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III

If what'iVfarx required was a complete plan of action, based on the study of history and observation of the contemporary scene, he must have found himself singularly out of sympathy with the reformers and prophets who gathered in the salons and cafes of Paris at the time of his arrival. They were, indeed, more intelligent, more politically influential and more responsible than the cafe philosophers of Berlin, but to him they seemed either gifted visionaries like Robert Owen, reformist liberals like Ledru Rollin, or, like Mazzini, both at once, unprepared, in the last resort, to do anything for the working class; or else they were sentimental petit bourgeois idealists in disguise, sheep in wolves’ clothing like Proudhon or Louis Blanc, whose ideals might indeed be at least partially attainable, but whose gradualist, unrevolutionary tactics showed them to be radically mistaken in their estimates of the enemy’s strength, and who were, consequently, to be fought all the more assiduously as the internal, often quite unconscious, enemies of the Revolution. Nevertheless he learnt much from them which he did not acknowledge, notably from Louis Blanc, whose book on the organization of labour influenced him in his view of the evolution and correct analysis of industrial society.

He was attracted far more strongly to the party, which, to distinguish itself from the moderates who came to be called socialists, adopted the name of communists. Neither was a party in the modern sense of the word : both consisted of loosely associated groups and individuals. But whereas the former consisted predominantly of intellectuals, the latter was almost

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entirely composed of factory workers and small artisans, the majority of whom were simple and self-educated men, exasperated by their wrongs and easily converted to the necessity of a revolutionary conspiracy to abolish privilege and private property, a doctrine preached by Babeuf’s disciples Blanqui and Barbas, both implicated in the abortive rising of 1839. Marx was impressed in particular by Auguste Blanqui’s organizing capacity and by the boldness and violence of his convictions; but he thought him lacking in ideas, and excessively vague as to the steps to be taken after the successful result of the coup d’etat. He found a similarly irresponsible attitude among the other advocates of violence, the most notable of whom, the itinerant German tailor Weitling and the Russian exile Bakunin, he knew well at this time. Only one among the revolutionaries whom he met in Paris seemed to him to display a genuine undet- standing of the situation. This was a certain Friedrich Engels, well-to-do young German radical, son of a cotton manufacturer in Barmen. They met in Paris over the publication of economic articles by Engels in Marx’s journal. The meeting proved decisive for both; it was the beginning of a remarkable career of friendship and collaboration which lasted during the remainder of their lives.

Engels began life as a radical poet and journalist and ended it, after the death of Marx, as the acknowledged leader of international socialism, which, in his own lifetime, had grown into a world movement. He was a man of solid and robust, but hardly creative mind; a man of exceptional integrity and strength of character, of many varied gifts, but in particular endowed with a remarkable capacity for the rapid assimilation of knowledge.

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He possessed a shrewd and lucid intellect and a firm sense of reality which few, if any, among his radical contemporaries could claim. Himself little capable of original discovery, he had an exceptional talent for sifting, assessing and perceiving the practical applicability of the discoveries of others. His knack of writing rapidly and clearly, his unbounded loyalty and patience, made him an ideal ally and collaborator for the inhibited and difficult Marx, whose own writing was often clumsy, overcharged and obscure. In his own lifetime Engels desired no better fate than to live in the light of Marx’s teaching, perceiving in him a spring of original genius which gave life and scope to his own peculiar gifts; with him he identified himself and his work, to be rewarded by sharing in his master’s immortality. Before they met he had independently ai rived at a position not unlike that of Marx, and in later years understood his friend’s new, only half articulated, ideas sometimes better than he understood them himself, and clothed them in language more attractive and intelligible to the masses than Marx’s often tortuous style. Most important of all, he possessed a quality essential for permanent intercourse with a man of Marx’s temperament, a total uncompetitiveness in relation to him, absence of all desire to resist the impact of that powerful personality, to preserve and retain a protected position of his own; on the contrary, he was only too eager to receive his whole intellectual sustenance from Marx unquestion- ingly, like a devoted pupil, and repaid him by his sanity, his enthusiasm, his vitality, his gaiety and, finally, in the most literal sense, by supplying him with means of livelihood at moments of desperate poverty. Marx, who like many intellectually creative men was himself

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haunted by a perpetual feeling of insecurity, and was morbidly thin-skinned and jealously suspicious of the least sign of antagonism to his person or his doctrines, required at least one person who understood his outlook, in whom he could confide completely, on whom he could lean as heavily and as often as he wished. In Engels he found a devoted friend and intellectual ally, whose very pedestrianism restored his sense of perspective and his belief in himself and his purpose. Throughout the greater part of his life his actions were performed m the knowledge that this massive and dependable man was always at hand to support the burden in every contingency. For this he paid him with an affection, and a sense of pride in his qualities, which he gave to no one else beside his wife and children.

