Karl Marx

His job in Paris, which seemed to promise financial security, turned out to be even more temporary than his last editorship. Only one issue of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher appeared before the breach with Ruge became irreparable – and it scarcely lived up to the cross-border promise of its title. Though France was well supplied with writers, not one of them was willing to contribute. To fill the gap, Marx included his essays on the Jewish question and on Hegel, together with an edited version of his correspondence with Ruge over the previous year or two. The only non-German voice was that of an exiled Russian anarcho-communist, Michael Bakunin. ‘Marx was then much more advanced than I was,’ he recalled. ‘He, although younger than I, was already an atheist, an instructed materialist, and a conscious socialist … I eagerly sought his conversation, which was always instructive and witty, when it was not inspired by petty hate, which alas! was only too often the case. There was, however, never any frank intimacy between us – our temperaments did not permit. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious and sly, and I was right too.’

For all its obvious deficiencies, the first and last issue of the Jahrbücher did have one contributor of international stature – the romantic poet Heinrich Heine, whom Marx had revered since childhood and befriended soon after arriving in Paris. Heine was a painfully thin-skinned creature who often burst into tears at the slightest criticism; Marx was a pitiless critic of magnificent insensitivity. For once, however, he restrained his icon-smashing inclinations, in deference to a genuine hero of literature. Heine became a regular visitor to the Marxes’ apartment in the Rue Vanneau, reading aloud from works in progress and asking the young editor to suggest emendations. On one occasion he arrived to find Karl and Jenny frantic with worry over little Jennychen, who had an attack of the cramps and was – or so they believed – at death’s door. Heine took charge at once, announcing that ‘the child must have a bath’. And so, according to Marx family legend, the girl’s life was saved.

Heine was not a communist, at least in the Marxian sense. He cited the tale of a Babylonian king who thought himself God but fell miserably from the height of his conceit to crawl like an animal on the ground and eat grass: ‘This story is found in the great and splendid Book of Daniel. I recommend it for the edification of my good friend Ruge, and also to my much more stubborn friend Marx, and also to Messrs Feuerbach, Daumer, Bruno Bauer, Hengstenberg, and the rest of the crowd of godless self-appointed gods.’ He contemplated the victory of the proletariat with dread, fearing that art and beauty would have no place in this new world. ‘The more or less clandestine leaders of the German communists are great logicians, the most powerful among them having come from the Hegelian school,’ he wrote in 1854, referring to Marx. ‘These doctors of revolution and their relentlessly determined pupils are the only men in Germany with some life in them and the future belongs to them, I fear.’ Shortly before his death in 1856 he wrote a last will and testament begging forgiveness from God if he had ever written anything ‘immoral’, but Marx was prepared to overlook this lapse into piety – which in anyone else would have provoked his most savage scorn. As Eleanor Marx wrote, ‘He loved the poet as much as his works and looked as generously as possible on his political weaknesses. Poets, he explained, were queer fish and they must be allowed to go their own ways. They should not be assessed by the measure of ordinary or even extraordinary men.’

The Jahrbücher may have been a financial disaster but it enjoyed great succès d’estime, not least because of Heinrich Heine’s satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria. Hundreds of copies sent to Germany were confiscated by the police, who had been warned by the Prussian government that its contents were an incitement to high treason. An order went out that Marx, Ruge and Heine should be arrested at once if they attempted to return to their fatherland. In Austria, Metternich promised ‘severe penalties’ against any bookseller caught stocking this ‘loathsome and disgusting’ document.

Arnold Ruge, taking fright, left Marx in the lurch by suspending publication and refusing to pay him the promised salary. Some historians have claimed that the quarrel needn’t have become terminal ‘had not other personal differences, especially on fundamental matters of principle, been developing between them for some time’. But in fact the most ‘fundamental matter of principle’ was a ridiculous squabble over the sex life of their colleague Georg Herwegh, who had already betrayed his new bride by starting an affair with the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, a former mistress of the composer Liszt and mother of the girl who became Cosima Wagner. ‘I was incensed by Herwegh’s way of living and his laziness,’ Ruge wrote to his mother. ‘Several times I referred to him warmly as a scoundrel, and declared that when a man gets married he ought to know what he is doing. Marx said nothing and took his departure in a perfectly friendly manner. Next morning he wrote to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future. My calling him a scoundrel filled him with indignation, and my ideas on marriage were philistine and inhuman. Since then we have not seen each other again.’

