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marx, Herr Vogt.

Marx arrived in London in 1849 expecting to stay in England for a few weeks, perhaps months: and in the event lived there uninterruptedly until his death in 1883. The isolation of England intellectually and socially from the main currents of continental life had always been great, and the middle years of the nineteenth century offered no exception. The issues which shook the Continent took many years to cross the English Channel, and when they did, did so in some new and peculiar shape, transformed and anglicized in the process of transition. Foreign revolutionaries were on the whole left unmolested, provided they behaved themselves in an orderly and inconspicuous manner, but neither was any kind of contact established with them. Their hosts treated them with correctness and civility, mingled with a mild indifference to their affairs which at once irritated and amused them. Revolutionaries and men of letters, who for many years had spent their lives in a ferment of intellectual and political activity, found the London atmosphere inhumanly cold. The sense of total isolation and exile was brought home to them even more sharply by the benevolent, distant, often slightly patronizing manner in which they were treated by the few Englishmen with whom they came into contact; and while this tolerant and civilized attitude did indeed create a vacuum, in which it was


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possible to recover physically and morally after the nightmare of 1849, the verY distance from events which created this feeling of tranquillity, the immense stability which the capitalist regime appeared to possess in England, the complete absence of any symptom of revolution, at times tended to induce a sense of hopeless stagnation which demoralized and embittered all but very few of the men engaged in it. In the case of Marx desperate poverty and squalor were added factors in desiccating his never unduly romantic or pliant character. While these years of enforced inactivity benefited him as a thinker and a revolutionary, they caused him to retire almost entirely inLo the narrow circle composed of his family, Engels, and a few intimate friends, such as Liejiknecht, Wolff and Freiligrath. As a public personality his natural harshness, aggressiveness, and jealousy, his desire to crush all rivals, increased with years; his dislike of the society in which he lived became more and more acute and his personal contact with individual members of it more and more difficult: he quarrelled easily and disliked reconciliation. While he had Engels to lean on he required no other help; and towards the end of his life when the respect and admiration which he received were at their highest, no one else dared to approach him too closely for fear of some particularly humiliating rebuff. Like many great men he liked flattery, and even more, total submission: in his last years he obtained both in full measure, and died in greater honour and material comfort than he had enjoyed during any previous period of his life.

These were the years in which romantic patriots, like Kossuth or Garibaldi, were feted and publicly cheered in the streets of London; they were regarded as

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The movement was badly organized. Its leaders neither agreed among themselves nor possessed individually, and still less collectively, clear beliefs as to the ends to be set before their followers, or the means to be adopted for their realization. The most steadfast members of the movement were those trade unionists of the future, who were principally anxious to improve the conditions and wages of labour, and were interested in wider questions only so far as they concerned their particular cause. It is doubtful whether a serious revolutionary movement could under any circumstances have been created out of this peculiar amalgam. As it was, nothing happened. It may have been the specious relief afforded by the great Reform Bill, or the power of Nonconformity which originally stemmed the tide. At any rate by 1850 the great crisis which had begun in 1847 was over. It was succeeded by the first consciously recognized economic boom in European history, which enormously increased the rate of development of industry and commerce and extinguished the last embers of the Chartist conflagration. Organizers and agitators remained to fight the workers’ wrongs, but the exasperated years of Peterloo and the Tolpuddle martyrs, which, in the grim and moving pamphlets of Hodgskin and Bray, and the savage irony of William Cobbett, have left a bitter record of stupid oppression and widespread social ruin, were insensibly giving way to the milder age of John Stuart Mill and the English positivists with their socialist sympathies, the Christian Socialism of the sixties, and the essentially non-political trade-unionism of such prudent and cautious opportunists as Cremer or Lucraft, who distrusted the attempts of foreign doctrinaires to teach them their own business.


