Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Favorable political circumstances brought an end to this family idyll. With the amnesty of 1880, Charles Longuet returned to France to write for a newspaper run by Georges Clemenceau—remembered today as the prime minister who led his country to victory in the First World War, but at the beginning of his political career a leader of the extreme left, whom Marx hoped to convert to socialism. Karl and Jenny were contemplating moving to Paris, to remain close to their grandchildren. But Jenny would not live long enough for this to be a possibility. She had been feeling steadily more ill in the late 1870s, and trips to the seaside and to spas had done nothing for her. By the summer of 1881, diagnosed with cancer, she was permanently bedridden, under the care of Lenchen Demuth and Karl. With a great effort, she got herself together for a trip to Argentueil, outside Paris, and spent three weeks visiting her daughter and grandchildren, before making a final return to London.55

  In the fall of 1881, as his wife lay dying, Marx himself fell gravely ill and could rarely leave his bed. Fifteen years later, his daughter Eleanor remembered, in an oft-cited passage, one of her parents’ last encounters: “I will never forget the morning when he felt strong enough to go into mother’s room. Together they were young again—she a loving girl and he a loving lad, entering into life together—and not an old man broken by illness and a dying old woman, saying farewell for what was left of their lives.” In Jenny von Westphalen’s final days, her spirits were cheered by seeing, fresh off the press, a copy of the essay by Ernest Belfort Bax praising her husband’s work, and receiving the news that in spite of the German government’s persecution, the socialists had maintained their position in the 1881 national elections—reminders of the man and his causes to which she had devoted her life. The physical pain of cancer eased by generous doses of morphine, she passed away on December 2, 1881.56

  Marx was too ill to attend his wife’s funeral. Engels gave the eulogy, which concluded with an atheist confession of faith:

  The place where we stand is the best proof that she lived and died in the full conviction of atheist Materialism. Death had no terrors for her. She knew that one day she would have to return, body and mind, to the bosom of that nature from which she had sprung. And we, who now have laid her in her last resting-place, let us cherish her memory and try to be like her.

  Better known than Engels’s graveside speech is the remark he made to Eleanor on the day of her mother’s death: “The Moor has died as well.” Perhaps we should give the last word to Marx, a favorite quotation of his from Epicurus, the subject of his doctoral dissertation: “Death is no misfortune to the deceased, but for those who survive him.”57

  Marx outlived his wife by exactly one year, three months, and twelve days. In that time, his health was in steady decline, with only occasional brief and modest improvements. Almost to the very end, his intellect remained active, and he followed current events, whether Liberal Party meetings in England, prospects for revolution in Russia, or the first experiments with the transmission of electric power. There were even some gestures toward political and intellectual work—meeting with French socialist leaders to mediate their quarrels, and preparing the third German edition of Capital—but his declining health made these efforts ever briefer and less effective. Marx had to leave the extensive correspondence with the German Socialist Labor Party leaders to Engels. Even the daily strolls with Engels became too much of an effort, and Marx had some harsh words for his friend’s promotion of exercise and fresh air.58

  Marx’s symptoms included pain in breathing; a chronic cough that became steadily more violent and painful, leading to vomiting and hemorrhaging, hoarseness and difficulty in speaking; and, toward the end, loss of appetite and difficulty swallowing. These were all most likely the result of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his father and four of his siblings. Perhaps it was the very same microbes, since they can lie dormant in the body for decades. Marx also complained of a weakness in one side, an inability to write with correct grammar and spelling, and loss of memory: he could have suffered a small stroke, a result of his high blood pressure. The physicians’ treatments, as with Marx’s other maladies, only made things worse. There was the inevitable arsenic and the use of inflammatory chemicals to raise blisters on the skin and eliminate moisture—just useless torment. Being sprayed with sulfurous mineral water at least felt pleasant. All these useless treatments were occurring at the very same time that the great German biologist Robert Koch had isolated the tuberculosis bacillus and discovered the cause of the illness.59

