Karl Marx (27 page)

‘
The clouds gathering over the money market
are sombre indeed,’ Engels wrote in the very week of the move to Grafton Terrace. ‘This time there’ll be a day of wrath such as has never been seen before: the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets over-stocked (already nothing more is being shipped to India), all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree. I, too, believe that it will all come to pass in 1857, and when I heard you were again buying furniture I promptly declared the thing to be a dead certainty and offered to take bets on it. Adieu for today; cordial regards to your wife and children …’ A rather tactless joke in the circumstances. No sooner was Marx installed in the magic castle than he realised, to his horror, that there was no money for the rent. ‘
So here I am,
’ he wrote to Engels in January 1857, ‘without any prospects and with growing domestic liabilities, completely stranded in a house into which I have put what little cash I possessed and where it is impossible to scrape along from day to day as we did in Dean Street. I am utterly at a loss what to do, being, indeed, in a more desperate situation than five years ago. I thought I had tasted the bitterest dregs of life.
Mais non!
And the worst of it is that this is no mere passing crisis. I cannot see how I am to extricate myself.’

Engels was flabbergasted: ‘
I had believed that everything was going splendidly
at last – you in a decent house and the whole business settled, and now it turns out that everything’s in doubt …’ He promised to send £5 every month, plus extra one-off payments whenever needed. ‘Even if it means my facing the
new financial year with a load of debts, no matter. I only wish you had told me about the business a fortnight earlier.’ For, as he confessed guiltily, he had just bought a splendid new hunter with some Christmas money from his father. ‘I’m exceedingly vexed that I should be keeping a horse here while you and your family are down on your luck in London.’

It was Jenny Marx who felt the misfortune most painfully. Her husband could withdraw into his study, where books and newspapers formed an impregnable barricade; the girls had the consoling distraction of new friends and a busy school timetable. But Jenny was marooned. She missed her long walks through the bustling streets of the West End, the meetings, the clubs and pubs, the conversations with fellow Germans who shared the misery of exile:

Our attractive little house
, though it was like a palace for us in comparison with the places we had lived in before, was not easy to get to. There was no smooth road leading to it, building was going on all around, one had to pick one’s way over heaps of rubbish and in rainy weather the sticky red soil caked to one’s boots so that it was a tiring struggle and with heavy feet that one reached our house. And then it was dark in those wild districts, so that rather than have to tackle the dark, the rubbish, the clay and the heaps of stones one preferred to spend the evenings by a warm fire. I was very unwell that winter and was always surrounded with stacks of medicine bottles …

On 7 July her new baby was stillborn, but she could hardly muster the energy to mourn. ‘One day,’ she found, ‘was just like any other …’ Her only involvement in the world beyond 9 Grafton Terrace came from copying out Karl’s twice-weekly article for the
Daily Tribune
. Then even this lifeline was cut. Noticing that the newspaper was using fewer and fewer of his contributions – and, of course, he was paid only for what was printed – Marx went on strike. ‘It’s truly nauseating that one should be condemned to
count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper vendor such as this,’ he raged. He saw himself as a pauper in the workhouse, crushing up bones and boiling them into soup.

His threat to transfer allegiance to some other paper worked – but only up to a point. The
Tribune
’s editor, Charles Dana, said that in future he would pay for one column a week, whether or not it was published. ‘
They are in effect cutting me down
by one half,’ Marx complained. ‘However, I shall agree to it and must agree to it.’ As a sop, Dana added that he was compiling a
New American Cyclopaedia
and wondered if Marx would like to write the entries on great generals and the history of warfare. Though it was Grub Street hack work of the dullest kind, Marx was in no position to refuse a fee of $2 per page.

The self-styled General Engels was happy to take on most of the labour – it would, he said, give him something to do in the evenings – and started on the first batch at once: Abensberg, Actium, Adjutant, Alma, Ammunition, Army, Artillery … But then an attack of glandular fever laid him low. For the rest of the summer he was effectively
hors de combat
while recuperating in the felicitously named Lancashire resort of Waterloo. This left Marx with the ticklish problem of explaining to Dana why the supply had suddenly dried up. ‘
What am I to tell him?
’ he wailed. ‘I can’t plead sickness, since I am continuing to send articles to the
Tribune
. It’s a very awkward case.’ He stalled for time by pretending that a parcel of manuscripts had been lost in the post.

The revolt by Sepoy soldiers against British rule in India added to his troubles, since the
Tribune
naturally expected a lengthy analysis from its expert. Fortunately Marx had learned enough artful dodging from the late lamented Musch to bluff his way out. ‘
As to the Delhi affair,
’ he confided to Engels, ‘it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the
Tribune
’s military correspondent, I have taken it upon myself to put this forward … It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get
out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’ By September, Engels felt well enough to have another crack at the
Cyclopaedia
, and from his new place of convalescence on the Isle of Wight there emerged a torrent of articles – on Battle, Battery, Blücher and many more. While visiting Jersey in October he moved on to the next letter of the alphabet, starting with Cannon. Could Campaign and Cavalry be far behind?

This burst of productivity was, however, interrupted by the most glorious news imaginable: the international financial cataclysm had at last arrived. Beginning with a bank collapse in New York, the crisis spread through Austria, Germany, France and England like a galloping apocalypse. Engels scuttled back to Manchester in mid-November to witness the fun – plummeting prices, daily bankruptcies and panic galore. ‘
The general appearance of the [Cotton] Exchange here was truly delightful
,’ he told Marx. ‘The fellows are utterly infuriated by my sudden and inexplicable onset of high spirits.’ One factory owner had already sold all his hunters and foxhounds, dismissed his servants and put his mansion up for let. ‘
Another fortnight, and the dance will really be in full swing
here.’

