In this chapter we shall try to become acquainted with two men. The first is Karl Marx, the originator of Communism, and the second is Friedrich Engels, his collaborator. We shall try to present their lives the way the Communists present them—not as the soft, visionary social reformers which so many text books seem anxious to describe, but rather as the two-fisted, power hungry revolutionists which their closest followers found them to be. Although presented in brief summary, this chapter attempts to include sufficient details so that the student of Communism can answer these questions:
• Why do Marxist writers call their founder a “genius” yet frankly admit he was “a violent, quarrelsome, contentious man, a dictator and a swashbuckler”?
• Was Marx well educated? What was his nationality? Where did he do most of his revolutionary writing?
• How was it that Marx never acquired a profession, an office, an occupation or a dependable means of livelihood?
• How did Engels differ from Marx?
• What were the six principal goals which Marx and Engels set forth in the Communist Manifesto?
• Why did Marx believe one of his first tasks was to “de-throne God”? Why did he think his book, Capital, would change the world?
• Why did Marx fail in his two attempts to create organizations for the promotion of world revolution?
On a chilly, foggy day in 1853, a British government official stood in the drizzling rain before the doorway of a human hovel in the heart of London’s slums. He knocked and after a short delay was admitted. As the officer entered the room thick clouds of smoke and tobacco fumes billowed about his head causing him to choke and cough while his eyes watered. Through the haze he saw the proprietor of the slum dwelling, a barrel-chested man with disheveled hair and a bushy beard. The man greeted the officer in a strong German accent, offered him a clay pipe and then motioned him toward a broken-backed chair.
If the officer had not known better he would never have guessed that the bushy-bearded man who sat before him was a graduate of a university with a Ph.D. degree. Nor that the wife who had just hustled the children into a back room was the daughter of a German aristocrat. Yet such was the case. This was the residence of Dr. and Mrs. Karl Marx.
At the moment Karl Marx was a political fugitive—having been driven from Germany, France and Belgium. England had granted him domicile along with other revolutionary leaders from the Continent and for this Marx was grateful. It gave him a lifelong base from which to continue his revolutionary work.
On this particular day the presence of the officer was no cause for alarm. It was the routine check which the British Government made on all political exiles living in England. Nor was the officer hostile. He found the Marxes strange but interesting people who could engage in very lively conversation on world problems while sitting blissfully in a domestic environment of incomprehensible confusion. The officer later included his puzzled observations concerning the Marxes in his official report:
“(Marx) lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest, neighborhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. The room looking out on the street is the parlor, and the bedroom is at the back. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick dust over everything and the greatest untidiness everywhere. In the middle of the parlor there is a large old-fashioned table covered with oilcloth. On it there are manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, odds and ends and his wife’s sewing basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives and forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumblers, some Dutch clay-pipes, tobacco ashes—all in a pile on the same table…. But all these things do not in the least embarrass Marx or his wife. You are received in the most friendly way and cordially offered pipes, tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be. Eventually a clever and interesting conversation arises which makes amends for all the domestic deficiencies.”{1}
Thus we are introduced to one of the most dramatic personalities to cross the pages of history during the nineteenth century. And one who would have a greater impact dead than alive. Biographers would grapple with the enigma of Marx’s life. At one moment Marx would be called “the greatest genius of this age,” and a moment later even his disciples would feel forced to call him “a violent, quarrelsome, contentious man, a dictator and a swashbuckler, one at feud with all the world and continually alarmed lest he should be unable to assert his superiority.”{2}
Such were the contradictory, surging forces of human dynamics which found expression in the turbulent personality of Karl Marx.
Karl Marx first saw the light of day at Treves, Germany, May 5, 1818. He certainly had no need to apologize for his progenitors. For many generations his male ancestors on both sides had been outstanding scholars and distinguished rabbis. However, the father of Karl Marx decided to break the ties of the past both religiously and professionally. He withdrew his family from the local synagogue to join the congregation of a local protestant faith and then reached out after professional recognition as a practicing attorney. Karl Marx was six years of age when the traditional moorings of the family were thus uprooted, and some biographers of Marx attribute his rejection of religion in later years to the conflicts which this sudden change in his life precipitated.