  Physicians attributed Marx’s illness to a bad climate, and thought the best cure would be dry air and warm weather. His final year was one lengthy odyssey. He spent the winter 1881–82 on the Isle of Wight, followed by three months in Algiers. He then traveled to Monaco and southern France, spent a final summer with Jenny and the grandchildren in Argenteuil, made a visit to Switzerland in the fall, and then returned to the Isle of Wight. Biographers have often noted that the promised mild weather never seemed to materialize: unseasonable cold and rain dogged Marx in his travels to the sun. Since his physicians linked recovery from his illness to the right climate, Marx’s fears, expressed to Engels, that he would never encounter good weather, and his instructions not to let his daughters know about these fears, were a way for Marx to say that he saw his imminent death as inevitable. The ultimate goal of his travels was his demise.60

  The travels were the one time in Marx’s life he left Northern Europe, and his stay in the French colonial capital of Algiers, a favorite destination for Frenchmen suffering from lung diseases, made a particular impression on him. Marx found North Africa’s exotic sights fascinating: the view of the sea, the hills, the snow-capped mountains in the background, the profusion of flowers even in winter. He was intrigued by the indigenous population—a man nicknamed “The Moor” meeting real-life Moors for the first time. If only his grandson Johnny could see the inhabitants: “how my little favorite would be astonished, by the Moors, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Negroes, in a word by this Babel and the costumes, (most of which are poetic) in this Oriental world. . . .”61

  But Marx would not have been Marx if he had not gone beyond the European fascination with the exotic Orient to critical observations about its social and political conditions. His guide to colonial society was a judge on the court of appeals, a man named Fermé, who had been deported to Algeria for his opposition to Napoleon III, and had married an Arab woman. He informed Marx about the police’s habit of torturing arrested Arabs to make them confess, while judges were supposed to know nothing of it. Fermé also explained that when an Arab was convicted of murder, the French colonists “demand that into the bargain a half dozen innocent Arabs have their heads just a little bit cut off.” This attitude, Marx thought, was typical of European colonists: “The British and Dutch, however, surpass the French in shameless arrogance, pretension and an atrocious Moloch of anger for retribution towards the ‘inferior races.’ ”

  Marx’s political associate David Urquhart had always admired the Turks for their dignified bearing and their social customs. Marx’s attitude toward the Arabs of Algiers was similar. He admired their noble demeanor, and their ability to look dignified even when dressed in rags or riding on a donkey. He praised their “Absolute equality in their social intercourse . . . not of wealth or position but of personality,” noting with a certain sympathy “the hatred against Christians and the hope of an ultimate victory over these infidels. . . .” Unlike Urquhart, Marx was not unconditionally pro-Muslim. He knew that the black African population of Algiers had been slaves of the Arabs until liberated by the French colonial authorities, and thought that for all their personal dignity, social equality, and anti-colonial aspirations, the Arabs of Algeria “will go to the devil without a revolutionary movement.”62

  On leaving Algiers, Marx returned to the South of France and spent several days in, of all places, Monte Carlo. The casinos, with their well-heeled gamblers and bevies of beautiful women ranging from countesses to co
urtesans, were as exotic as the Moors of Algiers. Listening to the gamblers’ constant talk of a “system” that would enable them to break the bank reminded Marx of nothing so much as the “inmates of a madhouse.” He went on to make an analogy, which his followers (and not only them) have repeated many times: “For all that, a casino is just child’s play, compared to the stock exchange!”63

  The rest of his voyage was more mundane. During his three months in Argentueil, Marx felt well enough to spend hours playing with the grandchildren, commute by train to nearby Enghien for the sulfur water treatments, and take long walks. The Paris suburb was a favorite of the Impressionists for their open-air painting, and one must wonder if Marx, during this visit, or with his dying wife the previous year, encountered Monet on the banks of the Seine. There followed in September 1882 a trip to Switzerland, accompanied by Laura, for by then Marx felt too weak to travel alone.64

