Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

'Do not imagine that these petty sufferings have bent me. I know only too well that our struggle is no isolated one, that I belong to the favoured and the fortunate, since my dear husband, the mainstay of my life, is still at my side. The only thing that really crushes me and makes my heart bleed is all the pettinesses that he has to suffer, the fact that so few have come to his aid, and that he, who has so willingly and gladly helped so many, should be helpless here. But you are not to think, my dear Herr Weydemeyer, that we are making claims on anyone. The only thing that my husband might have expected of those who have had so many ideas, so much encouragement, so much support from him was that they might have devoted more practical energy to his Review, might have taken a greater interest in it. I am proud and bold enough to suggest this. That little I think they owed him. But my husband thinks otherwise. Never, even at the most terrible times, has he lost his confidence in the future, or even his cheerful humour."

In the middle of May Marx and his family moved to Soho, the quarter where the most poverty-stricken refugees lived. He rented two small rooms in Dean Street, and there he lived for six years, in a noisy, dirty street, in a neighbourhood where epidemic after epidemic raged. In 1854 the cholera was worse in Soho than anywhere else. Three of his children died there. Those were unspeakably dreadful years.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue brought Marx in less than thirty thalers in all, and it was impossible to go on with it. Marx sold his library, which he had left in Cologne, got into debt, pawned everything that was not nailed fast. After the miscarriage of their literary plans Engels could no longer remain in London. He returned to 'fiendish commerce' in the autumn of 1853 and went to Manchester, to his father's cotton-mill, where he worked at a moderate salary as an ordinary employee. Engels's conviction that the revolution would soon free him from his 'Egyptian bondage' enabled him to tolerate a life he hated. But his chief aim was to help Marx. Marx, the brains of the revolutionary party, the genius, in comparison with whom he felt his own gifts to be merely talents, must not be allowed to perish in poverty-stricken refugeedom. For twenty long years Engels worked at a job he hated, abandoning his own scientific work in order to make possible the work of his friend. He wrote newspaper articles for him and gave him as much money as he could. During the early years this was not a great deal. Engels's salary increased only gradually, and he had considerable social responsibilities of his own. He had to maintain a 'respectable' household, and another in which he lived with an Irish daughter of the people named Mary Burns, and he kept Mary's relatives as well, but every pound he could possibly spare was sent to Marx, whose position became more and more desperate every month. In the autumn of 1850 Marx seriously considered the idea of emigrating to America, where he hoped to be able to found a German paper. Rothacker, who had taken part in the rising in Baden, was asked to prepare the ground among friends and acquaintances in New York. He wrote to Marx in November, saying that the prospects were as bad as they could possibly be. The immediate prospects in London, whatever they were, were better than they were in New York. Little Guido died, 'a sacrifice to bourgeois misery,' as Marx said to Engels. A daughter, Franziska, was born in March, 1851. When she died, barely one year old, Marx was forced to borrow money from a French émigré to pay for the coffin.

Marx wished to continue the review as a quarterly, but the publisher refused. Marx devoted all his energy to his book on economics. He and his friends in Germany spent months negotiating with every conceivable publisher, but not one of them was willing to have anything to do with him. Marx's name alone was sufficient to put them into a panic. Hermann Becker tried to get Marx's Collected Essays published in Cologne. One volume appeared and that was all. Marx offered the publishers a pamphlet on Proudhon, then a translation of Misère de la Philosophie; he offered to contribute to periodicals and was willing to write 'completely innocuous' articles. But all his suggestions were declined. Had friends--notably the excellent Daniels--not helped him, he would have starved in 1851. 'You can well imagine that the situation is very gloomy,' Marx wrote to Weydemeyer. 'It will be the end of my wife if it goes on much longer. The never-ending worries of the petty, paltry, bourgeois struggle are a terrible strain on her. To add to it there are all the infamies of my opponents, who never dared attack me but avenge themselves for their impotence by spreading the most unspeakable infamies about me and making me socially suspect. I should, of course, only laugh at the filth. I do not let them disturb me for one moment in my work. But you will understand that my wife, who is ailing, and has to endure the most dismal poverty from morning till night, and whose nervous system is upset, is none the better for having to listen to stupid go-betweens who daily report to her the outpourings of the democratic cesspools. The tactlessness of some of these people is often amazing.'

Naturally Marx did not receive a single penny for his 18th Brumaire. That was work for the Party. His battle for the defendants at the Cologne trial and his unmasking of the police in his Revelations was Party work too. During the second half of 1852 these activities occupied all his time. All this work was carried out under the most unspeakable difficulties. In February he reached the 'pleasant point' when he could not go out because his coat was in pawn and he could no longer eat meat because he could not get any more credit. His wife, little Jenny and Lenchen Demuth were taken ill. 'I could not and cannot fetch the doctor,' Marx wrote to Engels, 'because I have no money for medicine. For the last eight to ten days I have fed my family on bread and potatoes, and to-day it is still doubtful whether I shall be able to obtain even these.' Towards the end of the year the situation at last began to improve. Engels was able to send more money and the first payments arrived from the New York Tribune. But up to 1858 there were always times, even in the 'good' years, when Marx scarcely had a penny in his pocket. The children learned to resist the siege of creditors--the butcher, the milkman, and the baker--by saying: 'Mr. Marx ain't upstairs.' Once Marx was forced to fly to Manchester because of a doctor who threatened to sue him for a £26 debt, and the gas and water were going to be cut off. The following description of Marx's household, written by a Prussian spy who managed to ingratiate his way into it, is not without malice and is not to be credited word for word, but gives a pretty good idea of the general atmosphere of the life Marx led in 1853.