In elementary school young Karl revealed himself to be a quick, bright scholar. He also revealed a quality which would plague him the rest of his life—his inability to keep a friend. Seldom, in all of Marx’s writings, do we find a reference to any happy boyhood associations. Biographers say he was too intense, too anxious to dominate the situation, too concerned about personal success, too belligerent in his self-assertiveness, to keep many friends. However, Karl Marx was not lacking in sentiment and genuine hunger for affection. At 17, when he began his university career, the letters which he wrote to his parents occasionally unveiled deeply sentimental, woman-like feelings. Here is an example:
“In the hope that the clouds which hang over our family will gradually disperse; that I shall be permitted to share your sufferings and mingle my tears with yours, and, perhaps, in direct touch with you, to show the profound affection, the immeasurable love, which I have not always been able to express as I should like; in the hope that you, too, my fondly and eternally loved Father, bearing in mind how much my feelings have been storm-tossed, will forgive me because my heart must often have seemed to you to have gone astray when the travail of my spirit was depriving it of the power of utterance; in the hope that you will soon be fully restored to health, that I shall be able to clasp you in my arms, and to tell you all that I feel, I remain always your loving son, Karl.”
Such expressions must have puzzled the elder Marx. Throughout his career as a father he was never able to counsel or cross this hot-tempered son without precipitating an emotional explosion. The letters of Karl Marx make frequent reference to the violent quarrels between himself and his parents; the letters from Karl’s parents complain of his egoism, his lack of consideration for the family, his constant demands for money and his discourtesy in failing to answer most of their letters.
It was in the fall of 1835 that Marx entered the University of Bonn to study law. This was a hectic year. He scandalized his parents by joining a tavern club, running himself deeply in debt and almost getting himself expelled for “nocturnal drunkenness and riot.” His studies were most unsatisfactory and he threatened to become a professional poet instead of a lawyer. In the summer of 1836 he fought a duel and received a wound over the eye. It was finally decided that it would be better for the University of Bonn if Karl Marx transferred to some other university. The elder Marx heartily agreed. Karl was sent to Berlin.
It was at the University of Berlin that the intellectual forces in Karl Marx became sinews and the whole pattern of his life began to take shape. Although he complied with his father’s wishes and studied law, it was a half-hearted camouflage to cover up his avid exploration of philosophy. In the midst of this exploration his father died and Marx immediately came out in the open with his announcement that he would seek an academic career. He wanted to occupy a chair of philosophy at some university. Marx chose for his doctoral dissertation: “The Difference between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and of Epicurus.”
In this study he favored the materialism of Epicurus because it allowed for an energizing principle in matter. He thought that if matter were auto-dynamic it would do away with the need for a Creator, a designer or a governing force in the universe. The anti-religious sentiments of Marx found further expression in his thesis when he chose for its motto the cry of Prometheus: “In one word—I hate all the gods!” During this period of intellectual incubation three things dominated the thinking of Karl Marx: his desire to discover a philosophy of nature; his desire to completely repudiate all forms of religion; his desire to win the hand of the daughter of Baron von Westphalen.
While Marx was at the University of Berlin he fell in with a left-wing school of Hegelians who were followers of the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Hegel. At the moment their whole energy was consumed by a desire to liquidate Christianity. David Friedrich Strauss had published his Life of Jesus in 1835 and shocked all Germany with his contention that the Gospels were not true historical documents but were merely myths which he believed evolved from the communal imagination of early Christians. A close associate of Marx, Bruno Bauer, wrote on the same theme in 1840 under the title, Historical Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels. In this book he claimed the Gospels were forgeries. He said Jesus had never existed, that he was a figure of fiction and therefore Christianity was a fraud.
At this point Bauer and Marx decided they would boldly publish a Journal of Atheism, but the magazine lacked financial sponsorship and died in gestation.
Nevertheless, the anti-Christian campaign gained another eloquent protagonist named Ludwig Feuerbach who came out in 1841 with his Essence of Christianity. He not only ridiculed Christianity but presented the thesis that man is the highest form of intelligence in the entire universe. This exotic flash of speculation fascinated Marx. He had written the same idea into his thesis for a doctorate. Marx had bluntly said it is necessary “to recognize as the highest divinity, the human self-consciousness itself!”
The government’s reaction to this anti-Christian campaign took a serious turn; therefore Marx decided it would not be prudent to present his thesis to the University of Berlin where he had been studying. His friend, Bruno Bauer, suggested that he go to the University of Jena. Marx followed this suggestion and consequently received his degree of Doctor of Philosophy from that institution in April, 1841.
