Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

of 'civil society', that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.61

Marx then, in a famous and often quoted passage, summed up the 'guiding thread' of his subsequent studies of political economy. This summary contained four main points:

1.The sum total of relations of production - the way men organised their social production as well as the instruments they used - constituted the real basis of society on which there arose a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponded definite forms of social consciousness. Thus the way men produced their means of subsistence conditioned their whole social, political and intellectual life.

2.At a certain stage in their evolution the forces of production would develop beyond the relations of production and these would act as a fetter. Such a stage inaugurated a period of social revolution.

3.These productive forces had to develop to the fullest extent possible under the existing relations of production before the old social order would perish.

4.It was possible to pick out the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. There bourgeois relations of production were the last ones to create a divided society and with their end the pre-history of human society would be brought to a close.

Marx added a few more biographical details, described his views as 'the result of conscientious investigation lasting many years'62 and finished with a quotation from Dante against any intellectual compromise.

The most striking thing about the Critique of Political Economy itself - particularly after the alarms and excursions accompanying its writing - is how little substance it contains. Almost half the book consists of a critical exposition, with much quotation, of previous theorists on value and money. The rest is in two sections, the first on commodities and the second on money. Both were rewritten several years later in the first three chapters of Capital, the first section being expanded and the second condensed. The first section was the more important, but broke off after enunciating a few basic propositions. Marx began by defining a commodity as 'a means of existence in the broadest sense of the word'63 and, quoting Aristode, explained that a commodity had both a use-value and an exchange-value. The concept of use-value was not difficult but there was a problem as to how objects could be made equivalent to each other as exchange-values. The key to this problem was labour: 'Since the exchange-

Immediately after sending off the manuscript of the first part, Marx had set to work on the chapter on capital. Duncker declared himself willing to continue with the publication, but the whole project was engulfed by the enormous dimensions taken on by Marx's quarrel with Karl Vogt.71 This quarrel, which occupied Marx for eighteen months, is a striking example both of Marx's ability to expend tremendous labour on essentially trivial matters and also of his talent for vituperation. Vogt had been a leader of the left wing in the Frankfurt Assembly - though not left enough to avoid being attacked by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung - and on the dissolution of the Assembly he had emigrated to Switzerland where he taught geography at the University of Berne. He was the author of several works preaching a crude materialism and was a member of the Swiss Diet. On the outbreak of the Franco-Austrian War, which had been engineered by Bonaparte and Cavour to loosen Austria's hold on North Italy, Vogt started a paper in Switzerland whose main editorial line was that Germany would benefit from Austria's defeat and ought to support Bonaparte. In early May 1859 Marx was on the platform of an Urquhartite meeting to protest at the supposed Russian menace caused by the war. Also on the platform was Karl Blind who informed Marx that Vogt was being subsidised by Bonaparte, that he had attempted to bribe printers in Germany and London, and that he had recently been in secret conclave with Prince Jerome Bonaparte to forward the establishment of the Tsar's brother on the throne of Hungary.

Marx mentioned these accusations to Elard Biskamp, editor of Das Volk, who promptly printed them and even sent a copy to Vogt. Das Volk was the successor to a small paper edited by Edgar Bauer on behalf of the German Workers' Education Association which collapsed when Kinkel offered its printer a more lucrative contract to print his own paper. When asked by the Association to accept a commission to step into the breach, Marx informed Engels that he had replied that 'no one but ourselves had bestowed on us our position as representatives of the proletarian party; but this position had been countersigned by the exclusive and universal hatred accorded us by all factions and parties of the old world'.72 But in spite of his decision ten years previously to have nothing more to do with the Association, Marx let himself be persuaded to support the paper, pardy from compassion for the honest but incompetent Biskamp and partly from a desire to get at Kinkel. He refused at first to contribute direcdy to any paper he did not edit, but became increasingly involved, spent a lot of time and energy in organising support for the paper and,

when it finally collapsed after little more than three months, had to meet the outstanding printer's bill himself in order to avoid a scandal.73