'The chief leader of this party, (i.e. the Communists) is Karl Marx; the minor leaders are Friedrich Engels in Manchester, Freiligrath and Wolff (called "Lupus") in London, Heine in Paris, Weydemeyer and Cluss in America. Bürgers and Daniels were the leaders in Cologne and Weerth in Hamburg. All the rest are simple members. The moving and active spirit, the real soul of the Party, is Marx, for which reason I propose to give you a personal description of the man.

'Marx is of medium stature, and is thirty-four years of age. Although he is still in the prime of life, his hair is turning grey. His frame is powerful, his features bring Szemere (a Hungarian revolutionary) to mind very strongly, but his complexion is darker and his hair and beard quite black. Lately he does not shave at all. His big, piercing, fiery eyes have something demoniacally sinister about them. The first impression one receives is that of a man of genius and energy; his intellectual superiority exercises an irresistible power on his surroundings.

'In private life he is an extremely untidy and cynical human being. He is a bad host and leads a regular Bohemian existence. Washing and combing himself and changing his linen are rarities with him, and he likes getting drunk. He often idles away for days on end, but when he has a great deal to do he works day and night with tireless endurance. He has no fixed times for going to bed or for getting up. He often stays up for whole nights, then lies down fully clothed on the couch at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by people coming in or going out, for everyone has a free entrée to his house.

'His wife is the sister of von Westphalen, the Prussian Minister, and is a cultured and charming woman, who has accustomed herself to this Bohemian existence out of love for her husband, and she now feels quite at home in poverty. She has two daughters and a son, and all three children are really handsome and have their father's intelligent eyes.

'As husband and father, Marx, in spite of his restless and wild character, is the gentlest and mildest of men. He lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest neighbourhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. The room looking out on the street is the parlour, and the bedroom is at the back. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick dust over everything and the greatest untidiness everywhere. In the middle of the parlour there is a large old-fashioned table, covered with oil-cloth. On it there lie manuscripts, books and newspapers, besides the children's toys, bits and pieces from his wife's sewing basket, and cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumblers, some Dutch clay-pipes, tobacco ash--all in a pile on the same table.

'On entering Marx's room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that for the first moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, until you get used to it and manage to pick out certain objects in the haze. Everything is dirty, and covered with dust, and sitting down is quite 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 either Marx or his wife. You are received in the most friendly way and are cordially offered pipes, tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be. Eventually a clever and interesting conversation arises to make amends for all the domestic deficiencies, and this makes the discomfort bearable. You actually get used to the company, and find it interesting and original. That is a faithful picture of the family life of Marx, the Communist chief.'

However bad things were with Marx, he always kept up the outward appearance of an orderly bourgeois life. He was unwilling to allow the 'asses of Democrats' a cheap triumph and his pride brooked no sympathy. Only his most intimate friends knew of his distressed condition. He did not bow under the burden of want, but reacted to it only with anger at its compelling him to put aside the work which alone meant anything to him and which, as he well knew, he alone could do, and forcing him to postpone it again and a in for the revolting slavery of working for his daily bread. Unshakable belief in his mission kept up Jenny's courage as well as his own. Even in their most difficult years Jenny and Marx remained happy people. Unfortunately there are very few documents that throw light on this period. There are Wilhelm Liebknecht's memoirs, a few pages from a diary of a friend of Jenny's youth, and a few letters written by other exiles. The following passage from Liebknecht's memoirs is characteristic of Marx and his friends:

'Our outings to Hampstead Heath! If I live to be a thousand I shall never forget them. A Sunday spent on Hampstead Heath was our greatest treat. The children would talk of nothing else during the whole week and even we grown-ups looked forward to it, old and young alike. Even the journey there was a treat. The girls were excellent walkers, as nimble and tireless as cats. When we got there the first thing we would do was to find a place to pitch our tent, so that the tea and beer arrangements might be thoroughly looked after. After a meal, the company would search for a comfortable place to sit or lie down, and when this had been done everybody would pull a Sunday paper, bought on the way, from his pocket, and--assuming a snooze was not preferred--would start reading or talking politics, while the children, who would quickly find playmates, would play hide-and-seek in the bushes.