Shortly afterwards, however, a leveling blow wiped out his passionate ambition to become a professor of philosophy at some German university. This resulted from the fact that Marx collaborated with Bauer in writing a pamphlet which was vigorously investigated because of its revolutionary flavor. When the Prussian officials identified the authors, Bauer was summarily dismissed from the University of Bonn and Marx was assured that he would never be allowed to teach at any university in Germany.
Now the revolutionary spirit flamed high in Marx; somehow he must start a movement to remake the world. However, to succeed in such a task he felt he must have the companionship of Jenny von Westphalen, the attractive and popular daughter of a German aristocrat who lived in Marx’s hometown. For seven years he had corresponded with her. One of his letters made it clear that if she married him she would become the wife of a revolutionary. Said he: “Jenny! If we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt shall I fling my glove in the world’s face, then shall I stride through the wreckage a creator!”{3}
In June, 1843, the wedding took place. At the time the bridegroom was unemployed and Jenny von Westphalen soon discovered that this was to be a permanent characteristic of their entire married life. Karl Marx never acquired the slightest comprehension of the responsibilities which a husband assumes as the head of a family. Nevertheless, Jenny von Westphalen remained loyal and devoted to Karl Marx under circumstances which would have crushed a woman of weaker mettle. After the marriage they had a five month honeymoon following which they went to Paris, where Marx hoped to collaborate in publishing a revolutionary organ called The Franco-German Year Books. The publication collapsed after its first issue and Marx spent the next fifteen months in the pleasant task of “studying and writing.”
This was to be the pattern of his whole life. In later years while his family was starving he could be found at the library devoting himself to the interesting but, for him, completely unremunerative study of higher mathematics. Voltaire referred derisively to the breed of men who cannot run their own families and therefore retreat to their attics so that from there they can run the whole world. Marx seemed to fit this pattern. Although he seemed physically indolent, Marx was actually capable of prodigious quantities of intellectual work if it dealt with a subject which interested him. Otherwise, he would not stir. As a result of these personal characteristics, Marx never did acquire a profession, an office, a regular occupation or a dependable means of livelihood. Concerning this phase of his career a friendly biographer states:
“Regular work bored him; conventional occupation put him out of humor. Without a penny in his pocket, and with his shirt pawned, he surveyed the world with a lordly air…. Throughout his life he was hard up. He was ridiculously ineffectual in his endeavors to cope with the economic needs of his household and family; and his incapacity in monetary matters involved him in an endless series of struggles and catastrophes. He was always in debt; was incessantly being dunned by creditors…. Half his household goods were always at the pawnshop. His budget defied all attempts to set it in order. His bankruptcy was chronic. The thousands upon thousands which Engels handed over to him melted away in his fingers like snow.”{4}
This brings us to the only close friend Karl Marx ever had—Friedrich Engels.
In many ways Engels was the very opposite of Karl Marx. He was tall, slender, vivacious and good natured. He enjoyed athletics, liked people and was by nature an optimist. He was born in Barmen, Germany, November 28, 1820, the son of a textile manufacturer who owned large factories both in Barmen, Germany, and in Manchester, England. From his earliest youth Engels chafed under the iron discipline of his father, and he learned to despise the textile factories and all they represented. As he matured it was natural that he should have lined himself up with the “industrial proletariat.”
For the son of a bourgeois businessman, young Engels had a surprisingly limited education; at least it did not include any extensive university training. But what he lacked in formal training he supplied through hard work and native talent. He spent considerable time in England and learned both English and French with such facility that he succeeded in selling articles to liberal magazines of both languages.
Biographers have emphasized that while the hearty and attractive Engels differed in personal traits from the brooding, suspicious Marx, nevertheless, the two of them followed an identical course of intellectual development. Engels, like Marx, quarreled bitterly with his father, took to reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus, fell in with the same radical left-wing Hegelians who had attracted Marx, became an agnostic and a cynic, lost confidence in the free-enterprise economy of the Industrial Revolution and decided the only real hope for the world was Communism.
Engels had been an admirer of Marx long before he had a chance to meet him. It was in August, 1844, that he traveled to Paris for the specific purpose of visiting Marx. The magnetic attraction between the two men was instantaneous. After ten days both men felt it was their destiny to work together. It was during this same ten days that Marx converted Engels from a Utopian Communist to an outright revolutionist. He convinced Engels that there was no real hope for humanity in the idealism of Robert Owen or Saint-Simon but that conditions called for a militant revolution to overthrow existing society. Engels agreed and proceeded back to Germany.
