Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

more and the latest unhappy events have completely shattered me. I fear that we old ones will not be experiencing much more good and I only hope that our children will get through their lives more easily.'4 In 1875, the Marx family moved for the last time, into a smaller elegant terraced house in the same road; and, although Marx still had to apply to Engels lairly regularly to supplement his allowance,5 the financial worries of the past two decades were at an end.

small babies; and Charles-Etienne, Marx's first grandchild and named after him, died in Madrid barely three years old. Disillusioned with medicine, I'aul set up a photo-engraving firm in London. Competition from larger firms and Paul's utter lack of business sense meant that the undertaking had no chance of success, and throughout the 1870s the Lafargues lived (in very fair style) off Engels' contributions.6

Lafargue was also responsible for Marx's one venture into practical capitalist life. Lafargue had gone into partnership with Le Moussu, a refugee from the Commune and an expert engraver, who had invented a new copying machine. Together they intended to exploit the patent. 1'here was a third partner, George Moore, also an engraver. Lafargue quarrelled with Le Moussu and his place was taken by Marx, whose share was paid by Engels. Early in 1 8 74 Marx and Le Moussu also quarrelled about the ownership of the patent and in order to avoid an open law suit, decided to submit their case to an arbitrator, Frederic Harrison, the I'ositivist friend of Beesly, then practising as a barrister. Harrison related 111 his memoirs what followed:

liefore they gave evidence I required them in due form to be sworn on the Bible, as the law then required for legal testimony. This filled both of them with horror. Karl Marx protested that he would never so degrade himself. Le Moussu said that no man should ever accuse him of such an act of meanness. For half an hour they argued and protested, each refusing to be sworn first in the presence of the other. At last I obtained a compromise, that the witnesses should simultaneously 'touch the book', without uttering a word. Both seemed to me to shrink from the pollution of handling the sacred volume, much as Mephistopheles in the Opera shrinks from the Cross. When they got to argue the case, the ingenious Le Moussu won, for Karl Marx floundered about in utter confusion.7

Jenny, who was as fervently francophile as Tussy was pro-Irish, had lollowed Laura's example by becoming engaged to a Frenchman, Charles

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Longuet, in the spring of 1872. She had already been a little in love with Gustave Flourens, the communard general killed in the siege. Longuet had been active in the International, where he enjoyed good relations with Marx in spite of his Proudhonism, and had been a member of the Commune and editor of its official newspaper. There was as much amusement at the 'sheep's eyes' of the lovers as there had been with Laura's engagement. Longuet tried out several French dishes on the family, and everyone was happy except for Jenny Marx who wished that her daughter's choice could, for a change, have been an Englishman or a German, 'instead of a Frenchman, who naturally together with all the charming qualities of his nation is also not without its weaknesses and insufficiencies.... I can't help being afraid that Jenny's fate as a political wife is exposed to all the cares and troubles that are inseparable from it.'8

Longuet was as penniless as most of the French refugees. He had been a medical student and managed to get a temporary job lecturing at King's College. After their marriage in the St Pancras Registry Office in midOctober 1872, they moved to Oxford where Longuet tried to establish himself as a private tutor in French. Soon, however, they were back in London: Jenny did not like the 'orthodox and arrogant atmosphere of Oxford . . . that sham seat of science' and, as she wrote to Kugelmann,

London contains Modena Villas, and in the front room first floor of Modena Villas I can always find my dear Mohr. I cannot express to you how lonely I feel when separated from him and he tells me that he also missed me very much and that during my absence he buried himself altogether in his den Though married, my heart is as chained as it ever was to the spot where my Papa is, and life elsewhere would not be life to me.'

Jenny became governess to a local businessman's family and tried to give singing and elocution lessons, while Longuet eventually obtained a permanent post lecturing in French at King's College. Although Longuet was never as close to the Marx family as Lafargue, Jenny remained Marx's preferred companion. Her first child died in infancy, but she gave birth to five more children before her death in 1883. Marx was particularly attached to the eldest, Jean or Johnny, whom he referred to as 'the apple of my eye', and with whom he loved to play for hours on end the same boisterous games that he had enjoyed with his own children.10

Of the three daughters, therefore, only Eleanor was left unmarried." At the same time as Longuet was courting Jenny, Eleanor was developing a deep attachment to Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, a flamboyant French Basque who, at thirty-four, was exactly twice her age.12 He was a journalist, had been active in the Commune, and defended single-handed

the last barricade to be manned. But he was too much of an individualist to be an adherent of any one school of political thought. T h e Lafargues tried to snub the persistent Lissagaray.