Thus Vogt had no difficulty in identifying Marx as the source of the attack on him and replied in kind in his own paper. The matter would have rested there had not Liebknecht discovered the galleys of an anonymous pamphlet repeating the accusations against Vogt which was being printed on the same press as Das Volk and had, according to the typesetter, been handed in by Blind whose handwriting he also claimed to have recognised in the proof corrections. Liebknecht sent off a copy to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading conservative papers, for which he was London correspondent. On publication, Vogt prosecuted the Augsburger, which turned to Liebknecht for justification, who turned to Marx, who turned to Blind. Blind, however, refused to admit authorship of the pamphlet. Vogt's case against the Augsburger was dismissed on a legal technicality, though the fact that the defence had been unable to substantiate the accusations constituted a moral victory for him. This victory was enhanced by the publication in the Augsburger of a statement by Blind denying authorship of the pamphlet and supporting this with statements from the printer and typesetter whom he had suborned. Marx managed to secure an affidavit from the typesetter to the effect that the pamphlet really was in Blind's handwriting, and threatened Blind with prosecution. This produced a declaration in the Daily Telegraph that a friend of Blind's family, named Schaible, had been the author of the pamphlet; and at least Marx was exonerated.

There, too, the matter might have rested had not Vogt produced a book entitled My Action against the Allgemeine Zeitung. This included all the proceedings and documents of the trial followed by a commentary that branded Marx as a forger and a blackmailer who lived off the contributions of the proletariat while only having respect for pure-bred aristocrats like his brother-in-law Ferdinand von Westphalen. The book sold all its first printing of 3000 copies and immediately went into a second edition. The Berlin National Zeitung published two long leading articles drawn from Vogt's assertions, the arrival of which in London towards the end of January i860 sent Marx into a panic. He tried to keep the news from Jenny but of course she found out and was in a 'truly shattering state'.74 Marx also quarrelled violently with Freiligrath with whom his relations had become increasingly strained: Freiligrath had refused to heed his warning not to participate in the Schiller festival organised by Kinkel in November 1859; and he had dissociated himself abruptly from Das Volk when Liebknecht had mistakenly alleged that he was one of its collaborators. Marx's rage boiled over when he was informed - again mistakenly - that Vogt's book reprinted letters from Freiligrath

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that showed his intimacy with Vogt. When Marx realised how mistaken he was, he wrote to Freiligrath one of his most attractive letters. He claimed that his struggle against Vogt was 'decisive for the historical vindication of the party and its subsequent position in Germany', and continued:

I tell you frankly that I cannot decide to let irrelevant misunderstandings lose me one of the few men whom I have loved as a friend in the eminent sense of the word. If I am guilty of anything towards you, I am willing to make amends. Nihil humani a me alienum puto. ...

We both know that each of us in his own way, putting aside all private interest and from the purest motives, has held aloft for years over the heads of the philistines the banner of the classe la plus laborieuse et la plus miserable-, and I would consider it a petty crime against history if we were to break up because of trifles that are all explainable as misunderstandings.75

Freiligrath accepted Marx's explanations, but replied: 'My nature, like the nature of any poet, needs freedom. The party is also a cage, and it is easier to sing outside it, even for the party, than inside it.'76 Marx was pleased with Freiligrath's reply: 'Your letter pleased me a lot, for I give my friendship to only a very few men, but then I hold fast to it. My friends of 1844 are still the same.' But he thought Freiligrath's interpretation of the party was much too narrow:

After the 'League' was dissolved in November 1852 on my proposition, I no longer belonged to any Society whether secret or public, nor do I; thus the party in this completely ephemeral sense ceased to exist for me eight years ago.. . thus I know nothing of the party, in the sense of your letter, since 1852. If you are a poet, then I am a critic and had more than enough with the experiences of 1849-1852. The 'League'... like a hundred other societies, was only an episode in the history of the part}' which grows everywhere spontaneously from the soil of modern society.77

Thus Marx and Freiligrath repaired their friendship; but it never became as intimate as previously and all contact between the families was broken off by Jenny who was, as Marx admitted, 'of an energetic nature'.78

