Karl Marx

If amazement at this peculiar movement makes one think again, one sees that the relative conjunction ‘by which our heart has been moved’ refers not to the name but to the more remotely situated gratitude … The difficulty is due to the combination of three ideas: (1) that the King is leaving his homeland, (2) that he is leaving it only for a short time, (3) that he feels a need to thank the people. The too compressed utterance of these ideas makes it appear that the King is expressing his gratitude only because he is leaving his homeland …

If Marx thought that he could get away with this lèse-majesté, he had forgotten that monarchs have their own masonic solidarity. On 7 January 1845, at an audience with King Louis Philippe in Paris, the Prussian envoy Alexander von Humboldt handed over two items – a valuable porcelain vase, and a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm IV protesting at the outrageous insults and libels published by Vorwärts!. Louis Philippe agreed that there were indeed far too many German philosophers in Paris: the magazine was closed down two weeks later, and the interior minister François Guizot ordered Marx’s expulsion from France.

Where now? The only king in mainland Europe still willing to accept refugees was Leopold I of Belgium, though even he demanded a written promise of good behaviour. (‘To obtain permission to reside in Belgium I agree to pledge myself, on my word of honour, not to publish in Belgium any work on current politics. [signed] Dr Karl Marx.’) While Jenny stayed on for a few days to sell their furniture and linen, Marx left Paris in the company of Heinrich Bürgers, a young journalist from Vorwärts! who was quitting the country in disgust at ‘the punishment inflicted on the man who was my friend and faithful guide in my studies’. As their two-man coach rattled through Picardy, Bürgers tried vainly to lift his mentor’s spirits with choruses from German drinking songs.

A good night’s sleep was rather more restorative. The next morning Marx was already impatient for action, telling Bürgers to hurry up with his breakfast because ‘we must go and see Freiligrath today’. Ferdinand Freiligrath, a quondam court poet to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had fled to Belgium some weeks earlier to escape arrest after publishing a treasonous Confession of Faith. Once a regular butt of the old Rheinische Zeitung, he was now granted instant absolution as a convert to the anti-Prussian cause. Other new arrivals from the radical diaspora included Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, the Swiss radical Sebastian Seiler, the former artillery officer Joseph Weydemeyer (who was to become a lifelong friend), a gaggle of Polish socialists – and, most importantly, Friedrich Engels, who needed little persuasion to escape from the stifling propriety of Barmen and follow Marx into exile. Jenny’s brother Edgar von Westphalen, the lovable if incontinent puppy of the family, came too.

By the time Marx’s wife and daughter joined him, he was already back in the old routine – reading, writing, boozing, scheming. ‘We were madly gay,’ Weydemeyer recalled. There were long mornings in cafés and even longer nights of card-playing and tipsy conversation. For once, even the family finances were in credit: two days before leaving Paris Marx was paid a 1,500-franc advance by a publisher in Darmstadt for his embryonic work on political economy, and a whip-round by Engels added another 1,000 francs to the kitty, mostly from supporters in Germany. Engels also handed over the fee for his own book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, so that ‘at least the curs shan’t have the satisfaction of seeing their infamy cause you pecuniary embarrassment’. But, he added presciently, ‘I fear that in the end you’ll be molested in Belgium too, so that you’ll be left with no alternative but England.’

Jenny, pregnant once more, tried to conceal her disappointment at forsaking the shops and salons of Paris for boring old Brussels, but her mother was worried enough by this latest domestic upheaval to send her maidservant from Trier, Helene Demuth, on permanent loan. The twenty-five-year-old Demuth, who spent the rest of her life holding the Marx household together through countless crises and vicissitudes, was a small, graceful woman of peasant stock – round faced, blue eyed and always immaculately neat and well groomed even when surrounded by squalor. Her domestic efficiency was formidable and unflagging. As late as 1922, an Englishwoman who had visited the Marxes as a girl still recalled Helene’s excellent cooking: ‘Her jam tarts are a sweet and abiding memory to this day.’ Not that she was a meek little drudge: she guarded her new employers with tigerish ferocity, and any guests who outstayed their welcome could expect a severe mauling.