Last night Lissa came again [wrote Eleanor to her sister Jenny] . . .

again Laura and Lafargue shook hands with everybody . .. and not with him! Altogether they behave most oddly. Either Lissagaray is the perfect gendeman that Paul's letter and his own behaviour proclaim him to be, and then he should be treated as such, or else he is no gentleman, and then he ought not to be received by us - one or the other - but this really unladylike behaviour on Laura's part is very disagreeable. I only wonder Lissagaray comes at all.13

Marx, too, disapproved of the association, and refused to allude to any 'engagement'. Eleanor claimed that he was unjust towards Lissagaray but, as he wrote to Engels,

1 require nothing of him except that he furnish proofs instead of phrases, that he be better than his reputation, that one has some reason for relying on him. You see from the reply what effect the man continues to have. The damnable thing is that, for the child's sake I must proceed with great consideration and care.14

I Ic was sure that his intervention would force Lissagaray 'to put a good face on a bad situation'.15 Jenny Marx, however, strongly disapproved of her husband's attitude when Engels tactlessly showed her Marx's letter.16 She claimed to be the only one to understand her daughter's position and connived at Lissagaray's visits to Eleanor at Brighton, while keeping up

.1 continual correspondence with her and sending her hampers of special lood and clothes.

Meanwhile, Eleanor was trying to establish her financial independence. In the summer of 1873, aided by two clergymen and old Arnold Ruge (Marx's colleague of the 1840s) she got a teaching job in a ladies' boarding school run by the Misses Hall in Brighton. But she still pined for Lissagaray. Her health broke down and she had to return to London. Throughout 1872 she was the constant companion of her father, both at home and on his journeys to Harrogate and Carlsbad. Marx had forbidden her to sec Lissagaray and she appealed to him, probably some time during 1874:

I want to know, dear Mohr, when I may see L again. It is so very hard never to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult, and I don't feel as if I could be much longer. - I do not expect you to say that he can come here - I should not even wish it, but could I not, now and then, go for a litde walk with him? You let me go out with Outine, with Frankel, why not with him? - No one moreover will be astonished to see us together, as everybody knows we are engaged. . ..

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When I was so very ill at Brighton (during the week I fainted 2 or 3 times a day) L came to see me, each time left me stronger and happier, and more able to bear the rather heavy load laid on my shoulders. It is so long since I saw him, and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all my efforts to be merry and cheerful. I cannot much longer. - Believe me, dear Mohr, if I could see him now and then it could do me more good than all Mrs Anderson's17 prescriptions put together - I know that by experience.18

By the end of the year she had recovered from her ill health (which Marx attributed in large part to hysteria19), and continued a lively correspondence with Lissagaray who liked to address her as 'ma petite femme'.20 Marx seems later to have relaxed his restrictions on Eleanor, for in 1875 and 1876 she was assisting Lissagaray with his journalism and publishing projects. She translated into English the whole of Lissagaray's classic History of the Commune, which had been published in French in 1876; Marx himself helped considerably in revising the translation. But when an amnesty enabled Lissagaray to return to Paris in 1880, Eleanor did not follow him. During these years, the affair estranged Eleanor from her father; with her mother it was even worse:

For long miserable years there was a shadow between myself and my father . .. yet our love was always the same, and despite everything, our faith and trust in each other. My mother and I loved each other passionately, but she did not know me as father did. One of the bitterest of many bitter sorrows in my life is that my mother died, thinking, despite all our love, that I had been hard and cruel, and never guessing that to save her and father sorrow I had sacrificed the best, freshest years of my life. But father, though he did not know till just before the end, felt he must trust me - our natures were so exactly alike! . . .

