Routledge Library Editions karl marx

The other victims of this shameful process survived Daniels by many years, and some of them even worked their way back into the bourgeois world, for instance, Burgers, who was elected to the Reichstag as a progressive, and Becker, who later became Lord Mayor of Cologne and a member of the Prussian Upper House and whose highly patriotic attitude on all occasions won him the good graces of the government and the court. Amongst the convicted men who remained loyal to the proletarian flag were Nothjung and Roser, both of whom played an active part in the beginnings of the renewed working-class movement, and




Lessner, who survived both Marx and Engels and became one of their most devoted comrades in exile.

Mter the Cologne communist trial, the Communist League dissolved and its example was soon followed by Willich’s organization. Willich himself emigrated to America and during the civil war he won well-earned fame as a general in the Northern Army, whilst Schapper returned penitently to his old comrades. However, Marx was unwilling to permit the Prussian government to enjoy the miserable victory it had won at the Cologne assizes, and he determined to pillory it in the eyes of the world. To this end he prepared the revelations at the trial for publication in Switzerland and, if possible, also in America. Writing on the 7th of December to friends in America he declared : “ You will appreciate the humour of the pamphlet more I think when I tell you that its author is practically an internee owing to the lack of adequate covering for his feet and his behind, and that in addition his family was and still is threatened with really horrible misery. This too is in part a result of the proceedings because for five weeks I was compelled to devote all my energies to defending the party against the machinations of the government, instead of eariing a living. Not only that, but the trial has turned the German booksellers against me completely and I had hoped to come to some arrangement with them for the publication of my book on political economy.”

However, on the 11 th of December the son of Schabelitz, who had taken over his father’s business in the meantime, wrote to Marx from Basle informing him that he was already going through the first galleys. “ I am convinced that the book will create a tremendous sensation because it is a masterpiece.” Schabelitz proposed to print 2,000 copies and fix the price at 10 silver groschen per copy because he reckoned that at least part of the edition would be confiscated. Unfortunately the whole of the edition was confiscated when it was about to be sent into the interior from the little frontier village in Baden where it had been stored for about six weeks.

On the loth of March the bad news was reported to Engels with the bitter words : “ Such misfortunes threaten to rob one of all further encouragement to write. Always to be working pour le roi de Prusse ! " It proved impossible to discover how the leakage had occurred and the suspicion which Marx had at first harboured against the publisher turned out to be baseless. Schabelitz even offered to distribute the 500 copies he had retained in Switzerland, although little seems to have come of this. The affair had a bitter sequel for Marx when three months later not Schabelitz but his partner Amberger de


manded compensation for the printing costs in the sum of 424 francs.

Fortunately, however, the failure in Switzerland was in part compensated by success in America, though naturally the effect of the revelations there concerning the Cologne trial was not so disturbing to the Prussian government as it would have been in Europe. The Neu-England Zeitung, which was published in Boston, printed the revelations and Engels had 440 special copies printed at his own expense. With Lassalle’s assistance he proposed to distribute them in the Rhine province. Frau Marx corresponded with Lassalle on the point and the latter showed himself zealous enough, but unfortunately the correspondence does not reveal whether the plan was carried out successfully or not.

The revelations found a lively echo in the German-American press and Willich in particular came forward against the work. This caused Marx to write a short reply to him entitled The Knight of the High-souled Conscience, but to-day it is hardly worth while to lift the veil of forgetfulness which has long since fallen on it. As is always the case in such controversies, sins were committed by both sides, and, as the victor, Marx gladly refrained from triumphing over the vanquished. Referring to the first years of the emigration period he declared in i860 that its most brilliant vindication was a comparison between its history and the parallel history of the bourgeois governments and of bourgeois society. With very few exceptions the fugitives could be accused of nothing worse than having harboured illusions which were more or less justified by the conditions of the day, and of having committed follies which necessarily arose out of the unusual circumstances in which the emigrants unexpectedly found themselves.

When he prepared a second edition of the revelations for publication in 1875 he at first hesitated as to whether he should delete the passages dealing with the Willich-Schapper fraction, but finally he let them stand, feeling that any mutiliation of the text might appear like tampering with an historic document, but he added : “ The violent events of a revolution leave a disturbing heritage in the minds of those who take part in it, and in particular in the minds of those who are hounded into exile away from their homes. This mental disturbance affects even capable men for a longer or shorter period and makes them, so to speak, irresponsible. They fail to understand the meaning of events and they refuse to see that the form of the movement has changed. The result is that they indulge in conspiracies and romantic revolutionism which compromise both




them and the cause they have at heart. This is the explanation of the errors of Schapper and Willich. In the American civil war Willich demonstrated that he was something more than a weaver of fantastic projects, whilst Schapper, who was a lifelong pioneer of the working-class movement, recognized and admitted his momentary errors soon after the communist trial in Cologne. Many years later, the day before he died, Schapper referred with caustic irony to the folly of the early emigrant days. On the other hand, the circumstances in which the revelations were originally issued explains the bitterness with which the involuntary helpers of the common enemy were attacked. To lose one’s head at a moment of crisis is a crime against the party and it demands public expiation.” They were words of wisdom at a time when it was. still thought more important to maintain “ a good tone ” than to establish clarity on matters of principle.

Once the battle was fought and the victory won Marx was the last man to harbour petty rancour. Answering some brusque remarks of Freiligrath in 1850 on “ the doubtful and degraded elements ” which had found their way into the League, he admitted more than he need have done when he declared : “ Storms always raise a certain amount of dirt and dust, and a revolutionary period does not smell of attar of roses. It is clear that occasionally one is bespattered with all sorts of muck. It is impossible to be too particular at such a moment,” but he was justified in adding : “ However, if one considers the tremendous efforts of the official world against us, the ransacking of the Code Pinal against us, the slanderous tongues of ‘ the Democracy of Stupidity ’ (which has never been able to forgive us for displaying greater intelligence and greater strength of character than it did itself) and the history of all other parties, one must come to the conclusion that in this nineteenth century our party is distinguished above all by its cleanness.”

When the Communist League ceased to exist the last threads which connected Marx with public life in Germany were broken and from now on exile, “ the home of the good ”, became his home too.


CHAPTER EIGHT: MARX AND ENGELS

I. Genius and Society

M^ARx found a second home in England, but the meaning of the word must not be stretched too far. However, he was never interfered with in England on account of his revolutionary agitation, although in the last resort it was naturally directed against the English State also. The government of “ greedy and jealous shopkeepers ” displayed a greater measure of selfrespect and dignity than did those continental governments whose uneasy consciences caused them to hunt down their enemies with every measure of police oppression even when they were guilty of no more than discussion and propaganda.

In another and deeper sense Marx never found a home after his keen eye had penetrated the shams of bourgeois society. A discussion on the fate of genius in bourgeois society would fill a bulky chapter. Various opinions have been expressed on the subject, from the naive confidence of the Philistine who prophesies the final victory to every man of genius, to the melancholy words of Faust :

Die Wenigen, die was davon erkannt,

Die toricht gnug ihr voIles Herz nicht wahrten,

Dem Pobel ihr Gefiihl, ihr Schauen offenbarten,

Hat man von je gekreuzigt und verbrannt.¹

The historical method which Marx developed permits us to look more closely into the relation of things in this question also. The Philistine prophesies the final victory to every man of genius because the prophet is a Philistine, and if for once a genius escapes the crucifix and the stake then in the last resort it is because he was modest enough to remain a Philistine. Without the powdered pig-tails hanging down their backs neither Goethe nor Hegel would ever have been acknowledged as geniuses in bourgeois society.

1 “ Those few who saw and understood, and then,

With folly opened wide their hearts,

And showed their feelings to the mob,

Died ever at the stake or on the cron.”