'But this placidity sometimes demanded a change, and we would run races, to say nothing of indulging in wrestling, stone-throwing and similar forms of sport. The greatest treat was a bgeneral donkey-ride. What laughter and jubilation a general donkey-ride caused! And what comic scenes! And how Marx enjoyed himself and amused us too. He amused us doubly; in the first place by his more than primitive horsemanship and secondly by the fanaticism with which he asserted his virtuosity in the art. The virtuosity was based on the fact that he once took riding lessons during his student years, but Engels maintained that he never had more than three lessons, and that when he visited him in Manchester once in a blue moon he would go for one ride on a venerable Rosinante. On the way home we would usually sing. We seldom sang political songs, but mostly popular songs, especially sentimental ballads and "patriotic" songs from the "Fatherland," especially O Strassburg, O Strassburg, du wunderschöne Stadt, which enjoyed universal popularity. Or the children would sing nigger songs and dance to them. On the way there and back politics or the plight of the refugees were banned as subjects of conversation. But to make up for it we would talk a lot about literature and art, and Marx had the opportunity of displaying his astonishing memory. He would declaim long passages from the Divina Commedia and scenes from Shakespeare, in which his wife, who was also an excellent Shakespearian scholar, often relieved him.'

Among the Marxes Shakespeare was a regular family cult. Frau Marx once wrote to Frau Liebknecht, telling her with great satisfaction that her youngest daughter had made a Shakespeare museum of her little room. When Marx wanted to perfect his English, at a time when he could read but not speak it, he sought out and listed all Shakespeare's own expressions. In later years the whole Marx family would often walk all the way from Haverstock Hill to the Sadlers Wells Theatre, to see Phelps, the Shakespearian actor. They used to stand, for they could not afford seats. The children knew whole scenes of Shakespeare by heart before they could read properly.

In January, 1855, Frau Marx, who was then forty-one years old, had a daughter. 'The "bona fide traveller" is, I regret to say, of the sex par excellence,' Marx wrote to Engels. He had wanted a son to replace the dead Guido, who had been called 'Foxie,' after the popular Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot. Everyone was given a nickname in Marx's house. Marx himself was called 'the Moor,' as he had been called ever since his student days on account of his dark complexion and black hair, and his wife and children and all his acquaintances called him that too. The children varied 'Moor' mostly with 'Devil' or 'Old Nick.' Frau Marx was never called anything but 'Möhme.' The eldest daughter, Jenny, was called 'Qui-qui,' 'Di' and even the 'Emperor of China.' The next daughter, Laura, was called 'Hottentot' and 'Kakadu,' the son, Edgar, was called 'Musch' or, more respectfully, 'Colonel Musch,' and the youngest daughter, who was named Eleanor, was at first called 'Quo-quo' then 'Dwarf Alberich' and finally 'Tussy.' Tussy described some of the incidents of her childhood in Loose Leaves, which she wrote in 1895. She remembered how Marx carried her on his shoulders, and put anemones in her hair. 'Moor was certainly a magnificent horse. I was told that my elder sisters and brother used to, harness Moor to an armchair, seat themselves in it and make him pull it. Indeed he wrote several chapters of The 18th Brumaire in his rôle as "gee-up neddy" to his three children, who sat behind him on chairs and whipped him.'

Everyone intimate with Marx--Liebknecht, Lessner, Lafargue, and even only occasional visitors to his house--spoke of Marx's unbounded love for his children. Marx often remarked that what he liked best about Jesus was his love of children, and his daughter had heard him say that he could forgive Christianity a great deal for teaching the love of children. A year before his death Marx wrote to his daughter, Laura, that he was coming to Paris to find peace there. 'By peace I mean family life, children's voices, the whole of that "microscopic little world" which is so much more interesting than the "macroscopic" world.'

The voice of his favourite child was extinguished on April 6, 1855, when little Musch died. Marx generally hid his feelings, even from his closest friends. He was by nature so shy that he, a German, behaved with English reserve when it came to expressing his feelings. But in the letters he wrote during the days that followed the child's death his grief broke through the barriers. The beginning of a letter to Engels written on March 30 is quite matter-of-fact. He said that he had put off sending a daily health-bulletin, because the course of the illness was so up-and-down that one's opinion changed almost hourly. Finally the illness had turned into abdominal tuberculosis, and even the doctor had seemed to give up hope. For the last week his wife had been suffering from a nervous breakdown more severe than she had ever had before. Marx's next words were: 'As for me, my heart bleeds and my head burns, though of course I have to keep control of myself.' The next sentence sounds as if Marx were making an apology. That a father should so far forget himself as to talk of his heart bleeding over the death of his favourite child seems to him to demand an explanation. 'During his illness the child did not for a moment act out of harmony with his original, kind and independent character.' On April 6 he wrote: 'Poor Musch is no more. He fell asleep (literally) in my arms between five and six o'clock to-day. I shall never forget how your friendship helped us through this terrible time. You understand my grief for the child.' A week later he wrote: 'The house is naturally utterly desolate and forlorn since the death of the dear child who was its living soul. It is impossible to describe how we miss him at every turn. I have suffered every kind of misfortune, but I have only just learned what real unhappiness is. ... In the midst of all 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 together, has kept me upright.' At the end of July Marx answered a letter of condolence as follows: '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 one of those important people. My child's death has affected me so greatly that I feel the loss as keenly as on the first day. My wife is also completely broken down.' The wound never completely healed. Even after ten years and more Jenny Marx had not overcome her grief. 'The longer I live without the child, the more I think of him and with the greater grief,' she wrote to a friend.