Six months later Marx was expelled from France, along with other revolutionary spirits, and took up residence in Brussels, Belgium. Here Marx and Engels wrote The Holy Family, a book designed to rally around them those Communists who were willing to completely disavow any connection with the so-called “peaceful reforms” of philanthropy, Utopianism or Christian morality. The red flag of revolution was up and Marx and Engels considered themselves the royal color-guard.
The strange relationship which rapidly developed between Marx and Engels can be understood only when it is realized that Engels considered it a privilege to be associated with such a genius as Marx. Among other things, he counted it an honor to be allowed to assume responsibility for Marx’s financial support. Shortly after Marx was expelled from France, Engels sent him all the ready cash in his possession and promised him more: “Please take it as a matter of course that it will be the greatest pleasure in the world to place at your disposal the fee I hope shortly to receive for my English literary venture. I can get along without any money just now, for my governor (father) will have to keep me in funds. We cannot allow the dogs to enjoy having involved you in pecuniary embarrassment by their infamous behavior.”
This new partnership between Marx and Engels gave them both the courage to immediately launch an International Communist League based on the need for a violent revolution. They planned to use the workers in Germany and France as the backbone for their new political machine but this proved bitterly disappointing. After spending several months among the French workers Engels castigated them because they “prefer the most preposterous day-dreaming, peaceful plans for inaugurating universal happiness.” He told Marx that the tinder for a revolution in France was nonexistent. Having thus failed in their plan to build their own revolutionary organization, Marx and Engels decided to take over one that was already in existence. In August, 1847, they succeeded in gaining control of the “Workers’ Educational Society” in Brussels. This immediately gave them prestige among reform organizations in Europe. It also gave them the first opportunity to extend their influence in England. At this point Marx and Engels would have been surprised to know that England rather than the Continent would become the headquarters for their revolutionary work.
During November, 1847, word came from London that the “Federation of the Just” (later known as the Communist League) wanted Marx and Engels to participate in their second congress as representatives of the Communist organizations in Brussels. Marx and Engels not only attended the congress but practically took it over. By staying up most of the night laying their plans and by using shrewd strategy at each of the meetings, they succeeded in getting the congress to adopt all of their basic views. Marx and Engels were then commissioned to write a declaration of principles or a “Manifesto to the World.” They returned to Brussels and immediately set to work with Marx pouring into the text his passionate plea for a revolution. When they were through they had announced to mankind that the new program of International Communism stood for: 1. the overthrow of capitalism, 2. the abolition of private property, 3. the elimination of the family as a social unit, 4. the abolition of all classes, 5. the overthrow of all governments, and 6. the establishment of a communist order with communal ownership of property in a classless, stateless society. To accomplish this, the Communist Manifesto was crystal clear as to the course to be taken:
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”
The red glare of revolution came much sooner than either Marx or Engels had anticipated. In February, 1848, while the ink on the Communist Manifesto was still drying, the revolutionary spirit of the French proletariat united with the resentment of the bourgeoisie against Louis Philippe and a violent uprising ensued which drove the Emperor from the country. Immediately afterwards a provisional government was set up which included members of the Communist League, who promptly summoned Marx to Paris. Marx was flushed with excitement when he arrived at the French capitol armed with full authority from the Communist League headquarters to set up the international headquarters in Paris and to engineer the revolutions in other countries from there.
Marx learned that the intoxicating success of the uprising in France had induced the radical element in the provisional government to send “legions” into surrounding countries. Their purpose was to launch an uprising in each country and build the revolution into one magnificent conflagration. Although this was precisely what Marx had been advocating for several years, he suddenly sensed that such a campaign at the present moment might backfire and cause them to lose the support of the masses in those countries where legions were sent. Nevertheless, the plan was adopted and the first legions were marched off to Germany. Marx soon followed and began publishing a revolutionary periodical in his native tongue called the Rheinische Zeitung.
The revolutionary leaders soon discovered that Marx was a propaganda liability. This became painfully evident when he was sent with other members of the Communist League to organize the workers in the Rhine Valley. Marx, when asked to address the German Democratic Congress, badly bungled this golden opportunity. Carl Schurz says: “I was eager to hear the words of wisdom that would, I supposed, fall from the lips of so celebrated a man. I was greatly disappointed. What Marx said was unquestionably weighty, logical and clear. But never have I seen any one whose manner was more insufferably arrogant. He would not give me a moment’s consideration to any opinion that differed from his own. He treated with open contempt everyone who contradicted him…. Those whose feelings he had wounded by his offensive manner were inclined to vote in favor of everything which ran counter to his wishes… far from winning new adherents, he repelled many who might have been inclined to support him.”{5}
From the beginning the revolution in Germany had been anemic and by May 16, 1849, it had reached a state of inglorious collapse. Marx was given twenty-four hours to quit the country. He stayed just long enough to borrow funds and print the last edition of his paper in red ink and then hastened away to find refuge in France.
