Author: Peter Singer
Category: Nonfiction
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Chapter 1
A Life and its Impact
Marx’s impact can only be compared with that of religious figures like Jesus or Muhammad. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, nearly four of of every ten people on earth lived under governments that considered themselves Marxist and claimed – however implausibly – to use Marxist principles to decide how the nation should be run. In these countries Marx was a kind of secular Jesus; his writings were the ultimate source of truth and authority; his image was everywhere reverently displayed. The lives of hundreds of millions of people have been deeply affected by Marx’s legacy.
Nor has Marx’s influence been limited to communist societies. Conservative governments have ushered in social reforms to cut the ground from under revolutionary Marxist opposition movements. Conservatives have also reacted in less benign ways: Mussolini and Hitler were helped to power by conservatives who saw their rabid nationalism as the answer to the Marxist threat. And even when there was no threat of an internal revolution, the existence of a foreign Marxist enemy served to justify governments in increasing arms spending and restricting individual rights in the name of national security.
1. Karl Marx (1818–83)
On the level of thought rather than practical politics, Marx’s contribution is equally evident. Can anyone now think about society without reference to Marx’s insights into the links between economic and intellectual life? Marx’s ideas brought about modern sociology, transformed the study of history, and profoundly affected philosophy, literature, and the arts. In this sense of the term – admittedly a very loose sense – we are all Marxists now.
What were the ideas that had such far-reaching effects? That is the subject of this book. But first, a little about the man who had these ideas.
Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. His parents, Heinrich and Henrietta, were of Jewish origin but became nominally Protestant in order to make life easier for Heinrich to practise law. The family was comfortably off without being really wealthy; they held liberal, but not radical, views on religion and politics.
Marx’s intellectual career began badly when, at the age of seventeen, he went to study law at the University of Bonn. Within a year he had been imprisoned for drunkenness and slightly wounded in a duel. He also wrote love poems to his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. His father had soon had enough of this ‘wild rampaging’ as he called it, and decided that Karl should transfer to the more serious University of Berlin.
In Berlin Marx’s interests became more intellectual, and his studies turned from law to philosophy. This did not impress his father: ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass’ he wrote in a reproving letter (MC 33). It was, however, the death rather than the reproaches of his father that forced Marx to think seriously about a career – for without his father’s income the family could not afford to support him indefinitely. Marx therefore began work on a doctoral thesis with a view to getting a university lectureship. The thesis itself was on a remote and scholarly topic – some contrasts in the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus – but Marx saw a parallel between these ancient disputes and the debate about the interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel which was at that time the meeting ground of divergent political views in German thought.
2. Lithograph showing the young Marx (1836) at a drinking club of Trier students at the University of Bonn
The thesis was submitted and accepted in 1841, but no university lectureship was offered. Instead Marx became interested in journalism. He wrote on social, political, and philosophical issues for a newly founded liberal newspaper, the Rhenish Gazette (Rheinische Zeitung). His articles were appreciated and his contacts with the newspaper increased to such an extent that when the editor resigned late in 1842, Marx was the obvious replacement.
Through no fault of his own, Marx’s editorship was brief. As interest in the newspaper increased, so did the attentions of the Prussian government censor. A series of articles by Marx on the poverty of wine-growers in the Moselle valley may have been considered especially inflammatory; in any case, the government decided to suppress the paper.
Marx was not sorry that the authorities had, as he put it in a letter to a friend, ‘given me back my liberty’ (MC 66). Freed from editorial duties, he began work on a critical study of Hegel’s political philosophy. He also had a more pressing concern: to marry Jenny, to whom he had now been engaged for seven years. And he wanted to leave Germany, where he could not express himself freely. The problem was that he needed money to get married, and now he was again unemployed. But his reputation as a promising young writer stood him in good stead; he was invited to become co-editor of a new publication, the German– French Annals (Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher). This provided him with enough income to marry and also settled the question of where to go – for, as its name implies, the new publication was supposed to draw French as well as German writers and readers.