Father was talking of my eldest sister and of me, and said: 'Jenny is most like me, but T u s s y . . . is me'.21

For distraction, Eleanor threw herself into political activities: writing articles - particularly on Russia; and canvassing for firee-thinking candidates in the London School Board elections. She also undertook translation and precis work and spent long hours in the British Museum where she met George Bernard Shaw. And as her mother moved more and more into the background, Eleanor began to act as hostess to the visitors, several of whom have left admiring accounts of her appearance, vivacity and political understanding. Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, wrote of her that:

Eleanor herself was the favourite of her father, whom she resembled in appearance as much as a young woman could. A broad, low forehead, dark bright eyes, with glowing cheeks, and a brisk, humorous smile,

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she inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself, while she possessed a physical energy and determination fully equal to bis own, and an intelligence which never achieved the literary or political success - for she was a keen politician as well as sociologist - of which she was capable. Possibly, she felt herself somewhat overshadowed by her father's genius, whose defects she was unable to see.22

In the late 1870s Eleanor made an effort to build a career on the Interest in drama that she had inherited from her parents. T h e Marx l.miily had always been intensely interested in Shakespeare and became In vent admirers of the new interpretation given to the tragedies by Henry li ving: Jenny Marx, aided by Eleanor, had a series of articles published in the Frankfurter Zeitung defending Irving and his 'peculiar, faithful and original picture of Shakespeare'.23 Eleanor was a keen member of Furnivall's New Shakespeare Society and a friend of actors and actresses like I' 1 nest Radford and Dolly Maitland. She was also a member of a Shakespeare reading club which often met at the Marxes' house. One of its members, Mrs Marian Comyn, gave the following description of Marx at one of the meetings:

As an audience he was delightful, never criticising, always entering into the spirit of any fun that was going on, laughing when anything struck him as particularly comic, until the tears ran down his cheeks - the oldest in years, but in spirit as young as any of us. And his friend, 1 he faithful Frederic Engels, was equally spontaneous.24

Itiii however much he may have enjoyed the club meetings, Marx did not favour acting as a career for his daughter and Eleanor did not perform publicly until July 1881 (when she appeared in two one-act French plays). I ngels was in the audience and reported to Marx: 'Tussy was very good in 1 lie passionate scenes, though it was somewhat noticeable that she took I lien lerry as a model, as Radford took Irving, but she will soon get out 11I that habit; if she wishes to have an effect on the public, she must absolutely strike out a line of her own, and I'm sure she will.'25 Although line erupted by the illnesses and deaths of her parents, Eleanor persisted m Iter ambition and eventually, together with her future husband Edward AM ling, made a significant contribution to the theatre of the time.

I I . W O R K

Dining the years of the International Marx had little time for pursuing In . economic studies. At the end of November 1871 Meissner informed I1I111 that the first edition of Capital was almost completely sold out and

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until June 1873, mainly because of a long printers' strike in Leipzig. He made substantial changes in the first chapter with which, as his daughter

begun by a young Populist called Lopatin who moved to London in the summer of 1870 to work under Marx's direction in the British Museum while taking English lessons from Eleanor. Lopatin did not complete the translation (he returned to Russia on an unsuccessful mission to liberate Chernyshevsky from prison). T h e work was taken over by Danielson, a shy Populist scholar, who translated the book in the evenings on his return from the bank where he worked for fifty years. There was some fear that the Tsarist censors might ban the book but they found it so 'difficult and hardly comprehensible' that they concluded that 'few would read it and still fewer understand it'.27 Here they were wrong: the Russian edition sold better than any other, and copies of it passed avidly from hand to hand - sometimes inside the covers of the New Testament. Marx did not even have time to rewrite the first chapter as he would have liked; he wrote to Danielson complaining about the demands made on him by the International: 'Certainly I shall one fine morning put a stop to all this, but there are circumstances in which you are in duty bound to

Marx spent most of the following year tying up the loose ends in London. T h en in the autumn of 1873 he suffered a serious breakdown of health.

