Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer. He was Jewish and came from a family that had several rabbis in its history, but he had registered as a Protestant Christian when laws were passed preventing Jews from holding public positions. Marx’s mother, Henriette, was a Dutch Jew who also came from a family that included a long line of rabbis. Marx himself did not hold any strong religious beliefs and ended his life as an atheist, but the strong anti-Jewish feeling in the Rhineland during his youth must have had some influence on him.

  Although Prussia was a mainly agricultural country, the area of the Rhineland where Marx grew up was its most industrialized region. Marx’s early life there meant that he observed rural life under threat, experienced repression of religious belief and understood the power of the State and private ownership, all at first hand. These formative experiences had a part in shaping his later philosophy.

  The early life of Marx

  Marx’s upbringing was a middle class one. Little is known of his very early life as he became somewhat estranged from his family in his later life. He came from a fairly large family with brothers and sisters, but he was the oldest son and his brothers both died young.

  His father was said to be a serious, well-educated man but not particularly imaginative. He wanted his children to fit in with the society around them and he tried to encourage them to be good members of the State and church. He wanted to elevate the social standing of the family and so became a member of the casino club, where in 1816 he met Baron Von Westphalen, a senior government officer from an aristocratic family. The two families soon became friendly; Marx’s older sister Sophie was a great friend of the Baron’s daughter Jenny, and Karl was at school with Edgar, one of the Baron’s sons.

  Marx’s mother was not formally educated but this was fairly normal for women at the time. She put all her energies into bringing up her family and was forever anxious about them, even when they had grown up and left home.

  Young Karl was soon seen to be possessed of a strong and creative intelligence. He was fiercely independent, domineering and argumentative from a young age. His sisters told his daughter Eleanor that he used to force them to eat mud pies but they put up with it because he would tell them imaginative stories that they loved to listen to.

  His intelligence soon caught the attention of their family friend Baron von Westphalen. The Baron was a very cultured and educated man, somewhat radical in his beliefs and fond of literature, including Shakespeare who he liked to quote in the original English. The Baron became friendly with young Karl and encouraged him in his studies; they often took walks together and talked about Greek poetry. He lent many of his own books to the boy so that he could further his education and Marx dedicated his doctoral thesis to him in appreciation.

  It is thought that Marx was privately educated until he joined the Trier High School in 1830. His school records do not show flashes of any particular genius but he showed signs of independent thought, and demonstrated a tendency of not going along with the crowd in his refusal to talk to a new state-appointed headmaster who was given a position at the school.

  The old headmaster was a man of fairly liberal ideas and this led to a police raid on the school in 1832; literature in support of free speech was found circulating there and one of the schoolboy ringleaders was expelled. The headmaster was put under surveillance and eventually the authorities employed a very conservative co-headmaster to keep an eye on things. Marx would not talk to this man at all, and was one of the few boys who did not visit him after he graduated from school, much to his father’s embarrassment.

  Although intellectually powerful, Marx never had a particularly strong constitution and was dogged by ill health for most of his life. He had a weak chest, which eventually led to him being found unfit for military service in 1836. His parents constantly fretted about his health when he went off to university in Bonn at the age of 17.

  Spotlight

  While Marx was at university his parents bombarded him with letters advising him not to study more than his health could bear, not to smoke, stay up late, drink too much wine and to keep his rooms and himself clean and hygienic. He never took much notice of their advice and for most of his life he lived in a disordered way, smoked and drank far too much, and spent long hours studying and writing.

  University life

  Marx attended Bonn University in the autumn of 1835 with the intention of studying law. He soon found that it was not to his taste and spent most of his year there in time-honoured student traditions: running up debts and drinking. His father’s letters are full of complaint, accusing him of debauchery, lounging in a dressing gown with unkempt hair and of not taking his studies seriously enough. It is not surprising that he felt this way, for the student Marx was arrested and imprisoned overnight for drunken behaviour and rowdiness, was found with a pistol in his possession (strictly illegal, although he got off without charges when his father intervened), and was later wounded in a duel. The wound was above his left eye and left a lasting scar. As his opponent was a trained soldier he was lucky to get away so lightly.

  Marx was an arresting figure with a shock of dark hair, piercing eyes and a rather large flourishing beard. His dark complexion led to the nickname of Moor, which he kept all through his life; it became a special family name for him that even his children used. Although his voice was not commanding (he had a slight lisp), his intellectual abilities and inventive way with words meant that he was often listened to and deferred to by older students. He found an outlet for his ideas in the Poetry Club, where political ideas as well as literature were discussed. This meant that he did not spend as much time on his studies as he should have and eventually his father insisted that he should stop his ‘wild rampaging’ and move to a place with a more rigorous academic atmosphere.

  In the autumn of 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, again with the intention of studying law. Berlin was a much bigger place than Bonn and the university had the reputation of being seriously academic and a centre of radical thought in the form of the ‘Young Hegelians’. These were a group of academics, intellectuals and students who discussed and developed the ideas of the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831).