For the first couple of months Marx and his family lodged in hotels or the spare rooms of friends. But as soon as they found a more permanent billet – a small terraced house at 5 Rue D’Alliance, at the eastern end of the city – Jenny set off with her daughter and maid for a summer vacation in the Baroness von Westphalen’s residence in Germany, leaving Karl to make the place habitable. ‘The little house should do,’ Jenny wrote from Trier. A room would have to be set aside for childbirth, but ‘having concluded my important business on the upper floor, I shall remove downstairs again. Then you could sleep in what is now your study and pitch your tent in the immense drawing-room – that would present no difficulty. The children’s noise downstairs would then be completely shut off, you would not be disturbed upstairs, I could join you when things were quiet … What a colony of paupers there is going to be in Brussels!’ On 26 September, only a fortnight after travelling back from Trier, Jenny added to the colonial population by giving birth to another daughter, Laura.

Marx had promised the Belgian authorities not to publish anything on current politics, but thought he was quite within his rights to participate in politics and to pursue his studies in economic history. Hence the summons to Engels, by now an indispensable lieutenant. In the summer of 1845 the two men paid a six-week visit to England, partly to take advantage of the well-stocked libraries in Manchester and London but also to meet the leaders of the Chartists, the first working-class movement in the world. On their return, Engels rented a house next door to the Marxes and set about organising the socialist flotsam of Brussels into a comparable political force.

First, however, there was the small matter of Marx’s book. The research trip to Britain and the long hours he spent in Brussels’s municipal library must have raised the hopes of his publisher, Karl Leske, who was expecting the Critique of Economics and Politics by the end of the summer. But Marx had already set the manuscript aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘It seemed to me very important,’ he explained to Leske, ‘to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present … If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’

Not so: his ‘polemical piece’, The German Ideology, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. The only public demand for it came from Marx himself, who was now being caricatured by the Young Hegelians as an unthinking disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach. This infuriated him: Feuerbach’s demystification of Hegel had indeed been a glorious moment of revelation, like Keats’s first glimpse of Chapman’s Homer, but Marx had long since concluded that the critique merely substituted one myth for another. Feuerbach, the man who had turned Hegel upside down, was now due for the same treatment – or, as Marx put it, a ‘settlement of accounts’.

His exercise in philosophical bookkeeping began in the spring of 1845 when he scribbled down the brief notes now known as the Theses on Feuerbach. ‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice.’ Feuerbach had exposed the secular basis of religion, but then allowed the secular realm itself to float off into clouds of abstraction. ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking,’ Marx argued, ‘is not a question of theory but is a practical question … All social life is essentially practical … The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Theory without practice was a form of scholastic masturbation – pleasurable enough, but ultimately infertile and of no consequence. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels proceeded to spend the winter of 1845–6 theorising like billy-o as they composed their German Ideology.

The book begins with one of Marx’s attention-grabbing generalisations: ‘Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be.’ This is followed by another favourite trick, the provocative parable:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

These thinkers were sheep labouring under the delusion that they were wolves, whose vapid bleating ‘merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class’.

One sheep was Ludwig Feuerbach himself, whose conception of the world was ‘confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling’. He thus failed to notice that even the simplest natural objects are in fact products of historical circumstance. For instance: ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become a “sensuous certainty”.’ To Feuerbach, the cherry-tree was simply there, one of nature’s altruistic gifts.

Oddly enough, although the book had been intended as a settling of accounts with Feuerbach, he merited no more than a couple of short chapters. Bruno Bauer – ‘Saint Bruno’ – was dispatched with similar speed. But 300 unreadable pages were devoted to the follies of Max Stirner, an anarchic Young Hegelian author who proposed that heroic egoism and self-indulgence would liberate individuals from their imaginary oppression. Though Stirner’s existentialist credo deserved its come-uppance, a quick stiletto jab would have done the job far more effectively than Marx’s verbose sarcasm – which, ironically, looked very much like an example of the self-indulgent egoism that Stirner advocated.