They met in the autumn of 1844 after Engels had sent him for publication in his periodical a sketch of a critique of the doctrines of the liberal economists. Marx had hitherto vaguely counted Engels among the Berlin intellectuals, an impression which their only previous meeting had failed to dispel. He now wrote to him at once: the result w'as a meeting in Paris in the course of which the similarity of their views on the fundamental issues became clear to both. Engels, who had been travelling in England and had published a classical description of the condition of the English working class, disliked sentimental socialism of the school of Sismondi even more acutely than Marx. He provided that for which Marx had long been looking, a rich supply of concrete information about the actual state of affairs in a progressive industrial community, to act as the material evidence for the broad historical thesis which was rapidly crystallizing in Marx’s mind. Engels, on

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the other hand, found that Marx gave him what he had been lacking, a solid framework within which to fit his facts, so as to make of them a weapon against the prevalent abstractions upon which, in his opinion, no serious revolutionary philosophy could be based. The effect which the meeting with Marx had upon him must have resembled that which it had made earlier on the more impressionable Hess. It heightened his vitality, clarified his hitherto undeveloped political ideas, provided him with a sense of definite orientation, an ordered view of society within which he could work with the assurance of the concrete, attainable character of the revolutionary goal. This, after aimless wandering in the intricate maze of the young Hegelian movement, must have resembled the beginning of a new life, and, indeed, such for him it proved to be. Their immense correspondence which lasted for forty years was, from the very beginning, at once familiar and businesslike in tone; neither was greatly given to introspection; both were entirely occupied with the movement which they were engaged in creating and which became much the most solid reality of their lives. Upon this firm and reliable foundation was built a unique friendship, free from all trace of possessiveness, patronage or jealousy. Neither ever referred to it without a certain shyness and embarrassment; Engels was conscious of receiving far more than he gave, living in a mental universe created and furnished by Marx out of his own inner resources. When Marx died, he looked upon himself as its appointed guardian, jealously protecting it against all attempts at reform by the reckless and impatient younger generation of socialists.

The two years which Marx passed in Paris were the

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first and last occasion in his life on which he met, and was on terms of friendly intercourse with, men who were his equals, if not in intelligence, at any rate in the originality of their personalities and their lives. After the debacle of 1848, which broke the spirit of all but the strongest characters amongst the radicals, decimated them by death, imprisonment and transporation, and left the majority listless or disillusioned, he withdrew into an attitude of aggressive isolation, preserving contact only with men who had proved their personal loyalty to the cause with which he was identified. Henceforth Engels was his chief of staff; the rest he treated openly as subordinates.

The portrait of him which emerges from the memoirs of those who were his friends at this time, Ruge, Frcili- grath, Heine, Annenkov, is that of a bold and energetic figure, a vehement, eager, contemptuous controversialist, applying to everything his cumbrous and heavy Hegelian weapons, but, in spite of the clumsiness of the mechanism, revealing an acute and powerful intellect, the quality of which even those who were most hostile to him—and there were few prominent radicals whom he had failed to wound and humiliate in some fashion—in later years acknowledged freely.

He met and formed a warm friendship with the poet Heine, whose superb intelligence he valued highly, and in whom he saw a more genuinely revolutionary poet than Herwegh or Freiligrath, both, at this time, idolized by the radical youth of Germany; and he was on good terms with the circle of Russian liberals, some among them genuine rebels, others cultivated aristocratic dilettanti, connoisseurs of curious men and situations. One of these, an agreeable flaneur called Annenkov for


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whom Marx conceived a liking, has left a brief description of him at this time: ‘Marx belonged to the type of men who are all energy, force of will and unshakable conviction. With a thick black mop of hair on his head, with hairy hands and a crookedly buttoned frock coat, he had the air of a man used to commanding the respect of others. His movements were clumsy but self-assured. His manners defied the accepted conventions of social intercourse and were haughty and almost contemptuous. His voice was disagreeably harsh, and he spoke of men and things in the tone of one who would tolerate no contradiction, and which seemed to express his own firm conviction in his mission to sway men’s minds and dictate the laws of their being.’ Another, and far more remarkable member of this circle, was the celebrated Michael Bakunin, upon whom his meeting with Marx in Paris at this time had a more lasting effect. Bakunin had left Russia at approximately the same period as Marx had left Germany and for much the same reason. He was at this time an ardent ‘critical’ Hegelian, a passionate enemy of Czarism and all absolutist government. He had a generous, extravagant, wildly impulsive character, a rich, chaotic, unbridled imagination, a passion for the violent, the immense, the sublime, a hatred of all discipline and institutionalism, total lack of all sense of personal property, and, above all, a savage and overwhelming desire to annihilate the narrow society of his time, in which, like Gulliver in Lilliput, the human individual was suffocating for wartt of room to realize his faculties to their fullest and noblest extent. His friend and compatriot Alexander Herzen, who at once admired him and was intensely irritated by him, said of him in his memoirs :

