Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Yet after these encouraging words, obviously meant to bolster the spirit of Russian socialists, Marx’s profound doubts and ambivalence about Russia’s future prospects return. Indirectly responding to the perennial question posed by Russian revolutionaries whether Russia can proceed toward a socialist revolution based on its traditional peasant village communities without going through western-style industrialization, Marx again gives a hedging answer:

  The only answer possible to that question today is this: If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a common development.

  Yet in one of his last letters, sent to his daughter Laura, whom he addressed by her family nickname (“Dear Cacadou”), written on 14th December 1882, he expressed comfort in acknowledging reports from Russia that show “the great run of my theories in that country,” adding that he took great satisfaction that “I damage a power, which, besides England, is the great bulwark of the old society.”

  In retrospect, and one hundred years after the Bolsheviks seized power in a pre-industrial Russia, with catastrophic and oppressive results, one can well understand Marx’s skeptical ambivalence.

  THE LAST YEARS

  An external reason is responsible for the fact that the last decade of Marx’s life is less well documented than previous years: in September 1870—at the height of the events in France leading to the Paris Commune—Engels retired from running his family’s business in Manchester and moved to London, to a spacious house in Regent’s Park. In the following years, he and Marx met almost daily, but this put an end to their voluminous written correspondence, which has been one of the major sources for the details of Marx’s life after he moved to London in 1849, for he exchanged letters on a constant basis with Engels in Manchester. Once they were both in London, this river dried up.

  Yet it is still possible to reconstruct the last decade of Marx’s life through other sources. Not surprisingly, with his failing health, this period is characterized by both a diminishing literary output and a somewhat hectic travel schedule between numerous spas and resorts, seeking a cure or at least alleviation for his numerous maladies. With the demise of the IWA, Marx was also no longer involved in organizational or institutional activities.

  From more than a century and a half distance, and with the progress of modern medicine, it is not easy to gain an adequate diagnosis of Marx’s medical history. He had constantly suffered from boils and numerous stomach complaints; over time, heavy coughs, vomiting, and hemorrhages sometimes made speaking and swallowing difficult. Eventually this became accompanied by partial paralysis of one side of his body, some loss of memory, and difficulties in concentration. In all probability, these were the symptoms of latent tuberculosis; his father and some of his siblings had died at an early age from it. The doctors prescribed various treatments and medications, some of which now look totally useless and might even have exacerbated the patient’s condition; they also advised various cures and getting away from London’s nasty and inclement weather in search of warmer climes and the sun.

  So the last years of Marx’s life are filled with travels not only to regular spas—we have already mentioned his visits to Carlsbad—but also to numerous other resorts: in some cases he traveled with his wife, in others he was accompanied by his daughter Eleanor; some he undertook on his own.

  The list is lengthy: it includes Harrogate, Bad Neuenahr, Ramsgate, Eastbourne, Isle of Wight, Argenteuil (where his daughter Jenny and her husband Charles Longuet lived for some time)—finally even to Algiers, stopping on his way back from there in Cannes and Monte Carlo. Despite Marx’s relatively comfortable financial conditions at that time, these travels were obviously expensive, and he needed extra support from Engels, who again helped him generously—for the trip to Bad Neuenahr he supplied him with an extra one hundred pounds. In August 1874, Marx applied for British citizenship, probably to facilitate his travels, but was turned down.

  Despite his ailments, Marx tried to keep up both his reading and to a certain degree also his writing. In the late 1870s, Engels was preparing a lengthy polemic against the German social thinker Eugen Dühring, who developed a socialist system criticizing Marx’s theories of class analysis and class struggle, mainly arguing that moral persuasion, rather than economic interests, should guide the socialist movement. Marx contributed a chapter to Engels’s book, which was initially serialized and then appeared in book form in 1878 and became known as Anti-Dühring. It is today mainly remembered for Engels’s shrewd remark—aimed mainly at Bakunin’s anarchists—that under socialism the state would not be abolished but would “wither away.” That Dühring’s works later laid the foundations for a populist racist anti-Semitism made the polemic even more central in the canon of Marxist socialism. Marx’s contribution to Engels’s study became his last major piece of writing; his later years left only letters and sporadic manuscript notes.

  During these years, because of Marx’s failing health, European—and mainly German—socialists traveled to London to meet him: Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and others went on what started to become known as the pilgrimage to London.

  On 2nd December 1881, Marx’s wife, Jenny, died of cancer. Marx himself was too ailing to attend her funeral. Jenny’s death took a further toll on his health, and in desperation his doctors urged him to follow the sun—to Algiers, of all places, which had become fashionable among French people suffering from lung ailments. This was Marx’s only trip outside of western Europe, and his impressions from his visit in the winter months of 1882—as far as one can glean from a number of rather disjointed letters to his family and friends—were mixed.

