Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The worst of it is that during the entire time, even while suffering the greatest pain [from his skin disease] he has had to deal with his fears about money. I now see for the first time how deeply he took the matter to heart. Since the business with America [the end of the New York Tribune work] and the drying up of all regular sources of subsistence, he has had no rest. For entire nights, it always went through his head.35

  His lack of assets and income was shameful—it had to be hidden from the world. As a practical matter, had the Marxes not kept up appearances, creditors would have called in their loans. But some kinds of debt, especially the use of the pawnshop, were particularly shameful—a resort for the working class, not for respectable bourgeois. Rather than going themselves, Karl or Jenny sent Lenchen Demuth to the pawnbroker’s for them.36

  Jenny von Westphalen dealt with shopkeepers, and kept the household accounts. She knew the exact status of the family finances, while her husband did not. When Engels in 1868 provided a regular income for the Marxes, he began with an initial lump-sum payment, to eliminate all their debts. It turned out that Jenny had concealed from Karl £75 of the debts that she was hoping to pay off from the housekeeping money. When her husband discovered this subterfuge, he asserted that “Women evidently always need a guardian to run their affairs.”37 Marx understood that owing money was a shame to him as man by showing his inability to support his family, but could not recognize that it was shameful to his wife as a woman, implying that she was not running their household frugally and efficiently.

  Shame about the family finances was closely intertwined with Marx’s suspicious attitude toward the engagement of his daughter Laura to Paul Lafargue. Marx tried to hide his financial circumstances from Lafargue’s parents. He made desperate efforts to come up with the funds to provide some dowry—any dowry—for his daughter. His inability to do so was another sign of his failure to be sufficiently bourgeois.38 The belief, found in some interpretations, that Marx was blithe about his debts and cared little for his financial difficulties—sometimes portrayed as a rejection of bourgeois attitudes toward money, sometimes as a rejection of purported Jewish interest in it—bears little resemblance to Marx’s own feelings of guilt and shame about his chronic indebtedness, and his difficulties in obtaining a regular income.

  Contemporaries understood that a bourgeois professional or academic would have a difficult time in his early years, and Marx’s circumstances before he reached the age of thirty were similar to those of other young men of his social class—exacerbated, admittedly, by the early death of his father, his unusually youthful marriage, and his political commitments. His contemporaries generally experienced a gradual improvement in their circumstances as they grew older. This was true for Marx as well, in spite of the additional difficulties of life in foreign exile from the age of thirty-one onward. But the loss of his regular position with the New York Tribune undid the family’s economic success. Most bourgeois academics and professionals did not experience this kind of midlife setback, which created the profound loss of faith in himself that Marx expressed on his fiftieth birthday.

  Another way to look at Marx’s position is to consider the financial opportunities available to leftists at the time. In the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, leftist leaders were typically writers—journalists and freelance authors, taking any and every opportunity to make a living with a pen, whether directly connected to their politics or not. By the 1860s, a gradual shift from prominent leftists as authors to left-wing leaders as functionaries of a political party was underway—an occupation that, for all its problems, was more secure and better paid than the thankless task of freelance writing. Marx himself never made this transition, always refusing any leading position in the IWMA, to say nothing of a paid one. Even had he been willing to do so, large left-wing political parties were still in their infancy throughout his lifetime, lacking the dues-paying mass membership to support full-time professional politicians.

  There were other possibilities for procuring income, such as appealing to the public for support. Ferdinand Freiligrath’s friends in England did this in 1867, after he lost his position as a banker. The appeal, circulated in Germany and among German emigrants worldwide, ultimately brought in over 30,000 talers. Marx found it a repugnant spectacle. His attitude was best summed up by little Jenny’s comment, which he quoted proudly: “if her father would do something like that, she would publicly declare him not her father.”39 Marx interpreted these appeals as a form of dependence on charity, holding fiercely to the ideal of personal independence that was consistent with Victorian views of masculinity.

