Carr contrasts Bakunin and Marx as ‘the man of generous, uncontrollable impulses, and the man whose feelings were so perfectly subdued to his intellect that superficial observers disbelieved in their existence … the man of magnetic personal attraction, and the man who repelled and intimidated by his coldness’. True, Carr concedes that Bakunin was sometimes reckless and incoherent. But even these failings become virtues when set against the icy, inhuman discipline of a desiccated Marxist calculating machine.
According to Isaiah Berlin, ‘Bakunin differed from Marx as poetry differs from prose.’ The apparent implication that Bakunin was a lyrical free spirit and Marx a literal-minded plodder – is little more than a donnish rephrasing of that crude Trotsky/Stalin formula: the humane libertarian versus the ruthless authoritarian. It is a myth that has just enough truth to keep it alive. Bakunin was indeed a creature of pure emotion who despised Marx’s meticulous rationalism and attention to detail. His lack of interest in the complex mechanics of capital was matched or balanced by Marx’s contempt for cloak-and-dagger skulduggery. Beyond that, however, almost everything said and written about this battle of the giants is nonsense.
They had met in Paris in 1844 and then in Brussels shortly before the revolutions of 1848, at a time when Bakunin was still more of a communist than an anarchist. Though four years older than Marx, he acknowledged the young man’s superior learning (‘I knew nothing at that time of political economy’) while guessing that their irreconcilable temperaments would never permit ‘any frank intimacy’. That summer, Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung published a gossip item from Paris, attributed to George Sand, alleging that Bakunin was a secret agent of the Tsar: Marx’s willingness to spread this rumour can probably be attributed to his instinctive mistrust of Russia and the Russians. Nevertheless, he happily printed a letter from George Sand denying that she had ever said anything of the sort, and appended a brief editorial note apologising for the mistake. A few weeks later the two men met by chance in Berlin. ‘You know,’ Marx revealed melodramatically, ‘I am now at the head of a communist secret society, so well disciplined that if I told one of its members, “Go kill Bakunin,” he would kill you.’ However, since the source of this alleged remark is Bakunin himself, an incorrigible fantasist, we should not necessarily believe it. If Marx really had issued such a threat, would the short-fused Russian ever have spoken to him again?
As it happened they didn’t see each other for another sixteen years, but this was a purely geographical estrangement. After his adventures with Richard Wagner in 1849, Bakunin spent the next eight years as a peripatetic prisoner in Dresden, Prague and St Petersburg. In 1857, following the death of Tsar Nicholas, his sentence was commuted to ‘exile for life’ in Siberia. Four years later he escaped by stowing away aboard a ship bound for San Francisco, whence he returned via New York to Europe.
As with Lassalle, Marx could recognise a big man when he saw one, however much he disliked the fellow’s airs and affectations. Engels made the point very well in 1849, when publicly denouncing Bakunin’s scheme to create a pan-Slavic nation: ‘Bakunin is our friend. That will not deter us from criticising his pamphlet.’ Or mocking his habits, come to that. Like Lassalle, Bakunin was a regular comic butt in the Marx – Engels correspondence. ‘Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more,’ Marx noted merrily in 1863. ‘To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen-year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching “revolution” with the Finns.’ At the time he wrote this Marx hadn’t actually set eyes on the monster since 1848, but they renewed their acquaintance in the autumn of 1864 when Bakunin stopped off in London, en route from Sweden to Italy, to order some bespoke suits from the socialist tailor Friedrich Lessner.
Some historians have claimed that Marx always hated Bakunin, but the facts of this encounter prove otherwise. For one thing, it was Marx who requested the meeting
, having heard from Lessner (a fellow member of the International’s General Council) that Bakunin was in town. Why bother to seek out a man he despised? Marx’s letter to Engels the following day confirms that this was a comradely reunion. ‘I must say I liked him very much, more so than previously … On the whole, he is one of the few people whom after sixteen years I find to have moved forwards and not backwards.’ In a gushingly affectionate message from Florence a few weeks later, Bakunin addressed Marx as ‘my dearest friend’, praised his Inaugural Address for the International and begged for a signed photograph.
During their conversation in London, Bakunin said that he had now abandoned his juvenile obsession with furtive plots and secret societies: from now on, he vowed, he would involve himself only in the wider ‘socialist movement’, i.e. the International. But after arriving in Italy he soon reverted to his old conspiratorial capers – aided and abetted by a rich new Russian patron, the Princess Obolensky, who apparently found this fat, toothless giant irresistible. For the next three years or so he had no dealings with the International at all.
In 1867 the Princess and her pet anarchist moved to Switzerland, where Bakunin soon noticed that the International was establishing itself as a significant force. Making up for lost time, he determined to hijack the organisation for himself and devised what his biographer E. H. Carr calls a ‘bold plan’. Bold, but also utterly absurd. As the self-styled leader of the ‘International Alliance of Socialist Democracy’ – the latest of his many grand-sounding but tiny groupuscules – he wrote to the workers’ International proposing a merger, and a merger on equal terms. He would thus effectively become co-president of the new organisation. Naturally enough, Marx and his colleagues on the General Council scorned the idea: through their affiliated unions and associations they represented tens of thousands of workers, whereas the entire membership of Bakunin’s ‘International Alliance’ was probably no more than twenty. Having had his frontal assault rebuffed, Bakunin decided to tiptoe in through the back door instead. He informed the General Council that the International Alliance had been disbanded. But his new outfit, a mere ‘Alliance’ for Socialist Democracy, wished to become an ordinary, humble affiliate of the workers’ International, just like any other local section. Marx could see no harm in it, and recommended acceptance.
Karl Marx Page 33