Karl Marx

How could a half-educated girl compete with such sirens? Marx’s intellectual strength intimidated Jenny. When chatting to aristocratic mediocrities in gilded ballrooms she was witty, lively and supremely self-assured. When she was in the presence of her beloved, one look from those dark and fathomless eyes was enough to strike her dumb: ‘I cannot say a word for nervousness, the blood stops flowing in my veins and my soul trembles.’

One need hardly add that Jenny was a child of the Romantic Age. Like many restless spirits of that generation she read and reread Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, whose hero was shackled to a rock for defying the gods and enlightening mankind. (‘Prometheus,’ Marx declared in his doctoral thesis, ‘is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.’ An allegorical cartoon published after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung showed Marx himself in Promethean guise, chained to a printing press while a Prussian eagle pecked at his liver.) Unable to keep pace with Karl’s striding impetuosity, she began to dream that he too would have to be hobbled:

So, sweetheart, since your last letter I have tortured myself with the fear that for my sake you could become embroiled in a quarrel and then in a duel. Day and night I saw you wounded, bleeding and ill, and, Karl, to tell you the whole truth, I was not altogether unhappy in this thought: for I vividly imagined that you had lost your right hand, and, Karl, I was in a state of rapture, of bliss, because of that. You see, sweetheart, I thought that in that case I could really become quite indispensable to you, you would then always keep me with you and love me. I also thought that then I could write down all your dear, heavenly ideas and be really useful to you.

Though she conceded that this fantasy might sound ‘queer’, in fact it is a common enough romantic motif – the dark, dangerous hero who must be maimed or emasculated before he can win a woman’s heart. Only a few years later Charlotte Brontë used the same idea in the denouement of Jane Eyre.

Jenny’s wish was granted, more or less. During their four decades of marriage Marx was often ‘bleeding and ill’; and, since his handwriting was indecipherable to the untrained eye, he depended on her to transcribe his dear, heavenly ideas. Rapture, however, proved rather more elusive in real life than in her giddy dreams.

Half Prometheus, half Mr Rochester: if this is how his adoring fiancée saw him, the attitude of her more conventional relations can well be imagined. To marry a Jew was shocking enough, but to marry a jobless, penniless Jew who had already achieved national notoriety was quite intolerable. Her reactionary half-brother Ferdinand, the head of the family since their father’s death, did his utmost to prevent the union, warning that Marx was a ne’er-do-well who would bring disgrace on the entire tribe of von Westphalens. To escape the incessant gossip and browbeating, Jenny and her mother – who supported her loyally if anxiously throughout – fled from Trier to the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach, fifty miles away. It was there, at 10 a.m. on 19 June 1843, that the twenty-five-year-old Herr Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, married Fräulein Johanna Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, aged twenty-nine, ‘of no particular occupation’. The only guests were Jenny’s goofy brother Edgar, her mother and a few local friends. None of Karl’s relations attended. The bride wore a green silk dress and a garland of pink roses. The wedding present from Jenny’s mother was a collection of jewellery and silver plate embellished with the Argyll family crest, a legacy from the von Westphalens’ Scottish ancestors. The Baroness also gave them a large box of cash to help them through the first few months of married life but unfortunately the newlyweds took this treasure chest with them on a honeymoon trip up the Rhine, encouraging any indigent friends they happened to meet on the way to help themselves. The money was all gone within a week.

A few days before the wedding ceremony, at Jenny’s insistence, Karl had signed an unusual contract promising that the couple would have ‘legal common ownership of property’ – save that ‘each spouse shall for his or her own part pay the debts he or she has made or contracted, inherited or otherwise incurred before marriage’. One must assume that this was an attempt to placate Jenny’s mother, who was well aware of Marx’s hopelessness with money. But the contract was never enforced, even though he was seldom out of debt thereafter. During the next few years, the Argyll family silver spent more time in the hands of pawnbrokers than in the kitchen cupboard.

In that post-nuptial summer of 1843, the new Mr and Mrs Karl Marx were able to live on next to nothing as guests at the Baroness’s house in Kreuznach while waiting to learn from Ruge when – and where – his new journal would be born. It was an idyllic little interlude. In the evenings, Karl and Jenny would stroll down to the river, listening to the nightingales singing from the woods on the far bank. By day, the editor-elect of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher retreated to a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity.

Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, scribbling down thoughts as they occurred to him, and a surviving page from his Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:

Note. Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution. Not only on the revolutionary side. The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).

Once Marx had started on one of these riffs, playing with his beloved contradictions, there was no stopping him. Mightn’t the simple grammatical inversion that turned old monarchs into new also explain where German philosophy had gone wrong? Hegel, for instance, had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its predicate, whereas history showed the reverse to be the case. There was nothing wrong with Hegel that couldn’t be cured by standing him on his head: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Top down and bottom up, it all made perfect sense.

The credit for this discovery belongs to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Introductory Theses to the Reform of Philosophy had been published in March 1843. ‘Being is subject, thought predicate,’ he argued. ‘Thought arises from being, not being from thought.’ Marx stretched the logic much further by extending it from abstract philosophy to the real world – above all, the world of politics, the state and society. Feuerbach, a former pupil of Hegel, had already travelled quite a distance from his mentor’s idealism towards materialism (his most memorable aphorism, still to be found in dictionaries of quotations, was ‘Man is what he eats’); but it was a studiously cerebral materialism, unrelated to the social and economic conditions of his time or place. Marx’s foray into journalism had convinced him that radical philosophers shouldn’t spend their lives atop a lofty pillar like some ancient Greek anchorite; they must come down and engage with the here and now.

Feuerbach was one of the first writers from whom Marx solicited a contribution to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher as soon as he knew that its publication was assured. On 3 October 1843, just before setting off to join Ruge in Paris, he wrote to suggest a demolition job on the Prussian court philosopher F. W. von Schelling, his old antagonist from Berlin University. ‘The entire German police is at his disposal, as I myself experienced when I was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. That is, a censorship order can prevent anything against the holy Schelling from getting through … But just imagine Schelling exposed in Paris, before the French literary world! … I confidently expect a contribution from you in the form you may find most convenient.’ As further enticement, he added a cheeky postscript: ‘Although she does not know you, my wife sends greetings. You would not believe how many followers you have among the fair sex.’

Feuerbach was not seduced. He replied that, in his opinion, it would be rash to move from theory to practice until the theory itself had been honed to perfection. Marx, by contrast, believed the two were – or ought to be – inseparable. Praxis makes perfect, and the most necessary practice for philosophers at this time was ‘merciless criticism of all that exists’. The critique of Hegel had been inspired by Feuerbach; now Feuerbach himself, having served his purpose, must expect to be criticised in turn – most notably in the Theses on Feuerbach, written in the spring of 1845, which conclude with the most succinct summary of the difference between anchorites and activists: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’

Unlike most of the thinkers whom Marx chewed up and spat out, Feuerbach earned his lasting gratitude. ‘I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love which I feel for you,’ he wrote to Feuerbach in 1844. ‘You have provided – I don’t know whether intentionally – a philosophical basis for socialism … The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!’

In his last weeks at Kreuznach, Marx wrote two important essays which were to appear in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. The first, ‘On the Jewish Question’, is usually mentioned only en passant, if at all, in Marxist hagiographies. But it has provided powerful ammunition for his enemies.

Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either – unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers from the East End of London that she was ‘a Jewess’. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. ‘It is now quite plain to me – as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger,’ Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Lassalle’s ancestry. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’

Some passages from ‘On the Jewish Question’ have an equally rancid flavour if taken out of context – which they usually are.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling.

What is his secular God? Money …

We therefore recognise in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians. Although (or perhaps because) Bauer was an ostentatious atheist, he thought Christianity a more advanced phase of civilisation than Judaism, and therefore one step closer to the joyful deliverance which would follow the inevitable destruction of all religion – just as a gravedigger might regard a doddery dowager as a more promising potential customer than the local Queen of the May.