  The final stage of his journey, a return to the Isle of Wight in the winter of 1882–83, was jolted by the news he received on January 11, 1883, that his daughter Jenny, not yet forty years old, had died of cancer of the bladder. It was a crushing blow: Marx returned to London to die. He spiraled steadily downward in the last two months, losing both his appetite and his ability to swallow, so that toward the end he was subsisting largely on milk spiked with rum. He continued to read, but as his concentration waned, his reading matter went from economics and current events to novels and, finally, to publishers’ catalogs. Night sweats and a fever were signs of the relentless progression of his illness, although the doctors continued to believe that if the weather improved, Marx might yet survive.65

  Like so much of the evidence for Marx’s life, the news of his death comes from Engels. He made it a practice to walk over to 41 Maitland Park Road every afternoon after his friend returned from the Isle of Wight. On March 14, 1883, he was greeted by a tearful Lenchen Demuth, who told him that Marx, sitting down in his study after midday dinner, had lost consciousness. Engels went in. He found that his friend had ceased breathing.66 It was a peaceful end to a life filled with powerful, passionate emotions and strongly held convictions, with great aspirations and equally great setbacks, with adversity and struggle.

  14

  The Icon

  THE FUNERAL WAS A modest affair. Just a dozen mourners gathered, three days after Marx’s death: besides Engels, there was Eleanor, the two sons-in-law, two friends Marx had met through Engels in Manchester, both scientists, and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had journeyed to London from the Continent to represent the German social democrats. A small delegation from the London German Workers’ Educational Association was led by Friedrich Lessner, one of the defendants in the Cologne Communist Trial, who had moved to London after serving his sentence and become a loyal ally of Marx in the IWMA and among the German artisans. The members of the Workers’ Association were themselves aging and declining in numbers; Marx and Engels had been on chronically bad terms with them since the Franco-Prussian War and the dissolution of the International. The absence of most of them made the funeral an intimate occasion for family and friends—who were, in Marx’s death as in his life, also his political associates.

  Unlike the funeral of Jenny von Westphalen, the memorial service for her husband was overwhelmingly political. Condolence telegrams from French, Russian, and Spanish socialists were read out. Liebknecht spoke, providing the atheist confession of faith Engels had offered at Jenny’s funeral. While Engels had emphasized Jenny’s private life, especially her atheist convictions in the face of death, Liebknecht’s speech sounded a different note—an assertion of atheism in public life, combining Wissenschaft and politics. He declared that Wissenschaft would liberate humanity from God. Natural science was the first step in this liberation, but the science of society Marx had created and made available to the people would ultimately destroy capitalism, “and with it the idols and lords of the earth, who, as long as they live, will not let God die.” Liebknecht’s speech ended with a graveside oath, calling on his listeners—not so much the gathered mourners as the readers of the social democrats’ clandestine newspaper, in which his speech was printed—to commit themselves to follow on the path Marx had led them, until they reached its goal.

  Engels, fittingly, gave the main eulogy. He emphasized Marx as a man of Wissenschaft. Unlike Liebknecht’s presentation, in which echoes of the Young Hegelians were still evident, Engels evoked a positivist Wissenschaft, based on the natural sciences. In a telling and oft-quoted passage, he compared Marx to the scientific hero of the age: “As Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” After representing Marx as a scientist, one who was interested in the latest developments in the study of electricity even in his last days, Engels described his friend as “above all revolutionary. To take part in one way or another in the overthrow of capitalist society and the governing institutions it has created, to take part in the liberation of the modern proletariat . . . that was his life’s true profession.” To illustrate this, Engels described Marx’s journalism in some detail, and his participation in associations in Paris, Brussels, and London, culminating in the International Working Men’s Association, “the crowning of all” his work. A bit strangely, Engels said nothing of Marx’s chief period of revolutionary activity in 1848–49. He concluded with a heroic apotheosis: Marx was “the best hated, best slandered man of his time,” constantly under attack by bourgeois governments, while he was “honored, loved and mourned by millions of revolutionary coworkers, from the mines of Siberia across all of Europe and America to California. . . .”1