Meanwhile Marx had begun a forlorn prosecution of the National Zeitung in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London, both dismissed for lack of evidence, and began to collect material for a refutation of Vogt. Vogt's attack, thought Marx, had been on a large scale and a large-scale reply was needed, a reply which Marx also saw as a revenge for the Cologne trial of 1853. In March he went to Manchester for six weeks to check the archives of the Communist League in Engels' possession as

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Vogt had stirred up all the 'foggy gossip of the refugees'.79 He caused affidavits to be made left, right and centre, fired off at least fifty letters (that to his lawyer in Berlin alone is twenty printed pages) and entered into a 'secret and confidential'80 correspondence with the Daily Telegraph to try to get them to make amends. He started on the book in August but did not finish it until mid-November; both Jenny and Engels disapproved of the delay and considered Marx's approach much too thorough. It proved impossible to find a publisher in Germany and - despite Engels' warnings - Marx decided on a London publisher for whom Marx's book was his first commercial enterprise; Marx even optimistically persuaded him to agree to share the profits. What with the cost of the lawsuits, gathering material and printing, Marx found that he had spent about £100 to which Engels and Lassalle had to contribute heavily.

It took Marx a long time to decide on the title: he himself, supported by Jenny, favoured Da-Da Vogt, apparently on the grounds that it would 'puzzle the philistines',81 but Engels persuaded him to settle for the simpler Herr Vogt. The book was very long and described by Marx himself as 'a system of mockery and contempt'.82 Vogt, pillaried as a reincarnation of Sir John Falstaff, was pursued through two hundred closely printed pages whose style was so allusive that Engels recommended a resume after each chapter 'in order to present the general impression clearly to the Philistines'.83 Marx was at his most vituperative:

By means of an artificially hidden sewer system all the lavatories of London spew their physical filth into the Thames. By means of the systematic pushing of goose quills the world capital spews out all its social filth into the great papered central sewer called the Daily Telegraph.

Having transformed the social filth of London into newspaper articles, Levy transforms the articles into copper, and finally the copper into gold. Over the gate leading to this central sewer made of paper there can be read these words written di colore oscuro: 'hie.. . quisquam faxit oletum\ or as Byron so poetically translated it: 'Wanderer, stop and - piss!'84

Marx read passages aloud to Jenny and she found them highly amusing. Engels thought it better than the Eighteenth Brumaire and Lassalle called it 'a masterpiece in all respects'. However, few copies sold and subsequent generations have not shared the taste for vituperation so characteristic of mid-Victorian polemics. Disappointment at the book's failure was enhanced when the publisher went bankrupt and Marx was saddled with all the printing costs. Ten years later, following the abdication of Napoleon III, the final stroke was added to the tragi-comedy: the French provisional Government of 1870 published papers found in the Tuileries

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showing, almost beyond doubt, that Vogt did in fact receive subsidies from Napoleon and that Marx, for once in his career as a polemicist, was wholly justified.

III. M A R X A N D L A S S A L L E

During the early 1860s Marx's relationship to working-class politics in Germany was dominated by his relationship to Lassalle which was typical of the ambivalence that characterised all Marx's personal relationships. The son of a self-made Jewish tailor and seven years younger than Marx, Lassalle had become intimate with him during the 1848 troubles. Throughout the 1850s Lassalle had been extremely accommodating to Marx: he had offered to raise subscriptions to publish Marx's 'Economics' and also got him his job as London correspondent of the Neue Oder Zeitung. But Marx was not the man to appreciate favours and lent a ready ear to a series of accusations against Lassalle delivered by one Levy, a self-styled representative of the Diisseldorf workers who had already tried to convince Marx in late 1853 that a revolution was imminent in the Rhineland and paid him a second visit in 1856. According to Levy, Lassalle was only using the working-class movement for his personal affairs; he had compromised himself with the liberals, betrayed the workers and embezzled from friends. Engels was even readier than Marx to give credit to these accusations (although they were not supported by a shred of evidence) and recommended the breaking off of relations, declaring of Lassalle that 'his desire to push his way into polite society, to parvenir, to gloss over, if only for appearance's sake, the dirty Breslaw Jew with all kinds of pomade and greasepaint, was always disgusting'.85 Marx refused to reply to Lassalle's letters thereafter and only gave him a 'short and cool' answer when Lassalle offered him the possibility of writing articles for the Wiener Presse whose editor was Lassalle's cousin. Marx was also looking for a publisher for his 'Economics' and it was Lassalle again who acted as a very competent literary agent in the negotiations with Franz Duncker whose wife was Lassalle's mistress. Thus relations were temporarily restored: Marx complimented Lassalle on his recent publication Heraclitus (though he expressed himself differently to Engels) and Lassalle even turned to Marx for advice on the problem of duelling. Marx's curious reply was that, although duelling was irrational and 'a relic of a bygone culture, bourgeois society was so one-sided that, in opposition to it, certain feudal forms of expressing individuality are justified'.86