In the summer of 1856 Frau Marx went to Trier with her daughter to visit her mother. She found her dying. An uncle of hers had died not long before, but he was an old man of eighty-seven whom she barely knew, and his death, as Marx put it, 'was a very happy event.' The bequest from the two relatives made it possible for them to pay their old debts. In the autumn of 1856 they were at last able to change their two-room dwelling in Soho for a comfortable little house on the outskirts of the city at 9, Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill. But the improvement did not last for long. The New York Tribune accepted fewer and fewer of Marx's articles. They needed practically all their space for American politics and articles on the presidential elections, which had to be given preference to events in Europe, and then the approaching crisis began to cast its shadows before.

Marx and Engels had expected the crisis even sooner. As early as January, 1855, England, in Marx's opinion, was in the midst of a great trade crisis. Yet the dies irae, which, Engels hoped, would 'ruin the whole of European industry, glut all the markets, involve all the possessing classes, and cause the complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie,' did not arrive until the autumn of 1857, and then not nearly so dramatically as Engels expected, though assuredly it was terrible enough.

The first great crisis of the capitalist world started in America and embraced the leading countries of Europe; England as well as Germany and France. Marx and Engels thought their time had come. Marx wrote to his friend that, in spite of his own 'financial distress,' since 1849 he had never felt so 'cosy' as after this outbreak, and Engels himself felt 'enormously cheered.' The time had come to finish his economic work. On December 8, 1857, he wrote to Engels that he was working 'like mad' right through the night summing up his economic studies, in order to have at least the outlines in his head before the deluge.

In the winter of 1850-1 Marx had resumed work on the economic study he had started in Brussels and had had neither the time nor the inclination to complete during the years of revolution. In his thorough way he collected all the available material, made his way once more through the works of the great economists and in April, 1851, believed that after the five more weeks he intended to devote to the 'whole economic drudgery (ça commence a m'ennuyer)' he would be able to sit down and start to write his book. Two months later he set himself a new date. The material, he remarked to Weydemeyer, had so many damned ramifications that in spite of all his exertions he would not be ready for another six or eight weeks. All the same, in spite of all outward disturbances, the thing was hurrying to a conclusion. 'The Democrat simpletons, to whom enlightenment comes from above, naturally do not need to make such exertions. Why should they, born as they are under a lucky star, trouble themselves with economic and historical material? The whole thing is so simple, as the valiant Willich used to tell me.' But even this respite expired. First more political work intervened, and from 1853 to 1856 his theoretical economic labours languished altogether. Though Marx gave a great deal of attention to economic events, his own economic work had to give way to the task of trying to earn a living. Occasionally Marx looked through his old notebooks and read fragments here and there, but it was the crisis that first compelled him to take up the work at the point at which he had broken off more than six years before.

The crisis affected Marx personally very severely. In October the New York Tribune informed him that it had dismissed all its European correspondents except B. Taylor and himself, and that in future he was only to send one article a week. Distress once more entered the household from which it had only just been banished. Marx's wife was ill and the first signs of the serious liver trouble which was to attack Marx repeatedly in years to come made their appearance in the summer. Marx's financial distress increased rapidly during the winter, and at the beginning of 1858 he had reached a pitch when he wished himself a hundred fathoms deep under the earth rather than go on living in the same way. He wrote to Engels that he himself was able to escape from the wretchedness by concentrating hard on all sorts of general questions, but his wife did not have these resources. A few weeks later he wrote that it was fortunate so many cheering things were happening in the outside world, because personally he was leading 'the most troubled life that can be imagined.' There could be nothing more stupid for people of universal aspirations than to marry and give themselves up to the petites misères de la vie domestique et privée, he said. But even if the house tumbled about his head he was determined to finish his book. Marx worked so hard that in April, 1858, he collapsed. He complained to Engels that if he so much as sat down and wrote for a few hours it meant that he had to lie down and do nothing for a few days. In the summer the situation had become 'absolutely intolerable.' On July 15, 1858, he wrote to Engels that as a direct result of the position he was in he was completely incapable of work, partly because he lost the best part of his time vainly running about trying to raise money, partly because his powers of concentration could no longer hold out against his domestic troubles, 'perhaps in consequence of physical deterioration. ... The inevitable final catastrophe cannot be averted much longer.' A loan of £40 which Freiligrath arranged for him and on which Marx had to pay twenty per cent interest, helped him over the worst for a few weeks.

Marx's manuscript was finished at the end of January, 1859. It was not Das Kapital, the great work that Marx had planned. The first volume, an edition of a thousand copies of which now appeared in Berlin--it had been very difficult to find a publisher--was called Critique of Political Economy and consisted of only two chapters, on goods and money. It had appeared, as Marx hoped it would, 'before the deluge,' but that was because the deluge did not occur. In 1859 the crisis had passed, the old world had not collapsed, the revolution had not come. The effects of the crisis continued.