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Marx naturally began by establishing contact with the German exiles. London at this time contained a conflux of German emigres, members of the dissolved revolutionary committees, exiled poets and intellectuals, vaguely radical German artisans who had settled in England long before the revolution and active communists lately expelled from France or Switzerland, who attempted to reconstitute the Communist League and to renew relations with sympathetic English radicals. Marx followed his usual tactics and kept rigidly to the society of the Germans; he believed firmly that the revolution was not over: indeed he remained convinced of this until the coup d’etat which placed Louis Napoleon on the throne of France. Meanwhile he spent what he regarded as a mere lull during the battle in the normal activities of political exile, attending meetings of refugees, and quarrelling endlessly with those who incurred his suspicion. The cultured and fastidious Herzen, who was in London at this time, conceived a violent dislike for him, and in his memoirs gave a malicious and brilliant description of the position occupied by Marx and his followers then and later, among the other political emigres. The Germans in general were notoriously incapable of co-operating with the other exiles, Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, whose lack of method and passion for intense personal relations shocked and disgusted them. The latter, for their part, found the Germans equally unattractive; they disliked their woodenness, their coarse manners, their colossal vanity, above all their sordid and unceasing internecine feuds, in the course of which it was usual for intimate details of private life to be dragged into the open and brutally caricatured in the public Press.


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The disasters of 1848 did not indeed shake Marx’s theoretical beliefs, but they forced him seriously to revise his political programme. In the years 1847-8 he was so far influenced by the propaganda of Weitling and Blanqui as to begin to believe, against his natural, Hegelian, inclination, that a successful revolution could be made only by means of a coup d’etat, carried out by a small and resolute body of trained revolutionaries, who having seized power, would hold it, constituting themselves the executive committee of the masses in whose name they would act. This body would function as the spear-head of the proletarian attack. The broad masses of the working class after years of bondage and darkness cannot be expected to be ripe either for self- government, or for the control and liquidation of the forces they have displaced. A party must therefore be formed which shall function as a political, intellectual, and legislative elite ot the people, enjoying its confidence in virtue of its disinterestedness, its superior training and its practical insight into the needs of the immediate situation, able to guide the people’s uncertain steps during the first period of its new freedom. This necessary interlude he termed the state of permanent revolution, during which there is the class dictatorship of the proletariat over the rest ‘as a necessary intermediate step to the abolition of all class distinctions, to the abolition of all the existing productive relations upon which these distinctions rest, to the abolition of all social relations which correspond to these productive relations, and to the complete reversal of all ideas which derive from these social relations’. But here, although the end is clear, the means are left comparatively vague. The ‘permanent revolution’ is to be brought about by the


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dictatorship of the proletariat: but how is this stage to be effected and what form is it to take? There is no doubt that by 1848 Marx thought of it in terms of a self- appointed Hite: not indeed working in secret, or headed by a single dictatorial figure, as advocated by Bakunin, but as Babeuf had conceived it in 1796, a small body of convinced and ruthless individuals, who were to wield dictatorial power and educate the proletariat until it reached a level at which it comprehended its proper task. It was as a means to this that he advocated in Cologne in 1848-9 a temporary alliance with the leaders of the radical bourgeoisie. The petite bourgeoisie struggling against the pressure of the classes immediately above it is the workers’ natural ally at this stage: but being unable to rule by its own strength, it will become more and more dependent on the workers’ support, until the moment arrives at which the workers, already economic masters of the situation, acquire the official forms of political power, whether by a violent coup, or by gradual pressure. This doctrine is familiar to the world because it was adopted by Lenin and was put into practice with the most literal fidelity by him and by Trotsky in Russia in 1917. Marx himself, however, in the light of the events of 1848, abandoned it, at any rate in practice, in vital respects. He discarded the whole conception of the ilite, which seemed to him powerless to effect anything in the face of a hostile regular army and a supine and untrained proletariat. The leaders of the workers were devoid neither of courage nor of practical sense, yet it would plainly have been quite impossible for them to remain in power in 1848 against the combined force of the royalists, the army and the upper middle class. Unless the proletariat as a whole is made conscious of its


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historic part, its leaders are helpless. They may provoke an armed rising, but cannot hope to retain its fruits without conscious and intelligent support from the majority of the working class. Consequently, the vital lesson which the events of 1848 contain is, according to Marx, that the first duty of a revolutionary leader is to disseminate among the masses the consciousness of their destiny and their task. Inevitably this is a lengthy and laborious process, but unless it is performed, nothing will be achieved, save the squandering of revolutionary energy in sporadic outbursts led by adventurers and hot-heads, which, having no real basis in the popular will, must inevitably be defeated after a short period of triumph, by the recovered forces of reaction, and be followed by brutal repression which cripples the proletariat for many years to come. On this ground he denounced, on the eve of its occurrence, the revolution which resulted in the Paris Commune of 1871 : although later, and largely for tactical motives, he wrote it a moving and eloquent epitaph.