But France was no refuge. Marx arrived in Paris penniless and exhausted, only to find that the Communist influence in the new Republic had wilted and died. The National Assembly was in the hands of a monarchial majority.
As soon as possible he fled from France, leaving his family to follow later because he was destitute of funds. He decided to make his permanent exile in London.
Although Marx had to cram his family into a cheap, one-room apartment in slums of London, he felt sufficiently satisfied with their well-being to immediately concentrate his attention once again on the task of reviving the fires of the revolution. In spite of this spirit of dedication, however, Marx’s effort to lead out did more harm than good. His agitating spirit always seemed to create splinters and quarrels in the ranks of his confederates and before long he had practically cut himself off from his former associates. The Central Committee was taken out from under his influence and transferred to Cologne. There it remained until 1852 when all Communist leaders in Germany were arrested and sentenced to heavy prison terms for revolutionary activity. Marx did everything in his power to save his estranged comrades. He gathered documents, recruited witnesses and proposed various legal arguments which he thought might help, but in spite of all this yeoman service the verdicts of “guilty” pulled out of active revolutionary service every one of the party leaders then on trial. This sounded the death knell for the Communist League.
From this time on the Marx family lived in London in the most extreme poverty. A peculiar combination of emotions was expressed by Marx in his correspondence during this period. On the one hand he expressed soulful concern for the welfare of his wife and children. He confessed in a letter to Engels that the “nocturnal tears and lamentations” of his wife were almost beyond endurance. Then, in the same letter he blithely went about explaining how he was spending his whole time studying history, politics, economics and social problems so as to figure out the answers for all the problems of the world.
In 1852 his little daughter, Francisca, died. Two years later marked the passing of his young son, Edgar, and two years after that a baby died at birth.
A few paragraphs from a letter written by Mrs. Marx indicates the amazing loyalty of this woman who saw her half-fed children dying around her while their father spent days and nights in the British Museum library.
“Let me describe only one day of this life, as it actually was…. Since wet-nurses are exceedingly expensive here, I made up my mind, despite terrible pains in the breasts and the back, to nurse the baby myself. But the poor little angel drank in so much sorrow with the milk that he was continually fretting, in violent pain day and night. Since he has been in the world, he has not slept a single night through, at most two or three hours. Of late, there have been violent spasms, so that the child is continually betwixt life and death. When thus afflicted, he sucked so vigorously that my nipple became sore, and bled; often the blood streamed into his little mouth. One day I was sitting like this when our landlady suddenly appeared…. Since we could not pay this sum (of five pounds) instantly, two brokers came into the house, and took possession of all my belongings—bedding, clothes, everything, even the baby’s cradle and the little girls’ toys, so that the children wept bitterly. They threatened to take everything away in two hours. (Fortunately they did not.) If this had happened I should have had to lie on the floor with my freezing children beside me….
“Next day we had to leave. It was cold and rainy. My husband tried to find lodging, but as soon as he said he had four children no one would take us. At length a friend helped us. We paid what was owed, and I quickly sold all my beds and bedding in order to settle accounts with the chemist, the baker, and the milkman.”{6}
Thus the years passed. Literally hundreds of letters were exchanged between Engels and Marx and nearly all of them refer in one place or another to money. Engels’ letters characteristically contain this phrase: “Enclosed is a post office order for five pounds,” while Marx’s epistles are shot through with exasperated passages such as: “My mother has positively assured me that she will protest any bill drawn on her.” “For ten days we have been without a soul in the house.” “You will agree that I am dipped up to my ears in petty-bourgeois pickle.”
