Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx made for Paris, not as a refugee or political exile, as he publicly insisted, but as a representative of the central committee of German democratic clubs—the same group from whose provincial directory he had resigned in April 1849.5 Conditions in the French capital were very different from Marx’s last stay the previous April. Following the defeat of the Parisian working-class insurgents in June 1848, and especially after the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon, as president of the republic in December, the pendulum of French politics had swung far to the right. Speculations about a restoration of the monarchy were rife. Marx’s French friends, who had staffed the provisional government and welcomed him in the spring of 1848, were now banished to the opposition.

  Meeting up with past acquaintances, Marx found that they were making plans to return to power—a move Marx saw as crucial to reanimating the revolution, not just in France but across Europe. The conservative French government offered the opposition its opportunity by sending French troops to Italy, to overthrow the Roman Republic and restore the Pope. On June 13, 1849, Parisian leftists led tens of thousands of demonstrators into the streets to protest this move. The organizers were divided as to whether it was to be a demonstration—a peaceful sign of opposition to the government’s policies, still rather unusual in the mid-nineteenth century—or an armed attempt to overthrow that government. Most participants were unarmed, but instead of perceiving this as a gesture of goodwill, the conservative government responded with a massive show of force, dispersing the demonstrators and arresting the leftist leaders.

  A number of German radicals, including the representatives of the insurgent governments with whom Marx was in close contact, were prominently involved in the demonstration. One has to wonder if Marx himself took part. There is no definitive evidence, but a brief piece Marx wrote for a German newspaper, with its description of desperate demonstrators throwing chairs into the street to hold up cavalry charging at them, does sound like an eyewitness account.6

  His initial hopes for a new wave of revolution dispelled, Marx made plans to settle in Paris for a longer stay. He sent for Jenny and the children, even though a cholera epidemic was raging in the French capital and the family finances were increasingly difficult. Jenny pawned the last of her jewelry just to keep them going. Marx’s response to his personal and political challenges was a reprise of his previous experience in Paris, “a literary and mercantile enterprise,” as he wrote to Engels—in other words, German-language publications to circulate in Germany, but edited outside the repressive apparatus of the German states. An anthology of the best articles from the New Rhineland News was one possibility; an expanded version of “Wage Labor and Capital” another. Continuing this emphasis on economics, already a focus of Marx’s publishing efforts on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, was a proposal for a monthly periodical on political economy. As in 1847, such plans would require financial support from within Germany; Marx and his associates were busy in July 1849 trying to raise the necessary funds.7

  The French government, as part of its policy of isolating subversive political refugees, had no intention of letting Marx carry out these plans. The authorities announced that he would be permitted to remain in France only if he transferred his residence to the Department of Morbihan, a remote and deeply conservative coastal district in Britanny. Residing there, Marx would have had no political contacts and no way to support his family, even assuming he survived the move. Roland Daniels, the communist physician living in Cologne, warned him that the department was “the unhealthiest stretch of France, damp, muddy and exuding fevers, the Pontine Marshes of Brittany.” Coming down with malaria would be the inevitable result of living there.8

  When Jenny joined Karl in Paris, they had discussed their options for moving on, and the original plan had been to head for Geneva. But Marx was increasingly suspicious of Switzerland: the government of that small country, susceptible to the pressure of the counterrevolutionary great powers, was already beginning to treat foreign political refugees harshly—a trend that would be reinforced in the course of 1849 and 1850. Along with many other persecuted leaders and activists of the 1848 Revolution, he decided to move to London, capital of an island great power, with a liberal policy on political refugees. Leaving behind the children and a very pregnant Jenny in Paris for a few weeks, Marx reached London, via Boulogne, on August 27 or 28, 1849.9

  At the time, he was thirty-two years old, halfway through his life. As an adolescent and young man he had moved frequently, between 1835 and 1849 residing in Trier, Bonn (twice), Berlin, Cologne (twice), Brussels and Paris (three times). Previously, the Rhineland had been at the center of his wanderings, anchored at either end by Paris and Berlin, the capitals of the two great powers that had shaped the region and held the keys to its destiny. Moving to London meant breaking out of this path and heading toward a different future. Like most of the political refugees flooding into London, Marx did not see things that way; he still had expectations of an imminent return to the Continent following a renewed revolutionary upheaval. As late as 1861, he was making plans to return to Germany. None of these expectations would come to pass. Marx would remain an exile in London until his death.

  RESIDING IN LONDON WAS the culmination of the trend in Marx’s life toward big city living. London was enormous; with 2.4 million inhabitants in 1850, the world’s most populous city. About 20,000–30,000 of them were German immigrants: as in Paris, mostly craftsmen, with an admixture of émigré intellectuals and also a smaller group of businessmen and bankers. Marx would spend time in the working-class neighborhoods of the East End, with its many immigrant German artisans; he would look for funds and business deals in the City. His family would live in sets of rooms in Soho—immigrant, bohemian, and slummy—in central London; and later move to the newly built, suburban neighborhoods of North London. In all these different areas, Marx would have to confront a feature of the metropolis: the crushingly high cost of living.

