Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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Isle of Wight, whose inhabitants amazed him by their religiosity. He had to leave the Isle of Wight to look after Eleanor, whose nerves had once again brought her to a state of collapse, and to attend the funeral of his grandson Charles who had lived a little less than a year. Thus Marx was temporarily left without grandchildren - the four born so far all having died in infancy.

At the end of June 1874 Marx finally decided to take Gumpert's advice and go to Carlsbad, the fashionable spa built on the steeply sloping banks of the river Egen in Bohemia (now in the west of the Czech Republic). As early as 1869 Kugelmann had tried to persuade Marx to go there with bis daughter Jenny, and Marx had flatly rejected the place as 'boring and expensive'.52 Now, with more money and less health, he decided to go

gentleman, with his daughter Eleanor, from London.' As a private person, Marx had to pay double bath tax, but hoped that the self-description would 'avoid the suspicion that I am the notorious Karl Marx'.55 In anticipation of difficulties with the police Marx had applied for naturalisation as a British subject before his departure. At the beginning of August, his solicitor had forwarded the application to the Home Office together with the necessary references from four respectable householders. T h e I lome Office, however, rejected his request and refused to give a reason when pressed. In fact, the information passed from Scotland Yard to the I lome Office was that the applicant was 'the notorious German agitator' and 'had not been loyal to his own King and Country'.54 N o r did Marx escape constant police surveillance in Carlsbad, though it was merely reported that his conduct 'did not give rise to any suspicion'.55

Marx took his cure very seriously and let himself be turned, as he put it, into a sort of machine. He would be up at 5.30 at the latest and travel round six different springs drinking a glass of water at each at fifteenminute intervals. After a breakfast of special medicinal bread, there would be an hour's walk and mid-morning coffee in one of the cafes outside the town. Then a further walking tour among the surrounding hills, then

back to the hotel to change and have a nap before lunch, which was preceded every other day by a bath. After lunch there was further walking or longer organised tours followed by a light meal and early bed, all entertainments ending at 9.00 p.m. Marx enjoyed the life very much, particularly the long walks among the pine-clad granite foothills of the Erzgebirge. He also liked to pursue his habit of conferring witty nicknames on the more conspicuous passers-by. Franziska Kugelmann recalled a visit to a porcelain works at which they observed a man supervising an intricate turning machine.

'Is this always your job?' Marx asked him, 'or have you some other?' 'No,' the man answered, 'I have not done anything else for years. It is only by practice that one learns to work the machine so as to get the difficult shape smooth and fauldess.' 'Thus division of labour makes man an appendage of the machine,' Marx said to my father as we went on. 'His power of thinking is changed into muscular memory.'56

In the afternoon and evening, in general company, Marx preferred light conversation with such men as Otto Knille (a well-known painter) and Simon Deutsch (an Austrian journalist whom Marx remembered from his Paris days). Father and daughter were inseparable whether on walks or writing letters on the terrace behind their hotel. According to Eleanor, still embarrassingly forthright in her reactions to people and smoking almost continuously, she and her father got on very well in Carlsbad and 'his immense knowledge of history made every place we went to more alive and present in the past than in the present itself.5 7

For Marx, the only drawback to Carlsbad was Kugelmann. From the start of his stay he annoyed Marx by his 'carping criticisms with which he quite needlessly embitters his own life and that of his family'.58 Unfortunately, Kugelmann had chosen for Marx a room between his own and Eleanor's. T h e upshot was that

I had the pleasure of his company not only when I was with him, but also when I was alone. I put up patiently with the continual flow of his solemn chatter uttered in a deep voice .. . but my patience at last broke down when he began to bore me too utterly with domestic scenes. This arch-pedant, this bourgeois hair-splitting philistine, imagines that his wife does not understand or comprehend his Faust-like nature, which is struggling to some higher conception of the world; and he torments the poor woman, who is in all respects his superior, in the most revolting manner. It came to an open quarrel between us. I moved to a higher floor and so was completely quit of him (he had seriously spoiled the cure for me). We were only reconciled just before his departure, which took place last Sunday. But I said positively that I would not visit his house in Hanover.59

According to Eleanor, Mrs Kugelmann (for whom she had a great affection) was always being told by her husband that she was not sufficiently grateful for the benefits he conferred on her and 'the grand scene began because Mrs K. didn't lift up her dress on a dusty day'.60 Franziska wrote later that there was another point at issue: Marx and Kugelmann quarrelled violently during a long walk in which Kugelmann 'tried to persuade Marx to refrain from all political propaganda and complete the

studiously avoided Hanover. T h e y went first to Leipzig to see Liebknecht, who took them to welcome Wilhelm Bios on his release from prison. Bios, then a social-democratic journalist and later Prime Minister of Wurttemberg, wrote later:

Fxcited and happy I walked through the prison doors. Outside stood Liebknecht with one of his small sons.62 And near him there stood, with a beautiful young lady on his arm, a tall, thin man in his fifties with a long white beard, the moustache alone being really black. His complexion was fresh and he could have been taken for a jovial old Englishman. But I recognised him immediately from his photo... .65

They then went on to Berlin to see Marx's brother-in-law Edgar, who earned his living as a minor functionary while still preserving his sympathy lor communism. After a trip to Hamburg to see Meissner they returned to London at the beginning of October.