At one point in this bitter existence there seemed to be a sudden ray of hope. During a particularly desperate period when Engels could give no relief, Marx made a trip to Holland where a prosperous uncle generously handed him one hundred and sixty pounds. This was enough to put Marx on his financial feet, pay off his debts and give him a new start. But with money in his pocket, Marx decided to take a tour of Germany. He visited his mother in Treves, preceded to Berlin, undertook a number of drinking excursions with his old friends, had himself photographed and generally played the role of a gentleman of leisure. Two months later he returned home. Frau Marx welcomed her tourist husband thinking that now bills could be paid, clothing and furniture could be purchased and better rooms rented. She was horrified to learn that practically nothing remained of the hundred and sixty pounds.
In 1862 a great international exhibition was held in London, to proudly parade the industrial achievements of nineteenth century capitalism. The promoters of the exhibition were desirous of creating an atmosphere of international good will and therefore invited all countries to not only submit displays but also to send representatives of their workers to exchange ideas and good will with the workers of other countries who would be in attendance.
The British labor leaders, who had been gaining strength since 1860, considered this an excellent time to set up an international workers’ organization. They therefore took, every opportunity to make firm friends with labor leaders from Italy, Germany, France, Poland and Holland. In due time they were able to establish a permanent “International” with headquarters in London. One of the leaders of this movement was a tailor named Eccarius who had formerly been a right hand man to Marx during the days of the Communist League. As soon as the new movement began to catch on, Marx was invited by Eccarius to participate.
Immediately Marx began to assert himself—but within bounds. This was the lesson he had partially learned from the failure of the Communist League. The new organization was called the International Workingmen’s Association and is frequently referred to as the First International. As long as Marx restrained himself he was able to exercise considerable influence among the labor leaders from the various countries. By careful maneuvering behind the scenes he was able to get nearly all of his ideas adopted in preference to weaker, more peaceful programs suggested by “social-minded reformers.” But all of this seemed mealy-mouthed and unnatural to Marx. He admitted to Engels he had been forced to make compromises in order to keep peace:
“My proposals were all adopted by the sub-committee. Only one thing, I had to pledge myself to insert in the preamble to the rules two phrases about ‘duty’ and ‘right’; also about truth, morality and justice-but they are all so placed that they cannot do any harm…. It will be some time before the reawakened movement will permit the old boldness of speech. We must be strong in the substance, but moderate in the form.”{7}
In spite of this determination to be “moderate,” however, it was not long before the true feeling of Marx rumbled to the surface. He was concerned about two things: first, the need to create a hard core of disciplined revolutionists who could inflame the workers of the major industries in all countries with a will to act, and secondly, the need to eliminate any who might threaten Marx’s leadership in this new movement. What Marx was contemplating was a party purge.
The first to feel the force of the new campaign was the German labor leader, Herr von Schweitzer. All students of Marx and Engels seem to agree that both of them were completely without mercy when it came to dealing with a comrade who was marked for party liquidation. The broadside of propaganda which they launched against Schweitzer alleged that he was working for Bismarck, the Iron Man of Germany. Although this was pure fabrication, nothing would have been more devastating to Schweitzer’s reputation. Even today some historians use Marx’s charges as a basis for the claim that Schweitzer was a traitor to the cause of labor.
Another party pillar to fall under the purge was Mikhail Bakunin, the first Russian to become interested in revolutionary activities. He escaped from a Russian prison and had taken up residence in Geneva. Bakunin became so enthusiastic in advocating Marx’s principles that certain elements of the labor movement began gravitating toward his leadership. This was fatal. Marx immediately set out to destroy him. The technique was the same as that used against Schweitzer except that Marx and Engels charged Bakunin with being an agent of the Russian Czar. This had a ruinous effect for awhile. Then they spread a charge which later proved to be completely false—that Bakunin had embezzled 25,000 francs. Finally, to administer the coup de grace, Marx succeeded in getting the International to oust Bakunin from the Association. By this act Marx secretly felt he had destroyed the last man who might seriously threaten his leadership. What Marx did not know was the fact that in spite of this abuse, Bakunin would remain loyal to Marx’s precepts, even translate Marx’s books into Russian and thereby plant seeds which would ultimately bring the first nation in the modern world under a Communist dictatorship.
However, Mark’s anxiety to purge the International of all his personal enemies created such violent suspicion, distrust and party dissension that it brought about the organization’s total destruction. In fact, the end of the First International came close on the heels of Bakunin’s expulsion. The trade unions in England began to abandon the cause of international revolution and the workers’ groups on the Continent began ignoring the mandates of the Association. Finally, on September 8, 1873, the last congress of the International Workingmen’s Association was held at Geneva and Marx found that the thirteen delegates who finally agreed to attend had to be practically “dug up out of the ground.” For all practical intents and purpose, the First International was dead.