Bourgeois society, which in this respect is nothing more than the most clearly defined form of all class societies, may have as many other advantages as you please, but it has never been a hospitable host to genius. In fact, it could not be, for the very essence of genius must always consist in releasing the creative impulses of human nature in the face of all traditional obstacles, and in shaking at those barriers without which class society could not exist. Over the entrance to a lonely cemetery on the island of Sylt which affords a last resting-place to the unknown dead washed up by the sea stands the pious inscription : “ Here is the Cross of Golgotha, the Home of the Homeless ”. Unconsciously, but none the less aptly, this inscription sums up the fate of genius in class society. Homeless in class society, genius finds a resting-place only under the cross on Golgotha.

Unless, however, genius agrees to tolerate class society. When genius placed itself at the service of bourgeois society in order to overthrow feudal society, it apparently won tremendous power, but immediately it attempted to act on its own account that power melted away at once and genius was permitted to end its days on the rocks of St. Helena. Or on the other hand, genius consented to don the sober cutaway of the Philistine, and in that case it was permitted to rise, to become Minister of State to the Grand Duke ofWeimar or Royal and Prussian Professor in Berlin. But woe betide that genius which is incorruptible, which holds itselfin proud independence ofbourgeois society, which prophesies the approaching end of that society from the data supplied by the latter’s own internal workings, and which forges the weapons to give bourgeois society the coup de grace ! For such genius bourgeois society has nothing but sufferings and tortures which are still more cruel than the punishments of ancient society or the stake of medireval society, though outwardly they may appear less brutal.

Amongst the geniuses of the nineteenth century, none suffered more under this lot than the greatest genius of them all, Karl Marx. He was compelled to wrestle with poverty even in the first decade of his public activities, and when he emigrated to London he was loaded with all the burdens of the exile. However, the sufferings which made his lot Promethean befell him only in the prime of his manhood when in his laborious efforts to advance the cause of humanity he was compelled at the same time to struggle day after day with the miserable and trivial worries of life, to struggle depressingly to obtain the bare means of existence for himself and his family within the framework of bourgeois society.

And, in addition, the life he led bore no resemblance to the




life the ordinary Philistine regards in his usual ignorance as that of a genius. His tremendous industry matched his tremendous powers, and it was not long before his overworked days and nights began to undermine a constitution originally of iron. He was perfectly serious when he declared that incapacity to work was a death-sentence on any human being not really an animal. On one occasion when he had been ill for several weeks he wrote to Engels : “ Although I am quite unable to work I have read Carpenter’s Physiology, Lord’s ditto, Kolliker’s Gewebelehre, Spurzheim’s Anatomie des Hirn.s und Nervensystems and Schwann and Schleiden Ueber die Zellenschmiere".¹ In all his insatiable urge to scientific study he never forgot the words he had once used as a young man : a writer must certainly earn money in order to exist and write, but he should not exist and write in order to earn money, and he always recognized “ the categoric necessity of earning a living ”.

However, his own efforts in this direction invariably failed in face of the suspicion or hatred or, in the best case, the fear of a hostile world. Even such German publishers who were accustomed to priding themselves on their independence recoiled at the name of the infamous demagogue. All parties in Germany slandered him equally, and where the clear outlines of his giant figure could be distinguished through the artificial cloud around him, the malicious cunning of systematic silence did its infamous work. No nation has ever banished its greatest thinker so utterly and for so long from its national life as Germany did Marx.

The only time he succeeded in providing himself with a halfway secure basis was his work for The New York Tribune, which lasted a good decade beginning in 1851. At that time The New York Tribune had 200,000 readers and was the most powerful and popular newspaper in the United States, and by its agitation for an American brand of Fourierism it had at least raised itself above the exclusively money-grubbing activities of a purely capitalist undertaking. The formal conditions under which Marx worked for this paper were not unfavourable. He was required to write two articles a week and for each article he was to receive two pounds sterling. That would have meant over 200 pounds a year and would have enabled him to keep his head above water. Freiligrath’s commercial activities brought him in no more than that, in the beginning at least, and Freiligrath always boasted that he had never been without “ the luscious beef-steak of banishment ”.