  On one hand, Marx enthused about the lush Mediterranean winter landscape, and the “Babel of Moors, Arabs, Berbers, Turks and Negroes,” which, he wrote, would have been a joy to his beloved grandson. But he was not unaware of the political and historical context, which he referred to with his customary perspicacity. He showed some understanding for the Muslim Arabs’ hatred toward their French rulers and “their hope for an ultimate victory over these infidels.” On the other hand, he noticed the fact that the black Africans of the region had been enslaved by the Arabs, and that it was French colonial rule that put an end to this racial slavery and emancipated the blacks. As in his writings about India, there is no bleary-eyed naive idealization of the Noble Savage.

  Yet the medical results of this rather extraordinary journey to Algiers were meager. With his daughter Laura, he took further trips to Switzerland, and in the winter he went to the Isle of Wight.

  And then tragedy struck again: on 11th January 1883, his eldest daughter, Jenny, who was married to the French socialist Charles Longuet, died in Paris, also from cancer, at age forty.

  Marx never recovered from this shock. Two months later, on 14th March 1883, he died at his home in Hampstead.

  The funeral took place on 17th March at Highgate Cemetery in North London, where he was buried next to his wife Jenny. A lengthy report on the funeral, written and signed by Engels, appeared on 22nd March in the German Der Sozialdemokrat.

  Speaking in English, Engels opened his eulogy dramatically: “On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” It was as a revolutionary thinker, not as an activist, that Engels primarily eulogized his colleague and lifelong friend, going on to anchor Marx’s life achievement in the way he was to memorialize him in the following years: as the founder of scientific socialism (a term hardly ever used by Marx himself). Marx’s death, Engels declared, was an “immeasurable loss both to the militant proletariat of Europe and America and to historical science,” making the questionable parallel with Darwin, as we have already seen. He recalled Marx’s various editorial positions and his journalistic writings. The Communist Manifesto was not mentioned, but he praised Marx as the founder of the IWA—obviously bending the record consi
derably. Das Kapital was not mentioned explicitly, but Marx’s scholarly studies of the contradictions of capitalism and the eventual victory of the proletariat were.

  In an understandable exaggeration, Engels called Marx “the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time,” commenting rather generously that “though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.”

  It was a bravado speech, well attuned to the political goals and needs of the socialist movement at the time. It was later translated into many languages, appearing in most editions of Marx and Engels’s Selected Works and becoming for generations the official narrative of Marx’s life and achievements. Engels knew what he was doing: laying the foundations for what became the pyramidal structure of Marx’s hagiography and establishing him as the major thinker of the socialist movement. As funeral orations go, it is indeed splendid, and deserves to be remembered next to Pericles’ Oration in the Peloponnesian War and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

  As Engels reported, two wreaths were laid at the grave—by the editorial board of Der Sozialdemokrat and by the London Workers Educational Society. Marx’s son-in-law Charles Longuet then read three telegrams—from Piotr Lavrov in Paris on behalf of Russian socialists, the French Workers Party, and the Madrid branch of the Spanish Workers Party.

  Finally, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who traveled from Cologne, delivered a eulogy in the name of the German Social Democratic Party. In his report, Engels also mentioned that “the natural sciences were represented by two celebrities,” naming two mildly known scientists—a zoologist and a chemist—who had been close to Marx personally but could hardly be described as representing the scientific community.

  What Engels did not report was that there were just eleven people at the funeral.

  10

  A Historical Perspective: Impact and Legacy

  WHEN THE German Social Democratic historian Franz Mehring was preparing his biography of Karl Marx in the early years of the twentieth century, he visited London to try to interview people who had known Marx during his lifetime. It is told that he found in an old-age home a former librarian of the British Museum Reading Room, who vaguely remembered Marx when shown his photograph, and then added: “Oh yes, Dr Marx, a very fine gentleman indeed. For years he used to come to the Reading Room almost every day, but then one day he stopped coming and nobody has ever heard of him again.”

  This is of course both funny but also ridiculous, and for all the understandable hyperbole of Engels’s encomium in his funeral oration, that “Marx’s name will endure through the ages, and so will his work,” this seems to be much closer to the truth. Yet Marx’s impact is more complex and paradoxical than that of any major modern thinker, and has to be traced not only in the realm of political development, but also in terms of its influence on various fields of human thinking, research, and public discourse.

  First and foremost, capitalism did not collapse—on his major prognosis, Marx was wrong. Yet the current global free market system is very different from the sort of capitalism he described in The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital. In order to survive their intrinsic tensions and cyclical crises, so acutely described by Marx, capitalist societies introduced significant reforms and adjustments. Capitalist economies as he described them were premised on the principle of total nonintervention by the state in the economy: yet toward the end of the nineteenth century, and even more after the financial crisis of the 1920s and 1930s and World War II, social welfare reforms gave workers significant protection from the brutalities of early capitalism; legislation limited working hours and the employment of children and women; and unemployment, medical, and old age insurance offered meaningful protections, as did paid vacations and other welfare measures. No longer could it be said that proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains.

