have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of
civil wars and national wars not merely in order to
change your conditions but in order to change
yourselves and become qualified for political power,”
you on the contrary tell them, “We must achieve power
immediately.”
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a revolutionary
who limited his activity to lectures on political economy to the
Communist Workers’ Educational Union. The upshot was that
Marx gradually stopped attending meetings of the London
Communists. In 1852 he devoted himself intensely to working for
the defense of 11 communists arrested and tried in Cologne on
charges of revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their
behalf. The same year he also published, in a German-American
periodical, his essay “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis
Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), with
its acute analysis of the formation of a bureaucratic absolutist state
with the support of the peasant class. In other respects the next 12
years were, in Marx’s words, years of “isolation” both for him and
for Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and spiritual
pain. His funds were gone, and except on one occasion he could not
bring himself to seek paid employment. In March 1850 he and his
wife and four small children were evicted and their belongings
seized. Several of his children died–including a son Guido, “a
sacrifice to bourgeois misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom
his wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin.
For six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often
subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to lie to the
creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once he had to escape them
by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx’s financial
support. The sums were not large at first, for Engels was only a
clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at Manchester. Later,
however, in 1864, when he became a partner, his subventions were
generous. Marx was proud of Engels’ friendship and would tolerate
no criticism of him. Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and
from Marx’s friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their
economic distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in the
United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana, managing
editor of The New York Tribune, he became in 1851 its European
correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace Greeley, had
sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist system developed by
the French theorist Charles Fourier. From 1851 to 1862 Marx
contributed close to 500 articles and editorials (Engels providing
about a fourth of them). He ranged over the whole political universe,
analyzing social movements and agitations from India and China to
Britain and Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory, Zur
Kritik der politischen +konomie (A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy). In its preface he again summarized his
materialistic conception of history, his theory that the course of
history is dependent on economic developments. At this time,
however, Marx regarded his studies in economic and social history
at the British Museum as his main task. He was busy producing the
drafts of his magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das
Kapital. Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the
Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right and
were published after Marx’s death.
Role in the First International
Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding of the
International Working Men’s Association. Although he was neither
its founder nor its head, he soon became its leading spirit. Its first
public meeting, called by English trade union leaders and French
workers’ representatives, took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London
on Sept. 28, 1864. Marx, who had been invited through a French
intermediary to attend as a representative of the German workers,
sat silently on the platform. A committee was set up to produce a
program and a constitution for the new organization. After various
drafts had been submitted that were felt to be unsatisfactory, Marx,
serving on a subcommittee, drew upon his immense journalistic
experience. His “Address and the Provisional Rules of the
International Working Men’s Association,” unlike his other writings,
stressed the positive achievements of the cooperative movement and
of parliamentary legislation; the gradual conquest of political power
would enable the British proletariat to extend these achievements on
a national scale.
As a member of the organization’s General Council, and
corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were sometimes held
several times a week. For several years he showed a rare
diplomatic tact in composing differences among various parties,
factions, and tendencies. The International grew in prestige and
membership, its numbers reaching perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was
successful in several interventions on behalf of European trade
unions engaged in struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European political
personality; it was the Paris Commune that made him into an
international figure, “the best calumniated and most menaced man of
London,” as he wrote. When the Franco-German War broke out in
1870, Marx and Engels disagreed with followers in Germany who
refused to vote in the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General
Council declared that “on the German side the war was a war of
defence.” After the defeat of the French armies, however, they felt
that the German terms amounted to aggrandizement at the expense
of the French people. When an insurrection broke out in Paris and
the Paris Commune was proclaimed, Marx gave it his unswerving
support. On May 30, 1871, after the Commune had been crushed,
he hailed it in a famous address entitled Civil War in France:
History has no comparable example of such greatness.
. . . Its martyrs are enshrined forever in the great heart
of the working class.
In Engels’ judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s first example
of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s name, as the leader
of The First International and author of the notorious Civil War,
became synonymous throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit
symbolized by the Paris Commune.
The advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the
antagonisms within the International Working Men’s Association and
thus brought about its downfall. English trade unionists such as
George Odger, former president of the General Council, opposed
Marx’s support of the Paris Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867,
which had enfranchised the British working class, had opened vast
opportunities for political action by the trade unions. English labour
leaders found they could make many practical advances by
cooperating with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx’s rhetoric
as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they had “sold
themselves” to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under the leadership of the famed
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. A veteran of
tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, Bakunin could move men by his
oratory, which one listener compared to “a raging storm with
lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.”