  Timely inheritances helped fill some gaps temporarily, but neither the Marxes nor the Westphalens were wealthy enough to leave behind assets that would permanently support a family. What remained as a bourgeois occupation was business, and Marx’s own brief brush with the business world came to an end before it ever got started. Instead, there was Engels’s business income, on which Marx was, very unhappily, dependent. He told Engels in July 1865: “I assure you that I would rather have my thumbs hacked off than to write you this letter [asking for money]. It is truly crushing to remain dependent for half of one’s life.”40

  Marx never commented, however, about his dependence for income on the capitalist exploitation of the workers in the Ermen & Engels textile mill, who were better treated than most millhands but exploited workers, nonetheless. This was not true of his friend, who siphoned off the surplus value. In 1865, as Marx and Engels were breaking with Lassalle’s successor, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Engels warned Marx that Schweitzer’s followers would say, “What does that Engels want, what has he been doing all these years, how can he speak in our name & tell us what we should do, the guy sits in Manchester and exploits the workers, etc.”41 The reactions Engels anticipated seem a little unlikely, since they involved the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who with his red silk dressing gowns, dubious connections to a countess, and frequent trips to Swiss spas was not exactly a figure of proletarian rectitude. Rather, they reflected Engels’s guilt feelings about his own involvement with a capitalism he hated and wanted to destroy. One of the greatest sacrifices Engels made for Marx by going into his family’s textile business was renouncing a clear conscience about how he earned a living.

  A POINT EMPHASIZED IN recent studies of the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie—the German phrase Bürgertum is notoriously difficult to translate exactly—is the shaping of that social group by cultural conventions. These included a commitment to industriousness and continuous effort, and a decorous home life well stocked with all the facets of high culture.42 An adherence to these cultural conventions characterized Marx’s private life as well, although sometimes in a distinct form.

  Marx had a tremendous capacity for work. He spent twelve-hour days reading Blue Books in the British Museum; he wrote an enormous volume of articles and news reports for the New York Daily Tribune. The long hours in meetings of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, or the bulky manuscripts of his economics treatise, were further testimonies to his labors. Yet for all this toil, Marx’s important intellectual projects never came to fruition, or only in truncated form. His chronic financial problems were manifestly distracting and increasingly poor health made completing his work very difficult. But there were also elements of Marx’s personality that tended to counteract his best efforts.

  One important feature was the disorderly nature of his bohemian life. The scrawled, illegible handwriting, the impenetrable chaos of books and papers (sometimes impenetrable to him as well) that was his study attested to this. He would stay up till all hours and sleep until noon. His work was punctuated by frenetic bursts. He wrote, day and night, followed by a collapse in his health and periods of enforced idleness. None of this was conducive to completing large-scale projects. Marx’s actual process of writing was extraordinarily erratic. In a tradition handed down by his Dutch relatives, who had seen him at work on his econo
mic treatise while he was visiting his uncle Lion Philips, “as soon as he had written something down, it was Marx’s habit to stand up and to walk around the table, faster and faster, until something occurred to him and he then sat down again to write.”43

  Slow and steady is not the only way to win the race and people who work in bursts and spurts can get a lot done. But there was yet another feature of Marx’s personality that impeded the completion of his large-scale efforts. This was his insistence on completeness, on finding every last piece of information, and then rewriting over and over again what he had previously put down in the light of his latest finds. Observations about this feature of his working methods dogged Marx throughout his life. “He reads a lot; he works with uncommon intensity and has a critical talent . . . but he completes nothing, he always breaks off and plunges anew into an endless sea of books,” Arnold Ruge noted in 1844. Thirty-five years later, Friedrich Engels, who found this feature of Marx’s work-habits extremely frustrating, told him: “I would burn, with pleasure, the Russian publications on agricultural conditions, that, for years, have prevented you from finishing Capital!”44