translate Capital into French and Elie Reclus (brother of the famous anarchist geographer) had made a start, assisted by Marx's old mentor, Moses Hess. He soon gave up, however, and it was not until 1 8 7 1 (after no fewer than five other translators had attempted the task) that Marx opened negotiations with Roy, who had acquired a considerable reputation as a translator of Feuerbach. Roy was a school teacher in Bordeaux; mailing the various chapters and sections to and from London naturally made for new delays, which were further increased by Roy's difficulty in reading Marx's handwriting (he translated from the manuscript of the second German edition). Marx was lucky to have been introduced (by Lafargue) to an extremely energetic Parisian publisher, Maurice Lachatre, who had recently been exiled to Switzerland. Marx welcomed Lachatre's

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proposal to publish in separate instalments as 'in this form the work will lie more easily accessible to the working class, and this consideration is more important to me than any other'.29

In February 1872 the contract with Lachatre was signed. But the book was to be published at the author's expense. Applying to his cousin August

I'm not doing it for your political and revolutionary aims'.30 Roy's work, however, did not come up to Marx's high expectations and he found

1 march on the Russian publishers who had had their photo banned by die Government, on the grounds that it would imply too much respect loi Marx's personality). It had cost him, said Marx, 'more trouble than a whole fresh composition of the book in French';31 and he wrote in the

Fven before the French edition was finished Marx received urgent letters from his German and Russian publishers asking for Volume Two.

1'nplained the situation in a long letter to Danielson. He had just received

delay. Firstly, England was going through an economic crisis that differed

alio liom the United States, etc., make it pleasant for me to have a pieiext" for continuing my studies instead of winding them up finally loi the public'.36

I >aniclson himself had been supplying Marx with numerous books on Hiiv.i.in agricultural economics since the freeing of the serfs - books that both I'.ngels and Jenny sometimes felt like burning. This was a subject ili.it occupied Marx's mind particularly in the years 1876 and 1877. As I duels wrote, Marx after 1870 'studied agronomics, agricultural con-

4 IO KARL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

ditions in America and especially Russia, the money market and banking institutions, and finally natural sciences, such as geology and physiology. Independent mathematical studies also form a large part of the numerous manuscripts of this period.'37

A study of the evolution of agriculture in Russia was intended to illuminate Marx's ideas on ground-rent in Volume Three of Capital in the same way as English industrial development provided the practical examples to the ideas expounded in Volume One. Marx had learnt Russian specifically to be able to study the original sources. As in the 1850s and 1860s, Marx amassed a huge amount of material but he now lacked the power of synthesis and the driving force to make something of it. After his death Engels was amazed to find among Marx's papers more than two cubic metres of documents containing nothing but Russian statistics. During these years Marx filled in his microscopic handwriting almost three thousand pages - these manuscripts comprising almost exclusively notes on his reading. In his later years this reading became obsessional: he no longer had the power to create, but at least he could absorb. Thus the manuscripts for Volume Three of Capital remained virtually in the state in which they had been since 1864-65. Marx had rewritten almost half of Volume Two in 1870, but thereafter made only minor additions and revisions - realising, as he said to Eleanor shortly before his death, that it would be up to Engels 'to make something of it'.38 Marx kept the state of his manuscripts a secret from everyone, including Engels, who wrote later to Bebel that 'if I had been aware of this, I would not have let him rest day or night until everything had been finished and printed. Marx himself knew this better than anyone. .. .'i<> In fact, the state of the manuscripts was so chaotic that Engels could publish Volume Three of Capital only eleven years after Marx's death.

Marx's inherent reluctance to complete any of his economic work was abetted by other distracting tasks imposed on him during the 1870s. He collaborated on two shortened versions of Capital, Volume One, in German by Johannes Most and in Dutch by Domela Nieuwenhuis. N ot only did he help Eleanor translate Lissagaray's book into English but he also supervised in great detail the German translation. His aversion to Lissagaray as a possible son-in-law was more than balanced by his admiration for his History of the Commune. During the mid-1870s Marx gave some of his time to assisting Engels write Anti-Diihring which, by virtue of its systematisation and clarity, was to become the best-known textbook in Marxist circles with a circulation much wider than Capital.*0 In the Preface to the second edition, written after Marx's death, Engels says that he read all the manuscript to Marx and that Marx actually wrote a chapter consisting of a review of Diihring's Critical History of Political Economy.