The following year Marx went alone to Carlsbad. His journey out was enlivened by a discussion with a Catholic priest whose reserve Marx managed to break down by the production of a bottle of Cognac. On arrival he announced in letters home that the absence of Kugelmann was a great help to his health, and set about enjoying the long walks and the I'ilsener beer. He spent much time in the company of Maxim Kovalevsky,

.1 liberal Russian aristocrat who shared his interest in the history of land ownership in Russia, and was later a frequent visitor in London. Kovalevsky was no socialist but admired Marx profoundly and came to occupy the position in Marx's life so recently vacated by Kugelmann.

The police continued to watch Marx closely but could only report back to Prague that 'he lives quietly, has very little intercourse with the other guests and frequently goes on long walks alone'. T h e cure was very beneficial: Engels reported in October 1875 that 'Marx has come back

little more in society - mosdy among German university professors - where the question everyone wished to discuss was: what do you think of Wagner? Marx's thoughts were extremely sarcastic ones. Eleanor's health gave Marx much cause for anxiety and she narrowly avoided serious pneumonia at the end of their stay. On their return they spent some time in Prague with Kugelmann's brother-in-law, the businessman Max Oppenheim, and then made a detour via Bingen and Kreuznach as Marx wanted to show his daughter the places where he had married and spent his honeymoon.

In 1877 Marx did not go to Carlsbad; he went instead to the minor spa of Neuenahr in the Rhineland. In a lengthy justification to Engels, he explained that Carlsbad would be extremely expensive, as Jenny would not agree to be left behind this year; and also that a change of regime might be beneficial. Engels responded by presenting Marx with the

do with the English equivalent at Malvern. He went with his wife, his daughter Jenny and his grandson, all of whom were seriously ill. While they were there Lizzie Burns (with whom Engels had been living since the death of Mary) died of a tumour of the bladder after long suffering. Engels married her on her deathbed according to the rites of the Church of England. T h e following year Marx went to Jersey, but had to return to Ramsgate to be with his daughter Jenny after the birth of Edgar, his third grandchild. During this time the family was preoccupied with Jenny

in Ramsgate. Confined to her bed for long periods and mistrustful of doctors, she needed constant family attention. By the turn of the decade the topics of sickness and climate pervaded Marx's letters to the virtual exclusion of all else - understandably enough, in view of his own illnesses and the tragedies that had occurred within his family - he was now mentally and physically exhausted: in a word, his public career was over.

omous national parties. As often, Marx looked to war as the catalyst of revolution. 'The general situation of Europe', he wrote to Sorge in 1874,

'is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go through this war before we can think of any decisive external effectiveness of the Kuropean working class.'65 T h e only country in which there existed a proletarian party was Germany, to which, as Marx had foreseen, the centre of gravity of the workers' movement shifted after the FrancoPrussian War. It was Germany that occupied most of Marx's attention during the 1870s. More accurately, there were two proletarian parties in Germany, the Eisenach party and the followers of Lassalle, and the early 1870s saw attempts to bring about a union between them. This was aided by the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, the resignation of Schweitzer from the presidency of the Lassallean party, and the increasing pressure which Bismarck applied to both parties in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. When their first big electoral success showed that the two parties polled an almost identical number of votes, negotiations were opened and agreement reached in principle at the end of 1874. A united programme was to be adopted at Gotha, a small town in central Germany, in May 1875.