The second point on which he radically changed his views was the possibility of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Theoretically, he still believed that the dialectic of history necessitated a petit bourgeois regime as a prelude to complete communism; but the strength of this class in Germany and France, and its open determination to protect itself against its proletarian ally, convinced him that a compact with it would militate against the workers as the weaker power: the plan to govern from behind the scenes could not be realized yet. This had been the chief point of difference between him and the Cologne communists who had opposed alliance with the liberals as being suicidal

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opportunism. He now embraced their point of view himself, although not for their reasons: not, that is to say, because opportunism as such was morally degrading or necessarily self-defeating, but because it was in this particular case bound to be unsuccessful, to confuse issues in a party not too securely organized, and so lead to internal weakness and defeat. Hence his continued insistence in later years on preserving the purity of the party, and its freedom from any compromising entanglements. The policy of gradual expansion and the slow conquest of political power through recognized parliamentary institutions, accompanied by systematic pressure on an international scale upon employers through trade unions and similar organizations, as a means of securing improved economic conditions for their workers, which characterizes the tactics of socialist parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the legitimate product of Marx’s analysis of the causes of the catastrophe of the revolutionary year 1848.

His main objective—the creation of conditions in which the dictatorship of the proletariat, ‘the permanent revolution’, might be realized—was left unaffected: the bourgeoisie and all its institutions were inevitably doomed to extinction. The process might take longer than he had originally supposed; if so, the proletariat must be taught patience; not until the situation itself is ripe for intervention must the leaders call for action: in the meanwhile it must devote itself to husbanding, organizing and disciplining its forces into readiness for the decisive crisis. History has offered a very curious commentary on this conclusion: the makers of the communist revolution in Russia, by acting in accordance

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with the earlier and discarded view, and striking while the popular masses were palpably unripe for their task, did, at any rate, succeed in averting the consequences of 1848 and 1871: while the orthodox German and Austrian social democrats, faithful to the master’s final doctrine, by moving carefully and with caution, and expending their energy upon the education of the masses to a sense of their mission, were duly overwhelmed by the re-organized reactionary class, whose strength the march of history, and constant sapping on the part of the proletariat, should long before have finally undermined.

Meanwhile no sign of revolution could be detected anywhere, and the mood of irrational optimism was succeeded by one of profound depression. ‘One cannot recollect those days without acute pain’, wrote Herzen in his memoirs. ‘. . . France was moving with the velocity of a falling star towards the inevitable coup d’etat. Germany lay prostrate at the feet of Czar Nicholas, dragged down by wretched, betrayed Hungary. . . . The revolutionaries carried on empty agitation. Even the most serious persons are sometimes overcome by the fascination of mere forms, and manage to convince themselves that they are in fact doing something if they hold meetings with a mass of documents and protocols, conferences at which facts are recorded, decisions are taken, proclamations are printed, and so forth. The bureaucracy of the revolution is capable of losing itself in this sort of thing just as much as real officialdom: England teems with hundreds of associations of this sort: solemn meetings take place which dukes and peers of the realm, clergymen and secretaries, ceremoniously attend: treasurers collect funds, journalists write

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articles, all are busily engaged in doing nothing at all. These philanthropic or religious gatherings fulfil the double function of serving as a form of amusement and acting as a sop to the troubled consciences of these somewhat worldly Christians. . . . The whole thing was a contradiction in terms: an open conspiracy, a plot concocted behind open doors.’