This co-operation was, however, soon disturbed by differences of

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opinion on the Franco-Austrian War of 1859. Immediately on its outbreak Engels had - again through the agency of Lassalle - published a pamphlet entitled Po and Rhine in which he declared that Bonaparte was interfering in his own interests in North Italy preliminary to an attack on the Rhine. Lassalle also published a pamplet, but his views were noticeably different: he considered that any purely nationalistic German war against France could only serve the cause of the reaction which would be increased enormously by an Austrian victory; Bonaparte was a bad man, but the cause he was supporting was good and anyway he was too weak to pose a serious threat to Germany; if it became plain that he had serious territorial designs in Italy, Prussia should retaliate with a war of liberation in Schleswig Holstein. Marx, who enthusiastically approved Engels' pamphlet and was obsessed by the fear of a Russian alliance with France and by the urgent necessity to unseat Bonaparte, called Lassalle's pamphlet 'an enormous blunder'.87 He wrote to Engels: 'we must now absolutely insist on party discipline or everything will be in the soup',88 and delivered Lassalle a long lecture on publishing his views without prior consultation. Events, however, showed that Lassalle had the more realistic view of the situation.

What made Marx even more annoyed was that he thought that Lassalle's pamphlet had been given priority by Duncker over his own Critique of Political Economy. And when Lassalle informed him of his intention to publish a two-volume work on economics, he attributed the ignoring of his Critique to Lassalle's influence, though he comforted himself with the thought that, to judge from Lassalle's Heraclitus, he would 'find to his cost that it is one thing to construct a critique of a science and thus for the first time to bring it to a point where a dialectic presentation is possible, and quite another to apply intimations of an abstract, ready-made system of logic'.89 Lassalle had not replied to Marx's lecture on party discipline, but by January i860 Marx felt the urgent need for assistance in his battle of words with Vogt and asked Engels to write Lassalle a diplomatic letter excusing his roughness. However, Lassalle refused to let himself be persuaded that Vogt was a Bonapartdst agent: although he sympathised with Marx's case, he thought it unwise to have attacked Vogt without firm proof; he also reproached Marx with his 'mistrust', whereupon Marx sent him - from Manchester where he was staying with Engels - an anonymous denunciation of Lassalle that he had received from Baltimore and also informed him that 'official complaints' from Dtisseldorf were now in the party archives.90 Lassalle replied in a justified outburst:

Why do you send me this stuff with so triumphant a mien, so proud a

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gesture? In order to prove to me how little you at least are mistrustful of me!

Heavens! N O T to believe such a cut-purse slander behind a man's back - but that is the most elementary of moral duties of man to man. To believe such slanders and such fatuities of me must be for any person of understanding, for any one who knows the least thing about me, a physical impossibility!!! And you think that, by not believing it, you are doing me a favour? You want to impute that to yourself as a merit?

The only conclusion I draw is a firm proof of your inclination to believe all possible evil of every man without evidence, if you count it as a merit, and think it proves something, that in this case you did not believe.91

Marx realised that he had gone too far and for the rest of 1861 he and Lassalle corresponded regularly and good-humouredly.