  Not quite the same center of ideas and creative art as Paris, or even Berlin, London was a metropolis of science. The library of the British Museum was an unmatched storehouse of knowledge. Its rotunda, the round Reading Room (today a museum exhibit in which tourists are pointed to Marx’s favorite seat), was soon to become Marx’s home away from home. New developments in physics, chemistry, and biology, whether generated in the colleges and research institutes of the city, or arriving from elsewhere, were the subjects of publication, public lecture, and private discussion. Administrative and political capital of the one major overseas colonial empire existing in the world during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, London was also the nerve center of global capitalism. The decisions of the Bank of England and the movement of the prices of financial instruments on the London Stock Exchange reverberated around the world. News and information constantly poured into London, and came out, organized in print: as business publications like The Economist, up-market newspapers like The Times, and popular publications like the Daily Telegraph. Major newspapers all had to have a London representative, a fact that would prove Marx’s financial salvation in the 1850s.

  In September 1849, the most salient characteristic of London was that it was fast becoming the capital of exiles from the Revolution of 1848, an offshore haven of liberal politics and tolerant policies toward political refugees from a Continent where the forces of counterrevolution were increasingly gaining control. Marx threw himself into political activity on his arrival in London, beginning with the creation of a refugee committee, to raise money for these political exiles stranded on an alien island. He followed that up by reactivating the Communist League as a vehicle for his increasingly radicalized political strategy. Another facet of his political engagement was to create a journal, edited abroad but published and circulated in Germany, a plan initiated in Paris and brought to fruition in London. The New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy was announced in January 1850.

  The title underscored
Marx’s increasing emphasis on economics, but it reminded readers of his revolutionary role in the recent past. Crucial to Marx’s new political efforts was the assistance of his former associates at the New Rhineland News. As he was poised to leave Paris, Marx had urgently requested that Engels join him in London. His friend was unsafe in Switzerland, Marx reminded him, in danger of falling into the hands of the Prussians who would “shoot him twice,” for his role in the insurrections in the Wupper Valley and the German southwest. Even if he were safe, in Switzerland “you can do nothing,” while in London “we will do business.”10 The French government, however, refused to allow the subversive Engels to cross its territory. Instead, he had to make a giant detour. Traveling south from Lausanne to Genoa, Engels took a slow boat to London, passing his time during the five-week trip making sketches of the Spanish and Portuguese coast, finally arriving on November 12, 1849.11

  Over the next year and a half, almost all of Marx’s closest political collaborators fled the Continent for the British Isles, to the point that Engels could write in May 1851, “It appears the entire New Rhineland News will be sitting together in London by this summer. . . .”12 Joining Ernst Dronke, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Wilhelm Wolff, and Karl Schapper (Joseph Moll had fallen in battle with the Prussians) were other communists, such as the former Prussian officers Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich, and a trio of young radical intellectuals: Wilhelm Pieper, Peter Immandt, and Wilhelm Liebknecht, political refugees of the 1848 Revolution, who moved toward communism while in London exile. It was potentially a very good team, provided Marx could keep all the members together under demanding and difficult conditions.

  Marx’s work commenced with a meeting held on September 18, 1849, just three weeks after his arrival in London. It resulted in the creation of a Committee to Support German Political Refugees, which issued an appeal for funds that circulated in England, Germany, and the United States. Joining Marx on the committee’s directory were two radical émigrés, as well as two German craftsmen, Heinrich Bauer and Karl Pfänder, members of the German Workers’ Educational Association in London, the group that had been closely intertwined with the Communist League. The meeting itself was held in the Educational Association’s headquarters on Great Windmill Street.13

  The group was renamed the Social Democratic Refugees Committee in November. During its first two months of existence, it gathered the respectable sum of £36, and issued support to fifteen different refugees. The pace of assistance picked up as donations increased, and the committee provided over four hundred support payments between November 1849 and April 1850. The individual amounts were small but badly needed, since German political refugees were having a hard time in London—unemployed, with very precarious lodging, and sometimes no choice but to sleep in the parks or on the street. It was unselfish assistance, but there was a political point as well. Marx kept a list of all the recipients of the committee’s benevolence, in the hope that they might swell the ranks of his supporters in a future revolutionary moment.14

  The work on the refugee committee brought Marx back into close contact with the artisans of the Workers’ Educational Association, the onetime chief supporters of the Communist League that Marx had dropped in the first flush of evolutionary enthusiasm during the spring of 1848. Members of the League remaining in London, often fans of the conspiratorial style of the Communist League’s predecessor, the League of the Just, had not been entirely happy about this decision. They had made attempts to revive the League as a clandestine group and contact adherents on the Continent at the beginning of 1849.15 Now Marx decided to endorse and support these efforts, a significant turnabout from his previous advocacy of open, public, political organizations. But as the revolutionary movements in continental Europe were defeated one by one in the summer of 1849, and political repression increased, working in secret became the radicals’ main option. Marx’s plan was to create a widespread clandestine group that could emerge from secrecy, following a new revolutionary outbreak that he was expecting in the near future.