This perverse justification for official bigotry, which allied Bauer with the most reactionary boobies in Prussia, was demolished with characteristic brutality. True, Marx seemed to accept the caricature of Jews as inveterate moneylenders – but then so did almost everyone else. (The German word ‘Judentum’ was commonly used at the time as a synonym for ‘commerce’.) More significantly, he didn’t blame or accuse them: if they were forbidden to participate in political institutions, was it any wonder that they exercised the one power permitted to them, that of making money? Cash and religion both estranged humanity from itself, and so ‘the emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’.

From Judaism, nota bene, not from the Jews. Ultimately, mankind must be freed from the tyranny of all religions, Christianity included, but in the meantime it was absurd and cruel to deny Jews the same status as any other citizen. Marx’s commitment to equal rights is confirmed by a letter he sent from Cologne in March 1843 to Arnold Ruge: ‘I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer’s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational.’ It is also borne out by the other major work on which he started during the post-honeymoon summer of 1843, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction’, which was completed in Paris a few months later and published in the spring of 1844.

Though its title may be familiar only to the initiated, the essay itself is as famous as the article on Judaism is obscure. Many of those who have never read a word of Marx still quote the epigram about religion being the opium of the people. It is one of his most potent metaphors – inspired, one guesses, by the ‘Opium War’ between the British and Chinese, fought from 1839 to 1842. But do those who parrot the words actually understand them? Thanks to his self-appointed interpreters in the Soviet Union, who hijacked the phrase to justify their persecution of old believers, it is usually taken to mean that religion is a drug dispensed by wicked rulers to keep the masses in a state of dopey, bubble-brained quiescence.

Marx’s point was rather more subtle and sympathetic. Though he insisted that ‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’, he understood the spiritual impulse. The poor and wretched who expect no joy in this world may well choose to console themselves with the promise of a better life in the next; and if the state cannot hear their cries and supplications, why not appeal to an even mightier authority who promised that no prayer would go unanswered? Religion was a justification for oppression – but also a refuge from it. ‘Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

Most eloquent. Elsewhere in the essay, however, his verbal facility occasionally degenerates into mere word-juggling for its own sake – or, to be blunt, showing off. Here he is on Martin Luther and the German Reformation:

He destroyed faith in authority, but only by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into laymen, but only by transforming the laymen into priests. He freed mankind from external religiosity, but only by making religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from the chains, but only by putting the heart in chains.

Or on the difference between France and Germany:

In France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything. In Germany no one may be anything unless he renounces everything. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation.

After a few paragraphs of this pyrotechnic flamboyance, one suspects that the display itself has become an end rather than a means.

To wish away Marx’s stylistic excess is, however, to miss the point. His vices were also his virtues, manifestations of a mind addicted to paradox and inversion, antithesis and chiasmus. Sometimes this dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but more often it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down – including society itself. How could the mighty be put down from their seat, and the humble exalted? In the critique of Hegel he set out his answer for the first time: what was required was ‘a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes … This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.’ That last word resounds like a clap of thunder over a parched landscape. Never mind that neither Germany nor France yet had a proletariat worth the name: a storm was coming.

Marx’s theory of class struggle was to be refined and embellished over the next few years – most memorably in the Communist Manifesto – but its outline was already clear enough: ‘Every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneath it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureaucrats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ The role of emancipator therefore passes from one class to the next until universal liberation is finally achieved. In France, the bourgeoisie had already toppled the nobility and the clergy, and another upheaval seemed imminent. Even in stolid old Prussia, medieval government could not prolong its reign indefinitely. With a parting jibe at Teutonic efficiency – ‘Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one’ – he set off for Paris. It was, he sensed, the only place to be at this moment in history. ‘When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.’

3 The Grass-eating King

‘And so – to Paris, to the old university of philosophy and the new capital of the new world!’ Marx wrote to Ruge in September 1843. ‘Whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month, since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.’ The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had made the French capital a natural rallying point. It was a city of plotters and poets and pamphleteers, sects and salons and secret societies – ‘the nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at intervals which galvanised the whole world’. All the best-known political thinkers of the age were Frenchmen: the mystical Christian socialist Pierre Leroux, the utopian communists Victor Considérant and Etienne Cabet, the liberal orator and poet Alphonse de Lamartine (or, to give him his full glorious appellation, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine). Above all there was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, libertarian anarchist, who had won instant fame in 1840 with his book What Is Property? – a question he answered on page one with the simple formulation ‘property is theft’. All these political picadors would eventually be tossed and gored by Karl Marx – most notably Proudhon, whose magnum opus on ‘the philosophy of poverty’ provoked Marx’s lacerating riposte, The Poverty of Philosophy. For the moment, however, the newcomer would be content to listen and learn.