Naturally, there is no question of whether the amount paid to Marx by the American newspaper was at all in accordance

¹ Histobgy, The Anatomy of the Brain and the NerVous System and On Cell Matter.




with the literary and scientific value of his contributions, for a capitalist newspaper concern reckons with market prices and in bourgeois society it is perfectly justified in doing so. Marx never demanded any better treatment than this, but what he was entitled to demand even in bourgeois society was that the agreement should be respected and perhaps that his work should be valued on its own account also. However, the publishers of The New York Tribune did neither the one thing nor the other. In theory Dana was a Fourierist, but in practice he was a hard- boiled Yankee business man. In a fit of anger Engels once declared that Dana’s socialism resolved itself into the lousiest petty-bourgeois cheating, and in fact, although Dana was well aware of Marx’s value as a contributor and did not fail to advertise that value to his readers, he showed Marx every form of ruthlessness which a capitalist exploiter feels himself entitled to show towards exploited labour-power dependent on him for its existence. By no means his worst offence was that he often stole the contributions Marx sent in and published them in a garbled form as editorial articles, a proceeding which caused their real author understandable annoyance.

And further, not only did Dana immediately put Marx on half pay at the first sign of slacking sales, but he paid only for those articles which he actually printed as Marx’s work. In fact, he did not hesitate to scrap whole articles and everything in them merely because their general line did not suit his purpose. On occasions it happened that for three weeks, and even six weeks, on end all the contributions which Marx sent over found their way into the waste-paper basket, whilst those German newspapers to which he was able to contribute, for instance, Die Presse in Vienna, showed themselves no more decent. It was perfectly true when he declared bitterly that in his newspaper work he was no better off than a penny-a-liner.

In 1853 we find him longing for a few months’ peace in which to continue his scientific studies undisturbed : “ Apparently I’m not to have it. This constant churning out of stuff for the newspapers bores me. You can be as independent as you like, but in the last resort you are bound to the newspaper and its readers, particularly when you get paid on a cash basis as I do. Purely scientific work is totally different.” After he had been working for a few years under Dana’s despotic sway his tone became still more bitter : “It is utterly disgusting to have to be grateful when a rag like that kindly consents to take one into its canoe. Grinding bones and making soup out of them like the paupers in the workhouse, that is how much the political work for such a paper amounts to, though I have to do it in full




measure.” Marx shared the fate of the modern proletariat not only in the scantiness of his means of subsistence, but also in its utter insecurity.

The world always had a general idea of his situation, but in his letters to Engels we find terrible and moving details : on one occasion he was compelled to remain indoors because he had neither coat nor shoes to go out in ; on another occasion he had not enough money to buy either writing paper or newspapers ; and on another occasion we find him dashing around to acquaintances to borrow postage money to send off a manuscript to a publisher. And thtn there was the constant bickering with the grocer and other small shopkeepers because he was unable to pay promptly even for the barest necessities of life, not to mention the constant trouble with the landlord, who was for ever threatening to put the brokers in, and the eternal visits to the pawnbroker, whose usury swallowed up even that little money which might with difficulty have kept the shadow of starvation from the door.

And often enough the shadow not only fell across the threshold but over the very table itself. Accustomed from earliest childhood to a carefree life, his high-minded wife sometimes staggered under the slings and arrows cf a really outrageous fortune, and then she wished herself and her children in the grave. There are indications of domestic scenes in some of Marx’s letters, and on one occasion we find him expressing the opinion that people who pursued the general aims of humanity could commit no greater folly than that of marriage because thereby they betrayed themselves into the toils of the petty cares of private life. However, although his wife’s complaints may have made him impatient at times he always excused and justified her, declaring that she had incomparably more to suffer from the indescribable humiliations, worries and cares which people in their position had to go through, all the more so because she was denied that respite and refuge in the halls of science which saved him again and again. And to see the innocent pleasures of childhood so brutally shortened for their children weighed equally heavily on both parents.