For all its longueurs, however, The German Ideology is a most revealing account of what the twenty-seven-year-old Marx had learned from his philosophical and political adventures. Having rejected God, Hegel and Feuerbach in quick succession, he and Engels were now ready to unveil their own scheme of practical theory or theoretical practice – otherwise known as historical materialism. ‘The premises from which we begin,’ they announced, ‘are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life … These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.’ Whereas Feuerbach had argued that you are what you eat, Marx and Engels insisted that you are what you produce – and how you produce it. ‘The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour …’ And so on. These various refinements in the division of labour reflected the development of property – from primitive tribal property to ancient communal and state property, thence to feudal or estate property and onwards to bourgeois property. ‘The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals … It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.’ Slavery could not be abolished without the steam engine or the mule jenny, just as serfdom could not be abolished without improvements in agriculture, and in general ‘people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity’.

What would this liberation feel like? Though the new materialism of Marx and Engels was presented as the negation of idealism, their own vision of paradise turned out to be a pastoral idyll – bizarrely ironic in view of Marx’s contempt for country life, which he usually described as ‘rural idiocy’. Under the present division of labour, they noted, each man was trapped in an exclusive sphere of activity:

He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

A rather exhausting Nirvana, some might think. Engels certainly enjoyed hunting and criticising, but did his heart really thrill at the promise of postprandial cattle-rearing?

The Marxist paradise was evoked rather more enticingly in the interminable diatribe against Stirner, who had suggested that the division of labour applied only to those tasks which any reasonably trained person could perform – baking or ploughing, for instance. No one, he maintained, could have done Raphael’s works for him. This was an unfortunate example: Raphael had teams of assistants and pupils to complete his frescoes, as Marx and Engels were quick to point out. Besides, the communists didn’t believe that everyone should or could produce the work of a Raphael, but only that a potential Raphael must be allowed to develop without hindrance.

Sancho [i.e. Stirner] imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour … In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

Activities such as hunting, fishing and sheep-shearing, presumably. The question of who would clean the lavatories or hew the coal was neither asked nor answered. When a German smart aleck tried to catch him out by wondering aloud who would polish the shoes under communism, Marx replied crossly, ‘You should.’ A friend once suggested that she couldn’t imagine Marx living contentedly in an egalitarian society. ‘Neither can I,’ he agreed. ‘These times will come, but we must be away by then.’

Since its belated publication this century, extravagant claims have been made for The German Ideology as a ‘comprehensive exposition’ of the Marxist conception of history. Marx himself was more realistic about its limitations. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ he wrote, ‘all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.’ The tattered pages of the surviving manuscript do indeed appear to have been nibbled at the margin by small rodents, possibly of an unreconstructed Hegelian tendency.

Having sorted out the theory to their satisfaction, Marx and Engels moved swiftly on to the practice – ‘to win over the European, and in the first place the German, proletariat to our conviction’. And where was the German proletariat to be found? In Paris, London and Brussels, of course.

The earliest organisation of exiled German communists, the League of Outlaws, had been founded in Paris in 1834. Its members were mostly middle-class intellectuals – ‘the most sleepy-headed elements’, as Engels called them – who soon dozed off altogether. The clandestine League of the Just, which split away from it in 1836, was an altogether livelier outfit run by self-educated artisans who spent many a happy evening plotting putsches and conspiracies. Their politics, however, still amounted to little more than a vague egalitarianism derived from the eighteenth-century utopian Gracchus Babeuf. After participating in the botched Parisian uprising of May 1839 several of the League’s leaders fled to London, where they set up a respectable-sounding German Workers’ Educational Association as a front for their secret society. The most important of these figures were Karl Schapper, a burly typesetter and sometime forestry worker who had won his revolutionary spurs during the storming of a Frankfurt police station in 1833; Heinrich Bauer, a witty little cobbler from Franconia; and Joseph Moll, a watchmaker from Cologne of medium height but huge physical courage. ‘How often,’ Engels wrote, ‘did Schapper and he victoriously defend the entrance to a hall against hundreds of onrushing opponents!’ (Heroic to the last, Moll was shot dead on a German battlefield during the Baden uprising of 1849.)

Engels came to know the triumvirate while he was visiting London in 1843. They were the first working-class revolutionaries he had ever met, and to an impressionable bourgeois youngster their status as ‘real men’ easily outweighed the narrowness and naïvety of their ideology. Besides, they were undoubtedly efficient, having rebuilt the League of the Just as a thriving concern in London and created a network of supporters in Switzerland, Germany and France. Where workers’ associations were banned by law, their ‘lodges’ masqueraded as choral societies or gymnastic clubs.