Much of Marx’s motivation in trying to make the International Workingmen’s Association a great world movement was his desire to put into practice the very theories he was struggling to put down on paper. For several years he had pampered his two pet projects—the International and his “book.” Both projects drained him of his normal physical strength. This permitted an old liver ailment to flare up again and before long he was suffering from a rash of boils which threatened to cover his entire body. Ill health was to plague him the remainder of his days. In a letter to Engels he poured out his complaints against the pain and disappointment he was suffering:
“To my extreme disgust, after being unable to sleep all night I discovered two more first-class boils on my chest.” Later he wrote, “I am working now like a drayhorse, seeing that I must make the best use of all the time available for work, and the carbuncles are still there, though they are now giving me only local trouble, and are not interfering with my brain.” After a particularly severe attack he wrote: “This time it was really serious—the family did not know how serious. If it recurs three or four times more, it will be all up with me. I have wasted amazingly, and am still damnably weak, not in the head, but in the trunk and limbs…. There is no question of being able to sit up, but, while lying, I have been able, at intervals, to keep digging away at my work.”{8}
The “work” to which Marx refers was the research and preparation of the first volume of Capital. Marx was convinced that a revolution would never succeed unless the working masses had a revolutionary philosophy of history, economics and social progress. He wrote Capital in order to show why the violent overthrow of the present order was not only justified but inescapable. Elsewhere, we shall examine the theories of Marx, but at this point it is sufficient to point out that Marx looked upon the writing of this book as an unpleasant mission which had to be completed before international communism could germinate and flourish.
During 1865, when Marx was striving to prepare a final copy of his first volume for the printer, he told Engels he wanted to “finish it off quickly, for the thing has become a perfect nightmare to me.” He occasionally enjoyed periods of respite from his illness and finally wrote to Engels: “As regards the damned book, this is how the matter stands. It was finished in the end of December.” Engels assured Marx that the pain and suspense of getting the book completed were as great a trial to him as they were to Marx. He wrote: “The day the manuscript goes to press, I shall get gloriously drunk!”
It was not until March, 1867, that all the revisions were finally completed and Marx set out for Germany to have the book published in his native tongue. In a short time it began to be distributed.
But when Capital appeared in the book stalls it was far from the literary triumph which Marx and Engels had both expected. Its line of reasoning was entirely too finely drawn for the working masses and far from persuasive among intellectual reformers. It remained for the intellectuals of another generation to make Capital the principal excuse for their attack on the existing order of things.
By 1875 Marx had little satisfaction to draw from his life of struggle. The International had disintegrated around him and the book which was written to justify his policies was gathering dust in the bookstores across the Continent. Marx continued writing two more volumes but the flame was going out in him. After Marx’s death, it would remain the task of Engels to publish the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in 1894.
The closing years for Karl Marx were sterile, lonely ones. In abject defeat he turned to the bosom of his family. Always there would be Jenny to give comfort and consolation. But the Marx children bore the scars of their upbringing. When Marx interfered with the courtship of his daughter, Eleanor, she entered a free-love union with Edward Aveling and, following a most wretched existence with him, committed suicide. Another daughter, Laura, married a renegade doctor and later died with him in a suicide pact.
By 1878 Marx had abandoned practically every aspect of his work. His rock-ribbed self confidence had been shattered. Labor leaders ignored him, reformers ridiculed him. His words carried little weight, either at home or abroad.
Thus, his morale was at the breaking point when the toll of time struck down his only kindred spirit outside of Engels—Frau Marx. This gentle, aristocratic and long-suffering companion died of cancer December 2, 1881. Thirteen months later, Marx’s favorite daughter, Jenny, also suddenly died. Thereafter, Engels noted that Marx, the man, was as well as dead. He survived his daughter, Jenny, by only two brief months. On March 14, 1883, at 2:45 in the afternoon, he died while sitting alone in his chair.
Three days later six or seven persons followed the casket of Karl Marx to Highgate cemetery in London and there his one abiding friend, Friedrich Engels, read a funeral oration. It was the kind of oration Marx would liked to have heard. It granted him in death what Marx was never granted in life unequivocal tribute of glowing praise.
Thus ended the dynamic, turbulent and restless career of Karl Marx. By all standards it was a pathetic life, filled with burning ambition, constant frustration and continuous failure. Whether seen from the viewpoint of friend or foe, perhaps the real tragedy of Marx’s life can be found in the fact that for some amazing reason he almost instinctively planted the seeds of self-destruction in any project he promoted.