  If Marx’s version of the German middle-class work ethic had its own distinct torqued permutations, his home life followed a more conventional pattern. Both Karl and Jenny insisted on a decorous and proper household: no off-color jokes or slightly risqué songs. Wilhelm Liebknecht remembered stern rebukes about the songs. Karl was very embarrassed if any even remotely sexual topic was brought up in mixed company. His correspondence with Engels certainly contained many such mentions and a reveling in salacious scandals about their political enemies, but there was to be no public discussion of these things in front of women and children. As they got into their teens and early twenties, the two older daughters began to chafe under the cosseted propriety of their parents. After Laura married Lafargue and left home, Jenny, without her parents’ consent or even knowledge, took a job as a tutor just so she could get away from the strict atmosphere in the house and her mother’s increasingly irritable commands.45

  Marx’s mature public persona was that of a proper and distinguished bourgeois gentleman, as two amusing incidents from the 1860s demonstrate, one emphasizing his respectability to Germans, the other to Englishmen. After seeing to the publication of Capital, Marx was returning by ship from Hamburg to London in 1867. On board, he met a “German Fräulein,” who appealed to him for help. She was taking the train in England and did not know what to do with her baggage, as it was Sunday, and no porters were allowed to work on Sunday in England. Chivalrously, Marx escorted her in London until her train left. The young woman, it turned out, was Elisabeth von Puttkamer, Bismarck’s niece, “a lively and cultivated girl, but aristocratic and black-white [the Prussian colors] to the tip of her nose.” She was astonished to discover that the helpful gentleman was a notorious subversive, but the very fact that an aristocratic young lady turned to Marx for assistance speaks volumes about his outward appearance.46

  The following year, Marx discovered, upon returning home from a visit to Engels in Manchester, that he had been elected to a largely honorific, minor legal office, Constable of the Vestry of St. Pancras. Both Marx and Engels could not stop laughing about this ridiculously feudal-sounding position, and profoundly enjoyed the advice an acquaintance gave Marx about his election: “I should tell them that I was a foreigner and that they should kiss me in the ars [sic].” But, as the acquaintance informed Marx, the office “was an honour much valued by the philistines of St. Pancras,” that is, by Marx’s own bourgeois neighbors. It says a lot about their opinion of him that they chose him for this honor.47

  Propriety and decorum went along with a household appreciation of high culture. Marx admired the literary classics: Dante and Cervantes, Goethe and Shakespeare. The works of Shakespeare were, as Eleanor put it, “our house Bible.” By the age of six, she had learned long passages from his plays, taking after her older sisters. As the graduate of a German Gymnasium, Marx retained an interest in the culture of classical antiquity cultivated there, reading the ancient Greek dramatists in the original. He was no classicist snob and appreciated more recent literature, particularly realist writers: Sir Walter Scott and Alexander Pushkin, Alexandre Dumas and Honoré de Balzac. He was less impressed with German realist novelists (admittedly, the best of them, Theodor Fontane, only began writing fiction after Marx’s death), but greatly admired the work of his onetime friend Heinrich Heine, whose poetry and essays were an early form of literary realism. As we have seen, the daughters received music lessons; Marx was familiar with the works of classical musicians, and a great admirer of Bach, although music does not seem to have played the major role in the Marxes’ home life that it did for many educated Germans in the nineteenth century.48

  Very much in contrast to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century leftist intellectuals, Marx had no interest in the artistic avant-garde, or in any variety of popular culture. He relaxed with Shakespeare and Bach, not with popular Victorian fiction or music hall songs. In spite of Engels’s efforts to get him up on a horse, Marx engaged in no forms of exercise other than decorously taking long walks. His one substantial free time activity was the eminently intellectual pastime of chess—a game he studied intensively, and sometimes played obsessively. Tellingly, he had a very aggressive, attacking style of play.49

  Marx’s own bourgeois habits form an interesting contrast to those of his closest friend. His illegible and, to judge from the slant of the letters, left-handed scrawl was quite the opposite of Engels’s neat and precise clerk’s script. Engels’s regular working hours and his systematic and methodical approach to political writing were diametrically opposed to Marx’s late hours and bursts of intense effort followed by weeks of incapacitating illness. Engels’s ability both to earn money and to manage the money he had far exceeded that of his friend.