Although Marx often railed against promiscuity and libertinism with the puritanical ferocity of a Savonarola – if only to disprove the charge that communism was synonymous with communal sex – he observed the amorous escapades of his friends with amusement and, perhaps, a touch of envy. Jenny certainly feared as much. ‘Although the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak,’ she wrote from Trier in August 1844, two months after leaving her husband alone in Paris. ‘The real menace of unfaithfulness, the seductions and attractions of a capital city – all those are powers and forces whose effect on me is more powerful than anything else.’ She needn’t have worried. Among the seductions and attractions of Paris, the rustle of a countess’s skirt could not begin to compete with the clamour of politics. In the summer of 1844 Marx took up an offer to write for Vorwärts!, a biweekly communist journal sponsored by the composer Meyerbeer and now edited by Karl Ludwig Bernays, who had collaborated on the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher.

As the only uncensored radical paper in the German language appearing anywhere in Europe, Vorwärts!, provided a refuge for all the old gang of émigré poets and polemicists, including Heine, Herwegh, Bakunin and Arnold Ruge. Once a week they would gather at the first-floor office on the corner of the Rue des Moulins and the Rue Neuve des Petits for an editorial conference presided over by Bernays and his publisher, Heinrich Börnstein, who recalled:

Some would sit on the bed or on the trunks, others would stand and walk about. They would all smoke terrifically and argue with great passion and excitement. It was impossible to open the windows, because a crowd would immediately have gathered in the street to find out the cause of the violent uproar, and very soon the room was concealed in such a thick cloud of tobacco smoke that it was impossible for a newcomer to recognise anyone present. In the end, we ourselves could not even recognise each other.

Which was probably just as well, if both Marx and Ruge were in attendance: otherwise the ‘violent uproar’ might have degenerated into fisticuffs.

The two enemies continued their feud in the public prints instead. In July 1844, signing himself merely ‘A Prussian’, Ruge wrote a long article for Vorwärts! about the Prussian King’s brutal suppression of the Silesian weavers, who had smashed the machines which were threatening their livelihoods. He regarded the weavers’ revolt as an inconsequential nothing, since Germany lacked the ‘political consciousness’ necessary to transform an isolated act of disobedience into a full-dress revolution.

Marx’s reply, published ten days later, argued that the fertiliser of revolutions was not ‘political consciousness’ but class consciousness, which the Silesians had in abundance. Ruge (or ‘the alleged Prussian’, as Marx called him) thought that a social revolution without a political soul was impossible; Marx dismissed this ‘nonsensical concoction’, maintaining that all revolutions are both social and political in so far as they dissolve the old society and overthrow the old power. Even if the revolution occurred in just one factory district, as with the Silesian weavers, it still threatened the whole state because ‘it represents man’s protest against a dehumanised life’. This was too optimistic by half. The only lasting influence of the revolt was that it inspired one of Heine’s most celebrated verses, ‘The Song of the Silesian Weavers’, which was published in the same issue of Vorwärts!.

‘The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French proletariat its politician,’ Marx wrote in his riposte to Ruge, prefiguring a later assessment by Engels that Marxism itself was a hybrid of these three bloodlines. The twenty-six-year-old Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French socialism; now he set about educating himself in the dismal science. During the summer of 1844 he read his way systematically through the main corpus of British political economy – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill – and scribbled a running commentary as he went along. These notes, which run to about 50,000 words, were not discovered until the 1930s, when the Soviet scholar David Ryazanov published them under the title Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. They are now more commonly known as the Paris manuscripts.

Marx’s work has often been dismissed as ‘crude dogma’, usually by people who give no evidence of having read him. It would be a useful exercise to force these extempore critics – who include the present British prime minister, Tony Blair – to study the Paris manuscripts, which reveal the workings of a ceaselessly inquisitive, subtle and undogmatic mind.

The first manuscript begins with a simple declaration: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.’ From this premiss all else follows. The worker has become just another commodity in search of a buyer; and it isn’t a seller’s market. Whatever happens, the worker loses out. If the wealth of society is decreasing, the worker suffers most. But what of a society which is prospering? ‘This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition takes place among the capitalists. The demand for workers outstrips supply. But …’

But indeed. Capital is nothing more than the accumulated fruits of labour, and so a country’s capitals and revenues grow only ‘when more and more of the worker’s products are being taken from him, when his own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist’ – rather as an intelligent chicken (if such an unlikely creature existed) would be most conscious of its impotence when at its most fertile, laying dozens of eggs only to see them snatched away while still warm.

