Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

Preface to Third Edition

For this edition I have added a short postscript on how our view of Marx has been shaped by the events of the twentieth century, and also brought the bibliography up to date.

D. M.

Preface to First Edition

There has been no full-scale biography of Marx in English covering all aspects of his life since that of Mehring, first published in the original German in 1918. Two events have occurred since then which justify a fresh attempt: first, there is the publication of the unexpurgated MarxEngels correspondence - together with numerous other letters relating to Marx's activities; second, several of Marx's crucial writings were published only in the 1930s and considerably alter the picture of his intellectual contribution.

Much writing about Marx has obviously suffered from the grinding of political axes. Clearly it is impossible to pretend to a completely 'neutral' account of anyone's life - let alone Marx's. There is a vast amount of information and commentary on Marx and the very process of selection implies a certain standpoint. What I have tried to do is at least to write sine ira et studio and present the reader with a reasonably balanced picture. I have therefore relied considerably on quotation and write from a sympathetically critical standpoint that avoids the extremes of hagiography and denigration.

The book is intended for the general reader; and I have attempted to cover fully the three main facets of Marx's life - personal, political and intellectual. In dealing with this last aspect I have had to include some rather difficult passages, particularly in the latter halves of chapters one and two and the beginning of chapter six. These passages are, however, necessary for an accurate appreciation of Marx as a thinker.

I am grateful to Dr R. D. McLellan, Dr Brian Harrison and Mr C. N. Taylor who read parts of the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions; my particular thanks go to Dr G. M. Thomas whose inimitable sense of style has left its imprint on virtually every page of the book. Remaining deficiencies are certainly not their fault.

D.M.

722 Old Dover, Road,

Canterbury, Kent

December 1972

O N E

Trie?] Bonn and Berlin

I feel myself suddenly invaded by doubt and ask myself if your heart is equal to your intelligence and spiritual qualities, if it is open to the tender feelings which here on earth are so great a source of consolation for a sensitive soul; I wonder whether the peculiar demon, to which your heart is manifestly a prey, is the Spirit of God or that of Faust. I ask myself - and this is not the least of the doubts that assail my heart - if you will ever know a simple happiness and family joys, and render happy those who surround you.

Heinrich Marx to his son, MEGA i i (2) 202.

i . C H I L D H O O D

It may seem paradoxical that Karl Marx, whom so many working-class movements of our time claim as their Master and infallible guide to revolution, should have come from a comfortable middle-class home. Yet to a remarkable extent he does himself epitomise his own doctrine that men are conditioned by their socio-economic circumstances. The German city in which he grew up gave him a sense of long historical tradition and at the same time close contact with the grim realities of the underdevelopment then characteristic of Germany. Thoroughly Jewish in their origins, Protestant by necessity yet living in a Catholic region, his family could never regard their social integration as complete. The sense of alienation was heightened in Marx's personal case by his subsequent inability to obtain a teaching post in a university system that had no room for dissident intellectuals.

Marx was born in Trier on 5 May 1818. A community of about 15,000 inhabitants, it was the oldest city in Germany1 and also one of the loveliest

- situated as it was in the Mosel valley, surrounded by vineyards and luxuriating in an almost Mediterranean vegetation. Under the name of Augusta Treverorum the city had been considered the Rome of the North and served as the headquarters of the most powerful of the Roman armies. The Porta Nigra, in whose shadow (literally) Marx grew up, and the enormous fourth-century basilica were enduring monuments of Trier's

imperial glory. In the Middle Ages the city had been the seat of a PrinceArchbishop whose lands stretched as far as Metz, Toul and Verdun; it was said that it contained more churches than any other German city of comparable size. Marx did not only get his lifelong Rhineland accent from Trier: more importantly, his absorbing passion for history originated in the very environment of his adolescence. But it was not just the city of Roman times that influenced him: during the Napoleonic wars, together with the rest of the Rhineland, it had been annexed by France and governed long enough in accordance with the principles of the French Revolution to be imbued by a taste for freedom of speech and constitutional liberty uncharacteristic of the rest of Germany. There was considerable discontent following incorporation of the Rhineland into Prussia in 1814. Trier had very little industry and its inhabitants were mainly officials, traders and artisans. Their activities were largely bound up with the vineyards whose prosperity, owing to customs unions and outside competition, was on the decline. The consequent unemployment and high prices caused increases in beggary, prostitution and emigration; more than a quarter of the city's population subsisted entirely on public charity.

Thus it is not surprising that Trier was one of the first cities in Germany where French doctrines of Utopian socialism appeared. The Archbishop felt himself compelled to condemn from the pulpit the doctrines of Saint Simon; and the teachings of Fourier were actively propagated by Ludwig Gall, Secretary to the City Council, who constantly emphasised the growing disparity and hence opposition between the rich and the poor.