One cannot pore over the almost endless products of his pen—the weighty, complex books or the reams of sniping, feverish correspondence without feeling that Karl Marx projected into Communism the very essence of his own nature. His resentment of political authority expressed itself in a ringing cry for universal revolution. His refusal or inability to compete in a capitalistic economy wrung from him a vitriolic denunciation of that economy and a prophecy that its destruction was inexorably decreed. His deep sense of insecurity pushed him to create out of his own imagination a device for interpreting history which made progress inescapable and a Communist millennium unavoidable. His personal attitude toward religion, morals and competition in everyday existence led him to long for an age when men would have no religion, morals or competition in everyday existence. He wanted to live in a classless, stateless, noncompetitive society where there would be such lavish production of everything that men, by simply producing according to their apparent ability, would automatically receive a superabundance of all material needs.
Another characteristic of Marx which he shared with his intellectual off-spring—Communism—is that both must be viewed from a distance to be admired, even by friends. It is for this reason that biographers often treat Marx as though he were two persons. From a distance they might feel to admire his theories but upon close contact Marx becomes a different entity. Thus, Bakunin could call Marx the “supreme economic and socialist genius of our day” and then give the following evaluation of Marx, the man: “Marx is egotistical to the pitch of insanity….
“Marx loved his own person much more than he loved his friends and apostles, and no friendship could hold water against the slightest wound to his vanity…. Marx will never forgive a slight to his person. You must worship him, make an idol of him, if he is to love you in return; you must at least fear him if he is to tolerate you. He likes to surround himself with pygmies, with lackeys and flatterers. All the same, there are some remarkable men among his intimates. In general, however, one may say that in the circle of Marx’s intimates there is very little brotherly frankness, but a great deal of machination and diplomacy. There is a sort of tacit struggle and a compromise between the self-loves of the various persons concerned; and where vanity is at work there is no longer place for brotherly feeling. Every one is on his guard, is afraid of being sacrificed, of being annihilated. Marx’s circle is a sort of mutual admiration society. Marx is the chief distributor of honours, but is also the invariably perfidious and malicious, the never frank and open, inciter to the persecution of those whom he suspects, or who had the misfortune of failing to show all the veneration he expects. As soon as he has ordered a persecution there is no limit to the baseness and infamy of the method.”
The acid of boiling intolerance which Marx frequently poured down on the heads of his followers may be partially explained by his own complete certainty that the theories he had concocted were infallible gems of cosmic truth. In his heyday of abounding strength Marx often bowled over his opposition with mountain-moving declarations of supreme self-confidence:
“Historical evolution is on your side,” he shouted to his followers. “Capitalism, brought into being by the laws of historical evolution, will be destroyed by the inexorable working of these same laws. The bourgeoisie, the business manager of the capitalist system, appeared on the stage of history with that system, and must make its exit when that system walks off the stage. You, proletarians, keep capitalism going by your labour, and maintain the whole of bourgeois society by the fruits of your industry. But socialism will be a necessary organic outcome of capitalism, the essence of the latter being implied in the essence of the former. With the end of capitalism, comes the beginning of socialism as a logical consequence. You proletarians, as a class, being the incorporators of the forces and tendencies which will do away with capitalism, must necessarily make an end of the bourgeoisie. You merely need, as a class, to fulfill the evolution which your mission calls on you to fulfill. All you need is to will! History makes this as easy as possible for you. You need not hatch out any new ideas, make any plans, discover a future State. You need not ‘dogmatically anticipate the world.’ You need merely put your hands to the task which is awaiting you. The means by which you will do it are to be found in the unceasing, purposive, consistent fighting of the class struggle, whose crown will be the victory of the social revolution.”
When Marx died there was little to suggest to him in his closing hours that he yet would be remembered for the thing he had striven unsuccessfully to produce—a genuine revolution. While Western Europe wrote off revolutionary violence as a mere phase of Nineteenth Century social reform, a great slumbering giant in Eastern Europe was about to be rudely awakened by Marx’s revolutionary call to arms. This, of course, was Russia.
Before studying the revolution in Russia, we must turn to a brief review of the theories which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels left as a legacy to the disciples of World Communism. In these theories may be found the explanation for many things in the Russian Revolution and in subsequent Communist activities which otherwise might be difficult or impossible to understand.