Karl and Jenny Marx arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1843 and soon began mixing with the radicals and socialists who congregated in this centre of progressive thought. Marx wrote two articles for the Annals. The publication was, however, even more short-lived than the newspaper had been. The first issue failed to attract any French contributors and so was scarcely noticed in Paris; while copies sent to Prussia were confiscated by the authorities. The financial backers of the venture withdrew. Meanwhile, in view of the communist and revolutionary ideas expressed in the confiscated first issue, the Prussian government issued a warrant for the arrest of the editors. Now Marx could not return to Germany; he was a political refugee. Luckily he received a sizeable amount of money from the former shareholders of the Rhenish Gazette, so he had no need of a job.
Throughout 1844 Marx worked at articulating his philosophical position. This was philosophy in a very broad sense, including politics, economics, and a conception of the historical processes at work in the world. By now Marx was prepared to call himself a communist – which was nothing very unusual in those days in Paris, for socialists and communists of all sorts could be found there then.
In the same year the friendship between Marx and Engels began. Friedrich Engels was the son of a German industrialist who also owned a cotton factory in Manchester; but Engels had become, through contacts with the same German intellectual circles that Marx moved in, a revolutionary socialist. He contributed an article to the Annals which deeply affected Marx’s own thinking about economics. So it was not surprising that when Engels visited Paris he and Marx should meet. Very soon they began to collaborate on a pamphlet – or rather Engels thought it was going to be a pamphlet. He left his contribution, about fifteen pages long, with Marx when he departed from Paris. The ‘pamphlet’ appeared under the title The Holy Family in 1845. Almost 300 pages long, it was Marx’s first published book.
Meanwhile the Prussian government was putting pressure on the French to do something about the German communists living in Paris. An expulsion order was issued and the Marx family, which now included their first child, named Jenny like her mother, moved to Brussels.
To obtain permission to stay in Brussels, Marx had to promise not to take part in politics. He soon breached this undertaking by organizing a Communist Correspondence Committee which was intended to keep communists in different countries in touch with each other. Nevertheless Marx was able to stay in Brussels for three years. He signed a contract with a publisher to produce a book consisting of a critical analysis of economics and politics. The contract called for the book to be ready by the summer of 1845. It was the first of many deadlines missed by the book that was to become Capital. The publisher had, no doubt to his lasting regret, undertaken to pay royalties in advance of receiving the manuscript. (The contract was eventually cancelled, and the unfortunate man was still trying to get his money back in 1871.) Engels also now began to help Marx financially, so the family had enough to live on.
Mar
x and Engels saw a good deal of each other. Engels came to Brussels, and then the two of them travelled to England for six weeks to study economics in Manchester, the heart of the new industrial age. (Meanwhile Jenny was bearing Marx their second daughter, Laura.) On his return Marx decided to postpone his book on economics. Before setting forth his own positive theory, he wanted to demolish alternative ideas then fashionable in German philosophical and socialist circles. The outcome was The German Ideology, a long and often turgid volume which was turned down by at least seven publishers and finally abandoned, as Marx later wrote, ‘to the gnawing criticism of the mice’. In addition to writing The German Ideology, Marx spent a good deal of these years attacking those who might have been his allies. He wrote another polemical work attacking the leading French socialist, Proudhon. Though theoretically opposed to what he called ‘a superstitious attitude to authority’ (MC 172), Marx was so convinced of the importance of his own ideas that he could not tolerate opinions different from his own. This led to frequent rows in the Communist Correspondence Committee and in the Communist League which followed it.
Marx had an opportunity to make his own ideas the basis of communist activities when he went to London, to attend a Congress of the newly formed Communist League in December 1847. In lengthy debates he defended his view of how communism would come about; and in the end he and Engels were commissioned with the task of putting down the doctrines of the League in simple language. The result was The Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848, which was to become the classic outline of Marx’s theory.