Furthermore, in a prosperous society there will be a growing concentration of capital and more intense competition. ‘The big capitalists ruin the small ones and a section of the former capitalists sinks into the class of the workers which, because of this increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes ever more dependent on the handful of big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists has fallen, competition for workers hardly exists any longer, and because the number of workers has increased, the competition among them has become all the more considerable, unnatural and violent.’

So, Marx concludes, even in the most propitious economic conditions, the only consequence for the worker is ‘overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital’. The division of labour makes him more dependent still, introducing competition from machines as well as men. ‘Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor.’ Finally, the accumulation of capital enables industry to turn out an ever greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of a job or by reducing their wages to a pittance. ‘Such,’ Marx concluded with bleak irony, ‘are the consequences of a condition of society which is most favourable to the worker, i.e. a condition of growing wealth. But in the long run the time will come when this state of growth reaches a peak. What is the situation of the worker then?’ Pretty miserable, you won’t be surprised to learn.

The odds were hopelessly stacked in capital’s favour. A big industrialist can sit on the products of his factory until they fetch a decent price, whereas the worker’s only product – the sweat of his brow – loses its value completely if it is not sold at every instant. A day’s missed toil is as worthless in the market as yesterday morning’s newspaper, and can never be recovered. ‘Labour is life, and if life is not exchanged every day for food it suffers and soon perishes.’ Unlike other commodities, labour can be neither accumulated nor saved – not by the labourer, at any rate. The employer is more fortunate, since capital is ‘stored-up labour’ with an indefinite shelf-life.

The only defence against capitalism was competition, which raises wages and cheapens prices. But for this very reason the big capitalists would always try to thwart or sabotage competitiveness. Just as the old feudal landlords operated a monopoly of land – for which the demand was almost limitless, but the supply finite – so the new breed of industrialists sought a monopoly of production. It was therefore foolish to conclude, as Adam Smith had, that the interest of the landlord or the capitalist is identical with that of society. ‘Under the rule of private property, the interest which any individual has in society is in inverse proportion to the interest which society has in him, just as the interest of the moneylender in the spendthrift is not at all identical with the interest of the spendthrift.’

Marx had a strong if critical respect for Smith and Ricardo. As with Hegel, he used their own words and logic to expose the shortcomings of their theories. And the most obvious shortcoming was this: ‘Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain it.’ Classical economists treated private property as a primordial human condition, rather as theology explained the existence of evil by reference to man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world.

But there was nothing fixed or immutable about it. Already, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees: the aristocracy of money had supplanted the aristocracy of land. ‘We refuse to join in the sentimental tears which romanticism sheds on this account,’ Marx commented sternly. Feudal landowners had been inefficient boobies who made no attempt to extract the maximum profit from their property, basking in the ‘romantic glory’ of their noble indifference. It was thoroughly desirable that this benign myth should be exploded, and that ‘the root of landed property – sordid self-interest – should manifest itself in its most cynical form’. By reducing the great estates to mere commodities, with no arcadian mystique, capitalism was at least transparent in its intentions. The medieval motto nulle terre sans seigneur (no land without its master) gave way to a more vulgar but honest admission: l’argent n’a pas de maître (money knows no master).

Under this tyranny, almost everyone and everything is ‘objectified’. The worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. His labour thus becomes a separate, external being which ‘exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien’. No Marxian scholar or critic has drawn attention to the obvious parallel with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. (In view of Marx’s fascination with the Promethean legend, one might also note the novel’s subtitle: A Modern Prometheus.) While suffering from an eruption of boils in December 1863, Marx described one particularly nasty specimen as ‘a second Frankenstein on my back’. ‘It struck me as a good theme for a short story,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘From the front, the man who regales his inner man with port, claret, stout and a truly massive mass of meat. From the front, the guzzler. But behind, on his back, the outer man, a damned carbuncle. If the devil makes a pact with one to sustain one with consistently good fare in circumstances like these, may the devil take the devil, I say.’ Marx mentioned this pustulent incubus to his daughter Eleanor, who was eight years old at the time. ‘But it is your own flesh!’ she pointed out.

The concept of self-alienation was drummed into Marx’s children from infancy, mainly through the fairy stories which he invented to amuse them. ‘Of the many wonderful tales [he] told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle”,’ Eleanor wrote in a memoir:

It went on for months and months; it was a whole series of stories … Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always ‘hard up’. His shop was full of the most wonderful things – of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds, as numerous as Noah got into the ark, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore – much against the grain – constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures – always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop.