At the beginning of 1861, when Marx was at last rid of Herr Vogt, he began to toy with the idea of a definitive return to Prussia. In January 1861 Frederick William IV, who had been certified insane for the previous two years, died and was succeeded by his brother Wilhelm I who immediately declared a political amnesty. The conditions of the amnesty were not good: it only applied to those who had been convicted by Prussian courts and refugees had to rely on vague assurances. When Lassalle first proposed a renewal of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung backed by the money of his wealthy patron, the Countess von Hatzfeld, Marx was sceptical, thinking that 'the waves in Germany are not yet riding high enough to carry our ship'.92 Engels suggested that Lassalle launch a weekly and that Marx co-operate if the money were good enough. Although chary of collaborating in anything under Lassalle's control, Marx's income from the New York Daily Tribune was decreasing dramatically owing to the Civil War and he decided to go to Berlin to investigate possibilities. His financial straits obliged him in any case to go to Holland to see his uncle. Borrowing money for the trip from Lassalle he spent two weeks in Zaltbommel with the Philips - 'I have never known a better family in my life"" he wrote afterwards to his uncle - and managed to borrow £160 as an advance on his mother's estate. His uncle was, according to Marx, 'stubborn but very proud of my being an author'94 and Marx got Lassalle to write him the sort of letter that he could 'confidentially'95 show to his uncle to increase his reputation.

On his proceeding to Berlin, he was magnificently entertained for three weeks by Lassalle. He lived in 'a very beautiful house on one of the most beautiful streets of Berlin' and the countess, too, made a favourable impression on Marx: 'She is a very distinguished lady, no blue stocking,

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of great natural intellect, much vivacity, deeply interested in the revolutionary movement, and of an aristocratic laissez-aller very superior to the pedantic grimaces of professional femmes d'espritThere were visits to the theatre and the ballet (which bored Marx to death) and a dinner in Marx's honour where he was placed between the countess and the niece of Varnhagen von Ense. 'This Fraulein', he wrote to Antoinette Philips, 'is the most ugly creature I ever saw in my life, a nastily Jewish physiognomy, a sharply protruding thin nose, eternally smiling and grinning, always speaking poetical prose, playing at false enthusiasm, and spitting at her auditory during the trances of her ecstasis."'7 Marx did, however, manage to persuade the countess to start a press campaign against Blanqui's ill-treatment by the French police. The visit was prolonged since Marx was applying, with Lassalle's active assistance, for the recovery of his Prussian citizenship and the bureaucracy moved slowly. But Marx began to tire of Berlin society very quickly: 'I am treated as a sort of lion and compelled to meet many professionally "intellectual" ladies and gentleman.'98 He found the whole of Berlin engulfed in ennui: bickering with the police and the antipathy between civil and military authorities constituted the the sum of Berlin politics. Marx attended a session in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and found it 'a curious mixture of bureaucracy and the school room';99 there was a general spirit of dissolution in the city: people of every rank thought a catastrophe inevitable and the next elections would yield a parliament in opposition to the King.

In these circumstances, Marx considered the time ripe for the foundation of a new paper, but he and Lassalle could not agree upon terms. Lassalle insisted that if Engels joined the editorial board in addition to himself and Marx, then Marx and Engels should have only one vote against his own. But, although Lassalle was supplying the money, Marx considered that he could only supply a useful service if he were kept 'under strong discipline'. He wrote to Engels:

Dazzled by the reputation that he has gained in certain learned circles through his 'Heraclitus' and in another circle of spongers through wine and cuisine, Lassalle is naturally unaware that he is discredited in the public at large. There is also his dogmatism, his obsession with the 'speculative concept' (the fellow even dreams of his writing a new Hegelian philosophy, raised to the second power), his infection with old French liberalism, his arrogant pen, importunity, tacdessness, etc.100

In the end, Marx left Berlin without receiving his Prussian nationality (in spite of a personal interview with the Prussian Chief of Police, again arranged by Lassalle) and without a definite decision one way or another on the paper. Marx at least had the satisfaction of finding his old friend