The Manifesto was not, however, an immediate success. Before it could be published the situation in Europe had been transformed by the French revolution of 1848, which triggered off revolutionary movements all over Europe. The new French government revoked Marx’s expulsion order, just as the nervous Belgian government gave him twenty-four hours to get out of the country. The Marxes went first to Paris and then, following news of revolution in Berlin, returned to Germany. In Cologne Marx raised money to start a radical newspaper, the New Rhenish Gazette (Neue Rheinische Zeitung). The paper supported the broad democratic movements that had made the revolution. It flourished for a time, but as the revolution fizzled out the Prussian monarchy reasserted itself and Marx was compelled to set out on his travels again. He tried Paris, only to be expelled once more; so on 24 August 1849 he sailed for England to wait until a more thoroughgoing revolution would allow him to return to Germany.
Marx lived in London for the rest of his life. The family was at first quite poor. They lived in two rooms in Soho. Jenny was pregnant with their fourth child (a son, Edgar, had been born in Brussels). Nevertheless Marx was active politically with the Communist League. He wrote on the revolution in France and its aftermath, and attempted to organize support for members of the Cologne Committee of the League, who had been put on trial by the Prussian authorities. When the Cologne group were convicted, notwithstanding Marx’s clear demonstration that the police evidence was forged, Marx decided that the League’s existence was ‘no longer opportune’ and the League dissolved itself.
For a while Marx lived an isolated existence, unconnected with any organized political group. He spent his time reading omnivorously and engaging in doctrinal squabbles with other left-wing German refugees. His correspondence is full of complaints of being able to afford nothing but bread and potatoes and little enough of those. He even applied for a job as a railway clerk, but was turned down because his handwriting was illegible. He was a regular client of the pawnshops. Yet Marx’s friends, especially Engels, were generous in their gifts, and it may be that Marx’s poverty was due to poor management rather than insufficient income. Jenny’s maid, Helene Demuth, still lived with the family, as she was to do until Marx’s death. (She was also the mother of Marx’s illegitimate son, Frederick, who was born in 1851; to avoid scandal, the boy was raised by foster parents.)
These were years of personal tragedy for the family: their fourth child had died in infancy; Jenny became pregnant again, and this child died within a year. The worst blow was the death of their son Edgar, apparently of consumption, at the age of eight.
From 1852 Marx received a steadier income. The editor of the New York Tribune, whom he had met in Cologne, asked him to write for the newspaper. Marx agreed, and over the next ten years the Tribune published an article by Marx almost every week (although some were secretly written by Engels). In 1856 the financial situation improved still further when Jenny received two inheritances. Now the family could move from the cramped Soho rooms to an eight-room house near Hampstead Heath, the scene of regular Sunday picnics for all the family. In this year Marx’s third daughter, Eleanor – nicknamed Tussy – was born. Although Jenny was to become pregnant one more time, the child was stillborn. From this time on, therefore, the family consisted of three children: Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor. Marx was a warm and loving father to them.
All this time Marx was expecting a revolution to break out in the near future. His most productive period, in 1857–8, resulted from his mistaking an economic depression for the onset of the final crisis of capitalism. Worried that his ideas would be overtaken by events, Marx began, as he wrote to Engels, ‘working madly through the nights’ in order to have the outlines of his work clear ‘before the deluge’ (MC 290). In six months he wrote more than 800 pages of a draft of Capital – indeed the draft covers much more ground than Capital as it finally appeared. In 1859 Marx published a small portion of his work on economics under the title Critique of Political Economy. The book did not contain much of Marx’s original ideas (except for a now famous summary of his intellectual development in the preface) and its appearance was greeted with silence.