Although these conspirators still looked to Paris as the mother-city of revolutions, they no longer treated French philosophy with quite the old awe or deference. For the League now had a theoretician of its own, the journeyman tailor Wilhelm Weitling, whose book Mankind As It Is and As It Ought To Be had been published by the League in 1838.

Weitling, the illegitimate son of a German washerwoman, had the pious, anguished demeanour of a martyred prophet. He would have been quite at home among the travelling chiliastic preachers of the Middle Ages, or the communist millenarian sects that flourished at the time of the English Civil War, but he had little in common with the thinkers or agitators of nineteenth-century revolution. His creed was a home-made cocktail of the Book of Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount, in which the cloying sweetness of Sunday-school homily was spiced up with a dash of fire and brimstone. When not warning of imminent Armageddon he babbled happily of a return to Eden, an Arcadia in which hatred and envy would be unknown. It was as if one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had suddenly dismounted to stroke a passing cat.

Still, there was no denying the power of his evangelism. ‘The respect he enjoyed in our circles was boundless,’ wrote Friedrich Lessner, another communist tailor from Germany. ‘He was the idol of his followers.’ And, because of his wanderings through Europe, these disciples formed an impressive multinational brigade. Escaping to Switzerland after the failed French rebellion of 1839, he established branches of the League of the Just in Geneva and Zurich which eventually brought him to the attention of Swiss officialdom. During a raid on his lodgings the police found more incriminating evidence of his wickedness – an autobiographical manuscript, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner, in which he likened himself to Jesus Christ as an impoverished outcast who had been crucified for daring to speak out against injustice. This impudence earned him six months in jail for blasphemy, followed by deportation to Germany – where he was soon arrested again, this time for deserting from the army to avoid national service. By the time he reached London, in 1844, the thirty-six-year-old tailor was a legendary figure who drew large crowds of expatriate German socialists and English Chartists with his revivalist rhetoric. In one of his favourite coups de théâtre, he would hitch up an elegant trouser leg (as a tailor himself, Weitling always wore well-cut suits) to reveal the livid scars left by the chains and shackles of his jailers.

It’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to appeal to Marx than this vain utopian dreamer, whose political programme was summarised in a toe-curling preface to his book Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom: ‘We wish to be free as the birds in the sky; we wish to dart through life like them, carefree in joyful flight and sweet harmony.’ The best way of achieving lift-off, Weitling suggested, was to recruit a 40,000-strong army of convicted thieves and robbers – who, driven on by their burning grudge against private property, would bring down the mighty from their seats and usher in a new age of peace and joy. ‘Criminals are a product of the present order of society,’ he wrote, ‘and under communism they would cease to be criminals.’ In Weitling’s earthly paradise everyone would be provided with identical clothes (designed by himself, no doubt), and those who wished to wear anything else would have to earn it by working overtime. Eating would take place in communal canteens, though policy on cutlery had still to be decided. (‘These tailors are really astounding chaps,’ Engels commented after meeting some of Weitling’s followers. ‘Recently they were discussing quite seriously the question of knives and forks.’) When people reached the age of fifty they would be removed from the labour force and dispatched to a retirement colony – a sort of communist Eastbourne, though perhaps without the bowls club.

One can almost hear Marx snorting with derision at this twaddle. But he hesitated to condemn it publicly. Although he had proclaimed in 1844, with patriotic hyperbole, that ‘the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat’, the truth was that until the mid-1840s he had met very few German workers. (‘What the proletariat does we know not and indeed could hardly know,’ Engels reminded him in March 1845.) At first, therefore, his reaction to the emergence of a truly working-class thinker from his homeland was like that of Dr Johnson to the dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all – and, consequently, you reward the performing mutt with extravagant praise. ‘Where among the bourgeoisie – including its philosophers and learned writers – is to be found a book about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie – political emancipation – similar to Weitling’s work Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom?’ Marx wondered. ‘It is enough to compare the petty faint-hearted mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and brilliant literary début of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete …’