Delhi university library

¹ Quoted from Karl Marx, Man and Fighter, by B. Nicol- aievsky and O. Maenchen-Helfen.




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He was proud, excessively thin-skinned, and made great demands upon the world: the petty humiliations and insults to which his condition exposed him, the frustration of his desire for the commanding position to which he thought himself entitled, the repression of his colossal natural vitality, made him turn in upon himself in paroxysms of hatred and of rage. His bitter feeling often found outlet in his writings and in long and savage personal vendettas. He saw plots, persecution, and conspiracies everywhere; the more his victims protested their innocence, the more convinced he became of their duplicity and their guilt.

His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. ‘I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing’, he wrote in 1858. ‘Everything that these gentlemen [the doctors] say boils down to the fact that one ought to be a prosperous rentier and not a poor devil like me, as poor as a church mouse.’ Engels, whose annual income during those years does not appear to have exceeded one hundred pounds, with which, as his father’s representative, he had to keep up a respectable establishment in Manchester, could not, with all his generosity, afford much systematic help at first: occasionally, friends in


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Cologne, or generous German socialists like Liebknecht or Freiligrath, managed to collect small sums for him, which, together with fees for occasional journalism, and occasional small legacies from relatives, enabled him to continue on the very brink of subsistence. It is not therefore difficult to understand that he hated poverty, and the vicious slavery and degradation which it entails, more passionately even than servility. The descriptions scattered in his works of life in industrial slums, in mining villages or plantations, and of the attitude of civilized opinion towards them, are given with a combination of violent indignation and frigid, wholly unhysterical bitterness, which, particularly when his account grows detailed and his tone grows unnaturally quiet and flat, possess a frightening quality and induce intolerable anger and shame in readers left unmoved by the fiery rhetoric of Carlyle, by the dignified and humane pleading of J. S. Mill, or by the sweeping eloquence of William Morris and the Christian Socialists. During these years thme of his children, his two sons Guido and* Edgar, and his daughter Eranziska died, largely as a result of the conditions in which they lived. When Franziska died he had no money to pay for a coffin, and was rescued only by the generosity of a French refugee. The incident is described in harrowing detail in a letter written by Frau Marx to a fellow exile. She was herself often ill, and the children were looked after by their devoted family servant, Helene Demuth, who remained with them until the end.

‘I could not and cannot fetch the doctor’, he wrote to Engels on one of these occasions, ‘because I have no money for the medicine. For the last eight or ten days I have fed my family on bread and potatoes, and

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to-day it is still doubtful whether I shall be able to obtain even these.’

He was uncommunicative by nature, and less than anyone who has ever lived given to self-pity; indeed, in his letters to Engels he sometimes satirized his own misfortunes with a grim irony which may conceal from the casual reader the desperate condition in which he frequently found himself. But when in 1856, his son Edgar, of whom he was very fond, died at the age of six, it broke through even his iron reserves ‘I have suffered every kind of misfortune’, he wrote to his friend, ‘but I have only just learnt what real unhappiness is ... in the midst oTaH the suffering which I have gone through in "these days the thought of you, and your friendship, and the hope that we may still have something reasonable to do in this world, has kept me uprights. . .

‘Bacon says that really important people have so many contacts with nature and the world, have so much to interest them, that they easily get over any loss. I am not of those important people. My child’s death has affected me so greatly that I feel the loss as bitterly as on the first day. My wife is also completely broken down.’

z The only form of pleasure which the family could allow itself was an occasional picnic on Hampstead Heath during the summer months. They used to set out on Sunday morning from the house in Dean Street, and, accompanied by the faithful Lenchen Demuth and one or two friends, carrying a basket of food and newspapers bought on the way, walked to Hampstead. There they would sit under the trees, and while the children played or picked flowers, their elders would talk or read or sleep. As the afternoon wore on, the mood grew gayer

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and gayer, particularly when the jovial Engels was present. They made jokes, sang, ran races, Marx recited poetry, which he was fond of doing, took the children for rides on his back, entertained everyone, and, as a final turn, would solemnly mount and ride a donkey up and down in front of the party: a sight which never failed to give general pleasure. At nightfall they would walk back, often singing patriotic German or English songs on their way home to Soho. These agreeable occasions were, however, few and rare, and did little to lighten what Marx himself in one of his letters to Engels called the sleepless night of exile.

To this condition some slight relief was brought by the sudden invitation to write regular articles on affaiis in Europe for the New York Daily Tribune. The offer was made by Charles Augustus Dana, its foreign editor, who had been introduced to Marx by Freiligrath in Cologne in 1849, and was greatly impressed by his political shrewdness. The New York Tribune was a radical newspaper, founded by a group of American followers of Fourier, which had at this period a circulation of over 200,000 copies, then probably the greatest of any newspaper in the world; its outlook was broadly progressive : in internal affairs it pursued an anti-slavery, free trade policy, while in foreign affairs it attacked the principle of autocracy, and so found itself in opposition to virtually every government in Europe. Marx, who stubbornly refused offers of collaboration with Continental journals the tendency of which he thought reactionary, accepted this offer with alacrity. The new correspondent was to be paid one pound sterling per article. For nearly ten years he wrote weekly dispatches for it roaming over a wide field of subjects, which are

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of some interest even now. Dana’s first request to him was to write a series of articles on the strategy and tactics of both armies during the civil war in Germany and Austria, together with general comments on the art of modern warfare. As Marx was entirely ignorant of the latter subject and had at this period very little English, he found the request far from easy to fulfil: but to refuse anything which offered a steady if meagre source of income was unthinkable. In his perplexity he turned to Engels, who, as on so many occasions in later life, readily and obligingly wrote the articles and signe^ them with Marx’s name. Henceforward, whenever the subject was unknown or uncongenial to him, or he was prevented from working by absence or ill-health, Engels was called upon, and performed his task with such efficiency that the Tribune’s London correspondent soon acquired a considerable popularity in America as an exceptionally versatile and well-informed journalist, with a definite public of his own.

Engels’s articles on the German revolution were reprinted as a pamphlet by Marx called The German Revolution and Counter Revolution, and end with the assurance that the revolution is about to break out with even greater violence in the near future. Later the friends admitted they were over-optimistic. Marx formulated the celebrated generalization that only an economic slump can lead to a successful revolution; thus the revolution of 1848 was nurtured in the economic collapse of 1847, and the boom of 1851 removed all hope of imminent political conflagration.

Henceforth the attention of both is concentrated upon detecting symptoms of a major economic crisis. Engels from his office in Manchester filled his letters

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with information about the state of world markets; gold losses by the Bank of England, the bankruptcy of a Hamburg bank, a bad harvest in France or America, are noLed exultantly as indicating that the great crisis cannot be far off. In 1857 a genuine slump did at last occur on the required scale. It was not, however, except in agricultural Italy, followed by any revolutionary developments. After this there is less mention of inetit- able crises, and more discussion of the organization of a revolutionary party. The acute disappointment had fcft its effect.

While Engels dealt with the military intelligence required by the American public, Marx published a rapid succession of articles on English politics, internal and external, on foreign policy, on Chartism, and the character of the various English ministries, which he became expert at summing up in a few malicious sentences, usually at the expense of The Times, which always remained his bugbear. He wrote a good deal about the English rule in India and in Ireland. India was, he declared, bound in any case to have been conquered by a stronger power:

‘The question is not whether the English had any right to conquer India, but whether we should have preferred her to have been conquered by Turks or Persians, or Russians. . . . Of course it is impossible to compel the English bourgeoisie to want the emancipation or improvement of the social condition of the Indian masses, which depends not only on the development of the forces of production, but on the ownership of them by the people. But what it can do is to create the material conditions for the realization of this double need.’


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And again: ‘However melancholy we may find’, he wrote in 1853, ‘the spectacle of the ruin and desolation of these tens of thousands of industrious, peaceful, patriarchal, social groups . . . suddenly cut off from their ancient civilization and their traditional means of existence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities . . . always provided a firm basis to oriental despotism, confining the human intelligence within the narrowest limits, making of it the obedient traditional instrument of superstition, stunting its growth, robbing it ... of all capacity of historical activity; let us not forget the egoism of barbarians who, concentrated on an insignificant portion of earth’s surface, watched unmoved while immense empires crumbled, unspeakable cruelties were committed, the populations of entire cities were butchered—observed this as if they were events in nature, and so themselves became the helpless victims of every invader who happened to tu^n his attention to them. ... In causing social revolution in India, England was, it is true, guided by the lowest motives, and conducted it dully and woodenly. But that is not the point. The question is whether humanity can fulfil its purpose without a complete social revolution in Asia. If not, then England, in spite of all her crimes, was the unconscious instrument of history in bringing about this revolution.’

Of Ireland he said that the cause of English labour was inextricably bound up with the liberation (k Ireland, whose cheap labour was a continual threat to the English unions; her economic subjection, as in the analogous cases of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the United States, must be abolished before Ireland’s English masters, among whom the English working

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class (who treated the Irish much as the ‘poor whites’ of the Southern states of America treated the negroes) must be included, could hope to emancipate themselves and create a free society. In both cases he consistently underestimated the force of rising nationalism: his hatred of all separatism, as of all institutions founded on some purely traditional or emotional basis, blinded him to their actual influence. In a similar spirit Engels, writing of the Czechs, observed that the nationalism of the Western Slavs was an artificially preserved, unreal phenomenon, which could not long resist the advance of the superior German culture. Such absorption was a fate inevitably in store for all small and local civilizations, in virtue of the force of historical gravitation which causes the smaller to be merged in the greater: a tendency which all progressive parties should actively encourage. Both Marx and Engels believed that nationalism, together with religion and militarism, were so many anachronisms, at once the by-products and the bulwarks of the capitalist order, irrational, counterrevolutionary forces which, with the passing of their material foundation, would automatically disappear. Marx’s own tactical policy with regard to them was to consider whether in a given case they operated for or against the proletarian cause, and to decide in accordance with this criterion alone, whether they were to be supported or attacked. Thus he favoured it in India and in Ireland, because it was a weapon in the fight against imperialism, and attacked the democratic nationalism of Mazzini or Kossuth because in such countries as Italy, Hungary or Poland, it seemed to him to work merely for the replacement of a foreign by a native system of capitalist exploitation, and so to obstruct


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the social revolution. Among English politicians he attacked Russell as a pseudo-radical who betrayed his cause at every step, but his beie noire was undoubtedly Palmerston, whom he accused of being a disguised Russophile, and mocked for his sentimental support of small nationalities in Europe. He was, however, a connoisseur of political skill in all its forms, and confessed to a certain admiration of the elan and adroitness with which that cynical and light-hearted statesman carried off his most unscrupulous strokes.

His attacks on Palmerston brought him into contact with an exceedingly odd and remarkable figure. David Urquhart had in his youth been in the Diplomatic Service, and after becoming a warm Philhellene in Athens had been transferred to Constantinople, where he conceived a violent and life-long passion for Islam and the Turks, the ‘purity’ of whose constitution he admired, and for the Church of Rome, with which he remained on excellent terms, although he was born and died a Calvinist; with this he combined an equally violent hatred for Whigs, free trade, the Church of England, industrialism, and, in particular, the Russian Empire, whose malevolent and omnipotent influence he regarded as responsible for all the evils in Europe. This eccentric figure, a picturesque survival from a more spacious age, sat in Parliament as an Independent for many years, and published a newspaper and numerous tracts devoted almost entirely to the single purpose of exposing Palmerston, whom he accused of being a hired agent of the Czar, engaged in a life-long attempt to subvert the moral order of Western Europe in his master’s interest. Even Palmerston’s attitude during the Crimean War did not shake him: he explained it as a cunning

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ruse to cloak the nature of his real activities; hence his deliberate sabotage of the entire campaign, which was clearly designed to do Russia as little damage as possible. Marx, who had somehow arrived at the same curious conclusion, was no less genuinely convinced of Palmerston’s venality. The two men met and formed an alliance; Urquhart published anli-Palmerstonian pamphlets by Marx while Marx became an official Urquhartite, contributed to Urquhart’s paper and appeared on the platforms of his meetings. His articles were later published as pamphlets. The most peculiar are Palmerston, What Has He Done? and The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, both of which were devoted to exposing the hidden hand of Russia in all major European disasters. Each was under the impression that he was skilfully using the other for his own ends: Marx thought Urquhart a harmless monomaniac of whom use might be made; Urquhart, for his pait, thought highly of Marx’s abilities as a propagandist, and on one occasion congratulated him on possessing an intelligence worthy of a Turk. This bizarre association continued harmoniously, if intermittently, for a number of years. After the deaths of Palmerston and Czar Nicholas, the alliance was gradually dissolved. Marx obtained a good deal of amusement, and as much financial help as he could extract, from his relationship with his strange patron, of whom he soon grew quite fond; indeed, the latter was unique among his political allies in that their relation continued to be entirely friendly until Urquhart’s death.

Marx found few sympathizers among the trade union leaders. The ablest of them had either become followers of Owen, who by the shining example of his own

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achievements, sought to prove the wicked baselessness of the doctrine of class war: or else, like Harney, were busy local labour leaders working for the immediate needs of this or that trade or industry, dead to wider issues, prepared to welcome all radicals equally in a federation called ‘The Fraternal Democrats’, the very name of which revolted Marx. The only Englishman who stood at all close to him in those days was Ernest Jones, a revolutionary Chartist, who made a vain attempt to revive that dying movement. Jones was born and brought up in Germany and resembled more closely than anyone else in England the type of continental socialist familiar to Marx; his views were too similar to those of the ‘True Socialists’ Hess and Griin to please Marx entirely, but he needed allies, the choice was limited, and he accepted Jones as the best and most advanced that England had to offer. Jones, who conceived a great admiration and affection for Marx and his household, supplied him with a great deal of information about English conditions; it was he who turned Marx’s attention to the land enclosures which still went on in Scotland where many hundreds of small tenants and crofters had been evicted to make room for deer parks and pasture. The result was a vitriolic article by Marx in the New Tork Tribune on the private affairs of the Duchess of Sutherland, who had expressed sympathy for the cause of the Negro slaves in America. The article, which is a sketch for the longer passage in Kapital, is a masterpiece of bitter and vehement eloquence, directly descended from the masterpieces of Voltaire and Marat, and a model for many later pieces of socialist invective. The attack is not so much personal as directed at the system under which a capricious old woman no

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more deranged, heartless, and vindictive than the majority of her immediate society, has it in her absolute power, with the full approval of her class and of public opinion, to humiliate, uproot and ruin an entire population of honest and industrious men and women, rendered destitute overnight in a land which was rightfully theirs, since all that was man-made in it they and their ancestors had created by their labour.

Such pieces of social analysis and polemic pleased the American public no less than Marx’s dry and ironical articles on foreign affairs. The articles were well- informed, shrewd and detached in tone: they showed no particular power of prescience, nor was there any attempt to give a comprehensive survey of contemporary affairs as a whole: as a commentary on events they weie less candid and less interesting than the letters which their author wrote to Engels at this period, but as journalism they were in advance of their time. Marx’s method was to present his readers with a brief sketch of events or characters, emphasizing hidden interests and the sinister activity likely to result from them, rather than the explicit motives furnished by the actors themselves, or the social value of this or that measure or policy. This gives his journalism a highly twentieth-century flavour, and exhibits more vividly than his theoretical writings, the genuine difference between his naturalistic, acid, distrustful, ethically neutral attitude, and that of the great majority of the more or less humanitarian and idealistic social historians and critics of his time. At the same time he wras engaged in gathering material for the economic treatise which should serve as a weapon against the vague idealism of the loosely connected radical groups, which, in his view, led to confusion bolh

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of thought and of action, and paralysed the efforts of such few clear-headed leaders as the workers possessed. He applied himself to the task of establishing, in the place of this, a rigorous doctrine, unambiguous in theory and definite in practice, adherence to which would become at once the test, the reason and the guarantee of a united, and, above all, active body of social revolutionaries. Their strength would derive from their unity, and their unity from the coherence of the practical beliefs which they had in common.

The foundations of his doctrine were embodied in his previous writings, notably in the Communist Manifesto. In a letter written in 1852 he carefully stated what he regarded as original in it: ‘What I did that was new was to prove' (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat', (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’ On these foundations the new movement was to be built.