New political life awoke in Germany, though very faintheartedly. In Italy the movement for national liberation flared up anew. France's industry had been hard hit by the crisis, the state finances were disorganised, the price of corn fell, the peasants, who constituted Bonaparte's strongest support, were grumbling, opposition reared its head among the petty-bourgeoisie, the workers were gradually shaking off the paralysis which had held them in its grip since June, 1848. In this threatening situation the Emperor took the way out that lay nearest to his hand and went to war--not a general European war, the consequences of which could not be foreseen, but a localised war in which he had the maximum chances of victory. A victory over Austria and the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy was bound to strengthen his position, bind the army to him once more and confirm the false Napoleon as the legitimate successor of the true.

Marx's attitude to the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 was determined, like his attitude to the Crimean War, by the interests of the revolution only. The revolutionary party, weak as it might be, must do everything in its power to prevent Bonaparte's victory. The Austrian hangman's yoke in Italy must certainly be broken, but he who assumed the task of delivering the people of Italy was the enslaver of the people of France, and victory would only confirm his power. The defeat of Austria, which since the middle of the eighteenth century had opposed the advance of Russia in Eastern Europe, though its opposition was 'helpless, inconsequent, cowardly but stubborn,' could only be advantageous to Russian Tsarism. The enemy was Napoleon III and Russia. Even if victory should liberate the Italians--as in fact it did not--the interests of the European revolution came before those of Italian national liberation.

In their attitude on this occasion Marx and Engels were practically along in the revolutionary camp. To the German radicals the Russian danger seemed remote, but reactionary Austria was close at hand. It was difficult to be anti-Austrian without being Bonapartist. Lassalle achieved a masterpiece. Some of the German Democratic émigrés were noticeably edging towards Badinguet (which was what Marx called Napoleon. He either called him Badinguet or Boustrapa or Barnum, or at most Louis Bonaparte, but Napoleon never). The German émigrés had political reasons for their attitude. But there were also those who proclaimed the Emperor's European and more specifically German mission in a torrent of tyrannicidal words because they were paid to do so. Among them was Karl Vogt, a former Left leader in the Frankfurt Parliament, and now a professor in Switzerland and the ideal of the 'enlightened' philistines.

A small German newspaper in London which was more or less on good terms with Marx accused Vogt of being a bought agent of Napoleon. The accusations were reproduced in a leading reactionary paper in Germany. Vogt well knew that his patron would not betray him and brought an action against the newspaper. When it came into court the people in London who had hitherto acted as if they had the clearest proofs of Vogt's venality suddenly assumed the attitude of knowing nothing whatever about it, and Vogt, though his case was dismissed on technical grounds, left the court in the triumphant rôle of injured innocent. He published the report of the trial, at the same time attacking Marx as the ringleader of those who had slandered him, in spite of the fact that Marx had nothing whatever to do with the whole affair. Vogt alleged that Marx was the leader of a gang of émigrés who made a good living by blackmailing revolutionaries, threatening to denounce them to the police, and by forging banknotes.

Vogt's allegations were woven into such a highly ingenious web of lies, with truth and known fact so skilfully blended with half-truths and impudent fabrications, that some of the insinuations were bound to stick in the minds of those not fully acquainted with the facts of 'emigrant' history. Marx tried in vain to bring an action against Vogt and his friends. It was impossible to allow the slander to go unchallenged. Distasteful though it was for him to reply, and hating as he did the necessity himself, which, as he said with truth, he generally scrupulously avoided, he decided that the measure of success likely to be obtained by Vogt's tissue of lies compelled him to speak. His polemical Herr Vogt, a book of one hundred and ninety pages, appeared at the end of November. Marx transferred the accusation of lying to its author, and his analysis of Vogt's writings made practically a certainty of the suspicion that he was in the pay of Napoleon. Papers published' by the Republican Government in 1871 supplied the documentary proof. In August, 1859, forty thousand francs had been paid Vogt out of the Emperor's private fund.

Marx's fight against the attempt to secure his political annihilation by means of these denunciations occupied more than a year of his life. He was not able to resume his economic work until the middle of 1861. The years 1860 to 1863 were among the gloomiest of Marx's life. At the end of November, 1861, his wife went down with small-pox. She had barely recovered when Marx was taken ill himself. For years he suffered from carbuncles and boils, which were apt to break out again as soon as they had healed, and often made him unable to work for weeks. He was 'plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing,' as he wrote to Engels. The doctors gave him excellent advice. 'Everything the gentlemen 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.' When Marx said that in 1868 he was much better off than he was at the beginning of the sixties. In January, 1860, the New York Tribune asked him to send nothing for six weeks. After this interval his work was only accepted intermittently. A connection with the Vienna Presse seemed to offer a substitute, but after three months' hard work Marx only received six pounds in all. His connection with the New York Tribune finally ended in April, 1862. He was told that all its space was needed for American affairs, and therefore his correspondence must cease. This dried up Marx's only source of income. Engels, whose position in the firm of Ermen and Engels had gone on improving, sent Marx what he could and preserved the numerous family from the worst.