  That some of these protective reforms were initially introduced by conservative statesmen like Bismarck and Disraeli just adds to the dialectical twists of historical development: Marx himself did acknowledge in Das Kapital that, especially in England, extensive factory legislation might pave the way for a peaceful transformation. The growing power of the trade unions—no longer legally prohibited as interfering with the unrestricted play of market forces—coupled with the widening of the suffrage helped empower socialist parties. The modern welfare state was further extended through the writings of John Maynard Keynes and the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wistfully it can be argued that Marx’s dire prophesies about the doom of unbridled free market capitalism have been taken seriously and absorbed by the powers-that-be, thus making it possible for the capitalist system to reform defensively and survive, albeit it in a much milder form. Contrary developments under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher weakened some of these achievements, but they did not do away with its major premises. A totally unregulated free market does not exist anymore anywhere.

  This had a further consequence: in the first half of the twentieth century, Marx’s thought inspired some of the best intellectual minds in the western world, but such a fascination with radical social revolution is no longer a central factor in the political life of western societies. There may be other challenges to these societies, but these are very different from the doomsday scenarios of the Manifesto. Similarly, because of globalization, so aptly described there by Marx, much of industrial production migrated to Third World countries, with their lower wages and almost nonexistent factory and welfare legislation. Consequently, an exploited and pauperized industrial proletariat has almost totally disappeared from western societies, taking with it the revolutionary potential it once embodied; most of the classical working class in the West is now safely ensconced in the middle class.

  On the other hand, Marx’s name became associated with the major revolutionary attempt to establish a communist society—the Soviet Union. We have seen how ambivalent Marx was about Russia and its revolutionary prospects. Yet one thing is clear: Lenin’s October Revolution happened under conditions totally different from those ever envisaged by Marx.

  For one, it took place in the context of a country in the throes of a war that led to defeat and delegitimization of its czarist system: it was not a popular revolt against the ruling classes and was led by a small group of revolutionaries, not a mass working-class movement. Moreover, it took place in a society that was still pre-modern and pre-industrialized, with a weak proletariat and a vast peasantry that was far from being radicalized. The oppressive path taken by the Russian Revolution was a direct outcome of these conditions, exacerbated by the fact that, on taking power, the Bolsheviks did exactly the opposite of what Marx had envisaged a socialist revolutionary government should do: instead of the Ten Regulations of the Manifesto, which called for the nationalization of private property in land but the slow and step-by-step transfer of industrial property to the state, the Soviets confiscated the estates of the aristocracy and distributed them to the vast peasant population in order to gain their support, while at the same time nationalizing all industrial property. The consequences were catastrophic, leading eventually to the forced collectivization of peasant property and the forced industrialization of the Five-Year Plans. The chaos, disruption, and need for extreme coercive measures doomed the Soviet Revolution to the horrors of Stalinism; its emancipatory dream turned into the nightmare of the gulag.

  In order to survive, Lenin’s government not only got out of the war, but also signed a separate peace treaty with Germany and its allies during the winter of 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave imperial Germany its war aims in the east: Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics, in one way or another, came under German hegemony. This Drang nach Osten (drive to the east) was what German militarism was fighting for under Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, and it was achieved through a peace treaty with a Russian revolutionary government.

  This put the German Social Democratic Party in an impossible position. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, and after much soul searching, the reformist German SPD—th
e largest party in the German Reichstag—voted for the war credits with a clear caveat that it opposed any territorial expansion or annexation. It was not an easy position to take, and it led to a schism in the party, resulting in the secession of its pacifist left wing.

  With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a radical revolutionary government, claiming Marx as its prophet, acceded to imperial Germany’s most extreme expansionist policies. The German right wing had always viewed the SPD as anti-national and unpatriotic; now it became almost a laughingstock, as radical socialists in Russia paved the way for German imperialism in the east, while German social democrats were against annexations. Part of the problem faced by the SPD-led governments after 1918 can be traced to the delegitimation accusations they faced in the wake of Brest-Litovsk.

  There is another aspect to all of this: during the Cold War, many anti-communists ascribed the oppressive measures of the Soviet system to Marx’s ideology. As we have seen, there is very little support for such an interpretation in Marx’s own writings. In retrospect, however, it is now clear that many of the repressive Soviet measures not only resulted from the attempt to force a socialist mold on a pre-industrial society, but also had deep roots in the authoritarian traditions of Russian statecraft and the country’s weak civil society—an issue Marx himself addressed in his polemic against Bakunin. This dynamic continues to haunt Russia today: the quick reversal from the liberalizing goals of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika to the authoritarian methods of Vladimir Putin suggests that the continuity—and deep-rooted presence—of traditional czarist structures and methods is the major determinant of Russian political development, under Lenin and Stalin as well as Putin. A similar analysis can be made for the Confucian authoritarian traditions that are currently the backbone of the remaining communist regimes in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. They may invoke Marx’s name, but their roots, internal legitimacy—and sustainability—are somewhere else.