  Hegel had been the rector at the university and was almost an institution there. He was the nearest thing to an officially endorsed philosopher that existed, having been decorated by Fredrick William III for services to the Prussian Empire. Most of his followers received appointments or preferment in the universities, for even these were controlled by the State. Hegel’s philosophy is rather complex and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, but basically he believed that society progressed by intellectual development or ‘Reason’ and that Reason could be identified with a God-like figure he called the ‘Absolute’. Hegel asserted that the Absolute had developed throughout history, but it had come to consciousness of itself and culminated its development in the state of Prussia. There was no further progress for it to make as it had reached its ideal.

  The Young Hegelians agreed to some extent that the State should be the embodiment of Reason but they interpreted the theories of Hegel in increasingly radical ways. They saw the Absolute not as a God-like figure but as humanity itself. For a reader in the twenty-first century this does not seem particularly shocking but at the time the Church was a very powerful force in society. To suggest that mankind might be at the centre of the universe and not some God or Absolute was very daring. It was much later, in November 1859, that Charles Darwin made his theory of evolution public in The Origin of Species. His suggestion that mankind had evolved from apes caused more public outcry in its day than any work by Marx, and it is still a contentious issue for some people with deeply held religious beliefs. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who saw that scientific discoveries had led to Western society becoming more secular and thought this might lead to a nihilistic viewpoint of a world without meaning, didn’t proclaim ‘God is Dead’ until 1882; so the Young Hegelians were at the forefront of rad
ical thought.

  The Young Hegelians were a potentially powerful political force; many of them were atheists and liberals. They argued that the Prussian state was not the culmination of Reason and expression of the Absolute. They believed that things could be changed and Germany could become more democratic. This led to the authorities being increasingly worried about their activities and, as the Prussian state was well supplied with spies and informers, in addition to a large police force, they kept an eye on the activities of the Young Hegelians. Most of their activities were theoretical: they wrote about the problems, discussed them in bars and debated points of philosophy in great academic detail. They did not take action and this was one of the reasons that Marx finally lost patience with them; he wrote later in his Theses on Feuerbach that philosophy was not enough.

  ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.’

  Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845, Section XI http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

  When Marx first arrived at the university he did not think much of the philosophy of Hegel, in fact he disregarded it, for he was meant to be studying law (although he did not find his classes particularly interesting). He spent his first term writing rather a lot of romantic poetry to his childhood friend, Jenny von Westphalen. She had grown into a beautiful, cultured and intelligent young woman and they had seen quite a lot of each other during the summer break and become secretly engaged. Marx told his family about his love for her but it was kept a secret from Jenny’s family for over a year. They were madly in love and wrote each other very romantic letters; Jenny affectionately called him her ‘little wild boar’.

  Although Baron von Westphalen was fond of Marx, the couple did not think that he would approve of the match as Marx was not from the kind of family that a young lady should consider marrying into. The von Westphalens belonged to a much higher social class than a lawyer’s family. Also, Jenny was four years older than Marx and officially engaged to a young army officer. She thought it best if they kept their love a secret until she had time to talk to her father.

  As the academic year went on, Marx found he was becoming increasingly uninterested in the study of law, but he was not sure what he wanted to do with his life. He read voraciously and began his lifelong habit of taking notes on everything he read. He tried to write a philosophy of law and he wrote poetry, plays and a short comic novel but it seems that he suddenly realized that he would never be a ‘real’ poet or writer of the kind he wished to be. Eventually, he had a kind of breakdown and was sent into the country by his doctor for a rest cure. It was there that he read Hegel and became a convert to the Hegelian point of view, something he had resisted for a long time.

  From then on Marx became an active member of Hegelian societies in Berlin. He joined the Doctor’s Club in 1837 – a group of young Hegelian intellectuals that included Bruno Bauer, a theology lecturer, and Arnold Ruge, a radical philosopher.

  His father disapproved of such radical ideas and was horrified, especially as he could see that his son was being drawn away from his law studies into the world of philosophy and intellectualism that he despised – ‘the workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition’ was his description in a letter. This was the beginning of a major split between Marx and his family, for he never returned home to them in the holidays again and hardly ever replied to their letters. When his father died of tuberculosis later in that year he did not even go to his funeral, claiming that he was too busy, although he always kept his father’s photograph and it was finally buried with him.

  Marx attended very few lectures in his three years at Berlin University and he put most of his energies into philosophy. He rather neglected his fiancée Jenny as he was spending a lot of time with free thinking, free drinking intellectuals and their friends, who lived a more bohemian way of life than he had experienced in his middle-class, country-town upbringing. A bohemian lifestyle was a life of artistic freedom that began to be described in the early nineteenth century. Many creative people often chose voluntary poverty and moved into the poorer quarters of cities as an escape from restrictive social codes, or because they held unconventional moral or anti-establishment views.