There was music in the cafés at night, revolution in the air. With the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Philippe tottering, another high-voltage excitement seemed inevitable and imminent. ‘The bourgeois King’s loss of prestige among the people is demonstrated by the many attempts to assassinate that dynastic and autocratic prince,’ Ruge reported. ‘One day when he dashed by me in the Champs-Elysées, well hidden in his coach, with hussars in front and behind and on both sides, I observed to my astonishment that the outriders had their guns cocked ready to fire in earnest and not just in the usual burlesque style. Thus did he ride by with his bad conscience!’ Ruge, Marx and the poet Georg Herwegh – the presiding triumvirate of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1843. Ruge travelled from Dresden in a ‘large omnibus’ accompanied by his wife, a swarm of children and a large leg of veal. Inspired by the utopian Charles Fourier, he proposed that the three couples should form a ‘phalanstery’ or commune, in which the women would take it in turns to shop, cook and sew. ‘Frau Herwegh summed up the situation at first glance,’ her son Marcel recorded many years later. ‘How could Frau Ruge, the nice, small Saxon woman, get on with the very intelligent and even more ambitious Frau Marx, whose knowledge was far superior to hers? How could Frau Herwegh, who had only been married so short a time and was the youngest of them, find herself attracted by this communal life?’ Georg and Emma Herwegh had a taste for luxury – and, since her father was a rich banker, the means to indulge it. They declined Ruge’s invitation. But Karl and Jenny (who was now four months pregnant) decided to give it a try. They moved into Ruge’s apartment at 23 Rue Vanneau, next door to the offices of the Jahrbücher.

The experiment in patriarchal communism lasted for about a fortnight before the Marxes decamped and found lodgings of their own further down the street. Ruge was a prim, puritanical homebody who couldn’t tolerate his co-editor’s disorganised and impulsive habits: Marx, he complained, ‘finishes nothing, breaks off everything and plunges ever afresh into an endless sea of books … He has worked himself sick and not gone to bed for three, even four, nights on end …’ Shocked by these ‘crazy methods of working’, Ruge was downright scandalised by Marx’s leisures and pleasures. ‘His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs,’ he wrote a few months later, ‘and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to “have” – a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.’ It’s an implausible shopping list: Marx was uninterested in luxuries or fripperies. If he did desire such things it was undoubtedly on behalf of Jenny, who delighted in them. These early months in Paris were the first and only time in her married life when she could afford to indulge the appetite, since Karl’s salary was augmented by a donation of 1,000 thalers sent from Cologne by former shareholders in the Rheinische Zeitung. Besides, he wanted her to enjoy a last spree before being cribbed and confined by the demands of maternity. On May Day 1844 she gave birth to a baby girl, Jenny – more often known by the diminutive ‘Jennychen’ – whose dark eyes and black crest of hair gave her the appearance of a miniature Karl.

The novice parents, though doting, were hopelessly incompetent, and by early June it was agreed that the two Jennys should spend several months with the Baroness von Westphalen in Trier learning the rudiments of motherhood. ‘The poor little doll was quite miserable and ill after the journey,’ Jenny wrote to Karl on 21 June, ‘and turned out to be suffering not only from constipation but downright overfeeding. We had to call in the fat pig [Robert Schleicher, the family doctor], and his decision was that it was essential to have a wet-nurse since with artificial feeding she would not easily recover … It was not easy to save her life, but she is now almost out of danger.’ Better still, the wet-nurse agreed to come back to Paris with them. But in spite of Jenny’s happiness (‘my whole being expresses satisfaction and affluence’), she couldn’t entirely dispel her old forebodings. ‘Dearest heart, I am greatly worried about our future … If you can, do set my mind at rest about this. There is too much talk on all sides about a steady income.’ A steady income was one necessity of life that always eluded Karl Marx.