  Marx was laid to rest with his wife in Highgate Cemetery. The original grave was a modest slab; the far larger than life-size bust with which it is now crowned was only placed there by the (now defunct) Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956. The gigantic bust was the physical proof of the transformation of a living human being into an icon, a frozen representation of ideas, political positions, and identities, many of which were only tangentially related to the person’s actual life. The eulogies of Marx were an early stage in this process of transformation; indeed, Engels was already experimenting with such representations during the last years of Marx’s life.2 Although the eulogies were evidence of purposeful efforts to shape an image of Marx, the process also occurred in unexpected ways without conscious control.

  The obituaries of Marx that appeared in newspapers across Europe and North America within a few days of his death demonstrated, in nascent form, important aspects of his future image. One was the idea of Marx the man of science, the author of a definitive work of political economy. The socialist press certainly emphasized this feature of his life, but even the anti-socialist notices noted the quality and influence of his economic scholarship. The Arbeiterzeitung (Workers’ News) of the German socialist immigrants of Chicago proclaimed: “What Darwin was for the natural sciences, John Buckle [the English positivist historian and advocate of the idea of progress] for the science of history, Marx was for the science of political economy.”

  A second theme, rather more muted than the first, reflected Marx’s Semitic antecedents. British and Dutch newspapers reported his Jewish birth; a Spanish one described him as the descendant of a family of Spanish Jews, with a noticeably Mediterranean appearance, while in Turin he was “one of the handsomest types of the Jewish Slav.” The newspaper of the Jewish community of St. Petersburg called him “one of the most gifted sons of the Jewish people,” an affiliation noted by the American Israelite of Cincinnati, albeit not in quite such glowing terms.

  Running through virtually all the obituaries was the idea of Marx’s revolutionary life—particularly his engagement in the Revolution of 1848 and his role in the IWMA, with its connections to the Paris Commune. Politically more hostile writers observed that Marx’s revolutionary aspirations had all ended in failure: the Prussians had suppressed the midcentury revolution; the IWMA had dissolved. The more favorable accounts compared him wit
h other mid-nineteenth-century revolutionaries, such as Mazzini and Garibaldi, whose aspirations had also been thwarted or only partially achieved. They observed that while the IWMA had succumbed to the double blow of government persecution and factional intrigue, its principles remained to guide the labor movement in the future. One succinct summary came from a most unexpected source, the Cuban nationalist and anti-imperialist leader José Martí. After attending a public memorial meeting for Marx in New York, he wrote that Marx “saw in everyone what he carried in himself: rebellion, highest ideals, struggle.”3 These three features of Marx’s obituaries—scientist, Semite, and intransigent revolutionary—would be developed in ever more elaborate fashion over the decades that followed, increasingly creating a frozen image of him.

  Marx’s persona as scientific revolutionary was very much the creation of Engels, an integral part of his determination to cultivate the legacy of his friend’s thought as he understood it. Engels’s work had begun in the mid-1870s, as part of another intervention in the politics of the German labor movement. This one was directed against the influence of a lecturer in economics at the University of Berlin, Eugen Dühring, who was busy denouncing Marx’s ideas. As part of his disengagement from day-to-day politics, Marx let Engels handle the polemics, although he did offer some advice about economic questions. The upshot, the ponderously entitled Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolutionizing of Wissenschaft, generally known, for short, as the “Anti-Dühring,” was, in the fashion of Engels, a nasty and unpopular polemic. It was serialized in the Social Democratic Party’s flagship newspaper. Party leaders, aware of the bad reactions to the piece, took the precaution of printing the work on an irregular schedule, preferably at times when the fewest people possible would be reading the newspaper, which simply infuriated Engels.4