In the sultry atmospheie of continual intrigue, suspicion and recrimination which fills the early years of any large political emigration whose members are bound to each other by circumstances rather than by any clearly conceived common cause, Marx spent his first two years in London. He resolutely declined to have any dealings with Herzen, Mazzini and their associates, but he was not inactive. He edited the Neue Rheinische Zeilung as a review, organized committees to help refugees, published a highly successful denunciation of the methods of the police in the Cologne trials of his associates, tracking down and exposing the gross forgeries and perjury perpetrated by its agents; which, if it did not free his comrades, made trials of the same kind more difficult in the future; carried on a vendetta against Willich within the Communist League, and, believing that an institution which promotes half-truths is more dangerous than total inactivity and is better dead, by remorseless intrigue brought about its dissolution. Having thus successfully torpedoed his own former associates, and feeling nothing but contempt for the rest of the emigration as a collection of ineffective and harmless chatterers, he constituted himself and Engels as an independent centre of propaganda, a personal union round which the broken and scattered remnants of German Communism would gradually be gathered into

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a force once more. The plan was completely successful.

His most important writings of this period are concerned with the recent events in France: his style, often opaque and obscure when dealing with abstract issues, is luminous when dealing with facts. The essays on the Class Struggle in France, and the articles reprinted under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, are models of penetrating and cruel pamphleteering. The two pamphlets cover much of the same ground and give a brilliant, polemical description of the revolution and the second republic, analysing in detail the relations and interplay of the political, economic and personal factors, in terms of the alignment of classes whose needs they embody. In a series of sharp, epigrammatic sketches the leading representatives of the various parties are classified and assigned to the classes on whose support they depend. The evolution of the political situation from vague liberalism to the conservative republic, and thence to the open class-struggle, ending in naked despotism, is represented as a travesty of the events of 1789: then every successive phase was more violent and revolutionary than the last; in 1848 the exact reverse occurred: in June the proletariat was deserted and betrayed by its petit bourgeois allies; later those were in their turn abandoned by the middle class; finally they too were outmanoeuvred by the great landowners and financiers and delivered into the hands of the army and Louis Napoleon. Nor could this have been prevented by a different policy on the part of individual politicians since it was the inescapable result of the stage of historical development reached by French society at this time.

Marx’s other activities at this period included popular


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lectures on political economy to the German Workers’ Educational Union, and finally a considerable correspondence with the German revolutionaries now scattered everywhere, and notably with Engels, who reluctantly and unhappily, having no other means of supporting himself, made his peace with his parents and settled down in Manchester to work in the office of his father’s firm of cotton-spinners. The comparative security which he obtained by this .means he used to support Marx, materially and intellectually, during, the remainder of his life- Marx’s own financial position was for many years desperate: he had no regular source of income, a growing family, and a reputation which precluded the possibility of employment by any respectable concern. The squalid poverty in which he and his family lived during the next twenty years, and the unspeakable humiliations which this entailed, have often been described: at first the family wandered from one hovel to another, from Chelsea to Leicester Square and thence to the disease-ridden slums of Soho; often there was no money to pay the tradesmen and the family would literally starve until a loan or the arrival of a pound note from Engels temporarily eased the situation; ' sometimes the entire clothing of the family was in pawn, and they were forced to sit for hours without light or food, interrupted only by the visits of dunning creditors, who were met on the doorstep by one or other of the children with the unvarying and automatic answer, ‘Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.’

A lively description of the conditions in which he lived during the first seven years of exile survives in the report of a Prussian spy who somehow contrived to worm his way into the Dean Street establishment:

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KARL MARX

. . He lives in one of the worst and cheapest neighbourhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, everything is broken, tattered, and torn, with thick dust over everything . . . manuscripts, books and newspapers lie beside the children’s toys, bits and pieces from his wife’s sewing basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, pipes, tobacco ash—all piled up on the same table. On entering the room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that at first you seem to be groping about in a cavern—until you get used to it, and manage to make out certain objects in the haze. Sitting down is a dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, there another which happens to be whole, on which the children are playing at cooking. That is the one that is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking is not removed, and if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers. But all these things do not in the least embarrass Marx or his wife. You are received in the most friendly way and are cordial])’ offered pipes, tobacco, and whatever else there may happen to be. Presently a clever and interesting conversation arises which repays for all the domestic deficiencies and this makes the discomfort bearable . . .’x

A man of genius forced to live in a garret, to go into hiding when his creditors grow importunate, or to lie in bed because his clothes are pawned, is a conventional subject of gay and sentimental comedy. Marx was not a bohemian, and his misfortunes affected him tragically.