Karl Marx: the personal and the political
Karl Marx: An Illustrated History
By Werner Blumenberg
Verso, 1998
175 pages, $49.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Karl Marx's mother complained her son wrote Capital rather than made it. She was disappointed that the young Marx, coming from a comfortable, middle class home, trained in law at university and given the social key to personal prosperity, chose communism instead.
The achievements and hardships, the personal successes and failings, of Marx, the founder of modern communism, are visited in this reissue of Werner Blumenberg's 1962 biography. Blumenberg, an underground fighter against Hitler, and a member of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, was the guardian of the SPD's unique archive on Marx.
Blumenberg outlines the major events and phases of Marx's life. This began in 1818 in Trier. At university the intellectually energetic Marx studied law, history and philosophy, incurred bad debts, wrote bad romantic poems, fought duels, got drunk, went to jail and became secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier.
Like many other students, Marx chafed under the social and political backwardness of Germany. He got mixed up in student radicalism through the Young Hegelians, who took the philosopher Friedrich Hegel's theories of dialectical change amongst ideas into the realm of social change.
Marx's political journalism and his discovery of the working class as the "practical element for the emancipation of mankind" transformed him from a radical liberal democrat into a revolutionary communist. After 1848, the year of (defeated) revolution in Europe and the publication of the famous Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote together with his lifelong friend and political collaborator Frederick Engels, his life was spent in political exile.
As capitalism strengthened economically and politically, Marx retreated to three decades of theory and writing Capital in the reading room of the British Museum. In the middle of this he spent 10 years as the theoretician and leader of the First International, an alliance of proletarian organisations, before his death in 1883.
Hardship
Marx led a personally "wretched" existence for these 30 years. He racked up liver illnesses and gallstones, neuralgia and insomnia, boils and carbuncles which stopped him from walking or sitting, and tuberculosis of the lungs. He was chronically short of money — at one stage, the Marx family was reduced to bread and potatoes for 10 days, whilst Marx was sometimes unable to leave the flat because his clothes were in hock. Without Engels' financial support, Marx would have sunk into utter poverty and an early grave.
Poverty and ill health contributed to family difficulties, including the early deaths of three of their six children, and Jenny's occasional breakdowns.
Marx often responded to his domestic circumstances by retreating into himself. He adopted a cold and cynical exterior. This almost brought his friendship with Engels undone on one occasion when he gave his economic woes precedence over sympathy for the death of Engels' partner, Mary Burns.
Marx was not immune from bourgeois conventions of respectability, with its characteristically hypocritical treatment of marital infidelity and illegitimate offspring. Marx was the father of his housekeeper's son; the scandal was covered up through Engels pretending to be the child's father.
The Marx family also spent money they could ill afford on maintaining middle class appearances, complete with housekeeper.
None of this should be surprising. No individual can wholly escape the pressures of the society they live in, no matter how much they oppose that society.
Myths
Blumenberg, in performing the valuable service of peeling away the gloss from the uncritical personal picture of Marx so often presented in Stalinist devotional tracts, however, retails many myths which reformists, like him, use as stock ammunition to shoot down Marx and the politics of revolutionary socialism.
Blumenberg argues that Marx's alleged personal deficiencies are the cause of alleged Marxist political deficiencies. Marx is supposed to have sought not only ideological supremacy but the "personal submission" of his "non-Marxist" rivals.
Blumenberg offers as evidence of Marx's bruising personal style a number of supposed victims among his left-wing rivals — Wilhelm Weitling, Ferdinand Lasalle and Mikhail Bakunin. Towards them Marx certainly directed much of the fiery rancour that has featured in socialist (but not only socialist) polemics throughout political history, as arguments have been waged over political principles. But the personal pique that has often been a by-product of this, is not, as Blumenberg alleges with Marx, the cause.
Weitling was a tailor, utopian communist and "eloquent and devout believer in a just world order". Blumenberg says Weitling was eliminated from the communist workers' organisation, the League of the Just, by Marx's "acid philosophical dialectic".
Weitling, however, believed an enlightened revolutionary minority — with Weitling at its head! — must seize power for the unenlightened and passive masses. Marx turned his "cutting wit" against the elitist and dictatorial "socialism" of Weitling. The League of the Just was transformed from a conspiratorial secret society into an open revolutionary party, the Communist League.
Lassalle was a briefly influential workers' leader in Germany. Blumenberg says Marx's vitriolic feud with Lassalle was the result of Marx's "envy" of Lassalle's political influence and his wealth and large house in Berlin.
Marx's eyes were opened to what communist workers in Germany had long known — Lassalle was an unscrupulous egotist who would ditch the working class as soon as a better offer (from the bourgeoisie or the monarchy: Lassalle courted both) came along to satisfy his monomania — when Lasalle visited Marx in London in 1862. Marx was furious that Lasalle spent £1 a day on cigars whilst Marx pawned everything not nailed down to entertain his guest in the manner to which he had become accustomed.
Lassalle's belief that the state was neutral and could be won over to the workers' side — with Lassalle at their head! — was what Marx got wound up about politically, however. The illusion in state neutrality has been the sometimes bloody nemesis of many socialist struggles.
Blumenberg presents the anarchist Bakunin's Alliance for Social Democracy as a legitimate socialist political current eliminated by Marx from the First International. The facts rebel against this hardy myth.
Bakunin's many "organisations" were personal cliques, led by this grand conspirator. He plotted to take over working class organisations like the First International and eventually come to political power — with Bakunin, the anarchist-dictator, at its head.
Political differences
Weitling, Lassalle and Bakunin are not political corpses bearing testimony to Marx's oppressive personality and political machinations. The core of each one's politics was some variant of an elitist "socialism from above", or behind the backs of, the workers, which was antithetical to the democratic and self-emancipatory heart of Marx's socialist politics.
Blumenberg's choice to haul Marx before the court of social decorum is motivated by his political differences with Marx. Blumenberg believes in gradual reform through parliament, not socialist revolution.
When Parisian workers rose in arms and established their own democratic and accountable self-government, the Paris Commune, in 1871, they discovered the political form for working class emancipation — the working class organised as the state. Marx celebrated this display of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; the bourgeoisie and its republican government were terrified and responded with blood-letting savagery. Ever since, reformists have been perturbed by this experience.
Blumenberg accuses Marx, in a fearsome epithet, of unlocking a political Frankenstein's monster, adopted by Lenin and Stalin with their oppressive "communist" state. The key to Blumenberg's negative portrayal of Marx is his desire to pose social democratic evolution as the gentle alternative to Marxist revolution.
Blumenberg's biography is a politically partisan polemic against the Marxist politics of democratic working-class power. It builds its case on personal myths and political misrepresentations of Karl Marx. The photographs are great, but the price tag and Blumenberg's agenda make it an expensive picture book.