Marx was all the more predisposed to take a critical look at society as he came from a milieu that was necessarily excluded from complete social participation. For it would be difficult to find anyone who had a more Jewish ancestry than Karl Marx.2 The name Marx is a shortened form of Mordechai, later changed to Markus. His father, Heinrich Marx, was born in 1782, the third son of Meier Halevi Marx who had become rabbi of Trier on the death of his father-in-law and was followed in this office by his eldest son Samuel (Karl's uncle) who died in 1827. Meier Halevi Marx numbered many rabbis among his ancestors, who came originally from Bohemia, and his wife, Chage, had an even more illustrious ancestry: she was the daughter of Moses Lwow, rabbi in Trier, whose father and grandfather were also rabbis in the same city. The father of Moses, Joshue Heschel Lwow, had been chosen rabbi of Trier in 1723, corresponded with the leading Jewish personalities of his time and had been widely known as a fearless fighter in the cause of truth. It was said of him that no important decision was taken in the Jewish world without his having first been consulted. The father of Joshue Heschel, Aron Lwow, was also

rabbi in Trier and then moved to Westhofen in Alsace where he held the rabbinate for twenty years. Aron Lwow's father, Moses Lwow, came from Lemberg (the German name for Lwow) in Poland, and numbered among his ancestors Meir Katzenellenbogen, head of the Talmudic High School in Padua during the sixteenth century, and Abraham Ha-Levi Minz, rabbi in Padua, whose father had left Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century owing to persecutions there. In fact almost all the rabbis of Trier from the sixteenth century onwards were ancestors of Marx.5

Less is known of the ancestry of Karl's mother, Henrietta, but she seems to have been no less steeped in the rabbinic tradition than her husband. She was Dutch, the daughter of Isaac Pressburg, rabbi of Nijmegen. According to Eleanor (Karl's daughter), in her grandmother's family 'the sons had for centuries been rabbis'.4 In a letter to the Dutch socialist Polak, Eleanor wrote: 'It is strange that my father's semi-Dutch parentage should be so little known. .. my grandmother's family name was Pressburg and she belonged by descent to an old Hungarian Jewish family. This family, driven by persecution to Holland, settled down in that country and became known as I have said, by the name Pressburg - really the town from which they came.'5

Marx's father was remarkably unaffected by this centuries-old tradition of strict Jewish orthodoxy. He had broken early with his family, from whom he claimed to have received nothing 'apart from, to be fair, the love of my mother',6 and often mentioned to his son the great difficulties he had gone through at the outset of his career. At the time of Marx's birth he was counsellor-at-law to the High Court of Appeal in Trier; he also practised in the Trier County Court, and was awarded the title of Justizrat (very roughly the equivalent of a British Q.C.). For many years he was President of the city lawyers' association and occupied a respected position in civic society though he confined himself mostly to the company of his colleagues.

Although his beliefs seem to have been very little influenced by his Jewish upbringing, Heinrich Marx's 'conversion' to Christianity was one made solely in order to be able to continue his profession.7 The Napoleonic laws had given Jews in the Rhineland a certain equality but had attempted to impose strict controls over their commercial practices. On the transference of the Rhineland to Prussia, Heinrich Marx addressed a memorandum to the new Governor-General in which he respectfully requested that the laws applying exclusively to Jews be annulled. He spoke of his 'fellow believers' and fully identified himself with the Jewish community. But the memorandum was without effect. The Jews got the worst of both worlds: in 1818 a decree was issued keeping the Napoleonic laws in force for an unlimited period; and two years earlier the Prussian

Government had decided that the Rhineland too should be subject to the laws that had been in force in Prussia since 1812. These laws, while granting Jews rights equal to those of Christians, nevertheless made their holding of positions in the service of the state dependent on a royal dispensation. The President of the Provincial Supreme Court, von Sethe, made an inspection tour of the Rhineland in April 1816 and interviewed Heinrich Marx, who impressed him as 'someone of wide knowledge, very industrious, articulate and thoroughly honest'. As a result he recommended that Heinrich Marx and two other Jewish officials be retained in their posts. But the Prussian Minister of Justice was against exceptions and Heinrich Marx was forced to change his religion to avoid becoming, as von Sethe put it, 'breadless'. He chose to become a Protestant - though there were only about 200 Protestants in Trier - and was baptised some time before August 1817.8 (It was at this period that he changed his name to Heinrich having been known hitherto as Heschel.)

Marx's mother, who remains a shadowy figure, seems to have been more attached to Jewish beliefs than his father. When the children were baptised in 1824 - the eldest son, Karl, being then of an age to start school - her religion was entered as Jewish with the proviso that she consented to the baptism of her children but wished to defer her own baptism on account of her parents. Her father died in 1825 and she was baptised the same year. Her few surviving letters are written in an ungrammatical German without any punctuation. The fact that her letters even to her Dutch relations were in German suggests that she spoke Yiddish in her parents' home. Being very closely attached to her own family, she always felt something of a stranger in Trier. The few indications that survive portray her as a simple, uneducated, hardworking woman, whose horizon was almost totally limited to her family and home, rather over-anxious and given to laments and humourless moralising. It is therefore quite possible that Henrietta Marx kept alive in the household certain Jewish customs and attitudes.

It is impossible to estimate with any precision the influence on Marx of this strong family tradition. 'The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a mountain on the mind of the living',9 he wrote later. Jewishness, above all at that time, was not something that it was easy to slough off. Heine and Hess, both intimate friends of Marx - the one a convert to Protestatism for cultural reasons, the other an avowed atheist - both retained their Jewish self-awareness until the end of their lives. Kven Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, though only half-Jewish, proclaimed constantly and with a certain defiant pride at workers' meetings in the East End of London: '1 am a Jewess.'10 The position of Jews in the Rhineland, where they were often scapegoats for the farmers' increas-