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‘Bakunin was capable of becoming anything—an agitator, a tribune, a preacher, the head of a party, a sect, a heresy. Put him where you like, so long as it always is the most extreme point of a movement, and he will fascinate the masses and sway the destinies of peoples . . . but in Russia this Columbus without America and without a ship, having served, greatly against his will, a year or two in the artillery, and aher that another year or so in the Moscow Hegelians, longed desperately to tear himself away from a land where every form of thought was prosecuted as evil-mindedness and independence of judgement or speech was looked upon as an insult to public morality.’ t He was a marvellous mob orator, consumed with a genuine hatred of injustice and a burning sense of his mission to rouse mankind to some act of magnificent collective heroism which would set it free for ever; and he exercised a personal fascination over men, blinding them to his irresponsibility, his mendacity, his fundamental weakness, in the overwhelming revolutionary enthusiasm which he communicated. He was not an original thinker, and easily absorbed the views of others; but he was an inspired teacher, and, although his entire creed amounted to no more than a passionate belief in the need for destruction of all authority and the freeing of the oppressed, he built on this alone a movement which lived on long after his death.

Bakunin differed from Marx as poetry differs from prose; the political connexion between them rested on inadequate foundations and was very shortlived. Their main bond was a common hatred of every form of reformism; but it sprang from dissimilar roots. Gradualism to Marx was always a disguised attempt on the part of

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the ruling class to deflect their enemies’ energy into ineffective and harmless channels: a policy which the clearer heads among them knew to be a deliberate stratagem, while the rest were themselves deceived by it, as much taken in as the radical reformers, whose fear of violence was itself a form of unconscious sabotage of their professed ends. Bakunin detested reform because he held that all frontiers limiting personal liberty were intrinsically evil, and all destructive violence, when aimed against authority, was good in itself, inasmuch as it was a fundamental form of creative self-expression. On this ground he was passionately opposed to the aim accepted by both Marx and the reformists, namely the replacement of the status quo by a centralized state socialism, since, according to him, this was a new form of tyranny at once meaner and more absolute than the personal and class despotism it was intended to supplant. This attitude had as its emotional basis a temperamental dislike of ordered forms of life in normal civilized society, a discipline taken for granted in the ideas of western democrats, but which to a man of his luxuriant imagination, chaotic habits and hatred of all restraints and barriers, seemed colourless, petty, oppressive and vulgar. An alliance built on an almost complete absence of common aims could not last long: the orderly, rigid, unimpressionable Marx- regarded Bakunin as half charlatan, half madman, and his views as absurd and barbarian. He saw in Bakunin’s doctrine a development of the wild individualism for which he had already condemned Stirner: but whereas Stirner was an obscure instructor in a High School for girls, a politically ineffective intellectual, neither capable nor ambitious of stirring the masses, Bakunin was a resolute man of


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action, an adroit and fearless agitator, a magnificent orator^-a dangerous megalomaniac consumed by a fanatical' desire for power fully equal to that which possessed Marx himself.

Bakunin recorded his view of Marx many years later in one of his political tracts. ‘M. Marx’, he wrote, ‘is by origin a Jew. He unites in himself all the qualities and defects of that gifted race. Nervous, some say, to the point of cowardice, he is immensely malicious, vain, quarrelsome, as intolerant and autocratic as Jehovah, the God of his fathers, and like Him, insanely vindictive.

‘There is no lie, no calumny, which he is not capable of using against anyone who has incurred his jealousy or his hatred; he will not stop at the basest intrigue if, in his opinion, it will serve to increase his position, his influence and his power.

‘Such are his vices, but he also has many virtues. He is very clever, and widely learned. In about 1840 he was the life and soul of a very remarkable circle of radical Hegelians—Germans whose consistent cynicism left far behind even the most rabid Russian nihilists. Very few men have read so much and, it may be added, have read so intelligently, as M. Marx. . . .

‘Like M. Louis Blanc, he is a fanatical state-worshipper —triply so, as a Jew, a German and a Hegelian—but where the former, in place of argument, uses declamatory rhetoric, the latter, as behoves a learned and ponderous German, has embellished this principle with all the tricks and fancies of the Hegelian dialectic, and with all the wealth of his many-sided learning.’

Their mutual hatred became more and more evident as time went on: outwardly friendly relations continued

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uneasily for some years, saved from complete rupture by the reluctant and apprehensive respect which each had for the formidable qualities of the other. When the conflict ultimately did break out it all but destroyed the work of both, and did incalculable damage to the cause of European socialism.