Once more everything that could be spared, and many things that could not be spared, including the children's shoes and clothes, resumed the trail to the pawnshop. In the spring of 1861 Marx went to Holland to see his uncle, Lion Philips, who gave him an advance of £160 on his share of his mother's estate. Most of this sum went to repay old debts, and in November Marx was once more forced to write to Engels, telling him that his wife was suffering from such a serious nervous breakdown that he was afraid that if the struggle went on much longer, there would be a disaster. 'Take all in all,' he wrote in February, 1862, 'a lousy life like this is not worth living.' In the summer of 1862 Marx tried once more to persuade his mother to help him, but she would not give him a penny. 'My wife says she wishes she were with her children in her grave,' he wrote to Engels at the time, 'and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, sufferings and horrors which we have had to go through are really indescribable.'

Marx was determined to pursue his aim through thick and thin. In 1859 he wrote to a friend that he would not allow bourgeois society to turn him into a 'money-making machine.' But he had now reached such a pitch of distress that he wanted to become a money-making machine. In 1862 he applied for a job in a railway office, but his application was rejected on account of his bad handwriting. Jenny, the eldest daughter, unknown to her parents, wanted to go on the stage, not because she had any special inclination towards it, but for the sake of earning some money. Marx considered whether he should not break up his home, find posts as governesses for his two elder daughters and move with his wife and youngest child into a lodging house in the poorest district in London. Engels sent a five-pound note, and then another and another, and nearly lost his temper when Marx apologised for 'pressing' him.

In January, 1863, their friendship survived the first and only strain to which it was submitted. Engels lost his wife. 'I simply cannot tell you how I feel,' he wrote to Marx in a short note telling him the news. 'The poor girl loved me with all her heart.' Marx wrote back: 'The news of Mary's death has both astonished and dismayed me. She was extremely good-natured, witty and very attached to you.' He then went straight on to describe his own desperate attempts to raise money. His letter ended with: 'It is revoltingly egoistical of me to retail all these horrors to you at such a moment. But the thing is homoeopathic. One evil cancels out another. At the end of my tether as I am, what am I to do? There is not a single human being in all London to whom I can speak freely, and at home I play the silent stoic, to counterpoise the outbreaks from the other side. Work under such circumstances is absolutely impossible. Instead of Mary should it not have been my mother, who is full of bodily infirmities and has lived her life? You see what strange notions we "civilised" people get under the stress of certain circumstances.' Engels was deeply hurt. He wrote to Marx that all his friends had shown him more sympathy and friendship than he could have expected on this occasion, which affected him deeply, and 'to you it seemed a suitable moment for the display of the superiority of your frigid way of thinking. So be it!'

Marx allowed some time to elapse before replying. 'It was very wrong of me to write that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it was sent,' he wrote. 'It was not prompted by heartlessness. My wife and children will confirm me when I say that your letter, which arrived early in the morning, affected me as much as the death of one of my own nearest and dearest. When I wrote to you the same evening it was under the stress of very desperate circumstances. The brokers had been put in by the landlord; I had a summons from the butcher; there was neither coal nor food in the house and little Jenny was ill in bed. The only way out of such circumstances that I know is, generally speaking, cynicism.' Engels thanked his friend for his frankness. 'You will understand the impression your first letter made on me. I could not get it out of my head for a whole week. I could not forget it. Never mind, your last letter has made up for it, and I am glad that in losing Mary I have not at the same time lost my oldest and best friend.'

During the course of the year Engels gave Marx £350, which was a great deal considering how bad his business was as a consequence of the cotton crisis. Marx's mother died at the end of November, and the legacy was not a large one. It mitigated at least the worst of Marx's distress. In May, 1864, the faithful Wilhelm Wolff died in Manchester and left Marx £800. From September Engels, who had become a partner in his firm, was able to give him greater financial aid. From 1864 onwards Marx's financial position was tolerable and his freedom from petty cares enabled him to devote himself to his work. But his anxieties only really ended in 1869, when Engels sold his share in the cotton mill and was able to make Marx a definite, if moderate, yearly allowance.

Das Kapital was born in the years of illness and poverty, when Marx was sometimes reduced to the point of starvation. He wrote it while harassed with cares, agonised by his children's distress, tormented by thoughts of the next day. But nothing could completely overwhelm him. 'From time to time Engels urged him to finish the work at last. He knew Marx's over-conscientiousness. But Marx went on pruning and filing, and keeping up-to-date with the latest literature on the subject. 'I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole before me,' he wrote to Engels. 'My writings, whatever shortcomings they may have, have one characteristic: they form an artistic whole. In my opinion that is only obtainable by never letting anything be printed before I see the whole before my eyes.'

The fair copy of the first volume was completed in March, 1867. Marx, as he wrote to Becker, 'could throw it at the head of the bourgeoisie' at last. Marx read the final proofs on August 16. At two o'clock in the morning he wrote to Engels as follows: 'So this volume is finished. Thanks are due to no one but you for making it possible. Without your self-sacrifice for me it would be impossible to carry out the three volumes of this tremendous work. I embrace you, full of thanks. I greet you, my dear and faithful friend!'