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Towards the end of his life Marx moved nearer to the positivism then so fashionable in intellectual circles. This tendency, begun in Anti-Diihring and continued by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and Dialectics of Nature, reached its apogee in Soviet textbooks on dialectical materialism. It was this trend which presented Marxism as a philosophical world-view or Weltanschauung consisting of objective laws and particularly laws of the dialectical movement of matter taken in a metaphysical sense as the basic constituent of reality. This was obviously very different from the 'unity of theory and practice' as exemplified in, for instance, the Theses on Feuerbach. This preference for the model of the natural sciences had always been with Engels, though not with Marx, who had, for example, a much more reserved attitude to Darwinism.

Marx had always had a great admiration for Darwin's work. He had read On the Origin of Species in i860, a year after its publication, and had at once written to Engels that it contained 'the natural-history basis lor our view'.41 He considered that the book had finally disposed of religious teleology, but he regretted 'the crude English manner of the presentation'.42 Two years later, however, his view was slightly different:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his Knglish society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes's 'bellum omnium contra omnes', and one is reminded of I legel's Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a 'spiritual animal kingdom', while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society.43

I )arwin's book might have 'an unconscious socialist tendency', anyone who wanted to subsume the whole of history under the Darwinian expression struggle for survival' merely demonstrated his 'feebleness of thought'.45 Marx certainly used biological metaphors to express his ideas and considered his method in the study of economic formations more akin to biology than to physics or chemistry. The only place where Marx drew a direct parallel between himself and Darwin was in an ironical review of his own work for the Stuttgart newspaper Der Beobachter,46 Marx certainly wished to dedicate the Second Volume of Capital to Darwin. (Darwin lefused the honour, apparently because he had the impression that it was in overtly atheistic book and did not wish to hurt the feelings of his lamily.) But this suggests no more than that Marx appreciated Darwin's work - and not that he approached history in the same way as Darwin

had approached nature. Thus Engels' equating the views of Marx and Darwin in his famous speech at Marx's graveside is highly misleading.47

It is nevertheless true that Marx paid more attention to the natural sciences (physiology, geology and, above all, mathematics) during the last decade of his life than he ever did before. He was also much interested in the beginnings of anthropology and enthused about the work of Lewis Morgan, a once much-respected writer whose scholarly reputation has not survived subsequent research. In the winter of 1880 - 81 Marx drew up with great care a hundred pages of excerpts from Morgan's Ancient Society, excerpts later used by Engels in his Origin of the Family. What particularly interested Marx in Morgan's book was the democratic political organisation of primitive tribes together with their communal property. Marx was uninfluenced by the Victorian value judgements that permeate Morgan's work nor does he seem to have shared Engels' great admiration for his achievements. In particular, he did not see any close parallel between primitive communism and a future communist society.48

I I I . H E A L T H

What prevented Marx from finishing his life's work was his illness. By the early 1870s his earlier life-style and privations had irredeemably impaired his health. Throughout the last ten years of his life the pathetic search for soundness of body, which drove him from one health resort to another, played an increasingly central role. In April 1 8 71 Engels reported to Kugelmann that Marx had begun to live 'fairly rationally' since giving up his theoretical work with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War: he went for two-hour walks up to Hampstead most days and laid off beer for weeks on end if he felt unwell.49 But scarcely had he returned to his theoretical work (continuing with the French translation of Volume One) than he had a serious relapse: there was pressure on the brain with an attendant insomnia that even strong doses of chloral could not relieve. A stroke was feared. Engels persuaded him to go to Manchester at the end of M a y 1873 to consult Gumpert, Engels' own doctor and the only one in whom Marx had complete confidence. Gumpert gave him a strict regimen to follow and absolutely forbade him to work more than four hours a day. This considerably improved his health but there was a renewal of the headaches in the autumn and Marx again went north to see Gumpert. At the same time he took a three-week water cure in Harrogate in the company of Eleanor, who was near to a nervous breakdown. Marx occupied his time reading Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand which he found full of 'newfangled forms of expression, false profundity, Byzan-