Instead of getting the remaining, more original sections of his manuscript ready for publication, Marx was distracted by a characteristic feud with a left-wing politician and editor, Karl Vogt. Marx claimed that Vogt was in the pay of the French government. Lawsuits resulted, Vogt called Marx a forger and blackmailer, and Marx replied with a 200-page book of satirical anti-Vogt polemic. Years later, Marx was shown to have been right; but the affair cost him a good deal of money and for eighteen months prevented him writing anything of lasting value.
There was also a more serious reason for Marx’s tardiness in completing his work on economics. The International Workingmen’s Association – later known as the First International – was founded at a public meeting in London in 1864. Marx accepted an invitation to the meeting; his election to the General Council ended his isolation from political activities. Marx’s forceful intellect and strength of personality soon made him a dominant figure in the association. He wrote its inaugural address and drew up its statutes. He had, of course, considerable differences with the trade unionists who formed the basis of the English section of the International, but he showed rare diplomacy in accommodating these differences while trying constantly to draw the working-class members of the association closer to his own long-term perspective.
In 1867 Marx finally completed the first volume of Capital. Again, the initial reaction was disappointing. Marx’s friends were enthusiastic and did what they could to get the book reviewed. Engels alone wrote seven different – but always favourable – reviews for seven German newspapers. But wider recognition came slowly. In fact Marx became a well-known figure not because of Capital, but through the publication, in 1871, of The Civil War in France. Marx wrote this as an address to the International on the Paris Commune, the workers’ uprising which, after the defeat of France at the hands of Prussia, took over and ruled the city of Paris for two months. The International had had virtually nothing to do with this, but it was linked with the Commune in the popular mind. Marx’s address reinforced these early suspicions of an international communist conspiracy, and Marx himself immediately gained a notoriety which, as he wrote to a friend, ‘really does me good after the tedious twenty-year idyll in my den’ (MC 402).
The ruthless suppression of the Commune weakened the Internati
onal. Disagreements that had simmered beneath the surface now rose to the top. At the Congress of 1872, Marx found that he had lost control. A motion restricting the powers of the General Council was carried over his strong opposition. Rather than see the organization fall into the hands of his enemies, Marx proposed that the General Council should henceforth be based in New York. The motion was passed by a narrow margin. It meant, as Marx must have known it would, the end of the First International; for with communications as they then were, it was utterly impractical to run the largely European organization from across the Atlantic.
By this time Marx was fifty-four years old and in poor health. The remaining ten years of his life were less eventful. Further inheritances had by now ended any threat of poverty. In many respects the Marxes’ life now was like that of any comfortably-off bourgeois family: they moved to a larger house, spent a good deal on furnishing it, sent their children to a ladies’ seminary, and travelled to fashionable Continental spas. Marx even claimed to have made money on the stock exchange – which did not stop him asking for, and receiving, further gifts of money from Engels.
Marx’s ideas were spreading at last. By 1871 a second edition of Capital was needed. A Russian translation appeared in 1872 – Marx was very popular among Russian revolutionaries – and a French translation soon followed. Though Capital was not translated into English during Marx’s lifetime (like his other books, it was written in German) Marx’s growing reputation, even among the untheoretical English, was indicated by his inclusion in a series of pamphlets on ‘Leaders in Modern Thought’. Marx and Engels kept up a correspondence with revolutionaries throughout Europe who shared their views. Otherwise Marx worked desultorily on the second and third volumes of Capital, but never got them ready for publication. This task was left to Engels after Marx’s death. The last important work Marx wrote arose from a congress held in Gotha, in Germany, in 1875. The purpose of the congress was to unite rival German socialist parties, and to do this a common platform was drawn up. Neither Marx nor Engels was consulted about this platform – known as ‘the Gotha Program’ – and Marx was angry at the many deviations it contained from what he considered to be scientific socialism. He wrote a set of critical comments on the Program, and attempted to circulate it among German socialist leaders. After Marx’s death this Critique of the Gotha Program was published and recognized as one of Marx’s rare statements on the organization of a future communist society. At the time, however, Marx’s critique had no influence, and the planned unification went ahead.