  Spotlight

  Marx’s bohemian friendships led to a temporary romantic entanglement with a famous poet, Bettina von Arnim, who was old enough to be his mother. The liaison did not last for long, especially after he took her back home to meet his fiancée.

  One of his closest friends at the time was Bruno Bauer, who later became one of his enemies. Marx had a habit of forming very close friendships throughout his life, but when his ideas moved on and his friends didn’t he often ended up being totally antagonistic towards them, ridiculing them with very personal invectives, even though (and perhaps because) he had once shared the same ideas and believed in the same principles. He poured a lot of his energy into almost childish, involved attacks on people who had once been good friends.

  Bauer was a theology lecturer and prominent in the Young Hegelians. He encouraged Marx to drop his law studies and concentrate on philosophy. He believed Marx would suit a more academic life than that of a small-town lawyer.

  So Marx began work on his thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy, hoping that this would allow him to earn a doctorate and enable him to lecture at Berlin University. It was ostensibly a discussion of ancient Greek philosophy but it was actually quite a radical piece of work for the times, as Marx argued that philosophy should be detached from religion and freed from all kinds of dogma.

  Unfortunately, Marx chose a bad time to write on such a contentious subject as there was a radical change of policy at the university and a lot of Young Hegelians lost their jobs. Marx knew that his thesis would be marked by a very stuffy and reactionary lecturer who would probably fail him, so he sent it to the University of Jena which had a reputation of giving degrees quickly and easily. He earned his PhD in April 1841 and then spent most of the summer in Bonn philosophizing and getting drunk with Bruno Bauer. They got up to all sorts of pranks and jokes: galloping donkeys along the main street and writing a comic pamphlet in which they pretended they were shocked by the atheism of Hegel. This last joke backfired, as Bauer was dismissed from his university post and with him went any chance of Marx becoming a lecturer there.

  Life as a journalist

  Now that Marx had no chance of getting the academic post he had been hoping for he was uncertain of what to do next. His father’s death had left him without any allowance and his mother, who he did not visit, had kept back his share of the family estate. He travelled about aimlessly for a few months before settling down to his first and only career. He had always written clearly and lucidly and so he began to publish some of his writing.

  He began his journalistic career with a piece on censorship in the Young Hegelian journal Deutsche Jarbrucker in February 1842; the piece was brilliantly written but sadly and inevitably it was censored before publication. The journal was too radical for the times and it was closed down after a few months.

  Marx then moved to Cologne and began work as a journalist on the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper that had been founded in 1841 by a consortium of wealthy manufacturers and industrialists.

  At that time, Cologne was a city at the forefront of the new technological and industrial advances brought on by the Industrial Revolution and it was the largest city in the Rhineland. It became a magnet for anyone who wished for a more democratic or unified Germany and who believed in freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The industrialists believed in progress and were willing to finance projects that would lead to advances in German society. They thought that the newspaper would be a good way of promoting their aims.

  Adolf Rutenberg, the editor of Rheinische Zeitung, knew Marx very well. He had been a drinking companion in the Doctor’s Club and he was also the brother-in-law of Bruno Bauer. Marx’s assistant at the paper was Moses
Hess, who soon became a good friend, although not unusually they were to fall out later.

  Marx was soon writing hard-hitting articles, criticizing both the government and some of the liberals who opposed them in very uncomplimentary ways. His forceful nature meant that he became editor of the paper in October 1842. Once in charge he offended many of the people who had been writing for the paper previously, believing that some of their work was too frivolous. He fiercely criticized theories he felt were not thought out or argued properly.

  He also came into conflict with the censor many times. Every paper in Prussia had to be checked over by a public censor before it was allowed to be published, and Marx delighted in baiting and annoying the censor with obscure references and word games. When the censor believed something was not suitable for publication (as he often did), Marx would spend long hours in argument with him. Marx used his formidable intellectual powers to persuade the censor to change his mind and he often worried that Marx would make him lose his job.

  It was during his time at the paper that Marx realized his knowledge of social and economic matters was not very wide and was too theoretical. He began to study political economy seriously and to take a more practical and materialist interest in the world around him. One of his most controversial pieces was written about the plight of peasants when a new law was brought out dealing with thefts of wood.

  Under the old feudal system of government the peasants had the right to gather firewood in the forests. When the forests passed into private ownership the peasants had to pay for their wood and most of them could not afford to do this. The laws were so strictly absurd that people could even be fined for picking up a fallen twig. Marx did not hesitate to write a strongly worded article about this and to also write about the plight of wine growers in the Moselle region who had been badly affected by the imposition of tariffs and the importing of tariff-free wines. These were some of the earliest incidences of documentary reporting and it was at this time that Marx first began to think and write about matters of private property, economics, class struggle and State power.