An edition of one thousand copies of Das Kapital appeared in Hamburg at the beginning of September.

In 1867 Marx wrote to Siegfried Meyer: 'You must think very badly of me, the more so when I tell you that your letters not only gave me great pleasure but were also a real comfort to me during the painful period during which they came. Why did I not answer you? Because I was perpetually hovering at the brink of the grave. I therefore had to use every available moment to work, in order to finish my book, to which I sacrificed health, happiness and family. I hope this explanation will be sufficient. I laugh at the so-called "practical" men and their wisdom. If one wants to be an ox, one can easily turn one's back on human suffering and look after one's own skin. But I should have regarded myself as really impractical had I died without finishing my book, at least in manuscript.' Paul Lafargue says that Marx's favourite motto was 'Travailler pour l'humanité,' to work for humanity.

The twelve years from 1852 to 1864, from the dissolution of the Communist League to the foundation of the International, were filled with journalistic hack-work performed to keep body and soul together, and with poverty endured for the sake of his life-work.

Apart from his contacts with Chartists and Urquhartites, which were so slight that they hardly counted, Marx, who had been at the very centre of the furious political mêlée of the year of revolution, kept entirely aloof from political activity. His interests were devoted to foreign politics, the war, the Indian Mutiny, the Anglo-French campaign in China, the trade crisis, the internal state of France, the anti-slavery movement in America--events which he could only observe. In the articles Marx wrote and the correspondence he conducted with Engels there is little reference to Germany, the land to which the Communists had paid chief attention in 1847 and in which the Communist League had worked under Marx's leadership. Marx certainly did not ignore developments in Germany, but he followed them only incidentally. The revival of the German workers' movement was not his work. It happened without him. It happened against him, through Ferdinand Lassalle.

Lassalle was born in Breslau in 1825. He was the son of a Jewish business man. He studied Hegelian philosophy in Berlin and adhered to it in its orthodox, idealistic form throughout his life. His political position after the middle of the forties was at the extreme Left wing of democratic radicalism. He made friends with Marx and became a Communist during his few weeks of freedom in 1848--he was in prison until the middle of August and was re-arrested at the end of October for inciting to arms against the Crown. When he came out of prison the Neue Rhenische Zeitung was on its last legs. Marx and Lassalle did not meet again until the spring of 1861.

They wrote to each other in the meantime. Lassalle was the more industrious correspondent of the two. He kept Marx informed of his literary labours--he wrote a portly philosophical tome as well as a play--consulted him on political questions, offered and gladly gave Marx financial help. It was thanks to his mediation that the Critique was able to appear. He was the only man in Germany who was loyal to Marx. Marx had a high opinion of the younger man's energy and talents, though from the first he was repelled by his consuming ambition and his unbounded vanity. If no line remained of all Lassalle's writings except a letter of his dating from September, 1845, it would suffice to explain the human gulf that parted him from Marx. At the age of twenty Lassalle wrote: 'So far as I have power over human nature, I will use it unsparingly. ... I am the servant and master of ideas, priest of the god who is myself. I would be a player, a plastic artist, my whole being is the presence of my will, the expression of the meaning I put into it. The vibrant tone of my voice and the flashing light of my eye, every line of my face must reflect the imprint which I put upon it.' Lassalle loved theatrical attitudinising, which Marx detested from the bottom of his heart. He naïvely placed personalities as far before causes as Marx did the reverse, and was utterly careless about what means he chose to achieve his ends. He was a man who was ready to sacrifice everything for immediate success. From the first Marx did not completely trust him. The Cologne Communists refused to admit Lassalle to the League. But Marx regarded Lassalle as a front-rank politician and agitator even after personal contact with him in 1861 and 1862 had enabled him to form a better Opinion of the negative sides of his character than was possible from letters.

Marx visited Lassalle in Berlin in the spring of 1861. The Prince Regent of Prussia, the subsequent Emperor William I, issued an amnesty which made it possible for exiles to return on certain conditions. Marx, who did not believe he would be able to hold out much longer in London was thinking of returning to Germany. Lassalle proposed that Marx should collaborate with him in publishing a paper. Marx said to Engels that Lassalle might be very useful under strict supervision as a member of an editorial staff; otherwise he could only be harmful. The plan, however, came to nothing. Marx's attempt to re-acquire Prussian nationality, an essential preliminary to assure his being able to remain in Prussia, came to nothing too. The police suspected him of Republican or at any rate of non-Royalist views.

After the passing of the economic crisis in Germany a period of prosperity set in. The consequence in the political field was a revival of Liberalism. The Progressive Party in the Chamber opposed the Government more or less violently, and outside it tried to win over the 'fourth estate' (the tactical resources of the bourgeois revolution are very limited and always repeat themselves). Workers' educational associations, founded by Democratic intellectuals, sprang up on every side. Life revived in the workers' movement. Lassalle went to London in the summer of 1862 and proposed to Marx that the two of them together place themselves at the head of the new movement.