If Marx treated Bakunin as an equal, he did not conceal his contempt for the other famous agitator, Wilhelm Weitling, whom he met at this time. A tailor by profession, a wandering preacher by calling, this earnest and fearless German visionary was the last and most eloquent descendant of the men who raised peasant revolts in the late Middle Ages, and whose modern representatives, for the most part artisans and journeymen, congregated in secret societies dedicated to the cause of revolution; there w7ere branches in many industrial towns in Germany and abroad, scattered centres of political disaffection round which there accumulated many victims and casualties of the social process, men violently embittered by their wrongs and confused as to their cause and remedy, but united by a common sense of grievance and a common desire to eradicate the system which had destroyed their lives. In his books, A Poor Sinner’s Gospel and Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, W'eitling advocated a class war of the poor against the rich, with open terrorism as its chief weapon; and, in particular, the formation of shock troops out of the most deeply wronged and, therefore, the most abandoned and fearless elements in society—the outlaws and criminals—who would fight desperately to avenge themselves on the class which had dispossessed them, for a new and uncompetitive world in which they would begin new lives. Weitling’s belief in the solidarity

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of the workers of all lands, his personal stoicism, the years which he spent in various prisons and, above all, the fervent evangelical zeal of his writings, attracted to him many devoted followers among his fellow- artisans, and made him, for a brief period, a figure of European magnitude. Marx, who cared nothing for sincerity when it wras misdirected and particularly disliked itinerant prophets and the vague emotionalism with which they inevitably infected serious revolutionary work, nevertheless conceded Weitling’s importance. His conception of an open declaration of war against the ruling class by desperate men who had nothing to lose and everything to gain, the personal experience which lay behind his denunciations and moved his audiences, his emphasis on the economic realities, and attempt to penetrate the deceptive fa£ade of political parties and their official programmes, above all his practical achievement in creating the nucleus of an international communist party, impressed Marx profoundly. Weitling’s detailed doctrines, however, he treated with open, contempt, and, justly believing him. to be muddled, hysterical and a source of confusion in the party, set himself to expose his ignorance publifh and lower his prestige in every possible fashion. An account has been preserved of a meeting in Brussels in 1846 in the course of which Marx demanded to be told W’eitling’s concrete proposals to the working class. When the latter faltered, and murmured something about the uselessness of criticism carried on in the study, far from the suffering world, Marx struck the table, shouted, ‘Ignorance has never yet helped anyone’, and stormed out of the room. They never met again.


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His relation to Proudhon was altogether more complicated. While still in Cologne he had read the book which first made Proudhon’s name famous, What is Properly?, and praised the brilliance of its style and the courage of its author. In 1843 everything appealed to him which revealed a revolutionary spark, anything which sounded clear and resolute and openly advocated the overthrow of the existing system. Soon, however, he became convinced that Proudhon’s approach to social problems, for all his declared admiration for Hegel, was ultimately not historical but moral, that his praise and condemnation was directly based on his own absolute ethical standards, and ignored altogether the historical importance of institutions and systems. From this moment he conceived him as merely another French bourgeois moralist, and lost all respect for his person and his doctrines.

At the time of Marx’s arrival in Paris, Proudhon was at the height of his reputation. By origin a peasant from Besan^on, by profession a typesetter, he was a man of narrow, obstinate, fearless, puritanical character, a typical representative of the French lower middle class which, after playing an active part in the final overthrow of the Bourbons, found it had merely succeeded in changing masters, and that the new government of bankers and large industrialists, from whom Saint- Simon had taught them to expect so much, had merely increased the tempo of their destruction.

The two forces which Proudhon conceived as fatal to social justice and the brotherhood of man were the tendency towards the accumulation of capital which led to the continual increase of inequalities of wealth, and the tendency directly connected with it, which openly


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united political authority with economic control, and so was designed to secure a growth of a despotic plutocracy under the guise of free liberal institutions. The state became, according to him, an instrument designed to dispossess the majority for the benefit of a small minority, a legalized form of robbery, which systematically deprived the individual of his natural right to property by giving to the rich alone control of social legislation and financial credit, while the petite bourgeoisie was helplessly expropriated. Proudhon’s best known book, which opens with the statement that all property is theft, has misled many as to his mature views. Early in life he held that all property is as misappropriation ; later, however, he taught that a minimum of property was required by every man in order to maintain his personal independence, his moral and social dignity: a system, under which this minimum w'as lost, under whose laws a man could, by a commercial transaction, barter it away, and so, in effect, sell himstlf into economic slavery to others, was a system which legalized and encouraged theft, theft of the individual's elementary rights without which he had no means of pursuing his proper ends. The principal cause of this process Proudhon perceived in the unchecked economic struggle between individuals, groups, social orders, which necessarily leads to the domination of the ablest and best organized, and of those least restrained by a sense of moral or social duty, over the mass of the community. This represents die triumph of unscrupulous force allied to tactical skill over reason and justice; but for Proudhon, who was not a determinist, there was no historical reason why this situation should continue indefinitely. Competition, the favourite panacea of


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