Would revolution ensue immediately? He doubted it: the workers were bound to be pretty lethargic after such a long period of prosperity. But this was just as well, since the would-be leaders of the masses must first prepare themselves for the fray. As Engels saw it, he would command the insurrectionary army – crushing any bourgeois resistance with breakneck cavalry charges through the streets of Manchester and Berlin – while Marx directed the civilian side of the campaign, enlightening the proletariat in the mysteries of political economy. ‘
It’s a case of do or die
,’ Engels announced, strapping on his spurs. ‘This will at once give a more practical side to my military studies. I shall apply myself without delay to the existing organisation and elementary tactics of the Prussian, Austrian, Bavarian and French armies, and apart from that confine my actitvities to riding, i.e. fox-hunting, which is the
best school of all.’ The members of the Cheshire Hunt little guessed, as they sipped their stirrup-cups, that the charming Mr Engels on his powerful new steed was secretly preparing to become the Napoleon of north-west England. But he was in deadly earnest: ‘
After all, we want to show the Prussian cavalry a thing or two
when we get back to Germany. The gentlemen will find it difficult to keep up with me for I’ve already had a great deal of practice and am improving every day … Only now am I getting to grips with the real problems of riding over difficult country; it’s a highly complicated business.’ Equitation, he believed, was the ‘material basis’ of all military success. Why did the French petty bourgeois regard the wretched Louis Bonaparte as a hero? ‘Because he sits elegantly on a horse.’ This must have been rather galling for Marx, whose ungainliness in the saddle – demonstrated during Sunday donkey rides on Hampstead Heath – was a family joke.

By the end of December, Engels’s training scheme had transformed the sickly cotton merchant into a dashing cavalier. ‘On Saturday I went out fox-hunting – seven hours in the saddle,’ he noted breathlessly on New Year’s Eve. ‘That sort of thing always keeps me in a state of devilish exhilaration for several days; it’s the greatest physical pleasure I know. I saw only two out of the whole field who were better horsemen than myself, but then they were also better mounted. This will really put my health to rights. At least twenty of the chaps fell off or came down, two horses were done for, one fox killed (I was in AT THE DEATH) … And now, a happy New Year to all your family and to the year of strife 1858.’

Marx, not wholly convinced that all this gallivanting served a greater purpose, wondered how he would earn any more dollars from the
Cyclopaedia
while his co-author was leaping hedges and ditches. He was deep in debt, and the hungry wolves were again threatening to blow his house down. ‘
I try to avoid mentioning the matter to you
because the last thing I want is to subject you to any strain that might damage your health,’ he suggested gently.
‘Yet sometimes it seems to me that, if you could manage to do a little every two days or so, it might act as a check on your junketings.’ Engels refused: how could he be expected to read or write while his head was throbbing and buzzing with visions of ‘a general crash’? Marx took the point. For all his protestations about the need to earn a living, he too was infected by the melodramatic spirit of the moment. If fate had appointed him chief theoretician of the revolution, so be it. Fortified by ‘
mere lemonade on the one hand
but an immense amount of tobacco on the other’, he sat in his study until about 4 a.m. every night through the long winter of 1857–8, collating his economic studies ‘so that I at least get the outlines clear before the
déluge
’.

The deluge never came: those dark storm clouds portended nothing worse than a scattered shower. But Marx continued to build his ark, certain that a drenching flood would come sooner or later. When schoolboy arithmetic proved inadequate for complex economic formulae he took a hasty revision course in algebra. As he explained, ‘
for the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential
to go into the matter thoroughly’. Very thoroughly indeed: these nocturnal scribblings filled more than 800 manuscript pages. They remained unseen until the Marx – Engels Institute of Moscow released them from the archives in 1939, and became widely available only with the publication of a German edition in 1953, titled
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie
(‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’). The first English translation appeared as recently as 1971.

The
Grundrisse
– as it is now generally called – is a fragmentary and sometimes incoherent tome, described by Marx himself as a real hotchpotch. But as the missing link connecting the
Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts
(1844) with the first volume of
Capital
(1867), it does at least dispel the common misconception that there is some sort of ‘radical break’ between the thought of Young Marx and Old Marx. Wine may mature and improve in the bottle, but it remains wine for all that. There are long sections on alienation, dialectics and the meaning of money which take
up where he left off with the Paris manuscripts, the most striking difference being that now he merges philosophy and economics whereas before they were treated seriatim. (In Lassalle’s words, he was ‘a Hegel turned economist, a Ricardo turned socialist’.) Elsewhere, the analysis of labour power and surplus value anticipates his fuller exposition of these theories in
Capital
.

On the first page he proposes that material production – ‘individuals producing in society’ – should be the foundation of any serious enquiry into economic history. ‘The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point with Smith or Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century.’ Humans are social animals, and the belief that ‘production’ began with lone pioneers acting independently ‘is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another’. The subheadings in this introduction – ‘The General Relation of Production to Distribution, Exchange and Consumption’, ‘The Method of Political Economy’, etc. – give the impression that it is to be a rigidly schematic work. But Marx can never stick to a schedule for long, and in no time he is wandering off on picturesque detours and digressions. In his notes on the relation between production and the general development of society at any given time, he suddenly pauses to wonder about the enduring appeal of cultural artefacts. Why do we still value the Parthenon or the
Odyssey
, even though the mythology from which they arose is now wholly alien?

Is the view of nature and social relations which shaped Greek imagination and Greek art possible in the age of automatic machinery and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in, as against Roberts & Co.? Jupiter, as against the lightning conductor … Is the
Iliad
at all compatible with the printing press and even printing machines? Do not singing and reciting and the muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer’s
bar, and do not, therefore, the prerequisites of epic poetry disappear?