Marx and Engels were somewhat out of touch with the situation inside Germany,66 and were enraged both with the content of the programme and with the fact that they had not been consulted. Engels composed a long letter to Bebel in March 1875 in which he recapitulated the unacceptable Lassallean propositions incorporated in the programme: the rejection of all non-proletarian parties as a 'reactionary mass', the lack of international spirit, the talk of the 'iron laws' of wages and the lack of consideration given to trade unions. And he predicted that they would have to break with Liebknecht if the programme were adopted.67 Marx himself wrote to Bracke in M ay that 'every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes'.68 In Marx's view the Eisenach party should have confined itself to concluding some sort of practical agreement for combined action. As it was, he and Engels would dissociate themselves from the programme immediately after the Congress. T h e letter accompanied a manuscript entitled 'Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers' Party' which he asked Bracke to circulate among the Eisenach leaders. Liebknecht, who considered that the negotiations were too far advanced to be suspended, only allowed a few Eisenach leaders to see the document - and not, for example, Bebel. It was published only in 1891 and became known as the Critique of the Gotha Programme, one of the most important of Marx's theoretical writings.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme took the form of marginal notes ind contained two main points: one being a criticism of the programme's proposals for distributing the national product, the other being a criticism ol its views on the state. On the first point, Marx objected to the attempt

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to reintroduce into the party 'dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but which have now become obsolete verbal rubbish'.69 He did not find very revolutionary the opening declaration that the proceeds of labour belonged to society as a whole since it was a proposition that had 'at all times been made use of by the champions of the state of society prevailing at any given time'.70 Further, he criticised the programme for not attacking landowners along with capitalists. Talk about 'fair distribution' and 'equal rights' was vague; proposals that the workers should receive the 'undiminished proceeds of their labour' showed a complete disregard for necessary expenditure on capital replacement, administration of social services, poor relief, etc. In terms of the future communist society the phrase 'proceeds of labour' was meaningless, for

within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as litde does the labour expended on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour.71

Marx then offered a description of the distribution of the social product in the first stage of communist society 'as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges'.72 In this society the individual producer would receive a certificate from society that he had furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he would draw from the social stock of means of consumption the cost of the equivalent amount of labour. The same amount of

labour which he had given to society in one form he would receive back in another.73

Of course, Marx continued, this equality was, in effect, unequal. Measurement was made with an equal standard - that of labour: whereas men's capacities, family situations, etc., were not the same and thus inequality would arise.

But [continued Marx in a famous passage] these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordi-

nation of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundandy - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!74

Marx summed up his criticism of this section of the programme by saying:

Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democracy) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?75

Marx's second basic criticism was of the section where the programme called for a 'free state' and 'the abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages'. Marx replied that wages were not the value of labour, but the value of labour power. This fact made it clear that

the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing the productivity, that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that, consequendy, the system of wage-labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe proportionate to the development of the social productive forces of labour, whether the worker receives better or worse payment.76

The programme's solution to the problem was as misguided as its formulation: it proposed state-aided workers' co-operatives instead of the revolutionary transformation of society.

Turning to the proposal for a 'free state' Marx roundly declared that this could not be an aim of workers worthy of the name 'socialist'. Marx put the question: 'What transformation will the state undergo in c ommunist society? What social functions will remain in existence that are analogous to present functions of the state?' He did not answer this question specifically, but said: 'Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.''''''

In fact, the programme contained, according to Marx, nothing but the 'old familiar democratic litany' - universal suffrage, direct legislation,

popular rights, a people's militia, etc., many of which had already been achieved in progressive bourgeois republics.

In spite of his threats, Marx did not dissociate himself from the programme; and Engels' assertion that a split in the new party was absolutely certain proved quite mistaken. Bismarck's growing opposition to the socialists made the Lassalleans' policy of co-operation with the state more and more implausible, and the Eisenachers soon gained the upper hand. As the industrialisation of Germany increased at a gigantic rate, the new Social Democratic Workers' Party polled an ever larger number of votes. Nevertheless Marx was still far from happy with the policies of his colleagues and disciples. As even Bebel - whom Marx and Engels regarded as the only completely reliable member of the Party - commented: 'It

was no easy matter to arrive at an understanding with the two old men in London.'78

Although Marx was keen to have a theoretical journal in which to expose 'the absolute ignorance of professors and lecturers'79 he could not welcome the appearance in August 1877 Die Zukunft, a theoretical fortnightly designed to supplement the Party's newspaper Vorwiirts. It was financed by Karl Hochberg, the rich son of a Frankfurt bookmaker who had the best of intentions but, as Marx said, 'I do not give a damn for intentions.'80 He refused to write for the journal and felt more than justified when he read the phrases about justice and the phantasies of the future communist society that were reminiscent of the 'true socialism' of the 1840s. The result of 'bringing a bourgeois into the party'81 had not been a success. Marx summed up his general opinion of the situation in Germany as follows:

. . . A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party in Germany, not so much among the masses as among the leaders (upper-class and 'workers'). The compromise with the Lassalleans has led to a compromise with other halfway elements too: in Berlin (like Most) with Duhring and his 'admirers', but also with a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise diplomaed doctors who want to give socialism a 'higher, idealistic' orientation, that is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Dr Hochberg, who publishes Die Zukunft, is a representative of this tendency and has 'bought his way' into the Party - with the 'noblest' intentions, I assume, but I do not give a damn for 'intentions'. Anything more miserable than his programme of Die Zukunft has seldom seen the light of day with more 'modest presumption'.