Marx refused, both on personal and political grounds. He could not interrupt his work on economics. His personal distaste for Lassalle had developed into a violent aversion. 'Lassalle is now set up not only as the greatest scholar, the most profound thinker, the most brilliant of investigators, etc., but also as a Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu, with his everlasting chatter, unnatural falsetto voice, his unbeautiful demonstrative gestures and his didactic tone on top of it all.' That was how Marx wrote to Engels while Lassalle was in London, and it was one of the mildest of his utterances. The political and economic theoretical foundations that Lassalle proposed for the new workers' party were completely unacceptable to Marx. Lassalle's party was to start by demanding that the state should put capital at the disposal of the workers to found co-operative societies. Lassalle knew very well that even if these co-operative societies materialised, which was more than doubtful, they would at best create a few enclaves within capitalist economy. Concentrating on the co-operative movement meant weakening at the outset the proletarian struggle which had only just begun. Marx foresaw that Lassalle, 'like every man who believes he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, will give his agitation the character of a religious sect.' Lassalle put the Chartist demand for universal suffrage on his programme side by side with the demand for state aid. 'He overlooked the fact that conditions in Germany and England were entirely different,' Marx later wrote. 'He overlooked the lessons of the bas empire concerning universal suffrage.' In London Lassalle did not mention the over-cunning tactics he had prepared for leading the workers' movement and started to apply as soon as he returned to Germany.

Lassalle conducted his propaganda in speech and writing from 1862 until his early death in the late summer of 1864. His speeches were brilliant, his pamphlets magnificently written. He did in fact create a German workers' party. The General Union of German Workers was founded in May, 1863. But before it started its existence Lassalle had started to negotiate with Bismarck.

The conflict between the Prime Minister of Prussia and the Progressive majority in the Chamber was becoming more and more acute. Anything or anybody likely to damage them was welcome to Bismarck, even a Socialist and Jewish agitator like Lassalle, for whom the Prussian Junker would otherwise not have had much use. Most of the workers who were at all politically awake adhered to the Progressives. Lassalle's first task was necessarily to part them from the bourgeoisie. That the Liberal opposition would be temporarily weakened as a result was not of great importance. For once the workers' party was formed it would have to fight not only the Liberal bourgeoisie but the incomparably more resolute militaristic monarchists. Bismarck was aware of this. In making a compact with Lassalle he acted like a power coming to terms with a party which might be a power in the future, but for the time being was only a pawn on the chess-board next to other and more powerful pieces. Bismarck did not betray his class, but Lassalle nearly betrayed the workers' movement to Bismarck. How far Lassalle went with Bismarck Marx never knew as long as Lassalle lived, and even after his death he never learned the whole truth. It did not come to light until an old cupboard in the room of the Prime Minister of Prussia was opened in 1927. It contained the letters exchanged between Bismarck and Lassalle. The Workers' Union was so organised that its president, who of course was Lassalle himself, ruled over it like a dictator. Lassalle was justified in calling it his 'kingdom.' He was able to show Bismarck how gladly the workers subjected themselves to a dictatorship when they saw that it was working in their interests, and even how ready they would be to honour the king as the Socialist dictator. Lassalle believed in Realpolitik, which meant, in Marx's words, that he only admitted as real what was immediately in front of his nose. In this case what was in front of his nose was the good-will of the Government in its fight with the Progressives about the independent workers' party. The workers were to start establishing their independence by renouncing it to the party of Reaction. Lassalle was on the point of turning the General Union of German Workers into a small auxiliary corps of feudal reaction against the bourgeoisie. Even his state-aid slogan prompted him to seek Bismarck's friendship. Lassalle told the workers that if only the State helped, the co-operative societies could be formed at once. That State was the existing State, the Prussian monarchy. Lassalle, by limiting the proletarian struggle to one small aim, was bound to compromise with the rulers of Prussia, for it was they and not some power in the dim and distant future who were to help.

It was impossible for Marx in London to know how deeply Lassalle was involved with Bismarck. Lassalle believed he could outmanœuvre Bismarck, but was in fact outmanœvered by him. Lassalle sought Bismarck's help--only temporarily, of course, for as long as he should need it against the Progressives, after which, when it was no more needed, he would free himself from his powerful patron. But in fact this strange alliance only resulted in his increasingly becoming Bismarck's tool. Marx could not possibly know the full extent of Lassalle's deviation. Nevertheless he followed Lassalle's agitation with the most extreme suspicion. It became clear that he would have to oppose the fatal tendencies of the new movement. Marx broke off personal relations with Lassalle in 1862. Lassalle still sent Marx his pamphlets, but without a line of greeting. Marx found nothing in them but unskilful plagiarism of the Communist Manifesto and his later works, which Lassalle knew very well. Marx never replied.

In spite of all his deficiencies and mistakes, his compromises and his manœuvres, in spite of his dictatorial attitude, which was fundamentally inimical to the workers' movement, in spite of the limitations of his economic insight, Lassalle has the immortal merit of having revived the workers' movement in Germany. The creed of Lassalle remained that of a sect. After some vacillations and hesitations the German proletariat followed another route to that which Lassalle showed them.

On August 30, 1864, Lassalle was killed in a non-political duel. Four weeks later the International Working Men's Association was founded in London.