Bakunin admired Marx’s intellect but could hardly forget that Marx
had published a report in 1848 charging him with being a Russian
agent. He felt that Marx was a German authoritarian and an
arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General Council into a
personal dictatorship over the workers. He strongly opposed
several of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s support of the
centralized structure of the International, Marx’s view that the
proletariat class should act as a political party against prevailing
parties but within the existing parliamentary system, and Marx’s
belief that the proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois
state, should establish its own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of
the revolutionary was destruction; he looked to the Russian
peasantry, with its propensities for violence and its uncurbed
revolutionary instincts, rather than to the effete, civilized workers of
the industrial countries. The students, he hoped, would be the
officers of the revolution. He acquired followers, mostly young men,
in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and he organized a secret society,
the International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in 1869
challenged the hegemony of the General Council at the congress in
Basel, Switz. Marx, however, had already succeeded in preventing
its admission as an organized body into the International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of
revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they considered
to be Marx’s “authoritarian communism.” Bakunin began organizing
sections of the International for an attack on the alleged dictatorship
of Marx and the General Council. Marx in reply publicized
Bakunin’s embroilment with an unscrupulous Russian student leader,
Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and
murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with the anarchist left against
him, Marx feared losing control of the International to Bakunin. He
also wanted to return to his studies and to finish Das Kapital. At the
congress of the International at The Hague in 1872, the only one he
ever attended, Marx managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to
the consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the seat of the
General Council be transferred from London to New York City.
The Bakuninists were expelled, but the International languished and
was finally disbanded in Philadelphia in 1876.
Last years
During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative energies
declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic mental
depression,” and his life turned inward toward his family. He was
unable to complete any substantial work, though he still read widely
and undertook to learn Russian. He became crotchety in his political
opinions. When his own followers and those of the German
revolutionary Ferdinand Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist
goals should be achieved through cooperation with the state,
coalesced in 1875 to found the German Social Democratic Party,
Marx wrote a caustic criticism of their program (the so-called
Gotha Program), claiming that it made too many compromises with
the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside and
tried to mollify him personally. Increasingly, he looked to a
European war for the overthrow of Russian tsarism, the mainstay of
reaction, hoping that this would revive the political energies of the
working classes. He was moved by what he considered to be the
selfless courage of the Russian terrorists who assassinated the tsar,
Alexander II, in 1881; he felt this to be “a historically inevitable
means of action.”
Despite Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still retained
what Engels called his “peculiar influence” on the leaders of
working-class and socialist movements. In 1879, when the French
Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded, its leader Jules Guesde
went to London to consult with Marx, who dictated the preamble
of its program and shaped much of its content. In 1881 Henry
Mayers Hyndman in his England for All drew heavily on his
conversations with Marx but angered him by being afraid to
acknowledge him by name.
During his last years Marx spent much time at health resorts and
even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the death of his wife on
Dec. 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan.
11, 1883. He died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the
following year.
Character and significance
At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that
Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development of
human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society. But
“Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He was “the best-hated
and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he also died “beloved,
revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected in the
sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx was a
combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous intellectual.
He gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. A
Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in debate in
1846 recalled that “he spoke only in the imperative, brooking no
contradiction,” and seemed to be “the personification of a
democratic dictator such as might appear before one in moments of
fantasy.” But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences
and avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at
congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and
rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses
of the International where the rival socialist groups debated
important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man, most at home
in the atmosphere of the General Council or on the staff of a
newspaper, where his character could impress itself forcefully on a
small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting
distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed questions
of economics and sociology on a footing of intellectual equality.
Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas
such as that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an
agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to let
bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of him, yet
he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests of
relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal habits and
way of life, even to the point of joining two friends in a students’
prank during which they systematically broke four or five
streetlamps in a London street and then fled from the police. He was
a great reader of novels, especially those of Sir Walter Scott and
Balzac; and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an
affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his love of
children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his own. Of his seven
children, three daughters grew to maturity. His favourite daughter,
Eleanor, worried him with her nervous, brooding, emotional
character and her desire to be an actress. Another shadow was cast
on Marx’s domestic life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene
Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was dying
disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above all,
Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his
conception of a better society. He regarded struggle as the law of
life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s
masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,” as it
was officially described in a resolution of the International Working
Men’s Association, was published in 1867 in Berlin and received a
second edition in 1873. Only the first volume was completed and
published in Marx’s lifetime. The second and third volumes,
unfinished by Marx, were edited by Engels and published in 1885
and 1894. The economic categories he employed were those of the
classical British economics of David Ricardo; but Marx used them
in accordance with his dialectical method to argue that bourgeois
society, like every social organism, must follow its inevitable path of
development. Through the working of such immanent tendencies as
the declining rate of profit, capitalism would die and be replaced by
another, higher, society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital
are the descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books,
on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed that this
misery would increase, while at the same time the monopoly of