Easy enough in a fairy tale. But how could a worker recover the fruits of labour without recourse to magic? For Hegel, alienation had been simply a fact of life, the shadow that falls between the conception and the creation, between the desire and the spasm. Once an idea had become an object – whether a machine or a book – it was ‘externalised’ and thus divorced from its producer. Estrangement was the inevitable conclusion of all labour.

For Marx, alienated labour was not an eternal and inescapable problem of human consciousness but the result of a particular form of economic and social organisation. A mother, for instance, isn’t automatically estranged from her baby the moment it emerges from the womb, even though parturition is undoubtedly an example of Hegel’s ‘externalisation’. But she would feel very alienated indeed if, every time she gave birth, the squealing infant was immediately seized from her by some latter-day Herod. This, more or less, was the daily lot of the workers, forever producing what they could not keep. No wonder they felt less than human. ‘The result is,’ Marx observed, in a characteristic paradox, ‘that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his most animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than an animal.’

What was the alternative? By the time he wrote the Paris manuscripts, in 1844, Marx already had a formidable talent for spotting the structural faults of society – the rising damp, the rotted timbers, the joists that couldn’t sustain the weight placed on them – and explaining why the wrecking ball was urgently required. But his skills as a surveyor and demolisher were not yet matched by any great architectural vision of his own. ‘The supersession of private property is … the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes,’ he wrote. ‘Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity – a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created.’ Communism alone could resolve the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man. ‘It is the solution to the riddle of history,’ he announced, with a grandiloquent flourish, ‘and knows itself to be the solution.’

Maybe so; but what exactly was it? Unable to elaborate on his rather vague humanism, Marx preferred to say what it was not. No solution to the riddle of history could be found in the petty-bourgeois platitudes of Proudhon (‘his homilies about home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities’), or in the pipe-dreams of egalitarians such as Fourier and Babeuf, who – driven by ‘envy and desire to level down’ – would not abolish private property but merely redistribute it. Their imaginary Happy Valley was ‘a community of labour and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist’. Material possession would still be the purpose of existence, the only difference being that all men – including the former capitalists – would be reduced to the category of ‘worker’. And what of the women? Since marriage was itself a form of exclusive private property, presumably the crude communists intended that ‘women are to go from marriage into general prostitution’ – thus becoming the property of all. Marx recoiled in horror from this ‘bestial’ prospect.

One can see why the attempt at communal living with Herr and Frau Ruge was so unsuccessful. For all his mockery of bourgeois morals and manners, Marx was at heart a supremely bourgeois patriarch. When drinking or corresponding with male friends, he loved nothing better than a dirty joke or a titillating sexual scandal. In mixed company, however, he displayed a protective chivalry that any Victorian paterfamilias would have admired. ‘As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and restless character, is the gentlest and mildest of men,’ a police spy observed with surprise in the 1850s. The German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht – his companion on many a pub-crawl – found Marx’s prudishness touching and rather comical. ‘Although in political and economic discussion he was not wont to mince his words, often making use of quite coarse phrases, in the presence of children and of women his language was so gentle and refined that even an English governess could have had no cause for complaint. If in such circumstances the conversation should turn upon some delicate subject, Marx would fidget and blush like a sixteen-year-old maiden.’

In August 1844, while Jenny was still on her extended maternity leave in Trier and Karl toiled alone over his economic notebooks at their apartment in the Rue Vanneau, the twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels passed through Paris en route from England to Germany. Although the two men had met once before – when Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung on 16 November 1842 – it had been a cool and unmemorable encounter: Engels was wary of the impetuous young editor who ‘raves as if ten thousand devils had him by the hair’, as Edgar Bauer had forewarned him; Marx was equally suspicious, guessing that since Engels lived in Berlin he was probably an accomplice to the Free Hegelian follies of the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer. Engels redeemed himself soon afterwards by moving from Berlin to Manchester, and was allowed to write several articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, but what really stirred Marx’s interest was a brace of essays submitted to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – a review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, and a lengthy Critique of Political Economy which Marx described as a work of genius. One can see why: though he had already decided that abstract idealism was so much hot air, and that the engine of history was driven by economic and social forces, Marx’s practical knowledge of capitalism was nil. He had been so engaged by his dialectical tussle with German philosophers that the condition of England – the first industrialised country, the birthplace of the proletariat – had escaped his notice. Engels, from his vantage point in the cotton mills of Lancashire, was well placed to enlighten him.