The workers themselves, when, like Herr Most & Co., they give up work and become professional literary men, always breed 'theoretical'

mischief and are always ready to join muddleheads from the allegedly 'learned' caste. Utopian socialism, especially, which for decades we have been clearing out of the German workers' heads with so much effort and labour - their freedom from it having made them theoretically (and therefore also practically) superior to the French and English - Utopian socialism, playing with fantastic pictures of the future structure of society, is again spreading like wildfire, and in a much more futile form, not only compared with the great French and English Utopians, but even with - Weitling. It is natural that utopianism, which before the era of materialistically critical socialism concealed the latter within itself in embryo, can now, coming belatedly, only be silly, stale, and reactionary from the roots up... ,82

The Social-Democratic Workers' Party set up at the Gotha Congress certainly embraced many different sorts of socialism: Johannes Most advocated something very near anarchism, 'philanthropic' socialists were legion, and Dtihring's decentralised and highly egalitarian communes were very attractive to the Eisenach wing of the Party. Dtihring's struggle to overcome the difficulties caused by the disability of his blindness together with his outspoken radicalism in the face of university authority gave him a popularity in Berlin (where he taught) that only later would be tarnished by developing megalomania and violent anti-semitism. In general, Diihring considered his attack on Marx to be 'from the left' and criticised what he called Marx's Hegelian scholasticism, his economic determinism, his dependence on Ricardo and the vagueness of his ideas 011 the future communist society. Nevertheless, in spite of his witty characterisation of Marx as an 'old Young Hegelian', he rated him very high and held his works in considerable esteem. In 1877 the Party Congress almost passed a resolution to stop the publication of Engels' anti-Dtihring articles. Johannes Most proposed the resolution, declaring that Engels' articles were 'without interest for the majority of readers of VorwUrts'.m Uebel managed to carry a compromise resolution that they be published m a scientific supplement. In view of the 'demoralisation of the Party' caused by Liebknecht's opening the door to all comers, Marx welcomed the anti-socialist laws passed by Bismarck in October 1878. In the summer two attempts on the life of Wilhelm I had naturally infuriated Marx84 as they at once gave Bismarck the excuse to ban all Social-Democratic organisations, meetings and publications, a ban that was to be maintained lor twelve years.

Marx's displeasure at the situation in Germany centred once again around a new publication. In August 1879 there appeared the first number of a Jahrbuch edited by three exiles in Zurich: the same Hochberg who had started Die Zukunft, Karl Schramm (a Social-Democratic journalist),

and Eduard Bernstein, the future exponent of Revisionism and a recent convert from the ideas of Diihring to those of Marx. T h e Party obviously needed a rallying point: Johannes Most had begun to issue the anarchist Die Freiheit-, and Karl Hirsch, a socialist journalist living in Paris, had started a new paper called Die Laterne, published in Brussels. Hirsch was persuaded to take up the editorship of the proposed Jahrbuch, preparation of which was left to the three in Zurich: the first issue, however, contained such a quietist and reformist attitude that Marx and Engels felt bound to protest. What angered them also was the hostile attitude of the Zurich editors to Hirsch for having attacked in his paper a Social-Democrat named Kayser, who had voted in favour of protecting the German iron industry. Kayser had in fact consulted his colleagues beforehand and secured their permission to vote as he did. Marx, however, dismissed this manoeuvring as so much 'parliamentary cretinism'.85

In a long letter sent to Bebel, Liebknecht and other Party leaders, Marx and Engels summed up their grievances. T h e y rejected the Zurich group's view that the working class was incapable of emancipating itself, that reform alone should be the aim of the Party, and that its programme should be postponed. This sort of attitude, they said, reminded them of 1848; and such men were

the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie .. . full of anxiety that the proletariat, under the pressure of its revolutionary position, may 'go too far'. Instead of determined political opposition, general mediation; instead of struggle against government and bourgeoisie, an attempt to win over and persuade them; instead of defiant resistance to ill-treat- ment from above, humble submission and confession that the punishment was deserved. Historically necessary conflicts are all interpreted as misunderstandings, and all discussion ends with the assurance that after all we are all agreed on the main point.86

It was of course necessary that the proletariat should be reinforced by bourgeois converts. But these had first of all to be able to make a valuable contribution to the proletarian cause and had secondly to abandon completely their petit-bourgeois prejudices. Marx and Engels ended:

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one road open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class-struggle as the immediate driving power of history, and in particular the class-struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is, therefore, impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class-struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battlecry: The emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves. We cannot therefore co-operate with people