  The contrast between the solid businessman and his bohemian counterpart had its comic moments. In 1870, Engels alerted Marx that he was sure his letters were being intercepted and read by the police. When the letters arrived in Manchester, the four corners of the envelope had not been neatly folded together and sealed, so the seal must have been broken and the envelope incorrectly refolded. In spite of repeated warnings, Marx never responded, presumably evidence that the sloppily sealed envelopes were the result of Marx’s carelessness, not the machinations of a vigilant police force.50

  Far more serious was the effect of Marx’s work habits on his economics treatise. Engels’s very first letter to Marx implored him to “take care that the material you have gathered is soon tossed out into the world.” There followed over the decades a constant stream of admonitions and reminders, all on the same theme: Get the work done! When Engels began his postmortem editing of Capital, his only regret was that he had not done more of it: “Had I known, I should have pestered him day and night until it was all finished and printed.” What came naturally to Engels presented considerable difficulties to Marx.51

  The reverse proved true at home, where Marx was highly disciplined. Karl and Jenny’s straitlaced household was the antithesis of Engels’s lax and relaxed domestic arrangements with the Burns sisters. (No children ever came from those unions, and one does have to wonder whether Engels was better at doing it in “the good Parisian way” or if there were fertility issues involved.) After accompanying her father on shorter visits to Engels, Eleanor Marx upset her mother in 1868 by announcing she would much rather live with him in Manchester than in her parents’ stodgy household. The following year, at the age of fourteen, she spent four months with Engels and Lizzie Burns, including a quick trip to Ireland, a visit that was the high point of her young life. One hot summer’s day she had a particularly enjoyable experience. Lizzie Burns and her niece, who was the household servant, spent the day with Eleanor, lying on the floor, each wearing a light cotton dress, one petticoat, and no corset or shoes (by Victorian standards, close to naked), drinking wine and beer. Engels appeared that evening, “drunk as jelly
.” The idea of Jenny von Westphalen lying scantily dressed on the floor drinking with Lenchen Demuth—and the family patriarch tolerating such a spectacle—is inconceivable.52

  ALTHOUGH IT HAS BECOME a cliché, it is true that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was a middle class, perched between the aristocracy and the workers—and Marx’s attitudes about class as reflected in his personal life are quite revealing. Although Karl Vogt accused Marx of secretly envying the nobility, this seems extremely unlikely. In the early 1850s, Marx asserted that reactionary, aristocratic government ministers were preferable to petit-bourgeois democrats, but that was a denunciation of the democrats rather than praise of the aristocracy. It would have been odd indeed for someone growing up in a bourgeois Rhineland whose inhabitants did not at all miss the aristocracy of the region, purged by the French Revolution, to have been attracted to the nobility. Marx expressed extreme contempt for this social class, in his writings on ground rent and agriculture in Capital, his strange theories about Lord Palmerston and the Whig aristocracy, and his hatred of the Junkers, the Prussian noble landlords, a pillar of the Prussian monarchy he despised. This was not the attitude of someone with any attraction, secret or otherwise, to Europe’s hereditary elites. Marx was admittedly married to a noblewoman of sorts, whose visiting cards (a necessity for any proper lady of the time) described her as, “Frau Jenny Marx, née Baroness von Westphalen.” At one point, he had to warn her about indiscriminately handing them out because his political enemies might make use of them.53

  More relevant to the eminently bourgeois communist leader was his relationship with the working class. Even at the height of his political activity in Germany, Marx was a journalist who moved in bourgeois circles. This continued to be the case in exile, especially following the 1850 split in the Communist League. Workers who visited Marx’s home in conjunction with their IWMA activities reported on their gracious and friendly reception from all members of the family: the intellectual father, the mother with a title of nobility, and the lively and involved daughters. It did not hurt Marx’s relations with the working class that he was a particular kind of bourgeois—a scholar and a learned man, a figure of respect, especially in central Europe—quite unlike Engels, the bourgeois capitalist.54