  The exact circumstances of the reconstitution of the League and of Marx’s resumption of his position in its Central Authority have remained one of the secret society’s secrets, but the fall of 1849 seems like a plausible date, and the work of the refugee committee a probable first move. The initial evidence of a revived Communist League comes from the beginning of 1850, in some circuitous mentions in letters by Marx and Willich. Several years later, the Prussian police interrogated Peter Roeser, the Cologne cigarmaker and communist activist, who told them that Marx had written him in early 1850, suggesting he start a new League Congregation in that city. The reconstituted London Central Authority made its presence known only in the “March Address” of 1850, a statement of political principles and prospects for future revolutions drawn up by Marx and Engels and sent to the Continent via a secret emissary, the same Heinrich Bauer who was a leading figure on the refugee committee.16

  As he had done in Brussels, Marx combined his engagement in the Communist League during 1849–50 with work on a journal of political economy. The New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy was designed, like its predecessor, to be a corporation; but lacking access to his long-term Cologne supporters, Marx found investors few and far between. Publication began on a shoestring.17 Georg Schuberth, the magazine’s Hamburg publisher, “enjoyed in the booksellers’ world”—as Marx’s friend, the poet and experienced author Ferdinand Freiligrath, informed him—“a most dubious reputation.” Sure enough, Schuberth demanded extra funds from Marx to proceed to printing, which occurred late; his distribution of issues was chaotic and delayed. Against his contractual obligations, Schuberth insisted on cash in advance from book dealers; Marx’s representative in Hamburg even considered taking Schuberth to court.18

  The journal’s retail sales were also problematic. It was unclear if the local agents were supposed to deal directly with Marx or with the publisher Schuberth. In Cologne, where good sales were expected, there was a conflict between two different local agents, which ended up making it difficult for subscribers even to get their copies.19 The first issue was supposed to appear in January 1850, but it was still at the printers the following month, and subscribers had not received their copies in March. The initial three monthly issues finally appeared by May 1850, but as Marx’s agent in Hamburg informed him, “It is now the end of June and still no manuscript [of any additional issues]. People are furious. . . .”20 The original plan for the review had been to ramp up production from a monthly to a weekly, and when political circumstances were right, to a daily newspaper. Instead, because of the problems with printing and distribution, the frequency of publication declined. Four issues had appeared by June 1850, followed by a long pause over the summer, and then a last double issue in December of that year. Marx was hoping to resume publishing in 1851 as a quarterly, but in vain.21

  Behind this tragicomedy was a depressing political reality, the growing strength of repression and counterrevolution in central Europe. The review was published in Hamburg, then an independent municipal republic, where liberal ideas were stronger and the pressure of the Prussian government weaker than in most of central Europe. But even there, there was considerable reluctance to publish Marx’s radical writings. A potential alternative to the problematic Schuberth was one Herr Koehler, but he would only publish the review “if the tone of the monthly is not very passionate.” Similar problems appeared in gathering subscribers. In the radical city of Düsseldorf, tavern keepers refused to let Marx’s friends put out sign-up lists for subscription, fearing the authorities would revoke their licenses.22 Marx was saving his most subversive ideas for his clandestine writings, but even the milder forms of political radicalism published in the journal were difficult to advocate publicly in post-revolutionary central Europe.

  MARX’S CLANDESTINE STATEMENTS AT this time were indeed extreme, as demonstrated by the March Address of 1850, in which he described his new revolutionary strategy for the members of the r
evived Communist League.23 The document began with the assumption of an imminent European-wide revolutionary upheaval, “through a new independent uprising of the French proletariat or through an invasion of the Holy Alliance against the revolutionary Babel.” This new revolution would bring to power the “petit-bourgeois democrats,” that is, the 1848 radicals of the Prussian and German National Assemblies and the activists of the democratic clubs. These individuals, Marx and Engels noted, were calling themselves “reds” and “republicans,” but the workers should not be deceived; they were their main enemy.

  The democrats’ radical-sounding political and socioeconomic program would just make the workers’ lives temporarily more bearable. It would not lead to the abolition of private property and the eradication of social classes. Nor would it result in the conquest of state power by the workers and a dominant position for the “association of proletarians, not just in one country, but in all the dominant countries of the world.” To achieve these ends, the workers would need to “make the revolution permanent.”

  In the forthcoming revolution, the workers would have to be organized independently of the democrats—hence the need to revive the Communist League. And not just organized, but armed “with flintlocks, muskets, artillery and munitions.” Thus prepared, they would have three main tasks. One was to expand and deepen revolutionary violence:

  The workers must, above all, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, counteract, as much as possible, bourgeois efforts to calm things down and force the democrats to carry out their current terrorist phrases. They must work towards ensuring [that] the immediate revolutionary excitement not be suppressed right after the victory of the revolution. Just the opposite, they must attempt to keep it up. Far from opposing so-called excesses, examples of the people’s revenge on hated individuals or public buildings connected with hateful memories, they must not just tolerate such excesses but take over the leadership of them.